Behold The Man | Good Friday | Myles Holmes

Father, that's our desire this morning.

That as we continue to sit under your word, we would behold not just a man who was mockingly crucified, but the Lamb of God who was slain for our sins.

And that God, in this place, we would do what no one had the clarity to do in that place, God, that we would fall down.

That we would be broken.

Not only by the reality of our sin, but by the hope of our Savior.

God, do this work in us, we pray.

In the name of your son.

Amen.

Amen.

You can grab your seat.

In the verses we just read in John 19, Pilate brings Jesus out to the crowd, and Jesus stands there bleeding.

He's been beaten.

The crown of thorns has been pressed into his skull, and a faded robe is hanging off his shoulders.

And three times from that moment, the gospel writer John ironically calls us to behold him.

In verse five, Pilate comes out and mockingly to the Jews says, Behold the man.

In verse fourteen, again, feeling that his sarcasm maybe didn't sink in the first time, calls to the Jewish people, saying, Behold your king.

In verse twenty six, Jesus says it to his own mother, behold your son.

Pilate means for the Jews to look at him and seeing the mockery, seeing the blood, seeing the robe, to feel sorry for him.

Look how weak he is.

Look how broken he is.

Look how ridiculous he looks, the man who claimed to be the king.

To behold a broken and bloodied man like this makes it overwhelmingly clear.

He's not a threat.

He certainly cannot be a king.

And if he is anything, he is a man that you can dismiss.

Pilate's words are filled with great irony because what John wants us to do is exactly that: to behold the man, to this very morning look at Jesus.

But John's intention for you this morning is so much deeper than that.

From chapter 19, verse 1 and on, everyone will look at Jesus, and yet no one will see him clearly.

The soldiers will behold the man, but they will mock him.

Pilate will behold the man himself, but question him.

The crowds will behold the man and reject him, calling out, crucify him, crucify him.

The men at the cross will stand right beside him as he breathes his last, and all of them will miss what is happening.

They certainly all look at him, but they all get him wrong.

And yet there's great irony in this passage, in that everything they they say and everything they do, they actually reveal more truth about Jesus than they realize.

We're struck with this reality that you can look upon Jesus and still not see him.

And if it was a problem for those who witnessed the death of Jesus, loved one, how much more of a problem is it for us today?

You can grow up around the story, you can know the details, you can even speak the language and understand the claims and yet never actually behold him for who he is.

The question then that I'm praying would be pressed into you by the Holy Spirit this morning is this when you see Jesus, what do you behold?

What do you see when you look at Jesus?

It's possible to be this close and still be completely blind.

We see that all throughout the passage, and so let's begin where the passage starts with the soldiers.

Look at verse 2.

The soldiers have taken Jesus somewhere private.

These men, they they have no personal stake in Jesus.

This is another shift at work.

This is another man to crucify.

This is another problem that has been handed down to them from Rome to deal with.

These men then do what bored soldiers do with a man who claimed to be king.

They decide to make him look like one.

They find laying around some thorns and they twist it together into a crown, painfully pressing it into his head until the blood was released.

They find a purple robe and drape it over his shoulders.

They step back and mockingly look at what they cry out in verse 3 hail the king of the Jews.

It is mockery.

For these men, it is a casual cruelty.

The kind that doesn't even feel hateful to the people who are doing it.

They've become so numb to the reality of what they have done with this man, Jesus.

You and I have never physically beaten and mocked Jesus, and yet what we see in the heart of the soldiers is closer to us than we think.

You don't have to be hostile towards Jesus.

You don't have to be aggressive towards Jesus.

Your heart can just be dismissive of him.

Maybe in your life you've never hated Jesus.

You would never utter those words, but perhaps you've done the same thing as the soldiers.

You've played dress-up with him.

Behold the man, a good teacher.

Behold the man, a helpful voice in times of trouble.

Behold the man, a moral example when it's convenient, so that you've dressed Jesus up in a version that keeps him at this sort of comfortable distance, but never declares that he's any sort of king over your life.

Perhaps you've never rejected Jesus outright.

But day by day in your life you've reduced him to be something that's less than a savior and less than a king.

When Pilate calls them to behold Jesus, I want you to see this is the first way they behold them.

Behold him, behold the man they mocked.

Behold the man they mocked.

And yet, as those soldiers pressed down a crown of thorns onto the head of our Lord and Savior, they did not know the weight of what they were doing.

In that moment, they told more truth than they could ever possibly know.

Because in Genesis 3, in a book that they had never before read, were told that sin entered into the world, that at this very moment the world was broken.

And when God came back to this world, he uttered a curse upon it, and the sign of the curse was thorns.

That you would work the ground, but the ground would be filled with thorns that would make it difficult, that in Adam and Eve's work and in our work we would always have this visible reminder that sin had fractured everything.

Now, thousands of years later, the very Son of God comes to this world and publicly on display takes the crown of thorns, the symbol of the curse, and presses it into his head.

The soldiers thought they were humiliating a pretender.

They thought they were making fun of a joke of a man.

Yet they placed the entire curse of a broken world on the head of a true king.

They crowned the right king.

And they had no idea that they gave this king the very crown he came to receive.

They beheld a man who was worthy to mock about what was in front of them and what is in front of us is a king worthy to be crowned.

Not with gold, as worthy of it as he was, but with your curse, which he never deserved.

Yet there is no weakness in this king.

There is no failure in this king.

This is the king who stepped into a cursed world for this very reason.

And took the curse onto himself.

Pilate actually sees something entirely different in Jesus.

Pilate in this chapter is the most powerful man.

He has authority that the chief leaders do not to crucify Jesus.

He has a platform, a seat of judgment to sit in, and he has been given the full weight of Rome.

That's how Pilate stands.

Jesus, in contrast to Pilate, is beaten.

And it is very clear to everyone who looks at this scene that Pilate is the judge, that Jesus is the accused.

That much is obvious, and yet across this whole trial, Pilate keeps questioning Jesus.

Happens in chapter 18, verse 33, when he asks Jesus, Are you the king of the Jews?

Later in verse 38, he asks, What is truth?

In chapter 19, verse 9, he asks Jesus, Where are you from?

In verse 10, don't you know I have authority to release you or crucify you?

All the while Pilate thinks that he is the one with authority examining Jesus, and yet look what Jesus says in verse 11.

You would have no authority over me at all, unless it had been given to you from above.

But as you watch Pilate ask his questions, what you see is not Jesus being unraveled, it is Pilate being unraveled.

Every question he asks exposes him more and more all throughout the chapter.

Pilate becomes less and less of a man, his uncertainty on display, his veins filled with fear, a complete inability to do what he knows is right.

He came to assess Jesus, and yet he is the one getting found out.

And we've all had that moment, haven't we, where the tables have been turned on us, where we thought we were in control of the conversations, where we were the ones asking the question and yet walked away feeling completely exposed.

That's Pilate.

Notice the irony then of what happens in verse 13.

We're told that when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat.

The judgment seat was a visible reminder that the one who sat on it was in the place of authority.

That he had the final verdict.

It was the place of final say.

And yet everything in this passage points to the irony of Pilate thinking that he is the one that is in control.

The real judge in this scene is the one who is standing before the judgment seat.

The whole courtroom has been inverted, and Pilate has no idea.

It's the second thing I want you to see that they beheld when they beheld the man.

Behold the judge, they questioned.

Behold the judge, they questioned.

But notice, loved ones, that it's not just Pilate who questions the judge, that it is what we do.

That you and I, if we're not doing it now, we have done it in our life, we put Jesus on trial.

And as we see the foolishness of Pilate, as we see the absurdity of standing before the King of the universe whose word brought all things known into creation, as we see that absurdity, where are you with Jesus?

Are you evaluating him?

Are you weighing out his claims?

Are you deciding whether he meets your standard, whether his word aligns with what you think is reasonable?

Or just as foolish as Pilate.

We sit in the seat and expect Jesus to answer to us, and yet the courtroom is inverted on us too.

Loved one, you need to know this morning that Jesus is not on trial with you.

Jesus will be judged by no man.

Look then at Jesus.

This is the one who Pilate one day will find himself standing before on judgment day.

The judge of all the earth in this very moment that we're reading of is standing in the place of the accused.

But loved one, one day you will stand before Jesus.

And on that day, the question will not be, what do you think of Jesus?

On that day, the question will be, What does Jesus think of you?

What verdict does Jesus render about your life?

What do you think about that day, loved one?

The scandal of the gospel is that this real seat of judgment would not be the one that Pilate sat in.

That in just a few moments the seat of judgment would be filled by the Father who would pour out his judgment on his own son.

That's what the cross is.

The cross is the place where the fullness of God's judgment towards the sin of all who would believe is poured out in full measure.

The weight of every single sin, big and small, of all who would place their faith in Jesus Christ, is absorbed by the Son as the Father pours out the wrath that is deserved for it.

He is the only innocent man in all of history, and he takes the verdict of the guilty.

So that loved one, if you have guilt this morning, if you stand before a holy God, condemned, guilty, in Jesus Christ, you can receive the verdict of the innocent.

Would you behold him?

The judge who took your place.

Notice that in this chapter, Jesus is the man who took the curse.

He's the judge who took our guilt.

But by the time we reach verse 19, Pilate is then exhausted.

He has been pushed around all morning.

The priests have been trying to get him to do what they want him to do.

The crowd has been pressuring him.

And yet internally, Pilate knows that he's made a decision that is wrong.

He has found this man to be innocent, and yet he is going to crucify him anyway.

With the one last measure of authority he has, he places a sign above Jesus' head.

It is one last attempt to assert some control.

John tells us in verse 20 some fascinating things about this sign that Pilate wrote.

He tells us it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek.

That it was just outside the city where there were many people flowing in and out, and here was a man being crucified, and it could not be more clear who he was.

Written in the language of religion, written in the language of power, written in the language of culture.

The message was simple: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.

It wasn't worship.

It certainly was truth.

It was meant as a jab against the chief priests who were very clearly offended, coming up to Pilate saying, Don't write that he is the king.

Just say that he said he was the king.

Pilate finally struck the nerve that he had desired to strike with the Jews, and he finds then the confidence, saying, What I have written, I have written.

He meant it as defiance against Jesus.

He had no idea that he had just posted the truth of the gospel above the sacrifice in every language that mattered for the world to see and then behold correctly that this was not just a man who said he was the king.

This indeed was the king of the Jews.

It would not be taken down.

Pilate tried to use the sign to control the narrative.

God used the sign to declare the truth.

I want you to notice then the third way that they beheld him.

Behold the king, they tried to silence.

Love one, do you see Pilate in yourself?

Pilate is where many of us try to live.

We don't mock.

Jesus.

We don't reject Jesus.

But we sit on the fence.

We try to stay neutral with Jesus.

We try to keep him at a distance, holding off a decision about who he is.

I'm still I'm not sure if he's the Lord.

I'm not sure if he's the savior.

I'm still thinking about it.

I'm still figuring it out.

Pilate shows you something though, that there is no such thing as neutrality.

He tries to stand in the middle and he makes the clearest declaration of who Jesus is that day.

If no one would get it right, Pilate in irony would.

Love one, look at the sign hanging above the head of Jesus.

It is written in every language.

It is not an accident because though Pilate penned it, it was ultimately in the handwriting of God.

This is your king.

This is your king.

This is your king.

And loved one, you need to know that is that is God's message for you written on that sign that day for all to read, even this morning, so that you would know, regardless of where you're at in life, regardless of what you're doing in life, regardless of what you think your purpose in life to be, loved one, this is your king.

This is the king of the world.

Whether you acknowledge him, submit to him, believe him, this is who Jesus is.

And the scriptures tell us that one day Jesus will return, and on that day, every knee will bow.

Can you imagine it?

Pilate resurrected himself so that he might bow the knee to Jesus Christ.

The soldiers resurrected in the shame of what they have done, so that they might bow the knee to Jesus Christ and recognize in that moment when it is way too late that Jesus indeed was the king and loved one.

One day you will meet that king.

And on that day you will be resurrected with them.

And you will bow the knee.

Your tongue will confess that he is Lord.

The only question is this will you have bowed the knee already?

Will you have bowed the knee with a heart that has been opened up to what he has done?

Or will you bow the knee, submitting to his kingship when there is no longer a decision to be made?

Pilate wrote the truth.

Pilate tried to stay neutral.

You can't do both.

That you would read the sign and discern what you will do with that.

Will you believe that this is the king?

Or will you continue on your way, mocking the king of the world who hung on the cross for you?

Behold your king.

You cannot stay neutral about him.

By the time we reached the foot of the cross, the scene, which up until this point has been busy and loud, is now eerily silent.

The courtroom is empty, the verdict has been rendered.

The crowds have made their choice.

There's no room for arguments.

And what we find in verse 23 is a man dying on a cross.

Beneath him are the soldiers who have nothing on their minds but his clothes.

An interesting gap in the telling of the crucifixion of Jesus, isn't it?

That we would take a moment to talk not only about his clothes, but about the way that his clothes were stitched.

So John tells us that they would tear the garments, divide them in four parts in verse 23, but that the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece.

The detail must be significant for John, that in the very moment that the whole of his gospel has been building to, he's talking about these details.

That the tunic is woven in one piece, so that instead of tearing it, they must cast lots for it.

These men are gambling while the man dies above them.

You can almost miss the weight of what John is trying to tell us here, except that he tells us explicitly, quoting the scriptures from Psalm 22, they divided my garments among them, and from my clothing they cast lots.

A thousand years earlier it was prophesied.

Now it's happening.

The soldiers have no clue.

They're not trying to fulfill anything.

They're passing time.

And yet, as they pass the time, God is ironically fulfilling every detail about the crucifixion, pointing our mind not only to its reality, but its significance.

John then in verse 29 gives us one more significant detail.

There, Jesus is offered sour wine.

It's lifted to his lips on a hyssop branch.

Again, John never being random in the details, he gives, wants us to see something so clearly here.

That on the very week of Passover celebration, Jesus is offered a hyssop branch.

In Exodus chapter 12, in the first Passover, hyssop was used to apply the blood of the Passover lamb to the doorposts.

Exodus 12 · chapter mention

You may remember in Exodus 12, when judgment was coming both to Egypt and Israel, they were told that there would be salvation for those who painted the blood with the hyssop branch on the doorposts of their home.

On the day of Passover, then, the angel of death flew over and passed over every home which was marked by the blood.

It was the day that the people of Israel had celebrated every single year thereafter, a reminder that on the day of Passover, Israel wasn't saved because the people in the house were innocent.

They were saved merely by the blood of the Lamb being painted with the hyssop on the doorposts of their house.

They were saved because the Lamb had died in their place.

The only difference between those who on that day the angel of death fell in judgment upon, and those who were passed over was that the hyssop branch had applied blood in the moment of rescue, that the hyssop branch had applied blood when the judgment passed over, that the hyssop branch reminded them of the reality that a lamb was killed in their place.

And here's the hyssop branch again at the cross.

It is the same image.

The hyssop branch being extended into the Passover lamb who receives his final drink.

Identified at the moment of his sacrifice by men who have no idea what they are doing.

Find it fascinating, you can be this close to the most important moment in the history of humanity and still not see it.

You can stand at the foot of the cross and miss its meaning.

You can be here at this Good Friday service.

You can have grown up in church.

You can have been told the stories all of your life and still never actually behold Jesus for who he is, hanging on the cross, his body broken, bloodied.

His breath is fading.

Never see that this is the Lamb of God, who is taking away the sin of the world, whose judgment is being poured out both spiritually and physically.

And who's doing it in your place?

Who is there for your sin.

You can stand so close to this, closer than you and I even have ever stood and miss it.

Oh, that by the Holy Spirit you wouldn't miss it this morning.

Oh, that the Holy Spirit would deliver a truth to your heart in this very moment that was not in the heart of those men.

Love one, can you behold him?

John won't let you miss it.

After all the mocking, after all the questioning, after all the rejection, after hours and hours of being crucified on the cross in complete and utter silence, Jesus speaks.

He lifts up his voice in verse thirty.

And having received the sour wine, he said, It is finished.

The crown of thorns by which he bore your curse.

It is finished.

The judgment seat on which the verdict was rendered, the payment, Jesus says, it is finished.

The sign above his head declaring his kingship, the coronation, Jesus says, it is finished.

The Lamb of God bleeding out at the altar of crucifixion, Jesus declares, the sacrifice is finished, so that this morning Jesus could look to you, loved one, and declare it is finished.

That it is done, that there is nothing left to do, that you can contribute nothing else, that the job is finished, that the payment is complete.

The only question then is, will you behold him and believe that it is so?

You believe it, loved one.

Everyone in this passage saw him and got it wrong.

They saw weakness and missed glory.

They saw a man on trial and missed the judge of the world.

They saw a man being crucified and missed the very Lamb of God.

Do not be that close to what Jesus did on Good Friday and miss it.

Behold the man.

Behold your king.

Behold the Lamb and the judge.

It is finished.

This morning we gather together not just to hear it, but to remember it in communion.

Jesus gave us a way to behold him rightly, not with just our minds, not with just the eyes of faith, but in communion, he gives us a physical cup, his body and blood poured out for us.

On your way in, you received one of these cups, and if you didn't, the ushers are making their way to the front of the worship center now, and you can flag one of them down, they'll get one into your hands.

This cup represents his body broken for you.

This cup represents his blood poured out for you.

A declaration of completion that it is completely finished, that it is held in your very hands.

And perhaps in this moment you would hold it and cease from fumbling around with anything or taking off the lid, you're gonna have a time to do that, but maybe just hold it and in the silence reflect on this physical gift that has been given to you, a reminder of the declaration of the king who wore your curse, of the judge who took your verdict, of the Lamb who stood in your place.

As you take the bread, as you drink the cup, my prayer for you is that you would receive what Jesus Christ has finished.

And as the worship team sings over us, you can feel free to take this whenever you're ready, and then to join us in standing as we worship Jesus Christ, taking this as you behold him, not a mere man, but as the Son of God, worthy of all praise.