March 21

And led him unto Pilate.—Luke 23:1.

IN leading Jesus to Pilate, the Jews have left incontrovertible evidence, that now all power had passed from them as a nation, seeing it was not now lawful for them to put any man to death. So that the prediction of Jacob had evidently received its realization, viz., that the sceptre had departed from Judah, and the lawgiver from between his feet; and therefore, if that was a true prophecy, the Shiloh had now come. In leading Jesus to Pilate, the fact and notoriety of his death, would be more extensively circulated, and more generally known. The tidings of the crucifixion of the far famed claimant of the Jewish Messiahship, would thus be conveyed through the whole length and breadth of the Roman empire. Besides, it was by Jesus dying under a Roman sentence, that he expired upon a cross, which was a capital punishment among the Romans only. As one observes, his death would have been expiatory, had he been beheaded like John the Baptist, or stoned like Stephen; but how then could the types have been accomplished, especially that of the brazen serpent; and how could the predictions of the Psalmist, in the 22nd Psalm, have been so literally and strikingly accomplished. Thus when they led Jesus to Pilate, they were fulfilling, though unconsciously, what God had foredetermined, and what prophets had foretold should come to pass. Besides, as the sequel will demonstrate, by leading Jesus to Pilate, their own wickedness and the innocency of the Saviour, became more obviously apparent. What must have been the feelings of the generous and lovely Jesus, thus to be exposed to the assembly of the wicked; thus to be encompassed by dogs, and to be beset by the bulls of Bashan. (Psalms 22:12.) Yet so it was, he was abandoned by his disciples, persecuted to the death by his own nation, and now dragged before a Gentile tribunal, for the sentence to be ratified, and put into execution. How meditation on this subject, should reconcile us to calumny, to reproach, and to suffering, for his sake who thus allowed unnumbered billows of anguish to pass over him that he might finish the work of redemption on behalf of a guilty and dying world.