turn to Mark's Gospel now. We're returning again to the
Gospel of Mark. We're making our way into chapter
15 today and we're going to be reading together from Mark chapter
15 and verse 1. So if you would like to turn
with me please to Mark chapter 15 and verse 1. Mark chapter 15 and verse 1. And we're going to read down
to the end of verse 5. So just a short reading today,
but we trust that the Lord will bless it to us nevertheless. Mark 15, verse 1. And straightway
in the morning the chief priests held a consultation with the
elders, and scribes, and the whole council, and bound Jesus,
and carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate. And Pilate asked
him, Art thou the king of the Jews? And he answering said unto
him, Thou sayest it. And the chief priests accused
him of many things, but he answered nothing. And Pilate asked him
again, saying, Answerest thou nothing? Behold, how many things
they witness against thee! But Jesus yet answered nothing,
so that Pilate marveled. Amen. May the Lord bless this
reading to our hearts. There is a common strand that
flows through the whole process of the Lord Jesus Christ's trials
and interviews and interrogations. whether we think of that very
first encounter with Annas at his home when the Lord was taken
by the mob from the Garden of Gethsemane and stopped off at
the house of Annas where he was inquired of, where he was interrogated
about his doctrine and his disciples, or whether it is with Caiaphas
in the main judgment hall before the Sanhedrin, the high priests
and those who gathered there in order to interrogate the Lord.
or whether it's with Herod, who Pilate sent the Lord to. Hearing that he was a man from
Galilee, he thought, well, perhaps I can get Herod to deal with
this problem. And Herod took him. He was delighted
with the opportunity of meeting Jesus. He'd heard much about
him, but the Lord didn't speak much to Herod at all. And Herod,
frustrated, had him beaten and sent back to Pilate. Or whether
this narrative, these few verses that we have before us here,
is taken as the pattern and to highlight this common thread,
this common strand. The point is that all of these
men sat in judgment on the Lord. and the Lord answered very little
to them. They thought that they could
decide what they would do with him. They all believed that they
had the right and authority to decide what should happen to
Jesus of Nazareth. And they brazenly exercised that
assumed right. But what they did not consider
was if Jesus truly was that one whom he said he was, then what
they thought of him was of very little importance. Much more
important is what he thought of them. and woe betides self-important
little men. We see them in our world today,
we hear them in pulpits, we see them in churches, we see them
all around us, people who think that they can Judge God and judge
the Lord Jesus Christ. That they have the right to decide
what is right and what is wrong with respect to the revelation
of God and the work of salvation. And they set themselves up as
arbiters. They set themselves up as judges
over the Lord. We made mention in yesterday's
little introduction sheet of Pilate's wife. And she's not
mentioned in Mark's gospel here. It's Matthew in the parallel
passage that speaks of her. And Matthew alone amongst the
gospel writers speaks of her. And in some respects, his reference
to her is very brief and raises more questions than it answers. But one thing is clear about
that lady. She sensed something about the
Lord Jesus Christ that all of these other men did not see and
did not understand. She had something revealed to
her in a dream, something of the magnitude of the present
situation. facing her husband and those
around about him that no one else saw. And despite all their
power, despite their civil power, their military power, their religious
knowledge and training, she knew the Lord Jesus was a just man. and in some way she knew that
her husband in judging Christ was putting himself in great
danger. Today men and women imagine that
they can still judge Jesus Christ. Indeed there is a whole religious
system has grown up in recent years and in bygone years that
urges its followers to decide for Jesus and not to decide against
Jesus. Puts its followers into that
place of deciding about Jesus and his salvation and emphasising
man's free will in deciding their own eternal destiny. When in
truth the real question is not what you will decide to do with
Jesus, but what the Lord Jesus Christ will do with you. and a great deal of humility
and a great deal of self-examination is required by such men and women
as believe this doctrine. Because it is not what we think
of Christ that matters, but of what Christ thinks of us. The priests, they were about
their nefarious business early in the day. We're told that straightway
when it was day that they bound the Lord and took him to Pilate. And I imagine that many of these
priests had been awake all night. They consulted together in the
morning. They didn't consult together
in order to discover justice. in order to do what was right,
in order to do what was fair and appropriate. They consulted
together in order to agree a common narrative, in order to agree
what accusations would best stick before Pilate concerning the
Lord Jesus Christ. They wanted to settle on a story
that would be sufficiently believable to convince Pilate of the Lord's
guilt. Actually, it becomes clear when
we read these parallel passages from the Gospel writers, it becomes
clear that Pilate is well aware that they had delivered Jesus
into his hands because of envy, and that Jesus of Nazareth was
the victim in this situation of their devious politics. And
yet despite that, every route that Pilate takes to release
Jesus is blocked. And ultimately, we discover that
the unjustness and the weakness of Pilate becomes evident. To Pilate, the life of one man
was a small price to pay in order to keep the peace city was like a tinderbox of
religious fervour with anti-Roman sentiment just waiting to explode. Pilate couldn't afford to allow
the people to get angry and for the mob to be violent and so
he was willing to be expedient with the life of the Lord Jesus
Christ. But it's not really Pilate that
we're going to be thinking about today, and it's not his wife,
and it's not Herod, nor indeed is it the priests and the people
of Jerusalem. They don't take our interest
nor demand our attention. It is the Lord himself to whom
we look, and it is the things that the Lord said and did that
reveal to us the blessedness of what was transpiring here
at this time. I think there are several important
lessons that are highlighted in this short passage. They draw
our mind to the great work of redemption and blood atonement
and the work of grace that is unfolding before our eyes. What it all meant, what its significance
was and why it is important. And today I'm going to take just
three headings and ask the Lord to bless our thoughts on these
matters as we view the Saviour's steady progress towards the cross. He is going to die soon, within
a few hours indeed, and the everlasting life that he has won for his
people will be obtained when his own life is sacrificed on
the cross. And we shall touch upon the teaching
in this passage concerning the Lord Jesus Christ's role as our
surety about Christ in his office as king, and thirdly, the silence
of the Lord Jesus Christ before his accusers. So these are the
three points that I want to think about. Christ's suretyship, Christ's
kingship, and the silence of Christ before his enemies. So the first one then is to think
about the Lord Jesus Christ as our surety. And the Holy Spirit,
I think, has gone to great lengths to help us to understand the
significance of Christ, our surety, in the way in which he has revealed
the events running up to the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the example that we have
in these few verses is the binding of Christ and his deliverance
to Pilate. Christ being bound and delivered
to Pilate is an example of Christ's sure to ship role for his people. Here's what I mean by that. In
the Old Testament, the binding of the sacrificial lamb prior
to it being slain and sacrificed was emblematic of the binding
here of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Jews. And perhaps you'll
remember, we read it a number of weeks ago with the children,
perhaps you'll remember that occasion when Abraham took his
son Isaac to the mountains of Moriah I think perhaps we mentioned
at that time that there was a correspondence between the mountains of Mariah
and this area here in which Jerusalem was built and indeed potentially
even where the hill of Golgotha was. Be that as it may, we know
that Abraham brought Isaac to these very mountains where the
Lord Jesus Christ would now be crucified. And when he brought
his son there to the altar, Isaac asked his father, I see the wood,
I see the fire, but where is the lamb? And Abraham said to
his son, God will provide himself a lamb. And then Abraham took
his son and he laid him upon the altar and he bound him there
on the altar. And this is a picture to us of
the work of Christ. And so we see in the sacrifice
of Isaac The fact that God, in order to provide a way of salvation
for his people, would provide himself a lamb. Behold the lamb
of God that taketh away the sin of the world. And the Lord Jesus
Christ is that lamb provided by God. He himself is the lamb. And the binding of the Lord Jesus
Christ was in order to draw our attention to the linkage between
these two events. One was a picture of the other. So that in the Old Testament,
believers could understand what was going to happen to the Lord
when by faith they looked on the way in which God had instructed
and directed his followers and gave them pictures and patterns
in the Old Testament scripture of what would happen to the Lord
Jesus Christ. And the Lord would be bound,
and the Lord would be delivered into the hands of his enemies,
and the Lord would be placed upon the altar of judgment, and
there the Lord would die as the provided Lamb. And so there are
pictures and types and anti-types. There are likenesses and realities. There's prophecies and fulfilments. The Lord Jesus Christ is the
fulfilment of the Old Testament symbolism that pointed towards
the way of salvation. So we look at these parallels
and we see that the Holy Spirit supplies them in order that our
understanding and our linkages between these Old Testament patterns
and the reality and fullness in the person of Jesus Christ
might be more fully understood. And in them we see how the Gospel
in type and picture has always pointed to the coming Messiah
and what he would endure for the salvation of the elect. For Christ to be our substitute,
he must take our place and carry our punishment. But the Lord
was also our surety. We speak about these two words,
substitute and surety, and in many ways they overlap. But the
particular aspect of the suretyship of the Lord Jesus Christ is given
meaning and significance in the book of Hebrews, where we are
told that Jesus was made surety of a better testament. And that
testament, the other word for testament is covenant. That testament,
that better testament or better covenant is the covenant of grace
or the covenant of peace and it is redemption by Christ's
blood. We read about that in Hebrews
chapter 7. And this is the covenant of grace
and peace that was settled in eternity between the persons
of the Godhead, whereby the Lord Jesus Christ stood forth, stepped
forth as the covenant head and surety of his people. To answer for our debts, for
our sin, and to fulfil all our duty to God, to fulfil on our
behalf everything that was required of us. And that's the sense of
suretyship. Yes, the Lord Jesus Christ became
our substitute. He endured in our place. our sufferings but he was also
surety because not only did he answer for the debt but he fulfilled
all our duty and he satisfied the claims and demands of Almighty
God. Christ stood in our room instead
in all that he did and suffered It is we who properly are bound
over to the just judgment of God. It is we who are in bondage
to Satan in our sin. And we saw that previously in
our little introduction that the wicked are pictured as being
bound hand and foot and cast into hell and to outer darkness
in the last day. so that although we are guilty
and although we deserve to be bound and delivered to death,
It was the Lord Jesus Christ who was bound and delivered to
death in our place. And this is just a picture that
the Holy Spirit gives us to reinforce these parallels, to show us this
substitutionary role, and to remind us of the suretyship of
the Lord Jesus Christ. His substitution for us in all
points is foreshadowed in him being bound and delivered to
judgment. And his suretyship means that
he took all our debt, paid it to the full, and cancelled and
satisfied all our obligations and responsibilities to God. And this is what we mean when
we talk about free grace. That's what we mean when we talk
about God's provision for us in salvation. That everything
needful was laid upon the obligation of Christ. And that in the everlasting
covenant the Lord Jesus Christ undertook to fully satisfy every
righteous and holy demand that was laid upon the people of God's
elective choice and purpose. And all that Jesus did and suffered
was put to our account. When Christ had fulfilled all
righteousness and by his sacrifice had removed every penalty of
sin, His people were to all eternity and for all purposes made righteous
in Christ's righteousness and freed from all sin by His cleansing
blood. And that is the message of the
gospel. That is the good news of the
gospel. Not some notion about people
deciding yes or no, or people making some choice about whether
or not they're going to be followers, or whether they're going to be
believers, or whether or not they want to go to heaven. That
is so marginal and so inconsequential as to not merit repetition except
to expose its fallacy. The gospel is the fact that Jesus
Christ has done it all and ever had intended an everlasting covenant
to supply the salvation of his people. By the simple act of
binding and delivering the Saviour to Pilate, the Jews testified
to the representative role of Christ for all his elect people. They assumed, they thought all
they were doing was binding him as a mere precaution So that
as they led him through the streets of Jerusalem in that early morning,
from the temple to Pilate's judgment hall, he wouldn't escape. As if rope could prevent the
Son of God from escaping any more than nails could secure
him to the cross. But this act of the Jews prophetically
supported the true identity of Christ. He was bound and he was
delivered unto death. It fulfilled the words of the
prophets. So Christ is our substitute and
Christ is our surety. And here's another lesson that
we have from these few verses. Christ is our king. This again was another aspect
of this short trial that we have presented before us here, this
short interrogation between the Lord Jesus Christ and Pilate. One of the accusations made against
the Lord was that he claimed to be a king, the king of the
Jews. And the Jews, the priests, they
must have thought that this was a winning argument. Pilate could
hardly do nothing if a man from Galilee was setting himself up
against Caesar. They might have thought he was
a madman, but there was evidence that he was gaining followers
in Jerusalem and throughout Israel. And Pilate may well have thought,
better to nip such movements in the bud rather than let them
grow out of control. So Pilate at once asks the question
of Jesus. Art thou the king of the Jews? That was the one that he heard. That was the one that struck
him. The Jews were right to present
this as an argument because they knew that Pilate would have to
give it attention. So he at once asked the question,
art thou the king of the Jews? To which the Lord Jesus replied,
yes, I am. The little phrase that is in
our passage here is, thou seest. That would equally be well translated,
it is as thou sayest. It's just as you say. Yes, I
am a king. And it's perhaps at this point
in Pilate's dealings with the Lord that Pilate realises he's
dealing with a more nuanced matter. than simply a would-be Jewish
rebel. Pilate was a wily enough man,
he was a smart enough man, to know that the Jews envied Christ. And he knew that Christ was not
advocating armed rebellion. He knew this was a matter of
Jewish religion. But Jesus wasn't a threat to
the Roman army. He wasn't a challenger to Caesar. The Lord indeed told Pilate,
it's recorded in another one of the gospel writers, he told
Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world. To this end was I
born. This was the reason that I was
born. For this cause came I into the world, that I should bear
witness unto the truth. Jesus was a preacher of the truth. His kingdom, his followers were
not militant as far as politics are concerned or nationalism
was concerned. The Lord's kingdom is a spiritual
kingdom. It's not physical. It's not military. It's not employing the rule of
law in order to accomplish its aims and ends. That was true
then, and it's true now. And many people perhaps seem
to have missed that point, who want to use the laws of a land
in order to suppress certain kinds of activities. The Apostle
Paul tells us the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. If we are
to know anything about the righteous kingdom of God, the righteous
kingdom of Christ, it is in the experience of a justified spirit,
in a peace that passeth understanding. and in the joy of the Lord. These are Holy Spirit gifts. They are internal, they are spiritual,
and it is this that shows our interest in and membership of
the Kingdom of God. So the even Pilate grasped that
the Saviour was no threat to Caesar. Nevertheless, our Lord
truthfully testified to his kingly office and to his sovereign power,
a power far superior to all the kings of the earth and all the
powers of the ages. Sovereignty is applicable only
to our Lord Jesus Christ, says the Apostle Paul to Timothy. He writes, which in his times
he shall show. who is the blessed and only potentate,
the King of kings and Lord of lords. And it is this Christ,
this Christ of a spiritual kingdom, who is indeed King of kings and
Lords of lords, the blessed and only potentate, the sovereign
God of all eternity, that the people of God, the elect of God,
turn their eyes in praise and in worship. And here again we
have to emphasise the meaning of Christ's sovereign kingship,
his absolute right to do all the things that he does according
to his own good pleasure. If the sovereign God is not your
God, then you've got the wrong God. Even Moses, as we saw earlier
in the Song of Moses, understood that. Moses knew the Lord's dominion
and unrivaled majesty. Moses knew because he sang the
song, Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is
like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders? And Daniel testified equally,
None can stay his hand or say unto him, What doest thou? And
again we read, for the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, even for
this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might show my
power in thee, and that my name might be declared through all
the earth. It's the Apostle Paul in Romans
8. We worship Christ the King. We serve Christ the King. Our Saviour asserted his kingly
office and his sovereign majesty. The things that happen in this
world are because Christ has ordained it to be so and he is
sovereign ruler of all things in this world. The prophets declared
it. It was long anticipated in the
person of the coming Messiah and his apostles affirmed it
in a New Testament age. This is what the scriptures teach
and this is what we have been called to believe. So we consider
the suretyship of the Lord. We consider his kingly office. And then thirdly, we can think
about the silence of Christ. And perhaps a principal feature
of the Lord's trials is his silence or his relative silence in the
face of his enemies' accusations. We saw it with the high priests,
it was true with Herod, and we are told that Pilate, no doubt
a skilful judge of human nature in his own right, greatly marvelled
that the Lord should make no reply in his own defence. The silence of the Lord in the
face of these accusations from his enemies is more than simply
not speaking. It's also more than the fact
that the Lord was not giving legitimacy to the authority of
their court systems, which might have been a reason for not speaking. But the silence of Christ showed
that he did not resist the enemies who injured him. And that's the
point. There was no resistance in the
person of Christ. He was as a lamb led to the slaughter. The silence of Christ is seen
in that he did not complain against the injuries that were inflicted
on him. The injuries inflicted on Christ
were more than the blows that struck his face. They were more
than the nails that pierced his hand. There was the mockery,
there was the misrepresentation, there was the lies that were
spoken against him. There was the fact that emotionally,
Psychologically, a man would want to vindicate himself and
yet the Lord took it all because it was part of the punishment
that God brought against him for our sins. Such was the suffering
of the Lord, in body, in mind and in soul, in his emotions,
in all of the aspects of his nature, that the whole person
of Christ was crushed underneath this weight of suffering. He
didn't complain. He saw his affliction as the
justice of God against our sin. And he meekly and willingly accepted
all that he was called to bear. He owned the obligation he had
laid himself under as the surety of his people. He would pay the
debt. cup. He would bear the punishment
without any dispute, without any hesitation. Christ was harmless
and without guile. He was innocent at all times. He was meek. He was patient in
his suffering. The Lord was ready and willing
to be sacrificed in our place. And Christ would go all the way
to the cross without resistance, without reluctance, without reservation. It mattered not to him what lie
it was that convicted him. What mattered was that he paid
the price for the sins of his people. He didn't speak out against
his enemies. He didn't threaten them. He didn't
accuse them of duplicity and malpractice and all the lies
and deceit that he could have done. He viewed all his sufferings
set before him and he paid that suffering. He paid that debt
to the justice of God. God's justice demanded full satisfaction
for sin. And the end of that process would
be the complete emptying of the cup. No bitterness would be left
in the cup of God's wrath. Every last drop must be drained. And Christ's silence in the face
of his accusers was tacit acceptance of all that he was called to
bear and endure. The Apostle Peter wrote much
later in his own life. He wrote, who of Christ, who
when he was reviled, reviled not again. When he suffered,
threatened not, but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously. What a sight we have before us
here with the Lord Jesus Christ standing bound before Pilate. the eternal Son of God in human
nature, the Lord of life and glory, the Prince of kings of
the earth, standing before a heathen governor. Someday Pilate will
stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and Caiaphas will
be there, and Herod will be there, as we all, as men and women,
must stand. And our Lord Jesus Christ stood
before human judges, though he had no crimes of his own to answer
for, but he carried the sins of his people upon him. And for
this reason, as he stood before Pilate, he stood in reality before
the bar of God's justice. Soon the Saviour would receive
Pilate's sentence of condemnation. He was condemned in the flesh,
bearing the whole of the sin of his people in his body, so
that the righteousness of God might be imputed to us who believe. He stood bound before Pilate
that we might stand free before God. He faced death with boldness
and courage that we might escape everlasting death. and enter
heaven by a new and living way opened for us. And by the binding
of Christ, his people are freed. Paul tells us, stand fast, therefore,
in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not
entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Amen. May the Lord
bless these thoughts to our hearts.