John 19:15
They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.”
There is today a general sense, especially in the Western democracies, that personal liberty is absolute. There is a belief that each individual is absolutely sovereign and that one does not have a ruler. This is ultimately a mistaken notion, though, as we see starkly in this verse. The accusers of Jesus have to make a choice and God, through the secondary causation of Pilate’s question, gets the chief priests to state their position for the record. Isn’t this a remarkable moment in Scripture? God uses Pilate to ask the question and the Jews are forced to state their case openly for all to hear – and, indeed, even for us to read today. Be sure, they didn’t want to do this. They labored all along to try Jesus in the night, under cover of darkness, and to avoid this very moment. Assuredly, they didn’t plan on making this admission, but God used the circumstances to force their hand. The Jews, originally established to have only one true King – that is, God – have long since lapsed into idolatry. And, in the case of most sin, men are loathe to articulate exactly what they believe and dare expose their true motive, but God forces them and thus they admit publicly that their king is in Rome, not heaven.
Lest we should miss the point: the verse today is the question put before all men everywhere and at every time: “Shall I crucify Jesus?”
This is it. Whom will you serve?
We may entertain fanciful notions that we are little sovereigns, kings in our own moral universe, but we know deep down, especially in those quiet moments where conscience comes calling, that we are not actually unaccountable to the universe’s Judge and Creator. We know this and yet suppress this truth in order to pursue our alleged autonomy (Romans 1:18-19). This is the fundamental sin of mankind: refusing to acknowledge God as God and give thanks to Him. All sin is a repudiation of God’s authority over the person. This is why the Bible makes it clear in this verse, before Jesus is marched off to the summation of the great event, that the chief priests are denying His Kingship.
No person living under a king has a right to denounce that king. That is what has happened with mankind in general and in the heart of every unbeliever in particular. We will either bow before the righteous, true King of the world or we will fashion some false notion or another. And most of us today are horribly sloppy in our thinking toward the greatest subject of life. Young men and women give far more thought to what college they will attend than to the destination of their soul after death. That is true madness! We worry and fret over the trivial, the passing, and the temporary, and neglect our ultimate destiny. Questions about right and wrong are given short thrift because our institutions have taught us not to take them too seriously. “Don’t worry,” they say, “no one can judge you.”
But if we are to think deeply on the subject we become aware of the fact that either the world has a creator or it does not. Either the world is God’s or it’s an accident. The stakes aren’t small just because we can go through our days not thinking about the subject just as these Jews weren’t right by virtue of the fact that God didn’t immediately strike them dead when they proclaimed Caesar as their god. No, they assuredly faced death and judgement soon enough and so will we, so we shouldn’t go on blithely presuming on the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance, not knowing that these are meant to lead us to repentance (Romans 2:4).
The choice is clear to every person: either you are God’s or you are an accident. Every other option but the first leads invariably into absurdity. Do you choose on this day to say you are a naturalist and that evolution (blind chance) is your creator? Then you must live according to that doctrine. Go on and try it for one day. Go on and live according to the logical consequences of evolutionary philosophy and you will see that there is no way to do it without being a killer because that is evolution’s way to progress…to kill the weak. Hitler’s philosophy wasn’t crazy in the sense we like to use the word. He was an evolutionist and his politics, awful as they were, were products of his theology/philosophy. He believed in the survival of the fittest and so he systematically sought to kill the weak, the infirm, the handicapped. Indeed, he sought to speed up and help evolution. A man that offers aid to the weakest among us, if he’s a Christian, has helped a fellow image-bearer of God. An evolutionist/atheist who does the same has violated his own code.
This is the dividing line of all things. Where did we come from? No true debate about ethics or religion can have any meaning without first settling this point. The Jews were right as far as their logic went: Jesus needed to die because he was an enemy of Caesar; He was the true King. But, of course, like all false gods resembling mortal man or abstract ideas or images, Caesar himself had no true power. This is the ultimate tragedy in that every man or woman or child that puts their faith in anything but the true Creator God – in the Lord Jesus – will perish in their sins, having lived a life, thanklessly, in a land they didn’t create, trespassing the whole while, and calling the King a liar. Did you know that this is why we are under judgment? We have lived on God’s kindness, tasting the pleasures of life, loving the arts and nature, feeling the deep wonders of love and romance, and yet we spit at Him the whole time.
And this presumption that we’re our own god is so much rubbish too. See it here how the Jews declare that they, God’s chosen people, choose Caesar instead. It’s one of sin’s great deceptions that men and women apart from Christ convince themselves that they’re free. Today we choose the Caesar of Washington and a hundred other despots at our door. We vote ourselves into high taxation, embrace a tangle of regulations, limits and rules here, there, and everywhere, rather than the freedom that’s in Christ. We submit to these petty oppressions because sin convinces us that we chose them in our modern democracy. This is why we see such an absurdity as those who advocate for extreme sexual liberty yet embrace socialistic schemes. Yes, sin is a cosmic joke, a folly of epic proportions, a distortion of nature’s order, a form of moral dementia. But the laugh is always on the sinner (Psalm 2) because the harlot can only ride so long on the beast before the beast turns on her (Revelation 17:15-17). Sin convinces man that he’s a god. Of course, every person sees their limits – their bank account, their talents, their limited opportunity. This is meant to lead them to repentance. Instead, they rail against God for these limits and turn instead to the state and create a false king – a Caesar or a President. It’s all idolatry, you see. Man wants to worship a god in his own image, created after himself. Modern socialism – and the multitude of frivolous powers this impulse spawns, from the IRS to a homeowners association, all with a multitude of commandments God never gave – is man worshipping himself. Sinners seek to control their neighbor because they can’t control God. Like the Jews in our passage, sinful man embraces slavery and tyranny when he embraces sin. Freedom is rare on earth because sin is in the hearts of men.
Jesus will go meekly to the cross now. Notice His love even in the face of such acrimony. Look at Him and see His compassion and marvel at the kindness and severity of God. If we don’t repent we will take upon ourselves the punishment Jesus didn’t deserve but received so that we might be forgiven. This is the heart of the gospel and the gospel is God’s righteousness and love revealed toward us who have served false kings. We are just like the Jews that day. We cry that we have no king but “science” or “tolerance” or “relativism” or “hedonism.” We do not have a choice that we will serve a king. The question is whether we will serve the true King or one we have crafted to cover our sins and our pride.
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