The Dilemma of Pilate: Choosing Right Amidst Pressure

Twenty-seven, if you'd like to find that in your Bibles, follow along with me. I want to start at verse eleven. What is it that causes us to make decisions that are faulty? All of us have made decisions that we look back on and say, boy, that was not a good idea. We've all made decisions where we look back and say, that was the right thing to do. In this passage of Scripture, Jesus is standing trial, and terrible decisions are on the horizon for his circumstance. Why is it that people who would look at Jesus and make decisions about his life would make such terrible choices and decisions? Well, the same reasons all of us do at different times, because we let things interfere with really finding God's direction and will for us. And there are things that stand in our way that keep us from having a clear mind and a clear vision of what God wants us to do. In this story, there are several opportunities that people have to do what is right. It's sometimes difficult in this story to tell where God's hand is at work. After all, he told Jesus that he was going to come to Jerusalem, he was going to die, and after three days be raised from the grave. So Jesus' death on the cross was a part of what God had told him was already going to take place. But in this situation, God is actively at work trying to keep this decision from being made, it appears. How is it that what he knew was going to take place, he still actively tried to get it changed? Well, that's a mystery that I don't understand or know, but it seems to be what took place. In this story, beginning with verse 11 of chapter 27, meanwhile, Jesus stood before the governor and the governor asked him, Are you the king of the Jews? Yes, it is as you say, Jesus replied. When he was accused by the chief priests and elders, he gave no answer. Then Pilate asked him, Don't you hear how many things they are accusing you of? But Jesus made no reply, not even to a single charge, to the great amazement of the governor. Now, it was the governor's custom at the feast to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. At that time, they had a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, Which one do you want me to release to you, Barabbas or Jesus, who is called Christ? For he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him. While Pilate was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent him this message, Don't have anything to do with this innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him. But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed. Which of the two do you want me to release to you? asked the governor. Barabbas, they answered. What shall I do then with Jesus, who is called Christ? Pilate asked. They all answered, Crucify him. Why? What crime has he committed? asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, Crucify him! And Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting. He took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. I am innocent of this man's blood, he said. It is your responsibility. All the people answered, Let his blood be on us and on our children. Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged and handed over to be crucified. In the beginning of this story, you can see all the way through that Pilate does not want to issue the command to have Jesus crucified. He knows that there is something here that's wrong. He understands that the trial that they brought to him is the result not of a crime Jesus has committed, but because on the part of the Jewish leaders, they're envious of the crowds that Jesus had, the standing that he had among the people, and the success his ministry seems to be having. They were looking at him, and he could see in them this envy that was driving them. And Pilate wanted to do anything that he could to keep from crucifying Jesus. Not only in the passage that we just read, Jesus, that he does several things. He brings Jesus before him, gives him a chance to defend himself twice, which was what the law required. If he defended himself twice, he was given the opportunity to defend himself twice and didn't. Then he was assumed to be guilty. Pilate gave him every chance to be able to present his defense against the charges that were against him. He had sent Jesus once before to Herod when his case came to him because he thought Herod would deal with this thing and he wouldn't have to. He wanted to release Barabbas, as was the custom to release a prisoner at the time to this season of the year. And he gave them every opportunity to do so. Barabbas was a man who'd murdered people. He said, here you have a choice between someone that's never murdered anybody and someone that's murdered a person or many people. And he thought perhaps that maybe this would give them an opportunity to make that choice. Some people think that the thieves on either side of Jesus were followers of Barabbas. So he was a notorious man, it says in the Scriptures. Notorious not in the sense of famous, but notorious in the sense of a bloodthirsty man who killed people. Why would they ever reject this? He must have thought. But they did. He then turned to his wife, sent him a message saying, you know, you shouldn't have anything to do with this man because he's dreamed things about him and I've had turmoil about him. He turned the case over to the Jewish leaders saying, I'm going to let you make the choice. What do you want me to do with this man? Set him free or have him crucified? And he appealed to, before he announced the judgment in John chapter 19, he said, I want to again appeal to you to rethink this. Six different times in Luke, in Matthew and in John, we see Pilate in a spot where he wanted desperately to not pass judgment that Jesus would be crucified. But in the end, that's what he did. What happened that causes a person to be in a situation where they know the right thing to do, but they can't bring themselves to do it? What happens inside of a person when they know what is right, but they end up doing something that's wrong? I had a young fellow tell me one time that he and his friends were hanging out and they were just running around town sometime in July. They had had some firecrackers and stuff left over from the 4th of July. They were running around town trying to do one thing after another and talking about things that they could do that would be fun. And someone said, I tell you what, let's get those firecrackers and we'll set them off down here at the train track. And we'll have a good time because we'll blow up some things and we'll have a lot of fireworks out of season. He told me, he said, you know, I knew that was the wrong thing to do. But I've been hanging around with them all night and we've been doing things together, nothing that was illegal. And all of a sudden now they're wanting to do something that I knew was wrong. It was against the law to set off the fireworks at this time of the year. I tried to persuade them, he said, not to do it, but they insisted that they were going to do it. And I thought about it and I thought, well, what can I do? I can't stop them. I said, well, why didn't you just leave? And he said, well, you know, I'd been hanging around with them all night. I'd tried to talk them into doing what I thought was right. But I was afraid, you know, because I was with them, that if I left, they would think of me as not their friend anymore. They set off the fireworks in, of course, the small town of Ellenwood and pretty soon the police were there. And they corralled them all in the car and interrogated each one of them and he got in trouble. Here's the situation that Pilate found himself in. He had been doing a lot of things before this event that caused people not to trust him. He had brought at one time a bust of Caesar into the city of Jerusalem. And the Jewish people thought this was like idolatry to have a statue of someone in their city. And it caused such an uproar that people were angry with him and they hated what he had done. He also had some shields brought in from the city with carvings on them. And to the people of Jerusalem, it looked like those shields were idols. And he brought this right into the city of Jerusalem where God's holy place was. And he angered so many people. He also used some money in the temple called Korban money, money that was set aside for the use of God to use for some of the political activities that he needed, that he wanted to do in the city of Jerusalem. So he desecrated the money. There were some Galileans who came to town and were worshiping at the temple and making sacrifices. And he thought of them as rebels and he killed them. All these things had gone on long before this event. He had already created a situation for himself in which he was in hot water with the people of Jerusalem. And now this event comes and Jesus is brought before him by these people insisting that he killed them. He was in a spot where he no longer had any leverage with the people of Jerusalem. He'd been at odds with them for so long. He'd done so many things that caused trouble between him and them that he came to this spot and he could not do what he knew was right. Because the consequences of saying no to them would be devastating for him and his rule. Sometimes when we're trying to make decisions, we get ourselves in spots where we've done things for so long that finally we get to the place where we realize we're in a difficult spot and we want to say no. But we know that the people who've watched what we've done and the people we've participated with, if we say no now, they will say, wait a minute, aren't you the same fellow that did all these things with us? Weren't you the same fellow that participated in all the other things we were doing? Sometimes you get yourselves in situations in business where you've been a little bit shady in what takes place and then you try to make the right choice. And all those people that knew what you did before, they're on your case. Sometimes people get in situations with another man or woman other than their wife and they get so deep into that that they find that they can't say no. They know what the right thing is, but they just can't say no, even though they know it's right. So sometimes because of our own lifestyle, we bring ourselves to places where we need to make a decision that's right. But because of what we've done before, now we find ourselves in a place where we really can't. What Pilate wanted to do was to say, this is a phony charge. You guys are making charges against this man that had no standing. I find nothing wrong with him. I'm going to turn him loose. But what he was afraid of was that his position as the Roman ruler would be destroyed. His back lifestyle, his previous lifestyle, and the choices he'd made put him in a position where he could not do what he knew was right. Now, he could have done what he knew was right, but it takes a particularly courageous person who can stand and say, I'm going to do the right thing when it means a devastating result for yourself. For him, it would have meant that the Jewish people would have rebelled against his leadership and his rule in the city of Jerusalem and in the nation of Israel. And so he saw, if that happened, that his position with the Roman Empire would have been taken away from him. He would lose his standing. He would lose his job. He would lose his future because now he had no way by which he had any leverage with the people around him because of his own past behavior. It's very important for us to be able to live ourselves, live day by day, doing the things that are right. Because you never know when you're going to come to a place when you need to make a decision, a critical decision. And you want to know that up to that point, you've done the right thing. The people who've watched you will know if you've done the things that are wrong. And when you come to this decision, they'll hold it over your head because they know that you have not lived up to what you say you're doing right now. And that was his spot. His wife called him. He was sitting on the place where they would give judgment. And she indicated to him that she had had a very difficult experience because she knew that this man was innocent. And it caused her to dream, had a bad dream, bad experience. And so she appealed to him. I don't want you to do anything bad with this person. He would like to have appealed to it. He would like to have responded to his wife's appeal to him. But again, he was in a bind. He had to choose between his wife's direction to him and his job. And when you get in that situation, it's very difficult to be courageous and do the right thing. Because his job was at stake. His financial future was at stake. And he had no way to be able to make that choice. You know why he didn't? He had no confidence that God was going to take care of him. If you're outside of the will of God and living in such a fashion that you know you're not living with God, then when it comes time for you to make the right decision that you know God wants you to make, you're never sure that he's going to provide for you. The assurance we have that God is going to take care of us comes from our relationship of trust with him and our obedience to him, our commitment to him. So when we come to a decision like this and we say, whatever I decide to do, it could be disastrous for me. Jesus was at that place when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane. I have a choice to make. I can run away or I can stay here and be killed. A difficult choice for him. He knew what the will of the Father was for him. In his prayer, the last one we have is, thy will be done. How can you do that? How can you make a decision that is so disastrous that it's to take your own life? Jesus had confidence that because the Father had led him to this place and had made a promise to him that in three days he would be raised again, that he could make that difficult and destructive choice because of the promise of God. Now Pilate had no consciousness of any promise from God that if he made this right choice he would be protected. So he only had his own skill to depend on. The great thing we have in walking with God is a promise that he makes to us that if we live in obedience to him, he will take care of whatever consequences come from our decisions. So however desperate it might seem to you, however hard it might seem to you, if you know what the right thing is, you can make that choice immediately because you know God has made a promise to you. The promise that says, I will take care of you and provide for you. I have a friend who's been in a church before, but he used to work for a warehouser company in Dallas, Texas. They had bought some ground, options on a piece of ground they were going to build houses on and the man who owned the ground was in desperate financial trouble. They told Fred, I don't want you to buy this land, I want you just to let it alone because he's going to go broke and we're going to be able to buy this at a bargain arrangement. He knew what the right thing was for him to do. He knew that if he didn't do what they wanted him to do, he'd lose his job. So he went on a retreat ten times with God talking to him about what he was going to do. He came out of that saying, I know what the right thing is and I trust that God is going to take care of me. So he went back and told his bosses, I'm not going to do this. They fired him. He was without a job and in a little while he got a job with a bigger company with better pay. God took care of him. If you don't have that confidence, when you get in this spot where you're trying to make a decision and you don't believe that God has made a promise to you, if you'll do what I tell you, I'll take care of you. Now remember this, this is an easy story to talk about, but you get fired. And the day you're fired, you don't have another job. And the day you're fired, you don't know what you're going to have happen to you. You have a family, you have a lifestyle to keep up, and yet you know that this is what God says is the right thing to do. Pilate was in a spot where he knew the right thing to do. He tried multiple times to get the right thing done, but God never let him escape the personal responsibility of doing what was right. He tried to get out of it every way he could, but God held him to the focus to say, you know what's right and you have to make this decision yourself. He tried to get Herod to do it. He tried to get the Jewish leaders to do it. He tried to get the crowd to do it, anybody to remove the burden from him. But he didn't have the confidence that if he did what was right, God would take care of him because he never surrendered himself to live in obedience to God. He was taking care of himself in his own way. What God wants us to be able to do is live our lives in such a way that no matter what happens, we have confidence that doing the right thing is always going to provide for us an avenue to be obedient to God and to receive His care for us. He will take care of us. And if you can imagine when you get in situations where it looks really bad, that yes, that bad thing is going to happen to me, but I really believe that out of that bad thing happening because I've done what's right, God is going to do something even better for me. Then it gives you courage to make the right kind of choices. Jesus was brought before the crowd, the Jewish leaders. They were filled with envy for Him. He was prospering and successful and they were losing the crowd. One time they said to each other, you know, the whole world is going to believe in Him if we don't do something. That's why they set out to kill Him. What they could see was this man was destroying their own business, their religious business that they were doing. And they were determined to make sure that He was killed. Why didn't they see who Jesus was? Why in His teachings didn't they grasp that this was a man sent from God? Their minds were closed. One of the big reasons we make foolish decisions with regard to our life is that we're not open to what God's trying to tell us. It's difficult sometimes to be open to anything and everything God wants to tell us and He wants us to do. But the fact is, if you close your mind to these things and you do what you've always thought is the right thing, you do what you've always done, you do what you think is right without saying to God, God, maybe here you have something different for me to do. Then you find yourself in the position of these spiritual leaders. They knew the Bible forward and backward. But God was trying to teach them something and they were closed-minded to it. All of us have had spiritual training in our lives. Some of it has been very good and some of it is wrong and some of it is foolish and some of it is dangerous that we get. Because there's all kinds of ideas out there in the world about what's right and wrong. What we have to come to is the Scripture and read it and say, OK, God, I'm going to listen exactly to what you've said to me here. I'm not going to read into it my own ideas. I'm not going to bring into it what I've always heard it says. I'm prepared to say, speak to me, whatever you say, I'll listen. The Jewish leaders could not make the right decision because they were blinded by their own prejudices to who Jesus really was. The crowd that was there, I mean, a few days earlier, the crowd when Jesus came into Jerusalem, they followed him and hailed him as the Messiah and the future king is going to be there. And now, just a few days later, they're saying, crucify him, crucify him. What happened to them? When Jesus came into the city of Jerusalem, they thought that he was going to be the new king who would lead them to victory over the Romans. He had already proven himself not to do that, but Barabbas, the man who was on trial here with Jesus or a man who was the other choice with him, was a very political figure. He was leading a crowd of people who were rebelling against the Roman Empire. He was standing for the Jewish nation independent of the Roman Empire. And they were so caught up in this revolutionary movement to throw off the power of Rome that when they were offered an opportunity between a man who'd never killed anybody and who was simply a teacher of the truth of God and a man who'd murdered people, because he was a patriot, that's the word we would use, he was a patriot of the Jewish nation, they erased all sense of justice and took sides with this man for political reasons. Sometimes we can be swayed by the politics of our world to where we get away from what God is trying to get us to do and we get caught up in the things that people around us believe to be true, even though they may be opposite of what the scripture teaches. We must not allow any kind of things in this world, whether it's politics or economics or any of those factors, to control us so that we end up making decisions contrary to what the will and purpose of God really is. The people who were standing there were not against Jesus. They were for Jewish independence. We don't want the Roman government running our country and telling us what to do. And so when they were faced with a choice of a man who was a rebel who had killed people and a man who was a servant and minister and messenger of God, they were so overwhelmed with their patriotism that they lost all sense of God's direction and purpose. And so faced with a choice of Jesus or Barabbas, they cried, Crucify Him, Crucify Him. Pilate was in a spot. He tried every way he could to avoid making the decision. He tried to get Jesus to help himself and protect himself, and he wouldn't do it. He tried to get the Jewish leaders to let Jesus go. He tried to get the crowd to let Jesus go, and at the last thing that he did, he brought in a bowl of water and he washed his hands and said, I'm going to let you guys have your way, but I want to say that what you do from here on out is your responsibility and I take no responsibility for your actions. What Pilate wanted to do was to ignore the responsibility he had. He stepped back and said, I'm just going to let you do what you think the right thing is. Sometimes when we're in people, whether it's in business or a personal life or a family, and we're around people who are passionate and determined to do something and we know it's not quite the right thing to do, we don't want to be unpopular, we don't want to make the decision, so we step back in our quietness and silence and allow the disaster to take place. We want to wash our hands and say, I didn't do anything. We know that there was something wrong and we never said anything, we never tried to stop it, but we just step back and say, since I didn't do it, I'm not responsible for it. God gives us responsibilities for making the choices and decisions he wants us to make. We don't know in this situation, I mean, it's hard for me to tell in this story where Satan is at work and where God is at work. God's intention was that his own son would die on the cross. Was he trying to stop that from taking place by warning the lady, by making sure that Pilate was warned, by trying to make sure that there were other options given? Was he trying to help this to stop? Or was it Satan who was there saying, I know what God is doing, he's going to send his son to the cross so he'll be dying for the sins of men and be resurrected? It's really hard sometimes to know exactly what's taking place in the scriptures. But it's not always that difficult for us. When people ask us to do things that are absolutely contrary to what the scripture says, the issues get clear. What's difficult is we calculate the cost of our decision. And that's where it becomes hard. Because in our short sight we can see the immediate consequence of doing what we are set out to do. We can't see past that to what good God is going to bring from it, or if he will be good from it, or if the consequences will in the end be something we'll be proud of. We don't know that because we can't see it. It's a time in which we have to act in trust. I know what you say is right, and I know what you say is wrong. And I see the right and the wrong here, and I choose to take a stand for what is right regardless of the consequences. Sometimes we know that it will cause friendships to be broken. Sometimes we understand that it will hurt our relationships with the people around us. Sometimes we know that people will think less of us. But what God asks us to do in the middle of all these things is to say one thing. Lord, what do you want me to do? We have confidence that in the most complicated and difficult things in our life, God gives us Scripture to let us know what's right and wrong. He gives us the presence of his Holy Spirit to let us know what's right and wrong. He gives us the promises of Scripture to let us know that if we know what's right and we do what's right, the consequences will always be beneficial in the long run. Not always in the short run, but in the long run. Pilate's problem was he had no confidence in this. Jesus' great strength was he had every confidence in it. He didn't find it difficult to know what to do. He was there on trial. He knew they weren't going to believe him. He knew it was no reason for him to fight it. He had already settled that in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now he was prepared to face whatever came. Not because he thought that it was going to be easy, but because the Father had made him a promise. You're going to Jerusalem. You'll be killed, but in three days you'll be raised. The people who were there, all of them were faced with choices. They were blinded by the things around them. They were controlled by the forces that took place before all this took place. But in all this story, only Jesus has the freedom to make the choices that he knew were right. And so when the charges were hurled against him and the accusations were made about him, he knew that this was a time for him simply to sit and listen and to trust God. Because he'd already been in the Garden of Gethsemane. He said, I don't want to do this. The Father said, I'll take care of you. He said, I really don't want to do this. The Father said, I'll take care of you. He said, I don't know that I can take it. The Father said, I'll take care of you. And he said, OK, if you say it's all right, I'll let it happen. And everyone was astonished that Jesus faced the charges, all the things that were going on with peace, because he knew that if he did what the Father told him, the end result would be victorious. And when you have this, no matter where you are in this story, whether it's your ignorance or whether you're jealous or whether you've strayed away from God or whatever it's been, when you get to the place where the choice needs to be made, you say to God, I give you my life. I'm willing to do whatever you tell me. And I will obey you regardless of the apparent consequences, confident that doing what God says is right will result in the victory of your life. Life is not always simple. Many of the choices we have to make are complicated because they affect us and they affect the people around us and they affect the neighbors that we have and the church family that we have. Sometimes they're complicated decisions to be made, but they're complicated when we think of the possible outcomes that could be there. They get pretty simple when you just say, what does God say is right? And when you don't look past that to the consequences, then many of our decisions become very simple. Because when you sit down to look at the consequences of our choices, you can think of all kinds of bad things that might happen. But when you stop to remember, if I do the right thing, God will give me the victory. And you only look at that, then in spite of how bad it might look out there, you can be confident that doing what God said you should do will give you victory. In this story, the winner is the Jewish leaders and the crowd. The loser is Jesus. And the real loser is Pilate, who knew what was right, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. And when the story's all over, there's only one winner, and it's Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, all the rest lost. That's our confidence, that God has power to do anything that he wants. And when we trust him, he will protect us, take care of us, rescue us, and make sure that our lives achieve the purpose he has for us. Making decisions can be very complicated, but it makes it simple for us to understand we only have one person to listen to and one choice to make. And when we simplify that, then it becomes easier to know what the right choice is. And by faith, we can be confident that the right choice is right. Let's pray together. You may have friends and family around you who are making important choices in their life. You can help them. You can help them when they talk to you by simply saying, what do you think the right thing is to do? What do you think God would want you to do? And if they've never trusted their life to Christ, you can start there, saying, you know, if you'll trust your life to Christ, he promises you that he will guide you in your choices. And as your choices are made, he will make sure that they're good ones in the end. And when you come for yourself, the choices that you have to make, you have to be careful about your motive. What is my motive? To get what I want? What is my motive? To achieve my own personal goals is my motive to do the will of God. By focusing on our motive, it helps us to make those choices that are right. Father, we give thanks to you that you've made a promise to your children that you would guide us, that you would protect us from the destruction this world brings. So help us to be able to live fearlessly, doing the things we know you want us to do, believing that in the end, they will be right, victorious, and good. In the name of Christ we ask this, amen.