Mark 14:54 Commentary and Bible Study

You can try and imagine what the palace of the high priest looked like. There are claims that it has been located and excavated, but all is still controversial. However it would have been a very grand building, a huge building of stone, near the temple. As you went in through a very imposing archway and a long porch leading to the courtyard within – which had no roof; the courtyard was an open-air courtyard – then to the left, let us say, there was a great reception room, and in that Christ's trial before Annas took place. There were a smaller number of chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees in that reception room, and Christ was bound and he was bundled in there, and that was the first trial or hearing. Then he was dragged out across the courtyard – Peter was in that courtyard – to the great hall on another side where the entire Sanhedrin Council, such as were in Jerusalem, had assembled, and there was the trial there.‘And Peter followed him afar off.’ At the inaugural Lord’s Supper, the Lord Jesus Christ had said to Peter, ‘Simon, Simon [this is a very solemn word to him], behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat’ (Luke 22:31). Satan has desired to put you in this great sieve, and in goes the wheat and it is shaken and shaken until the grain falls through, leaving only the husks, the chaff. Satan wants to shake you and shake you, so that you fall and it is proved that you are no disciple of mine. You are just chaff; you follow me only for something that you are going to have. He doesn’t believe that you are genuine. It is rather as Satan claimed of Job to God, in the Book of Job: ‘Job doesn’t serve you for nothing, only for what he gets from you.’ ‘But I have prayed for thee’, says the Lord to Peter, ‘that thy faith fail not’ (Luke 22:32). Peter has been warned, but he insisted that he was ready to die with the Lord (Luke 22:33), and so now he follows the band of those who have arrested Christ, and John also followed, we learn from John’s Gospel (John 18:15). He had fled at first like the other disciples, but now at a safe distance he follows the Lord even into the palace of the high priest.