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A.D. The Revolution That Changed the World

Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

THE DAY GOD DIED

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How God's Chosen Nation Murdered Its Own King

Matthew 26–27; Mark 14–15; Luke 22–23; John 18–19

Pontius Pilate had a dilemma on his hands. It was the Jewish holy week of Passover, and Jerusalem, a city of about 50,000 people, was packed with some 150,000 celebrants from Middle Eastern and Mediterranean nations. As the Roman governor of Judea, Pilate had good reason for concern. Since the Romans had conquered the fiercely independent nation of Israel in 63 B.C., insurrections were a constant threat as groups of nationalist zealots smarting under Roman occupation frequently rose up to defy their conquerors.

The volatility in the atmosphere was palpable. Such an influx of people was difficult to manage under the best of conditions, but on this particular Passover in A.D. 33, the tension was ratcheted up several notches by rumors that the miracle-working rabbi named Jesus would be present. Many Jews thought this man was the long-awaited Messiah. The last thing Pilate wanted was a report to Caesar that he had allowed a revolt against Roman authority in this already explosive region. As Roman procurators did at every Jewish feast, Pilate brought hundreds of Roman soldiers into Jerusalem to enforce order.

The elite Jewish ruling council, known as the Sanhedrin, believed in a coming Messiah, and they were on the lookout for him. They thought the one who would release them from their oppressors would be a powerful ruler, a man of religious and political clout. This Jesus did not fit their expectations. He was born in obscurity to poor parents, he had no formal education, he appeared to be nothing more than an itinerant street preacher, and he mixed with the rabble—not only with common fishermen, tradesmen, and turncoat tax collectors, but also with known sinners, such as prostitutes, and ceremonially unclean people, including lepers.

The members of the Sanhedrin were frustrated by Jesus, who seemed to have no respect for the religious leaders' traditions and, in their eyes, no respect for the Law of Moses. They were particularly outraged by his seeming violations of the Sabbath rules. One of the Ten Commandments is "Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy" (Exodus 20:8). This meant that no work was to be done on the seventh day of the week. The Jewish leaders had encrusted that simple law with a mountain of restrictions that buried the Sabbath in legalism. Then along came Jesus, flagrantly violating their rules by healing sick people and plucking handfuls of grain for his disciples to eat on that day.

Worst of all, these Jewish leaders saw Jesus as a blasphemer. When he made claims that indicated he saw himself as God, the Jewish leaders needed no more evidence against him. Such apparent contempt and irreverence fit the very definition of blasphemy. The heretic must die.

But there were obstacles. Jesus had become immensely popular with the people. He had won them over with his miracles and healings, along with his vivid teachings, which delivered deeper insights than they had ever heard. The people were flocking to this polarizing figure and slipping out from under the Sanhedrin's control. It was becoming evident that he was a threat to their power and influence. Popular or not, Jesus had to go.

The Sanhedrins Murderous Plot

In the tradition of Jewish rabbis, Jesus had surrounded himself with a small group of men who followed him and listened to his teachings. Like the teachers of his day, he was training them to carry on the work he had begun. In the Gospels these men are called disciples, a word meaning "follower, student, or adherent." Like others who thought Jesus was the Messiah, these disciples expected him to raise an army and drive the Romans from their land.

Just when the Sanhedrin's anger with Jesus was escalating into a plan to kill him, they had a timely visit from one of Jesus' disciples, Judas Iscariot. As it turned out, it didn't take much for Judas to turn his back on his teacher. "How much will you pay me to betray Jesus to you?" he asked them. They offered thirty silver coins, and he placed Jesus into their hands.

Judas timed his betrayal to occur when Jesus returned from praying in the garden of Gethsemane after celebrating Passover with his disciples. He approached his master and greeted him with a traditional Middle Eastern kiss on both cheeks. This act identified Jesus for the throng of police officers and officials who were lurking in the shadows. As they surged forward to make the arrest, Jesus' companion Peter assumed that the rebellion had begun. He drew his sword and slashed at the arresting official, slicing off his ear (John 18:10).

But to Peter's surprise, Jesus stopped him. "'Put away your sword,' Jesus told him. 'Those who use the sword will die by the sword'" (Matthew 26:52). Jesus picked up the severed ear and, with a miraculous touch, reattached it to the man's head (Luke 22:51).

Peter was shocked. Was there to be no revolt? Just what was Jesus about? Only an hour or so earlier, Peter had vowed to stand by his Master through thick and thin, saying, "Lord, I am ready to go to prison with you, and even to die with you" (Luke 22:33). But Jesus, knowing that Peter had misunderstood the nature of his mission, said, "Peter, let me tell you something. Before the rooster crows tomorrow morning, you will deny three times that you even know me" (Luke 22:34).

At the moment of Jesus' arrest, all but two of his disciples fled for their lives, fulfilling one of many Old Testament prophecies: "Strike down the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered" (Zechariah 13:7). Peter, however, was not among those who scattered. Though reeling from Jesus' unexpected arrest, he was determined to stick by his beloved master in spite of the danger to his own life. He followed at a distance as the Temple police led Jesus to the home of Caiaphas, the high priest, for a trial.

Peter watched from the courtyard, warming his hands by a fire, when a servant girl recognized him.

"You were one of those with Jesus the Galilean," she said (Matthew 26:69).

Peter emphatically denied it.

But others around the fire recognized him and asked the question twice more. With increasing vehemence, Peter claimed each time that he didn't even know Jesus. Immediately after Peter's third denial, a rooster crowed in the distance. Peter remembered Jesus' prediction that he would slip into disloyalty. Shamed and guilt ridden, Peter fled the scene and went into hiding with the other disciples.

Inside the house of Caiaphas, Jesus faced the first of five trials he was to endure. Caiaphas questioned him harshly, but Jesus offered no response until the high priest said, "Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God." Jesus answered, "You have said it" (Matthew 26:63-64).

That was all Caiaphas needed. In a rage, he ripped his robe and accused Jesus of speaking blasphemy, which according to Jewish law was punishable by death. Caiaphas had Jesus beaten, and then he sent him to the Sanhedrin for an official trial.

This second trial was so riddled with illegal and unjust maneuvers that no one familiar with Jewish customs would think it was legitimate. They tried Jesus at night, which was against the Jewish law. They presumed he was guilty at the outset, which was also against the Jewish law. They hired false witnesses to testify against him—a blatantly illegal act in any courtroom. They mistreated Jesus as a prisoner, scourging and beating him, and they provided him with no legal defense. The entire trial from beginning to end was a travesty of justice.

The Jewish council, having condemned Jesus to death but lacking the legal power to execute him, sent him to Governor Pilate for his third trial. Pilate, no doubt irritated at being bothered so early in the morning with what he considered a Jewish affair, began to question Jesus. He soon realized that the Jewish leaders were seeking his death out of sheer jealousy, and he told them he could find no fault in Jesus. But the Jews insisted that his teaching had stirred up trouble in both Judea and Galilee.

When Pilate discovered that Jesus was a Galilean, he thought he would rid himself of the problem by passing him off to Herod, the puppet king over Galilee, who was in Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus faced Herod in his fourth trial. But like Pilate, Herod could find nothing in the man that was worthy of death. So he sent Jesus back to Pilate for his fifth and final trial.

The shrewd Jewish leaders, knowing that Pilate's standing before Caesar was precarious, assembled a crowd ofJews to wait at the steps of the Antonia Fortress, the military garrison where Pilate resided when in Jerusalem. The restless mob presented the thinly veiled threat of an uprising if the governor did not accede to the Sanhedrin's wishes. Pilate, already fearing a Passover riot, felt every ounce of the pressure the Jews were applying.

Yet Pilate resisted. Though he was a jaded politician accustomed to bending justice at will, his conscience was not completely dead. He did not want to condemn this man who clearly did not deserve the death penalty. Adding to his uneasiness was his wife's urging that he spare Jesus, for she'd had a troubling dream indicating that he was innocent. Pilate sought desperately for a middle course that would both save Jesus and appease the unbending Jews.

Pilate had Jesus brutally scourged, thinking such harsh punishment would satisfy the Jews' appetite for blood. When that failed to move them, he tried to release Jesus in accordance with a long-standing Roman custom to free a condemned Jewish prisoner, usually an insurrectionist, as a favor to the Jews during their holy week. But the mob, stirred to a frenzy by the Jewish leaders, would have none of it. They shouted over and over, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" (Luke 23:21).

Pilate now feared a full-fledged riot if he did not concede to their demand. He gave in and handed Jesus over to the Roman soldiers for crucifixion. In a futile attempt to evade responsibility for his cowardly act, he ordered a basin of water and washed his hands before the mob, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood. The responsibility is yours!" (Matthew 27:24).

After seeing Jesus condemned, a deep wave of remorse overwhelmed Judas Iscariot. The bag of silver coins he had coveted now stood as an accusation against him. He could keep them no longer. He took them to the chief priests and confessed his sin, saying, "I have betrayed an innocent man." The officials callously retorted, "What do we care? ... That's your problem" (Matthew 27:4).

That was the final blow for Judas; he could no longer bear the weight of his guilt. He hurled the blood money across the Temple floor, ran out, and hanged himself.

The King Is Killed

Crucifixion, a Roman invention, was possibly the most brutal, painful, and inhumane mode of execution ever devised. It consisted of nailing the victim through the hands and feet to an upright wooden cross. The pain was excruciating, and there was no way for the person on the cross to find relief. When someone hangs this way with outstretched arms, the lungs are compressed, making it impossible to draw a deep breath. Death usually came by asphyxiation.

While Jesus hung on the cross, the Roman soldiers gambled for his clothing, fulfilling this prophecy from Psalm 22:18: "They divide my garments among themselves and throw dice for my clothing." At this point all of Jesus' disciples had abandoned him except John, who stood beneath the cross comforting Jesus' grieving mother, Mary.

As Jesus gasped for his final breaths, the very earth and sky reflected the outrage of the event—that humankind had murdered the Son of God. Luke describes the scene:

By this time it was about noon, and darkness fell across the whole land until three o'clock. The light from the sun was gone. And suddenly, the curtain in the sanctuary of the Temple was torn down the middle. Then Jesus shouted, "Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands!" And with those words he breathed his last. LUKE 23:44-46

Victims often hung alive on their crosses for days. Jesus, however, succumbed after only six hours, no doubt due to the ordeal he had endured prior to his crucifixion. He had been up all night and forced to walk two or three miles to the sites of his five trials. He had suffered two beatings, one ordered by Caiaphas and the other a scourging with Roman whips. The second beating would have left his back in shreds, causing profuse bleeding and exposing layers of muscle and bone. A circlet of thorny briars had been forced onto his head, causing unrelenting pain, not to mention additional bleeding. He was already so weakened that he couldn't carry the horizontal beam of his cross to the site of his execution, as condemned prisoners were customarily forced to do.

As the day neared its end, the Jewish leaders, assuming Jesus to be alive, asked Pilate to break his leg bones so he would die before sundown. The Sabbath would begin at six o'clock that evening, and it was against Jewish law to leave a dead body unburied on the Sabbath day. Breaking the legs of crucifixion victims made it impossible for them to push themselves upward to take pressure off their lungs, thus hastening the process of suffocation.

Pilate gave the order, and Roman soldiers were assigned to this grim task. But when they approached Jesus, he appeared to be dead already. To be certain, a soldier thrust a spear deep into his side. Blood and water poured from the wound, indicating that the blood serum had already begun to separate into its components—a sure sign that the heart was no longer beating.

With these two acts—leaving Jesus' legs intact and piercing his side—the Roman soldiers unwittingly fulfilled two more prophecies concerning Jesus: "The LORD protects the bones of the righteous; not one of them is broken!" (Psalm 34:20) and "They will look on me whom they have pierced" (Zechariah 12:10).

Among the members of the Sanhedrin was a wealthy man named Joseph, who came from the Judean town of Arimathea. Joseph was a follower of Jesus and had opposed the council's decision to seek his death. He went to Pilate secretly (to hide his action from his colleagues) and requested that he be given charge of Jesus' body.

Joseph, aided by Nicodemus, another member of the Sanhedrin who secretly followed Jesus, took the body, treated it with seventy-five pounds of spices, and wrapped it tightly in several layers of traditional grave cloths. They laid the body on a stone slab in Joseph's newly hewn tomb, thus fulfilling another prophecy: "He was buried like a criminal; he was put in a rich man's grave" (Isaiah 53:9). Then the two men, no doubt aided by friends or hired help, rolled a huge, disk-shaped stone over the opening.

The Night at the Tomb

The members of the Sanhedrin were well aware that Jesus had predicted he would rise again on the third day after his death. To prevent his disciples from stealing the body and claiming he had been resurrected, the leaders requested that Pilate seal the tomb and station Roman soldiers to guard it until three days had passed. Pilate granted their request. The stone that covered the tomb was secured with a Roman seal, and a Roman guard of four to sixteen soldiers was posted to prevent anyone from approaching the tomb.

If the biblical account ofJesus' arrest, trials, and crucifixion ended here, it would be a grim story indeed—in fact, a tragedy like the human race has never seen. But here is what happened next:

Suddenly there was a great earthquake! For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, rolled aside the stone, and sat on it. His face shone like lightning, and his clothing was as white as snow. The guards shook with fear when they saw him, and they fell into a dead faint. MATTHEW 28:2-4

The resurrection of Jesus had begun.

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Why Did Jesus Have to Die?

This chapter describes the first of two critical events in the life of Jesus that show why he came to earth. He came first to die, and second to be resurrected to new life. These two events cannot be separated, for one is contingent upon the other. Yet it is important to note just what the death of Jesus did for humankind even before the Resurrection occurred.

We can see the importance God places on Jesus' death by the fact that nearly one-fifth of the Gospel of Luke, one-fourth of Matthew, and about one-third of John and Mark are devoted to his final hours. This is appropriate when we consider that to die was his very purpose in coming to earth. In that sense, he was more important to us in death than in life. To understand why Jesus' death is so important for us, we must go back to the beginning.

It All Started in Eden

The Bible tells us that in the beginning God created man and woman in his image and in perfect relationship with him. But God also gave them freedom to choose whether to live under his best plan for their lives or to live on their own terms. Tragically, when they listened to Satan, who appeared in the form of a serpent, and ate the fruit of the infamous forbidden tree, they chose to reject their creator and become their own masters. Instead of obtaining independence, however, they now lived under the tyranny of Satan.

With this decision came Adam's and Eve's inevitable deaths. God is the source of life, and by rejecting him, the first couple doomed themselves to die. It is a fixed law of the universe that "the person who sins is the one who will die" (Ezekiel 18:20). Our problem is the same as theirs, for we inherited their nature and the result of their sinful choice, and we have lived out the life they passed on to us—a life of pride and rebellion against God.

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Excerpted from A.D. The Revolution That Changed the World by DAVID JEREMIAH, Stephanie Rische. Copyright © 2015 David P. Jeremiah. Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc..
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