The Defeat of Evil (part 2)

The Utter Sovereignty of God at the Cross

Jesus died… just about every theologian and historian agrees on that point. Was Jesus a victim at the hands of lawless men? Before Peter lay blame on those gathered at Pentecost, he said something very peculiar. He said that Jesus was delivered up to death “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God…” In other words, those who successfully had Pilate condemn Jesus to death by crucifixion were only able to do so because it was God’s plan. Not only did Peter see Jesus’ death this way, but so did the first Christians, for when they faced certain religious persecution, they gathered together to pray: “…for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27-28).

Do you know what Acts 2 and 4 is saying? Peter preached and the first century Christians understood that God killed His Son and He used wicked people to do it! One of the most staggering passages in the Bible for me is found in Isaiah 53. Hundreds of years before Jesus was ever born; these words were written about One who would come:

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. 4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.

These verses cause me stagger into grateful and humble worship over the great price Jesus paid on my behalf because He alone bore my grief’s and carried my sorrows, he alone was wounded for my transgressions, He alone was crushed for my iniquities, upon Him alone was the chastisement that brought me peace with God, and by His stripes alone am I healed. But what staggers me more than anything else is what I read in the verses that follow, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—everyone—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all…. Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief” (vv. 6, 10). The murder of Jesus was premeditated.

As you recall, in Genesis 3 God promises that a deliverer would come who would fatally crush the head of the serpent (Satan) for his role in tempting Adam and Eve to sin against Him. It would be through this deliverer that God would reverse the curse of sin that has plagued all of creation since that terrible day in the Garden. From Genesis all the way through Malachi the Old Testament not only prophesied that this deliverer would one day come, but even spoke of the nature of His suffering leading up to His death. In other words, God was even involved in the details of His Son’s death; consider the following verses:

• Jesus would be rejected (Psalm 118:22; Matt. 21:42)
• Jesus would be hated (Psalm 35:19; John 15:25)
• Jesus would be abandoned by his own friends (Zech. 13:7; Matt. 26:31)
• Jesus would be pierced without any of his bones being broken (Psalm 34:20; Zech. 12:10; John 19:34-37)
• Jesus would be betrayed by a close friend (Psalm 41:9; John 13:18)
• Jesus would be handed over for 30 pieces of silver (Jer. 19:1-13; Zech. 11:12-13; Matt. 27:9-10)
• Jesus understood the details and reason for His impending death (Isa. 53:3-10; Mark 10:33-34)

There is a popular story used to illustrate John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should no perish but have eternal life.” The story is about a bridge operator who brought his son to work one day. The operator thought his son was fishing and didn’t realize that his son was playing by the gears that open and close the bride for boats to pass through. The bridge was opened for a boat to pass through, but while it was opened his son fell into the gear room. The son could have been rescued had not it been for a train full of passengers making its way towards the bridge that was still up. So, the operator was faced with a horrible decision: save his son and allow the train with all the people to perish or kill his son by closing the bridge for the purpose of saving the people on the train from certain doom. The bridge operator chose to save the people on the train by closing the bridge and killing his one and only son.

There is only one problem with that very touching and emotional story. Jesus’ death was not a last minute decision made by God the Father for the purpose of saving the likes of us from certain doom in hell. Unlike the bridge operator, God planned the death of His Son long before this world was ever cursed, long before Adam and Eve rebelled in the Garden. As John Piper put it so well: “God was at work in all the circumstances that brought Jesus to the cross. Behind the spitting and flogging and mocking and piercing is the invisible hand and plan of God.” [1]




[1] John Piper. Spectacular Sins (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books; 2008), p. 103.

The Defeat of Evil (Part 1)

Introduction
About three weeks ago, I wrestled with the nature and origin of evil and suffering in the first three blog posts. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. On the 6th day, God created two human beings in His image unlike anything else He created previously. In Genesis 3, both Adam and Evil fell into sin; Eve was deceived, but Adam fully understood what he was doing when he took the forbidden fruit and ate. There are three answers to the origin of evil and suffering: (1) Satan is alive and well on planet earth, (2) We are a sinful and cursed race, and (3) All of creation is cursed. The good news is that God is using Satan, sin, and a cursed creation to accomplish His purposes by defeating evil.

In Genesis 3:15 God promised to defeat evil: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Someone will come who will destroy the devil and his works; that someone was Jesus Christ. But how did He do that? What I would like to do is see how the utter evilness of evil, the utter goodness of God, and the utter sovereignty of God all come together at the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. What I would like to do is look at the death of Jesus from the three vantage points that we see in Acts 2:22-24.

The Utter Evilness of Evil at the Cross
In his sermon to 3000 plus people in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, Peter gives three reasons why Jesus was nailed to the cross. One of those reasons is placed upon those gathered for the day of Pentecost: “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst… you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”

When we behold Golgotha the day Jesus died, we see evil at its worst. Jesus, an innocent man, was sentenced to death in the most humiliating and horrific way. All throughout Jesus’ life, people were trying to kill him. When he was a toddler, Herod had all the children two years old and younger murdered in Bethlehem in an effort to keep Him from growing up. When one reads the four Gospels in the Bible, we learn of many attempts made by the religious leaders to take his life. And of course, you recall that it was Judas who betrayed him by accepting a bribe of 30 pieces of silver to hand Jesus over to them.

It wasn’t because Jesus was a criminal who deserved to die that led to the persistent attempts by others to take His life, for He was totally and completely innocent. In fact, after Jesus was condemned, Judas brought back the 30 pieces of silver he received from the religious leaders saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood” (Matt. 27:4); he then committed suicide by hanging himself.

Think for a moment of the magnitude of Judas’ sin. He witnessed the many healings; saw Jesus hush the stormy seas to sleep; after Lazarus was buried, Jesus raised him from the dead. I am sure Judas was shocked when Jesus took the two fish and five loves of bread and feed more than five thousand people… Judas even helped pass out the baskets! Judas was also well aware of the intentions of religious leaders to have Jesus killed when he betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver… the price of a common slave. Judas handed over not only an innocent man to be killed, he handed the Son of God, the Holy One of Israel, the Lord of Glory, the spotless Lamb of God to be murdered by lawless men.

Judas gathered a band of soldiers and some officers to take Jesus by force. Upon finding Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas pointed out Jesus to the soldiers with a kiss. Jesus was arrested and tried… illegally.

Jesus faced six trials; none of the trials were performed according to the laws of the land. The first person Jesus is brought before is Annas (who was still upset that Jesus drove the people and money-changers out of the temple –Annas oversaw the money changers). Jesus was not required to answer any of Annas’ questions, but when he did answer he was struck by one of the soldiers… something that was forbidden during a Jewish trial. Annas then sent Jesus to Caiaphas the high priest where some false witnesses were gathered to incriminate Jesus (still under the cloak of night).

Up to this point Jesus remained mostly silent, when Caiaphas got frustrated he asked a question in such a way that any pious Jew was required to answer: “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God” (Matt. 26:63). So, Jesus answered the high priest: “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt. 26:64), which was a direct reference to him being the Messiah as promised in Daniel 7. So, they got what they were hoping for… words from Jesus’ lips that were in their opinion blasphemous. Caiaphas condemned Jesus, a violation of Jewish law that required the whole council to vote, and the gathered people spit on him and beat him.

Jesus... tired, beaten, humiliated and bleeding, faced a third trial before the Jewish Supreme Court known as the Sanhedrin. This was the shortest of the three Jewish trials; they asked Him if he was the Messiah, to which He answered “yes.”

The final three trials Jesus faced were not justified either. In Rome there was a three phase process that led to either an acquittal or punishment: (1) accusation, (2) interrogation, and (3) a verdict. In Jesus’ fourth trial Pilate heard the accusations against Jesus but upon interrogating him, found him to be innocent. To get out of the jam he found himself in, he sent Jesus to his life-long enemy Herod, but the only thing Herod felt Jesus deserved was humiliation and mocking; this was Jesus’ fifth trial. Herod sent Jesus back to Pilate to receive a sixth and final trail.

It was at Jesus’ sixth and final trial that Pilate found himself trapped. He really believed Jesus was innocent. Pilate tried several avenues to get out of declaring Jesus guilty, so the first thing he offered was to have Jesus chastised and beat. Jesus was taken to a place for flogging where they stripped him naked before a whole group of soldiers. Two soldiers trained in the art of scourging flogged him with what was called a Cat-of-Nine-tails; each tip was laced with sharp bone and metal for the purpose of tearing apart the flesh. Jesus was flogged; his skin and muscle was torn to pieces, and when Pilate brought Him before the people he was one bloody mess.

If you thought things could not get any more worse, they did. It was the Passover and it was customary to release one prisoner, so Pilate gave the crowds a choice: (1) Jesus of Nazareth, or (2) Barabbas: a notorious criminal guilty of murder. When given the option, the crowd chose to free Barabbas. When Pilate asked why, the only response that he received was a riotous crowd screaming: “Let him be crucified!” “His blood be on us and our children!” Jesus was handed over to die in the most violent, humiliating, and painful death known in human history – crucifixion. As the soldiers prepared Jesus for death, they took his bloody and torn body, put a scarlet robe on him, placed a crown of thorns on his head, put a reed in his right hand, and mocked him by bowing down and saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They then struck him on the head, spit on him, and led Him away as He carried His cross. On His way to Golgotha, as He carried His cross, he was further mocked, spit upon, and beaten. When he finally reach the place where He would be crucified, they stripped him naked again, nailed him to the cross, all in a manner to amplify intense humiliation and pain for all to see. Even while on the cross the Son of God was further mocked by the religious leaders as well as the two criminals crucified next to Him. Shortly before His death, Jesus cried “It is finished!” The Bible tells us that he gave up His Spirit and died. Man had committed the ultimate evil… he killed the Son of God.

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