to the glory of God. Now, I want to remind you that there are actually three things going on here as Jesus stands before Pilate. Number one, there is the love of the world that we see in Pilate. Number two, there is the condemnation of Jesus by the crowds. And number three, there is the sovereignty of God at work even here, even now with this situation. And several years after the resurrection, this same Dr. Luke quoted the apostles as they were praying about these issues, all working simultaneously together. In the book of Acts 4, verses 27 and 28, it says, For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur. So the men who led the church during its very first years believed and taught that the evil actions of unsaved and wicked men, including the murder of Jesus Christ, was carried out under the predestined purpose of God, who works all things after the counsel of Him. So in reality then, evil is not a force that roams freely throughout the earth, but is merely a tool that God uses to further His own good will in both saving all of His elect and damning all of the non-elect. So we're going to take some time to go through this together, and my goal is that three things will become clear in your mind. Number one, the great danger of loving this present evil world. If you are a world lover, the love of the Father is not in you, which means you're not born again. Number two, condemning Jesus only condemns yourself, because nobody can condemn Jesus. Number three, God is absolutely sovereign in the death of His Son. Now last week we saw how that loving the world is so very dangerous because it illustrates a heart that has not been born from above. And the very best passage that I'm aware of that describes this is found in 1 John 2, verses 15-17. So please go there with me. 1 John 2, verses 15-17. The Apostle John was moved along by God the Holy Spirit to say this, Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. This does not say that if you love the world, you won't love the Father. This is saying that if you love the world, the Father doesn't love you. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away in also its lust, but the one who does the will of God lives forever. Now this passage ties people in knots. And that's why most people just don't get into it. They don't ever talk about it. Because on the surface it would seem that love is a good thing. Right? We've got an awful lot of songs written about love, don't we? We talk an awful lot about love. I mean, even God Himself is love according to 1 John 4, 8 and verse 16. So if love is good and God is love, why is John telling us that for us to love the world means that God's love is not in us? Doesn't John remember what he himself wrote in his own Gospel record in John 3, 16? For God so what? Loved the world that He gave. His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. So if God so loved the world that He gave Jesus, why is John telling us not to love the world? Is the Greek word for world in John 3.16 different from 1 John 2.15? No. It's the same word. It's kosmos. So why is John forbidding us to do what God Himself did? Listen to the logic of the apostle. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. Well, that's not all that's in the world. There's trees and oceans and people and buildings and ham sandwiches and orange juice and all kinds of things. Lawn mowers and all kinds of stuff in the world. That's more than three things in the world. And that tells us that the world that John is talking about is not any of those other things. That the world that John is talking about is different because it comprises these characteristics. And then he says the world is passing away, and also its lusts. So we see that the world that John is forbidding us to love is not the dirt or the trees or the mountains that God created. It's not even the people that God made in His image, even though many of them are sinful. The people that work with you on the job that are wicked are not your problem. They're not a hindrance. That's your mission field. I mean, wouldn't this world be wonderful if all it was was a bunch of Christians? Well, evidently not, or God would have done that. That's called heaven. Only people in heaven are going to be Christians. We're not in heaven. We're on the earth. And we're commanded to be salt and light. Now, I'm not in favor of being around a bunch of loud-mouthed, sinful people that's cussing and blaspheming God. I don't like that any more than you do. But I want to try to tell you something about a danger that the church already went through many, many years ago that we're about getting ready to get into again, and that's called monasticism. Monasticism means the world's bad. And it's sinful. And therefore, as Christians, we need to pull away from the world and get off by ourselves. And where we can fast and pray and read the Bible and be clean and pure and holy and not have to get dirty with all those bad people. And it didn't work back then and it's not going to work now because the will of God is for you to go out into that sinful world and preach the gospel to every creature. And those of you that don't understand this, are you saved? How'd you get saved? Somebody preached the Gospel to you. And before you were saved, you was one of those bad people. Huh? Aren't you glad monasticism wasn't in force? So you could get saved. Well, we don't want that. And that's a danger that we need to learn from history. You say, well, it's a lot easier when we get off by ourselves. Sure it is. It doesn't even take the Holy Spirit. You can be happy all by yourself. It's a lot easier to pray when you're by yourself. It's a lot easier to read the Bible when you're by yourself. I mean, church would be great if it wasn't for all those pesky people in it. But Jesus died for people. And everybody that's not saved is coming from somewhere. And where they're coming from is bad. And so how are they going to get saved if we don't preach to them? Huh? Amen. I'm not telling you it doesn't matter what you do. You've got to keep your guard up when you're around lost people, don't you? Or you'll end up doing what they do. So we've got to be holy, but we don't have to be distant from people. Huh? Okay. That's the Bible. The Bible tells you to do the hard things, not the easy things. God didn't save you to be safe and secure. God saved you to be faithful and holy and busy and fruitful. Hallelujah. Okay, the danger is in the world system. that exists as a result of the fall and that continues to function in complete rebellion to God. And that world has three characteristics. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. And John said that these three things are not from the Father, but they're from the world. They didn't come from God. And then John said the world is passing away and also its lusts. So having these three attributes abounding unhindered in your life indicates that God's love is not in you and therefore you are not saved. But we must understand that it isn't that some lost people love the world while others don't. No, loving this present evil world in these three characteristics is what it means to be lost to begin with. It is the default setting of all who have not been born from above. Lost people love the world. So being a world lover is merely another way of understanding the depravity of fallen man. And as I told you last week, Ian Murray has the best quote I've ever read about this when he said this, quote, Worldliness is departing from God. It is a man-centered way of thinking. It proposes objectives which demand no radical breach from man's fallen nature. It judges the importance of things by the present and material results. It weighs success by numbers. It covets human esteem. It wants no unpopularity. It knows no truth for which it is worth suffering. It declines to be a fool for Christ's sake. Worldliness is the mindset of the unregenerate. It adopts idols. It is at war with God. Unquote. And so I'm telling you that the world is not just another way of living. It is at war with God. And so there's a hostility. There is a violence. There is a stress, a strain, an energy that comes from living in this world that is dominated by this system and yet being separated from it. And so the language in the Bible about being in the family of God is a language of love. The language of the Bible when it pertains to being in the kingdom is the language of agriculture. But the language of the Bible when it pertains to sin and when it pertains to living distinct from the ways of the world is the language of war. It is the language of battle. It is not the language of compromise. It is the language of military conquest. You are either being conquered or you are conquering. And that's the attitude we have to have as we live in this sin-cursed world. And the point of bringing this up in this series is to show you that Pontius Pilate was not saved. That his love of these three things meant that God's love had never visited him. And therefore, what he is doing in sentencing Jesus to death was the result of his own unconverted and wicked heart. And that is why Dr. Luke recorded this in Acts 4.27. For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel." Now look closely at what Dr. Luke wrote here. He says that Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the people of Israel were gathered together against. There was an assembly with the stated objective of being against Jesus whom God had anointed. So they were not neutral. They had an objective. They were at war with God. And the way this is phrased in the Greek shows us that these wicked worldly people gathered together against Jesus in accord with their own desires. In other words, this gathering was willful on their part. They voluntarily chose to gather together against Jesus. They wanted to gather together against Jesus. So this is a conscious act of their fallen and depraved will. And that means that these people were fully culpable in this horrendous sin. And that means that God could and that He did damn them for the evil that they did. This is the greatest sin in the history of the world. The condemnation of Jesus and putting to death the Son of God. You can't get worse than this. But then look at what Loke wrote in the very next verse. in verse 28, to do whatever your hand and your purpose predestined to occur. Huh? Now, as you ponder that, I want to show you something. The Old Testament contains hundreds of prophecies concerning the Messiah. Almost 400 individual prophecies. Including the town of His birth, and the genealogy of his parents. Now there's a logic out there put forth by the passion conspiracy book that that somebody gave me when I was first saved how this was all contrived by Jesus that he took a potion and that it knocked him out and he really didn't die and he got with the disciples to fake his death so that when he rose from the dead everybody was the old look he rose from the dead of course they don't explain how you send it up into heaven but anyway the. And so there's all been all kinds of theories about how Jesus really didn't die or that Jesus really didn't rise from the dead. And this is all just contrived in that they went backward after the Bible had already been printed, and they went back to make Jesus look like He fulfilled all these prophecies. But you've got a problem, Houston, because these prophecies in the Old Testament were written down and they were published as far west as Great Britain, as far east as India, all into northern Africa, hundreds of thousands of copies of the Old Testament were in print and circulated around the world 200 years before Jesus was ever born. And it talks about the town of His birth and the genealogy of His parents. You can't go back and fix that. And included in these prophecies is the indisputable fact that God desired for deity to take on human flesh, be born of a virgin, be subjected to all sin and yet never fail, and then be crushed under the weight of God's fury against all of God's elect. So Jesus came to die. He was born to die. The Lord did not come the first time to be accepted by the masses, or to be loved, or to be wanted, or even admired. Jesus was born to be rejected, to appear to the average person as though God Himself had forsaken Him. Listen to the prophecy of Isaiah that was written 500 years before Jesus was born in Isaiah 53 verses 2-12. He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him. And look upon Him with admiration is the unspoken way that's supposed to be understood. Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. Nothing about Jesus was attracted. You hang around Jesus and you're going to die. You hang around Jesus and you're going to be persecuted. You hang around Jesus, you're going to lose everything you own in this life. He was despised and forsaken of men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hide their face, now the Hebrew here lets you know, they hide their face because they're ashamed of Him. He was despised and we did not esteem Him. Esteem Him means praise Him. Lift Him up. He was despised and therefore He was not exalted. Surely our griefs He Himself bore and our sorrows He carried. Yet we ourselves judged Him, esteemed Him to be stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. The average person looked at Jesus in His first advent and said, God has cursed that man. God is against this man. That's the level of the grief and the sorrow and the agony that Jesus carried around with Him. The scholars of the Old Testament did not gather with Jesus when He was here in His first advent. That's why He picked the nobodies and the rejected people of the world. But He was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray. Each one of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth. Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth. By oppression and judgment He was taken away. And as for His generation who considered that He was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of My people to whom the stroke was due, His grave was assigned with wicked men. Yet he was with the rich man in his death, because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth. But the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief. he would render himself as a guilt offering. He would see his offspring. He will prolong his days and the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in his hand. As a result of the anguish of his soul, he will see it and be satisfied. The reason he will see people saved, the Bible says, is because of the anguish of his soul. He bought your joy in your salvation. He paid for your delight in Him with His own agony. That's why you can be happy in Him, because He agonized. Hallelujah. Tell Him this will put you on your face. Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the booty with the strong, because He poured out Himself to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet He Himself bore the sin of many and interceded for the transgressors." So it was God's will for Jesus to take on the sins of all of God's elect and be punished by the wrath of God as though those sins were His. And that is why Isaiah said the Lord was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief. Now, a few years ago, I preached a sermon series on that which pleases God. And in that series, I told you that this passage does not say that God simply crushed Jesus, but that God was pleased to crush Jesus. And the word please here in the Hebrew is the same word that we get the word joy, the word delight, the word satisfaction, the word happiness from. So, it pleased the Lord to crush Jesus. Crushing Jesus, even though He was entirely innocent, brought pleasure and delight and joy to God. And so this goes way beyond even being the will of God. Crushing Jesus for my sins and your sins brought pleasure to the Father. God the Father rejoiced and delighted at the crushing of His own Son. Now why in the world was that? How could that possibly be true? The common answer is this is how much Jesus loved me. or this is how much God loved me. And look, I absolutely rejoice at God's love. And I elevate it and magnify it, and I wonder after it more than most people do. But I reject that that is the final, or the best, or even the most important reason why God took such pleasure in crushing Jesus. The Apostle Paul wrote about this in Ephesians 1, and I want you to go there with me to find the answer. And it begins with verse 3, where he said, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. So the end for which Christ died, the cause, the purpose as to why God went to such great lengths to take on flesh and live down here as a suffering servant for thirty-three and a half years, and be crushed under the weight of eternal wrath against the sins of those He chose to save from before the foundation of the world is summed up in one simple but profound statement, to the praise of the glory of His grace. Hallelujah! And that means that God's grace has a glory to it. And yet that glory is not seen. It cannot be seen or manifested or displayed unless there exists somebody who needs it. Because manifestly, God does not need grace. We are saved by grace. Jesus was saved by works. We're saved by works. We're saved by trusting in His works. Ah! Yes, sir. So in His marvelous wisdom, God created man. And He allowed man to fall so that God may redeem them by what He alone does for them. And as God redeems wicked sinners, the glory of God's grace is seen and it is displayed. And as God's amazing grace is displayed through the saving of wicked rebels, That glory is acknowledged. And it is marveled. And it is valued. And it is praised. And we sing about it all the time. Hallelujah. And that is why it pleased God to crush Jesus. Now this means that it was God's predetermined purpose for these men to gather together against Jesus. And so even though they all voluntarily chose to do this, God was very busy working to sovereignly allow these evil men to carry out the wickedness that was already in their hearts. So even though God could have sovereignly intervened and stopped them, He chose to step aside and allow evil men to carry out the evil intentions of their own hearts on Jesus so that the Son of Man will be killed, so that the glory of God's grace would be praised by rescuing sinful rebels. Hallelujah. Now, many people in the modern church rejoice at the concept called human self-determinism. Another way it's phrased is human free will. And these people seldom, if ever, miss an opportunity to uphold and magnify this concept. Somebody sent me a link to a video, and this blasphemer that's on TV named Bill Maher had Mike Huckabee on his program to ask him a very simple question. It is the preeminent question of all blasphemers and all atheists. And it is the preeminent question that the Bible answers. If God is sovereign, and if God is good, why is there evil in the world? And that needs to be answered. And I'm sitting there watching this and I'm saying, praise God, my buddy Mike, he's going to go over there and he's going to slaughter this pagan. And the first thing out of Mike Huckabee's mouth was about the concept of human free will. And I said, golly! Invite me! All these big-shot preachers don't know the Bible. Invite some podunk preacher from Gulfport. He'll tell him human free will is a myth. It doesn't exist. It's never existed. We just made it up. You know in the black and white movies, the bad guy wore the black hat and the good guy wore the white hat. You remember that? A long time ago when the good won. Alright. The bad guy is a guy named Pelagius. He's the bad guy. He's the heretic. He's the guy that was excommunicated out of the church because he promoted the concept of human free will. The good guy is Augustine. The good guy is the Apostle Paul. The good guy is Jesus. The good guy is Moses. The good guy is God the Father. The good guy is the Christian church that believes the Bible. And this concept basically says that while God is sovereign, He has chosen to carry out His sovereignty through the means of human self-determination or human free will. So once people exercise their will, once they make a choice, once they determine in themselves to do something, God voluntarily limits His own will and purposes, and He stands aside while these people carry out their choice. And this concept goes on to say that God so values human determinism and is so sacred to God that God will not violate it and will in fact allow men to perish in hell rather than act decisively against man's will. And if that is true, there's not a one of y'all that would be in here this morning. You'd all be lost. So I try to be as offensive as I can about this because everybody tippy toes around this issue. I'm not telling you that God periodically violates human free will. He just violates the stew out of it all the time. He just slaughters it all the time. He doesn't even apologize for it. Amen to that. So in the case of salvation, this concept teaches that all God can do is offer eternal life through His Son, Jesus Christ, and invite everyone to come and drink of the water of life. But individuals must either take God up on His divine offer and be saved, or reject that offer and remain damned. I was taught that. And so even though God desires that everybody be saved, He can't save them. unless fallen, sinful, frail, and mortal human beings choose to allow God the privilege of saving them. I don't know how you can get any more self-righteous than this. How this could be any more arrogant than it is. Who in the world do you think you are? And so here's the deal. I want to serve the biggest guy in the room. I want to bow my knees to the strongest being in the universe. Whoever I can defeat by my choices, that's not God. And I'm not going to serve a God like that. I'm going to serve a God that tells me what to do and has the power to enforce His will upon me. Amen. Hallelujah. And that's the God of the Bible. And in this case of these men gathering together against Jesus, this concept says that Pilate and Herod and the Gentiles, along with the people of Israel, voluntarily chose to have Jesus killed. And because God so values human self-determinism, He's powerless to stop them. So God's up in heaven wringing His hands and fretting over what they're planning to do to Jesus. That's blasphemy. Now self-determinism makes sense on some level and it's easy to teach and it's easy to learn. I just taught it to you. And this is so true that today the concept of self-determinism is the single most popular and most vigorously defended doctrine of the modern church. You can slaughter the deity of Christ all day long and they'll never bat an eye. You can reject the doctrine of the Trinity and get your own television channel. You can be a popular singing group and pronounce persons in the Trinity are ridiculous, that it's all offices, which is an ancient heresy called modalism. And you can be one of the best, most invited, most loved Christian singing groups called Phillips, Craig, and Dean that you can imagine. T.D. Jakes can preach against it and have a church packed out with 30,000 members. Nobody has a problem with that. You touch human free will and you're into a holy battle. You start coming against human determinism and you've got a war on your hands. Amen to that. And so what's wrong with the doctrine that so many people believe and so many people teach and so many people love and defend today? Well, there's just one thing wrong with it. God's Word doesn't teach it. That's all that's wrong with it. And the Bible has never taught it. In fact, the Bible teaches against it. So my question is, why doesn't the modern church teach against it since the Bible does? Dr. Luke didn't say that God so valued human self-determinism that He passively stepped aside to allow evil men to gather together against Jesus. No! Luke was moved along by God the Holy Spirit to say that the reason these wicked men carried out their evil intentions on Jesus was to do whatever your hand and your purpose predestined to occur. Hallelujah! Say it loud and proud! And that means that God is sovereign, not man. Hallelujah. It means that God is decisive, not man. It means that God is in control, even in this, and not man. It means that the only reason that evil men can carry out their wicked intentions in the earth against another evil person, or against a saint of God, or against Jesus, is because God has chosen to allow them. That means not a soul on this earth can touch you. unless it's the Father's will. And if it's the Father's will for them to touch your flesh, the promise is that bad thing is going to work together with all the good things and it's going to work ultimately to the glory of God and you're good. And so rather than desire to be set free from it, you ought to rejoice in it. Which I think the Bible says. And many times God chooses not to allow it. And in those cases, God chooses to actively and sovereignly intervene in the lives of evil people to forcefully stop them from carrying out the evil that was in their hearts to do. Other times, God chooses to govern man's evil intentions to the point where He allows some of the evil they intend to be carried out while prohibiting the rest. And one of the best examples of God choosing to sovereignly intervene in the evil intentions of wicked people and stop them from carrying out the evil that was in their hearts to do was in the very first sermon that Jesus preached back in Luke 4. So turn there with me. Luke chapter 4. I want to show you something. Jesus starts His ministry at the house. with his own family, his own nieces and nephews and uncles and aunts and friends that he grew up with, his own rabbi, his own elders, the people that knew him. That's where he began his ministry here. And Jesus returned to Galilee and the power of the Spirit and news about Him spread throughout all the surrounding district. It was good those days. Everything was rosy. Everything was great. And he began teaching in their synagogues and was what? Praised by all. And he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he entered the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. And he opened the book and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. If you know the Bible, that's Isaiah 61, and he didn't finish the second verse. He only read one and a half verses. He didn't read the whole second verse. And he closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. Now you didn't do that back then. The teacher never sat down. You always stood. Jesus sat down. He did that a lot. Huh? And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed. I guarantee you they were. And he began to say to them, today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. What does that mean? What does that mean? Isaiah is talking about me. That's what he's telling them. And all were speaking well of him and wondering at the gracious words which were falling from his lips. And they were saying, is this not Joseph's son? How in the world did he preach like this? Huh? Now watch what he says. And he said to them, no doubt you will quote this proverb to me, physician, heal yourself. Whatever we heard was done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well. And he said, truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a great famine came over the land. And yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath. a Gentile. She wasn't even a Jew. Huh? In the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed but only Nahum and the Syrian. And the more he's talking, the madder they're getting. What's he telling them? You're not saved because you're born Jewish. You've got to come to God by grace through faith. Are you not going? And all the people in the synagogue loved what he said and they rose up to hug his neck. Huh? Be careful. We're filled with rage as they heard these things. Look up the word rage. That's more than mad. and they got up and drove him out of the city and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built in order to throw him down the cliff. Man preached one and a half verses and they wanted to throw him off a cliff and that's Jesus. So when the radio station says we don't want you to preach in our station, don't get bent out of shape. They tried to throw Jesus. I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. Jesus was perfect. And they tried to throw him off a cliff, right? Now notice that at the beginning of his ministry with Jesus, he was well received. Luke says that Jesus was praised by all. And even as he read the first one and a half verses of Isaiah 61, their only response was all were speaking well of him and wondering at the gracious words which were falling from his lips. And they were saying, is this not Joseph's son? It was only when Jesus began to explain what the prophet Isaiah meant by what he wrote 500 years earlier that they became outraged. It was when Jesus told these extended family members that the only way that God could save them was if they were unworthy, wicked sinners. That's when they got angry with Him. Only when Jesus began to tell them the truth about how God visited pagan Gentiles under the Old Covenant and blessed them ahead of the Jews did they react this way. And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things. And they got up and drove Him out of the city and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built in order to throw Him down the cliff." Now, did they make their mind up? Were they exercising their free will? Yep. Did they make a choice? Yep. Were they dead set to do this? Yep. And so we're being told that once people do this, God stands back. He can't do nothing. Right? So the exercise of their own free will, their human self-determinism, their choice and their desire was to throw Jesus off the cliff and kill Him. But what happened? Did God stand by helpless to intervene? Was God paralyzed by the exercise of their free will? Did God so value human self-determinism that He was obligated to allow them to carry out their desires even against His own will? No! Look at the next verse. But passing through their midst, He went His way. Wow! Now this doesn't mean that Jesus got lost in the crowded scuffle. This is not describing a mob scene where Jesus escapes unnoticed. No, this is a miracle. It's a divine intervention. This is Jesus in His absolute deity and His complete omnipotence walking right through them. Why? How? Because it was not time for evil men to triumph over Him. And therefore, God acted decisively to violate their will and stop them. Right? And this truth again is illustrated by what Jesus Himself taught in John 10, 17, and 18 when He said, For this reason the Father loves Me. Why? Because I lay down My life so that I might take it again. No one has taken it from Me. But I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down and I have the authority to take it up again. This commandment I received from My Father. You're going to kill God? Seriously? So until Jesus laid down His life on His own initiative, He was immortal. And could not be taken or killed. Now I'm going to tell you, flat out, so are you. You cannot die. You will not die. No matter what happened. They can shoot you with a gun. They can give you strychnine. Nothing will kill you until it's your time to go. And nothing will keep you when it's your time to go. You are immortal until it's time for you to die. The only other time is when you're turned over to Satan because you're in rebellion. But when you're serving God and you're in the will of God, you will not die until it's time for God to take you home. Hallelujah. And that's why these people operated without any sense of fear. All of them operated that way, right? A poison snake latched onto Paul's hand, what did he do? He ran to Walmart Urgicare. No, he shook it off in the fire and kept right on going. Never even stopped working. Praise the Lord. Amen. You can't die. They stoned the man to death. That's what the Bible says. And the apostles held hands and circled around him and prayed. The next day, he's preaching the gospel. Go figure that one out. Busted lips, eyeball hanging out, shattered collarbone. Next day, he's preaching the gospel. I'm into that. Praise the Lord. Now why is that? Jesus said, I have authority to lay it down and I have authority to take it up again, this commandment I received from my Father. So the only reason Jesus is standing before Pilate right now is because it is time for Jesus to lay down His life. And because it is time, God sovereignly allows the evil intentions of these wicked men to flourish against His own Son, but only to the degree that it furthers God's predetermined purpose to crush Jesus with the sins of all of God's elect imputed to Him. But even at that, God is very carefully governing all of the atrocities that are taking place against Jesus as these terrible people beat the sinless Lamb of God without mercy. Now, I was raised to believe that they beat Jesus 39 times because the Apostle Paul said that they beat Him 39 times. They didn't beat Jesus 39 times. They beat Jesus till they got tired. The closest thing I've ever seen with my own eyes as to what that must have looked like is Mel Gibson's movie. They beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him. Turned him over and beat the front. They beat the back. They beat his face. They beat his legs. They beat his chest. They beat his neck. They beat him and beat him and beat him. And God was right there allowing those wicked men to beat the Prince of Life. and He would not die. He would not die at the hand of men. He could not die at the hand of man. God killed His Son for you and me. He died on the cross with the wrath of God upon Him, not by the hand of a man. And so, Jesus. God is very busy actively making sure that Jesus does not die until the Father can impute the sins of all of God's elect on Jesus while He is suspended between the earth and the heaven on the cross and until God Himself can pour the full fury of His wrath against those sins on the darling of the Trinity and God can take pleasure in crushing His Son. And so the reality is it right now is Jesus stands before this merciless tyrant who has put untold numbers of people to death. He, not Pilate, is in complete authority. And the serenity and calmness that Pilate sees in Jesus and the complete absence of any fear in his eyes troubles this evil man. And Luke writes that Pilate said to the chief priests in the crowds, I find no guilt in this man. Now part of this was the fact that Pilate despised the Sanhedrin and knew that these religious frauds had trumped up these charges against Jesus. But part of this was in the fact that Pilate was so impressed with Jesus, he wanted Him to live! The Bible tells you that. We're not going to get into it today, but next week. It tells you! He wanted to let Him go! And so Pilate pronounced his verdict on Jesus. Not guilty. These Jewish hypocrites brought Jesus to Pilate so He would render His judgment. And so He did. And normally that would have been it. For all intents and purposes, Jesus' trial was over at this point. Pilate had heard the case. He had examined the accused. And he had rendered his verdict. Not guilty. And yet the trial goes on. And my question is why? Normally this would have been the end of the matter. Yet it wasn't the end. Why? It's time for Jesus to die. Now, I understand why the Jews wanted to keep going. They wanted Jesus dead. But why is Pilate entertaining this obvious breach of legal protocol? Why doesn't he just end it right there? He has pronounced Jesus to be innocent, so why doesn't he send Jesus and the Sanhedrin away? And what is even more strange is that Pilate rendered his judgment against Jesus three different times. He did it here in verse 6. He did it again in verse 14 when he said, You brought this man to me as one who incites the people to rebellion, and behold, having examined him before you, I have found no guilt in this man regarding the charges which you make against him. And then when the people insisted that he pronounce death on Jesus in verse 22, Pilate said, Why? What evil has he done? I have found in him no guilt demanding death. Therefore, I will punish him and release him. I'm going to get into this next week, but they just beat the stew out of you just for good measure. Even when you were innocent, they beat you. They were going to beat him anyway, even though they were going to let him go. So even though Pilate was standing in the position of being the judge, he saw the innocence and the righteousness of Jesus. And this wicked pagan ruler who normally showed no mercy to anyone who stood before him, literally became somebody who was pleading Jesus' cause. And this illustrates the second point in this series. Condemning Jesus only condemns yourself. You see, human beings cannot condemn Jesus. Sinful fallen people cannot condemn Jesus. Jesus is God. And in every sense of that word, Jesus' purity and innocence and righteousness and sinlessness is pristine. It is obvious to all. You don't have to be a biblical scholar to know that Jesus was pure and innocent. Jesus cannot, therefore, be judged by other men. He cannot be truthfully accused of a single sin. He cannot be condemned by any of His creatures. Jesus Himself said this in John 8, verse 46, Which one of you convicts Me of sin? And the answer is nobody. Because it is impossible for anyone to find any fault at all in Jesus. Jesus is the only sinless man who ever lived and who will ever live. Every other human being, whether he is a godly prophet, or an anointed apostle, or a dedicated pastor, or a wicked man like Pilate, all humans are sinners who deserve nothing but God's wrath and condemnation. Nobody deserves forgiveness. Nobody deserves heaven. And the only people who can be saved believe that. And so those who try to stand in judgment against Jesus only judge themselves unworthy of eternal life. Those who find fault with Jesus cut themselves off from the only man who can forgive their sins and rescue them from doom. And they only condemn themselves to everlasting punishment because no one can lay claim to being sinless except Jesus. And that means that Jesus stands alone. No one even comes close to Jesus. He is in every sense an exclusive. And that means that part of being saved is to know and to believe and to trust in the sinlessness of Jesus Christ. Because only a sinless high priest can offer a sinless sacrifice to wash away the sins of God's people. The writer of Hebrews wrote in Hebrews 7, 24-27, But Jesus, on the other hand, because He continues forever, holds His priesthood permanently. Therefore He is able to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separate from sinners, and exalted from the heavens, who does not need daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people, because he did this once for all when he offered up himself. And then this writer told the Jews who wanted to go back to their animal sacrifices, that if they reject Jesus and put their trust in anyone or anything else, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins. You either come to Jesus or you have no sacrifice. There isn't another one. So it's Jesus or nobody. There is no other option, no other path to heaven, no other way for anyone to be forgiven and pardoned. So a wicked, unworthy sinner runs to Jesus, bows before Him and confesses his horrible sins. He repents of those sins and he puts his faith and his trust in Jesus personally and in his finished work, or he dies in his sins and spends eternity in a lake of fire. So the notion that people need more proof in order to believe, or that if only they could see a sign or a miracle that they would believe is ludicrous, when they have a sinless Lamb standing before them. And so all of those present that day, all who stood in judgment against Jesus, they were not judging Jesus, they were judging themselves. They were not condemning Jesus, they were condemning themselves. Now Luke tells us that the Jews began to see that Pilate began to be wavered. He began to waver by Jesus. And so they begin to say in verse 5, He stirs up the people, teaching all over Judea starting from Galilee even as far as this place, meaning Jerusalem. And this was the opening that Pilate wanted. He knew the Jews were simply trying to use him to carry out their wishes on this man. And Pilate was also very impressed with Jesus on a personal level. And so he didn't want to be the one to pull the trigger and have Jesus killed. So Luke writes in verses 6 and 7 of chapter 23, when Pilate heard that, or heard it, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. And when he learned that he belonged to Herod's jurisdiction, he sent him to Herod, who himself also was in Jerusalem at that time. And next week we're going to see how a bond of love was forged between two wicked, evil men over the death of Jesus Christ. It's incredible. So now Pilate is washing his hands of Jesus the first time and sends Him over to Herod to let Herod do the dirty work of condemning Jesus. But Lord willing, next week, we will see that this effort by Pilate to escape being the one to condemn Jesus failed. And we will see how God actively governs this entire situation to place Jesus before Pilate again, even though it was not His normal place. And He did so because God had chosen Pontius Pilate, above all the other people on the earth, to be the one to condemn the Son of God to die. So Lord willing, next week we will conclude this amazing series on the love of the world, the condemnation of Jesus, and the sovereignty of God. Amen. Let's pray.