........ a spiritual journal of a Walksbyfaith journey   

publication date: April, 2002.  

Five on trial and what happened to Barabbas that day -

Comments: This study is pulled from the archives on our forum @[ www.ezboard.com/bthecode ].
Originally found on another board and was the catalyst for my as yet unfinished "Whois". Anyone wanna help me out and play prosecutor?
Reposted by:Walksbyfaith Apr 29, 2002
Interesting study - What do you think?

The Gospel of Barabbas
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by: Steve Schlissel
Messiah's Congregation, Brooklyn, New York.

Text: Luke 23:1-25, Supporting Scripture: John 18:28-40, on the left -->

Something that we need to bear in mind as we read the accounts about the sufferings of Jesus is this: It was the world that was on trial here, not Jesus. This is the way we must view these accounts. The world is being summoned before Christ, not the other way around. That may be the way that it is seen by the eye of flesh, but actually God is conducting the court, and the world is being judged as Christ is brought before each party. When we read of Christ being brought before them, uppermost in our minds must be that they are actually being brought before Him, to be tried, and to be exposed, and today we're going to discuss the exposure that we can glean in the cases of several of these.

It should be apparent that the false church was tried and found guilty already, that Pilate, acting as the civil ruler was being tried, that the crowd which called for His blood was being tried, and that foolish Herod the hedonist was being tried.

We read of God's sovereignty in these affairs in summary form when the apostles, later on after Pentecost, were praying, and they put it like this in their prayer in

Acts 4:26-28:
The kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against His Christ. For truly in this city there were gathered together against Thy holy servant, Jesus, whom Thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel to do whatever Thy hand and Thy purpose predestined to occur.

So nothing was being put over on God in all these matters, but God was bringing them into judgment. Yes, the world was on trial in the trials of Jesus, and the world was condemned. Only one man, in this whole account, seemed to be better for what had transpired, and that man was Barabbas.

I would like today to look at the verdicts which were brought in the cases before us. The theme of the first several is this: Men show themselves for what they really are when they are summoned by God, before Christ. And this is just as true today, as it was then. When the gospel is preached and Christ is presented to the conscience, it is you who are being presented to the Christ, and it is you who are on trial, and you are showing yourself for what you really are when Christ stands before you.

We see, first of all, the Jewish leaders exposing themselves in the gospel of Luke, in the account that we read.

Luke 22:66-71
And so they dragged Him before Pilate, with some charges,

and here we find the people being exposed before Christ, the self- righteous people of this world. Here you have the most credentialed religious leaders in the universe; the learned of the learned. The ones whose Phds trailed behind them in all their advanced studies in literature, and Talmud, and the sayings of rabbis. They know it all. They know the history of the covenant. They know about creation. The know the number of letters on the page of the Bible, they know the numbers of the words in each scroll. They know it by heart. And here they are, these people, very religious, standing before the Christ and what do we find them doing? They examine the Messiah sent from God. They condemn the Messiah sent from God. And these Jews, these leaders of the covenant people, drag the Messiah, bound in chains to a Gentile Roman governor to have Him executed. They are showing themselves for what they really are. They are not lovers of God in any sense, but lovers of self, lovers of their own righteousness. Theirs was a false religion which for all time has been present with the true church to a greater or lesser extent; the religion of self-righteousness.

It has always been this that has been the central battle in the gospel. How are you made right with God? And on one hand the answer of people is that we make ourselves right with God, and with that you have every single religion in the world, including much of Christianity. But the answer of God is that, I will make you right with Me, all by Myself, and that's the answer of the gospel, and the gospel is what's missed by these Jewish leaders.

In Romans 10:2-3, Paul speaks of them by saying,

Brethren, the pleasure indeed of my heart, and my supplication that is to God for Israel, is--for salvation; Rom 10:1
for I bear them testimony that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge, Rom 10:2

. They did not submit to God's righteousness. And I tell you it's this very thing that continues to plague you today, if you feel yourself distant from God, as you rely on your own righteousness to make you right with Him, and that can never happen, and it could never give you peace. It will always lead you down the same course that we find these religious leaders on. When push comes to shove, you will actually hand Christ over in order to maintain your own integrity and your own righteousness.

Jesus was a threat, not to their nation, as they claimed, but to their pride and to their position, and this was obvious even to Pilate, for when they brought Him before Pilate with these charges, we could almost imagine Pilate laughing. Here were the Jews telling Pilate, This man doesn't want us to pay taxes. As if they did! As if the greatest yearning they themselves had was to pay taxes to Caesar, and now they've found someone who is trying to tell them not to. Well, we are so submissive to your Roman government that we're going to hand Him over to you. Pilate must have doubled over. How could he believe that for a moment?

And the first charge, that He's inciting rebellion is so vague and meaningless. The only charge that Pilate was interested in was the one about being king. But the interesting thing for our purposes is that of the three false charges that they brought Jesus to Pilate with, not one of them was the real charge that they wanted Him nailed for. They wanted Him crucified for claiming to be the Son of God, and claiming to be their Messiah. But they made up three other charges to get their will done.

When a man's pretended self-righteousness is being exposed by Christ before him, he will do anything to continue in his self- deception, even hand Christ over to death. As they were facing Christ, and they felt, from His own holiness, their own poverty of spirit, and as their false religion was being stripped away, the pain was so great that rather than humble themselves and throw themselves before the Messiah, they would rather hand Him over to be killed.

And so it is in all our struggles with this question of righteousness. How can I be made right before God? It's either God imputes Christ's righteousness to you by faith, or you save yourself. This is the heart of the gospel and the answer is always the same. Salvation is by God's work and that humbles us. We can add nothing to God's work, and that humbles us.

So the verdict of this first trial is self-righteousness upon the religious leaders. And so the question for us would be, Whose glory are you seeking in your religion? In your acts of piety, and in your faith, and in your prayers, and in your daily devotional walk? Whose glory are you seeking? Are you seeking to build up a whole list of righteousness that you can have to boast before God? Look at how perfect I am. I've done all these things! In so doing, such a one only reveals, all too clearly, that he knows nothing of the blood of Christ. They knew nothing of being broken by Him, humbled by Him, but they only know the old religion of self-righteousness, what I do to become right with God, not what God did to make me reconciled to Him.

Now the second trial that we see is the trial of Pilate before Jesus Christ, and here we have the trial of the coward exposed as a coward, though Pilate, I'm sure, did not think of himself as a coward. He probably thought that he was a pretty courageous man. History tells us that when push came to shove for him he killed people. He didn't get to his position by being afraid of the rat-race of Roman politics. He knew how to maneuver and get what he wanted. He was probably quite ruthless in some ways.

But when he was faced with Christ, his true character was shown. Here is something truly remarkable. The Jewish leaders showed themselves by regarding Jesus as a threat, but Pilate has earned the disdain of history because he condemned the man whom he knew to be completely innocent. He didn't regard Jesus as a threat in any way, on any level. He said, The man is without stain. And yet he condemned him anyway. Pilate ignored the first two charges, as we said, and pursued an investigation on the kingship of Jesus. Yes, Jesus confessed to being a king, and Jesus Christ preached to Pilate that day. Jesus dangled before the conscience of Pilate the nature of His kingdom. He said, It's the Kingdom of Truth, and He said to Pilate, Pilate, everyone on the side of truth listens to Me.

And here's the opportunity for Pilate to be pricked in his conscience now, and to seek God's truth. When Jesus says to Pilate, Everyone who loves the truth listens to Me, the underlying message is, Are you of the truth, Pilate? And Pilate's answer is, What is truth? And he turns quickly away from his salvation.

Pilate is an earthy man with no spiritual aspirations. He is someone to whom a kingdom of truth is nothing more than a fairyland. Yet, he seeks to release Jesus, because he knows the truth. He seeks to set the truth free but he should have sought to be set free by the truth. He had it all backwards, and thus, despite this knowledge and conviction that the man before him was innocent, despite his wife who told him that she had suffered greatly in a dream, because of this man and he should let Him go; all the evidences and all the pressures of providence were laying upon Pilate to release this man. But yet, the crowd said, Give us Barabbas, and the leaders said, Give us Barabbas. And Pilate went against his conscience because he was a coward. Despite his insights into the motives of the accusers, he condemns himself by handing the Messiah over to death.

God does not like cowardice. God does not look with favor upon people who do not have the courage of their convictions, who know something to be true, but to act as if it isn't, who will act as if the opposite of the truth is true. Like Pilate indicated his measly character by saying, I have found no fault in this man, therefore I will punish Him and release Him. He is spineless and willing to do heinous things in order to avoid confronting himself and his God.

And therefore we read this terrifying truth in the Book of Revelation,

The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars. Their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. And this is the second death.

Heading the list of those going to hell are the cowards who did not have the courage of their convictions, who came before Christ for the test and who failed. Pilate was on trial that whole miserable morning, and Pilate was condemned, and found guilty. Jesus tells us the solution to the fear that we all experience, when in Matthew 10:28 He tells the disciples, Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. The fear of man is a snare, and so many of you live your lives in the fear of what other people will think of you and what others will say, and whether you'll be accepted by them at work, or at school or in other places. And yet that is the principle of Pilate, looking after your own interests and subsuming what you know to be true in order that you may continue in a path or position, or whatever you have obtained up until that point.

But you know that the outcome of that sort of life is that when it comes down to it, you will be willing to crucify Christ also. because you're a true coward in your heart. God calls us to be courageous. He knows that we're cowards by nature, and therefore He speaks to us very plainly in the Word, telling us not to deny Him before men. He tells us to trust Him and to be strong and courageous, and not to be afraid of people. With God, I won't be afraid, with God, what can man do to me? it says in the psalms. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and don't be a Pilate, on those occasions when you are confronted by the world urging you to crucify Him when you know that you must own Him as your own.

And now we come thirdly to the crowd who is on trial before Jesus that day, and I want to review a little passage from Matthew 27:20-26: [Read Matt. 27:20-26]. The most horrifying cry in all the pages of history. This is the crowd, the mindless mass. Pilate, at his trial, had revealed himself to be a coward. The leaders of the Jews had been condemned as hating God's righteousness, and hypocritically loving their own. And the crowd is also summoned before Jesus Christ that day as He stands before them. And here we see that they are not merely a bloodthirsty lot, but a mindless one. The crowd moves as the man moves, towards evil, only with more daring than an individual, with more recklessness than an individual man.

Long ago in the Law, God warned, in the Book of the Covenant in [Exodus 23,] Do not follow the crowd in doing evil. God knows the ways of sinful men and so we see He warns us, Don't go with the flow, don't move with the crowd when they do wrong. And yet, all of us who have teenagers know that this is the most frequent justification for any sin. Everybody's doing it. The crowd does it, and therefore we have found the justification for doing it ourselves.

But let me tell you about a crowd this day. They called for the blood of Christ, and said that they were even willing to live with the responsibility to the nth generation. Kill Him, and we'll take full responsibility. You want to follow the crowd?
You are mindless.

We are witnessing the raising up of an entire generation of millions of people who have not learned to think for themselves, and who only know what the crowd says. It is terrifying to live in these days, if it were not for our knowledge of God supreme. It's not simply that public education doesn't teach our children to think critically or correctly, as much as our culture doesn't encourage people to think at all! We are raising a generation of mental morons, characterless people who are unable to discriminate, who are unable to cut through argumentation, who are unable to evaluate data, who are unable to learn true value and stand on it.

The question put to the crowd in our text is the question which every soul who hears must answer, What think ye of the Christ? Now what happens when you have a generation who have not been taught to think and they're faced with that question which is above all questions, What think ye of the Christ? What are they going to answer? I don't know, what does everybody else think? And how do we know what everybody else thinks, but from television. And what do we learn about Christ on television? We learn that his followers are Jimmy Swaggart, and we learn from the newspaper that rapists carry Bibles. We learn from television drama that Christianity is something not to be trusted, that it produces fanatics or lunatics. So we find out what the crowd thinks, and we lose a generation of people that say, I don't want to have anything to do with that, because they have never learned to think of Christ as He is presented on the pages of Scripture, because that requires thinking. They just tell what they're told to say. They respond with what they were told to respond with. And so the work of evangelism is much more difficult, humanly speaking, isn't it? Because now we have to get very basic, and we have to help people throw out all the things that they know that they don't know, in order that we might come to the issue of the Christ, whose Son is He?

The response of our generation is, I don't know what to think until I see the survey. I don't know how to vote until I see who's in the lead. I don't know what I want until I find out what most other people are saying. And what we will soon find ourselves doing is finding or place in that crowd and doing what we're told, and saying, Crucify Him. Where is the man, where is the woman who can stand up and say, I know Christ and I don't care if the whole world lines up against me. I know my Redeemer.

Whenever the argument is advanced, Well, everybody's doing it, I want you to remember just one thing: This crowd condemned itself before Christ with that thinking. So, the third trial is over and the crowd has been found guilty of mindlessly condemning the Christ out of hand.

And now we come to Herod, who is a clown, and a man who lives for amusement. Jesus stood before Herod because Pilate had learned that Jesus was from Galilee, and it's one more attempt to get rid of this problem which would not go away. He said, Maybe Herod can get this matter off my hands.

And Herod is a perfect clown. Each person so far has been revealed by their estimation of Jesus. God has presented His Son to each of them and said, What will you do with My Christ? And they reveal themselves by their answer. We've seen the religious poverty of the religious leaders, the cowardice of Pilate, and the crowd saw Jesus as nothing, and showed themselves to be slaves, rejecting Him. But Herod sees Christ as a source of amusement, as a kick, as a pleasure, something to titillate me, something to provoke a giggle in me. He is a lover of pleasure rather than a lover of God. All he sought from Jesus Christ was a trick. Hey, can you pull a rabbit out of your hat? The Holy of Holies comes to earth and tabernacles among us, and this man asks for tricks.

When Jesus refused to comply, they did their best to get at least some kind of laugh out of Him. They clothed Him in a robe, and put a mock-crown on Him, and faked some sort of honor to Him, and thus they sealed their doom. This was not the Herod who slaughtered the innocent babies. This is the Son of that Herod, and he is known as Herod Antipas. This is the Herod who had married his brother's wife, and John the Baptist spoke to Herod and said, It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. And Herod was upset by this and convicted by John in his conscience. But rather than repenting, he became more and more frivolous, giving himself more and more to pleasure to cover over his guilt. In his lustful pleasure, this is the man that gave the head of John the Baptist to his wife's daughter when she danced for him. This shows you what sort of man he was, devoted to pleasure, putting to death the man under whose preaching he had become convicted.

Herod let himself become hardened and shallow, and he is frighteningly like many today. How many, as soon as the 5 o'clock whistle blows, it's off to the pleasure house. They rush to excite and amuse themselves. The one thing this generation dreads is solitude, in which they might have to face themselves. And so, like Herod, in order to avoid self-examination, they go and give themselves every pleasure that they can, to keep themselves amused and occupied, so that they can just get away from confronting the poverty of their own spirits.

But, you know, some people do worse than that. They drag the same principle into religion, and they don't seek God, but they seek pleasure in their religion. And they seek to go to church, not to reverence Christ, and not to hear His Word, and not to obey it, but they go to church to be amused. The music is great! I dig the sound and the rhythm. And they run up and down the aisles, and go into ecstatic utterances. All the while that the Christ is silent before them, for He does not speak to Herod, and He will not speak to Herod, and He will not speak to people who seek to use Him for kicks and for amusement. Christ is not our toy. He does not do tricks before us. It is we who are always on trial before Him.

The verdict is pronounced upon Herod - guilty as a clown. So The leaders represent self-righteousness, and Pilate represents cowardice, and the crowd a void of character, and Herod, pleasure lovers, all of whom are guilty before Christ.

And now we come to Barabbas, the one man who got good news out of this day. His very name means `son of the father' -bar abbas. Barabbas, you see, is a representative man. He represents all the human race who were freed by Christ. You and I are Barabbas! Our condition is the same as his; we are in a state of rebellion against the authorities. We raise our hands with bloodthirsty motives. We have been caught and bound in chains, placed in a dark dungeon, under the curse of the law, awaiting the day of judgment. We are Barabbas. We have no hope to get our because we are guilty. We are only waiting for execution - guilty sinners condemned to death and hell.

Suddenly, Jesus comes to trial and the great alternative is presented. If Jesus would be spared, we would be lost. Barabbas would go to death. But, if Jesus is sent to execution instead... Here is the key of the gospel of Barabbas. Behind the voice of the crowd is the voice of the Father in Heaven. You see we are Barabbas, and God the Father said, Give Me Barabbas. It will cost the death of My Son but I would have them free. It will cost the death of My Son, but I want them released. So, give Barabbas the news. Tell him that another is being sentenced in his place. Tell him he can take off his chains and come out of prison. He doesn't need to stay in darkness any longer. Another one has been given over to the darkness, that he might be freed.

Hear the voice from heaven say, Give Me Barabbas. Put yourself in his place, and say, Father, I am Barabbas, and because of your grace, I have been made a son of the Father, bar abbas. And by the grace of Christ I can cry, Abba, Father, to my Father in heaven.

The great exchange occurs. The murderer's bonds, curse, disgrace and mortal agony are transferred to the righteous Jesus, while the liberty, safety, innocence and well-being of the immaculate Nazarene become the lot of the murderer. Barabbas is installed with all the rights and privileges of Jesus Christ, while the Son of God enters into all the infamy and horror of the rebel's position. The great exchange occurs.

And so we've seen bad news and four verdicts, but in the case of Barabbas, we see the Gospel. A man saved, delivered and set free. Not by personal improvement. Can you imagine what it would have been like if they had come to Barabbas with the good news and he had said, Well before I come out, I want to reform myself, and be worthy of this release. You miss the point, Barabbas. Another one has been sent in your place, and how can you become a good, rehabilitated citizen in prison? First you must come out into the light, not by personal improvement, but by a substitute.

Five verdicts, but only one is good news. Pilate wanted absolution from his responsibility and he didn't get it - bad news. The people wanted political liberation and they didn't get it - bad news. The priests wanted to establish their power, and they only brought about their own destruction - bad news. Herod only wanted amusement, and he is not amused today. There is only one thing Christ would provide for seekers; a substitute for guilty, shackled, imprisoned sinners. Barabbas was the only beneficiary in this whole affair. He got what he didn't even seek - grace, pardon, freedom. Do you want pardon? Then come to Christ and learn the gospel, the good news according to Barabbas.

So, lastly, you must remember this. Today Christ has been presented to you. But He is not on trial. You are. What verdict is being revealed? What think ye of Christ, and what do you seek from Him?
Amen
[ www.messiahnyc.org/ ]

G*d Bless
~ We live to serve ~

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