The Kangaroo Court (Part C)

They dictate the terms. Well, if He's God, He's going to have to do this before I believe Him. So now you become the dictator of deity, denying God the right to tell them the truth about themselves, about Himself. This is what the devil does. The Bible never goes out of style. Why is that?

Because sin never goes out of style. You're the salt of the earth. You're the light of the world.

Not without God's word you're not. This is what makes the difference. Please join with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And now here's Pastor Rick in Mark chapter 14 with the conclusion of his study called The Kangaroo Court. The silence is killing him. He wants Jesus to say something. Don't just stand there and ignore us.

Even though we're lying to you and trapping you and already made up my mind, you're not getting out of this alive, which makes it a kangaroo court. What is the shame? With the wicked there is no shame, says Zephaniah the prophet.

He kept silent. It's so easy to like persistent no-gooders. We need that word.

It's not a word, but it needs to be a word. These were up to no good and persistent in doing it and the Lord is just standing there and it is irritating them. They want help to send him to the cross. This man, Caiaphas, who speaks on behalf of most of the Sanhedrin, the government, the 70 elders of Israel that ran the nation, their Supreme Court and their Congress all rolled into one, you could even say to some degree. Their minds were fixed and so was their fate because of their choices. Their minds were fixed against Christ without a reason. And this Caiaphas, the leader, the ringleader, he is dragging a boatload of dupes down with him because they enjoy being dupes. They wouldn't call themselves that. They would resent being called that.

We'll cover that at the end hopefully this morning, this study. He says, are you the Christ? He's using truth to murder the unwanted Messiah. Are you the Christ?

He asked him right on. A Christ is the Greek for the Hebrew word Messiah. The anointed one, the definite article there, the anointed one. There are others who are anointed. It was the anointed high priest, there were anointed kings, anointed prophets. This one is the anointed son of God. They understood that because that's in his question.

He's the one that phrases the question. And so here is Christ infuriating them with his silence. He ignored their courtroom because it was not just.

He ignored their lies and their distortions. But this man, Caiaphas, we'll get the pilot later, not this morning, unless you want to stay. But anyway, this Caiaphas and his group, they're up to their neck in darkness. Have you ever met anyone like that? I'm sure you have.

You've met people that are just up to their neck in darkness. And so he puts Jesus under oath to incriminate himself so that Christ could incriminate himself in their court. And he asked this question, are you the son of the blessed? See, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed? This tells us that they believe the Messiah would be the son of God, equal with God, divine, we would say.

They didn't have all of it worked out, but they had that much worked out. And that's why the question is phrased this way. And instead of saying, are you the Christ, the son of Yahweh, why does he not use the covenant name of Yahweh in pronouncing the divine name? Well, he's following yet another superstition that these religious people had created and worked into their religion as a custom, as a tradition of not pronouncing the name of Yahweh. Why did Yahweh give you the name? He didn't say, hey, here's my name, don't ever say it. He gave them the name so they could be reminded and instructed on his nature. Name is nature in the Bible. When you, you know, his name shall be called Immanuel, the name Jesus means the Savior.

These things are not casual, they are profound, they are well thought out. And here God is standing, God the Son is standing right in front of them and they despise him. Isaiah 53, and if you're not familiar with Isaiah 53, it is that chapter, that profound chapter written about 700 years before the virgin birth of Christ.

There it speaks of his arrest and his trial, his crucifixion, his sufferings, some of the bystanders and his resurrection. Verse 3 of Isaiah 53, he is despised and rejected of men. We kind of downsized that word, despised, but how can you, right?

In other words, he's hated, he's loathed by these people. How dare you be Messiah without our permission? How dare you be Messiah and not do what we tell you to do?

How dare you be Messiah and not honor us for the criminals that we are? He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. It's so profound, a man of sorrows, why?

Why was he? Because he saw the sufferings of human, how many beggars were on the street? How many broken lives and broken families did he see and know about? And he knew there were more outside of Israel in the world. He was not insensitive and this is why he's referred to as the son of man. He identified with us, he's also the son of God, but he's the son of man. Ezekiel is one of the Old Testament prophets that uses that phrase the most. And it's saying the Messiah, when he comes, he knows what's happening with you. He's not indifferent or insensitive. But there's a program that God is following and we have to line up with it.

He has to be our Lord through the program regardless of how unpleasant it is. It says a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. It just builds on what I just said about him. And then it says, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. So Isaiah the prophet is identifying with the Jewish people.

He's saying, when Messiah comes, this is some of the attributes that belong to his character. He's going to be hated for this. And we're going to hide our faces from him like he's not who he says he is. And we're watching it in this court. There's nothing just about this. Court is disgusting enough to have to go to than to have to know that you're going to be the victim of injustice at the hands of those who are sworn to uphold justice. You can't win.

That makes them criminals. Isaiah again, we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised. He repeats it. And we esteemed him not.

We saw nothing in him that we liked because he was not like us. That's what is going on with Caiaphas and those who are in agreement. And it will come out in its true colors when they start abusing him at the end of this paragraph. And the Holy Spirit has written it all down for us to say to us, what are you going to do with it? Okay, you go to Bible studies. You learn about Christ.

You learn about the symbolism, the types. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to love like Christ? Are you going to be Christ-minded? What happens? What are you going to do when you fail? What are you going to do as a Christian when you do not achieve, when you find out you're not what you wanted to be in Christ?

What are you going to do with that? That's what Peter's going through. Peter thought he was going to be all this and that. Peter's the one that wrote, humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord and he will lift you up in due time. Well, where would he learn a lesson like that? We just read about a piece of it. Profound teachings.

You can't make this up. You can't sit down at some nice, you know, scenic desk at a window with a typewriter and just fabricate the Bible. Had Christ answered this question, are you the Christ? Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed? If he said no, then his ministry would have been destroyed. If he says yes, they've got him.

What is the charge they're going to really have on him? Blasphemy. Saying that he's the Son of God, the Son of God.

The definite article again. Verse 62, Jesus said, I am. Gets right to it, without hesitation. Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed? I am.

There's a very important moment here. He says, I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven. And Rick Cassib will be one of the guys with me. He doesn't say that, but he should have.

He had to go, I'm going to ask him about that. But we know, because the Bible tells us later, that the saints will be with him. And we should have a blessed assurance of our faith. We're not ashamed. We're not ashamed of Christ. And that means that we believe him when he says, he who believes in me, though he shall die, he will live.

He's not going to die. He's going to be with me. And when whatever happens comes our way and says that's not true, we rebuke it with truth. So without hesitation, he answers. He admitted to being the one whom the prophets spoke with such splendor, such unequaled splendor, they spoke of this Messiah. He's saying, I'm it. Here I am, handcuffed, your prisoner in your mind. Here I stand before you and I am your Messiah.

I am God the Son. That's how Caiaphas understood it. That's how the court understood it. That's how Jesus meant it. By this affirmation as Messiah, Son of the Blessed, he made sure, this is important, I think it is, he made sure that they were going to crucify him for the truth and not for all these false witnesses. They were not going to send him to the cross on trumped up charges. They were going to send him to the cross for truth.

And that's why he is saying this. No false witness took him to the cross. It was a true and faithful witness. And the New Testament writers talk about his faithful appearance in the presence of Pilate where he doesn't back down knowing the consequences. And so he dismisses all the liars with this single, I am, just as you said. And then he goes ahead and he illustrates a behavior that goes with being the Christ. When you see me sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven, though they won't live to see it, they'll know about it.

So if they would slay him, they must do so on the basis of truth and not false reasons. Now when he says, I am, that was far more than what Caiaphas was hoping for. Caiaphas was such a happy little boy at this moment. But he's still a devil by choice. Again, like Judas Iscariot, when he was born, he was a little baby, you look into his eyes, he was cute and everything, he pulled his cheeks and everything. He was cute as any other baby. I've never seen an ugly baby.

I mean, just all of them, even if they're born under great stress and they're still little innocent ones compared to humans. Well, nobody's innocent compared to Christ. We're born in iniquity.

We have to accept that because there's a solution that makes it acceptable in that way. Anyway, the solution would be, of course, the cross of Christ, the resurrection, the salvation he gives. This plain declaration in the Greek translation, now you have the Old Testament that was originally written in the Hebrew. And when the Jews went to captivity and they were freed from other nations, not all of them went back to Israel. The majority of them were dispersed, the diaspora around the world. And Alexandria in Egypt became, I almost said in Virginia, that would have been bad because they don't know how to vote up there. But anyway, are they going to see from the planet?

Anyway, let's get back to this. They had the Bible in the Hebrew originally, but as the Jews were born in Gentile territories, they were removed from the Hebrew language and they were speaking in the vernacular of whatever people they were in. The Greek happened to be, thanks to Alexander the Great, a dominant language, a common language. So they then took their Old Testament Hebrew and they translated it into Greek. So when they translated the verse from Exodus chapter 3, where Yahweh, God Almighty, says, I am, they used the identical Greek word that Jesus is using here, that Mark has recorded and so does the other evangelists, Matthew, Luke, and John. And so when he says, I am, the court understood that he is matching himself to Exodus 3, verses 6 and verse 14, where this was Yahweh's prerogative and not any commoner. Moses could not say, I am. No one else could, except the Messiah, the Son of God. And that is what is happening here. The only true testimony that night, it was seismic.

It rattled the court. A few of them, we know, for example, Nicodemus sided with the Christ, or at least was not siding against him at that point. Clearly, they believed Messiah would be divine, which takes away the excuses of groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons who deny the deity of Christ, that he is equal with the Father, even though it's taught in Old and New Testament alike. And if you can say to them, well, if the Jews understood it, what's your problem?

You know, they bring it up again later. Anyway, the charge of blasphemy, there it is, verse 14, Caiaphas will say it, and their response is, how dare you be the Son of God without us telling you. They made it impossible for anyone to be the Messiah according to the Scriptures. They could only be Messiah according to these people if they decided he could be Messiah, which is kind of like, you know, forcing someone to be your king.

How do you do that? Because if he's the king, he's the ruler. How can you rule over him if this is upside down? Many today make it impossible for God to be God. They don't want to hear anything he's got to say.

They dictate the terms. Well, if he's God, he's going to have to do this before I believe him. So now you become the dictator of deity, and denying God the right to tell them the truth about themselves, about himself, this is what the devil does. And the Bible never goes out of style. Why is that?

Because sin never goes out of style. You're the salt of the earth. You're the light of the world. Not without God's word you're not. This is what makes the difference. Consuming the word of God.

Take of my body. No one else in history has what we have. And so the true church is hated. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power.

Then it would be too late for them, unfortunately. God has no plan of salvation for the unsurrendered life. Am I losing anybody with that?

This is what we have to tell people. God has no plan of salvation for you if you're not surrendered to him. If you're dictating terms to him. He then says, and coming with the clouds of heaven. He is claiming that Daniel, the great prophet Daniel, was talking about him. And he is taking upon himself the deity that Daniel applied to this figure. Daniel chapter 7 verse 3. I was watching in the night visions and behold one like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. He came to the ancient of days and they brought him near before him. And there in Daniel what we see is we see the Father and Son just interacting just together on the same level. And Christ always talking about his Father every chance he could get.

I always do the will of my Father. He's just always making sure that that stayed in front of his listeners. But these men, robes, riches, religion, reputations, that alliteration is very accurate. That's what mattered to these men. Not truth, not scripture, not even the obedience or desire to obey the scripture.

Outward things, not inward things held their attention. And there are many such people that claim to be Christians and they live like these guys. And the truth sets you free, not pretending about it. Anyway, verse 64. You have heard the blasphemy.

This is now Caiaphas. This is his response to Jesus saying, yep, I am. You have heard the blasphemy.

What do you think? And they all condemned him to be deserving of death. It's not blasphemy if it's true. And it is true in this case. But we don't want you to be Messiah because we don't like you.

That's what it comes down to. The darkness in these men was so thick they loved it. It was a welcomed darkness. Matthew chapter 6. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness but therefore the light that is in you is darkness.

How great is that darkness? Well, we're looking at it being acted out right here. Does knowing this make us better Christians? Does knowing that these men are doing it this way, behaving this way, does it influence us towards righteousness? Because Satan is not the only one that gets to talk. God gets to talk too.

The question is who are you going to believe? Verse 65. Then some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, to beat him, and to say to him, prophesy. And the officers struck him with the palms of their hands.

These are the authorities doing these things against the law. There go the kangaroo court. Now the world likes to say, well, the Bible's not true. Can't believe it. I don't believe you.

That's our response. When they say, I don't believe the Bible, we say, I don't believe you. I believe God, just as he says. And when you say you don't believe the Bible, can you tell me why you don't believe the Bible?

And can you make sense when you tell me? First thing they usually go for is, well, the contradiction. Show me them.

Show me the contradictions. And anyway, verse 65. I mean, I'm not saying this as though they're my enemy.

I look beyond them. I see Satan influencing them, and we want the chance to preach. Verse 65. Then some began to spit, as I mentioned.

Let's follow that. To spit on him, to blindfold him, to beat him, to say to him, prophesy, and to strike him with their hands. They went right to work, did they not?

They pounced. It's sort of like the scapegoat which he represents. He represents the goat that is spared and the goat that is sacrificed and the goat that is a scapegoat. He represents them both in this Old Testament illustrations that are given to us.

Here, they're jeering him, they're hating him. Isaiah 50 again, Isaiah the prophet, this time chapter 50, verse 6. Speaking of Messiah, I gave my back to those who struck me and my cheeks to those who plucked out the beard. I did not hide my face from the shame and the spitting.

He's totally in control. Luke adds this. And many other things they blasphemously spoke against him. This is the one before whom the angels worship and demons tremble and men can't get it. This is the one whom Isaiah saw high and lifted up and the train of his robe filling the temple. When Isaiah said, woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips who dwells in the presence of a people who have unclean lips. The only one they would permit to be Messiah would be the one that they would rule over, as I've said earlier.

But listen, I'm almost done. Christ is their high priest and he is their sacrifice and this is what they do to him. When Paul writes the Roman letter to the church in Rome that he had not yet visited, he just pours his heart out as a Christian, as an apostle. And he talks about salvation very much.

It is a masterpiece of Christian literature and scripture. He writes, he says, and when we were still without strength to be saved, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. Then he goes on again, but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And then he writes to the Corinthians, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. Christ died for the ungodly. Christ died for us. Christ died for our sins according to the scripture. So see, God speaks too. And God says, I know Satan is serious, but I am serious too.

And I am stronger, but it's got to be your choice. God will have nobody in heaven that has bruises on them because they've been pushed into heaven. We come in because we see the love and he receives us. Love restrained Jesus Christ. He was not dying to kill them.

He was dying to save them. I don't have it so easily. I mean, I want to strike at enemies. I know vengeance is fine, says the Lord.

That's at least how it should be. And I struggle with this, but you know, as a Christian, I never struggled with that. Now that I'm a Christian, it's now an issue because I want to serve my God. And I have this flesh that, you know, raises itself up. And I got to beat it down. It's worth it, incidentally. Don't give up. You keep failing, falling on your face. That's to be expected.

Just keep getting up. Thanks for tuning in to Cross-Reference Radio for this study in the Book of Mark. Cross-Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross-Reference Radio. You can search for Cross-Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the Book of Mark, right here on Cross-Reference Radio.