John 18:29
So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?”
Pilate is the highest authority in the land. He is Rome’s voice and certainly Rome’s fist. In their sin-driven frenzy, the Jews have brought Jesus to him so that they might do away with Him. They will not go into him because to do so will render them, according to Old Testament law, unclean and force them to miss the coming Passover. So Pilate goes out to them; the authority of Rome appeases the mob. When we see in our day the rule of law give way to the whims of the mob, we shouldn’t be surprised. Sin does this. Sin draws us away from the law of God so that our pendulum swings, especially in times of tumult, wildly from anarchy to tyranny.
Of course, Pilate asks them what the charge is against Jesus. Hence begins the last logical outworking of Eve’s conversation with the Serpent. The Fall didn’t happen right at that instant when she took the fruit of the tree and ate and then Adam followed suit. That was the physical consequence of the decision to judge good and evil without reference to God. That was the Fall. The Fall was that exact minute that man set himself up as the judge of ultimate things; it was the exact instant when the heart refused to kneel before God’s Word and instead set itself up as His equal. Satan says it, “…and you will be like God…” In other words, he says, “you will be able to reason without reference to God. You will be free as He is free.” Upon such has every death, disaster, and heartbreak ever been built.
And now we have Pilate stepping forth in the morning, in all his earthly authority, ready to judge God in earthly wisdom. The whole event is a stunning comedy/tragedy. Sinless Jesus is betrayed and arrested and abused and hauled before Rome. And, yet, He’s not just put to death. There is this whole business of having to make it “legal” when, in fact, it’s quite simply the outworking of hatred.
Pilate comes forth in his legal authority and wants to know what the charge is. He’s saying that justice must be carried out. He’s saying that it’s not okay to just put men to death willy-nilly. He’s proving that the law of God is written on the hearts of all men because they must justify their actions. Think on this: no evil man, from the most petty to the most powerful, ever lived that didn’t try and justify himself. From the drug addict to the dictator, all engage in the fine human art of self-justification. Man cannot just sin and be done with it but is ever busy with the facade of justice and truth and rightness in the face of their sin. Such is the proof that God’s law is upon our hearts and that we’re acutely aware of it, yet constantly and actively repressing it.
Sin is always both antinomian and legalistic, hence the crude spectacle of both government and the mob.
The genesis of sin is man’s attempt to make sense of the world and life without reference to God and it’s the ultimate of irrational things, which leads, inexorably, to ever more scenes like this one. Both Pilate and the crowd need a pretense for their action. Like every sinner, they need to cloak their sins in the appearance of justice. All men everywhere do this because there is absolutely no escaping God’s presence. This is His world and, therefore, it’s a moral and legal world. An atheist who claims that there is no God has ever this problem before him: he can never make sense of why things need to make sense. The atheist is the pretender like Pilate, standing in propped up, temporary authority, playing the role of judge without ever reconciling his avowed belief in nothing with this standard of right and wrong. In Romans Paul says of them, “They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them…”
Everything that follows is a farce. Pilate will interview the Lord and never quite feel comfortable. He knows somewhere in his heart that this whole thing is madness just as every sinner knows that every action and belief must be justified. There’s no way around this and only Christianity makes sense of why this is so obviously true. Truth and morality and justice exist because God exists. That is what is in back of all of these things. To disconnect them from God and prop ourselves up as ruler is the height of irrationality, the root of sin, the cause of death – which is the judgement of sin – and the source of all the pain and suffering in the world. It’s all so simple and yet man will not let go of his false autonomy.
Every time we see the ludicrous working as the just, and when we witness the preposterous masquerading as wisdom, we know this is true: man has tried to be God and judge good and evil without reference to Him.
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