John 11:53 Commentary and Bible Study

Here then is their determination – ‘Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death.’ But their counsel did not succeed. There was another two months to go; they were unable to arrest him, and he went out of the city, and took himself off to a town or village called Ephraim in the Judean desert. Nobody knows quite where it was but it is thought to have been located some twenty miles north-west of Jerusalem. They had done that before, but now they are really serious. However, they had a particular plan, and it is back in Matthew 26:3 and I must just read this to you, because this seems to be the same Sanhedrin meeting – ‘Then assembled together the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders of the people, unto the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas, and consulted that they might take Jesus by subtlety.’ It was never in their plan that it should be a public arrest, and that there should be a trial, or anything of that nature. They consulted as to how they might take him secretly – cunningly, subtly – and just ‘kill him’ – do away with him. And the crowd would never know what had happened, and the people who followed him would lose heart, and be dispersed.And verse 5, of Matthew, 26, ‘But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.’ ‘Yes, under Caiaphas,’ they said, ‘we’ll do it secretly, but we won’t do it yet. We’ll do it after the Passover, when the crowds have gone. We’ll track him down, and we’re simply do away with him.’ Well, you know, of course, that that is not how it happened. Jesus Christ offered himself, in effect, because he came into Jerusalem and it was done at the feast. It was done according to God’s timetable, not according to theirs – and there is importance in that, as we shall see in due course.