The Passive

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Barabbas represents all of us. Like Barabbas, we are rebels against the rule of God. And Jesus, a man of perfect goodness, died in our place. He'll take the cross that was intended for us. The Gospel is about one word. And if you don't get this one word right, no matter how much else you know, you have missed everything in the Gospel. One word.

Substitution. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Okay, so have you ever been on the sidelines of a field but wished you were playing in the game? That competitive itch was so strong and you wanted to just run out, grab the ball, and start running, right? Well, we're in a series called Can't Believe and we're discovering the barriers that can hold us back from saving faith. And today we're looking at the arrest and trial of Jesus and several people who missed out on salvation because it was easier just to stay on the sidelines.

See, they weren't too interested in getting into the game, so to speak. If you missed out on any of the previous messages, you can catch up free of charge at jdgreer.com. But first, let's join pastor J.D. with the message he's titled The Passive. We are in our series called Can't Believe in which we're looking at seven different kinds of people in the Gospel of John who just, for whatever reason, couldn't bring themselves to believe in Jesus. We're going to look at someone who could not believe in Jesus, a man who could not believe in Jesus because he was passive. Passive.

He didn't really make a decision about Jesus one way or the other. He just didn't think the issue was all that important. Now, passivity is a general problem in human nature. I think it's one particularly acute in our culture and probably particularly among males in our culture. Passivity is when you don't direct active energy to something, even when you really should. Passive people have a tendency to just go with the flow, to let things unfold as they will. Sometimes you're passive about something because you just don't place a great deal of importance on it.

Sometimes people are passive because, to be frank, it takes less courage to not make a decision in many cases than it does to have to make one either way. And throughout John chapter 18, Jesus is going to confront the passive with the need to make a decision about him, to reckon with what they actually think about him, and then to act on that knowledge. We'll begin reading in verse 4. As the chapter opens, Judas, you know Judas has betrayed Jesus and he shows up in the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus and he's got a group of armed soldiers with him. Verse 4, Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, Whom do you seek? Now, don't miss, right here, don't miss the odd juxtaposition of phrases in that sentence. If Jesus knew all that was going to happen to him, why does he need to ask who they've come to arrest?

Well, here we go. Jesus is forcing them to acknowledge what they are doing. And you're going to see he does this several times through this chapter because so many people go through life without ever evaluating what they're actually doing with Jesus. But here's the thing, a postponed decision can have the same functional effect as not making a decision. For example, I know that a lot of young people get in trouble with their retirement because they just never get around to saving for it when they're young. They don't ever make that decision, it's just that they fail to make the decision to save for retirement and that functionally becomes a decision not to save for retirement.

As a same result, you show up in your 60s with nothing to retire on. So Jesus is constantly in this chapter forcing the question, where do you stand with me? Where do you stand? Because to not decide for me 100% is to decide against me. Jesus in that way is like an exit ramp off of a highway.

If you don't take the exit, then you are on that highway and you are going to go to where that highway is headed. So they answered in verse 5, well, we seek Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus said to them, I am he.

Now, in Greek, there's no he, so it's just I am, which is, of course, the Hebrew name for God. So verse 6, when Jesus said to them, I am, they drew back and they fell on the ground, which was clue number one that this was a bad idea, right? The guy says his name and you get knocked down on your can.

At that point, I felt like you should pack up and go home, right? But they're, you know, they're not going to do it. I mean, last week we saw that his voice was so powerful that he could bring dead people out of the graves. Here you see that his name is so powerful it knocks armed soldiers on the ground. So he reaches down to help them up, verse 7, and asks them again, whom do you seek? And this time they said, much more meekly, I might add, uh, Jesus of Nazareth, sir, there's not too much trouble.

If it's inconvenient, we can come back later, if it's inconvenient. Jesus answered, I told you that I was he. Remember, remember the whole, you know, I spoke, bam, you fell down thing, remember that?

Yeah, they remember. So if you seek me, let these men go. This was to fulfill the word that had been spoken.

Of those whom you gave me, I have not lost even one. Now, there's something extremely important in what Jesus just said there and how we said it that we're going to come back to in a few minutes. Verse 10, then Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's servant and cut off his right ear. Now, Peter's kind of late to the party because if you remember, at the Garden of Gethsemane, he was, he was taking a nap.

So he's groggy and he's grumpy and he just shows up swinging. By the way, he's not naming for, aiming for the guy's ear. He's not Zorro, you know, trying to do a little knife trick.

I mean, he's trying to turn the guy's head into a canoe. Well, luckily he missed, just, you know, hacked off his ear. The servant's name was Malchus. So Jesus said to Peter, put your sword in its seed.

Peter, shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me? Now, in Luke's account of this, Luke adds that Jesus, at that point, reached down, picked up the guy's ear and reattached it, which is clue number two that this is a bad idea. He reattaches your ear after it's been hacked off? I mean, imagine being Malchus. One minute your ear is, you know, ringing and your head is throbbing in pain and you're staring at your bloody ear on the ground and the next minute he's reattached it and you can hear again. You know, Malchus is like, ah, did he just put my ear back on?

Does it look normal? You know, this is, this is strange. So the band of soldiers and their captain and their officers of the Jews arrested Jesus and bound him.

Unbelievably insane. First they led him to Annas for he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was the high priest that year. It was Caiaphas who had advised the Jews that it would be expedient that one man should die for the people. Now, throughout this chapter, the Apostle John is going to note how Caiaphas accidentally fulfills every single part of God's plan of prophecy. Because what John is trying to show you is that while it looks like Caiaphas is in control or Pilate is in control, it's actually God who's in control.

That's why he points it out. Verse 19, the high priest then questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching. Jesus answered them, I spoke openly to the world. I've always taught publicly in the synagogues and in the temple where all the Jews come together. There's nothing that I've said in secret.

So why do you ask me? Ask those who heard me and ask them what I said to them. They know what I said. When he said these things, one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand saying, is that how you answer the high priest? Jesus answered him, if what I said is wrong, then bear witness with me about the wrong, but if what I said is right, why do you strike me?

I mean, you've got to agree the restraint here is unbelievable. I mean, I feel like if that had been me at that point, I'd have been like, how dare I say that to the high priest? How dare you strike the real high priest? This whole high priestly system, by the way, was set up by me to point you to me, and in just a few hours, I'm going to make this whole thing obsolete, and then I'm going to come back from the dead, and how are you going to feel when I show up riding on the clouds of glory? And then I would have dropped another I am and knocked them on their can, or at least a truly truly. Would have gone Jay Cutler on them, you know, or something like that, and which is probably why God did not tag me to play the role of Jesus. So now you know, all right. Verse 28, then they led Jesus from the house of Caiaphas to the governor's headquarters.

It was early morning. They themselves did not enter the governor's headquarters so that they would not be defiled, but so they could eat the Passover. Again, the irony here. The corrupting and blinding power of religion in the Bible is unbelievable, because here you've got a group of guys who are about to crucify the Son of God, who are about to put on trial incarnate goodness, and they're worried about going into some guy's house because they're going to be defiled so that they can't eat the Passover, and the Passover points to this guy they're crucifying. Verse 29, verse 29, so Pilate went outside to them and he said, what accusation do you bring against this man? They answered him, if this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you, which is what we call, fancy word, obfuscation, which means you're not really answering the question.

That's what your kids do, you know, to you when you ask them a question they don't want to answer. So Pilate's like, well, that's not really an answer, so take him for yourselves and judge him by your own law. The Jews said to him, it's not lawful for us to put anybody to death, which is a lie. You know, the Jews could have called a lynch mob and stoned Jesus like they would do with Stephen just a few months later, and if they'd have done that, Pilate would have turned his head. But the problem, you see, was that Jesus was way too popular among the people for the Jewish leaders to get away with just stoning him.

They needed to be rid of Jesus and not have the people blame them for it. So they're trying to shovel this off on Pilate to get him to do the dirty work so they could get Jesus killed and they wouldn't have any responsibility for it. But see, there again, John adds, verse 32, this was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die.

Again, what John is showing you is that this is all playing right into God's plan. You see, one of the things that Caiaphas the high priest knew is he knew that the Romans would kill him by crucifying him, by hanging him up on a tree. And the Jewish people in the law, Deuteronomy 21, 23, it said, everyone who dies hanging on a tree is cursed by God. And so what that meant is that when the Jewish people saw that Jesus would die by crucifixion, they would have to assume he was cursed by God. And Caiaphas could be like, see, there's your proof, he's a fraud, he got cursed by God, the Romans killed him, that's proof. Deuteronomy 21, 23, he was cursed by God, that's why he died that way. But God's plan all along had been for Jesus to die cursed on a tree. And Caiaphas is executing it perfectly, even if unintentionally, because this is how God mocks Satan.

What they intend for evil, he twists and turns and uses it for good. Now, Pilate is in a pretty difficult position. And I don't want to create too much sympathy for Pilate, because that's just not what we do in church. But Pilate, you see, was already on pretty thin ice as a governor.

He'd only been in this position a very short amount of time, a few months, and he had already, in those few months, made some colossally boneheaded decisions. For example, when Pilate first came into the office, he wanted to kind of establish his authority with a bang, so he parades through the streets of Jerusalem with these big banners of, you know, on the top of them was the image of Emperor Tiberius the Caesar. And then he mounts those banners everywhere in Jerusalem, including putting one on top of the temple.

Bad idea for Jews, because, A, to have any kind of image in a temple area, and much less one of a pagan Roman emperor, and then to put it on top of the temple, so they're unbelievably furious and they riot. So Pilate says, all right, let's have a discussion. He gets them all together in the amphitheater, all these rioters, and then he surrounds them with Roman soldiers, and he threatens to kill them. Well, some of the Jews, called his bluff, laid down on the ground and bared their necks and said, go ahead and kill us. And Pilate knows he can't do that at this point, and so it makes Rome lose face, and it's a big embarrassment on him. A few months later, he needed some money to pay for an aqueduct he wanted to build, didn't have any money, so he goes in and he raids the temple treasury.

Again, stupid decision number two. You're raiding the Jewish temple to build, you know, take money and build it for something you want, and so the Jewish people riot again. This time, Pilate has these plainclothes officers go in among the people and kill them as if the people wouldn't know that these were really Roman soldiers. So they're going to kill all these rioters.

Of course, the people figure this out, and it's a big, huge mess. Well, the result of all these boneheaded decisions was that the Jews hated Pilate, and Rome was totally annoyed with him. Particularly, Emperor Tiberius had put Pilate on probation. One more misstep, and he is fired as the governor. That's the position that Pilate is in.

One more riot, and he's gone. And see, the Jews know that, and they use that, and they're like, you better do what we want, or we're going to call Uncle Caesar, and we're going to get you out of here. So Pilate's in a tough place. He enters his headquarters again and calls Jesus and says to him, are you really the king of the Jews?

What's he trying to do? He's trying to get him to admit that he's a rival king to Caesar, and then he's got a reason to kill him. Jesus answered, do you say this of your own accord, or did others say that to you about me? Pilate answered, am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priest have delivered you over to me.

What have you done? Jesus answered, my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my serpents would have been fighting that I might not be delivered over to the Jews, but my kingdom, you see, is not from the world. Then Pilate said to him, so you are a king? And Jesus answered, you say that I'm a king? For this purpose, I was born, and for this purpose, I've come into the world, what's that purpose? To bear witness to the truth.

Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. Pilate says to him, verse 38, what is truth? After he'd said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told him, I find no guilt in him. In other words, this guy's no threat. He's got no political aspirations. I mean, he's put him in a place where he could claim kingship if he wanted, he's not done it. He considers himself a spiritual king who bears witness to eternal truth.

There's no threat to Rome in that. Verse 39, but you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want to release, release to you the king of the Jews? And they cried out again, no, not this man, give us Barabbas. Now Barabbas, you see, was a robber. Pilate knows he's being played.

He's not, he might be boneheaded, but he's not stupid. He knows he's being played, so he comes up with what he thinks is a pretty ingenious solution. And under normal circumstances, it would have been an ingenious solution. He appeals to a custom where they would release one Jewish political prisoner at Passover as a sign of goodwill. So Pilate gives them what he thinks is a ridiculously easy choice.

And it was a ridiculously easy choice. On the one side, they got Barabbas, who was a terrorist and a thief. He's harmed a lot of people.

Nobody likes him. Everybody, Jews included, knows this guy is a public menace and he deserves to die. And they have to choose between him and Jesus.

Jesus, the one who taught people to love their enemies and multiply the loaves and the fish and fed hungry people and raised little girls from the dead. But the people, incited by the Jewish leaders, call out for the release of Barabbas. But in so doing, give you perhaps the clearest picture anywhere in the gospels of what this whole thing is about. You see, Barabbas was a bad man by anybody's metric and he was a rebel. Jesus was the picture of innocence, yet Jesus will die and Barabbas is going to walk free. Think about what that must have been like if you'd have been Barabbas. Barabbas woke up that morning assuming that by sundown he'd be dead. But that evening, he's sitting down having dinner with his friends and this strange man who embodied perfect goodness and virtue is hanging on a cross in his place. We know that three people were crucified on that day and we know that on the right and left of Jesus were two people who were described as what?

Robbers. Guess who the third one of those was? Barabbas. Jesus is hanging on a cross that was intended for Barabbas and Barabbas is at home having dinner with his friends. Scholars point out that Barabbas's name is kind of strange.

It's kind of like not really a name. Bar means son of, abbas means father. So Barabbas means son of a father. Any dude here not a son of a father?

Anybody? In other words, what he's saying is this is everybody. Barabbas, by his very name, represents all of us. Like Barabbas, we are rebels against the rule of God. And Jesus, a man of perfect goodness, died in our place. He'll take the cross that was intended for us. You see, the gospel is about one word and if you don't get this one word right, no matter how much else you know, you have missed everything in the gospel.

One word. Substitution. Substitution. Or the way we say it around here at the Summit Church, Jesus in my place. Now, this theme has been dripped throughout this entire chapter.

This whole substitution thing. You saw it in verse 8 and that phrase I pointed out to you when the soldiers come to take Jesus and Jesus says, if you seek me, let these men go. What Jesus said literally, let these men go, is the Greek word apheami, which is the word forgive. So what Jesus literally said is, you take me, I want you to release these guys. I want you to forgive them. I want you to let them go.

I'll be taken, they'll walk free. You see substitution in verse 11 in Jesus' statement to Peter after Peter cuts off Malchus' ear. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given to me? The cup was the Old Testament picture of the wrath of God. When somebody was being punished by God, the Jews would describe that as taking the cup of God's wrath and drinking it. And Jesus, as God the Father, is stretching out the cup of wrath for the human race. Jesus steps in the way and says, no, no, I'll take that. It was a cup that was intended for my sin. A cup of wrath that God intended for your sin and Jesus drunk it in our place. You see substitution in verse 14 in Caiaphas' prophecy that one man must die for the people and then in verse 32 when it talks about the kind of death Jesus had to die. Like I told you earlier, those who hung on a tree showed that they were cursed by God.

We have been cursed by God, but Jesus would die cursed in our place. You can see it in the mystery. You can see substitution in the mystery of how Jesus responds to Pilate. You see this chapter will tell us, chapter 19 will tell us, that eventually Jesus would fall silent before Pilate.

They're going to start accusing him of all kinds of things and he doesn't open his mouth. Universally, it is recognized that when you are in a court of law and somebody is accusing you of things and you fall silent, that essentially what you are doing is pleading guilty. Jesus pled guilty of everything he was being accused of, not because he was guilty, but because he was consenting to your guilt and he was consenting to my guilt. Because Jesus saw that behind Pilate and behind those Jewish leaders was the finger of God the Father pointing at Jesus, accusing him of your sin. He was leveling at him the list of things that you and I had done and Jesus stood there silently consenting to the guilt that you had brought upon yourself. Jesus would go to the cross an innocent man, but Jesus would die on the cross a guilty one. Because 2 Corinthians 5 21 says, at the cross God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us so that I might become the righteousness of God in him.

That's substitution. Jesus became my condemnation so I could become his righteousness. Christianity is not about moral improvement.

It's not about slight changes. It is about one who is innocent dying the cursed death of those who are guilty and those who are rebels and guilty like Barabbas walking free. That's what this whole thing is about.

And one word that describes every single thing in this story is that word substitution. We play the role of Barabbas. Jesus died in our place. By the way, by the way, you looking for an assurance that God will forgive you and accept you if you come to him?

You looking for an assurance? This whole chapter screams it. The character chosen to play you in this chapter is the worst kind of person. A rebel, a murderer, an extortionist, a man that nobody likes, Barabbas.

He was the Osama bin Laden of his day. That's who God chose to play you in this narrative. And that was intentional because he is trying to show you that no matter who you are or what you've done, Jesus' death can free you. You see it in God's willingness to forgive. You see God's willingness to forgive in the severity of the beating that they're about to give to Jesus.

Chapter 19 says they're going to beat him Roman style. And we know from history, Roman history, a little bit about what that beating was like. They always administered it with what they called a cat of nine tails, which was a long whip that was divided into nine different leather straps. And into those leather straps were embedded piece of bone and glass and metal. And the painful part of the beating was not just when the leather strap hit you, as painful as that was, it was the fact that those pieces of bone would embed in your skin. And then that Roman soldier would kind of tug it just a little bit the way you would do if you're trying to hook a fish after he bit, you just didn't get a slug in there. And then after it had embedded into skin, they would rip it so that it would just flay the skin off the body. People who saw these things say it's not uncommon that you would see one of these cat of nine tails embed into a bone and you would see a man's rib go flying off of his rib cage. We're almost certain that when they got done with this beating, Jesus was at least partially disemboweled. The flaps of that whip would have sliced through his skin and shredded it like a ribbon.

When they were finished, Jesus would have been left as a crumpled, bloody heap. You want to measure? You want to measure for how wide, how high, how deep and how broad the love of God is for you?

You want to measure? The cross is the measure of that love. You want to know if God loves you? You want to know if God can save you? Why don't you measure your answer to that question by the greatness of the sacrifice that he made for you there and the price he was willing to pay for you there?

You can establish the value of something by what you're willing to pay for it. Jesus put a value on you that was worth him going through this. So I repeat to you, this is words of John Owen, I gave them to you a few weeks ago, the greatest unkindness, the greatest insult you could ever give to Jesus is to doubt his love for you. Vast beyond all measure is the love that Jesus has for us.

It's so hard to comprehend, but we need to accept his love. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer and a message titled The Passive. Well, Pastor JD, you've taught us that we can't separate the gospel experience from the mission experience.

Can you explain a little more what you mean by that? One of the things we say is that if you've truly experienced the gospel, it's going to always propel you outward to carry the gospel to others. You see, the stark reality is that at most, only one third of our world is Christian. And that's if you count everybody who identifies as Christian, which we know is not true. But even if you were to count everybody who claims Christian as a true Christian, that means at least two thirds, about four and a half billion people are by their own admission, not Christian.

And therefore, according to the scripture separated from God, half of those people, half of that 4.5 billion have little to no access to the gospel. More than anything else, you and I have a responsibility in our generation to make sure they have a chance to hear the gospel before it's too late. And so I want to see us at Summit Life take that responsibility seriously. We do that through the radio. We do that by going on mission trips. We do it by planting new churches.

We want you to be a part of all of those things. If you'll reach out to us at JDGuirre.com, we would love for you to become a gospel partner with us just as a way of saying thank you to you. We would love to put into your hands some of the resources that we provide through this, like this new 20-day devotional I have called What is the Gospel? That'll take you more deep into the gospel.

And I promise you, when you press into it, you're going to find this sweet compulsion pushing you outward to carry the gospel to people who don't know it, whether that's a son or daughter who lives in your house, a neighbor across the street, or somebody in a country far across the world whose language you don't know, but you know that you've got to do something to help get the gospel to them. So come check it out at JDGuirre.com and join up with us today. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or it might be easier to give online at JDGuirre.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch, and I'm so glad that you joined us today. Be sure to listen again Tuesday as we continue our series called Can't Believe on Summit Life with JD Guirre. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Guirre Ministries.