נָשָׂא nasa
What It Means
Nasa is one of the busiest verbs in the Hebrew Bible — over six hundred appearances — and most are utterly ordinary: lift your eyes, carry a jar, bear a load on a shoulder. That is what makes its theological use so striking. When Hebrew wants to say “forgive,” it reaches for this porter's word. “Forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:7) is literally carrying them; “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven” (Psalm 32:1) is literally lifted off. Forgiveness, in Hebrew, is never a ledger quietly amended from a distance — it is as concrete as [the mercy seat](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/bible-language.html#hilasterion). Sin is freight. It has real weight, and it does not evaporate; someone must stoop, get under it, and carry it away — as the scapegoat “shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area” (Leviticus 16:22).
A Story
At the end of July 1941, after a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, the deputy commandant selected ten men from Block 14 to die by starvation in reprisal. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out for his wife and children. A Polish Franciscan priest, Maximilian Kolbe — prisoner 16670 — stepped out of line and asked to take his place, and the commandant agreed. Kolbe spent two weeks in the starvation bunker of Block 11, leading the dying men in prayer; on August 14, 1941, he was killed by lethal injection. Gajowniczek survived the war and lived until 1995 — five more decades, carried on another man's shoulders.
For Your Journey
We know the weight this verb names. We carry what we have done and — often heavier — what has been done to us; a grudge is someone else's sin we have volunteered to keep hauling. Our instinct is to manage the load: minimize it, explain it, hand pieces of it to anyone who will listen. Scripture's word is stranger and better: it can be lifted off entirely, the way [filthy clothes were stripped from Joshua the high priest](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/#2026-07-05-zech3-clothes) and clean garments put on him. “Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you” (Psalm 55:22). And people who have felt the straps cut make the best forgivers — we bear with one another as those who have first been borne.
In Christ
Isaiah saw it seven centuries early: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” — nasa, twice — and again at the song's end, “he bore the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12). When John the Baptist pointed at Jesus and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), he was translating nasa into flesh: lift-and-carry-off, the scapegoat's job description. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). The one who invited the weary to come to him for rest (Matthew 11:28) got under the full freight of our guilt at the cross and carried it outside the camp, beyond retrieval. And heaven now sings to [a Lamb standing as though slain](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/#2026-07-10-rev5-worthy-is-the-lamb) — the Carrier, still bearing the marks of the load.
“Bearing shame and scoffing rude, / In my place condemned He stood; / Sealed my pardon with His blood. / Hallelujah! What a Savior!”
“Thus far did I come laden with my sin; / Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in, / Till I came hither; what a place is this! / … / Blest cross! blest sepulchre! blest rather be / The Man that was there put to shame for me!”