35 - Jesus and Salvation, Part 1 His Illegal Court Trials

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Systematic Theology. We are glad to have you with us, glad that you could be part of our class.

As we are going through the doctrines that are formally known as a systematic theology.

We're going through these doctrines in a systematic way. In other words, we're building upon one upon another.

As we go through, starting with the study of the nature and character of God, and building up to where we, as we'll see today, looking at one specific member of the

Trinity, Jesus Christ, and His role in salvation. Now, we are glad you're with us, but, you know, someone sent something into us that if you saw the intro to the class there, you got to see, you got to hear a sound, the intro song.

And we can't help but to play this. Now, I'm told that they couldn't change the video, so we're going to play something for you.

It's going to be sideways, so just kind of tilt your head like that, and you can watch just fine. But this is what we love about people that want to train children from a young age, and they get excited.

Well, we appreciate that being sent in. Someone that is training their children up well to be excited every

Monday night to see the Striving for Eternity Academy getting them taught on their theology from a young age.

I guess that gives new meaning to raising up your child in the way they should go.

We really appreciate that. And also, I will say, because, you know, I didn't think about this.

Someone told me that I should mention this, but if you want to encourage others, we have this little card that we give out.

The lights are kind of, here, how's that? So, we have these little cards. If you want to get a handful of these, they explain about the

Academy. Yeah, that's not going to work. You won't read that. But this is what we take to conferences, and when we're at a conference, we have them.

If you want to get a whole bunch of them, feel free to email us at theacademyatstrivingforeternity .org

and tell us how many you want. We'll ship some out to you so you can pass them around if you want to encourage others to be following along with us in the class.

It'll be really good. It could be a lot of fun as we start getting into the doctrine of salvation, and people will jump in, and we can get into that big debate that everyone's waiting for.

You know, two big debates that you get into theology, right? You get into the Calvinism versus Arminianism, and then you get into end times, and everyone debates over those.

As we've been saying, if you have been a good student and following with us from the beginning, then you know that we're saying you've got to start at the beginning of the character of God.

We're building on that, and that's why I think we're going to come to, hopefully, a point where we don't have to have so many of the arguments that so many seem to be having in these areas because we're going to be seeing that we've built a theology based off of the

Scriptures, and we're going back to the nature and attributes of who God is to answer some of these things that people really struggle with.

If you have your syllabus, if you want to get a syllabus, you can enroll at the website down there, and you can get yourself one of the syllabuses.

That'll give you all the notes that I speak to, and you can have room to take your own notes.

So, we are in, out of four books, we're in book number two, and we called it

God's Gift to Man. The section that we are in is section number three, the doctrine of salvation, and we're in lesson number six, when this is now

Christ and salvation. Now, we had looked previously how the

Father had planned salvation. That was lesson number five. This week, what we want to do is we want to look at how the

Son provided it. The Son provided salvation. So, that's what we're going to look at now.

We remember, as I said in the last, actually the last two classes really, when we looked at the lessons on the

Father and salvation, I said that our study of the doctrine of salvation begins with examining the work of the

Triune God. That this is one of the things that we see all three members of the

Trinity active in the salvation of man. We see all three active in creation, in the resurrection of Christ, and the salvation of man.

And just as a way of review, there's some key texts that we gave you. I'm not going to read them this time, but just to give them to you again, so that you can see all three members in a single verse, where you're going to see them all having a role.

That's going to be 1st Ephesians 1, and really verses 3 all the way to verse 14, one long section.

You see the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all active in salvation in that passage. You can look at Titus chapter 3, verses 3 to 7, and you'll see there all three members.

And then in one single verse, basically, is 1st Peter chapter 1, verse 2.

And there you see in one verse all three members again. And the focus there is to see that this is not something that just one member of the

Trinity did, but they were all active in a role. Now this is a real issue for those that believe in what's called modalism, or what some call

Pentecostal oneness theology, where you get this idea where God was the

Father in the Old Testament, He became Jesus the

Son when He walked the earth, and then He became the Holy Spirit in this day and age, and then

He'll return to the Father at some later time. That's how some argue for that, that it's one person, one

God, different modes. Three different modes. That's modalism. Now, as you look up those texts that I gave you, you'll see that it's really hard for that to be true, because they're all active in salvation at the same time.

There have to be different people. And we've already built on this. If you go back to earlier lessons, when we looked at the

Trinity of God, the triunity of God, we dealt with this issue of how we come to the conclusion that God is three people.

So, we won't go to that again. But this lesson on Christ and salvation, we're going to look to answer some of the questions, why did

Jesus have to die? Have you ever thought about that as a Christian?

Why did He have to? Paul makes a really good argument for this, and we'll get to that. So, this lesson is going to hope to answer some things like that, and this lesson is going to focus on the work of Christ in our salvation.

So, we're going to get specific on what Christ did, and we're going to look at His life and get into some neat things historically that I think you may not be aware of with what happened that night that Christ was put on trial.

But we mentioned, as I already mentioned, that the Father provided salvation. Okay, the

Father planned it, sorry. The Son, He provided salvation.

And the way that He provided it, and actually I should, you know, thank you.

I was just told that I forgot to give a blank last week. I've got to look that up. So, in your syllabus, if you're a student, last class, it was brought to my attention in the

Facebook group that I missed a blank under lesson number 5,

Roman numeral 1, letter B. It said, speaking that God is the designer, under His provisions of grace, there was a sentence that said this, so then grace is

God's response to love, to the plight of mankind, which makes salvation possible for all.

Possible is your blank there. And so, I must have skipped over that last week, so I'll just mention this now and then we'll get back to today's lesson.

What this says is that when God the Father, in giving the grace, in providing

His grace, it was a response of love, and in this sense, yes, we can say

God loves all people, only in the sense that He provided a sacrifice and planned, by giving

His grace, to make salvation possible. That doesn't mean that just because Jesus died, all people get to go to heaven.

Sorry, we don't teach universalism. But it's the idea that it makes it possible.

What does get someone to heaven? We're going to be digging into that and get into a little bit more specifics with it.

But what that says is that it makes it possible. That's what the grace of the

Father provided. It made it possible for all to come to know Christ. Do all come to know

Christ? No. And we're going to look at that today. Now, where that is helpful is because we know that, and I'm sorry if you were raised with the phrase,

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. But, and I know some people get bothered by this, but that's just not biblical.

Because God doesn't love all people the way that we mean that when we say it.

You see, God does love all people in that He provided a sacrifice, but He didn't provide that all would be saved.

He loves His own children differently than the way He would love someone else's children.

Okay? The devils, right? So, a child of the devil is not going to have the same love of a child of God.

Now, God loves His children, but Psalm 711 and many others will probably get to it, but actually we looked at it last week when we talked about His wrath, but God is angry with the wicked every day.

And that's hard for some to understand in a generation of people who have been raised to believe

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Okay? So, I'm sorry

I missed that blank. I think that's probably the first time in 35 lessons that I have missed a blank.

I'm sorry about that. Maybe on YouTube we can kind of put the blank in there and get something in there to tell people.

So, where we are today is that the Son provided salvation.

And with this we see that Jesus Christ provided the way to a relationship with the

Father. He provided the sacrifice for our sin. That's your blank there, the word sacrifice.

He provided the sacrifice. That's what Jesus was, the sacrifice. Now, Christ's death and suffering is the first part we're going to see.

We're going to see this in two parts, that it's Christ's suffering and His death and suffering, and then we're going to look at His significance.

And so, looking at Christ's death and His suffering as this sacrifice, and I doubt that we're going to get through this lesson.

I know there's chuckles, there's surprise. But, you know, there's so much that we can look into.

I mean, we could spend days discussing the significance of the death of Jesus Christ.

And I encourage you to not just be watching the videos and filling in the blanks in your syllabus, but getting some good systematic theologies.

We can recommend some. If you email us, just email us at academyatstrivingforattorney .org, and we can provide those to you, and we'd be happy to do that.

We actually have one student right now who has sent us a list of what books he currently has,

Theological Works, and we've put together a customized plan for him so that he can follow along and do some outside reading.

And that's really good, and that is something we encourage you to think about doing. We're going to eventually, hopefully, build a list of that with a lot of different books, so you can just grab whichever ones you happen to have available.

But if you send us which books you have, we'll get back to you with a list of some chapters to read along with the videos to dig into more detail, because there's no way we're going to get in one or two classes all that you could dig into on this subject of Christ's role in salvation, okay?

So, the Passion Week, which is really exciting because we're actually coming up to that time of the year right now, at least when we're taping this live, is we're coming up to the

Passion Week and the Resurrection Sunday, and so it's an exciting time to look at these things.

The Passion Week of Christ is the last week of His earthly ministry, of His earthly life, during which

His human suffering for sin reached its pinnacle, okay?

And that pinnacle was on the cross. But before we get to the cross, let's take a look at His examinations.

His examinations. Because in His examinations, we're going to see some things about His trial that maybe you didn't realize.

And so what I want to do is first give you, before we look at some of the, if you have your syllabus there, before we jump into the syllabus,

I want to talk about the way a Jewish trial is supposed to be run.

The way that it was designed by rabbinical law, by God in the scriptures, that it was there to protect the innocent.

That's where in the United States here, we have the idea that we're innocent until proven guilty.

That comes from the Bible, not liberalism, just saying. Okay? We get that idea.

That didn't come from England, because in England you're presumed guilty until proven innocent. In America, men that were very well familiar with the

Bible developed a legal system that was based on the idea of someone being innocent until proven guilty, because that's what scripture teaches.

So, you know, they had this Jewish legal system. It was about 70 men plus the high priest, making 71.

The 70 were known as the Seventy or Council. We would be familiar with them by the title of the

Sanhedrin. Sanhedrin is the term. It's a

Greek term which has the idea, you know, basically of this council of 70 men.

Now, these men had to be mature. Okay? They had to be in their 40s.

There was rare cases sometimes that someone could be under that. But you had to be someone who's already experienced enough of life that you're a little bit more mature.

You were distinguished in your community. So, out of 70 men, think about the millions of people that were in Israel, the millions of men to pull from, and only 70 of them could be on this board.

And so you have—this is where the Sanhedrin are going to be different than the rabbis, than the

Pharisees. So there were only 70 of these men, and they were the council. Now, there were rabbinical requirements to a court system that guaranteed the accused criminal certain rights of a public trial.

The trial needed to be public. If someone was accused, especially if accused for a crime that would sentence them to death, there had more stringent rules of how the court system was supposed to be.

Again, the idea of rabbinical law, the idea of God's law, both focused on the innocence, protecting the innocent.

Okay? And so the requirements were that the trial had to be public. It had to be open to the public.

You couldn't have select people. You couldn't close the courtroom to the public, especially if a man was going to be sentenced to death.

He had the right to a defense counsel. Okay? Not only a right to it, but it was almost required.

Whether he could defend himself, like in America, would be one thing, but he had the right to be given a defense counsel.

That's where we in America get that idea. And the conviction was only on testimony of two or three reliable witnesses.

You had to have at least two reliable witnesses. Now, reliable meaning that those witnesses had to know the time, the place, the day, and the events.

Okay? They couldn't just have a vague idea. They had to have detailed accounts of what happened.

So you see there that the trial, therefore, being open to public scrutiny. If something was being a sham, it would be open.

It had to be during the daytime. Okay? When court would be open to the public.

The defendant had the right to hear all the evidence beforehand that was going to be brought against him and had a right to bring witnesses on his own behalf.

And no matter how damning his own testimony could be, his testimony could never be used in a court of law.

Okay? Against him. That's where we get the Fifth Amendment. So he wasn't allowed to be the only evidence against himself.

There had to have been witnesses. There had to be a case developed. Now, to guard against false witnesses, they had rules.

Jewish rules were that there had... Because they wanted to prevent someone that could be doing something of revenge or of bribing.

And one of the rules... I really wish this rule would be carried over into the American court system.

But to prevent against a false witness, the Old Testament had rules to protect against false witnesses by saying that if somebody was to come bear false witness in a court against someone else and it's proven that their testimony is false, they suffer the punishment that they sought for the other person.

In other words, if you and I go to court and I'm claiming you did something wrong and I claim that you did something worthy of death or did something worthy of prison or a fine of $10 ,000 and I'm making that claim and the court rules that my testimony is not valid, it's false,

I'm not bearing true witness but a false witness, then in that case, whether you're guilty or not, that gets handled separately.

But my false testimony gets punished with the charge that I sought to get you punished with.

In other words, if I was arguing for you to have death... in a case of a death penalty, I would receive death.

If I was arguing in a case for you to have punishment of imprisonment, I would get the imprisonment.

If I argued that you should be... or was in a case of witness where you were going to be charged with a fine of $10 ,000,

I would have to pay you the $10 ,000. You see, that was a good deterrent against people bearing false witness, right?

If you were knowingly giving false witness, you'd be a little bit more concerning because now it's not just contempt of court, it's you receive whatever you're looking to get that other person charged with.

So that was a protection. Now, rabbinical law required that the sentence of life...

sentence of death could not be carried out... now check this out... could not be carried out until after the third day that it was rendered.

In other words, once a case was rendered that someone was guilty of death, they could not have that death carried out for at least three days.

Why three days? Well, one thing that would happen immediately. Now, if the person was found innocent in the case, they were let go immediately.

If they were found guilty, there would be a three -day period where a rider was put on a horse and his charge was to ride around and herald this message that somebody gives the name, the charge, and that they're sentenced to death.

Why? So that the message could go out far and wide so that if there's anybody who has information of this person's innocence, they could bring it to the court so they had time to get to the court.

They could relay that information to the rider and the rider could bring it back so that they could then have a stay or a waiting period until this person can come forward with the evidence of their innocence.

So there was a three -day wait period. And it's very interesting because during this three days while the rider is going out, the judges in this case had to fast and pray for the person they found guilty.

They had to be going before God and going without food and asking

God for direction so that the delay of execution also provided the evidence to come in from wherever it might come in so that people could give this evidence of his innocence.

Meanwhile, the judges are supposed to be setting themselves aside yet right with God in the judgment that they're decreeing.

Because the defendant was protected from self -incrimination, his confession, no matter how convincing, was not sufficient in itself for evidence of conviction.

This all becomes important because all the evidence that we see when it comes to Christ's trial, you're going to see how illegal his case was.

Maybe as I'm going through all these requirements to a court of law, you're already realizing that the sentence, the examinations that Christ went through were illegal.

And we're going to go through that and see that. But there had to be this presumption of innocence.

We didn't see that with Christ. If the accused was found innocent, they're set free, right?

But if they're guilty, you get a time to examine. Now, when we look at Christ, we look at Jesus' trial, we're going to look through these different...

There were three different Jewish trials and three different Roman trials, all within a period of about 12 hours, one night.

And we're going to see that Jesus was illegally tried. He was tried illegally because, first, there hadn't been a charge made to him before the trial.

He was supposed to be told what the charge was and provided all the evidence. That wasn't the case.

He wasn't given what the charge was because they couldn't find witnesses that would agree.

So he was tried at night, not in public, but in private, at night, not during the day.

No defense was provided for him in any of his trials. He was executed the same day he was sentenced.

There was no fasting. And one of the things I didn't mention is also with the three -day period, it was required you couldn't have it over a feast day because during a feast, the judges wouldn't be allowed to have a time of fasting and prayer.

And so you couldn't do it during a feast time. You'd have to do it after. So it should have been seven days after, not during Passover, but after Passover, and yet his trial was during the

Passover, the first day. So, consequently, the judges couldn't have fasted and prayed and sought intervention because they sentenced him to death that very same day.

And it transpired with a verdict that was based on his own testimony.

It was ultimately Jesus' testimony that convicted him. If you remember the account, it was when

Jesus declared that he was

God, that they, you know, who he was, that's when they said, wait, this is blasphemy, and by his own testimony, he was found guilty.

Okay? So I give you all that so that as we go through his examinations, I want you to see with that as a backdrop, how illegal this examination, this court case was against Jesus.

This was the most unjust trial in history. So one of the things

I sometimes do when I open air preach sometimes, I go to an area where maybe people don't expect me to open air preach.

You can do this in places like in New York or places like that, and if I'm the first one to get up, sometimes I tell a story about a friend of mine from overseas, and I talk about an illegal trial that he was given.

He was charged and sentenced to death illegally. A bunch of judges who had it informed.

They had a bunch of people come in and bear false witness. The guys couldn't even come straight.

They couldn't come up with a clear story. They ended up convicting this guy because, you know, even though the country had the equivalent of a

Fifth Amendment, they convicted this guy based on his own testimony, and they sentenced him to death. They rushed his death sentence.

They killed him the very day that he was put on trial, and they gave no chance for him to make a defense, for him to bring witnesses in his defense.

They charged him. And I go through and I explain how this man was sentenced illegally, and people listen, and they start getting upset.

Their sense of justice gets violated. I mean, they know this is wrong.

This just isn't right. And I can see it as they stop and they listen. They want to know more. Who is this person?

What happened to this person? I say, you know, what ended up happening to my friend? My friend was killed.

He was put to death at the hands of a government system that sentenced him right away.

And you know what? He never said a word in his defense. And he went to that death, and he never put up a struggle.

He never argued. And he did that knowing the whole time that someone else was guilty of the crime that he was being punished for.

He was being punished, and he knew who it was he was going to be punished for. He knew what the crime was.

He knew who did it. And he was punished and sentenced to death for someone else, and that someone else is me.

I'm the one that should have died. I'm the one that should have suffered that consequence.

I'm the one that should have been punished and sentenced to death, but he did it on my behalf.

But I got news for you. He didn't die for me alone, but he died for you too.

And he rose from the dead three days later, and that man is Jesus Christ when he died on the cross.

And then I get into explaining the gospel. But that's a fun way to explain the gospel, captivate an audience.

No trickery. I'm explaining what Christ actually did. I'm just not telling them who it is until they're fully understanding the injustice of the trial that he suffered and then understanding why he did it.

And that's what we're looking to do. Why did Jesus have to die? So, let's take a look at his examination.

First, at the house of Annas. We see this in John 18, verses 12 and 13.

We see here it says in John 18, So the band of soldiers and their captain of the officers of the

Jews arrested Jesus and bound him. First they led him to Annas' house for he was the father -in -law of Caiaphas who was the high priest that year.

So let me explain some things now. So, Caiaphas was the high priest.

One of the things that Rome did was the high priest was supposed to be high priest for life. And the

Romans prevented that. So what they did was they came in and they came in to and wouldn't allow someone to be high priest for life.

They would give him a term limit basically that he could be high priest. And Caiaphas was high priest but he kind of kept it in the family.

His daughter married Annas and Annas became the high priest. But Caiaphas, as we see, was still really the guy in charge.

He was the guy pulling the strings. And we see that because before they bring him to the high priest they bring him to Caiaphas first.

Okay, so we see that Christ was bound and brought to Annas.

Sorry, to Annas, the father -in -law of Caiaphas. Did I say it wrong? Okay. So he was brought to Annas who was the one that was high priest and really the one pulling the strings.

So he first goes before Annas. That's trial number one. Trial number two, they couldn't get a conviction.

Trial number two, they bring him before the courts of Caiaphas. Okay, and we see that in Matthew 26.

We see this in verse 63 to 65 here. Let's look.

But Jesus remains silent because really the verse we want is 61.

Oh, we don't have that. Okay. So let's look at... Do we have the... No, okay. Well, then we'll read this one.

One point I want to make is in Matthew 26, 61. But Jesus remains silent and the high priest said to him,

I endure you by the living God. Tell us if you are the

Christ, the Son of God. Jesus said to him, You have said so, but I tell you from now on you will see the

Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven.

Then the high priest tore his robes and said, He has uttered blasphemy.

What further witness do we need? You have heard his blasphemy. So really the verses that I wanted to focus on 61 where it talks about they accused him of false prophecy.

That's your blank there, false prophecy. The accusation that they charged him initially with was false prophecy.

Why is that important? Because the verses we just read, he's accused of blasphemy.

That's the thing. The charge he was charged with was switched when they couldn't find enough false witnesses to satisfy the charge of being a false prophecy.

So here's the charge of false prophecy. With that, they can't get witnesses.

They hear him give this testimony claiming to be God. They change the charge to blasphemy.

So they accuse him of false prophecy. Then they accuse him of blasphemy.

It is here that Peter sat in the inner court of the palace and denied

Christ. Just kind of a footnote. Put your blanks in there. It is here that Peter, that's your blank, sat in the inner court of the palace and denied

Christ. This is that event. Here's the time. Now, he's in Caiaphas' house.

They've had this trial. They get him basically in a small group. This is probably not the full

Sanhedrin. And so what do they do? They go to the third trial. Now they got the conviction because before they really couldn't figure out how they were going to spin this case.

So Jesus is there. He's got no one to protect him, no defense. They're just making accusations, bringing people in.

They're saying this, saying that. They're trying to get something that'll stick. Nothing's sticking. Jesus ends up saying, claiming to be, agreeing that he is the

Christ, the Son of God, which is a claim of deity. They say, boom, that's it. We got the conviction, blasphemy.

Sentence him. Now that we got it, let's take him to court. So it's kind of like a pretrial where they're just looking to see how they can get a guilty conviction, completely opposite to what the rabbinical law and what the biblical law says.

They're not presuming innocence. They're looking to see how they can sentence him to death. So in Luke 22, 66 to 71, let's not put that up.

We won't have time to read that. But he's then brought before the Sanhedrin. This is the group of 70, 72 people.

This was the great council of the 70 elders, 72 elders, in this case 72, because it's the 70 men plus two high priests,

Anaphis and Caiaphas. So Anaphis and Caiaphas are the two high priests. So it probably could have been up to 72 men there.

Okay, the elders are the teachers of the Jews. They asked Jesus if he was the

Messiah. That's your blank there. They asked Jesus if he was the Messiah.

In other words, if he was God. After hearing his answer, they led him to Pilate. The council could not carry out the sentence and they presented him to the

Roman government. So we're going to get into the question, probably not this week but next week, of who killed

Jesus. But what we see here is that you had three

Jewish trials in Annas' house, in Caiaphas' house, and then before the

Sanhedrin. So the first two, we're just looking to see how they can get something to stick, how they can get some guilty sentence.

Once they had that, they brought it to the Sanhedrin, they condemn him, and immediately they rush him off to Rome.

They say, Rome, you've got to do this right away. So they give him a trial before Pilate.

This is now the first of the three Roman examinations. So before Pilate, this you can see in Luke 23 verses 1 -5, or you can look at Matthew 27 verses 11 -14.

But the scribes and the elders had come with Jesus to accuse him before Pilate, saying that Jesus was attempting to subvert

Rome by claiming himself to be king, not God, notice that, and refusing to pay taxes.

Now when did that charge happen? Such charges made this a political, that's your blank there, a political issue, made this issue political.

See, this was no longer a religious issue. The Jewish trials was all focused on Jewish law and religious issues.

When they brought him before Rome, they knew that wasn't going to stick. And so they made it a political issue and argued that the charge was that he was king and not paying taxes, making it a political issue.

Pilate asked Jesus if he was the king of Israel.

That's your blank there. Asked Jesus if he was or were the king. Okay, basically the answer is yeah, he is the king.

He is the king of Israel. But he's not a king in the sense that they thought it. Okay, so having heard that he was from Galilee, Pilate sent

Jesus to Herod. Pilate didn't want to have to deal with this. He knew what was going on.

He knew the Jewish people were jealous. He knew that they were upset. He knew that they were losing their power and just wanted to kill

Jesus. Pilate was, I mean, you don't rise to the level where Pilate was without knowing the political game.

Okay, and Pilate, if you know history, he rose to that position very well because of his politics.

So he knew what was going on. Now he and Herod didn't get along. They weren't friends actually. It says that they weren't friends until this night.

It was after this night that they became friends because of this. But he hears that Jesus is from Galilee and he's like, hey, he's from Galilee.

That's not my town. So, you know, I'm not over Galilee. Herod is, and hey,

Herod happens to be in town. Hey guys, you know what? Take him to Herod.

He's Herod's problem. So what do they do? They pick him up and march him off to Herod.

So Herod, and this is in Luke 23, verses 8 to 12, Herod had heard of Jesus and he wanted to see him to see if he would perform some miracle.

I mean, this is the guy who had Jesus, John, beheaded and he wanted to see this

Jesus. He had known about John. He wanted to see Jesus. So pressured by the accusations of the elders and scribes,

Herod opted to make a mockery, and that's your blank there, Herod opted to make a mockery of this so -called king with a purple robe and a crown of thorns.

Okay? So he does a mockery. He's not interested in actually putting a trial. He also knows what's going on and he doesn't want to deal with it either.

But he's willing to have a little fun with it in his mind. He then does that and sends him back to Pilate for examination,

Roman examination number three. Remember, this is all in a 12 -hour period. Okay?

All during the night. All six of these examinations. All illegal. Whether by Roman law or by Jewish law.

But back to Pilate in Luke 23, 13 -26, it was during this examination that Pilate found

Christ faultless. They didn't do anything wrong and wanted to release him as the one prisoner given freedom at the feast.

The crowd, spearheaded by the elders and scribes, cried out for his crucifixion and Pilate complied, washing his hands of the blood of Jesus.

So what you have here is that Pilate knew what was going on and wants to release him. Now it's into the daytime.

It's into the morning. He comes up with a plan. What Pilate would do is, for the

Passover, he'd release one prisoner. He knows that the masses of people looked up to Christ.

They saw Christ. They didn't like the Jewish leaders and they did like Jesus. And so he thought that they would very quickly be calling for Christ to be let free.

And so he gets the worst criminal he can find, Barabbas, and says, okay, you can have either

Jesus or Barabbas. And the Jewish leaders argue to give us

Barabbas, give us Barabbas. He's the political leader, this guy that was killing people.

They probably argued that he was doing it to help save the Jewish people from the

Roman imprisonment. So the argument, though, was that they got the people to argue for Jesus to be crucified.

And it's interesting, when you look at it, Pilate kind of walks off the set because he's sitting there giving the judgment and then his wife grabs him and says, listen,

I want to talk to you alone. And as a wise husband, he goes and talks to her and says, hey, we'll put the trial on hold.

But while he's gone and she says, hey, you have nothing to do with this man. I have been having dreams of him. He's innocent.

I have nothing to do with him. Well, I think that dream was probably given by God to be the very thing, knowing that Pilate would be pulled off the scene for that time period.

Why? So that Pilate comes back and all the

Jewish leaders have now spread out and convinced the masses of people, crucify Jesus, crucify

Jesus, give us Barabbas, give us Barabbas. And being good at doing mob control, being good community organizers, they went and got the mob to cry out for innocent blood.

And that is what happened. And he was then found guilty.

But Pilate, not wanting anything to do with this, washes his hands and says, this is on you. And they say, no, no, no, no, no, we can't.

We're good citizens. We can't break Roman law and sentence someone to death. We can't carry out a death penalty, which is really interesting because in Acts, they were more than happy to do it with Stephen, weren't they?

No, they wanted Rome to do it so they couldn't get the blame later. They didn't want the blame.

They say to Pilate, yes, yes, yes, it'll be on our blood and our children's blood. It'll be on our heads.

But in reality, even to this day, people say, no, no, no, we don't want that. Jewish people don't want to be said that they killed

Jesus. And in a sense, they did. They gave Jesus up to that trial.

They sentenced him illegally, the Jewish leaders. It was Rome who carried out the sentence.

And though the Jewish people led him to that in an illegal trial, the Jewish leaders, and Rome carried it out, that's not who killed

Jesus. That's the reality. Somebody else killed Jesus.

And we're not going to have time to explain who it was this week. Because we're going to get to that next week when we look at his execution.

Because there's a lot there, but when you look at his, the accounts, the six different examinations,

I hope at least now you have a different idea how illegal that was. So we're going to continue next week with Christ's role and his execution.

Why did he have to die? Who actually killed Jesus? Now if you have any questions, or maybe you want to send in some videos of your children, or anybody, if you want to sing along with the opening, or give us some videos that you would like us to play to introduce the class, feel free to send those in.

We'll be happy to play them. You can send it to the email below, academy at strivingforeternity .org

Now I had said online, well I'll make one quick announcement. Before the big announcement,

I'll make one quick announcement, and that is Ohio Fire. The Ohio Fire is 60 days away from today.

Ohio Fire is May 30, 31st of 2014. That's 60 days away.

So we encourage you to go to the website now and enroll, register. It costs about $40 a person to actually put on this event, but we don't charge you anything for it.

You can attend free. We take a donation. We ask if you could at least cover your expenses.

Most people don't, and some people give for the others who can. So we encourage you, even if you're not going to attend, if you want to give, you can go on to the website down there.

You can donate. We will try to help people get out there if they can't afford to get there, pay bus fare and things like that.

So we want to encourage you to sign up. Mark Spence, Carl Kirby Jr.,

myself, Eric Kunin will be speaking. So I encourage you to register.

I said that I had a big, big announcement that we're going to be making tonight on something that the ministry,

Striving for Eternity, has been working on for years. We've been looking forward to getting to a point where we are going to be tomorrow.

It may actually go live at some point today. I don't know for sure what time, but I do know that I've seen it.

It's up. It's running. What is it? It is the Striving for Eternity store.

The link that I think is down there is the direct link. It will be linked later on when it is fully live and all the kinks are worked out.

We hope. It will be off the main

Striving for Eternity page, but I encourage you to help us out in going to the store and buying some products.

They actually don't help us to make any money because we basically sell them at cost.

It's not a way to make money and put food on the table. I understand. But we have already bought and paid for the products and we got this large inventory that we'd like to get rid of.

Even if it's not making money, it's saving us from paying things out. You can go there now.

As far as I believe, that site is now out of developer mode and you can pay through PayPal.

It's supposedly live. If not, we're going to hear it from the developer going, hey, people are sending me emails.

We're looking forward if you can help us ship you as much stuff of our products as we can.

But if you could go there, that is a big thing for us. We've been trying to get there for a long time.

But you can get the NorCal Fire, both 2012, 2013, the

Jersey Fire of 2013. The most important message CDs in bulk are there.

You can get our newest product, which is the Grung and Grace Discipleship Study Guide. That's out there.

That you can order. What else do we have? The Striving for Eternity Academy.

If you want to sign up, there's a way to do that there. Or if you want just a syllabus, you say, hey,

I got this systematic theology one, but I need number two. You can pick that up out there.

That's out there. And I think there's some other things out there. So with that, the brother of encouragement this week is someone who's been working literally all night to get this going.

And I will say this, he's been doing it all night because there is something else, some other big news that's gonna be tomorrow.

And if you want to hear that big news, well, you're gonna have to listen to Wretched Radio. But he's been getting, this brother has been working overnight to see that we can get this store set up before tomorrow.

And that is brother Ken Cook. He is with preparedmarketing .com.

He also works for CARM. If you're familiar with CARM, CARM is a friend of the ministry here.

Brother Matt Slick, who's the president of CARM, is a friend of the ministry here.

And Ken works there. He is a young man that you look up to because he's quite tall.

But he's also good at martial arts, so you don't want to pick a fight with him. But so what you have is with Ken is a guy who is using his computer skills to really help out ministries like Striving for Eternity and CARM to be able to help put stores together.

But he's also a guy that's really good in theology, really good on a lot of different topics of theology.

If you've listened to Cross Encounters Radio, you've probably heard him dealing with theological issues.

So brother Ken is our brother of the week. For you to go out and encourage, he is on Facebook.

You can tag him in our Striving for Eternity Facebook group. And we have had a lot of new people joining the group.

And some of those people, maybe it's the first time you're joining the class. Welcome. But we encourage you to be in the

Facebook group. Be having lots of discussion both on the class and other issues. And want to encourage you one more time to go out to the store.

Check it out. See the products we have there. Buy as many of those products as you can. I mean you can get like a spindle of the most important message

CDs. And you can give them out like gospel tracts. That's what we do. So just want to encourage you to remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.