A tweet went viral a couple years ago for its beautiful irony. Someone was lamenting the massive plague of debt that so many people and so many nations had, and so they suggested that we should “just pin all the debt in the world on one person and then kill him.” Multiple people laughed and responded that they had just accidentally invented Christianity. Isn’t it funny how often the unbelieving world can’t help but unwittingly long for the gospel?
This happened to the chief priests and Pharisees as well, even at their most corrupt. Their stubborn rejection of Jesus had reached a point of being embarrassingly unreasonable. Even when there was no denying he was the Messiah, they only took him as more of a threat, and their reasons for doing so grew to make less and less sense. The problem was that they loved their positions of power and status more than they loved God. And they never would have said so—they were teachers of the Law! But when push came to shove and their love was tested, they ran to protect their worldly treasures by condemning to death the very God they claimed to love. Perhaps that should make us stop and consider what we really love most.
And yet, even in their corrupt and sinful scheming, the gospel accidentally sounded forth. They decided that one man, Jesus, should die so that the whole nation would be spared from Rome’s wrath—not realizing that God’s intention was for that one man to die so that the nation would have eternal life in him. God has a sense of humor!
The fact is that even when we are farthest from God, even when our love is the most distorted, the core desire of all of our hearts is always, always the redemption of the Lord. A sinner is a person who seeks his soul’s redemption and fulfillment in all the wrong places, not knowing that those things can only come from God. Yet even then, any line of reasoning that pursues good things always comes back to the saving work of Christ. One man indeed died so that we may have life. So seek every good thing in him alone.
