We Beheld His Glory # 71

The Judgment and Condemnation of Pilate

But that is not all. What about Pilate?

If the Jewish High Priest and the Sanhedrin were the center of religion over a wide area of the world, Pilate was the local representative of a still wider and more powerful world system. The long and indomitable arm of Rome and Caesar reached over the world and held it in an imperious sway. This, in a very real sense, was the world - the kingdom of this world. It could crush at a word and silence with a gesture.

The Jewish hierarchy, thinking to secure its ends through that austere and relentless power, blindly forced Jesus into the judgment hall of Pilate. With every kind of indignity and humiliation heaped upon Him He stands with no defense and no appeal.

But look - listen! What is happening?

He is quietly and steadily tearing down the moral structure of that whole edifice, and exposing the utter rottenness of its moral foundations. Pilate is nonplussed, disconcerted, cornered like a trapped creature. He is writhing, looking in every direction for some way out. Subterfuges, tricks, expedients, policy, pretension, play-acting!

Jesus is the Judge and Pilate is in His court.

He forever and for history discredits Pilate as a rightful executor of equitable laws by proving him guilty of accepting reports without getting evidence (18:34, 35); He makes him hide behind the transparent veil of cynicism; compels a verdict of innocence; draws out his inconsistency; drives him to subterfuge; makes him repeat his verdict twice; uncovers a secret fear: puts him in the place of a puppet; discloses more moral weakness; proves him to be a mere worldly time server; draws forth an acknowledgement even if in irony of universal sovereignty.

The Vindication of the Son of Man

So Jesus has established His claims. He came to bring the kingdom of God - but, thank God, not of the rotten kind in this world. He claimed to be the Truth, and He has torn the mask from the devil's system of falsehood. He claimed to be the Light, and He has exposed the haunts and works of darkness. He came to die not at man's choice and will, but by laying down His life of His own accord. He came to overcome the world and its prince and He has done it! And so we might go on.

The one inclusive and glorious issue is that, while men thought themselves to be in the saddle, driving on to their own ends, God in sovereignty was in charge fulfilling His own pre-determinate and foreknown counsel. The real government was with the supposed "victim."

"We beheld his glory" - the glory of the transcendence of moral excellence - "glory as of an only begotten from the Father full of grace and truth."

The so-called "trial" of Jesus is a parable. It forever illustrates and demonstrates the judgment of this world - religious and secular - and postulates the ruin of all that is built upon corruption, falsehood, pretension, and mere formality.

Here is the -

"one death-grapple in the darkness,
twixt old systems and the Word.
Truth for ever on the scaffold,
Wrong for ever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And amidst the dim unknown,
standeth God, keeping watch above His own."

By His Cross He conquers!

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 72 - "The Church - Transition from the Natural to the Spiritual)