S. Lewis Johnson -- Pontius Pilate (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said,.

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glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

My name is Mike Abendroth.

We're continuing our series with Dr. S. Lewis Johnson, Jr., that's L -E -W -I -S,

and he preached for many years in Dallas, and then he also taught at

Dallas Seminary, Trinity Seminary, overseas as well.

I love to listen to S. Lewis Johnson.

You can go to the SLJ Institute and find lots of his sermons there, 1 ,500 sermons.

Today, part one, his sermon from his series, Leading Figures in the Drama of Golgotha.

John 18, 28 and following, Pontius Pilate, a vacillating

man.

So today's part one, Pontius Pilate, a vacillating man, S. Lewis Johnson, Jr.

I want you to fall in love with the teaching of S. Lewis Johnson because he so magnifies Christ

Jesus and his work.

And so I thank the Lord for the gift of S. Lewis Johnson, and I want you to listen to him today,

talk about Pontius Pilate, the vacillating man.

Today, we're beginning a series of studies in some of the outstanding

figures in the crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, and for the first

of our series, I want you to turn for the scripture reading to John chapter 19, John chapter 18

and verse 28.

John chapter 18 and verse 28.

And this morning, I wish, in contrast to some of our other mornings, to read

a lengthier portion from the Word.

So we will begin at chapter 18 and verse 28.

The context is the Passion of Christ.

Then led they Jesus from Caiaphas unto the hall of judgment, and it was early.

And they themselves went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled, but

that they might eat the Passover.

Pilate then went out unto them and said, What accusation bring ye against

this man?

They answered and said unto him, If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered

him up unto thee.

Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him, and judge him according to your law.

The Jews therefore said unto him, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death.

I think you might say they had kind of made up their minds what they wanted to do.

That the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled which he spake, signifying by what death he should die.

Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again and called Jesus and said unto him, Art thou

the king of the Jews?

Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others

tell it thee of me?

That text has been woefully misused in preaching.

It does not mean what it has commonly been thought to mean.

It means simply, Pilate, is this your own personal evaluation or

has the charge and accusation been brought to you by the Jews?

Pilate answered, Am I a Jew?

Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me.

What hast thou done?

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world.

If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight that I should not be delivered to the Jews.

But now is my kingdom not from hence.

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then?

Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king.

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.

Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

That is a very, very important statement.

May I read it again?

Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?

And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews and saith unto them, I find in him no fault

at all.

But ye have a custom that I should release unto you one at the Passover.

Will ye therefore that I release unto you the king of the Jews?

Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas.

Now Barabbas was a robber.

Then Pilate therefore took Jesus and scourged him.

And the soldiers planted a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe and said,

Hail, king of the Jews.

And they smote him with their hands.

Pilate therefore went forth again and saith unto them, Behold, I bring him forth to you that ye may know

that I find no fault in him.

Then came Jesus forth wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, and Pilate saith unto them,

Behold the man.

When the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, Crucify him,

crucify him.

Pilate saith unto them, Take ye him and crucify him, for I find no fault in

him.

The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because

he made himself the Son of God.

When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more afraid, and went again

into the judgment hall and saith unto Jesus, Whence art thou?

But Jesus gave him no answer.

That, too, is a very important statement.

Jesus gave him no answer.

Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me?

Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?

Jesus answered, Thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above.

Therefore, he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.

And from henceforth Pilate sought to release him.

But the Jews cried out, saying, If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend.

Whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.

When Pilate therefore heard this saying, he brought Jesus forth and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that

is called the pavement.

But in the Hebrew, Gabbatha.

And it was the preparation of the Passover, and about the sixth hour, Roman

time.

And he saith unto the Jews, Behold your king.

But they cried out, Away with him, away with him, crucify him.

Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your king?

The chief priests answered, And mind you, this is the theocracy.

This is the people of God.

We have no king but Caesar.

May God bless this reading from his word.

Let's bow together in prayer.

Our gracious God, the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,

we come to thee through him who suffered the passion that we

might have life.

And we acknowledge, Lord, that our allegiance is to him

and to thee by the Spirit.

We thank thee, Lord, that in the inscrutable wisdom of God we have

become believers in Jesus Christ and thus are of

the truth and have heard his voice.

We cannot understand, but, Lord, we are grateful for that which

thou hast done.

And today before thee as part of that company of people who belong to thee,

we want to confess our unworthiness, confess our lack of

gratitude for that which thou hast done, confess our unfaithfulness

in the life which thou hast given to us.

And we pray, O God, for ourselves individually and then as a

group of the children of God that thou wilt enable us by thy

grace to do thy will.

We thank thee, Lord, for each one present.

And we know that many, many needs are represented here.

For those who are not yet in the family of the faithful, O

God, bring conviction through the Holy Spirit that they turn to him

and find in him the solution to the riddles of life and the possession of

an everlasting life in relationship to thee.

For those of us, Lord, who know thee and who have failed, we pray that

thou wilt lift us up by the Spirit of God and restore us

to that brightness of relationship to thee that means fruitfulness in Christian service.

We pray for those who are troubled by the stresses of life and the tragedies of life,

and we pray that thou wilt comfort them and build them up and encourage them.

For those, Lord, who face important decisions this week, may the guidance of the Holy

Spirit be their portion and may they sense that thou art going before them

in the path that thou wouldst have them to take.

Lord, we pray for Believers Chapel, for the Christians who meet here, and we

pray that this testimony may continue to reach out in the city of Dallas and to the uttermost

parts of the earth.

We pray, O God, that thou wilt enable us to walk under the head of the Church, Jesus Christ,

and reliance upon him.

We especially pray for the young people who are here and pray that thou wilt minister to them through the

Word and prepare them for life that lies ahead of them.

Today we remember particularly the work of Campus Crusade for Christ on the campus of the

University of California at Berkeley.

And we know, Lord, that amid the turmoil that exists there today,

young people are going in with a testimony for Jesus Christ.

And we pray that thou wilt encourage them and in the midst of that turmoil enable many of the

young students to discover in Jesus Christ the meaning of life.

And may they put their trust in him.

And may the work of God move forward today significantly and throughout

this week through the testimony to Jesus Christ that is given on that great campus.

And so, Lord, we pray that thou wilt undertake there, protect and keep and guide.

And may there be the blessing of the Holy Spirit upon the activities of the week.

And we commit our service to thee.

Pray for the singing.

May it redound to the glory of Jesus Christ.

And for the ministry of the Word.

May it be in the spirit.

For Jesus' sake.

Amen.

Our subject this morning is Pontius Pilate, a

vacillating man who lacked the courage of his convictions.

Pilate was the Roman procurator of Judea.

He began to serve in the year 26.

And his procuratorship ended in the year 36 A .D.

He played the leading part in the civil trial of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We don't know a whole lot about the life of Pilate except that which is recorded in the Word of God.

There is tradition to the effect that in his early years he had been a frontier fighter.

And then he married well.

He married Claudia Procla, who was the daughter of Tiberius, the granddaughter of Augustus.

And as a result, either of his service in the frontier or as

a result of his marriage, he had been made by Tiberius, the procurator of Judea and

Samaria.

Someone has said that politics is a game with two sides and a fence.

Most politicians find the fence the easiest place to sit.

A few years back I remember Billy Graham telling a story about a Texas politician who was

approached by a newspaper man and asked his opinion about a certain issue.

He said, well, I have many friends on one side of this issue

and I have many friends on the other side of the issue.

The newspaper man pressed him and said, but where do you stand?

He said, I stand for my friends.

Now if we were giving a political exposition of Pontius Pilate, that is the kind of opinion that we

would reach, for this man was a vacillating man.

A group of the first said later that he was inflexible, merciless, and

obstinate.

But when you look in the word of God, you discover that Pilate comes off much better than that.

As a matter of fact, Jesus Christ apparently had a high regard for Pontius Pilate,

and you can sense that in the fact that he had scarcely a word for Caiaphas, the high priest.

He wouldn't even speak to Herod, but he had a long conversation with Pontius Pilate

and apparently dealt with him and dealt with him in a very tender way.

And when you notice the things that Pilate said in the New Testament, you come to the conclusion that apparently

Jesus thought that Pilate was a man with whom he might struggle, that is, for his

soul.

Think of some of the things that Pilate said.

They are words that have rung down through the centuries.

Behold your King.

Behold the man.

What shall I do then with Jesus, who is called the Christ?

What is truth?

This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

All of these are words of Pontius Pilate.

I think there is one little touch about the man Pilate that gives us another inkling of the kind of man he

was.

In the midst of the trial, he received a very, very hurried word from his wife.

And apparently there was in the heart of Pontius Pilate a love for his wife.

And you remember that she sent word to him and the word was, Have thou nothing to do with this

just man, for I have suffered many things in a dream because of him this day.

I've always said, and I've said it here in this auditorium more than once, that one of the best ways to

learn something about a man is to look at his wife.

For the kind of wife that a man chooses is a great insight into the character of that man.

And Pontius Pilate apparently had chosen a woman who had a love for him and for whom he had a love,

and who also was interested in him and concerned about him.

And it gives us, at least it gives me the idea that in a man in

whom there exists love for a woman, there can also exist love for God.

And it appears to me that perhaps this too is one of the reasons that Jesus so pleadingly dealt

with Pontius Pilate.

In John's account, there are four phases of the civil trial of Jesus.

Not all of the details are given here and we have to rely upon the information that we have from the Gospel of

Luke.

But the four phases are the phases that I want to briefly consider this morning in an attempt to get at the character

of this man, Pilate, and draw the lessons that should be drawn from it.

Phase one, if I were Bob Thieme in Houston, I would call Operation

Rubber Stamp.

For the first thing that the Jews wished to do when they brought Jesus to

Pontius Pilate was to have him simply rubber stamp the decision that they had already made

about him.

They wanted to snow him.

And so they brought Jesus in and they said, when Pilate said, what accusation have ye against

this man?

They simply say, if he weren't a malefactor, we wouldn't have delivered him to you.

They don't answer the charge.

They don't give a charge.

They simply say, we brought him to you, and if we brought him to you, it's certain that he

is a malefactor.

So simply rubber stamp our action and we will go about the job of putting him to death.

Now, Pilate was too clever for that.

He had already had experience with the Jews and that experience was not very happy.

And it was not altogether their fault either.

And so he didn't fall for that stratagem.

He said, you have a law, you deal with him, knowing, of course, that they couldn't do to him, by their law, what they

wanted to do.

And so they replied, but we can't put him to death.

And then John interjects a word, which I think is very interesting.

He says, in order that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled which he spake, signifying by

what death he should die.

In other words, it had been prophesied from of old that Jesus would die by crucifixion

and not by stoning.

But if the Jews had put him to death, they would have stoned him.

And in this little interplay of action in which Pilate says, you put him to death and they say, we

cannot put him to death, the Romans must put him to death, John sees the hand of God.

In other words, he sees the providence of God even in the fact that by this simple denial of

their accusation and their desires, the word of God is fulfilled and Jesus is

crucified rather than stoned to death.

Now that was phase one, Operation Rubber Stamp.

Phase two involves the political accusation.

John doesn't state the accusation.

We have to gather this from the statement that is made in the Gospel of Luke.

At this point, when Pilate asks for an accusation, they say, why he said that he was a king.

He said that he was Messiah, the king of the Jews.

Now this, of course, was designed to bring our Lord Jesus into conflict with the Roman authorities.

And so Pilate goes into the judgment hall again and he calls Jesus and he says unto him,

Art thou the king of the Jews?

Now this is a question that is loaded because, of course, Jesus was the king of the Jews, but he wanted to

know if he was king, that is, if Pilate thought he was king in the Jewish sense or in the Roman

sense.

For if Pilate was speaking in the Roman sense, then he would have to say, I'm not a king.

But if he was speaking in the Jewish sense, that is, a king who conquers by the truth of God and who shall

rule over the earth in the kingdom of God, then he would answer yes.

And so Jesus spoke to Pilate and said, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee

of me?

And Pilate says, I got it from the Jews.

Am I a Jew?

Your own nation and your own pre -chief priests have delivered thee unto me.

What hast thou done?

I think it was Mr. Spurgeon who said, perhaps he could have answered then, I've gone up and down Jerusalem

doing good, as Peter did.

What hast thou done?

But Jesus then answers, My kingdom is not of this world.

Now we must stop for just a moment here because this text has also been misused.

It has sometimes been said, because Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world, that he shall never have a

kingdom in this world.

You only have to read back a chapter or so in the Gospel of John to see the fallacy of this kind of reasoning.

For in the preceding chapter, the 17th chapter, Jesus had spoken of the disciples

and he had said that they are not of this world.

And yet they were in this world.

He meant that they were not by nature related to those who were in the world because they had a new nature.

Their nature had been given them by God.

And consequently, they were not of this world.

They possessed divine nature.

They are the children of God.

And when Jesus said, My kingdom is not of this world, he did not mean that he would not have a kingdom in this world,

ultimately.

But he meant that that kingdom, when it came, would be a heavenly kingdom, that is, one that was dominated

by the principles of heaven rather than the principles of earth.

So in a Roman sense, I am no king.

I am not a raffle of Caesar, Pilate.

But I am a king in the Jewish and in the biblical sense.

And Pilate says, Art thou a king then at all?

Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king.

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world that I should bear witness unto the truth.

The Lord Jesus Christ did not come to bear witness to religion.

He did not come to bear witness to priestcraft and pomp and incense and ritual and all of the other things that

go to make up religion.

He did not come to bear witness to the program of the church.

He came to bear witness to the truth, he said.

I have come into the world that I should bear witness unto the truth.

And then he adds these significant words, which I want to speak on now for a few moments.

He said to Pilate, Everyone that is of the truth, heareth my voice.

You know, Jesus said that we were to be fishers of men.

And when he said that we were to be fishers of men, he meant that we were to seek to win men to him.

Now there are many angles that a fisherman uses.

He has all kinds of flies.

He has all kinds of hooks.

And he has all kinds of stratagems whereby he catches fish.

And there are all kinds of stratagems, and there are all kinds of hooks, and there are all kinds of flies

in catching the souls of men.

A man who is a fisher of men must learn how to catch fish, and they all are caught in different ways.

But one of the strangest angles which Jesus ever used is the angle that he used here.

If I were speaking to a class in theology, I would say it was the angle of a strict and strong

Calvinism.

For that is exactly what he says.

He says, Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.

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