13 So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Stone Pavement, and in Aramaic Gabbatha. 14 Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” 15 They cried out, “Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” 16 So he delivered Him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus, 17 and He went out, bearing His own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. 18 There they crucified Him, and with Him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. 19 Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 20 Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. 21 So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’” 22 Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”
Today we come to the cross itself, and during the next few weeks we will be looking at the significance of the cross in some detail, because the day that Jesus died for the sins of the world is the most important day in all of history.
The sovereign hand of God and Jesus’ obedience to the will of the Father are the backdrops to the tragedy played out as Jesus went to the cross, yet, at the same time, it is impossible to overlook the corruption and hypocrisy of both the Romans and the Jews at the same time.
Pilate had done everything he could, short of actually doing his job properly to have Jesus released, while the Jewish authorities were determined that Jesus should be executed, going so far as threatening to report Pilate to Caesar if necessary.
Pilate then made a great show of presenting Jesus to them by proclaiming, “Behold your King!” The sarcasm here is easy to see and his audience plumbed new depths of depravity. The response of the people took them even deeper into their sinful rejection of their Messiah. “They cried out, ‘Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’” (John 19:15)
This was the final step in the process John wrote about in the prologue of his Gospel. “He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him.” (John 1:11) We have no king but Caesar. What a tragic and dreadful thing for God’s chosen people to say. They actually hated Caesar and had always claimed that God was their king, so why would they stoop so low as to say they had no king but Caesar? Their hatred of Jesus was so great they would rather deny their own convictions and beliefs in order to have Jesus put to death.
George Campbell Morgan wrote, “In that sentence the Jewish nation expressed, through its rulers, their final subjugation by Gentile power, and their rejection of their birthright inheritance. They bowed the neck to Caesar in order to murder Jesus.”
They rejected the Messiah whom God had promised them, and in so doing they renounced their sacred covenant with God. They replaced God Himself with an evil Gentile dictator. The Bible scholar George Beasley-Murray wrote, “This renunciation of Jesus is nothing less than the abandonment of the messianic hope of Israel and their repudiation of the promise of the kingdom of God, with which the gift of the Messiah is inseparably bound in Jewish faith.”
Paul wrote in Romans 10:3, “Being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness.” The result of this rejection of their Messiah was that they were now in the same position as the Gentiles they actually hated. Ephesians 2:12 calls them “strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”
Their own Scriptures pointed them to Jesus, but they rejected Him, and the warning to us is clear to see. Those who do not receive Jesus as Lord and King, who hear and reject the Gospel, and refuses to humble themselves as sinners before God’s throne of mercy, consign themselves to a life of increasing darkness, and ultimately to eternal destruction. There is nothing worse than having no hope, and without God in the world.
The Jews, by saying, “We have no king but Caesar,” probably thought such a statement was nothing more than a casual, passing remark, but they really had no idea just what they were saying. The name of Jesus Christ continues to be flippantly blasphemed today, and just as the Jews in Jesus’ day, people have no idea what they are saying, but this is a direct result of willful rejection of the only Saviour of the world. When we become desensitised to just how evil and depraved our hearts really are, our sin no longer bothers us, and that is a very dangerous place to be.
God has given us His own Son, only to find His grace rejected with contempt by so many. Hebrews 2:1-4 gives us a stern warning. “We must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will.”
James Boice writes, “Someone has said that human beings never learn anything from history except that they never learn anything from history. The rejection of God and Jesus is not a Jewish verdict alone. It is the verdict of the human race. What else does the fall of man mean if it is not the willful rejection of God’s rule? It means, ‘We will not abide by His restrictions.’ What does the crucifixion of Jesus mean if it does not mean, ‘We will not have this man to rule over us?’”
Verse 16 tells us that Pilate then handed Jesus over to the Jews to be crucified. Mark Johnston wrote of this pivotal moment in history, “It is for this moment that the whole of the Bible has been preparing us. From the time of the Fall, throughout the whole Old Testament revelation, God was leading His people towards that day when He would send a Saviour and through Him bring about salvation for all time. Similarly, from the moment of the conception of Jesus in the womb of the virgin Mary, right through to the climax of His ministry in Jerusalem, the Gospels have been preparing us for this - His death, and everything that it would achieve.”
It’s interesting that John, just like the other Gospel writers, doesn’t dwell on the details of the physical suffering of Jesus as He was flogged and then crucified. Death by crucifixion is generally agreed to be the most brutal and cruellest means of execution ever invented, but the Gospel writers quite correctly focus on the spiritual anguish of Jesus as He bore the sins of humanity on the cross.
It’s also worth noting that the original audiences that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote to would have been familiar with such a dreadful means of execution, as it was quite common in the Roman Empire in the first century, so it just wasn’t necessary to go into all the details.
Also, placing too much emphasis on the physical suffering of Jesus, as horrific as it was, tends to overshadow the real suffering He underwent on the cross as the Son of God endured the horror of God’s righteous wrath at human sin. It was this suffering which caused His cry of anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
Leviticus 16:27 says, “The bull for the sin offering and the goat for the sin offering, whose blood was brought in to make atonement in the Holy Place, shall be carried outside the camp. Their skin and their flesh and their dung shall be burned up with fire.” Jesus was taken outside the city walls of Jerusalem to die, just as the Israelites had performed sacrifices for centuries on the Day of Atonement.
There was no protection outside the city walls in those days. That was the place of death and destruction, a foreboding picture of the desolation of hell, and yet, it is precisely there where the writer of Hebrews talks about the salvation we need. “The bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through His own blood. Therefore let us go to Him outside the camp and bear the reproach He endured.” (Hebrews 13:11-13)
We’re told in verse 17 that Jesus carried His own cross to Golgotha, and here we see a fulfilment of what happened at Mount Moriah nearly 2000 years earlier. In fact, many scholars believe that Mount Moriah and Golgotha are the same place.
“Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘My father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.” (Genesis 22:6-8)
The first thoughts that usually come to mind when we read the story of God telling Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice is one of horror. How could God ask him to do such a thing, we say. But how else are we to understand the enormity of our sin, and the cost of our salvation? When we see the clear link between Genesis 22 and the atoning death of Jesus as God’s own Son carried the wood of the cross and provided the perfect Lamb of God as the sacrifice for our sin, what a wonderful picture we see of the infinite price of our salvation.
Jesus took not only Isaac’s place as the final, perfect sacrifice, but He takes the place of everyone whose guilt and sin requires that Jesus should die so that we can be spared the wrath of God that we deserve. In the cross of Christ, God provides the sacrifice which frees us from the condemnation of our sin.
There is also a tremendous amount of significance in the fact that Jesus was crucified along with two other people. “There they crucified Him, and with Him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.” (John 19:18)
Isaiah 53:12 says, “He poured out His soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors.” The Romans probably meant to add to Jesus’ shame by placing Him between two condemned sinners, but this gives us a graphic insight into the whole purpose of Jesus’ life and death. The Pharisees had criticised Him for socialising with and eating with sinners, but here He now dies with sinners, the very people He came to save. He said in Mark 2:17, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners,” so it was more than appropriate for Jesus to be crucified between guilty sinners, because He came to us for the specific purpose of dying for our sins.
Leon Morris wrote in his commentary about Jesus dying with two criminals, “For the writers of the Gospels this was not an insult but the expression of an important truth. Jesus came to save sinners. He died to save them, and the fact that on the cross He hung between people who were obviously grievous sinners graphically illustrated that truth. His death was a death on behalf of sinners, and His position when He died brought that out for those who had eyes to see.”
The difference between those two men and each of us and Jesus, is that sin is in us, while on the cross as He suffered and died, our sin was place on Jesus.
Paul describes it like this in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” As Jesus bore our sin, God treated Him as if He was guilty of every sin ever committed, and because of that, He now treats us as if we are as righteous as His own Son. The cost of our salvation is quite literally, incalculable, which makes rejection of Jesus Christ as the Saviour just as incalculable. It is the greatest sin.
God, because of the atoning death of Jesus, will forgive every single sin, no matter how despicable or how evil it may be, with one exception: Unbelief. Those who reject Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice will pay the price of their sin themselves. We’ve referred to Jesus’ words in John 3:18 often in this series, and He could not make this truth any clearer: “Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
Pilate, by making the sign which was put onto Jesus’ cross, knew that the Jews would be offended by it, which was probably the reason why he insisted the sign say, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”
What Pilate would not have known was that this was yet another reminder of the sovereign hand of God orchestrating the events of that dreadful, yet glorious day. This small, yet significant detail reminds us of God’s control over the death of Jesus, and even as He hung on the cross in shame, the glory of Christ shines through, because He is the King.
Traditionally the Romans made a condemned man wear a sign around his neck, detailing the crimes he was guilty of as he made his way to the cross, but Jesus was not guilty of anything, and Pilate knew it. So he taunted the Jews by having a sign proclaiming Jesus as their King added to His cross.
Kings did not die on crosses as common criminals, but Jesus did. As Paul wrote in Philippians 2:7-8, Jesus “emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
But He was still the King, even as He suffered and died. The role of kings in those days was to conquer, provide, rule, and make peace. Jesus did all of these things while on the cross. Christ the King conquered our enemy the devil, He provided forgiveness for our sins, He rules in our hearts, and He makes peace between sinners and a holy God.
Jesus achieved all of these kingly tasks as He hung on the cross, which is why it was right for Him to be acclaimed as the true King, even in death.
It is also no coincidence that Pilate wrote in three languages on that sign. “Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek.” (John 19:20)
Just a week before His death, Jesus said, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:23,32) And now, Israel’s King and the world’s Saviour was lifted up on a cross to be seen by all.
By pointing out that Pilate’s sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek, John is saying that Jesus is available as the King for everyone who chooses to believe in Him. He was not just the Jewish Saviour, but of the Romans and Greeks too. Jesus is the Saviour of the world, just as John the Baptist had said: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29)
Of course, the Jewish authorities were furious when they read the sign on Jesus’ cross, because this sign reminded them of the innocence of the man they condemned, but more importantly it clearly proclaimed their treason against God as they refused to embrace their Messiah.
This is why they said to Pilate in verse 21, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’” Possibly for the first time in this whole episode, Pilate showed some backbone by refusing to give in to their demands. “What I have written I have written.”
Here again we see God’s sovereign will at work. The sign on the cross did not say that Jesus claimed to be the King of the Jews. It stated the truth. Even while Jesus hung on the cross, the place of ultimate shame and humiliation, He still ruled as the King of kings and Lord of lords. He was and still is the King, and He died because He was the King of God’s chosen people, and because only through His death can anyone, Jew and Gentile alike be forgiven and reconciled to God for all of eternity.
The Cross of Calvary speaks not only of God’s grace to the world but it also reveals the state of human hearts. The chief priests’ objection to Pilate’s sign shows how hardened and dark their hearts had become. They refused to humble themselves as sinners before God, and in so doing the cross stands in judgment of them.
But the grace found at the cross is for all who turn in repentance and faith to Jesus, just as one of those crucified with Him found. John doesn’t record his confession, assuming that his readers would be familiar with Luke’s account.
The believing thief recognised that he was a sinner. He said to the other criminal crucified with him, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” (Luke 23:40-41)
Recognising and acknowledging our sin against God is always the first step towards salvation. Until we see our need for a Saviour, we will not turn to God. This man did. But not only that, he knew that Jesus was the Saviour He needed, and he received the gift of eternal life as He turned to Christ and was saved.
We are no different to that man. Each one of us stands guilty before God, and we need the grace of Christ to save us. I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of John Newton, the former slave trader who was dramatically transformed by the grace of God. He wrote many hymns, including Amazing Grace. Towards the end of his life, Newton said, “Two things I know: I am a great sinner, but Christ is a great Saviour.”
Will you see your great need and turn to Christ and be saved, or will you be like the other thief on the cross, cursing the name of the only Saviour of the world, and condemned for that blasphemy forever? If there is only one thing we can learn from the man crucified with Jesus, it is this: Until we draw our last breath in this life, it is never too late to bow the knee and confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. But you must confess Him to be saved.
Charles Spurgeon, in a sermon preached in December 1874 said, “This is Jesus the King of the Jews. He claims to be King, so stand at the foot of the cross, I pray you, and admit His claim. If you would have Jesus to be your Saviour, you must have Him as your King; you must submit to His government, for He claims the right to rule over all who acknowledge Him to be Jesus; yea, more than that, He claims to rule all mankind, for all power is given unto Him in heaven and in earth, and we are bidden to proclaim His kingdom throughout the whole world, and to say to all men, “Jesus of Nazareth is your King, bow down before Him. Ye kings, bow before Him, for He is King of kings; ye lords and nobles, bow before Him, for He is Lord of lords; and all ye sons and daughters of men, bow at His feet, for He must reign; and even if you are His enemies, He must reign over you; in spite of all your enmity and opposition, you must be brought to lie at His feet. The claims of Christ, therefore, were published even from the tree on which He died; so do not resist them, but willingly yield yourselves up to Jesus now, and let Him be King to you henceforth and for ever.”
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 19:13-22
Discuss the significance of the crowd’s statement in verse 15.
How do we still hear this cry in the world today?
Read Genesis 22:1-8
This is a difficult passage to understand, unless it is read with the cross of Christ in mind.
How does the story of Abraham and Isaac point us to Jesus’ sacrifice?
When Pilate fixed his sign to Jesus’ cross, he had no idea of the true meaning of what he wrote.
Discuss the simple, yet significant truth it proclaimed.
Why was this sign written in 3 languages?
Read Luke 23:39-43
What does this teach us about how we are able to come to salvation?