Good Friday - We Have No King But Caesar

Sin Replaces Your King

Theme: Idolatry

1 Kings 18:21 “Elijah went before the people and said, ‘How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.’”

Jeremiah 2:13 “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that hold no water.”

“Idolatry” in the OT is “Desire” in the NT. It’s fundamentally a heart issue—we are “prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love.”

We already discussed the counterfeit issue- here you see the people actively placing their allegiance to Caesar because it fit their needs in the moment to crucify Jesus.

From the very beginning, God’s people have been replacing Him. It happened in the Garden, when Adam and Eve chose the voice of the snake. It happened with Abraham and Sarah when they chose Ishmael. It happened with the nation of Israel when they chose Saul. It happened again when David chose Bathsheba, and when Jezabel chose Babylon. And it’s happening today, all the time. God longs to be in this Covenant relationship with us, the relationship that marriage is designed to image, in which He says “I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Jer 31:31-34). This is what we were meant for! This is God’s good design, that we would be His, His Beloved, and He would be ours. But we run away from Him and chase after other gods, and we thrust comfort and autonomy and freedom of expression and pleasure onto the throne of our hearts, shouting all the time “we have no king but Caesar. Mammon is our king, and Babylon is our home! I will be my own master. Give me Lust, Pride, Power, and Wealth, to guide me. What need have I of God? What has He ever done for me? I have made myself! I have built this life, this identity. It’s my life, my right, my kingdom, my time to live in freedom!”

God is not our king.

But He wants to be, and He has pursued that vision since the very beginning in the Garden of Eden. Yet we run and hide in the shadow of sin rather than resting in the shadow of His wings. We cling to our petty throne. We choose a king who has nothing to offer us over the only true King. As Lewis writes,

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

We choose mud, not recognizing the glory of God’s offer to serve Him in love. It’s a heart issue. It’s an issue of deep-seated brokenness. Something within us is very wrong, very twisted against God’s good design so that we are led away by our own desires to our own peril, rejecting the leadership, the protection, and the hope of the true King. And not only do we run from Him, but as we chase after the idols we become like them—cold and dead inside. And we turn with hard hearts back on the One who would save us in love, and we’re asked, “shall I crucify your king?” And in a most dramatic and unthinkable betrayal, God’s beloved chooses to send Him to His death, preferring another suitor who spells for her only death and destruction. “Oh Jerusalem, [My Beloved]! You who kill the prophets and stone those [I have] sent to you! How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Mt 23:37). Like Jerusalem in this moment, we passionately and utterly reject the Creator, the Redeemer, the King of kings, the One who would save us, and we take for ourselves Caesar: the shell of a king, a broken cistern that holds no water and can do nothing to satisfy us. Let’s read together.

RESPONSE:

Pastor: John 19:15, “Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked...

Congregation: "We have no king but Caesar! We have no king but Caesar! We have no king but Caesar!"