The following is a sermon transcript from our Sunday Service at The Rock Church in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Each week, we gather to worship, learn from God’s Word, and grow together. This transcript is provided as a free resource to encourage and equip you in your walk with Christ. While you’re welcome to read and share this content for personal use, we kindly ask that it not be redistributed or published elsewhere without prior written consent from The Rock Church.
Introduction
The human heart is a fascinatingly wicked little thing, is it not? You guys all know this, but I’m sure that you’ve heard in, you know, secular circles, the human heart is basically good. Deep down, people are basically kind, loving, generous.
Well, if any one of you would say that, and I don’t think you would, but if you meet someone that would say that, send them to me. I would love to talk to them. I would say to them, let’s get you out from under that rock you’ve been living under. I’m just gonna turn the TV on, and I’m gonna show you something.
And when you do turn the TV on, there’s one thing that you see every single time, no matter what: Forensic Files. When I turn on the TV, I can be assured that Forensic Files will be on. They must run it 24 hours a day on HLN channel. Actually, they only run it 19 hours straight a day. I looked it up. Only 19 hours straight of programming. That’s 38 episodes. That’s 38 episodes of Forensic Files to show us all these heinous, wicked acts that people are committing in our country.
It’s terrible. It’s depraved. And I can’t look away. It’s terrible. I get sucked into the Forensic Files. The narrator, Peter Thomas, does an incredible job. If you’ve never seen Forensic Files, this is how almost every one of them starts: Steve Rasmussen came home at the same time every day, but not this day. Investigators found a single peanut M&M with DNA on it.
Anyway, and of course, you know, that peanut M&M is the whole key to, you know, solving the crime, and they get him, and it’s always some scorned lover who takes out a life insurance policy. It’s wicked. It’s wicked stuff. And when I tell myself I’m only going to watch the first five minutes of this thing, and three hours later, there I am, glued in the thick of a 19-hour Forensic Files marathon.
So if you want to join me in that sometime, I’ll bring the snacks. It’ll be awesome. We can expose ourselves to the depraved moral condition of man together. And I wouldn’t recommend these marathons because after I do binge watch Forensic Files, I can be feeling pretty hopeless, pretty depressed, pretty saddened about just the condition that we’re in.
So what is going to be the solution to this world of evil? Can man be the solution to the evil? No, man caused the evil. How could man be the solution to the problem that he caused? No, no. The good always has to come from God to overwhelm the evil.
And that’s why my main point tonight is this: From man’s deepest evil, God can bring about his highest good.
Thank you, Ben. You helped me this week to form these points. I appreciate it.
Some secondary points are these. Men collect and store up evil in their hearts. Point number two progresses. It’s Satan leverages our own evil inclinations in order to further his goals. And then number three is the hopeful one. Even when evil is increasing, God is accomplishing his good purposes.
In these verses that Ben read here, Luke 22, verses 1 through 7, we can see into the hearts of evil men. They are literally hell-bent on murdering a truly innocent, peaceful, loving, wise, and popular teacher, Jesus. And that offends us. Even our warped sense of justice and morality is offended by this crime that they’re plotting. But what we’ll find at the end of it is that God was using their evil for a very good purpose for us.
So I’m going to read the first two verses again.
Now the feast of unleavened bread drew near, which is called the Passover. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to death, for they feared the people.
Men Collect and Store Up Evil in Their Hearts
So the chief priests, who are these guys? They’re also called Sadducees. This is the established religious order of the day. They’re rich. They’re well-connected. They’re well-connected with the Romans. Your everyday Jew could not stand the Roman oppression in Israel, but the Sadducees, these chief priests, they were quite agreeable to it. They were profiting from it. It was really working out for them.
So, of course, they’re going to despise anything that upsets the delicate order that they are profiting from. So, when Jesus comes along… We are not happy about Jesus coming along. Jesus, he has not been trained in the religious schools. He has not apprenticed under the famous rabbis. He comes from dubious birth circumstances, doesn’t he? Did you hear that his parents were not even married when he was born?
So he’s coming out. The Sadducees are simultaneously disdainful of Jesus, also threatened by Jesus. And they must have been so incredibly jealous of Jesus. Just days earlier, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, a king’s welcome from the people. This was the time of the year, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. They’re supposed to be the stars, man. They’re supposed to be the stars of the show. All the attention on them during this feast.
The Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, it’s an eight-day process. They happen concurrently. There’s the Passover, and Wednesday was Passover this week. So there’s the Passover and then seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
Here’s how you get ready for the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Well, first of all, you’ve got to pick out your Passover lamb. You set it aside four days prior to the slaughter. You inspect it. You’ve got to make sure it’s worthy of the sacrifice. And also, people are cleaning out their houses regularly. They’re sweeping out the corners. They’re getting the cabinets. They’re getting the dishes scrubbed. Why? To get rid of the leaven. And the leaven, of course, represents sin.
Jews are still doing this today. They’re vacuuming out their cars. Any crumb of leaven from their Tastykake, that is too much, because it has yeast in it. The idea is your life is supposed to be spotless, so at the very least, they are making a big outward show of getting their act together. They’re getting their lives cleaned up. They’re doing a deep clean.
As Christians, we know that this powerful symbolism is from that ancient traditional feast and it connects to Christ. We know that there is a deep connection to what the Jews are doing for their Passover lamb and their Feast of Unleavened Bread, getting the sin out, to what Christ was fulfilling during that feast.
1 Corinthians 5 explains it well.
For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
So in the story from Luke, we get to see what Paul called the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil. The priests and the scribes are chowing down on the leaven of malice and evil in this text. During that exact time, they’re supposed to be examining their lives, looking deep, getting the sin out. What are they doing? They’re getting together in the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms, conspiring, you know, getting their little hands, doing this thing. You always know something’s going down when people are doing this. And that’s what they’re doing.
They’re conspiring to murder an innocent man as their households are cleaning up the leaven out of the corners, the cabinets, the dishes. Meanwhile, the holy men here, they’re secretly harboring this closet full of leaven, this closet full of sin, storing it up while their households are making a big show of getting rid of it.
Are we seeing the hypocrisy here, the contradiction, the absurdity even? We must be careful not to think that we are so much better than these chief priests and scribes. Yes, I’m talking to you, you good people of the rock. These villains of the Bible, are they there for us to puff up and say we’re so much better than them, we’re so much more moral? No, they’re there, these villains, to show us how much we are like them, unfortunately. How much more we’re like them than like Jesus, that’s for sure.
I got a confession to make there. I’m going to say it. I had a little bit of murder in my heart this week. The neighbors roaring by 5 a.m., the loud exhausts. That feeling that I had in here, it was not Christ-like love. It was not.
And we easily dismiss those thoughts. We think that those sins that we’re harboring in our heart, our thoughts, those are our secret sins. But they matter, too. The things that we do in secret are still leaven that we’re storing up in our hearts.
So in the verses that we just read here, it says that the chief priests and scribes, it says they’re seeking how to put him to death, for they fear the people. So they want this murder to be done privately, discreetly, secretly, away from the people. And that’s a big problem because Jesus was always surrounded by a lot of people.
So they’re in their little room conspiring. They’ve got a big problem. That thing that they’re trying to do, they want to make sure that no one sees them do it. They know that it’s really bad. They know that it’s sin. So the chief priests and scribes, they feared the people, is what it says. But what about the fear of the Lord? What about the fear of the Lord who sees in the secret, who sees into the secret places?
Anyway, I guess for them, the end justified the means and whatever it took to keep their grip on the power, the money was worth it as long as they could do it in secret. But you can close the door. You can draw the shade. Sin is still sin, no matter what. Whether it’s happening outside of your body or inside of your heart, it’s sin.
But the hypocrisy that we see of these supposedly holy men, these religious leaders, concealing, scheming, it’s a foregone conclusion that they are going to murder Jesus. They’re just arguing over how they’re going to do it. Such an incredible amount of evil being stored up in the hearts of these men.
And it’s quite a dilemma for them. Like I just said, they don’t want it to be messy. How are they going to accomplish this evil task when Jesus is always in these public spaces and that’s the only time that they have access to them? If only there was someone on the inside that could give them the information on how to get to Jesus away from the people when the crowds are all gone.
So in verses 3 to 6, we’re going to see what happens. It’s an answer that does come to their wicked dilemma. It’s a solution that seems too good to be true when one of the twelve, a disciple named Judas, comes calling.
So point one was men collect and store up evil in their hearts.
Satan Leverages Our Evil Inclinations to Further His Goals
Now point number two is that Satan leverages those evil inclinations to further his goals.
Verses 3 to 6:
Then Satan entered into Judas, called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve. He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them. And they were glad and agreed to give him some money. So he consented and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of a crowd.
We know only a few things about Judas Iscariot from the Bible, but his reputation certainly precedes him, does it not? Biblical names, very popular. Judas, not so much. My name is rare. My name is Duncan. And I looked up, Mount Laurel, New Jersey, public records. There are eight Duncans in New Jersey. There are zero Judases in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. It is not a popular name because it’s synonymous with evil. It’s synonymous with treachery, betrayal. No one’s naming their kid Judas. If I name my kid Judas, I’d have to give him a pretty good nickname to get around that.
Well, we see a curious thing that happens to Judas here, something that’s terrifying. It says, Satan entered into Judas, which I’m going to try to explain to you. And we really have to be precise in how we explain the actions of Judas because there’s multiple forces working here at the same time.
And firstly, the force number one is that God is sovereign absolutely over all. He has decreed everything that has occurred and everything that will occur. The Second London Confession says this: God’s wisdom is displayed in directing all things. Some things, most things, the good things. No, all of the things, even the ugly things.
The second force at work on Judas here is spiritual warfare. I do believe in spiritual warfare. I believe in the schemes of the devil. The Bible warns us about him. Our adversary has been given limited power in this world, in this age, and he uses it to make life as miserable as possible for people. So that’s the second force.
Then the third is I believe that people are moral agents that make actual choices. And these choices matter. Our choices matter to God. I’m personally responsible for my bad choices, even if it was part of God’s decree. Even if it was part of God’s decree, I’m still responsible for my bad choices.
So when we read that Satan entered into Judas and then he went away to betray Jesus, was this because God appointed him to do it or Satan tempted him to do it or Judas chose to do it? And the answer is yes to all three of those things. Those are all true at the same time.
This betrayal that was unfolding was decreed by God and prophesied about in Psalm 41:9:
Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me.
It’s a decree, folks. Created beings usually don’t understand how they are being used in the moment by God to accomplish his decree. Satan didn’t understand. He didn’t understand that this was part of the redemptive plan that God had. It was unfolding. All Satan saw was this is an opportunity. I’m going to destroy Jesus by getting to Judas.
So Satan entered Judas. Do you think that this means that Judas was just this poor, innocent bystander, minding his own business, and then Satan came into him, controlling his mind and body like a robot to do Satan’s bidding? No. Satan entering Judas is not like a hand entering a sock puppet. I promise. It’s not like that. Satan did not force his way into Judas. Satan was an invited guest of Judas. Judas had been giving those come hither looks to Satan his entire life, preparing a guest room for Satan in his heart.
This is just the moment when Satan took him up on that invitation and said, Judas, you’ve been inviting me in your entire life. Let’s make this thing official, baby. You’re mine. And that’s when they just completely united.
I don’t want you to make any mistake on this. Satan did not have the upper hand on Judas. It’s quite the opposite, actually. Judas had the power that you and I have to resist the devil. And more importantly, all of the intercessory power of Jesus himself was available to Judas to help him. We are not tempted beyond our ability. Amen. We are able to resist.
But instead of resisting the temptation, Judas nurtured the temptation, loved the temptation. He was like a little pet for Judas, taking care of the temptation. The temptation grew up, grew big. It started small, just a few coins here and there from the money bag.
John 12:6 says:
Judas was a thief, and having charge of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
So there it is. As the treasurer of the group who was supposed to be stewarding these money gifts that were given to Jesus’ ministry, he’s instead treating the money bag like his own personal take a penny, leave a penny.
And do we have any examples of that still today in the visible church? People who are outwardly disciples, but they’re stealing from the Lord, stealing from the Lord’s people. You know we have those. That greed and love of money is the foothold that Judas gave to Satan. And then Satan used it to break down any sort of loyalty that Judas had. Once Satan knew what Judas’ button was, he started pushing it. Satan started grooming Judas for the betrayal of Christ. And that’s what adversaries do to win traitors. They groom them over time. They prepare them, they gain their trust, and then they exploit them for their goals.
Judas never thought about how money was supposed to be used to serve Christ. He was more concerned with how Christ could be used to get some money. And Satan used that as an inroad. Once you give Satan a toe in the door, he can push it wide open. The destruction of your soul starts with small sins. Small invitations to the devil. Even those of us who are visibly part of the church.
Luke, he makes it a point to write for us here that Judas was of the number of the 12 in the inner sanctum. He was on the team. He was getting the most of Jesus. He was seeing the miracles. He was getting the most instruction, revelation, care, love. Imagine how those multitudes that were following Jesus longed to be one of the 12, the inner team.
So he was part of that group, but not really, was he? He was a member of the 12 visibly, but Jesus knew from a long time ago that his heart was dead, rotten, unregenerate. Jesus surely had put a calling on Judas’s life, but it was not an effectual calling unto salvation. It was Judas was purposed to be lost. That was his calling. He was surely a vessel prepared beforehand for destruction, and not just a vessel to be destroyed, but a vessel to carry destruction. He brought destruction in a vessel to be delivered upon the body of Jesus Christ.
So Judas goes to the enemies of Jesus and the disciples to betray them. He’s switching sides here. I’m sure that he was titillated by the rise of Christ’s ministry. He was excited by all the things that he thought that he could get from it. Not the spiritual things, but the material things. Because the more that Jesus’ ministry was growing, the more economic benefit Judas could skim off of the top of it.
And when Jesus came into Jerusalem just a couple days earlier, I said he had a triumphal entry, the King’s welcome. They were so excited for Jesus. They’re laying their coats down so that the donkey colt could go over them. Judas must have been so encouraged by that energy because people like that love to open their pocketbooks.
But then that Holy Week that we’re talking about, there’s something that changed about Jesus’ message. Instead of using that popularity to kind of keep that religious fervor going, Jesus’ message was getting darker and darker. He started talking about things like, well, he threw out the moneylenders from the temple, didn’t he? And he was confronting religious leaders, making a lot of enemies. He starts talking about the temple being destroyed, people being imprisoned, tortured, persecution, all these things.
These are not warm, fuzzy messages, and Judas must have had his hands over his face saying, no, no, no. It’s all, it was all going so well, and now it’s not. And so Judas knew in that time period, I think, that instead of being ascending directly to the throne, this Messiah was going to a cross instead. And Judas wanted out of that. He wanted to switch sides.
He went to the chief priests and says, of course, they were glad. This is the answer to their problem. This is their big break. There was some money that changed hands, 30 shekels of silver, a nice bit of coin but not, you know, quit your day job forever type of money. But when the road with Jesus was looking tough, Judas found the off ramp and he needed a new gravy train. So those chief priests, they supplied it.
Judas may have had the title of disciple as one of the 12, but he was never actually one of them. Judas referred to Jesus as Rabbi. Never Lord. He never called Jesus Lord. He was a fence-sitter the entire time, the entire ministry of Christ, never committing, never being saved. And then Satan pounced on that.
Satan is still out there craving to turn the visible disciples of Jesus against Christ. Because your adversary, he prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. There’s nothing that would excite Satan more than devouring a Christian tonight.
If you’re someone that comes to church but has never called Jesus Lord in your heart, then you have a target on your back. The devil is aiming at you. Don’t be a fence-sitter. Ben said on Sunday, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?
Judas turned against Christ because he had never been given the gift of faith. And he didn’t believe that Jesus would win. He didn’t have faith that Jesus would win against these enemies that are gathering against him. And so he joined the enemies. And that was part of God’s decree.
So now that we’re all depressed, men collect evil in their hearts. Satan leverages our own evil inclinations to further his goals.
Even When Evil Is Increasing, God Is Accomplishing His Good Purposes
Now for something encouraging. When evil is increasing, God is accomplishing his good purposes. It’s going to get better here, I promise.
Verse 7:
Then came the day of unleavened bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed.
So, did the death of Jesus have to happen? Couldn’t there have been another way? No. No, I call that theological back talk. Romans 9 is very clear. Who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Parents don’t like back talk. Do you think God likes back talk? No. So, who are you to talk back to God that you have a better plan?
This betrayal, the injustice, the agony, it was required for God’s plan to be fulfilled. The angel at the tomb reminded the women, remember how he told you? While he was still in Galilee, the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and crucified.
So there it is. Christ, our pure and spotless Passover lamb, the lamb who takes away the sin of the world, he fulfilled this very great salvation for us. He endured the worst of the physical, the worst of the emotional, but it had to happen as the scriptures foretold.
Verse 7 says, the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Luke could have written down that the Passover lamb was sacrificed, but instead he conveys the necessity of it by saying the lamb had to be sacrificed. There is not another way for the wrath of God to pass over you other than by the blood of the perfect and spotless lamb.
It’s a commemoration of the first Passover in Egypt. The Israelites, they’re putting the blood of the lamb on their doorposts, taking the branch, dipping it in the bowl, wiping it across the lintel, the crossbeam there. And that was important because that was the mark. So that when the angel of the Lord, bringing a taste of death to Egypt, passed through the land, he passed over the households that had the mark.
And now, if you have faith in Jesus Christ, the mark of the Lamb’s blood is on you. That’s across your doorpost now. The great and terrible day of the Lord is coming when he returns at the end of the age to judge the world in righteousness. What a relief that on that day, God’s wrath will be passing over God’s people.
That’s good news that’s worth feasting over because the Feast of Unleavened Bread, it happens right after the Passover. It’s supposed to be a party. This should have been the feast that ended all feasts. The leaven was gone. The sin was gone. It was swept away, not just for that moment, but completely and forever with this ultimate Passover lamb. The work of the cleaning had been done by Christ for all those who believe.
For the haters in the story that we talked about, they tried everything they could to keep Christ’s kingdom from coming. And the spiritual powers of darkness, indeed, they were at work, but nothing could undo God’s plan. Their evil choices were contained in the bubble of God’s plan. They were encapsulated by the greater reality of God’s plan.
My main point was that God can bring his highest good out of man’s deepest evil. But why does it have to be like this? Why does God use evil to bring about good? And my answer for you is that God has to use evil to bring about good in the world because that’s the only thing he has to work with here. Man’s evil in various degrees is the only thing that we bring to the table. We don’t have any good that we can generate from ourselves for God to use for his plans. So he’s got to make something good out of the evil. And he displays his glorious power by forming beautiful things out of ugly things.
On the night of the crucifixion, when our Passover lamb was being killed, God used the evil plans against him as the actual mechanism to establish his way of defeat over evil. Evil had overplayed its hand. Evil can’t understand the goodness of God, the power of God. Evil can never understand that when evil is increasing, God’s grace and justice and supernatural power are going to be displayed even more, all the more to overwhelm evil, to smother it.
That evil, it might seem victorious for a moment, but the goodness of God will be displayed as even greater in the long run. Remembering this, remembering this story, the way that God has worked in history, it builds up our faith so that when we have evil coming against us, we can take comfort in knowing that God will use it.
God hates evil. God hates evil so much that he frustrates evil by bringing good out of it. When God provided the perfect Passover lamb, that was the greatest good that’s ever been done out of the most evil thing that’s ever been done. And it’s included here to show us something hopeful. The evil from this story is past and gone. It’s over. But the goodness of God and the reality that he has purchased for us, that’s our present joy and future joy. And it lasts forever.
Closing Prayer
All right, join me in prayer now.
Our great God, we exult in what you’ve done. Your ways are so much higher, so much better. We submit ourselves to them. And Lord, you didn’t even spare your own son. How much more will you give to us all things that we ask for in his name?
We thank you for your word. Thank you that you are faithful every day to encourage us from it and that there is no bit of life that is unexperienced by you, Jesus, and that you haven’t counseled us for in your word. You’ve missed nothing.
And we celebrate tonight, this Good Friday, and it is so good what you’ve done for us, Lord. It’s a goodness that we can’t fathom. And we pray for understanding to know just how wide and deep your love is for us.
In Jesus’ name, amen.
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