Well, thank you so much. Again, it's been a delight to be with you. We're changing out the systems here, but I would like to, this morning, kind of walk you through the rest of the Passion Week. Now, you have two lessons, and I'm going to touch on those. And the notes are rather complete, but I just thought, having traced the drama as far as we have, there might be some wisdom. We can't cover it in great detail, And wherever I go, I lean on whoever I can to let me come and do a whole seminar in a Passion Week. And if that ever happens, well, then you'll hear some of this again. What can I tell you? But I would like you to, I'd like to walk with you through the balance of the week. Now, the outline we've been using, you'll get it up there in a moment, is that Sunday is a day of Messianic presentation. That's the triumphal entry and it didn't happen accidentally. It happened because Jesus caused it to happen. And I like to say it this way, that Jesus, because he was the perfect expression of what he demanded of his disciples, that they be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, that Jesus was that perfectly and he did in fact strategize and carefully... He planned his ministry in ways that you and I could have done were we clever enough to think of it. It's not just that as God he was pulling strings that we can't pull. I would submit to you that he was actually, as I say, thanks so much, he was... You know what? I was going to do my doctoral dissertation on this theme. And actually, I got it about half written, and I gave it up. But because I had two guys on my reader committee that didn't like it, and I knew I was spitting into a stiff wind, then that's not wise to do. But having said that, when I submitted it and wrote the syllabus, about 80 pages, I struggled with this. what's call it, ways in which Jesus, you know, I thought about manipulated the events of the passion. Well that's not good, you know. I thought of ways in which he choreographed, but I'm an old Baptist, I can't go there for heaven's sake. So I came up with the word orchestrated, that he orchestrated the events of his own passion. Now it was interesting that they didn't, my committee didn't like that. So it came back to me with a new title, and it was Jesus' role in the events of his own, but it seemed a little understated. I mean, it wouldn't have been the same without him, as I always say. But on the other hand, that's where I'm after, that Jesus, without, and that's not to say that there were not many points in this process where the Spirit of God directed Jesus to access his omniscience or other divine attributes and so on. But in laying these plans and so on, I would submit to you that we best to understand it as Jesus doing it within the limitations of unfallen humanity, or to say it another way, in ways that you and I could have done were we, as I say, clever enough to figure it out. But having said all that, Sunday is a day of messianic presentation. We've talked about that. I think we understand it. And then, as I said last night, Monday and Tuesday are days of Messianic proclamation as Jesus cleanses and seizes the temple and puts himself on display as Messiah, and then drives that city to a decision. And Monday and Tuesday is so pivotal. I'll go back to what I said last night. I think it's not only legitimate, but almost mandatory. I mean, it's forced upon us to ask the question, given Sunday, why Friday? And I think the answer is, in fact, the demands, and this is so consistent. One of the things, I'm going to appeal to this a couple of times, On that CD there's a list of what I call ten important insights into the ministry of Jesus. And I just tried one time to sit down and summarize some of the elements of the narrative and some of the dynamics of the narrative, which are little appreciated, but it's hard to make sense of the narrative unless you come to grips with these things. And one of them is, I talked about this last night, that Jesus was such a master at confronting an easy offer of acceptance. You know what I'm saying? When it was easy, Jesus would always, and what He would always do is put His finger right on the place, it's the rich young ruler, you know, just put His finger right on the place where there is the greatest reluctance to submit. Or where submission would be the most painful. And that's exactly what He demands. Not because it's painful, But because there has to be total submission in order to honor him, and so he's going to take you to the place of greatest reluctance in the demanding of that submission. That make sense to you? And that's exactly what he's doing with the city of Jerusalem when he demands that they make a choice between him and the Pharisees, because it is so painful. It's so instructive to me, and it's an argument from Silas perhaps, but it's so instructive to me that in those woes that we didn't spend any time with, but that great series of woes which is listed right there in Matthew 23, read them, it'll make your You'll make your eyes water. I mean, it's just excoriating. But every one of them begins this way. And by the way, the word woe is an Old Testament prophetic word. It's the word that the prophets would use when they spoke a curse upon some Gentile nation. So to stand there in the presence of these Pharisees who regarded themselves as the gatekeepers and say, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, You encompass land and sea to make one proselyte, and when you have made him a proselyte, he is twofold more the son of hell, remember son, the son of hell than you are. Those are not words calculated to endear him to the Pharisaic fraternity. But what I was going to say is, I think they are calculated to drive the city to a decision. But what I was going to say is that all through those two days when Jesus possessed the temple, He was confronted again and again, not only by the Pharisees, but by their, you know, their hated, also by the Sadducees. But he doesn't say, woe to you, Sadducees. Is it because the Sadducees didn't deserve some sort of condemnation? Oh no, they had it coming. But nobody cared about the Sadducees. The point is not just to pronounce woes upon the Pharisees, it's to demand that the people make a choice between the religion that they have embraced and is so carefully and thoroughly embodied in the Pharisees and what Jesus has come to offer them as their Savior. Does that make sense to you? Alright, now I'm still reviewing and I've got to get going because we've got a lot of ground to cover. I mentioned that Wednesday is a silent day, but it's a very important day because of the fact that all of this logistical preparation has to take place. And I'm going to emphasize it again, the record is absolutely explicit that that logistical preparation cannot begin until Tuesday night. It does not begin until Tuesday night, late Tuesday night, when Judas shows up and says, I can help. Just before he shows up, all the Sanhedrinites are throwing their hands in the air and say, we can't do it, we'll have to wait until after the Passover. It is not insignificant, by the way, that Jesus is going to die on the high day as our Passover. But that plot begins to unfold. It's laid on Tuesday night. It involves the arrest of Jesus when he is in the absence of the multitude, which he knows will be, Judas knows will be at the Passover. And then it involves an arrest by 600 soldiers, a trial before 70 Sanhedrinists, and then a public tribunal in the house of Pilate at about 4.30 in the morning. I really struggle with the altitude up here. I walked up here and I'm still trying to get the bubbles out of my chest. But at any rate, by Thursday, everything is in readiness. Now I want you to go to Loop 22. That's where I had you last night and never got there. And I'm going to more or less walk you, and I'll use the PowerPoint And so I'm not really going to trace the notes, though, there. I will go through the notes. Luke 22 is Thursday afternoon. And notice what it says. By the way, Jesus is in Bethany. And I think there's one other thing that happened on that silent Wednesday, and I'll come to it in just a moment, that we can infer. We can only deduce or infer it. It's not explicit in the record. In Luke 22, verse 7, it says this, "...then came the day of unleavened bread, when the Passover must be killed." All right, now let me just stop there real quickly. Passover is in the spring of the season. There are three pilgrimage feasts in the annual cycle that God gave Israel. Yea, verily, when they entered the land, when they came into the land under Joshua, and the land was divided, God knew that the tendency would be to just exist unto themselves. And so he gave them these three times a year, when all the male adult Jews were to report to the central sanctuary and worship God. Now actually, there are seven feasts, but they are grouped in three seasons, the spring, the summer, and the fall. And so in the spring you have three feasts, and they are Passover, unleavened bread, and firstfruits. Then in the summer you have a stand-alone feast, which is Pentecost. Then in the fall or autumn you have three more feasts, and they are Trumpets, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles. So when it says here, the one week of feast in the spring included both unleavened bread, which was the beginning where you got all the leaven out of the house, and on that day is when the Passover must be killed in this year. So I go back to it. verse 6 he says, it came the day of unleavened bread when the Passover must be killed. Let me say one other thing. That lamb had to be purchased by the 10th of Nisan. The Passover lamb had to be purchased and inspected and accepted by the 10th of Nisan. And then, interestingly enough, you were to keep, and both Leviticus and Exodus are explicit about that, you were to keep the lamb with you until the day of slaughter. What that meant is you couldn't keep it in the pasture, you couldn't keep it in somebody else's property. It had to be there among your domestic animals in the courtyard and so on. It had to get used to you. And the idea is God, I think, wants you to develop a certain attachment, and that lamb, an attachment to you. Because you're going to take and lay your hands on the back of that lamb, and that lamb, his throat is going to be slit. But at any rate, that's what's going on. They had evidently had this lamb now for four days, and it's time for it to be slaying, at least four days, since the 10th of Nisan. The slaying of the lamb was to be done on the 14th of Nisan. Nisan is the spring month. Between the evenings, and you'll see various ideas, but as I understand it, it's basically, in Israel the sun is very hot. And the air heats up very quickly, especially in the spring and summer and even into the fall. When it does, when the air, Israel lies between the desert and the sea, and when you get that hot air beginning to rise, you get the displacement off the Mediterranean Sea, and it's to die for. Oh, it's something. But we were there, I was there in July, it was as hot as it's ever been since they kept records in Israel. It was 113 when we were at the Dead Sea. But we were in Jerusalem, it was hot in places, but in the afternoon, when those breezes would start, we would sit in an outdoor dining area in the hotel we were staying in, and sit and talk after dinner, and the women were taking the tablecloths off and wrapping around them, because it was getting chilly. But it was still hot with that cool breeze. Well, I would submit to you that when those breezes start to blow about three o'clock in the afternoon, that's the first evening. Again, what the Bible says is, the Lamb is to be slain between the evening. Most translations put at twilight. But the Hebrew is explicit, between the evenings, because in Jewish life, you have that first evening when you get the afternoon breezes, and then when the sun disappears and the stars appear, that's the second evening. So you're talking, you've got a season, you've got maybe four, four and a half hours during which all the lambs, the Passover lambs, have to be slain on Nisan 14. All right, so Jesus dispatches the disciples to do that. And it says, he sent Peter and John, and I want you to be patient with me here, because I'm just asking for a little mercy here, but people get upset with me about this, but I'm telling you, my way to read it is the only way to read it, so there. He sent Peter and John saying, go and prepare the Passover for us that we may eat. And so they said to him, where do you want us to prepare? And he said to them, behold, you know this story, when you have entered the city, a man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water, follow him into the house where he enters and say, the master of the house, the teacher says, Where is the guest room? Now, the reason I ask for some patience is, again and again, people get a little upset with me here, and I'm kind of whining, I know, but because everybody finds omniscience here. Now, think about it. Honest to goodness, does that make sense? Because if you read it that way, it sounds as if Jesus says, go prepare for the Passover, and they say, where do you want us to do it? And he said, well, I hadn't thought of that, but I'm getting something here. You're going to go into town. What's that guy doing with that pitcher of water? Did he also get a vision? What's that house doing? Folks, I am absolutely persuaded that Jesus orchestrated this. I think another thing that probably happened on that silent Wednesday, and there's a good deal of speculation here, but I think something like this had to happen. Jesus is in Bethany with the Twelve. Tomorrow, Thursday, is the day of Passover slaying. I think Jesus perhaps went and found his host, Lazarus, and said, I need to borrow one of your servants. He got that servant off by himself. He said, I want you to go into town. There's a woman who lives in town. She's a follower of mine. She's been very gracious to me. And I need a place to keep the Passover. Ask if I can use her upper room. If that's okay, I want her to have a man carrying a pitcher of water. There is consummate cleverness and wisdom in that. Because a man carrying a pitcher of water in that culture is the perfect signal. It's unusual. Very few, mostly women and children, carry water. But it's not like a three-headed chicken. You know what I'm saying? People are not going to stop and stare, but they're not going to be more than a couple of guys. And it's the perfect signal. And so Jesus says, go in and find that man. And again, Jesus asked for the woman in the house, if you don't mind. Alright, time up. I'm not going to go into it, but I think if you put all the indications of the Bible together, you can be pretty confident. It's not very important. It won't come up very early at the Bema Seat, if you know what I'm saying. But I think you can be pretty confident that the woman whose house this is, is Mary, the mother of Mark. This seems to be the house of Mary, the mother of Mark. But whosoever it is, and that's why I say the woman of the house. Very possibly, and by the way, that'll explain something. Because, and I could take you through the line of reasoning in the book of Acts that we kind of reason backwards to this, but do you recall that in the book of Mark, and only in the book of Mark, when Jesus is arrested, there's a young man in the garden with a sheet? This is one of those stories I always say that you really have a hard time finding a flannel draft board, you know what I'm saying? Because remember what happens here? Pardon me? Yeah, yeah, sans the sheet. Remember when they ask him, he's got a sheet wrapped around him, and they say, aren't you one of them? And he runs off with leaving the sheet behind. Well, the point is, it is very characteristic, the man is unnamed, but it's very, very characteristic of the gospelists to tell kind of embarrassing stories on themselves, and to avoid telling those stories on the others. And so there's every reason to think that this, in fact, is Mark. For which reason, as I'll try and explain to you in just a minute, you have good explanation because Well, here's the point and now I should I got into this I'm going to have to get ahead of myself But what's going to happen is Jesus is going to go to that house He is going to Judas is going to get up and leave and go to fetch the Sanhedrin is Jesus is going to say let's get out of here and head for Gethsemane Judas is going to come back to that house So he goes up the outsides. He's got six hundred soldiers He goes, you know, it bangs on the doors or you can throw us it open and the doors The house is empty that is the room is empty Now Judas realizes the only place he can go is Gethsemane. Does that make sense to you? So he heads for Gethsemane. Meanwhile, there's a kid sleeping in the bedroom downstairs. He hears all this commotion, 600 soldiers on through the sheet around himself. Does that make sense to you? It all fits very, very well. But having said it, like I say, it's ancillary. But here's the thing. What's going on here? Come back to Luke 22. I've got to quit that. Luke 22. Look. What's going on here? Why does Jesus See, I think Jesus very carefully set this up and arranged for this house, and what He's doing is keeping it a secret from whom? Because if Judas had known where that house was, those soldiers would have undoubtedly been waiting there, and there would have been no Passover, and there would have been no Last Supper, and there would have been no Gethsemane experience. Jesus is so careful. He's not trying to avoid the cross. but he's putting it on his timetable. And it's interesting, when he gets his disciples into the upper room, he says, you don't know with what a desire I have desired to keep this feast with you. And I think he's making reference to the fact that he had rather move heaven and earth to make sure that he would have this time with them. Does that make sense to you? Now, given that, I want you to think for a minute about what's going on in the soul spirit of Judas. Judas, and by the way, let me just talk about this real quickly. There is an attempt in this quarter and that, I run into it again and again, to somehow psychoanalyze Judas and come up with some meaningful and legitimate rationale for his wickedness. He was disappointed because Jesus hadn't established a kingdom and he was trying to You know, he was trying to draw Jesus out and force Him to... Look, Judas was a thief. You know what, guys, I've got to tell you. You don't need any explanation other than this. Sin makes you stupid. And when you cling to sin, and that sin begins to get... And Judas was a thief. And because he loved his sin, More than he loved what he knew full well to be the truth. No man, but I'm telling you, hell will be full of no other sort of individual. The only way, I would say, I think the hardest thing a person can do, I think you have to get up every morning and work as hard as you possibly can to get into hell. God has put, now, we'll do it. Our fallen nature, we'll do it. But you don't slip into hell. The fact is, God has surrounded you with so much truth and so much light, every man who ever entered this world, and God has a reward for them that will seek Him, that is, will respond a right to the light that He's given you and so on. Now I'm getting into another thing, but my point is, Judas simply loved his sin more than he loved what he knew to be the truth, and as he rebelled and steeled himself, Against that truth, it's the principle of Scripture. It's the Pharaoh principle. You know, the hardening of the heart principle. And the fact is that Judas, his soul spirit was so corrupted and so distorted, and he had learned to despise this one who loved him so and had been so good and so careful to him. And I believe on the basis of that, that rebuke on Saturday night which so angered him that he had gone off to make this deal. Now think about it. There are 600 soldiers waiting to arrest Jesus. There is a cadre of the most important and influential men in all of Jewry waiting to try Jesus. Pilate has his alarm set for 4 o'clock in the morning so he can get out there and none of that can happen until Judas tells him where Jesus is. And here it is, they're going off to the place and he doesn't know where it is. And his soul is burning in among us as he thinks, I've been schnookered again, if you don't mind. Well, having said it, Jesus makes his way to a hill on the, and I call Thursday evening, by the way, a time of messianic preparation. I say Thursday evening because the record picks up right here when Jesus dispatches Peter and John to have the Passover lamb slain. That's where the record picks up on Thursday afternoon. And I'm going to walk you through the events. And I'll take you to some scripture. I'm headed somewhere. I'd like to spend some time with Jesus before Pilate, before we're done this morning. But at any rate, He goes, I left off a parenthesis there, but He goes to the house of Mary, the mother of Mark. Now, I'm going to use this map again and again. It's a map of the city of Jerusalem in Jesus' day. It's very, very helpful from Herschel Shanks. See this little dotted line right here? See that? That's superimposed on it. For what it's worth, those are the modern city walls. And so what Shanks, in drawing this map is trying to do is give you some point of reference. If you've ever been to Jerusalem, when you get to Jerusalem, if you haven't been there, get there for heaven's sake. But the city walls that are very evocative, they're also very modern. They were built in the 1540s, which is pretty ancient for us, but they're very, very modern by biblical standards. And those city walls which we see today, which are, like I say, give it some charm and so on, are entirely confusing because they're so wrong as far as position is concerned. These are the city walls in Jesus' day. Now, this is the western hill. I'll teach you Jerusalem. Everything you need to know about Jerusalem in ten sentences here. Jerusalem is two hills and three valleys. If you can find it, just get to know two hills and three valleys. It's not real clear on this map, but I'll give it to you here. The two hills are the eastern hill, which is right here. This is the eastern hill. It is the Temple Mount and the city of David. This is the little city of David down here, what's called the Lower City. And this is basically the only city that David ever conquered. Then he bought a threshing floor north of his city, and Solomon built the temple there, and then of course Herod came along and enlarged that hill. So this right here is the Eastern Hill. Does that make sense to you? The Eastern Hill. The Western Hill is over here. It's called the Upper City on this map. It's where you want to live, because that's where you catch the Mediterranean breezes. So the broad western hill, which was outside the city until the days of Hezekiah, but then it was included. And in the days of Herod, it was fortified. So this is the western hill. I say there are two hills, three valleys. The three valleys are the Kidron. Kidron Valley runs over here, and it's not on a map, is the Mount of Olives, outside the city. Remember, the Bible talks about a mountain which is on the east of the city. That's the Mount of Olives, north-south. Runs all the way along the city. By the way, we talked yesterday about if you go down the Mount of Olives and head off this way, you're down to the Dead Sea, right? So you have the Valley of Kidron, a very, very deep valley. By the way, you know, this temple was a slaughterhouse. When we think of the temple, we think of it as sort of a pristine, cathedral-like place. Think of it. The smells, the noise. It was thousands of animals being slaughtered. And all of that had to be cared for. All of that had to be kept pure. It had to be kept clean. And there was a huge system of cisterns and conduits and sluice gates opening. And all of the refuse that wasn't collected and burned was channeled into this Kidron Valley. And remember this. And at Passover season, as the blood was washed away, you understand the lamb had to be slain, but the blood had to be caught and then dashed against the altar. Now there was a system of draining that away. The interesting thing is, it was drained into this brook called the Kidron. And I'm outside a little careless to have all this stuff being drained. But in fact, that is, that Kidron Valley becomes, it's an akhal or a riverbed that makes its way all the way down to the Dead Sea. And God provided this remarkable cleansing system where it was all washed into that salinated Dead Sea and emulsified. So it really is a very, very important feature of it. But at any rate, this is the Kidron Valley. Now the other valley, the other very important valley, runs on the west and the south and it's called the Hinnom, the Hinnom Valley. This is Jesus' picture of hell. The Aramaic word for valley is Geh. And so Geh Hena is the Valley of Hinoam. And the reason, are you familiar with why that is? This is where they burned the refuse. And there was a constant burning there and flies and so on. Probably down here, there's a gate down here called the Dung Gate. It's still to this day called the Dung Gate because in antiquity the dung would be carried out there and burned down here. so that the winds would carry it past the city and carry the smell past the city. And so at any rate, that's the Hinnom Valley. There is today, all right, let me tell you one other thing. I better get going, Bookman. This area right here, the upper city and the Valley of Hinnom is where most of the fighting was in 1967 as the Jews recaptured the city of Jerusalem for the first time since 70 AD. As a result, it was pretty well leveled. And as a result of that, it's the nicest place in Jerusalem today. It's also the place where we know the most about the city, because archaeologists... See, Jerusalem, we'd love to dig there. Anybody would love to dig there, but it's a living tell. People are living there. But because that one area was stripped clean, that western hill, it's exactly what we're talking about here this morning, archaeologists were able to go in there for several years. And actually, they worked long after they began to build it. They built everything on big stilts and built apartment buildings above it. And to this day, there are museums you can go to down below the very, very nice quarter. But at any rate, the point is that here in the Valley of Gehom, there is a beautiful park in an outdoor amphitheater, a beautiful outdoor amphitheater. And they have huge concerts there. And I was there one time. And they had this great, this huge concert where they had the Israeli Philharmonic and several Philharmonics from around the country and about ten Jewish choirs and and it was this big Medical convention there and so on so and I slipped in and it was it was really fantastic And they want they concluded it by singing handles Messiah these Jewish choirs And I thought this has got to be the most out-of-body experience I've ever had Here I am sitting less listening to ten Jewish choirs saying handles Messiah and In hell, right? You know what I'm saying? In Gehenna. But at any rate, I'm being goofy there. But at any rate, here's the point. This is where the wealthy people live. The upper city is where the wealthy people live. Now this is where Jesus is going to come to this borrowed home. And I'd love to stop on it, but if I do, we'll not get where I want to get. So let me just tell you real quickly, One of the most dramatic and I think important elements of this narrative, of this upper room narrative, is the dullness of the apostles. Jesus is carefully, I believe Jesus knows exactly what's at foot. He knows the plot that's being laid. He may have known it omnisciently, I don't know, but I think he was probably intuited enough to figure out where Judas had been that evening and so on. But however you like it, The fact is that he knows he's never going to die again. He is desperate for this time to spend with his disciples when he can instruct them. But I believe, you know it's interesting, on the way up, in Matthew 19, on the way up to this Passover, Jesus had made a spectacular promise to the apostles. He had said, you are going to sit on twelve thrones over the twelve tribes. When Messiah rules, you are going to be given an important place in the administration of that messianic kingdom. Now, some of those tribes are bigger than others. You know what I'm saying? And the Bible says that there arose, as they entered the room, Luke 21 says that there arose a dispute among the disciples over who should be greatest in the kingdom. Now almost certainly that dispute had to do with seating arrangement. I'm not going to model it for you, I often do, but just to be quick about it, you've got to wipe your mind clean of the da Vinci painting, right? That's not the way, it may be good art, I don't know, but it isn't very good history. Thirteen guys all on the far side of the table facing the artist, you know, with high Tudor back chairs and so on, probably not. The fact is that they reclined to eat around a U-shaped table with pillows, but the important thing is that there was a designated spot where the captain of the feast, and that would be Jesus, would always sit, and the closer you sat to him, the more honorific your place. And I am absolutely convinced that these disciples were persuaded that Jesus was about to hand out kingdom assignments. Put it together folks, on Sunday he was welcomed as king, on Monday and Tuesday he claimed, that's the last, that's all ringing in their ears, that's the last thing they can remember. Quiet Wednesday, now they come and gather for Passover. Passover remembers the time when God delivered Israel from a covenant, from a Gentile overlord. Why not now? And I think they are diving for the chief of seats. Well, at any rate, it's in the midst of that that Jesus gets up and washes their feet. And then he begins to instruct them. Now go with me real quickly to John 13. Now you know what? I've got to tell you something else. Alright, now I left something out. Okay, we're doing this by fits and starts just for the moment. But the fact is that there's something that happened on Tuesday afternoon that's recorded only in John that I want us to think about. You will probably remember it. If you want to look at it, you can see it in John chapter 12, verse 20. But suffice it to say, and I say on Tuesday afternoon, it's hard because John doesn't give us a real clear breakdown, but it's either Monday or Tuesday afternoon. During that time when Jesus was possessing the temple and his challengers were coming and he was putting them to silence and he was speaking these parables against the nation and so on, In the midst of that, the Bible says in John 12, I think it's verse 20, that some Gentiles, some Greeks, some proselytes who were there for the Passover came and said, we want to meet Jesus. They're brought to Jesus. Strangely enough, Jesus begins to speak about His death. Let's go there, I guess. John 12, it's only a couple pages back. John 12, because I want you to see, folks, there's something I want to label for you. And it is so pivotal. to coming to any sort of an honest appraisal of what's going on in Calvary. And that is, this is what I want you to see. As the cross drew near, it began to absolutely terrify Jesus. Cripplingly so. It's impossible to overstate the horror that filled Jesus' soul. Now, let me say, we're going to talk in a few minutes a little bit about crucifixion. And I think I understand it fairly well, and I would certainly concur that it's the most awful, deliberately gruesome means of execution man has ever devised. There's none more horrible than crucifixion. But it wasn't the prospect of the physical suffering of crucifixion that horrified Jesus. We need to understand it. It was the prospect of being made sin for you and for me. that terrified Jesus. But it's interesting to trace it. And we have just an interesting juxtaposition because on, let's say Tuesday, either Monday or Tuesday, let's say Tuesday afternoon, Jesus, these Greeks are brought to Jesus and it says in John 12 in verse, let me get there, it says in verse 23 that Jesus said, the hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified. Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone." Now, many times when we come to this verse, we think that Jesus is encouraging His disciples, and even these Greeks, to come to grips with the fact that they have to be willing to die. But I think He's talking primarily about His own death. He says, now is the time for the Son of Man to be glorified. And He is contemplating the fact that it is absolutely necessary for Him to die. Now, this is what I want you to catch. as he contemplates his death. He's teaching. All of a sudden, in verse 27, his whole demeanor seems to change, given the way the record is written. And he says, Now my soul is troubled. And I picture Jesus as he contemplates his death, here in the midst of all this commotion, so I'm kind of stepping away and coming to grips with the fact that his soul is so heavy. And then he says this, What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. He contemplates praying, Father, save me from this hour. But he won't do it. He resists it. He says, no, no. But for this purpose, I came to this hour. And therefore, he says, this is his prayer, Father, glorify your name. We sang a chorus yesterday, glorify your name. I never heard it before. Do you know which one I'm talking about? Remember which one I'm talking about? I'd like to know the providence of that chorus, because it just perfectly picks up on this moment right here. I wonder if the author had this in mind, because Jesus, contemplating His death, horrified by the prospect of becoming sin for you and me, actually considers, what shall I pray? Shall I pray, deliver me from this hour? No, I can't. And so in the midst of all of that horrible heaviness, He simply prays, Father, glorify Your name. In all that I'm about to go through, you be glorified. Gentlemen, you cannot come up with a more telling and exhaustive paradigm of how you ought to handle the heartaches of your life. That's it right there. God, I don't know how I'm going to get through this. I'm going to trust you. But ultimately what I'm after is, glorify your name. And this is such a poignant moment. And the heart of the Father, which is so carefully attuned to that of the Son, is so gripped, it seems to me, by this scene, that the Father breaks protocol and speaks out loud. This is the only time He does this publicly. He does it at the Transfiguration of the Baptism, but the only time He speaks aloud publicly is right here, and He says in verse 28, "...a voice came from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." Now that's the promise that Jesus is going to take to the cross. The Father's assurance that He, the Father, is going to be glorified in what is about to unfold. Does that make sense to you? But what I want you to catch, well, let's leave it at that, because now go over to John 13, and I return to the story, John 13 and verse 30, well, let's start in verse 30. I'm leaving out a whole lot of very important material, but this is what happens, gentlemen. Jesus is in the upper room. He is giving leadership. He is overseeing the Passover feast. In the midst of the feast, he washes the disciples' feet. That's the principle of servant leadership that is so poignant to us and so on. By the way, it's so fascinating to me that Jesus washes their feet and then sits down, and remember it says in John 13, he looks at his disciples, the twelve, they're all in the room, and he says, You call me Master and Lord, and you say, well, for so I am. If then I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, and just to make a point, how do you finish that sentence at your house? If I've washed your feet, you ought to wash my feet. But Jesus didn't ask us to wash his feet. I always think if he had, I mean, if he were here, I think you'd all stand in a long line to wash his feet, but he asked us to do something much more difficult and even more meaningful. What did he say? If I wash your feet, you ought to wash one another's. You know, it's an interesting thing. I shouldn't get lost in this, but this is the season of the year called the latter rains. It's a lot of rain, a lot of slop, and there is nothing that is more a full paw than to enter a feast room with soiled feet. So there's always going to be a basin to wash your feet. Remember, you had to have your feet shot. You had to have your shoes on by mosaic law. but you would always wash your feet. But normally there would be a servant, and it wasn't one of the noblest servants. This wasn't a job much to be coveted, but there would be a servant assigned to it. This is a borrowed house, so it says everything was made ready. So there was a basin, there was a towel, but no servant. And I think every one of those disciples, as they entered the room, probably had a little gut-check moment, you know, and I should, but if I kneel down and, oh man, somebody will stick his feet in my and I'll have to wash his feet, and I don't want to do that, and after all, I don't want Dan or Gad, you know, I'm hoping for Judah or Manasseh, you know, so for heaven's sakes, and so, but now they're gathered around, and you've got to understand, this is one of the things, if you can wipe your mind clean of the dementia thing, their feet are not tucked away neatly under a table, you know, they're reclining and their feet are hanging out, and Jesus gets up and washes their feet, and then challenges them to wash one another's feet, but then Jesus says at the table, he says, the hand of the one who's going to betray me is with me at the table. Now, by the way, we can almost certainly identify the people who were sitting on either side of Jesus. The one to His right, or more or less in front of Him, because they would recline more or less in this fashion. So you're laying here like this and there's a table here and there's a man here and a man there. And you'd have pillows and you'd make yourself comfortable and so on. But the man in front of Jesus is undoubtedly whom? It's John. because he leaned on Jesus' breast. And if he wanted to whisper to Jesus, he'd simply lean back. And that's exactly what happens. Now, interestingly enough, the man to the left of Jesus, time out, this is what James and John were asking. Sit one on the right and one on the left. Don't think of a big purple throne room. This is what the kingdom looks like. It's a time of feasting and celebrating, and to sit one on the right and one on the left. And so John was given this place of honor. Another guy we can almost certainly identify, well, we really can, Peter. Evidently Peter moved a little slow, because the Bible says that Jesus announced that the hand of the betrayer is with me at the table, and Peter motioned, remember that, to John, asking him who it is. So John leans back privately and asks Jesus, and I think Jesus says privately, it's the one to whom I give the morsel. Now that pretty much narrows it down to either John or the other side of Jesus who is Judas. And it's really significant that Judas, and I'm telling you something, measure the dynamics of this. You're sitting around the table, you're thinking that the kingdom assignments are about to be made, and you're grousing over the fact that you're sitting way over there on the other side, and there's Judas right next to Jesus. Judas was the only sophisticate among the twelve. He was from Judea, which is the white-collar territory, the educated, the others were all Galileans, the dirt under your fingernail territory. And Judas was trusted with the bag. He had a great deal of leadership. I mean, he was respected. And now he's sitting right next to Jesus. And understand that what would happen is, after the lamb had been slain, it would be prepared in almost like a paste or a stew. And you'd have little loaves of bread. You would dip in there and eat it as part of the meal. And if you got a nice morsel, you might hand it to a neighbor. Now it would be very, very unusual to get up and walk around the table. So it's almost certain that Judas was next to him. And it's interesting, by the way, when, this is compelling to me, when Jesus said, the hand of the betrayer is with me at the table. Now remember, Judas is sitting there thinking, I've got to get out of here. There are 600 soldiers waiting to arrest this man. There's a whole legal apparatus, both Jewish and Roman, waiting to try him. And it can't happen until I turn him over. I've got to get out of here. And Jesus hands him the... I'm sorry. Jesus said, the Bible says that they all began to ask among themselves, could it be I? Could it be I? Peter made motion and so on. But the Bible also says that Judas, who is right next to Jesus, said to Jesus, is it I? And Jesus said, it is. That changes the dynamic in the upper room. Judas knows full well now that Jesus is entirely onto him. Jesus does a kindness. It's just an act of fraternal kindness to hand that sop to a neighbor. I think everybody else around the table was probably jealous. Judas' wicked heart is just enraged when Jesus does that kindness. And Judas gets up and storms out. I shouldn't say that. He makes a lame excuse. I need to go buy something again. The Passover feast is virtually over. Some people have really stumbled over this business of going out at this hour of the night, probably around 10, 11 o'clock at night, and saying, I'm going to buy something against the feast. Here's the interesting thing. Judas was the only one who lived in the region. It was a Passover. I think the other disciples very possibly could have thought, and he did keep the bag, and so they very possibly could have thought, he's going to go and stay at his own home, and then in the morning he'll go to the market and get what he didn't find us, which would have been entirely standard procedure. So he makes an excuse, he leaves. Now, look at John 13, because it is so compelling to me, given that John 12 passage, the way Jesus picks it up. In verse 30, we're picking the story up, it says, Having received a piece of bread, he then went out immediately. It was night. So this is Judas. He is going off to fetch the Sanhedrinists. And then Jesus says to the eleven gathered around the table, Now the Son of Man is glorified. Remember what God had promised him? I have glorified myself in you before I will do it again. And now as Judas departs, Jesus says, Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. Now, the point is, the game is afoot. The drama is beginning. The curtain is going up. Judas has gone to fetch the soldiers in the Sanhedrin. Now, Jesus begins to teach. He teaches for... And by the way, the disciples would have fully anticipated laying back and going to sleep in this room. Jesus begins to teach. In the midst of that teaching, he introduces, not here in John, but in the Synoptics, what we remember as the Lord's Supper. And it's interesting that Paul, in his telling of the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, he says, on the night when Jesus was betrayed. Remember that? But in the Greek, it says, on the night while he was being betrayed, Jesus took bread. Judas is on the way to get the Sanhedrin. Now, let me give you that same map once again. Oh, here it is. So I'm saying that he goes to the house of Mary, the mother of Mark. I should have taken you here before. I'm interrupting myself again. But this is a model. Those are not behemoths in yonder valley there. This is a beautiful model at the Israel Museum, 50 to 1. It's all kept up with whatever finds are made, they go in and keep it all up and so on. And this right here is the Palace of Herod. This whole area is the Western Hill. Right there, it's actually the Tomb of David, but that's where the house was where Jesus kept the Last Supper. Now again, you can see the temple here. See that, the southern reaches of the temple? Way up here, well here, up here is the Antonia Fortress. When Herod had this huge, marvelous temple built, he actually built, he actually, it was already there, it was a fortress already, and he incorporated the temple around the fortress. But this fortress, called Antonia after Mark Anthony, was a beautiful, it was really a bit of a mini palace but it was also a hugely fortified and this is where the Roman soldiers would be staying. So Judas starts out here and he's going to make his way up to the fortress Antonia and now as I say, I think I give it to you, I say Judas would have started here and then he was going up here to fetch the Sanhedrinus and the soldiers. They're waiting to arrest Jesus, but they can't until they find out where he is. But then he would have brought them back here. That's why I say that's where he perhaps would have awakened young Mark. But meanwhile, and this is what I'm about to tell you, Jesus has headed to Gethsemane. Let me just give it to you quickly. Look at John 14, verse 31. This is where I was taking you. Jesus. Judas is gone. He's in the upper room with just the eleven. He introduces this new covenant. You know, by the way, when you take the Lord's Supper, it grieves me, quite frankly, that we are, in our day, for whatever set of reasons, we don't deliberately conceptualize ourselves in terms of this marvelous new covenant to which we are made beneficiaries. We really don't. We just don't conceptualize it. And that New Covenant is so important. You know, another word for covenant is testament. And you have 27 books that you call the New Testament. That's New Covenant literature. That's God giving you instruction how you are to live, having inherited the blessings of this marvelous New Covenant, which is not like the covenant, God says, which I made with the children of Israel at Mount Sinai. And this New Covenant, and I think the two primary blessings of the New Covenant are, these are so big, number one, sin once and for all forgiven. Oh, what a blessing this is in the Old Testament to go up to the temple and to offer up a sacrifice and to have the promise of God that that blood is going to make an atonement for your sin, but you never ever offered your last sacrifice, right? Under the Old Covenant. It's often been said, and I think there's something to it, that it's perhaps instructive that in all the accoutrements and everything that was provided for the temple when God laid out the temple, the one thing that was not provided was any sort of a bench or seat. In all their doing, the priests were never allowed to sit down. Because if they sat down, you might get the impression that they were done with their work, and they were never, ever done with their work. Jesus offered himself up, and then what? He sat down at the right hand of the Father. That's new covenant. That's so blessed. And the other blessing of the new covenant, I believe, is this, to use a pedigree phrase, this new covenant ministry of the Holy Spirit, by which He ministers to us a measure of intimacy with the Father that the Old Testament saint would have been horrified to hear you talk about. The Old Testament saint, I don't find any place in the Old Testament where the most godly of them ever refer to God as Father. He's God. He's King. We know him not only as father, we know him as papa. That would have made the ears of an Old Testament Saint tingle. I mean, he'd have been horrified, scandalized to hear you talk that way. That's what's ministered to us because we are beneficiaries of a new covenant. When God makes a covenant, especially with a people, now the exception is the Davidic covenant. I can't find a seal for the Davidic covenant, but there's a seal for the Noahic covenant, the rainbow, there's a seal for the the Abrahamic Covenant circumcision. By the way, a lot of people don't realize this. You know what I mean by a seal? There's something that reminds you of that covenant in the course of living. Just something that is designed to call you back to covenant faithfulness just in the course of living. To remind you of it. And the seal of the Mosaic Covenant, you know what that is? The Sabbath. When you keep the Sabbath, you're swearing allegiance. The seventh day, you're swearing allegiance to the Mosaic Covenant. The seal of the New Covenant is the Lord's Supper. This is the New Covenant in my blood. When you take the Lord's Supper, deliberately think, conceptualize yourself as living under these blessed provisions made possible by the death of a testator, by the fact that Jesus has spilt his blood once and for all, and now you have sins once and for all. It's such a blessed thing. But anyway, that happens in the Upper Room as Jesus introduces them to that Memorial Supper by which he once said and the other thing always strikes me about that supper is You know, it's yeah It seems to me that once a person comes to grips with the dynamics What's going on with the death of Jesus and what it means that we could never ever for a moment forget it But Jesus knows better remember and so he leaves us this just do in remembrance of me It's it's sobering that we have to be reminded, but we do let's come to grips with it but having said that the point is that Jesus introduces that, and then, here's where I'm taking you, taking so long to get there, John 14 and verse 31, because he begins to teach, and then very abruptly, the last phrase in John 14, 31, and by the way, before I read it, you'll often see John 14, 15, 16 referred to as the Upper Room Discourse, but it won't quite work, because in verse 31, you see it there, he says, Arise, let us go from here. So the point is, Judas has gone to fetch the Sanhedrinus, Jesus needs a little more time. And so again, being as wise as a serpent, Jesus takes his disciples and he leads them out to Gethsemane. Now, Gethsemane, let me talk about Gethsemane. It was illegal by rabbinical law. The rabbis had decreed that it was illegal to have a garden inside the city. It was too tight. and you'd have to dung it, and it would foul it, and so on. And so anybody who could afford to do it would secure a little plot of ground somewhere around, and all this whole city is ringed with gardens. And you would build some sort of border to it, usually thorns and so on, to keep the animals out, and thieves out, and so on. This was a private garden. It's interesting that in this garden, we almost certainly know where this garden is. There is so much compelling in such ancient Look, time out. It's always a bit of a guess to know, is this for sure exactly where this happened? And it's always more of a guess in Jerusalem because it's a living tell. But outside Jerusalem, here's Gethsemane. And the interesting thing about it is, the garden which remembers Gethsemane... Gethsemane means olive press. And the garden which remembers Gethsemane includes a cave. And I think this is the point. When Jesus would come to Jerusalem, the Bible says John 18, he would often stay here with his disciple. Well, a cave is nice, it's warm in the winter, it's cool in the summer, and it's secluded and so on, but it's not a public place. It's somebody's own. As a matter of fact, in that cave is a first century olive press. There is an ancient olive press in that cave. So clearly there was a bit of a factory here, and there were all these out, and they would go in here. and impress them and so on, but that cave gave the perfect place for Jesus to stay. So do you see what's happening here? Jesus says, arise, let's go hence, and he makes his way from the place where he kept the Last Supper across the city. It's now going on probably toward midnight. It's moonlit, whether or not there are clouds, we can't say, but it's certainly, it's Nisan 14, it's certainly full moon. And he makes his way across, and I'd love to talk about it, but it's along this way that he teaches John 15 about the vine and the branches and so on, that he teaches about the coming of the Holy Spirit, as he makes his way with the 11. It's probably on the side of the Valley of Kidron, as he makes his way down the side of the eastern hill and across. that he stops and prays the prayer of John 17. When I take people to Israel, I always try and save the last day to walk the last night of Jesus. And we do this. We start in the upper room and then we walk over to Gethsemane and then we come back up to where Jesus was probably tried by the Jews and so on. But the point is that I love to stop there on the side of that Kidron Valley and just work our way through that. And look, by the way, at John 18. John gives us an interesting insight here, as he says that John 18, verse 1, again you understand that he has left the upper room, he's with his disciples, eleven of them, and now he's making his way across the deep Kidron to the Garden of Gethsemane. And so John says, when Jesus had spoken these words, that is, this high priestly prayer, he went out with his disciples, went out of the city, and over the brook Kidron, And John has Jesus stepping over that brook, which, remember now, it was earlier this afternoon that the Passover lambs were slain, and so that brook is undoubtedly running red with the blood of those Passover lambs, and it's just a poignant scene here as Jesus steps over that, and he realizes, oh, that's a picture of the blood he's going to shed in just a few hours, and so on. But notice it says, verse 2, that Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, for Jesus often met there with his disciples. And so Judas, undoubtedly, as I said, had taken the soldiers in Sanhedrinus to the place where Jesus had been, but finding it empty and maybe with a little more bravado and confidence than he really felt, you know, don't worry about a thing, fellas. And honestly, there's no other place Jesus could have gone in the middle of the night with 11 people. You can't. Remember, this is, like I say, remember the parable of Jesus talking about importunity and he talks about the man who had a friend come And he went next door and knocked on his neighbor's door and said, do you have some bread? And it was the middle of the night. Remember what his neighbor said? Go away. I'm in bed. Don't be doing this in the middle of the night. So you can't, you know, this is, this is well into the night. And the only place Jesus could have gone and Jesus was, if you don't mind leaving breadcrumbs, you know what I'm saying? He wasn't trying to escape Judas, but he was trying to buy a little time. So Jesus goes out here to Gethsemane. And now you have this marvelous scene in Gethsemane, and I'm not going to spend much time with it. But let me just say this. Go to Luke 21. And let me just say this, guys. I should give this more time. I can never get past Gethsemane. It's the most compelling and heartbreaking scene. Actually, Luke 22 and verse 47. But let me just say this. And I always feel like, you know, here you have God the Son in the most intimate, traumatic moment, beseeching God the Father. And I always feel, what business is it of ours to peer into this scene? But the Bible wants us to come to grips with it. And I believe for this reason, guys. And so contemplate this more carefully than I'm going to give you time for. But I don't believe, I think that if you're going to come to grips with dogmathy, you've got to start with Gethsemane. That is, there's never a time when the depth of suffering which Jesus is going to endure is more dramatically put on display as when He struggles with the temptation to turn back from the cross there in Gethsemane. And when He comes, I think He probably came to that cave and left eight of them there and said, please pray for me. And then he took three into the garden itself. And he said to those three, Peter, James, and John, he said, My soul is heavy in me unto death. Please watch and pray. And then you know that he went into the garden, cast himself in the ground, and he began to cry out, Father, if there be any way, let this cup pass from me. Now, what strikes me here, guys, is this. on Tuesday afternoon, he had contemplated this prayer, he had refused to do it. Isn't it instructive that what Jesus, I'll say it right out loud, what Jesus was able to resist the temptation even to pray, now there's no wickedness in this prayer, but he refused to even pray it on Tuesday afternoon. Thursday night, three times, Father, I was standing in that cave one time with the choir from Master's College, and I don't know why, I'd never noticed it before, but I was reading it in Mark, I was reading it to the choir, and I noticed where it says, as Jesus is praying, Mark in Mark alone says that he cried out, Abba. And the intimacy of that moment, Papa, if there be any, all things are possible, if there be any way, let this cup pass from me. And I thought, you know, I've got a son, and my son is in some horrible And I've got the power to deliver and he looks at me and he says, Papa. And again, I'm going to make the point, it seems to me he prays on Thursday three times what he refused to pray on Tuesday. But every time he prayed it, he went on to say, nevertheless, not my will but thine be done. And Luke gives us two insights that are so compelling. And the first one is there in verse 46, just real quickly, where he says, Luke 22, not 46, verse 43, an angel appeared to him from heaven. Now guys, come to grips with the genuineness of Jesus' humanity. I do not believe that Jesus ever used his miracle-working power on his own behalf. It would have been cheating on the kenosis. There are only two times in Jesus' ministry when the Father dispatches angels. Now the first one, you remember it, is after 40 days of fasting at the temptation. Right? At the very beginning of Jesus' ministry. What do you look like after 40 days of fasting? Yeah, you see, you're barely alive. Jesus endured 40 days of fasting, this heavy duty tempting by the devil, and then the devil departed him. Jesus was in the Jeshamon, the wilderness. He was alone. There was nobody to help him. He was about to die. He desperately needed help. He wouldn't use his miracle. If it was somebody else, he might have just miraculously spoken him into help, but he wouldn't do that. And so the Father dispatched angels, I think, to do for Jesus at that time what you and I would have done for him if we'd have been there to get him something to drink and eat. Oh, he was drinking, but get him something to eat and kind of nurse him back to health. Now, what staggers me is that the only other time God dispatches angels is in Gethsemane. And here, he is alone, not by reason of the fact that he's in some desolate place, but because his disciples have all fallen asleep. And Jesus is in some sort of physical extremity. I mean, he's at where, but his He is so, in some way, he needs angelic assistance, but not by reason of a 40-day fast. He needs that angelic assistance. He is pushed to unspeakable limits by reason of the contemplation of what he was about to endure. That's what I want you to catch. As Jesus contemplated the cross, I would submit to you, it cripplingly terrorized him. So much so that angels... I don't know what those angels did. I picture them just kind of helping him up off the ground. And it's with angelic assistance that the Son of God staggers out of the garden. Why? Because he has come into grips with what he's about to endure. That's what I say. And the Bible goes on to say in the next verse there in Luke 22, that he sweat great drops of blood. I take that as physical. I don't think it's metaphorical. I think the point is that this is a physical condition. We're familiar with it. When a man is under such pressure heart begins to beat with such ferocity and drives his blood pressure up and it begins to burst arteries and blood seeps into the sweat glands and so on. Dr. Hopewell can do a lot better than that with it, but the point is that I think it's physical and again it demonstrates, it's Dr. Luke giving us insight by reason of this angelic assistance, by reason of this pink stain that was left on the ground as he got up and staggered away with angelic assistance. He's trying to help us come to grips with the terror that filled Jesus' soul spirit as he contemplated the unspeakable agony he was going to endure when he became my sin sacrifice. It's not the cross. It's not the physical suffering. Now, as he emerges from the garden, real quickly, he is arrested. And now, Friday, a day of Messianic perfection. And what I mean by this, we're moving toward the cross, and of course, on the cross, Jesus is going to cry out, it is finished, and the work that the Father had sent Him is going to be perfected. But I want us to think about the trials, because what's going to happen is, there's going to be a series of, alright, Jesus is arrested somewhere around 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock midnight, in the middle of the night. He is immediately spirited off, taken off, to back to the house of Caiaphas. In other words, he had had the Last Supper here. He had gone out to Gethsemane. That's where he was arrested. He's brought back probably through the city. There's a set of stairs here that people like to remember as the stairs that actually came up. They are first century stairs. You can do as well with that. But anyway, he's brought up to another place on the western hill. Now, I told you yesterday, just real quickly, that Caiaphas also had a private home out here. That's where Judas went. That's the Hill of Evil Council. But up here, on the Western Hill, inside the city walls, there is a villa which belongs to whoever is the high priest. And Caiaphas and his father-in-law, Annas, have occupied this for over a decade. And so this is where the Jewish trial is going to be held. Now look, I mentioned this to you real briefly last night, but I'm not going to spend any time other than to say, I mentioned to you last night, look, their only hope, the only hope of the Jewish authorities is to accuse Jesus as a seditionist this becomes so much a part of this whole drama because it's such a sensitive area and it's sensitive because on the one hand Jesus is not a seditionist and he cannot go to the cross as a seditionist because sedition is wicked and Jesus is going to go as the sinless son of God on the other hand he is a king and he will not refuse to acknowledge that he is a king but he's not a seditionist see the point is very delicate now what happens is the Now, the Sanhedrinists, the Pharisees and Sadducees, in the middle of the night are holding this arraignment, if you don't mind, to try to come up with a charge. And there's an initial short time where he's interrogated briefly by Annas, but then he's brought in. Annas is the old father-in-law of Caiaphas who had been high priest for a long time and was so crooked even the Romans wouldn't put up with that, so he had maneuvered Caiaphas. four of his sons, and one of his sons-in-law to be high priest in the course of time, but this time it's Caiaphas, and Caiaphas is a horribly wicked man. But the point is that Caiaphas, because he's the high priest, is overseeing this illegal trial. Remember, you can't have a trial between sundown and sunup. You can't have a trial in the private quarters. It's got to be done in public. You know where the judge usually sat? Remember where the judge... There's really instruction in there. Where'd the judge usually sit in the ancient world, in all of Israel's history? In the city gate. And the reason is because that's a bottleneck. It's got to be done in public, and you can suborn witnesses and so on. So normally, and there was a place on the Temple Mount that was very open, it's called the Chamber of Hewn Stone, where most Sanhedrin trials were kept, but to do it in a private home was absolutely illegal. But Caiaphas is ruling. Another thing was, by Jewish protocols now, if in a capital trial, a trial which would eventuate in the accused being put to death if he's found guilty, If in a capital trial two witnesses disagree with one another, immediately the man is set free. And the Bible is explicit. They called witnesses, they disagreed with one another, they couldn't get their story straight, they tried to accuse him and he's going to tear down the temple and all this sort of stuff. And finally, when it became apparent, you've got to understand, Caiaphas is working against a very, very short timetable here. He has probably paid a lot of money, and I'm making that up, but I don't think Pilate hated the Jews as much as he could be manipulated by the Jews to get him to set up his tribunal out on the gobblet of the pavement at 4.30 in the morning. But at any rate, that's what's in the offering and Pilate has, I'm sorry, Caiaphas has set this up. But he can't take Jesus to be tried by Pilate unless he can come up with a charge. And the only charge that will work is that he is a seditionist, which means he claims to be a king. But Jesus has been so circumspect about the way he made claim to be Messiah that they didn't have anybody who would come and say, I heard him say, I'm Messiah. So what happens is Caiaphas, all the witnesses don't work and they've worked so hard to do it, and I think Caiaphas was just going to roll the dice. He's going to take a flyer. He's going to say, Let me just try one thing. I don't know what else to do. It probably won't work. He's never consented to this before. But he put Jesus under oath and he said, tell us, are you the Christ, the Son of the living God? And Jesus replied, I am. And there would have been such a gasp and hurrah that went up in the room. And finally we got him. We got 70 men who heard him say it. He claims to be Messiah. Now, Jesus is very, very concerned that the record be straight. And he's not going to consent to the charge, are you Messiah? Later on they're going to, alright this is what happens, I think I mentioned to you before, alright. He consents, they think they've got him. The part that is incendiary that will render him culpable before the Roman authorities is he claims to be Messiah. Does that make sense to you? Now they put him in hold. They think we got him now. They're in this villa. There is certainly a large courtyard. They all had it. And probably you go through that courtyard and find some underground installations. And Jesus is kept down there for a time because what they're waiting for, as I said last night, is the first blush of dawn. And when the first little hint of gray on the eastern horizon, they're going to haul him back up so that they can say they did this after sunup. That make sense to you? So they wait, and in the meanwhile Jesus is blindfolded and cuffed. This is very possibly when they plucked his beard and so on. But he's a prisoner now. It's very, very much a part of this sort of procedure to abuse and make fun and so on of the criminal. Not by the Jews, but by the Romans, and these are Roman soldiers. And so now the first blush, this is such a compelling scene, of light is on the eastern horizon. And they're going to drag him back up into that same room, and they're going to convene, not for trial, no witnesses, just to get him to once again confess. And this is when they're going to say, tell us, are you the Christ? And he says, I'm not going to confess to that. And so they, and the Bible says they sigh, and they said, okay, are you God come in the flesh? And he said, I am. He was entirely in charge here, and the charge had to be that he claimed to be Messiah, God coming to flesh, because that's exactly what his claim was. Well, the interesting thing is, as they are dragging him through the courtyard for that short post-dawn, if you don't mind, hearing, Peter is in that same courtyard. Earlier that day, when Jesus had said, you're all going to go back, Peter had said, if everybody else goes back, imagine that, by the way. 12 and Peter says, you know, I don't blame you for being suspicious of those guys, you know, but if all those go back, not I. And it's interesting when they left the upper room and Jesus had said to him, Peter, before the cock crows, before the rooster crows, you're going to deny me three times. Now, Peter's got to be saying to himself, it's midnight. What am I going to do this in my sleep? How could it be? And then as Jesus leaves the upper room with his 11, Peter runs and catches up and again says, if everybody else goes back, I'm swearing to you, I'm out. Jesus says again, no, before. Now, Peter has already, he's warming his hands, he's already twice denied the Lord. Somebody comes up to him and says, surely you were with them. He takes a note. He says, I never knew him. And at that moment, Jesus is being hauled through that same courtyard. And the Bible says, that Jesus turned and looked upon Peter. And by the way, the words were still falling out of Peter's mouth when, what else happens, just at the crack of dawn, you see? That rooster crowed. And Jesus looked upon Peter and Peter went out and wept bitterly. Remember that? But the Bible says this, and this always staggers me, even with regard to what I was saying earlier. It says there that Peter remembered the word of the Lord. How could he forget? It was just a few hours ago. And he had forgotten. You know what, by the way? Peter, above all men, came to grips with the fact that he had a wicked tendency to forget what he should never forget. And so he wrote an epistle. And he said, I'm writing to stir your minds up, your pure minds, by way of remembering. He says, though you know these things, I'm going to tell it to you again because you need to be reminded. I'm going to write you an epistle so that after my death you'll be reminded. Because he knew we have a tendency to forget, and he learned it the hard way. But now Jesus has been found. See, the Sanhedrinists have the goods on Jesus. And so now Jesus is hauled to the Romans. Those are the steps I was talking about before. But now Jesus is taken to the Jerusalem residence of the Roman procurator. Now, I've used up too much time, so hold on for dear life. I'm going to go through this lickety-split. This may not mean anything to anybody in the room but me, but good heavens, I've got the microphone. To me, listen, it's important because there are so, you know what, you know what, by the way, you know that there's a whole community of scholars, so-called, I don't know, you do what you want with that, who live to, you know, to find untruth in the Bible, who live, they're critics, and their whole enterprise is about proving the Bible fallible, right? Well, guess what? Their happy hunting ground is the Gospels. Because you've got four guys telling the same story. And I'll tell you what else, the happiest part of that happy hunting ground is the Passion Week, because you've got four guys telling a lot of detail. And one of the areas where they attack the Scriptures is they'll say that there simply is not time for all that happens on this morning, because it is generally understood... Are you with me? What I'm talking about is Jesus is now going to be taken to Pilate. Pilate lives in Caesarea. Caesarea is a city, a beautiful Herod-made city down on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It's an unspeakably beautiful city. That's his residence. He comes up here, the procurator, at this time Pilate, for the feasts. And when he does, he stays in a residence which is called the Praetorium. That's where Jesus is going to be taken by the Jewish authorities. Now they think they have something they can use against him before Pilate, so they're going to haul him off to Pilate. Now the point is that most people think that the Antonia is where that was. And here's a picture of the Antonia, and again it's the model, and you can see it's described in the ancient sources as having these great four towers on the northwest corner of the temple. The Bible says that because it was Passover, John 18, the Jewish leaders didn't want to go into Herod's residence. That's what the praetorium means. The praetorium means the house of the ruler. So they didn't want to go in, too, so that he came out on the gabathah, the pavement. By this construction of things, this is the gabathah. This is where Jesus would have been tried. By the way, see what I do here? Yeah, there's gabathah. There's a gate that is remembered in the sources, and it's a northern gate, and here is where Galgatha Almost certainly was. We can argue about that another time. But that's what this model is representing, okay? So, if you don't mind, if Jesus was tried here, and finally, at 6 o'clock in the morning, Pilate washed his hands, and Jesus is taken out this gate over to Golgotha, and therefore, by that construction of things, this is the Via Dolorosa. Does that make sense to you? Now, here's the problem. Jesus is tried by the Jewish authorities here, And then he's hauled clear up here to be tried by Pilate. Pilate is going to pronounce him innocent. Jesus' accusers are going to say, the man is a troublemaker. He began making trouble in Galilee. Remember this? When Pilate hears the word Galilee, he's going to say, man, I'm not in charge of Galilee. Herod's in charge of Galilee here in Antipas, and he's right here in town. So he's hauled off to Herod. Most people think Herod had a palace somewhere here, though we've never found it. So this has Jesus being hauled up here, tried before Pilate, taken down to Herod, tried before here it sent back up here scourge the bradley's thing the uh... that you know the uh... behold the main thing about everything and it's just not enough time i've walked this many times and it's a good i mean to the streets of the city and so i mean if you know it's it's a good twenty minutes and you gotta understand you he's hauling you got soldiers all in jesus and so on so it just it just won't work and i think it's a lot better the place of Herod's, Herod the Great, that's the father of Herod Antipas, okay? But Herod the Great, this is, am I confusing here? Herod the Great died just weeks after Jesus was born. But he's the one who shaped this whole city. And he had built this marvelous palace. Now here's, well this is Jaffa Gate, this is where the palace is today, that's Herod's palace, this is the area of Herod's palace. But more importantly, there's a representation of it. On the north, are these three huge towers. Now those are fortifications. Jerusalem is always most exposed from the north. Attack is always, always, always going to come from the north. And so it's got to be defended on the north. And Herod built this beautiful palace, which was half the western hill, and on the north it was as fortified. My point is, where would you stay if you're Herod? here is called the Agora, or the marketplace of the upper city. And this is a very, very public place, so as the city wakes up, they would make their way up, this would be available to them, and they would be there very quickly. Does that make sense to you? So, regardless, let me just take you, what happens is that the Bible says specifically that they bring Jesus to Pilate, They have induced Pilate to come outside, and there Jesus is tried before Pilate. Now I'm going to take a few minutes here, we've got to be done. But let me take you, let me do two things, and then we'll conclude very quickly. I want you to take your Bible, I want to do a little Bible study. We have come to Jesus' trial before Pilate. And I just thought about what would be profitable, and what I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, 1 Timothy 6, Paul says something to young Timothy, which I don't think doesn't resonate very well with us today. And I just want one little thought of this. He says in 1 Timothy 6, verse 13, he says, I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus, who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate. You see that? Paul says to Timothy, on the basis of the good confession. In other words, Paul expected Timothy to go to school on the way Jesus handled himself before Pontius Pilate. And I'd like to take just about five minutes and think through the way Jesus handled himself. Now here's the interesting thing. There are actually going to be three stages to the Roman trial. First of all, Jesus is brought to Pilate, right here. And his enemies, the accusers, the Sanhedrinists, well, Pilate says, Pilate, the Roman officer who's in charge of this trial, says to the accusers, what's the charge? And they try a ploy. They say, if you weren't a criminal, we wouldn't have brought him to you, just crucify him. And Pilate says, no, I'm not going to do it. You go do it yourself. And they say, interestingly enough, you know that we can't put him to death. In other words, this isn't about trying him, it's about murdering him. Pilate several times announces Jesus is guiltless and he says he stirred up, and his enemies say he stirred up trouble at the beginning of Galilee, and he says, well I'll send him to Herod. So Jesus is sent to Herod. Herod wants to see a miracle. Jesus remains absolutely mute before. He never says a thing as accusers or hurling accusations and so on. Finally Herod, weary of it, sends him back to Pilate. Pilate makes heroic, if cruel, efforts to deliver Jesus. Pilate is not a primary villain in this scene. And finally, after he scourges him, I believe when Pilate scourged him he was doing so in the hope that he could sate the bloodthirstiness of the Jews, but that doesn't suffice. He takes Jesus and puts a cheap robe around him and stand before the people and says, behold the man, as if to say, look at the man. You're telling me that this man is a threat to Rome? Give me a break. He says, would you have, look, Swindoll does something with the Barabbas thing that is so much fun, but I haven't got time to talk about it. But if I get time later, it's so much fun. But I can't do it. I shouldn't have got into that. But at any rate, he offers him the Barabbas thing. Now, here's what I want you to catch. In all of the trial before Pilate, where Jesus is standing there before his accusers, as the trial goes on, the city begins to wake up and unmask, file into that area, and so on and again, I think everybody but Jesus expects the city to be on Jesus' side. But the fact is that throughout that whole thing, Jesus speaks once in public. When Jesus is brought to Pilate, Pilate says to him, are you the king of the Jews? And Jesus says, I am. It is as you say, I am. Time out. This is undoubtedly happening in Aramaic, right? That's the mother tongue. Yeah, it's basically the mother tongue of the Hebrews. Aramaic has no word for yes. But there are a number of expressions, and the strongest is, you said it. It's just as you said. And so when Jesus is asked by Pilate, are you the king of the Jews? He says, it is as you said. It's the strongest way of giving a positive response, an affirming response to a question. Well, here's my point, and I've not left myself much time, but go to John 18. The interesting thing is, again, put it all together. Paul says to Timothy, I adjure thee by the good confession that Jesus made before Pontius Pilate. But Jesus only speaks once in public, but there are two times two of the most poignant scenes in all of Scripture, where Pilate takes Jesus alone into the Praetorium. And I think the sum and substance of the good testimony which Jesus made was... and I'd like to think through these two times. The first one is in John 18. What has happened is, again, the accusers, the Sanhedrinists, have brought Jesus to Pilate and said, just crucify Him. You'll see it in verse 28. Well, verse 29, Pilate went out to them and said, what's the accusation? They answered and said, if you weren't an evildoer, we wouldn't have delivered him. And Pilate said, you take him. And they said, you know it's not lawful for us to put a man to death. Well, drop down to verse 33. Now, by the way, time out. Let me just say this. Try to imagine what's going on in Pilate's soul spirit. Pilate didn't live in a vacuum. Jesus has been ministering for all of these years. Pilate's a horribly superstitious man. As I said to you before, he is out of coupons in Rome. There was a man who had been his protector, and that man had been put to death. He had to be thrown in Rome. And so now, that happened in October of 31, and so Pilate has been without a protector for a year and a half. He's barely hanging on to his reign. And now they bring him this Jesus. They want him to put him to death. But Pilate's heard of him, so he takes him inside. And I love this exchange. Now, read with me. In John 18, verse 34, 33, Pilate entered the praetorium. Now, you've got to understand, that's his household, so he takes Jesus alone into the house. And he called Jesus and said to him, Are you the king of the Jews? Alright, now listen. Pilate is functioning as judge, and the charge is sedition. So he says to Jesus, Are you the king of the Jews? And Jesus responds by saying, Are you speaking for yourself about this or did others tell you this concerning me? Now what I want you to catch, and I think what is behind Paul's statement to Timothy, is you've got to understand the delicacy of this situation. Because on the one hand, as I said earlier, see what Jesus is saying to Pilate is this, Are you asking me whether I'm guilty of the charge? Or are you asking me on your own whether or not I'm a king of the Jews. You see, in Pilate's mind that's all one. Jesus knows those are two very different issues. And so he's going to sort it out. And Pilate answered and he said, listen, am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you to me. What have you done? And Jesus says, now listen, let me just tell you, you know, I got sick a couple of years ago and the doctors wanted to take my spleen. My wife threw herself across the path and wouldn't let it happen and found me some nutrition and I got better and I'm entirely better and I still have a spleen. And now and again I bent it. And I may do it here this morning, but I'm going to try to avoid that. But the fact of the matter is, here's the thing. There is a theology, it's a theology held by brothers in Christ, but I think it is really, really bad theology. And it teaches us that there is no future kingdom, that God replaced Israel with the church, and that the kingdom is here today. This is called amillennialism. Many of you are familiar with it, maybe some of you embrace it. I'm going to tell you, I don't. But, this is the amillennialism. You've got an amillennialist friend, he drops his Bible, it's going to plop open to this passage, because they love this passage. My kingdom is not of this world. All right, now let's think about what's going on here. Jesus is alone in the Praetorium with Pilate. He is on trial for his life. Pilate has asked, are you guilty of what you are charged with? On the one hand, Jesus cannot let it stand that he's a citizen. On the other hand, he cannot allow it to be thought that he's not the king of the Jews. And so he says, my kingdom is not of this world. Now, this is taken by the Amillennialists to say that the kingdom is entirely otherworldly. Folks, number one, does it make sense that at this moment, on trial for his life, in the middle of the night, alone with Pilate in the Praetorium, Jesus seizes the opportunity to deliver himself of a lecture on kingdom theology that totally unsays everything the Old Testament ever said about the kingdom? It just doesn't make any sense. And furthermore, what he is saying here, he explains when he goes on to say, if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight the issue. The Jews always were having pretender messiahs. There were always these insurrections and the pilot had to be very, very sensitive about it. But they all happened the same way. Some pretender messiah would raise a little cadre and he'd find a fastness out in the wilderness somewhere and he'd get a little militia around him and he'd come out at night and he'd fall on the Roman troops and so on and he'd pillage. And Jesus is saying, my kingdom doesn't come that way. In other words, the question before the house is, is Jesus a threat to Rome? And the answer is, absolutely not. My kingdom doesn't come that way. He's not going to disavow his kingship. As a matter of fact, he goes on to say, and he says, my kingdom is not from here. In other words, my kingdom doesn't come in that fashion. Again, the only question before the house as far as Pilate is concerned is, is Jesus guilty as a seditionist? And Jesus affirms, absolutely not. My kingdom doesn't come that way. But then Pilate says, well, then are you a king? And Jesus says, you say rightly that I'm a king, for this cause I was born, for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to this truth. And any man who loves the truth, everyone who is of the truth, who is passionate for the truth, is going to hear my voice, I am a king. And a king brings a kingdom. Now, Jesus is not disavowing the Old Testament here. He's not unsaying the Old Testament. He is simply insisting. Now what I want you to catch is the care with which I believe Jesus desperately loved Pilate. I think, you know, there's a tradition that Pilate became a believer. I don't know. Well, let me take you to the next case. Because what happens is, again, I go to all the Gospels and put them together, but Pilate comes out. Oh, am I in trouble. Pilate comes out, announces that Jesus is guiltless. This is the Galilee thing. Off to Herod Antipas, comes back. Pilate scourges Jesus and so on. Finally, look in John 19, in verse 1, He scourged them, the soldiers took this crown of thorns, and He brings them out. Verse 4, it says, Pilate went out again and said to them, Behold, I bring them out to you, and you may know that I find no fault in them. Folks, it is hugely important that in this trial, the duly appointed and overseeing judge five different times announces Jesus is absolutely guiltless. He's going to go to the cross as the unblemished lamb of God, but they're horrified. This is when the behold the man thing and drop down, if you will, to verse six. When the chief priests and officers saw him, they cried out, crucify him. Pilate said, you take him and crucify him. I find no fault in him. Now, folks, I know I'm late. Let me just say, this is so huge. They had tried. His enemies had tried so hard to get him crucified as a seditionist. They are confessing. After all that, Pilate said, the man is not a seditionist. I'm not going to crucify him. And therefore, verse 7, the Jews answered and said, well, we have a law, and according to our law, he ought to die because he made himself the Son of God. Ultimately, what Jesus is going to die for is claiming to be the Son of God. Now, Pilate is horrified. That's not what he wanted to hear. And so he took him inside once again. Look at verse 9. He went again into the katorium and he said to Jesus, Where are you from? Who in the world are you? What is going on here? Now they claim, they insist that you claim to be the Son of God. And I'm supposed to crucify you. And the point is, Jesus said nothing. Jesus gave him no answer. And Pilate said to him, Are you not speaking to me? Don't you know that I have the power to crucify you and the power to release you? And Jesus answers, and listen, gentlemen, real quickly, many take his answer as arrogant and supercilious. Just don't tell me, Pilate. I think this is so tender. I think this is one of the most remarkably loving and tender moments in all of Scripture. As Jesus, in private interview with Pilate, and Pilate, see, here's the thing. Pilate was a man of absolutely no character. In this one scene, he begins to demonstrate some character. He actually has a concern for the truth. He has to acknowledge this man is not guilty. He doesn't want to crucify him. But he has to crucify him. Think about it. There is something that has to happen and it won't happen unless Pilate makes it happen. And so Jesus says in verse 11, you would have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above. Now what he is saying is this, Pilate, you didn't chase me down. You didn't put a price on my head. Those were the Jewish authorities. But in order to get me dead, they had to bring me to the Romans. And in God's careful providence, you happen to be the one on the throne. You're not guilty in this. And then he goes on to say, the one who delivered me to you has the greatest sin. Now, I'm not here to say that Pilate didn't do wickedly in turning Jesus over. He did. But his was not the greatest sin. And the question before the house is, if you don't mind, what's Jesus saying to Pilate? I think, gentlemen, he is saying this. I think he is saying, Pilate, do it. Yours is not the greater sin. It has to happen. I think he's giving him permission. I really do. I think he's saying, oh, I think he's saying, Pilate, if you're going to get saved, wait until this afternoon. You know what I'm saying? For now. I think he's saying, I think he's saying, Pilate, do it. Just as he said, there is such, and guys, let me, this is by way of a sermon, and I'm going to be done with this, but, go a little further here. As I've contemplated this, the way, Paul says to Timothy, learn from the good confession of Jesus. Now we just traced these two times where Pilate interviews Jesus alone. And it seems to me these four lessons, there's this, forgive the outline, but there's this controlling allegiance to the truth. He cannot let the truth, he can't simply say, oh Pilate's not important. He has to affirm that he is the king. that has to be that the record has to be so pure but beyond that there's this compelling affection for the accuser honest to goodness folks i think pilot i think jesus it loves pilot i think of course he loves course he loves But the fact of the matter is, I think he sees a nobility in Pilate that Pilate has never shown before, and he wants to honor him for it, he wants to walk him through this. And I'm telling you, I like the thought that Pilate became a believer. You know the big argument for Pilate becoming a believer, by the way? Besides that there's an ancient tradition. And I know, we don't believe in tradition, but sometimes there are these ancient traditions that come to us and there's every reason to regard them as, how did Paul die? Anybody? How did the Apostle Paul die? He was beheaded, right? I mean, everybody has that in their mind. That's not pure tradition. So we don't know for sure. Now, there's a tradition that when his head was lopped off, it bounced three times, and every one of those spots, a little tree came up, and if you ate the fruit from that tree, it was healed. I'm not believing that. So the point is, with tradition, you take it or leave it. But I'm not bound to it. And there's a strong tradition that Pilate did in fact become a believer. But one of the big arguments is, and I don't know that this is a real compelling argument, but how else did we know about these interviews, you know, if Pilate didn't share them after the fact? Now Jesus could have shared them. But the fact of the matter is, my point is, I am persuaded that of all that went on in the day, the thing that most impacted the heart of Pilate was this winsome character of Jesus. I don't think he was I don't think he challenged him. He honestly answers his question. But thirdly, there is this convincing answer, if you don't mind, for every objection. In other words, Pilate had genuine concerns and Jesus had an answer. But above all things, when Jesus tells Pilate, it has to happen. I think that's what he's saying. Pilate, yours is not the greater guilt. And he more or less makes it possible for Pilate to turn Jesus over to be crucified. Now what happens is, you can read it right there in John 19, we read it earlier, Pilate's going to come out once again, he's going to insist once again that Jesus is absolutely guiltless. But when he does, look at verse 12, from then on Pilate sought to release him. But the Jews cried out, saying, If you let this man go, you are not Caesar's friend. And it's that that brought Pilate, well, let's say it this way, Pilate reverted to his cowardly self, his self-serving self, and he washed his hands and turned Jesus over to be crucified. We need to be done. Let me just say this. See if I can get to it here. Without getting to it, Jesus is going to Be turned over to be crucified about six o'clock in the morning. There is some preparation to be made by nine o'clock. He's hanging on the cross. He hangs there until three in the afternoon when he cries out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? It bespeaks spiritual death. When we think of death, we think almost exclusively of physical death. That's a grand afterthought with God. You know how quick God can fix that? spiritual death. And why do I say that? Because that's what the Bible teaches. God comes to Adam and says, don't eat of that tree. And the moment you eat of that tree, and the day you eat it, you'll die. He eats the tree, lives 938 years and dies, right? No, no, no, no. He dies. He had known what it was to walk in the cool of the day with God, and now he's fleeing God, and this alienation from God is what death is all about in the Bible. Now, it has fruits in the physical body, and it bears its fruit in physical death, and that's a consideration, and Jesus is going to suffer all the death involved, but the real essence of death. in the Bible is this separation and for whatever that is inscrutable, you and I believe in a triune Godhead, whatever that means, it certainly bespeaks the fact that there is a oneness and an intimacy between the persons of the Godhead that we can't even begin to imagine. For whatever this means, and it's beyond I think our ability to fully comprehend, but what the Bible represents is that for those hours, for those awfully dark hours on the cross, Somehow the Father judicially separated Himself from the Son, disfellowshipped Himself from the Son. Jesus knew what it was to endure spiritual death, not His own. It was our death that He endured. And there was an infinity of suffering in there that we can only begin to imagine. And it's interesting that when it's all over, John 19, Jesus says, and it always gets a hold of me here just real quickly, Jesus, at the end of those six hours, He says, in John 19, he says, I thirst. And that always seems strange. There are seven times when Jesus speaks on the cross. And they're all so noble and important. And this one seems to be kind of an exercise, you know, a Sesame Street exercise, which one of these is not like the other, you know, because I thirst. I think the point is that Jesus had something to say that he didn't have the strength to say. His body was so racked and moisture was entirely drained from his body. And so I think probably he gathered all the little tiny strength that he had left after all of that awful suffering and he croaked out in a little voice that only the people at the very foot of the cross could hear. And there's a soldier there who takes a little sponge and and holds it, and Jesus takes, I picture him taking that moisture from that cheap soldier's wine, taking a minute to try to moisten his throat and his voice box, and loosen his tongue from the top of his mouth, and gather what little strength he had, because, gentlemen, he had something to say, and I'll get lost in this, that he longed to say, he didn't have the strength to say it. And all creation had longed to hear him say that. And he had died a death we can only begin to imagine in order to earn the right to say it. So he gathered all the strength that he had and he cried out, it is finished. Such a moment. I always think how the heart of God must be broken when we suggest that there's something we can do to add to what Jesus did. It's finished. The books are balanced. The price is paid. The debt is covered. He's died a death which is sufficient to cover God's offended holiness and therefore which can cover and atone for our sin. And after that Jesus cried out, not my God, my God, but Father into thy hands I commend my spirit. He's laid a tomb on the third day that tomb is found empty. And Paul says in Romans 1.4, and this is what I mean by the day of Messianic pronouncement, Paul says in Romans 1.4 that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead. The word Paul uses there for declared is our word horizon, horizo. And the idea is honestly that it was just spread across the horizon from pole to pole, from sky to earth, this message. He is the Son of God. Why was he crucified? He claimed to be the Son of God. How does God prove true a man's claim to be a divine messenger, and thus the truth of His message? By miracle. What's the greatest miracle mankind has ever witnessed? The most undeniable miracle man has ever witnessed? Jesus came alive from the tomb. There's a little chorus we sing. I can never remember, but it's... He came from earth... He came from heaven to earth to show the way from... from earth to the cross, from the cross to the grave. Now this is it. From the grave to the sky. And I always think, oh, be still my heart. No, no, it didn't happen that way. If it had happened that way, Christianity never would have got legs. You know what I'm saying? He walked on his earth, now I'm not getting after the song, I know, we're looking for a meter here, but the fact of the matter is, let's not forget, he walked on his earth for 40 days. He showed himself alive by many infallible And by reason of that, His claim to be the Son of God became not only believable, it became absolutely undeniable. And so that resurrection is the means by which God pronounced Jesus to be everything He claimed to be and to be able to do everything He claimed to have come to do. Amen and Amen. Alright, you've been very patient. It's late, we've got to get out of here. Let me have a word of prayer with you. Father, we thank you for your son. I thank you for this weekend, for this delight to be in this place, for this church and the ministry that you have and these men and what you're doing through them in the church. Father, I pray that this would be a time that would be an encouragement and a help. But Father, I thank you for your son. Father, he came and lived this life that we never could have lived because it was a life of absolute sinlessness and perfection. And then he died this death that we never could have died. It wasn't his death. He didn't deserve to die. It was a selfless, innocent death. And Father, in that, He paid this price, that price that we never could have paid, a price that was sufficient to cover Your holiness and thus to atone for our sins. And Father, for that reason, we have life which is not our own. Might we just realize anew that we have been bought with a price and it's a precious price. And therefore, our happy opportunity, our obligation, but beyond that, our opportunity is to glorify you in all that we do. Make that our determination by your Spirit. Thank you in Christ's name. Amen.