Jesus in My Place
Notes
Transcript
1 And as soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. And they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate.
2 And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.”
3 And the chief priests accused him of many things.
4 And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.”
5 But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate was amazed.
6 Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner for whom they asked.
7 And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas.
8 And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he usually did for them.
9 And he answered them, saying, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?”
10 For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up.
11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release for them Barabbas instead.
12 And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?”
13 And they cried out again, “Crucify him.”
14 And Pilate said to them, “Why? What evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.”
15 So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.
Do you see Jesus as a martyr or the messiah?
There was a young lady named Perpetua. She was born about 150 years after the crucifixion of Jesus. Being born into a noble Roman family, she ended up converting to Christianity in her early 20’s. She was 22 years old and a young mother. She was going through the process of preparing to be baptized when she was pleaded with by others to deny Christ.
She wasn’t alone. Her servant Felicitas was right next to her. She too had converted to Christianity and was facing her imminent death as well. What they did with them was they sent them to an arena where there were public games. Just days before this, Felicitas had given birth. Perpetua had a young child at home and her father had begged her to renounce her faith for the sake of her child.
She told her father, “I cannot call myself by any other name than what I am - A Christian”. Both Perpetua and Felicitas faced gladiators in the arena. It was said that Perpetua actually guided the trembling hand of the young gladiator who was to kill her to ensure that he did his task swiftly.
When we study history, there are nearly countless accounts of people who gave their life to the cause of Christ. The earliest one being Stephen in the book of Acts. And it still happens today that people are murdered because of their faith and their refusal to deny Jesus as Lord and savior.
Many deaths have been recorded that are noble deaths because they stood for truth and stood for what they believed. But there is one death in history that stands above them all. The death of Jesus is unique in the fact that he did not die because of his faith, but he died for our faith. He was no martyr, he was and is the messiah.
Our passage today follows the second and final trial that Jesus faces. When we study this, we see that earthly justice is evaded from one man. While at the same time, cruel punishment is placed on the one perfect man that has ever been. That man being Jesus Christ.
True Justice is from God
True Justice is from God
I believe with my whole heart that each of us want to see justice enacted. But often times, what man sees as justice is only empathy. We must believe that God is the one who will bring true justice on all wrong doings. Even when they let a murderer free and kill and innocent man, God will bring justice.
Our passage her begins with the second trial of Jesus when he is delivered to Pilate. And Pilate asks him a very pointed question.
1 And as soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. And they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate.
2 And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.”
Jesus gives him what we may believe is an answer, but it really isn’t. This is Jesus basically saying, “if you say so”. He is not going to declare himself to be the king of Jews to Pilate. He neither confirms nor denies this accusation. In John’s account of this, he goes into more details of this exchange. I want to encourage you to go and read all of John 18, but I want to share the response of Jesus to Pilate here.
36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”
37 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
Jesus is King. But his kingdom is a greater kingdom than the Jewish kingdom or the Roman empire. He is king of all creation. So, while this accusation of him claiming to be king is a true one in this moment with his answer, his kingdom will not fall. It will reign forever.
If you notice though, the charges have changed between the first trial and the current one. In the first trial, the charge was blasphemy. Jesus claiming his divinity. Now, it is him claiming to be royalty.
The reason that it is different is that the Roman government would not execute him for blasphemy. They would need a charge such as treason. So now, they claim that he is declaring himself to be king. This would be an attack on the governmental establishment. Their tactic here is to trump up as many charges as possible with hopes that one will stick.
3 And the chief priests accused him of many things.
4 And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.”
5 But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate was amazed.
Jesus did not defend the trumped up charges. I would say that there are 2 obvious reasons why. First, the verdict was already determined and they were just going through the motions to make a show of it. Secondly, he had asked God that if he could do this any other way to make it happen. And the answer was to go through what he was going through. The lack of defense was not due to him being a coward but to him being conformed to the will of the father. So the proceedings continue.
6 Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner for whom they asked.
Pilate would release a prisoner at Passover. This seems kind of crazy for us to think that this would be a practice. But, when we look at events that are going on, we may understand a little better. For his first 5 years in power, Pilate had treated the Jewish people horribly. But in the year 31 AD, one of his colleagues was executed in Rome, which made him vulnerable in Judea. When this happened, the emperor Tiberius told the governors to stop treating the Jewish people so harshly. So, if any complaints would come up the pipeline to Tiberius from the Jewish people, this would mean that Pilate would be relieved of his duties. The man who was once extremely harsh towards the Jews now bowed down to their demands.
7 And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas.
8 And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he usually did for them.
So they wanted Pilate to release a prisoner.
Now, earlier in the week, there had been a group that had attacked the temple. They were inciting riots and causing chaos. And unfortunately, people were killed. One of the men who had been part of this and had murdered people in this insurrection, was a man named Barabbas. They had arrested him and he was in jail awaiting his execution.
Pilate saw this as an opportunity to find favor with the people. He would release a prisoner to gain trust with the people. He knew that Jesus was not guilty of the charges that the priest had brought him in for. So, surely, when given the choice, the people would choose to have Jesus released and continue with the execution of Barabbas.
9 And he answered them, saying, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?”
10 For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up.
He was right in this assumption. There was some envy there. The people loved Jesus and loved to hear his teachings. But it was deeper than envy. They felt threatened. Jesus was going to ruin their cash cow that they have developed. He was going to remove the need for the priests to be the intermediary. He was going remove the need for people to purchase animals to be offered up by the priests because theirs was not up to par. Their pocket books would be hurt severely. So they needed him gone.
Pilates asks the crowd if it is the King of the Jews that they wanted released. Any person with any sense would say that this is logical. To release the one who had not killed anyone and continue the execution process with the murderer. But that isn’t what happens.
11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release for them Barabbas instead.
The chief priests work their way in and around the crowd and begin to change the atmosphere. Who knows if the crowd had begun to be on the side of Jesus or not. But they were being swayed. They were being influenced. It doesn’t matter what they really wanted, the crowd started to go along with outside forces.
I see it way too often that someone gets influenced by outside forces and is swayed into decisions that go against their true nature. What we may call peer pressure still happens with everyone. And it could happen with people that we don’t even know. Chances are that the crowd was not very personal with the chief priests. But they were still influenced by them. The crowd may have known who they were and knew that they wanted to gain attraction with them, so they listened to them and did what they said. They tried their hardest to fit in. And the result of that is to release a dangerous murderer and kill the only innocent man that ever lived.
This is just as applicable today as ever. Look at issues such as abortion and homosexuality and immigration and politics. We have all of these outside forces that are in our ear telling us what we need to think and believe and say. When the place we should go to and the only voice that should be influencing us is that of God. This is why we, as a church, and as historic baptist Christians, truly believe in the sufficiency of scripture. We stand on the word of God alone. As the reformers said, we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to scripture alone, for the glory of God alone. Let us not forget that.
We must protect ourselves from ungodly and outside influences.
So the chief priests are in the crowd and stirring them up and influencing them to release Barabbas instead of Jesus.
12 And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?”
13 And they cried out again, “Crucify him.”
Less than 5 days prior, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a colt. He was surrounded by people as he entered and they were declaring, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David. Hosanna in the highest!”
9 And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
10 Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”
But now, the people are crying out to Pilate, “Crucify him!”. What a change. The same man getting a different declaration by likely the same people. What has changed? We know what hasn’t changed is Jesus. His teaching was still the same, his reactions were still the same. He had most certainly not changed.
But what has changed is the voice the people are listening to. The same ears that were listening to Jesus and recognized that he was the messiah, the king of Jews, were now tuned in to listening to the voices that were wanting to kill Jesus. They were being influenced and manipulated by evil and controlling forces that sought to kill righteousness while seeking to protect their manipulative religion.
14 And Pilate said to them, “Why? What evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.”
Pilate knew and acknowledged that Jesus had done no wrong. He saw the trumped up charges against Jesus. He saw the violence and the beatings that were already happening to Jesus. And the decision falls on him. He is the one who has the final say. He is the one who decides who is to be released. He, in this moment, can make a stand against evil and stop this. But, just as the people listened to the voices of the high priests, he listened to the voice of the people. “Crucify him!”
15 So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.
He did what the people wanted. He released the killer and sent away Jesus to be crucified. But in the meantime, Jesus would continue to be beaten.
This is a very tough text. And I am afraid that if I stop right here, that you will leave here and instead of being encouraged, you will actually feel discouraged. So we must understand that this is not the end. Because true justice is from God. Not from the high priests, not from the people, and not from Pilate.
In a matter of hours, Jesus will go to a place called Golgotha. He will have to carry the cross that he will be hung on. He will be nailed to this cross and raised in the air for all to see him die. And he will do just that. His body will stop working. He will stop breathing and he will hang, limp and lifeless, on the cross till they take him down and he will be place in a tomb.
All will feel lost. The disciples will continue to feel defeated because the man that they followed had been killed and buried and hope will feel lost. But, and this is what we must look to for encouragement, Jesus rose from that grave. They come on Sunday to check on his body, and it is gone. He goes on to appear to them nearly a dozen times in the weeks ahead and keeps teaching them. He then physically ascends to heaven and gives the disciples the task of taking this gospel message of hope to the world.
What is this message? Jesus in my place.
That was the message that the disciples took to the world around them and that is the same message that we have today. That we are sinners in need of salvation. But this salvation is only obtained by Jesus going to the cross that we deserve. We deserve the cross but he went in our place. He went in my place. And now, because of our salvation, we live for him.
Will you do that? Will you live your whole life for him? I know that we can all look around at our world today and see how it desperately needs Jesus. But do we believe that he has put us where we are as the solution to take Jesus to the world. God has placed us right here, right now for a reason. And that reason is to bring hope to the dying world through the message of Jesus.
Our passage today is building up that message. It is pointing us to the cross and the resurrection of Jesus that we have our hope in.
But that isn’t all that we should see in our passage today. So what else should we see.
We need to look at Pilate and see that he did evil when the opportunity of good was in his face. He was influenced by outside voices and chose to build up his own image instead of standing up for injustice. We have opportunities on a daily basis where we can make decisions like this. The chance to stand for truth is overtaken by our desire to wanted. Our stances will change so that we fit in with the culture around us. We begin to listen to the voices we shouldn’t listen to and those voices get louder and louder until the voice of God is so quiet that we don’t even hear it.
With that being said, we should also trust in the sovereignty of God in all situations. Jesus shows us that here. He could lean on his humanity and try to take matters into his own hands, but he knows that God’s plan is unraveling. Jesus was always plan A. Adam was always gonna fail. Noah was gonna fail. Abraham was gonna fail. Moses was gonna fail. David was gonna fail. But Jesus would never fail. He willingly went to the cross to die for our sins. He is the one who bore the wrath of God on account for our iniquity.
He is worthy of all praise. And we are going to end our service today by singing that very thing. That he is worthy.
