Sometimes I feel like a reporter, or perhaps the publisher, for one of those grocery store tabloids. I rake up the muck in some people’s lives and spread them all over the front page. But I hope that no one ever thinks that it is for the headlines or for some sort of wicked entertainment. I bring up the sins of OTHERS in order that they might not become the sins of US – you and me.
What is the theme of these ten verses? Well, there is the obvious statement of fact and the biographical history which applied to Christ Jesus. And the last two verses take us to the fulfilment of prophecy. But other than these, there is one underlying theme – the sins of the men described here. II Peter closes with words which might be applied to us tonight – “Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things … beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness. But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.” When we can clearly see the sins of Judas and Caiaphas, then we are better prepared to fight in the day of our temptation – with the blessing of the Lord. Oh, our sins may not be the same – we pray that they will not be the same – but all sin is related, and all sin is dangerous. So what are the sins described in this scripture?
We will start with the easiest – the sins of Judas.
His are the easiest because we’ve looked at them before, and they are highlighted in underlined red ink. “I have sinned, in that I have betrayed the innocent blood” – betrayal. There are a couple of interesting things in regard to the details of this confession.
First, there is a definite article which I do not always see or read – “I have betrayed THE innocent blood.” I am not an expert in the Greek language, so I will defer to the men who translated the Bible for us. They wanted to emphasize that Judas didn’t just betray innocent blood – which of course he did. But Judas betrayed “the” innocent blood – the only human blood which is not tainted by the sin of Adam. I can’t say Judas understood Jesus’ deity and the hypostatic union of deity with humanity. But whether or not the betrayer knew of it and implied it before the high priests – it is the truth. Christ is the only human being since the fall of Adam who could have made the claim of absolute innocence, and Judas apparently made it for Him. But still, a knowledge of this important doctrine – or any important doctrine for that matter – did not make the confessor a child of God.
Judas’ first sin in this particular scripture was his betrayal of the Son of God. And as I tried to point out last week, this is not a sin confined to the wicked unbeliever – the child of hell. Peter was guilty of a sin very similar to Judas’, and if the apostle could commit this sin, so might any of us. Last Wednesday, one of the members was saying that she can’t abide a professing Christian whose mouth flows with the slush of the street gutter – and I agree. Just as Peter cursed and swore in an effort to disassociate himself from Christ, so do those professing Christians whose vocabulary is constantly vulgar and worldly. Similarly there are millions of professed Christians whose dress code appears to identify more with God’s enemies than with the Lord Himself. Rarely, would you or I deliberately declare that we are not Christians, but I wonder how often things in our lives hide that we are? How many times since our conversion to Christ have we betrayed our Saviour? Another of Judas’ sins was the subject of this morning’s message – false repentance. I know that it might be argued that “I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood” was not sin. It might be said that it was not all that it should have been, but it wasn’t evil in itself. On the other hand, what is the definition of sin? Isn’t it “to miss the mark?” – Isn’t it to come short of the glory of God? Judas fell short of what was required of him at the time. Someone might call this a small sin when compared to murder, extortion and kidnaping. But remember that Judas’ failure to properly repent was directly involved in his final condemnation. He is not in hell today because he didn’t fully repent, but his lack of repentance still was not pleasing in God’s sight.
Was it sin for Judas to litter the floor of the temple? How about his disturbing the peace and his disruption of the devotions of some of God’s worshipers? Perhaps I am bordering on the silly. But there is one other major sin, which I will address more fully next Sunday – he “departed, and went and hanged himself.” Suicide is a sin against God, a sin against the suicide himself and against everyone who loves him. Perhaps we can’t take this sin to the lengths of the Roman Catholic church, which bases its opinions on other false doctrines, but it is a sin nevertheless. Suicide is murder. Some might call it a mercy-killing – euthanasia – but that is a matter of semantics – it is murder and sin. As I say, I will return to this subject next week, so we’ll skip over it tonight. There were other sins in Judas’ life I am sure, but these jump out at me from the text.
What about the sins of the chief priests and elders of the people?
The most obvious was Israel’s condemnation of their Messiah. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.” Christ spoke of this and prophesied his rejection in several of His parables, but the people heard them not.
For the sake of application, let’s forget about Israel and that these were the leaders of God’s chosen nation. For the sake of argument, let’s just say they were ordinary men – common citizens of the family of Adam. As such they were dead in trespasses and sins just as all people are. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” and “the wages of sin is death” – eternal death. Earlier in speaking to representatives of these people, Jesus said – “The Father himself… hath borne witness of me. Ye have not his word abiding in you; for whom he hath send, him ye believe not. Search the scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me that ye might have eternal life” – John 5:37-40. As it was with Judas, there is a sense in which these people are in hell today because they rejected their Messiah, their Saviour, the Passover Lamb of God. Theologically, they are in hell because they are spiritually dead, and they rejected the “way, the truth, and the life” – eternal life. That rejection may have been the most damning sin in their lives.
But what about the details of their condemnation of Christ? It was based on their pre-judgment of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a sin to be close-minded, to reject the Word of God, to silence the witness of the Holy Spirit. It is a sin to hear the words of Christ and not to heed what He saith. And similarly it is sin to hold the Word of God in our hands and not to listen to what it says. Those men pre-judged Christ – pre-judged the Word of God, looking at the scriptures with their false doctrine in mind, rather than seeking the message of the Lord. Be careful in thinking that you – that we – have not been guilty of this same sin.
Perhaps I am reading into it more than I should, but related to their prejudgment was premeditated murder. “When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death.” This doesn’t sound to me like a jury sitting down to weigh the evidence presented during the trial. Forgive me if I am wrong, but this sounds like a cadre of criminals trying to come up with a plan in which to murder someone. They didn’t want it to look too obvious, and they didn’t want to pull the trigger themselves. Of course, it couldn’t be an accident, but could they force someone else to do plunge in the knife? The finalized plan was to force the Roman governor into a corner from which he could not escape. “Let’s make Pilate kill this Nazarene.”
What are the sins of the priests? How about the inclusion of others in their sins. Sins are gregarious – even if they aren’t sociable, they are social – they rarely stand alone. There are the more obvious aspects of this – one lie leads to another and another in an attempt to cover the sinfulness of the first lie. Then there are the cousins of the first sin. Why did the man lie? Because he was trying to protect his pride which was in jeopardy. Because of his pride he was embarrassed that he doesn’t have the toys that his neighbor has. In other words, his covetousness, led to wounded pride, and then led to his attempted deception. Hence the bumper sticker – “My other car is a Lexus.” And then the gregarious nature of sin is seen in trying to draw other sinners into our particular circle. Elsewhere we are told that these wicked priests didn’t have the authority to put a man to death. Capital punishment belongs in the hands of the government, not in the hands of the individual. The Inland Empire Philatelic Society cannot execute a man for destroying a rare stamp. And the Sanhedrin had no legal authority to execute this blasphemer. However, that didn’t stop them from killing Stephen and other saints of God. One would think that the young man who was in charge that day when Stephen was stoned to death would have been taken by the Romans and tried for murder, but it didn’t happen. Generally speaking, the Romans didn’t care if one Jew decided to kill another Jew. That’s one less problem for them to deal with. As we shall see later “Pilate (will say) 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.” When these priests sucked Pilate into their murder plot, their own sin intensified.
My next point might be stretching things just a bit, but I’ll let you decide. Judas returned to his sponsors saying, “I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.” At that point what should these religious leaders – what should these priests of Israel have done? Aren’t they supposed to help restore the fallen and bring the guilty back to a place of fellowship with God? Shouldn’t they have spoken to Judas about sacrifice, about true repentance, about restoration? They failed in one of the primary purposes of their office. Ezekiel 22:26 applies here – Israel’s “priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them.” Obviously, those high priests didn’t help fallen Judas because they were as guilty as he was.
Incidentally, I discovered an interesting point, quite by accident last Thursday. In trying to read this scripture in Greek, I saw that the word “betray” is not used by Judas alone. The word “paradidomi” (par-ad-id’-o-mee) is found three times in this scripture, but it is translated “betrayed” only twice. In verse 2 it is rendered in its most common way – “delivered.” “And when they had bound him, they led him away and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor.” The point is, these priests and elders were as much guilty of “betraying” Christ as Judas was. That is true both actually and linguistically.
What were the sins of these leaders in Israel? Going back to my previous point, do I detect sin in verse 4? “And they said, What is that to us? See thou to that.” What? Are they actually saying that Judas sinned but they hadn’t even though they paid the man to do what he did? Some of the best old “Law and Order” episodes on television, involved catching and prosecuting the people who encouraged the crime. They didn’t pull the trigger, but they encouraged the other man to do it. “Oh Judas, you say that you have sinned? Well, that’s your problem not ours.” But it WAS their problem.
And how about the hypocrisy of the blood money. Why did they reach into the treasury for those thirty pieces of silver in the first place? Wasn’t it to facilitate the death of Christ? Wasn’t that money tainted the moment they wrote the check or reached into the box or whatever? When Judas returned it, they self-righteously declared, “This is blood money. It is unfit for use in the service of God.” What blatant, disgusting hypocrisy. But isn’t this another common sin? Isn’t this something of which we are guilty? What Judas did was wicked, because it was Judas who did it. But when I do the same thing, or something nearly the same, it is not sin. Murder is a sin, as all of us know, but my hatred is not a sin even though the Lord has condemned it too. Murder is a sin, but my lack of love is not sin, because that person doesn’t deserve my love. Hypocrisy is a wild fire among the saints of God.
You may be able to see some other sins in this scripture, but I’ll close with just one more. Isn’t it a second sin when we try to cover our first sin with something we consider to be righteous? The priests didn’t acknowledge their payment to Judas as sin, but I believe that it was. But even without their acknowledgment, they attempted to atone – to cover – whatever they did, by giving that money to the poor. Judy asked me the other day, if non-Catholics can be buried in a Catholic cemetery. I told her that from what I have heard, they cannot. And similarly, the Jews did not like non-Jews to be buried in their tombs or cemeteries. I don’t know what was done before, but it was decided at this point to spend this blood money on a worthless piece of property in which to bury Roman soldiers and other strangers. The top soil had been scraped away in order to dig up the clay underneath, and apparently that was pretty well used up as well. “This piece of property is absolutely useless, so let’s bury those useless foreigners in it.” Did this apparently good deed somehow rectify their earlier horrendous sin? Catholics are not the only religionists to sell indulgences for past or upcoming sins.
Finally, this evening, it needs to be understood that even though the Lord may prophesy upcoming sin, or it might be mentioned in the course of a Biblical conversation, that doesn’t make God a co-conspirator, nor does it take the sinfulness out of the sin. Matthew took the words of Jeremiah, coupled them with those of Zechariah, and declared that God prophesied that thirty pieces of silver would buy a potter’s field. The Lord willing I will come back to this confusing prophecy next Sunday evening. But my point at this point is this – God’s omniscience and prophecy of these men’s sin, in no way reduced the guilt of the priests which committed it.
You and I are sinners – sinners saved by grace, I hope, but sinners nevertheless. Your sins and my sins may not be the same or even similar. And neither of us may sin after the fashion of either Judas or these religious leaders. But the general nature of sin is the same, particularly in the sight of God. May we look at the sins of others, especially those of the Bible and do our best to keep from repeating them. May it be in our hearts to bring glory to Christ through godly living and Christian service.