If you'll open your Bibles now
to John chapter 19. John 19. Man. And by man, of course, I'm
speaking generically, including both male and female,
including everybody. that has ever come into this
world as one of the natural descendants of Adam. Man has a high opinion
of himself. As our country prepares itself
for presidential election, we are going to be treated, in air
quotes, treated to an overwhelming number of political ads where
men claim that they know what the problems are, and they know
the solution, and if you'll just vote them into office, they'll
fix everything. Now, that's a pretty high opinion, but that's natural to us. We think we know right from wrong,
and we think we have the ability to make just judgments about
others. We also have this tendency to
think that we have the power to plot a good course and follow
it. I remember being told, and I
can't remember whether it was high school or college, but that
Benjamin Franklin, you know, he thought he would moralize
himself. And from the stories I've heard
about him, he could have used a lot of it. I know we all could,
but he seemed to kind of stand out in those things. And so he
wrote down a list, and I think it was 13 you know, immoral things. And he was going to quit them
and start doing the right thing. And he thought he could focus
on each one for a month and eradicate it from his life and then move
on to the next one. He quickly found out he couldn't
eradicate them, not in a month, not in a year. not in his life. So he never did finish his 13.
I don't know if he ever got away from the first one. But man thinks
he can do something. Man thinks that his will is significant. But the exact opposite is true.
Man does not know right from wrong. Oh, we have a vague sense. But the interesting thing is
about humanity. While we have a vague sense of
right and wrong, because it says that even the Gentiles, they
do by nature the things that are written in the law, and that's
proof that God's written it on their hearts, that is. And I
believe what's meant there is just the common human conscience.
Everywhere you go, there are certain laws to be found among
humans. Man finds a way, rather than
simply obeying the good that he knows he should do, he finds
a way to break those laws but justify himself in doing it. I'll give you an example. I doubt that there's a dozen
people in the entire United States that thinks that the slavery
that was practiced in this country was moral. And most of us are horrified
at the thought of one person owning another person. But not only was it done, and
this is something we've got to come to terms with, it was done
by some of our brethren in the Lord. and they justified themselves
in it. Some of them would say, well,
these are descendants of Ham, and God cursed Ham. Actually,
he cursed Canaan, not Ham. But they say, these are descendants
of Ham, and Ham's descendants are under a curse to be the slaves. And so it was all right that
they were slaves. Or they would say, well, God
has determined what shall happen in everyone's life and this is
just what he determined for them. It is amazing how good we humans
are at turning our sinfulness into righteousness. It happens. People commit murder and they
may admit that they killed someone But those that'll admit it, most
of them will say, but, and then they'll give a reason that it
was okay to do that. There are some justifiable reasons
for that, self-defense, things like that. But almost no one actually confesses, in the sense
the Bible means to confess, that they are sinners. Nor do men have nearly so much
power as they think they do. One of the points of wisdom that
age teaches us is how little we're going to accomplish. I remember, you know, graduating
high school, I remember graduation night. It was 50 years ago this
year. And you know, you're 18, you're
full of all the energy of youth, and you've passed what everyone's
telling you is this great milestone. And they give you these encouraging
words as though you're going to, you know, grab the world
by the tail on a downhill pull. It's all going to work out. Maybe
you go off to college, and I remember when I graduated college in 77,
I was so excited. In fact, I was thinking, man,
I'm going to go on. I'm going to get a master's degree, and
I'm going to get a doctor's degree. I was going to get real smart. And then I remembered when I
first started pastoring. I was 28. And I thought, OK,
I'm going to go to this little church in Owensboro, Kentucky.
And I wasn't looking for a mega church, but I thought, You know,
we'll start preaching the gospel. We'll preach it consistently
and plainly. And this place is going to fill up. By the time
I was done, it was smaller than when I started. And then I came
here. All right, that was just preparation
there in Owensboro. Now I'm going to be in Iowa.
And it feels to me like the dam is about to break. People are
going to want to hear this message. And I started preaching. Now,
I give God thanks for every every bit of fruit that he's brought
from this ministry. But I'll confess, I thought much
more would happen. We got this building a year after
we started. It didn't fall. The original owners of this building
did not own it as long as we've owned it. Youth gives us the feeling that
we're going to really accomplish something. And it turns out,
no, it's going to be like everybody that came before us. The only
thing that age is going to do is make us old. And we get weaker
and weaker. Last night, as I was putting
the bulletin together and I was the article I wrote about Herod
and the fact that the Lord would not answer Herod's questions,
wouldn't talk to him. And so I was looking at this,
you know, the Lord's trial, if you want to call it. Now they
talk about something that needs to be in air quotes. That was,
that was a kangaroo court. That wasn't a trial, but I read the account of it
in all four of the gospels and something stuck out to me. And
let's look here in John chapter 19. beginning in verse 12. From then on, Pilate tried to
set Jesus free. But the Jews kept shouting, if
you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who
claims to be a king opposes Caesar. When Pilate heard this, He brought
Jesus out and sat down on the judge's seat at a place known
as the stone pavement, which in Aramaic is Gabbatha. It was
the day of preparation of Passover week, about the sixth hour. Here is your king, Pilate said
to the Jews, but they shouted, take him away, take him away,
crucify him. Shall I crucify your king? Pilate
asked. We have no king but Caesar. Finally, Pilate handed him over
to them to be crucified. Now what stood out to me as I
read this, comparing verse 12, the first
part of it, and then verse 16. From then on, Pilate tried to
set Jesus free. Verse 16, finally, Pilate handed
him over to them to be crucified. Now, why did this stand out to
me? Well, think of who Pilate is
or was. He was one of the most powerful
men of his day because he was the representative of the most
powerful empire of his day there in Palestine. That's what the Romans referred
to it as. Palestinia, I think they called
it. He was the governor. He was Rome's representative,
because Rome considered all of that land to be territory under
their jurisdiction, and Pilate was the face of Rome there in
Jerusalem. Now, whatever else one may say
about Rome, this is true of them, for their day They were as powerful
as the United States is in our day. They ruled a kingdom that, if I'm remembering this right,
probably encompassed about one-third of the known world at that time. They were fabulously wealthy. compared to other parts of the
world, they had a military almost never defeated. And when they
were defeated, it was generally because they were being led by
a guy that didn't know what he was doing. But the soldiers and
the armaments that they had, just about everywhere Rome went,
Rome got what it wanted. And Pilate, was the face of that
empire there. And he had soldiers. I'm sure there were other government
officials to help him out with the work there. And he did everything he could
to save Jesus. But he couldn't do it. And I thought to myself, now
that's remarkable. Because I think on any other issue in which he
and the Jews would have come into conflict, he'd have seen
to it he got his own way. The Romans don't take no for
an answer. That's just the way they were.
But on this day, Pilate, the face of that powerful empire,
did everything he could do as the face of that great power
to set Jesus free, and he couldn't do it. You know, it kind of reminded
me of what our nation did about 20 years ago. I think it was
20 years ago, this past March, if I'm remembering correctly,
that we sent our military forces. We'd already been in Afghanistan.
We sent them to Iraq. And here was the plan. And it,
by human wisdom, it sounded like a good plan. Even sounded maybe
like a noble thing to do. We were going to go over there
to the Mideast where it's all ruled by dictators of one sort
or another, no matter what title they give themselves, generally
there's one guy in charge, and there's a tyranny over the people
in every one of those countries. Our thought was, let's go over
there, we'll establish democracy in the Middle East, and then
we won't have to worry about terrorists anymore. And we spent trillions of dollars
and thousands of American lives, and who knows how many lives
of the citizens of those nations. And here we are 20 years later,
and it's no better now than before we started. when we pulled out of Afghanistan
a couple of years ago. I don't know if you saw the pictures
of what went on, heard the stories. And usually I don't participate
in collective guilt. You know, we're told that all
of us white people, we ought to feel guilty about slavery.
And I said, I don't, because I never had any slaves. Some
of my ancestors did, but I didn't. And I'm not going to feel guilty
for what they did. And I don't take glory for what they did
either. Every man stands or falls on
his own. But I've got to admit. When I saw our military essentially
driven out, and our nation abandoned all
those people in Afghanistan who had sided with us, I was embarrassed. Man can't do what he wants to
do. He can't even do what he thinks
is right and good. He tries, he says he will, but
then he doesn't. Why was it that Pilate, for all
his power, for all his resolve, and you know, secular accounts
of Pilate say that he was more or less a just man. He was a
decent politician, a decent ruler. He tried to do what human beings
would consider to be right, and when you think about it, he said,
this man has done nothing worthy of death. He was really surprised
that the Jews wanted to kill him. Why couldn't he do what he wanted
to do and what he knew was the right thing to do? Well, the
first reason, and there's several, and I've entitled this, Man Against
God. And I don't mean that in the
general sense that mankind is in rebellion against God. That's
one way in which man is against God. I'm talking about man as
represented by Pilate coming up against the will of
God. But that's only really part of
the answer. We'll get to that one. the will
of God in all of this, and that's why Pilate couldn't change things.
But here's the first answer. Look in Matthew chapter 27. Matthew
27. And then beginning at verse And you know, it's a rather long
passage I was going to read, but we're going to, I'm going
to kind of summarize it. And beginning in verse 15, it
says, Now it was the governor's custom at the feast to release
a prisoner chosen by the crowd. All these events of crucifixion
happened during the time of the Passover feast. a pilot in an act of generosity
towards the people. Every year, he would release
a prisoner, a Jewish person who was a prisoner of Rome. He would
let the crowd choose somebody, and he would set them free. It
didn't matter what they had done. It didn't matter if they committed
treason against Rome. It didn't matter if they were
murderers, thieves, thugs, whatever. They could choose anybody, and
he'd set them free. I remember Pilate's trying, he's
doing all he can to set Jesus free, and he comes up with this
idea. I'll ask them, who do you wanna set free? And
they're gonna have the choice of this Jesus. And then he picked
a very notorious criminal, a man named Barabbas. And I think most
translations call him a thief. But the word translated thief
doesn't just mean someone who steals. This is someone who will
do whatever it takes to get what you have, including violence
to the point of death. So he was not just a thief, he
was a murderer. And obviously, the people knew who he was. So
here's Pilate. using his best political skills. And he thinks, I'll give them
a choice of Jesus or Barabbas, and they're not gonna want to
let Barabbas go. They're not gonna want a thieving
murderer loose among them. And he presents these. He said,
all right, shall I release to you Barabbas, killer, or Jesus? King of the Jews. And he thought
he had it then. They would certainly ask that
Jesus, I mean, I'm sure Pilate thought, I mean, they can't hate
him that bad that they would prefer a murderer be loosed among
them. And you know what they did? They
chose Barabbas. They chose to let free a man
who was quite willing to kill them. rather than set free the
one who had been sent to be the savior of the world. Now, what
point am I going to draw from this? Pilate was trying to set
Jesus free, but there is no human power capable of withstanding
man's hatred of the Lord Jesus Christ. No human power that can
overcome that. Now we have been a nation for
247 years. That's a long time. And during that time, most of that time, those who
were believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, found safe haven here. There was enough believers, as
compared to unbelievers, that most of the hatred for Christ
was kept kind of in check. But here's the thing about man,
he never changes. And over the course of our history,
The preaching of Christ and Him crucified, well, it's ebbed and
flowed, waxed and waned, the same as it is everywhere. But
you and I have seen in our lifetime a remarkable decline of what
we might call the fear of the Lord. They hate God. Now, they claim to hate this
and those people. And that may be true, but that's
not where the hatred's starting. And it's remarkable, is it not,
to notice the ridiculous things they'll believe in order to uphold
their hatred of God. I came across a video this past
week, and this woman was on a rant. The Bible says, and she quoted
a couple of things from the Bible that sound nice, and then she
went on a list of quotes and paraphrases, some of them were
correct, some of them were not, but things that she knew wouldn't
fly well among our woke society. She said, the Bible also says,
da-da-da-da-da, and da-da-da-da-da, and I mean she just, phew, And
what it shows, what things like that demonstrate, and I mean,
this was not like a scholarly attempt. She was mad. And she was doing
everything she could to make the Bible God's inspired record
of his activities. trying to make the Bible look
foolish, backward, grossly unjust. Why? She hates the God who inspired
it, that's why. We've got something in our day
called hate speech. And I agree, there's a lot of
hate speech going on, but it's not what they're calling hate
speech. They hate God, and because of that, anything that expresses
some aspect of the character of God, whether it be a theological
statement or just a statement about what's right and wrong,
they reject it. And they reject it out of hand.
They don't even make an argument for it. They just, well, you're
stupid to believe that. Just as an example, I'm just
using an example of how ridiculous, otherwise intelligent people
become because of their hatred of God. This whole thing about
transgender rights, and I read an article, it popped up on,
I think it might have been a Facebook thing, and I clicked on it. I've
told you before, I can't stand a closed door. I gotta open it
and see what's inside. So I click on these stories,
and Indiana, in Indiana, A district court, a district appeals court,
has upheld the decision of a lower district court that says that
transgender youth, while they're at school, should be allowed
to use the bathroom that corresponds to what they think they are,
to what they identify, and the locker room. I know what you
all are thinking. That's the most ridiculous thing
in the world. At least I hope you're thinking that. Can you believe that human beings
think that? I mean, just honestly, we're not talking here, as they
say, about rocket science. This is something little children
learn very early on. And yet we've got people who
have been elevated, not to the highest court in our land, but
next to the highest court. I think the only place you can
go after an appeals court like that is to the Supreme Court.
These are supposed to be the top thinkers, some of the top
thinkers in the country. And what got me was the ACLU
that had brought this lawsuit. One of their spokesmen said,
and they were, of course, they approved of the decision of the
court, And everything that was said,
it's only right that people can feel safe and secure in these
facilities. And as I read that, I thought,
you know, everything he said there is the argument I would
use against that decision. I mean, don't want to get indelicate
or anything, but there shouldn't be any men going in the ladies'
room. Period. Nor the other way around. But I think that the women would
likely feel more threatened by that situation. And I thought, yeah, that's right.
Those children, when they go to school, they shouldn't be
afraid. to use the restroom because somebody
of the opposite sex is free to walk in. But that's exactly the argument
the guy used to support the same nonsense. And when you look and
see these people promoting concepts Concepts which you shouldn't
even have to argue against, but they make arguments against them
that are so ridiculous you think, what's driving this? People are
not naturally this stupid. It's not stupidity driving it.
It's hatred of God. And we can try to protect ourselves
from it. Fortunately, well, our children are grown
up. They don't go to school. And we live in an area that is
pretty far behind the curve of the more urban regions and coastal
regions of our nation. But it'll eventually get there. But probably before I see any
of my descendants suffering a great deal from this, I'll be gone. But I can see it. I can see these
things happening. And not all the joined power of those who oppose this trend
can seem to stop it. Why? There is no human power. that is equal to natural man's
hatred of God. All of Pilate's skills, authority,
and power got him nowhere. In Matthew's account, it puts
it that way. When Pilate saw that it was getting
him nowhere, He consented. He did that hand-washing ceremony. Well, OK, I got nothing to do
with this. Oh, yes, he did. He had the power
to stop it. I mean, he had the legal authority.
Let's put that. He had the legal authority to
stop it. He could have said, in the name of Rome, this is
not going to happen. And if the crowd that he gathered
had gotten rowdy, all he had to do was call for the local
centurion, said, get the guys together, get this crowd under
control, and it would have happened. But, no, not even Pilate within
himself could find the strength to resist them. Secondly, in
the end, the will of every natural man, and you know what I mean
about a natural man, someone who's only experienced natural
birth, has never been born again by the Spirit of God. The will
of every natural man will eventually buckle to the united will of
other natural men in things pertaining to God. It never fails. Look at Mark chapter 15. Mark chapter 15. Verse 15. Now here we are at the point
where Pilate's done all he could. Done all he could to set Jesus
free. He has argued with the people.
He even thought Ocal compromised with them. And he had the Lord
flogged. And they had that crown of thorns
on his head. Beat him half to death. And they still kept saying crucify
him. Verse 15, wanting to satisfy
the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged
and hanged at him over to be crucified. When it comes right down to it,
it doesn't matter whether you're some nobody or if you are the
face of the most powerful empire in things pertaining to God,
you will buckle to the popular will unless you yourself have
been born again. Thirdly, and this was the point
that actually brought me to this message, Well, this was the first
answer that came to my mind. Why couldn't Pilate get this
done? The events of the day were predetermined
by God. In fact, they were the foundational
work of God in bringing to pass his entire eternal purpose. Now, we won't turn there, That
passage from Acts chapter two that we read between our second and third
hymn, what did Peter say? This man, meaning Jesus, was
handed over to you by God's predetermined counsel. And you, with wicked
hands, not meaning their hands, their hands were wicked, but
I think what he was talking about. And you, along with the Romans, you crucified him. Now, they did it out of the wickedness
of their own hearts. That's what motivated them. But
what was behind all of it? God's will. This was no accident. It's not
as though our Lord Jesus did not have enough sense to know
how to stay out of trouble. It's not as though the Lord Jesus
himself could not have prayed to his Father and put an end
to all this. He said he could. But he also
said, shall I pray, Father, save me from this hour? It's for this
very hour I came into the world. Now, I don't know how long transpired
between creation and the day of our Lord. If you just count
up the genealogies and consider that those genealogies that were
given were complete, then there was only about 4,000 years between
the creation of the universe and our Lord's appearance on
the earth. But we also know, I mean, we've got examples of
it in the scriptures, they often would write genealogies and they
only mention the more significant people in it. So we don't know
whether those genealogies are full, but I don't think it's anything
like millions of years. Nonetheless, the moment the world was brought
into existence, that day of crucifixion was already ordained and set
by God. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't
plan B. It wasn't even a subsection of
plan A. It was plan A. What does the
book of Revelation call our Lord Jesus? Think about this. The
lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Pilate, if you
were Caesar himself, you couldn't have stopped this. because God
had ordained it. Jimmy Swaggart, that formerly
famous, well, he's still famous, but more like infamous now. But back, I think it was in the
late 80s, and he was a good one for tearing up whenever he wanted
to. My professor referred to it as
automatic tear ducts. And he was preaching one time
about the crucifixion and he got all weak and he said, if
I'd have been there, I'd have stopped it. Who do you think you are, Jimmy?
God ordained this. You're not going to stop it.
I'll tell you something, apart from grace, if we'd have been
there, we'd have been in the crowd saying, crucify him. Not
only would we have been unable to stop it, we wouldn't even
want it to. We'd have been behind it. And the only reason that
we're not in the God-hating crowd right now is because of grace. It's the only reason. We're no different. One of the more remarkable statements
in the Scriptures is in Isaiah chapter 53. where it's written, it pleased
the Lord Jehovah to crush him. And it says concerning our Lord's
suffering in the same chapter, and the will of Jehovah will
prosper in his hand. Rather in this crucifixion, yeah,
there were some people that wanted it to happen, there were some
people that didn't want it to happen, but none of it mattered. God
wanted it to happen, even to the fact, to the very detail,
that our Lord would die by crucifixion. Why? Why crucifixion? Because
it is written, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. And
understand that they didn't carry out executions by hanging, as
we think of it in our day. When it says hanged on a tree,
it doesn't mean they threw a rope over a branch and put a loop
in the end of it and hung them by the neck until they were dead.
What they would do is execute someone and then hang their bodies
on a tree as a display of justice. They'd hang them on a tree or
hang them somewhere. They wanted to make a public spectacle of
this person's death. And Paul quotes that scripture
and he said, Cursed is everyone that is hanged on a tree. Christ
was made one of these cursed things. Christ redeemed us from the curse
of the law, having been made a curse for us. The Jews wanted him killed, and
they frankly, they didn't care how he was killed, as long as
he was killed. And Pilate had said to them, hey, he's done
nothing against Roman law. You do with him according to
your law. And you know what they said?
Well, under Roman jurisdiction, their courts didn't have the
right to put anybody to death. And so they said, you crucify
him. Because that was a Roman way of executing those that were
non-citizens of Rome. And it says right in the scripture,
this was done so that Christ would be killed
essentially the way the Lord had predicted it would happen.
And Christ was made a curse. Do you see how little the power
of man, the choices of man, the will of man has to do with anything?
Everything everybody did that day, even those things which
were done trying to Keep the Lord's crucifixion from happening.
Every one of them played in to that happening. Why couldn't it happen? Why couldn't
Pilate, the man that he was, set the Lord Jesus free? Because
at the time Pilate wanted to set him free, finding him innocent
of any crime worthy of death, Jesus was already condemned.
in a court higher than Pilate's. Now Pilate thought he was the
high court there. And we've got a court system,
and I suppose it's as good as any that man's come up with,
but it's certainly not perfect. But we have what's called the
supreme court. There's one higher than that.
It's God's court. When men no longer have the knowledge
in their hearts that when they leave this life that they go
to stand before God to be judged by Him. It's appointed unto man
once to die and after that, the judgment. When they lose that,
they run wild. One thing that keeps Men in check. It says, by the fear of the Lord,
men depart from evil. By that I mean, the knowledge
that I am going to face God and I can't hide my sin from Him.
And He is perfectly righteous and just and will give me exactly
what I deserve. That keeps people from acting
as bad as they might otherwise act. But you see, Pilate was
judging according to men's standards and man's standards have to be
moderated because nobody's perfect. But our Lord Jesus was standing
in the presence of God even as He stood in the presence of Pilate. And He was standing before God
as a representative of God's elect. All the elect were encompassed
in His single person. And as He stands there, we're
back to Isaiah 53, all we like sheep have gone astray. and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. Now that doesn't mean that he
laid the iniquity of every individual human being on Christ. It says
all we like sheep. All the iniquity of God's sheep
His wandering sheep, His wicked, sinful, foolish sheep was laid
on the Lord Jesus Christ. And so thoroughly identified
was our sin with the Lord Jesus Christ. He owned them as His
own sin and He stood before God guilty of what we had done. And even though Pilate could
find no reason for him to die, a judge higher than Pilate said,
yes, there is a reason. There is a just cause for this
man to die. Not only the cruel death of a
crucifixion, it says that God made his soul, his inmost being,
a sacrifice for sin. Pilate couldn't set him free
because a higher court had already condemned him. And you know what I say to that?
Thank God. Thank God. If Pilate had been
successful, we would all die in our sins. Am I glad that the Savior had
to die for me? No. But I'm sure glad He did. I'm not glad that I'm such a
wicked person that nothing less than His slaughter could save
me. But knowing that I'm such a person, I'm glad that God,
the Judge of all, laid my sin on Him and then laid the fullness
of my due punishment on Him. And I'm glad that not even the
Roman Empire could stop that. Well, I'll say this, I'll try to be
real quick. There was another thing man couldn't stop. The
most powerful man in the world could not stop the crucifixion
of Jesus Christ. We'll not turn to it, I'll just
tell you the story, but Matthew chapter 27, we have the account
that after our Lord was crucified and put in a tomb, the Jewish
leaders came to Pilate, says, we know that this deceiver said
that after three days he'd rise again. Now we think that his
disciples are gonna come in the middle of the night and steal
away his body and then go around telling everybody he raised from
the dead and then it's gonna be worse
than when he was alive. You know what Pilate said to
them? Okay, you have your guard, you do everything you can to
keep the tomb shut. And they did. They posted a guard. And I don't know whether it was
Jewish temple guards or if it was Roman soldiers. I don't even
know for sure whether the scriptures tell us which one of the guards
came from, but I know this, whether Roman soldiers or the temple
guards, they were under this. If they did not protect that
tomb from anybody opening it up, their lives were forfeit. That's just the way it operated
back then. And they put a seal on there. Meaning by that, you
know, it's just like the police do, you know, at a criminal scene,
they'll put tape across the door, or just put a, if they want to
make sure that nobody opens a certain door, they'll put tape across
it. It's not as though the seal itself is strong, but it says,
you know, do not open by order of the police, and they can tell
if anybody opened it up, because the tape will be broken. And
so this was a seal on there, and it said, don't roll the stone
away, don't go in here, under the threat of Rome. They did
everything they could to keep his body in that tomb. And as it began to dawn towards
the first day of the new week, Mary Magdalene and some other
women went to the tomb. And when they got there, the guards had been stupefied. and the door, the stone was rolled
away, and there was an angel, and he must have looked glorious,
because the people were frightened, and he said, don't be afraid.
I know that you seek Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here. That's probably the only time
those words sounded good. He is not here. For He is risen,
just as He said. And not Pilate, nor all the authorities
of the Jews put together could stop it. And we were in Him when He died,
we who believe, we were in Him when He died, in Him when He
rose, and in Him when He ascended on high. And you know something?
Not all the concerted efforts of men can stop us from being
made alive in Christ, from being raised from the dead, and from
someday quite literally being in His presence at the right
hand of God. Pilate did all he could to set
Him free, then did all he could to keep Him shut in. And he was
utterly unsuccessful. Why? In both efforts, he was
opposing the Lord. And that never succeeds. Thank
God. Heavenly Father, bless your word
as only you can. In your name we pray.