John 19:21
So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,” but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’” Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”
You would think that with their plot finally fulfilled and with Jesus at last dying, the chief priests would be happy. Instead, they take exception to Pilate’s writing on the placard that Jesus was their King. What do we make of this? Why did the Holy Spirit move John to include this episode in the gospel? Well, at first glance the matter seems obvious: that God has come to men in humility, despite a multitude of signs and wonders testifying to His authority and divinity, and man has hated Him and made sure to murder Him. The very people that should have easily recognized Him – those men trained up in the Law and the Prophets – were actually those that hatched the plot that put God on the cross. Indeed, the most religious of all people didn’t recognize God.
Pilate’s inscription is the truth. Jesus was the King. He had done miracles that had never before been seen and never again will be. After Jesus made a man see that had forever been blind, the Pharisees hated Him. After He made a crippled man whole and allowed him to walk freely, they accused Him of breaking the Sabbath. Jesus gently asked them to consider the insanity of their contention. Could He wield such power if He were breaking God’s law? The obvious logic of Jesus contention was lost on their hard and impenitent hearts. And, alas, when He raised Lazarus from the dead, when the deceased walked out of his tomb, they should have been astonished and fallen down at His feet. Instead, they hated Him all the more and intensified their desire to kill the Son of God.
Nicodemus had come to Jesus and stated the obvious, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” Of course, Nicodemus had come in the cover of night for he was a rank minority amongst the rulers in regard to Jesus. Nevertheless, he understood the blatantly obvious. No one could do what Jesus had done and was doing unless God was pleased with him. And still, despite such powerful miracles, the religious leaders rejected Him.
This is the thing about rejecting God: it’s always an exercise of moral will, an act of moral insanity, because the proof of His divine nature and eternal power are always clearly perceived in the natural world. In Ephesians chapter 4 we learn that the ignorance of men on spiritual matters is due, not to lack of intellect, but to the hardness of their heart. The heavens declare the glory of God; they don’t suggest, hint, infer, posit, hope, or speculate about the glory – they declare it! To deny God’s clear manifestation in nature and in our own consciousness is to do the same thing the chief priests had done: deny the obvious. If man has any reasonable right to be confused about God’s existence and identity, then God is not just to condemn him. The Scripture obliterates this nonsense in Psalm 19 and Romans 1. All men know God but they reject Him as their God, as their King, and, trying to be like God, they become like Satan.
Jesus had told them that they were like their father, the Devil, who was a liar from the beginning. Forget about lying to your boss or on your taxes for a moment and think of the most fundamental lie that sinful men and women tell themselves everyday – that there is no God and, therefore, all of life is chance. But look for a short second at how ridiculous the matter becomes upon even a cursory inspection. If there is no God, no ultimate judge of life, no Creator, then all of the universe is just chance. Why then would a non-believer bother to say that there is no evidence for God? Why does evidence or logic matter in a universe of chance? There is no way to account for it and it’s all a bunch of nonsense.
The evidence is clear. Sin, at its most fundamental root, is the rejection of the obvious fact that God is God and we are not. We would like Him to go away so that we would have no boundaries. This Is what the religious leaders had done to Jesus and what the sign reminded them of – their rejection of their King. Man has no problems with religion so long as he can create it in his own fashions, to serve his own ends. But man has a real problem with God – with His sovereignty, His holiness, and His omniscience. Thus, this is the end of all of men’s dealings with God if they had their way – they hate God and will kill him if they have the chance because there can never be two sovereigns. It is him or us. And it is Jesus that lays down his life so that we have peace with God at last.
Recent Comments