Jesus the Righteous Judge
Download MP3If you would, open your bibles to Luke chapter 22. Luke 22, and I'll begin reading in verse 63. Now the men who were holding Jesus in custody were mocking Him as they beat Him. They also blindfolded him and kept asking him, Prophesy. Who is it that hit who struck you?
Joel Brooks:And they said many other things against him, blaspheming him. When day came, the assembly of the elders of the people gathered together both chief priests and scribes, and they led him away to their council. And they said, if you are the Christ, tell us. But he said to them, If I tell you, you will not believe, and if I ask you, you will not answer. But from now on, the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.
Joel Brooks:So they all said, are you the Son of God then? And He said to them, you say that I am. Then they said, what further testimony do we need? We have herded ourselves from his own lips. Then the whole company of them arose and brought him before Pilate, and they began to accuse him saying, we found this man misleading our nation, and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ, a King.
Joel Brooks:And Pilate asked him, Are you the King of the Jews? And he answered him, You have said so. Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, I find no guilt in this man. But they were urgent, saying, he stirs up the people, teaching throughout all Judea and from Galilee, even to this place. When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean.
Joel Brooks:And when he learned that he belonged to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent Him over to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at the time. When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had long desired to see Him, because he had heard about Him, and he was hoping to see some signs done by Him. So he questioned him at some length, but he made no answer. The chief priests and scribes stood by the Hemenalate accusing Him, and Herod with his soldiers treated Him with contempt and mocked Him. Then arraying him in splendid clothing, he sent him back to Pilate, and Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this, they had been at enmity with each other.
Joel Brooks:Pilate then called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and said to them, you brought me this man as one who was misleading the people. And after examining him before you, behold, I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him, neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Look, nothing deserving death has been done by him. I therefore, I will therefore punish and release him. But they all cried out together, Away with this man, and release to us Barabbas, a man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city and for murder.
Joel Brooks:Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release Jesus, but they kept shouting, Crucify! Crucify Him! The third time he said to them, Why what evil has He done? I have found in Him no guilt deserving death. But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that He should be crucified.
Joel Brooks:And their voices prevailed. So Pilate decided that their man should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder, for whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. Pray with me. Lord, what we just saying, we believe that you are the only righteous judge.
Joel Brooks:We thank you that you humbled yourself, Jesus. You submitted yourself to your father's will. You you came to this world and you suffered under the judgment of Pilate. You, the Judge, suffered under His judgment. Lord, thank you.
Joel Brooks:You just seems shallow in light of that, but we do say thank you. Holy Spirit, we ask that you would come and you would press these truths deep into our hearts. Do not let us leave the same people we came in. I ask that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore, but lord, may your words remain and change us. And I pray this in the strong name of Jesus.
Joel Brooks:Amen. This is gonna be somewhat of a shorter message than, than I usually preach because I want us to have a more extended extended time of prayer at the end, and I'll I'll tell you the reasons for that later. And so we're just gonna we're gonna cut back a little bit, looking here at the trial of Jesus. Actually, it's, I'm not even sure if you should really call this a trial. It's a it's a mockery of a trial.
Joel Brooks:It's completely illegal. It starts off being done at night. No witnesses for Jesus are allowed. There is no real defense. They beat up their prisoner.
Joel Brooks:Justice is not being pursued here. Every gospel when it comes to the trial of Jesus slows down. I hope you've seen that when you read through the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. But but all the Gospels, they get there, and then they slow down because they really want to draw you into this. Every detail is important at this point.
Joel Brooks:One detail that every gospel includes is this mocking of Jesus. He's mocked. Repeatedly mocked. And it's very important that we understand that because it actually reveals a lot about us, and also reveals us a lot about Jesus. I've asked many of my neighbors over the years.
Joel Brooks:I've lived at our current house for about 9 years now, I guess. When we first moved in there, most of our neighbors were were not believers, and I had the chance to share the gospel with them. And, every one of them at some point, I've asked them what they thought about Jesus. Just tell me, what do you think about Jesus? And I've never heard any of my neighbors who were not Christians, none of them ever said a negative word.
Joel Brooks:It's amazing. They all had very positive things to say about Jesus. Things like, you know, I think he was, he was a great man. He was probably a really good teacher. He was a man of love, and, they they just would go on and on.
Joel Brooks:And they wouldn't be alone in this. I think if you were to ask the leaders of other religions, or even secular historians, tell me, what do you think about Jesus? They would tell you very positive things. Great man, great teacher, humble man, profound ideas, a man of love. The problem with all of that, is that that does not get you killed.
Joel Brooks:Those things do not get you killed. Those things do not get you mocked. Jesus did not get killed for being a pacifist. He didn't get killed because, hey, you love people too much. We're gonna crucify you.
Joel Brooks:That's not why he was killed. It certainly doesn't explain all the mocking that's happening here when they blindfolded Jesus, and they would strike him, and they would say, tell us, who hit you? Prophesy. He was he was mocked so much that even when he was on the cross, they're yelling, hey, you saved others, but you can't save yourself. The thieves on the cross even started mocking Jesus.
Joel Brooks:The entire experience, he was mocked. But but you gotta ask yourself, why all of this hostility? It wasn't because he said, blessed are the poor. It wasn't be because of his Sermon on the Mount. The reason Jesus is treated with such hostility is because of his claims.
Joel Brooks:It's because of his claims. He claimed to be the son of God. He claimed to be the Lord of the universe. And nothing brings out hostility and rebellion in humans as when somebody else says they have authority over you. It brings it out in us.
Joel Brooks:If you don't believe me, I challenge you this week. I've got a little social experiment I would like for you to do. I want you to go home, get a big banner, blank banner, and write on it, please do not throw rocks at my house. Okay? Just make a big banner like that, put it in your front yard.
Joel Brooks:Please do not throw rocks at my house. I promise you the moment you put it in your yard, the chances of people throwing rocks at your house just increase by about a 1000 fold. Nobody's ever thrown rocks there before, but the moment you put a sign, and you try to exercise authority and say, don't do this, people drive by and they're like, nobody tells me what to do, and they'll stop the car, get a rock, start throwing. It's sin in us. If you read confessions, Saint Augustine, he writes about it and he says, he pondered so hard about, why did I steal pears from this man's orchard when, you know, it wasn't stealing that I I was drawn to, and I didn't even like pears?
Joel Brooks:It's like, because somebody told me not to. It was forbidden, and that stirs up something in us. All of us in here have problems with authority. And Jesus claimed to be the authority. He's mocked because of his claims.
Joel Brooks:He claimed to be the Messiah. He claimed to be the Son of God. And for this reason, people hated him then, and people hate him now. I use this illustration about 2 years ago, but it's worth repeating. Some of you are familiar with the writings of Anne Rice.
Joel Brooks:She's a pretty famous writer. She wrote Interview with a Vampire. After she wrote that, she she wanted to do a book about Jesus. She is she was not a believer at the time, not a Christian at all, but she wanted to write a book that and and use a lot of the historical facts about Jesus. And so like any good writer, she she researched Jesus.
Joel Brooks:She went to the scholars. She read the articles. She read the books. She read her bible. She read these different things to to do the good research work.
Joel Brooks:And through this, she actually became a believer. But but this is what she she wrote because she was on the other end of the spectrum. She says this, These skeptical arguments that insisted that the gospel writers were suspect or were written too late to be of eyewitnesses, all of those arguments lacked coherence and were full of conjecture. Some of the books that I read were nothing more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on little or no data at all.
Joel Brooks:The whole case for the non divine Jesus who somehow stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified, and had nothing to do with the with Christianity's founding, which came years later, that whole picture which floated in liberal circles that I had frequented for 30 years, that case was never made. But not only was that case not made, I found something even more surprising. I discovered that these scholars, so many of them that devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus. Some pitied Him as a helpless failure. Others sneered at Him.
Joel Brooks:Some showed outright contempt. Now I had never come across this in any other field of research I had studied. For example, the people who go into Elizabethan studies are not out to prove that Elizabeth was an idiot. People in Elizabethan studies do not make snickering remarks about her or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. Occasionally, scholars will study a villain in history, but even then, they they tend to, they tend to argue for the importance of his or her place in history.
Joel Brooks:But in general, scholars don't spend their lives in the company of historic figures who they openly despise. But these New Testament scholars detest and despise Jesus Christ. There's a profound, interesting observation that Anne Rice made. And that when when she was studying Jesus and going through all that scholarship, she found people hated him. People who had devoted their lives to studying him absolutely despised Jesus.
Joel Brooks:They despised him because of his claims. The claims that Christ made forced them to either believe him or to mock him. If he is who he says he is, there's nothing more to do than to throw down their lives before him in absolute allegiance. If he's not who he says he is, there's nothing left to do but to mock him or pity him. And this is why people hate Jesus, why he is still mocked.
Joel Brooks:He has only given us 2 options. That's it. Two options. You fall down at His feet and you call Him Lord, or you call Him a fool and you mock Him. And if the Jesus you know has not produced one of those two reactions in you, it's because you've never really looked at them.
Joel Brooks:If you're just kind of indifferent to Jesus, if you just if you just kind of think, well maybe he's a good teacher, and he's a good moral person, he was a man of love, and you just kind of think those generic things, it's because you've never actually looked at him. Because that option is not there. You're either going to call Him Lord, or you're going to mock Him and call Him a fool. Now the Jewish leaders in this story here, they've already found him guilty. They they've already begun the mockery, and they want to go ahead and crucify him, but they can't.
Joel Brooks:You've got to get Rome to crucify. They don't have the power to do this, and so the first thing they do is actually they move Jesus in the night to have them at Pilate's home by the morning for trial. When they brought them before Pilate, they didn't bring up the old accusations. They had to bring up some new ones because Pilate could care less about this religious spiritual stuff they're gonna bring up. They needed something concrete.
Joel Brooks:And so they say, hey. Jesus has claimed to be a king. Jesus is committing treason. That's their accusation. Treason, which is punishable by death.
Joel Brooks:And this would have to be treated seriously by Pilate because if anybody is trying to seize the throne, well obviously, you got to take care of that. And so when Jesus stands before Pilate, Pilate asked him in chapter 23 verse 3 this question. Says, are you the King of the Jews? And when he asked that, we like to spiritualize that. Pilate's not a spiritual person.
Joel Brooks:Okay? This this is this is not a spiritual context here. He's asking him about, do you have an army? What's your political agenda? Are you going to try to overtake Rome by force?
Joel Brooks:Are you going to try to bring up an insurgence? Do you claim to be the king of these people? It's interesting that every gospel includes this question. Every one of them. And also, every gospel gives the exact same answer to them, which is extremely rare.
Joel Brooks:But it tells that all all gospel writers see this question, Jesus' answer to this question of extreme importance. They don't differ at all in the wording here. His answer in verse 3 is this, You have said so. It's actually only 2 words in Greek, it's you say. You say.
Joel Brooks:Now some translations, maybe the ones that you have, might translate it positively as like, it is as you say, meaning a yes or affirmative. It doesn't say that. It simply says, you say. It's it's purposely ambiguous. If you're really trying to pull out the meaning of this, it's frustratingly ambiguous.
Joel Brooks:Because it is neither a yes, and it is neither a no. It is, you say. You say. And I think that the reason actually, I I know. This is the reason Jesus answered that way, is it's not a fair question.
Joel Brooks:It would be like one of you coming up to me after the service and saying, hey, Joel, have you finally quit beating your wife? There's there's no good answer to that. I can't say yes, I can't say no. It's not a fair question. It's it's it's a guiding question.
Joel Brooks:It's a misleading it's a question that already has judgment attached to it, and it's the same thing here. It's not a fair question, because when Pilate asked him, are you the king of the Jews? What he thinks of as a king is vastly different than how Jesus would define a king. What he thinks of it as power is vastly different than how Jesus would define power, or how Jesus would use power. Pilate's thinking armies.
Joel Brooks:He's thinking, commanding people, coercing people to to your will. And so when he asked Jesus this, it's not a fair question. Pilate, he thinks of power. Well, you see how he thinks of power. He's giving Jesus a lesson in how he thinks a ruler should be.
Joel Brooks:A ruler is one who can take somebody and has power over them and can mock them. A ruler is somebody who can have anybody beaten up, whether they're innocent or not. A ruler can exert his or her will on somebody, force them to do what they want them to do. That is exactly what Pilate's doing. That's exactly what Herod is doing.
Joel Brooks:And so Pilate is showing Jesus, I will show you power, I'll show you what a ruler is like. That's what he's been doing. For for Pilate, power means you can use people for your own ends. We know that Pilate believed this, not just from in here, but in extra biblical sources like Josephus. We know Pilate was ruthless.
Joel Brooks:He he would execute so many people. Don't don't don't read from this that, you know, Pilate is seriously wondering, you know, like, you know, he really wants to let Jesus free out of deep conviction of his heart. That's not who Pilate is. He could care less about that. He would gladly kill and just move on, but he's very clever, And it's, I mean, it's the day before Passover.
Joel Brooks:Jerusalem is flooded with people. Jesus is an extremely popular figure. You kill Him, you've got a riot. You've got that. Of course he wants to to let go this popular figure, to preserve his own position.
Joel Brooks:If he can't do that, and he's got to kill him, he's got to make sure it's done in such a way that the blame is to the people, not to him. And so he goes through all these things. Who do you want me to release? Hey, this is on your hands. This is, I wash my hands of this.
Joel Brooks:But Pilate could care less. I I really think to Pilate, Jesus was nothing more than more than some kind of sorry lunatic, claiming to be powerful, claiming to be a king. Like, you and what army? Pilate had a completely different view of power. And actually, if you look through the trial of Jesus, you know, one thing that really stands out is He never opens His mouth.
Joel Brooks:He is silent. He's silent. And the reason he's silent is nobody asked him fair questions. We we see that at the end of chapter 22 in verse 67, it says, if you are the Christ, tell us. But he said to them, if I tell you, you will not believe.
Joel Brooks:And if I ask you, you will not answer. But from now on, the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of god. And so he answers her question by saying, you know what? Why should I answer? Your minds are made up.
Joel Brooks:You're not gonna listen to what I have to say, and if I ask you a question, you're not you're not after the truth. And then Jesus gives his one detailed answer of everything, and He refers to Daniel 7. He says, But from now on, you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the power of God, which is a text from Daniel 7 talking about the Ascension of the King in which He is seated at the right hand of God and can judge. And what he says here is, you know what? You were trying to judge me, but judgment is coming, and I will be the one seated at the right hand of power and who can judge.
Joel Brooks:And after that, he doesn't open his mouth anymore. Nothing more than, You say, you say, as people ask unfair questions. Let me ask you, where do you see yourself in this this whole story of the the arrest and the trial of Jesus? Where do you see yourself? Are are you one of the ones who mocks Jesus?
Joel Brooks:And this is how you can mock Him. You treat him as a good teacher. You treat him as a good moral person, as just a man of love, but you certainly don't treat them as Lord. That's mockery. Are you are you one of them?
Joel Brooks:Or or are you like Peter, someone who's going to deny Jesus when people begin to mock Jesus or mock him. You know, for most Christians that I know, the reason that their faith crumbles at times, it's never because of an argument. It's never because of some reason that was given to them. It's because somebody sneered at them. Somebody mocked them, and they melt.
Joel Brooks:You know, maybe some of you have experienced this. You you've thanked God for food at a dinner table or at lunch table, and some unbeliever said, you pray? And you melt. It wasn't an argument. It wasn't, you know, logic.
Joel Brooks:They just it was just kind of a sneer. Maybe you've experienced that at times. I I can remember this. My mom is, you know, she's a Christian, but she's not one of the ones who just she was not gonna raise her hand in worship, certainly. She she's not expressive like that.
Joel Brooks:And I remember, she was sitting next to me in a worship time, and I wanted to raise my hands, and I thought, my mom is gonna look at me, and she might she might just go, what the heck is he doing? Now, she wouldn't have argued with me, but I would've just felt this look, and it kept me from obedience. Are you like Pilate? Are you like Herod? People who are going to use Jesus for their own purpose.
Joel Brooks:If Jesus can can make you happy, you're gonna keep them. If Jesus is gonna ask you to do something you don't want to do, you just discard him. But all along, Jesus the the your all your views about Jesus really are about you. How can he benefit me? If holding them to him here benefits me, great.
Joel Brooks:If discarding him benefits me here, great. But it's all about your power, not about Christ's authority. I hope that well, I know all of us probably see parts of ourselves in there, but we should also see ourselves in Barabbas, the man who was rightly accused, the man who was rightly judged, but was set free, and Jesus was executed in his place. We we should all see ourselves there. Wherever you see yourselves in this story, I I just want you to stop and take a look at our silent and suffering savior who humbled himself, put aside his power.
Joel Brooks:He took on shame. He took on the mockery in order not to coerce you, not to control you. That's an abuse of power. He did that to change your heart, which is a whole different type of power, And I want you to look at him.
