Luke 22:63-65…
Jesus was being mocked and ridiculed on all counts. If the leaders do their sort of condemning, so will the followers. It happens today. People feel safe to attack a person once they think they are on the winning side. People love to pile on. It’s in our fallen nature.
We must remember that Jesus was still in charge, even at the time of His betrayal, abandonment, arrest, abuse, trials, and denials. In all these events we see that men of all stations rejected Him. So that men of all stations might be saved by Him.
While Jesus remains faithful to His calling, all other men consistently fail to be faithful. No one understands fully what is going on. People are abandoning Him. But even in this “hour of darkness” He is in control. His prophecies are coming to pass, through the agency of sinful men. Jesus was taken captive and condemned because He purposed to do so.
Think of yourself and this mocking and abusing. We come to realize that we have done this to Jesus. It is like when we first start to feel the pang of conscience about our sin. Our first thoughts, when we are being drawn by the Spirit to worship Christ, might come as a feeling of, “yeah I’m not perfect”, but then we see that we are personally responsible, and they move to “yeah, I’ve done some bad things”.
Then, as we are being drawn into the moment of saving faith in Christ, we see the truth more fully. We have attacked Christ personally. Our hand was the one that drove the bitter nail into His on the cross. Instead of seeing ourselves as somehow just indirectly sinning against God, we realize that we have sinned directly against a holy and just God, directly attacked His person. It is cosmic treason.
We ask, “How can we trust God?” This is the answer, because while we were yet sinners Christ died for the ungodly. He cared for us, not only when we didn’t care for Him, but while we actively opposed Him, whether we realized that or not. Now we do realize that, and it makes all the difference (Romans 5:10). He doesn’t need to prove himself to us, He’s done it. See it right here. All this betrayal, abandonment, arrest, abuse, trials, and denials are things you have done to Him. This is all a piling on of the evidence of His love for you.
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