John 19:6
When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.”
It is a rare church today that reads Scripture during the service. Perhaps a line here and there, but not whole chapters or long passages. We don’t meditate upon the word even in church! We want the pastor to move on to important things: like…me! I’m important…my life is important. Tell me something practical so I can apply it at work or to my hobbies. Learning Scripture for the sake of learning Scripture is boring.
This is a mask, though. The real problem isn’t that today’s church goers are self-absorbed and shallow (though they are) but that they’re dead in their sin. They dare presume to tell the church not to focus too much on the Word! They dare presume to tell the Lord that what He has ordained as the means of feeding His sheep isn’t sufficient. Well, this atrocious arrogance happens not merely because we’re pathetically immature spiritual brats but because we hate what God tells us in Scripture. And what is it exactly that irks us? That all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. This truth is on every page and in every line – and it cuts so deep into the self-righteous facade of the modern believer that they simply don’t want to hear it.
Let them sing in their praise bands. Let them hoot and holler over the so-called practical wisdom of a charismatic entertainer they call a preacher. Let them get a “rush” and a “high” over their experience but don’t let them really hear and learn the word of God. This is the strategy of hell and it has duped millions. Here in America we have thousands of churches and so many of them are as dead as their city’s graveyards because there is no gospel preached therein. For the gospel of God confronts rebels with the truth about themselves – that they have turned aside and need to repent. Praise bands and all that are fine so long as the praise is for the work of Christ on the cross for our redemption. And you can’t have that without acknowledgement of sin. No sin, no cross; no cross, no grace; no grace, no redemption. Singing and rejoicing absent of all this is, in point of fact, having a party on the way to hell.
And what of this business of practical theology? What is more practical than preaching Christ and Him crucified at every turn? Do I need to control my temper? Indeed. And I’ll do so more efficiently when I know the greatness and holiness of the God that has saved me. Do I need to be more industrious? Of course – and I shall be when I do all things unto the Lord whom I know because He’s revealed Himself in the Bible. You see, all practice is the practice of some theory. To remove sound biblical preaching and reading from church is to turn the house of God into a group therapy session, or a concert of some sort. And Christianity isn’t self-help, it’s God-help!
The chief priests and their sycophants are convinced of their overall rightness with God. They cry for crucifixion because Jesus has done to them what the Bible does to us today: convict us of our sin. This is the work of the Spirit that Jesus promises: “…He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me…” (John 16:8-9). This is precisely what modern man and the modern church doesn’t want to hear. We close our eyes and plug up our ears and babble like petulant little children. We say, “I don’t want all that fire and brimstone stuff…that’s all nonsense from the past.” But we confuse material progress with moral improvement. That we have smart-phones and better technology doesn’t in any way prove that we are right with God. We’re simply more comfortable in our sin.
The chief priests had Jesus face-to-face and they hated Him because they loved their own authority. This is the same case with every man and woman that loves their own opinion over the Bible’s. The irony is that just as then, when Pilate saw nothing to condemn Jesus for, but the religious leaders hated Him, so have we kicked Scripture out of our world. That we sit in a pew doesn’t make us holy – in fact, we can be even more the God-hater than the chief priests. It is always as simple as this: do we proclaim our goodness or God’s? Do we seek our glory or that of Christ? Do we pray for holiness or comfort? If we cling to any notion, regardless of how small or petty, that we are pretty good people and don’t deserve punishment, then we have rejected Jesus just as the chief priests did on that day. And the way to see that we’re clinging to self-righteousness is that we won’t like what the Bible says about sin. It’ll be offensive. To the repentant, though, what the Bible says about sin is the most beautiful thing in the whole world, for only through it do we see the glory that is the love and mercy we have in Jesus Christ.
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