A Glimpse into the Heart of the Master

Sitting in the upper room with all of His disciples, Jesus sent Judas out, knowing that Judas would betray Him. He's the treasurer, and when Jesus sends him out of the room, then they assume that Jesus is saying, now either get something that we need for the Passover Feast or do something that will be generous to the needy and to the poor. So they have no idea what is actually happening as Jesus reveals His betrayer. Knowing what was about to happen, Jesus was troubled but hardly surprised. He knew His purpose, and He accepted the outcome.

Today on Redoing Your Mind, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson continues his series on the upper room discourse. We'll learn that Jesus was intimately familiar with all the painful experiences of humanity, and that His suffering was not a pathway to defeat but an entrance to victory. Well, now we're coming to our third study in the farewell discourse of our Lord Jesus in chapter 13 and verses 21 through 31. Let me read one or two of those verses just to set the scene for us. After saying these things, His teaching about us becoming servants of others, after saying these things, Jesus was troubled in His Spirit and testified, Truly, truly, I say to you. Notice that?

This is really important. Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray Me. And then at the end of that section, Judas leaves the room, and it was night. And we're told, When Judas had gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified. When I was a very young Christian, there was a painting in our local art gallery by the famous artist, Salvador Dali. The title of the painting, some of you undoubtedly will have seen pictures of it, Christ of St. John of the Cross. It was a picture of Christ hanging on the cross. The cross was almost flying towards the viewer in the sky, and down below was the Sea of Galilee and fishermen on a boat. The St. John of the Cross, to whom reference is made in the title, was a medieval, mystical theologian in the Roman Catholic Church.

And people loved this picture. Actually, I remember as a youngster, you know how people use their Bibles as filing cabinets sometime? Many of my friends, teenagers in their early twenties, would have this picture inside their Bibles.

They almost used it as a kind of devotional help. A few years later, a young university student, just in the period when the works of Francis Schaeffer began to be published, and in one of Francis Schaeffer's works, he has a commentary on this famous painting by Salvador Dali, Christ of St. John on the Cross. The cross is flying above the Sea of Galilee, and Jesus is nailed to the cross. And Schaeffer makes the very important point that none of us seem to have grasped, which was this, that in this picture, the cross never touches the earth. And so he was really saying, this Christ of Salvador Dali's imagination is not actually the Christ of the Gospels.

And Christ of St. John of the Cross is not actually Christ of St. John, the author of the fourth gospel. Because right from the beginning of the gospel, John is telling us how the Son of God has come among us and anchored Himself to our world. The way he puts it so dramatically in John 1.14 is this, the Word became flesh, not just that the Word became a man, but the Word entered into the reality and indeed the frailty of our human condition.

He became subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to use Shakespearean language, that befalls all of us. And we have a very interesting insight here into the wonder of this in the life of the Lord Jesus. We've seen how Jesus has dramatically displayed the work He will do for our salvation, how Jesus has then taught His disciples to look at what He has done and to see if He is their Lord and Master, then they should also be willing to follow His example in bowing before others, becoming the bond slave indeed of others in order to serve them for the sake of their salvation. And now it's almost as though John is saying, I just want to pause the action now so that we can look together right into the heart of the Lord Jesus. Jesus has now said that one of them is going to betray Him. And do you remember how John himself has said to Peter, and Peter has spoken with John, and they want to find out who is it that's going to do this. And Jesus says, it's the one that I'm going to give the piece of bread to, once I've dipped it into the marvelous juices that they would use.

And He hands it to Judas Iscariot. And Jesus says, I'm telling you this before it takes place so that when it does take place, you will know I knew that it was going to happen. And then we read these words in John 13 verse 21, after saying these things, Jesus was troubled in spirit. And so John has this amazing section in which he's saying, I'm going to take you inside the mind of the Lord Jesus. And as he does so, several things unfold. The first is this, he tells us, we've noticed in verses 21 and 22, that Jesus confessed that His spirit was deeply troubled.

And the language Jesus uses here is strong language. He is saying, my spirit is agitated. You know how if you're given bad news, it seems as though your inner framework of emotion seems to be out of sorts. You feel a jangle of your whole person.

It's difficult to stay still. And this is what Jesus is experiencing. Actually, the other gospels will use similar language about this period in Jesus' life, especially when He goes into the Garden of Gethsemane.

And as He contemplates the significance of what He's going to experience in the hours that follow, we're told that He has that sense of profound homesickness, of somebody who's far away from home and knows that there is much that needs to be gone through that is difficult and dark before they return home again. Actually, the language that's used in Mark's gospel is the language that would have been used in antiquity of somebody who had received such a shock that they wondered if their whole being was becoming deranged. And this is what John wants to point out to us. Not that He said, but that Jesus said about Himself. Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, Truly I say to you, one of you will betray Me. Now, of course, this is especially significant because one of the verses in this section of Scripture that we know so well is that at the beginning of John chapter 14, Jesus will say to His disciples, Don't let your hearts be troubled. And we'll see the connectedness between these two things when we come to John's gospel.

I think the thing to notice here is that Jesus is troubled in spirit because the one who is going to betray Him is present in the room. You've ever experienced that in perhaps a family gathering or some social gathering or gathering of neighbors or gathering in the church? There is one person in the room and that one person in the room can pollute the whole atmosphere.

I sometimes think of it like this. I remember the days when you walked out of an airport in order to be able to breathe clean air. But now you run out of the airport to get past that 10-yard barrier in order to breathe clean air. Now, why is that? It's because smoking has been banned in most public places like airports.

And now it's all done outside. And as soon as you step into that atmosphere, if you're not a smoker, then you feel it's polluting everything around you. If you are a smoker, it feels quite normal. It happens when you get into the elevator, doesn't it, in a high-rise building. Somebody comes in from the third floor and you notice immediately that the atmosphere in the elevator changes because their breath indicates they've been outside having a quick cigarette, haven't they?

And just one person, their breath, not many breaths, and it changes the whole atmosphere. And so for Jesus, the atmosphere in this room has actually become very tense. I mean, think about it, this man who has been with Him three years, this man who has been appointed the treasurer of the apostolic band, this man who has seen Jesus' miracles, who has professed to be His disciple, this man has harbored in his heart a resentment against the Lord Jesus. And Jesus is troubled in spirit.

Now, I think there's a very obvious application of that, isn't there? As we see Jesus as He really is because He has been troubled in spirit. He is able to succor and help those who likewise are troubled in spirit. But then the passage moves on to tell us something else about Jesus. Being troubled in spirit, Jesus now reveals the identity of His betrayer. An interesting thing is, of course, as we are people who know John's gospel, our eye has already been on Judas Iscariot. But that's not true of anybody in the room except Jesus and Judas Iscariot. The two of them share a hidden secret that Judas is on his way to betray the Lord Jesus. But none of the other disciples know this. John is actually from time to time, as he's spoken about Judas' activity in the gospel, he's just stopped and said, I want you as a dear reader, he's saying, I want you to keep your eye on this man.

Because this man who seems so insignificant, he doesn't do very much in the gospels, this man is going to come right to the center of the gospel before the story is finished. And we know certain things about Judas Iscariot. We know that he was pilfering money from the treasury of the disciples. We know that when Jesus was worshiped by a needy woman, he was the one who said this ointment could have been sold for a small fortune and the money given to the poor. John later on understood, he didn't mean a word of that.

He meant that money could go into the bag from which he was stealing. So, as readers of John's gospel, our eye has been on Judas Iscariot. And interesting, isn't it, that here in verses 28 and 29 when Jesus actually dismisses Judas, everybody apart from Judas and Jesus assume Judas is going out on a mercy ministry.

He's the treasurer and when Jesus sends him out of the room, then they assume that Jesus is saying, now either get something that we need for the Passover feast or do something that will be generous to the needy and to the poor. So, they have no idea what is actually happening as Jesus reveals his betrayer. Now the question is this, how did Jesus know? How did Jesus know that Judas was going to betray him?

I think the answer is twofold. First of all, because he knew somebody would betray him. It was written in the Scriptures, wasn't it? The one who shares my bread lifts his heel up against me. That's an interesting expression, isn't it, in the light of Genesis 3.15, that the serpent would crush the heel of the Savior and the Savior would crush the head of the serpent.

It's the lifting up of the heel in the attempt to crush the Savior that will actually, as it were, miss the Savior's head but strike the Savior's heel. And Jesus knows this. He knows his Bible. How did he know that it was Judas Iscariot? How did he know it was Judas Iscariot? We could say, well, of course he knew it was Judas Iscariot.

He was God. But characteristically in the Gospels, Jesus has knowledge, not just because he's God, but because he has perfect discernment. John told us earlier in the Gospel, Jesus didn't entrust himself to people because he knew what was in them.

Now, sometimes we're like that, don't we? You know, we might not be able to find words to express it, but we feel, I'm not sure I can really trust him. In all our sinfulness and our ignorance and our spiritual insensitivity, we are sometimes sensitive enough to feel there's something not right about him. And I have very little doubt that the purity of Jesus' discernment perfectly understood the little signs that were present in the life of Judas Iscariot that indicated he would be the one who would betray him.

And there are four marks of that actually. The first is this, the mark of somebody who will betray the Lord Jesus and as Hebrews says, trample him underfoot and despise the blood of his covenant sacrifice. One of the signs will be that when they see grace in Jesus, they experience what I call anti-grace. They see grace in Jesus and they are repelled by grace. That's a far more common thing than we sometimes think, isn't it?

It's a kind of general assumption. When people see the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, they'll love the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, but it's not true. Some of you know it's not true because that was your own experience. You saw the grace of Christ in somebody else's life or in the teaching of the gospel and you actually hated it.

You ran from it, you sought to protect yourself against it so that the grace that saves sometimes serves as a kind of litmus test as to where our hearts really are. You know the strange thing? People always by nature prefer law to grace. Isn't that strange?

But isn't that true? Why? Because you can try to do law, but all you're able to do about grace is receive it with empty hands. Remember a minister I knew telling me of a distressed physician who called him in great distress and they met in a hotel for coffee and he said to this physician after she had told him her story, he said, have you ever asked for forgiveness? She became so angry, she picked up her purse and she stomped out of the hotel.

Why? Because she wanted to be told there was something she could do in order to be saved and he was telling her there was something she needed to receive, the grace of forgiveness in Jesus Christ and there was this inner hostility. Sometimes too this betraying spirit is revealed if when our sin is unmasked by Jesus, usually privately, we seek to disguise it rather than confess it. It's interesting that the other disciples apparently said, Lord, is it I who am going to betray you? But Judas Iscariot hardened his heart against the Lord Jesus. What's even more significant here is at least in terms of the chronology of this passage, Jesus did actually kneel down before Judas Iscariot and wash his dirty feet. The giving of the sop may mean different things, but that Jesus knelt down before Judas Iscariot and washed his dirty feet and displayed the most exquisite grace.

I think I can tell you how there is a little bit of that in many people. I've met many Christians who when I've said that Jesus washed the dirty feet of Judas, they've come to me and said, no, no, he couldn't have done that. He wouldn't have done that. You wouldn't have done that. How do I know you wouldn't have done that?

Because I think I can speculate fairly easily, there are lots of dirty feet that you have thought yourself above washing. But here's a man who knows that Jesus knows He's going to betray him, and Jesus is down there. Do you think He looked up into Judas' eyes? What do you think He saw? I wonder if He saw in those eyes.

How dare you? How dare you display such a gracious touch to my dirty feet? And the climax of this in a man's spirit is quite simply this, that they regard Jesus as their servant rather than be willing to become His servant. And so Jesus is sold for the price of 30 pieces of silver, as we know the price of a slave.

That's actually hugely challenging for Christians in the 21st century, I think, because so often we are encouraged, even sometimes in public teaching, that Jesus is our slave, that Jesus is somebody who will come into our lives, and He will do the things that we would like Jesus to do for our lives. My dear friends, that's the spirit of Judas Iscariot, not the spirit of the Lord Jesus. So Jesus is troubled in spirit. Jesus reveals His betrayer.

And as He does so, and this is especially true in verses 27 through 29, Jesus settles His own destiny. Now this is wonderfully important for us because at this stage in the gospel, Jesus is being victimized, and He's going to be victimized more. Judas is victimizing Jesus. The soldiers are going to victimize Jesus. The Roman soldiers are going to debase Jesus. The religious authorities are going to spit in the face of Jesus. Together the secular and the religious authorities will conspire to have Jesus publicly exposed and crucified. But none of them actually settles Jesus' destiny.

It's marvelous, really. Here they are, and they assume that they are in control. But Jesus is actually now making the moves that will inevitably and irretrievably settle His own destiny. And it's very interesting, isn't it, that all of this begins when Jesus dismisses Judas to do His work, and says to Him essentially, what you are going to do, Judas, you do now under My Father's sovereign control and ultimately for My glory and the salvation of the world. Remember how Martin Luther used to put it, never forget, he said, that the devil is God's devil. And here is Judas Iscariot and behind him the evil one seeking to destroy Jesus. And Jesus knows that this is not His destruction but His pathway to glorification because through the serpent crushing His heel, He will crush the serpent's head and bring a most glorious salvation to all of His people. And then when Judas leaves the room, the atmosphere becomes clean once again.

And we'll see more of that in our next study. There is no question that Judas' betrayal of Jesus was evil, but it brought about the very redemption that God had planned from the beginning. As Dr. Ferguson put it, Judas did this under the Father's sovereign control. It bolsters our faith, doesn't it, to see God working His plan so perfectly in time and space. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Friday, and we just heard a message from Dr. Sinclair Ferguson's series, Lessons from the Upper Room. In 12 messages, Dr. Ferguson looks in depth at the final charge Jesus gave His disciples before His crucifixion. We will send you this two-DVD set when you contact us today with your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. When we study God's Word, our minds are renewed, our lives are transformed. That, of course, comes from Romans chapter 12, and it's where we draw the name of our program.

It reminds me of something that Dr. R.C. Sproul wrote in his book, The Holiness of God. He said this, The key method Paul underscores as the means to the transformed life is by the renewal of the mind. This means nothing more and nothing less than education, serious education, in-depth education, disciplined education in the things of God. It calls for a mastery of the Word of God. And then he says this, We need to be people whose lives have changed because our minds have changed. And really, that's why Ligonier Ministries exist, to help you know what you believe and why you believe it. And that's why we're here each day on Renewing Your Mind. So we're thankful for your financial support and your prayers as we continue this important work. Thank you for joining us this week, and we hope you'll make plans to be with us beginning Monday for Renewing Your Mind. .