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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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John 19:6
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It is not the crowds crying out, not yet. There is a large number of leading clergy, chief priests, scribes, Pharisees, Levitical police and officers. ‘Crucify him.’ And Pilate responds angrily with something which is quite illegal – You do it, do it yourselves. He does not mean that of course. It is illegal for them to do it themselves. Only Pilate can give the order.But the Jewish leaders answered him, ‘We have a law.’ Back in Leviticus, Moses taught that anyone who blasphemed terribly, including the ultimate blasphemy of making themselves God, was to be executed. Now at last they are forgetting about the law of Rome. They know that will not wash. Pilate has found him not guilty, so they are forced to tell the truth – we want him executed because he made himself the Son of God.That was sheer unbelief. There was no trial on that charge. On that charge, he was to be executed virtually without trial. If there had been a trial on that charge, it would have collapsed. Witnesses for the defence would have been called, thousands of them, people who had personally been astonishingly healed, would stand up one after the other. Why any number of people could attest – I was hopeless crippled and deformed, and at a word, he restored my withered limbs and gave me back life. Perhaps they bring forth one of the final miracles, Lazarus – I was dead. And the relatives, yes, he was dead, and he had been in the grave four days, and Christ said, Come forth, and he lived. What would the chief priests, the scribes and the Pharisees have done? Were they not in the front row of the vast crowd when Christ did these miracles and witnessed them for themselves? Any charge that he had falsely called himself the Son of God would have collapsed, there would be so many people who would have said otherwise. Many of these Jewish leaders had seen the raising of Lazarus and been astonished, but they so hardened their heart, and they were so prejudiced and so jealous of him, that they will get their way, if they can, by any means.
Application
Before we were converted, our unbelief was wilful. It was driven by the fact that we wanted sin. We wanted moral liberty, we did not want the restraint that God puts upon us. We did not want to obey him and seek him, and so we hardened our hearts against our natural instincts in the being of God, against all perhaps that we had learned from the Scripture about Christ.
Christ was not only subject to dishonesty outwardly, but in his inward sufferings. When he took the punishment of our sin, he took the punishment for every lie we have ever told, every act of deceit, every dishonest thing. You see it in the outward aspects of Calvary, you may be sure he atoned for all our lies inwardly in his inward suffering.
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