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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > The cross was God's plan all along | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Psalm 123 Psalm 15 (after the law of God) Psalm 2:1-2 Hymn 30:3 Psalm 92:1-4 Scripture reading: Acts 2:22-41 Text: John 18:28-32 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
When I was a missionary, I often had to fly back and forth between the big city of Vancouver and the small town of Smithers, near where I was serving. This is one of the most beautiful flights in the world. I’d always try to get a window seat on board the little Dash 8 turboprop. I’d never get any reading or work done during the flight. That’s because most of it passed over the rugged beautiful Coast Mountains of British Columbia. The flight path always crossed over Mount Waddington, the highest mountain in BC at over 4000 meters. Surrounding Mount Waddington was a sea of glaciers. On a clear day it was absolutely glorious. It was just something fantastic to take in.
Our passage from John this morning is meant to put us in a similar position. While we’re in the section dealing with Christ’s sufferings leading up to his death, there’s something here to marvel at. The Holy Spirit wants us to survey the landscape, so to speak, and see what God is doing here, his amazing work. There’s sinful human activity, but over it all God is carrying out his plans for our salvation from sin. And we should look at this in awe, just like you would if you were flying over the Coast Mountains of Canada, or any other incredible scenery in the world. We should let it lead us to worship for our good and wise God.
So I preach to you God’s Word this morning: The cross was God’s plan all along.
We’ll consider:
- Human scheming
- Divine management
In the previous verses, Jesus was before Annas the emeritus High Priest. While Peter was outside lying and denying, Christ was inside speaking the truth and standing on it. After that, he was taken to another part of the high priest’s palace to face Caiaphas. John doesn’t tell us the details of what that confrontation involved.
The next thing we know, Jesus is being brought from Caiaphas to the Roman governor’s headquarters, also known as the Praetorium. This is where Pontius Pilate was. Besides our Saviour Jesus who was both God and man, there are only two other human beings mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed. One is the mother of our Lord, Mary. The other is Pontius Pilate. That makes him one of the most famous politicians of the whole history of the Roman Empire. He was just a governor and if not for his role in what happened with Jesus, he probably would only be known to a small group of historians.
Who was this Pontius Pilate? He was the prefect or governor of Judea from about AD 26 to 36. He had a lengthy record of confrontations with the Jews under his rule. A Jewish writer named Philo described Pontius Pilate as proud, vindictive, corrupt, and cruel. So, not a fan. By the way, Pontius Pilate isn’t his first and last name. History hasn’t recorded his first name, but Pontius was his family name, comparable to our last names. The name Pilate indicated a particular branch of the Pontius family. So that was the governor to whom Jesus was brought, and with whom he interacts over the next few sections in John’s gospel.
Pontius Pilate himself didn’t have some kind of master plan for putting Jesus to death. But the Jewish religious leaders certainly did. And so there they were at the gate of Pontius Pilate early in the morning, probably before 6:00 AM. Most of us wouldn’t appreciate someone showing up at our door at an hour like that, but in general the Romans were sold on the virtue of getting up quite early in the morning. The Jewish religious leaders knew the governor would be up.
Now it’s interesting that they refuse to actually enter the governor’s residence. It was the time of Passover and they didn’t want to make themselves unclean. We have to unpack that a little bit. You might be thinking, “Didn’t Jesus and his disciples eat the Passover the night before? Wasn’t that where we read about the institution of the Lord’s Supper?” So why didn’t these Jewish religious leaders eat the Passover the night before like Jesus and his disciples did? The best answer to that question is that “eating the Passover” here doesn’t mean “eating the Passover lamb on the actual Passover day or evening.” Rather, it refers more broadly to the Feast of Unleavened Bread which began with the Passover. If they became unclean, the Jews would have been unable to celebrate that feast. That’s why they refused to enter the headquarters of the governor.
According to Jewish religious regulations, they weren’t permitted to go inside the home or building of a Gentile without becoming unclean. Gentiles are unclean and where they live is unclean and if you go in there, you get contaminated, you become unclean as well. God didn’t actually say that in the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament. The Jews had developed that regulation from God’s command to be holy and to be separate from the Gentiles.
But now we have this really bizarre situation here. The Jews are trying to kill someone unjustly – which is a grossly unholy thing. Yet they’re so concerned about their ritual purity or cleanliness. They’ve totally neglected the weightier matters of the law. In fact, not only have they neglected the weightier matters, they’re violating them by trying to have Jesus put to death. It’s an example of what Jesus said in Matthew 23:24, “You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” It’s so easy to do, isn’t it? We make a big deal out of little insignificant things, and the big things we neglect or even violate. It’s part of our fallen human condition, something we need to be aware of, something we need to fight against.
So we now have this scene where there’s a crowd of Jewish religious leaders. And they have Jesus bound with handcuffs in their midst. And they’re all standing outside the house of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, asking for him to come out and meet them. Then in verse 29 he does. He comes out on the porch and asks, “What accusation do you bring against this man?”
Now you may remember that when Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, there was a squad of Roman soldiers with the Jewish leaders and Judas Iscariot. We’re told in John 18:3 that Judas had procured this squad of soldiers. We don’t know how he did that, whether he had to ask permission from Pontius Pilate or whether there was someone else he asked. So it’s possible Pontius Pilate knew something was up, but it’s also possible this is the first time he hears about what the Jews are planning to do to Jesus.
Regardless, the Jewish leaders give an evasive answer to Pilate. They basically just say, “He’s an evildoer, a criminal, take our word for it. Trust us. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here first thing in the morning.” But they leave out any specifics. They’re apparently hoping Pilate would just look at all this as a formality. He’d want to avoid any trouble with the Jews and he’d just sign off on killing Jesus quick and easy. That was part of their scheme. If only it had been that easy.
Pilate made it much more difficult. He didn’t want to waste his time with what he assumed were little Jewish squabbles. So he told them to go and take Jesus and judge him by their own laws. He thought it was just a minor matter that the Jews could manage themselves without Roman involvement.
That’s when the Jewish religious leaders showed their hand. In verse 31 we read of how they said to Pilate, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.” So there you have it: they want Jesus to die. But they can’t do it. Why not? Because under the Roman government of Judea, there was only one situation in which the Jews were allowed to go ahead and just have someone executed. That’s if a person, even a Roman citizen, were to defile the temple. If any Gentile entered the inner courts of the temple, the Jews had free reign from the Romans to put such a person to death. But Jesus obviously hadn’t done that, so they needed to get the Romans involved in order for Jesus to be executed.
And when they said, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death,” they spoke more truth than they realized. Because it wasn’t lawful for them to put Jesus to death. He was the perfectly innocent Son of God. He was the perfectly obedient Son of God. Unlike them, there was nothing in him deserving of death. Pilate will acknowledge that soon enough. It was wrong and wicked for the Jewish religious leaders to scheme and conspire to have Jesus executed by the Romans.
This was something for which they would be held responsible. In our reading from Acts 2, when Peter was preaching his Pentecost sermon, it’s striking how he refers to the crucifixion of Christ and the involvement of the Jews. In Acts 2:23, he says to the Jews, “…this Jesus…you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.” The Romans may have put Jesus on the cross, but behind it was the scheming of the Jewish leaders. In Acts 2:36, we hear Peter saying, “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” The way Peter has it, it’s as if the Jews themselves had nailed Jesus to the cross. They’re responsible for this great travesty of justice. And for good measure Peter says it again in Acts 4:10 when appearing before the Sanhedrin, “…Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified…” He lays the blame at their feet.
So there’s this sinful human scheming for which human beings are held responsible. That’s the way it always is. God always treats us as responsible for our thoughts, words, and actions. When those thoughts, words, and actions are sinful and wrong, there will be a reckoning. The good news of the Bible is that there is a way to escape that reckoning and that’s through Jesus Christ. In our reading from Acts 2, many of the Jews were cut to the heart by what they heard. They were internally convicted of their sin. And then Peter called them to turn from their sin and turn to Jesus with faith in their hearts. When they did that, they would be forgiven by God for their treacherous scheming and murder. God will grant forgiveness for any sin for anyone who turns to him, also for you.
In our reading from Acts 2, we have human responsibility, but we also have something else. We have the ultimate lens through which we need to look at our passage from John 18. It’s in Acts 2:23. Before saying the Jews crucified and killed Jesus, Peter says Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” This tells us that when we look at John 18, we also have to see the divine management going on here. We have to see God’s sovereignty and providence at work for our salvation.
If we zoom out to the widest view, it was in God’s providence that the Romans were ruling over Judea. The cross was the standard Roman instrument of execution. We’ll come back to why the cross is so important in a moment. But for now, let’s just note that if left to themselves, the Jews would have stoned Jesus for what they thought was his blasphemy. They would never have used a cross.
If we start zooming in a little more, we have Pontius Pilate. We have his rocky relations with the Jews. This made him more susceptible to their scheming. At this point in his career, he wanted to avoid trouble with them as much as possible.
Not only that, but he happens to be in Jerusalem. Jerusalem wasn’t normally the place where you’d find Pontius Pilate governing Judea. Normally he’d be up in Caesarea on the coast. But because Passover was often a volatile time for the Jews, he’d come to Jerusalem. He’d be closer to the action if something happened. So in God’s providence, he was right there at the right place at the right time.
Then we have the prophecies Jesus had made about his death. Verse 32 refers to that. It speaks of fulfilling the word Jesus had spoken about the kind of death he was going to die. He had predicted his own death. In Mark 10 and Luke 18, he had told his disciples he was going to be killed by the Gentiles. In Matthew 20:19 and Matthew 26:2, he explicitly mentions crucifixion as the way in which he’s going to die. And in John’s gospel, in John 12:32, he said that he would be “lifted up from the earth” in his death. John added the explanation, “He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.” Being “lifted up from the earth” was meant to make us think of crucifixion.
Now why was the cross such a central part of God’s plan? If you know your Heidelberg Catechism, then you’ll recall from Lord’s Day 15 that a crucified one was cursed by God. It was by being crucified that Jesus took the curse which lay on us because of our sins. When our Catechism says that, it’s drawing on what the Bible says in a couple of places. It was first of all in the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 21:23 God said that anyone who would hang on a tree was under his curse. For Jewish people in the time of Jesus, the cross was considered for all intents and purposes to be like a tree. After all, it’s made of wood and it resembles a tree with a trunk and branches. So if you hung on a cross, in the Jewish mind you were cursed by God. That’s what their Scripture said. And Galatians 3 makes that connection explicit. It says in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’…” The cross was essential as a mechanism for the transferring of our curse to Jesus. And in his wisdom, God sovereignly organized and managed everything to make sure the cross would happen.
If we dig a little deeper into the curse associated with the cross, we have to think about it in the terms Jesus used for it back in John 12:32. He spoke of being lifted up from the earth. One of the horrific things about hell is the isolation. All of God’s blessings are withdrawn, including the blessing of relationships we enjoy on this earth. Everyone in hell experiences it in complete isolation from everyone else there. The cross is a picture of this aspect of hell’s cursedness. The one on the cross is lifted up out of the crowd of humanity. No one on earth wants him. As he’s lifted up, he descends into our hell on the cross, he’s cut off and isolated from all human relationships.
But then he’s also not wanted in heaven. Don’t you remember how Jesus cried out the words of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” That too is part of the cursedness of the cross. The cross puts him in a kind of no man’s land between earth and heaven. Rejected by humanity and forsaken by God. All blessing withdrawn, there is nothing but curse on each side. On the cross, there’s nothing left but hell. What we deserve, Jesus has taken in our place, provided we place all our trust in him.
So the cross was God’s good and wise plan for our salvation all along. We can see that in our passage and stand in awe of it. It leads us to worship God for his goodness and love towards us. He didn’t leave us in our state of accursedness, but through the cross he provided a way to transfer that accursedness to Jesus, so we could have his blessedness transferred to us.
But the divine management involved in the death Jesus was going to die on the cross tells us something else. Something incredibly comforting. As we’ve seen this morning, there was wicked human scheming going on here. And yet, through his providence, God was able to take that incredible wickedness and injustice and he was able to turn it to our blessing. On the cross we see suffering and we see injustice, but we also see proof of our Father’s love and sovereignty, his heart and his power. That’s a comfort for us when we experience suffering and injustice. Sometimes horrible things happen in this life. We know how Scripture says that all things work together for good. But we may wonder how this or that particular trial or difficulty, that form of suffering, can possibly be for our good. I’ve said it before, but it needs to be repeated because we so easily forget: look to the cross. Always keep going back to the cross. It’s there we see evil human scheming, but over it all divine management working everything together for good. Our Father may not give us an explanation of our suffering in this life or even in the next, but he does give us the cross. He shows us his love and wisdom and power there and it’s at the foot of the cross that we hear him saying, “My child, trust me. If you can trust me here, you can trust me anywhere.”
We began with flying over the mountains. You know mountains are always places associated with splendour and majesty, also in the Bible. In Isaiah 40:9, the prophet tells Zion, which itself is a mountain, to go up to an even higher mountain to proclaim the good news. Zion is to say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” God’s people are to behold him with his might, his power. But also his heart, his compassion, how he tends his flock like a shepherd and gathers the lambs in his arms. It’s a picture of the salvation we have through the gospel. This morning, we have beheld our God. We’ve seen his goodness, love, and wisdom in how he arranged our salvation through the cross. It’s his name we ought to lift up in love and praise, now and forever. AMEN.
PRAYER
O God of glory,
We worship your holy Name for your goodness, love, and wisdom. Thank you for assuring us of your sovereign power over all things. We adore you for what you did with the cross for our salvation. Thank you for Jesus who bore the curse of that cross in our place. We praise you for how his sacrifice assures us that we won’t ever be cut off from you and we won’t be cut off from each other. We’ll have a relationship with you into eternity and a relationship with our brothers and sisters. We exalt you for that. Father, as we go through trials and suffering in this life, please help us with your Holy Spirit to always remember the cross. Help us with your Spirit to remember how you’ve been able to bring infinite good and blessing from something so horrible and wrong. Please cast our doubts away and fill us with faith and trust.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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