We're in our continuing Bible
study in the book of Luke and in chapter 23. Actually, we're
going to be backing up a little bit into the close of chapter
22 and pick up a few nuggets that came to light. I think I brought this up many
years ago when I taught through the book of John and then again
in Mark. This is the third gospel that
we've gone through. Anyway, apparently I had forgotten
it. It was so pertinent that I felt
that it was worthy of going back, backing up a little bit for a
few minutes. I really liked in our bulletin this morning, this
article from John Newton that he said, I consider all second
causes and instruments as mere saws and hammers in the divine
workman's hands. that they can neither give us
pleasure nor pain, but as our Lord and Savior is pleased to
employ them. So how he uses all things according
to his purpose is really pertinent in our lesson today and has been. Last week we were at the beginning
of chapter 23 when Jesus was brought into Pilate. At first, as I was looking to
start off in verse 6 today, I felt like a hawker. Well, this
is just so obvious and plain It needs no comment by me, just
read it. But there's a lot of things here
that are of interest that I was able to dig out, so we'll kind
of look at those as we go through. The name of today's lesson is
doing exactly what I determined before to be done. And that was,
you know, as Christ was in front of the Sanhedrin, as Christ was
in front of Pilate, he would look at them. With that view,
everything you're doing, you're doing exactly as I determined
it to be done. And all the types, as Norm's
been going through all the Old Testament, and all the types
and shadows and pictures and metaphors are now unfolding in
reality and in time as recorded by Luke the physician. And so
everything that we've read about, and we go through the Old Testament,
and Norm goes through it and says, well, this is a type in
the shadow of the Lamb slain before the foundation of the
world. This is a type in the shadow of Christ redeeming His
church. This is a type in the shadow of the things that Christ
would go through in behalf of His people as their substitute.
And as we so often mention, as it's written in Luke 24, He expounded
to them all the things in the Law and the Prophets concerning
Himself in all the Bible. And so we believe that. that all the Bible, everything
that's written in the Bible is somehow about Christ redeeming
the church, somehow about Him, even though that we may not particularly
see it. As it pleased him to reveal it
to us, once in a while we get an inkling as we look through
that lattice work that Norm so often talks about. As we look
through that glass darkly, as Paul said, we can just see little
glimpses of it. In the previous chapter, in chapter
22, we read about they arrested Jesus that night and then they
took Him away and they took Him to where the Jews held their
court. And he was kept in an outer courtyard area and abused
by the guards all night long. And they blindfolded him and
slapped him around and said, prophecy, who it was that hit
you, you know, and mocked him. And in early, when it was day,
they brought him to the the Sanhedrin, the court of the Jews, and question
Him. And if Thou art the Christ, tell
us plainly. And you know in Luke, if you
want to back up to one chapter, Luke 22, 67, He said, If I tell
you, you will not believe. I can tell you exactly. But it won't do any good. In
some of the other chapters that we read, Jesus knew from the
beginning who they were that believed not. It's not that he
has a crystal ball, it's just that he has determined his sheep
from before the foundation of the world, because God gave him
those children to redeem, as it tells us in John 17. Thine
they were, thou gavest them to me. And so he knows exactly,
he says, I know my sheep, and they hear my voice. To these
guys, he says, You cannot hear my words. You cannot believe
because you are not my sheep." That's a quote from, a paraphrase
actually from John 10, 26 and John 8, 47. Those two times that
he was in front of these same folks. And why do you not? understand my words because you
cannot hear my words. You cannot. It's like that word
cannot means that you have no ability to hear my words. You hear them physically, but
you can't hear them spiritually. You can't believe. And you can't hear. You know,
people in religion today, they look at it, well, that's harsh.
That's harsh. Why can't we believe? We've got
ears. We've got eyes. Why can't... But he said, you know, it's no
good to tell you because you won't believe it if I told you.
And I tell you and you can't hear it. He's not casting his
pearls before swine is what he said in Matthew 7, 6. It's like,
it's not going to do any good. I'm here to do exactly what was
determined to be done from before the foundation of the world.
And so in Luke 23 verse 1 through 17, the whole multitude of them
arose and led him into Pilate. And so they've already met in
secret and said, this guy's got to go. And when they brought
him in, to that Sanhedrin and they're quizzing him and saying,
tell us plainly, if thou art the Christ, tell us plainly.
Speak up. They adjured him, it says. They demanded an answer. And
he said, Art Thou the King? Art Thou the
Messiah? And he wouldn't give them the,
he said, Thou sayest, you're saying the truth, but you don't
believe it. You're saying the truth, but
you have no idea what it means. You have no idea of the context
of it. And as I was kind of reviewing
this and studying it, that as he was being brought before the
Sanhedrin that had actually previously plotted his death, and now they
sat in judgment against him. the reply of Jesus to them as
He stood before them, and they sat claiming to be under the
rule of God, as it's recorded in Luke 22, 69, and in Matthew
26. Let's look over there at Luke 22. Let's start in verse 66. This is really powerful. As soon
as it was day, the elders and the people and the chief priests
and the scribes came together and led him into their council,
saying, Art thou the Christ? Tell us. And he said unto them,
If I tell you, you will not believe. And also, if I ask you, you will
not answer me, nor let me go. Hereafter shall the Son of Man
sit on the right hand of the power of God." I've read that passage many times,
and we just think he's just telling them, you know, pretty soon I'll
be crucified and resurrected, and then I'll rise and I'll be
sitting on the right hand of God. But when we look at that
and we put it together, they're sitting in judgment against him. And he says, pretty soon I'm
going to be sitting in judgment. Hereafter shall the Son of Man
be sitting on the right hand of the power and coming in the
clouds of heaven. That's Matthew 26, 64, a record
of it. Hereafter shall you see the Son
of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds
of heaven. Isn't that an interesting answer? You guys are sitting against
me, but hereafter, I'll be sitting and you'll be on the receiving
end." But they said, we don't get that. That does not compute. We don't understand that. He'll
be sitting and they will be standing there in judgment. And you know,
he seems to reflect that what he caused to be written in the
Psalms, and that's just what we always find. Anything that
we run into in the New Testament, he's had that written down beforehand. And many times it says, as it
was written, as it was written. But many times they don't make
that little notation, but we find that it was written. Most
of the time we find that that's what's really happened. In Psalm
chapter 58, the first couple of verses of Psalm 58, It's written, Do you indeed speak
righteousness, O congregation? Do you judge uprightly, O ye
sons of men? Yea, in heart you work wickedness,
you weigh the violence of your hands in the earth. So they were supposed to be the
ones that were in charge of the gospel, they were supposed to
be able to make judgments based on the Word of God, and yet their
hearts worked wickedness. In Psalm 94 and verse 19 through
21, Let's imagine what was going
through the mind of Christ as He was standing there in front
of these people and He just told them that, you know, soon I'll
be sitting at the right hand of power. In Psalm 94 and verse
19, In the multitude of my thoughts
within me, thy comforts delight my soul. in the multitude of
my thoughts within me." As he was in front of those people
and they were conniving and lying and condemning him to death,
he was thinking about the people that his death was redeeming.
He was thinking about the ones God gave him from before the
foundation of the world in the covenant of grace. You know,
we read that verse from Jeremiah 29, 11, It's one of our favorite verses.
He says, For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith
the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected
end. And the way that comes about
is through what he's going through at this very moment in Luke 23. In the multitude of my thoughts
within me, thy comforts delight my soul. It's just beyond our
ability to imagine that. In verse 20, he says, shall the
throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee which frameth mischief
by a law? They accused him of violating
the law. He blasphemeth because he says he is the Son of God.
Tear this temple down and I'll rebuild it in three days. They gather themselves together
against the soul of the righteous and condemn the innocent blood.
Psalm 94, 21. Isn't that utterly amazing? And to think that he caused that
to be written ages before he was standing there in front of
these very people. Ironically, these Jewish religionists,
this is just astounding. They took him to Pilate, but
they wouldn't go in because he was a Gentile. And if they went
into a Gentile place and had anything to do with the Gentile,
they would be unclean and they wouldn't be able to eat the Passover. We can't go in there. We'll be
unclean, ceremonially unclean. Yet they didn't consider themselves
defiled by condemning Jesus to death. Isn't that amazing? And they did it by false witnesses
and incredible lies. They took everything that he
said and twisted it. He said he was the king of the
Jews. We have no king but Caesar. You know, they were the ones
that they would have given anything to throw off the Roman yoke. The history of Israel was just
like one insurrection after another. 70 A.D., they came and burnt
the town down and during the Passover time and when three
million Jews were... I was just reading an interesting
article that they didn't count the people The Romans didn't
have an ability to count the people that were coming in. There
were so many of them. But they did have an ability
to count sheep. And they did have an ability
to look at what the Jewish rules on the Passover were. And they
said, in this particular year when Jesus was being condemned,
There was 267,000 sheep sold at the sheep market. And the
rule was one sheep per 10 people, family of 10 people. So they
just said, well, we have 267,000 sheep sold. So times 10, that's
2,670,000 people in Jerusalem for the Passover. just by a little bit of arithmetic.
And Josephus said there was like close to three million people
in Jerusalem at 70 A.D. when the Romans surrounded it
and starved them out and all those terrible things that we
read about later on. But what amazing things. In their heart, they work wickedness.
Psalm 58-2. Then we come to chapter 23 where
they lead Jesus to Pilate. The whole multitude
arose and led him into Pilate. chapter 23, verse 1. You know,
this is exactly what Jesus said was going to happen in Mark chapter
10. Remember when we went through
the book of Mark? It was a long time ago. In Mark 10, 32, and they were
in the way going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus went before them, and
they were amazed. And as they followed, they were
afraid. because the Jewish religion people
didn't like them and they were afraid And he took again the twelve
and began to tell them what things should happen unto him, saying
in Mark 10, 33, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son
of Man shall be delivered into the chief priests and to the
scribes, and they shall condemn him to death and deliver him
to the Gentiles. And they shall mock him and scourge
him and spit on him and shall kill him. And the third day he
shall rise again. So he gives them the cliff notes
of Luke 23, 24. Here's what's going to happen.
Not that he had a crystal ball, but things were happening as
he determined them to be done to satisfy God. God's going to look at the travail
of his soul as this goes on. Jesus is going to be standing
there saying, you're condemning me, but my thoughts are on my
sheep. no greater love hath a man than
he lay down his life for his friends." Pilate had a reputation. He was a stinker from the word
go. They knew what was going to trip
his trigger He was in Jerusalem because there
was going to be a lot of Jews in Jerusalem for this Passover.
He was in Jerusalem from Caesarea, and so was Herod. Herod was the Tetrarch of Galilee. Pilate had a reputation for dealing
harshly with the insurrectionists. And he didn't think much of the
Jews' religion. He kind of took every opportunity
he had to stick them a little bit on it.
Remember in Luke 13, 1, there were at present that season some
that told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled
with their sacrifices. So he killed them. mingle their
blood with the blood that they were using in the sacrifice,
the blood of the lambs that were slain. So he just said, okay, want a
little blood? I'll mix your blood in with that.
I'll kind of mock the Jewish religion and get rid of the troublemakers
all in the same fell swoop there. But you know, like we read about
the saws and hammers. And what Norman said about the
king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, and he turneth whichever
way, like the rivers of water, he turneth whichever way that
he wants it to go. And Pilate was one whose heart
was in the hand of God to do as God before determined to be
done. If you just stop and think about
this for just a second, about these saws and hammers things,
and that God is not a random God, and that He determines everything.
As it says in Acts 4.27, the Jews, and the Gentiles, and Pilate,
and Herod, and all of them were all gathered together to do what
was before determined to be done for that purpose. His whole life was destined for
this one consequential act. From the minute he was born,
he was on a path to do this one thing. He was going to declare
Jesus innocent. I find no fault in this man.
And yet, in the same breath, he's going to condemn him to
death and have him scourged. Normally under Roman law, if
you were brought in for a trial and they found you innocent,
they wouldn't scourge you. You wouldn't be subjected to
punishment if they found you not guilty of whatever crime,
and yet he inflicted this terrible scourging that most people didn't
live through. Thirty-nine lashes, you know,
forty lashes save one, I think they called it. I think we've talked about it
before, though. They used this whip that had
a lot of arms, little tendrils on it, and they would put little
bits of metal and things in the ends of it to make it cut more
and hurt worse. Scourging was a terrible thing,
and a lot of people didn't live through it. But he was predestined to proclaim
Him without fault, predestined to condemn Him to death, gathered
to do what was before determined to be done. In Pilate in John
19, we mentioned this before, speakest thou not unto me? Because
he said, don't you know I have power to to kill you or let you go. And
Jesus says, you could have no power at all against Me except
it were given thee from above. Therefore, he that delivered
Me unto thee hath the greater sin. But they were doing what
was before determined to be done. And so as He's taken all these
abuses, He's taken the spitting, He's taken the scourging, He's
taken the smiting and all those things
and having his beard plucked out. I think I mentioned before
I have a beard for most of my life. Somebody plucks the hair
out of my beard, we're having a problem right now. We're going
to have a discussion about that. These are hooked in pretty good. My daughter used to get my wife's
dad down on the, he had black hair, and then later on in life,
he kind of had the gray creeping in, and he had the white hairs
in his mustache, and she'd get him down, sit on his chest with
a pair of tweezers. Grandpa, can I pluck out the white ones?
And she'd start plucking them out, and every once in a while,
she'd go, oops. That one wasn't white. So anyway, that's a, that hurts. Pilate, he thinks that somehow
a severe lashing is going to appease the Jews and he can just
turn this. He knows that it's just a religious squabble. He
knows that he's not an insurrectionist. He's He was there when the triumphal
entry came into Jerusalem, though, and all the people were shouting,
Hosanna to the king. But I think he understood that
it wasn't really going to be a threat to the Romans. It was
more of a religious thing, and he said, I'll just scourge him
and turn him loose. And no, we don't want that. We want him dead, dead, dead,
dead, crucify him. And he says, well, during their questioning, they
say, well, he's been causing problems ever since he left Galilee.
And Pilate says, Galilee? Galilee? That's Herod's jurisdiction. So he sent him over to Herod,
Luke 23. Now, there's lots of Herods in
the Bible, and I thought maybe just for a second we'd just kind
of run down the list here. There was a Herod the Great that
was in charge of that whole region when Jesus was born. And remember,
he was the one that the wise, he had the wise men brought to
him. And where's that? Where is he that's born king
of the Jews? And they said, well, in the east
there somewhere in this, in this, his, scholar said, well, the
Bible says that out of Bethlehem shall come he that is born king
of the Jews. So he went over and had the soldiers
go there and kill all the babies that were two years old and younger.
That was their dad. That was Herod the Great. And then when he got old and
died, the kingdom was divided by his four sons. That's what
that word tetrarch means, ruler over a fourth. And so there was
Herod Antipas, which is the Herod that we're dealing with here,
Herod Antipas of Galilee. And he's the one that had John
the Baptist beheaded. And we had Herod Archelaus, he
was the Tetrarch of Judea and Samaria, and Herod Philip, Tetrarch
of the area north and east of Galilee. So Herod was kind of
their kind of like the Chinese names. It's something like Xi
Jinping and his daughter's name is Xi Jinping. It's all, the name is, it's the
name of the family but they all had their sub-name like Antipas,
Philip, and Archelaus. And then there was Herod Agrippa
that was a grandson. Herod Agrippa I, and you find
him in Acts 25, and he was the one that had Peter put in prison.
And then he gave God not the glory and was eaten by worms.
all that stuff. So there's lots of Herods in
there, but Herod Antipas is the one that we're dealing with now.
And they were all scoundrels. None of them was good. But he was kind of a half, his
father was Idemian, but he was part Jewish. And so he would
have been in Jerusalem for the Passover too, because it was
required. He gets Jesus taken before him. The guy that had his man killed,
his messenger killed, the one that had John beheaded. And Herod
says, hey, you know what? I'm really interested in this.
I heard a lot about this Jesus guy. I'd like to see some of
that magic stuff. So they brought Jesus there to
Herod, and Herod questioned him a little bit, but he wouldn't
answer him. So the guards of Herod abused
him some more and sent him back to Pilate. Pilate says, well, apparently
Herod didn't find anything worthy of death either. So again, I
find no fault in this man. I'm just going to turn him loose.
And they said, no, no, no. Crucify him, crucify him. But
one of the things that we find in this block of Scripture, Jesus, he didn't conform to Herod's
wishes to Hey, I'll do some of that magic stuff for you. Got somebody dead, I'll raise
them up. Got somebody with leprosy, bring them out. Those kind of
things. But they mocked the Lord God
Almighty. The mocking. You know, and as I thought about
that, We kind of all fall into that
scope of that before we're regenerated, before Christ is revealed to
us. We kind of mock Him. We're like, eh, that's religious
stuff. It's imaginary. It's mythology. It doesn't amount to anything. And many people, hey, I'm a,
call me a sinner, I'm a great sinner. Kind of boastful about
my sin. Hardly any sin I haven't committed.
Pretty boastful about that. I don't need saving. I don't
believe in the hidden at all. Don't believe in his redemptive
power. I don't believe in even the need
for a redeemer. We mock him. You know, there's
a couple of verses in Romans Chapter 9 that describe the patience
of the Lord in tolerating abuse and maltreatment to accomplish
the redemption of His people. In Romans 9, 22, what if God,
willing to show His wrath and make His power known, endured
with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction? Now those vessels of wrath, we've
run into a couple of them here in Luke 22 and 23. We got those
religious leaders, the chief priests and the elders and all
those that were condemning Jesus to death. We have the Gentiles that are
going to carry it out. They're the saws and hammers
of redemption that God uses. But they're vessels of wrath
fitted for destruction. And that he might make known
the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had
for prepared unto glory. And I think that's the view that
Jesus has when he's responding to Pilate. That's a view that
Jesus had when he was in front of the Sanhedrin. I'm putting up with you. I'm
long-suffering toward you. Your time will come, but right
now I'm being patient with you because you're my saws and my
hammers that I'm going to use to redeem my people. I'm looking
at you with the eyes of long-suffering because I'm going to make known
the riches of my glory on the vessels of mercy before prepared
unto glory." What a statement about his, he
set his face like a flint to go and do this, to go to Jerusalem
and to do this. In John 18, 37, Pilate therefore
said unto him, Art thou a king then, Jesus? Thou sayest that
I am a king. To this end was I born, and for
this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto
the truth. And what truth is he talking
about? He's talking about the truth of the gospel. He's talking
about the truth of grace, the covenant of grace. And he says,
everyone that is of the truth, heareth my voice. Well, that's
a powerful statement there. He said, these are the people
that are going to hear, and the Spirit is going to cause them
to believe. Everyone that is of the truth, heareth my voice. And the rest are, some are going
to say, a thunder. What a powerful block of Scriptures
that we have here. When we condense it all, we try
to connect all these dots together and look at what's going on,
and now Jesus is approaching each thing as He prepares to lay down His
life, a ransom for many. So we're out of time. We didn't
even hardly read much of Luke 23. We spent so much time on
the background stuff, but I encourage you to get time to read through
Luke 23, 1 through 17, as he deals with these various people
that are the saws and hammers of redemption. So until next
time, be free.