12. Chapter 12: Christ Confronted By the Dead Judas
C H A P T E R T W E L V E Christ Confronted By the Dead Judas
Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, Saying I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed,and went and hanged himself.
—Mat 27:3-5.
ISRAEL led its own Redeemer back to the great house of bondage; it delivered Him who was the head and crown of Moses into Pharaoh’s hands. You ask why Israel did this? Because it hated freedom? No, but because it wanted a different freedom than that which Jesus chose to give. And therefore it wanted a different prophesying of that freedom. Well, they could very easily have confronted Christ, the prophet of true freedom, by many of the prophets of that other freedom which they wished. If it is true that the people failed to place the two kinds of prophets over against each other, it is also true that the angels did not hesitate to do so. They set the one over against the other, and God did this also.
Two prophets of that other freedom were brought into judgment together with Jesus on one and the same day, and were cited before the throne of God and men simultaneously. One of these was Barabbas to whom we shall refer later. The other was Judas Iscariot, of whom we have spoken before.[1] This was a striking contrast. Jesus Christ wants to give Israel its freedom, but His people give Him up to the house of bondage. And here are those “other” heroes of liberty who on Christ’s own day have seen their ideal of freedom called into judgment. On the night when Jesus’ soul departed, Barabbas celebrated a great feast and the body of Judas Iscariot lay shattered on the ground. We can say that both of these were dead; but the angel said of both of them that they were not buried.
However, the Son’s struggle for freedom is the antithesis God places over against both of these. Hence it is a part of the calling of Jesus Christ to endure this suffering in which God confronts Him with Barabbas’ frothing cup not only but with Judas’ ebbing blood also. At this point, we must follow the narrative for a moment. After his sinister betrayal, Judas could find no peace again. He saw Jesus given up into the hands of murderers and, restless and tortured in his conscience, he followed Him in his thoughts. Now, as ever before — such was his nature — he did not join the others, but locked up all of his fears within himself, taking counsel with his own soul and his own spirit only. He kept back his anxieties with his own hands. He erased the question marks which his own fingers had written upon his conscience; he personally obliterated the exclamation points of his tortured sense of self-sufficiency. Now, with a bitter despair, he wars against the logic of the facts which he himself has unloosed. In the last analysis, Judas also was in his own fashion an “idealist” Hence he could not feel at ease now. Once he had passed the crisis which had its climax in the act of betrayal, it became clear to him again that if it were true that the Judean, the idealist, the nationalist, the chauvinist had in part prompted him to the act of betrayal, it was also true that his love of money had been one of his motivations.
It is not always possible to keep back introspection, to keep from seeing oneself as one really is. It was not possible for Judas. He saw himself as he was, at least in part. Thereupon he began to make discriminations. He said to himself that he must go to heaven or hell. He feels that he is very near his death. The veil of sin disappears after a time. The hand which keeps turning the mirror aside tires at last; then there is nothing to hinder us from seeing the motives which have prompted our soul to the act of sin, and from discerning precisely the several causes. Then self-revelation comes with a pang. We wake to find that while we were in our sinful drunkenness, that while we were steeped in the sleep of sin, we have tossed ourselves naked. And we discover besides that our son, Ham, has invaded the privacy of our room. Judas now also arrives at the moment of reflection. He detects the differences between one motive and another. He sees at once that it was something more than the orthodox yearning of his Judaistic soul for Israel’s national freedom which drove him to the act of betrayal. Yes, that obstinately held idea of freedom may have induced him to take exception to Jesus Christ — for Jesus certainly was not living up to that ideal. Still, he cannot deny that his greed has also played a part. That fact he can no longer hide from himself. The knowledge one learns from Satan is very clear. But it comes too late, and it does not convert the heart to and by means of a father’s love. At this point, then, Judas falls into Satan’s sieve. That evil spirit convicts him of sin, righteousness, and judgment, but the Holy Spirit does not simultaneously unite him with the righteousness of Christ, with Christ’s merits, and with Christ’s satisfaction for guilt. Now that he has confessed to himself that his avarice was one motive prompting the betrayal, all those other rationalizations derived from his Judean orthodoxy disappear. He discovers suddenly that although Jesus did not come to establish an earthly realm of freedom, He never thwarted a single cry for liberty. He becomes fully convinced that in the persistent contest of war and peace such as Judas had wanted to conduct, Jesus had borne himself as one whose “character” was unimpeachable, even according to Judaistic ethics. Accordingly, Judas now faces the atrocity and the “immorality” of Jesus’ death. All patriots who have “character” must say, “But this is not the royal way of doing things.” They must say that even though the place is seething with priests. Judas confesses it to himself: he has tainted the banner of his Judean order with innocent blood. He confesses to himself that those who shed that blood were tyrants. When he sees Jesus being driven from the judgment hall of the Sanhedrin to the praetorium of Pilate, he understands that nothing can be done about it any more. The blot of blood can never be cleansed from his knightly banner. Judas is no longer an honest man, he knows, not even in the eyes of men.
Therefore the thirty pieces of silver burn in his hand. Mark the plea of this man who has often passed by Jesus, but has never entered into Christ. He goes to the chief priests, throws the money at their feet, fully confesses that the blood of Jesus was innocent blood, and says, “I have sinned, betraying innocent blood.” This is the cry of despair uttered by a broken man, who comes back to his father confessor because he has no other to whom he can go. Nevertheless he knows that he has lost respect for the chief priests. And these have nothing to say other than that he may see for himself what course things will take with them and with his former Master, and that they cannot worry about his scruples and regrets. Hence the confessor stands alone in the darkness. Piteous and despairing, he stands alone in the night. The night is cold and frosty, and there is no one to cover him. God does not — He has not been asked to help. The people do not, the father-confessors do not help him, and Judas’ own soul, too, cannot comfort him any more. He leaves these fathers who have no good word to say to him, and goes out into the night. No, he does not weep bitterly there; he swallows his tears. This was ever his manner. He has changed, and yet he is the same. He stops to talk with no one. He soon finds himself a secluded spot and there he hangs himself. A comparison of Matthew’s account with what is written in the Acts of the Apostles reveals further that Judas, who hanged himself on a tree, could not be supported by the branch after a time, that he fell forward to the ground, and lay there disemboweled. At this point our thoughts can take various directions. We can study the figure of Judas; we can tediously and patiently try to plumb the depths of his soul. We can attempt to point out the wide divergence between his sorrow, between his manifestation of grief, on the one hand, and the spiritual remorse which is in conformity with God and which leads to genuine conversion unto salvation. We can consider the difference between Peter’s denial and the remorse which followed upon it and which was fruitful unto salvation, and Judas’ fruitless coiling about on the same human plane. We can even stop to point out that the words which Judas spoke were not the expression of a heart which is truly penitent and converted to God.
Those are possibilities and each might be pursued with profit. For it is true that Judas does not by his manner of speaking and confessing appear to be a true penitent. “I have sinned,” he says. But what the passage really states is this: “I have made a mistake.” And this confession is nothing more than a condemnation of a particular thing; it is not a condemnation of the evil root of which that thing is the product, nor of the whole condition of his lost life. It is true, besides, that Judas condemns his act only as measured by human standards and not as evaluated in comparison with the eternal righteousness of God. Moreover, although Judas admits that Jesus’ blood is innocent, he does not take a refuge in this blood as having in it the power to make others innocent before God. In addition, we can say that although Judas comes to make his confession before men, he does not come to God; he does go to the confessional of his former paymasters, but he makes no admission to the one Paymaster of all human guilt. Him he should have seized upon in order to implore Him to give him that which could have ministered to his peace. Yes, he no longer condemns the man Jesus as He is over against human law, but he does not seek the shelter of Christ over against the divine judgment. Then, too, by determining his own penalty he does what is the prerogative of judges and thus manifests an arrogance which would certainly not be his if he had been converted to God in Christ.
All this is true, is very true. But it is not appropriate for us to emphasize such issues now. Our purpose here is not to discuss true and false repentance, true and false remorse, human as compared with divine law, or anything of that kind. Our subject is Christ. Christ as He is in His suffering. Our theme is the redemptive event as it impinges upon the chaos of natural history — that redemptive event which by means of special revelation reveals the naked essence of things, and brings them to bear upon the conscience.
Because that is our subject, we cannot take time to present a psychological treatise on Judas and his remorse, nor even a theological study of the same theme. The important question is what significance the death of Judas has for the holy event of the day, that is, for the death of Jesus Christ, for heaven, for sacred history. As we lead our thoughts in that direction, we see that Jesus is compelled to face the corpse of Judas. Here again Jesus Christ must prove to be the Elect of God, savouring sweetly because of the anointing of the Holy Ghost; He must prove to be the living, the strong, the son of David as he is in his immovable kingdom.
Now who, in this connection, can keep from thinking first of all of the invisible world? There is a way on which only spirit- sent souls travel; it takes its course straight through the meandering paths of the world. If we really had eyes to see that invisible world in all of its movement and life, it would have our undivided attention. Then we should want to see to what surprising extent these invisible forces busy themselves with the world that we can touch and see. He, especially, who lets the holy Scriptures have their say in this matter will direct the attention of his soul to these spiritual forces in the air. He will think immediately of the activity of angels, and of the activity of the souls of men. As for these angels, we have seen them make their appearance more than once in the history of the passion of Christ. But may we ignore the work done by the souls of men? Certainly not, for this would mean that we were being unfaithful to the God of revelation. God Himself in His gospel has given us a glimpse of that seething activity and life which arose in the world of departed souls because of and for the sake of the death of Christ. Those who doubt this should look ahead for a moment to what we hope to discuss more fully later[1] when we shall listen to what the Bible has to say about those souls of the redeemed who have died before, and who become alive at the moment of Jesus’ death, in order to make their appearance in Jerusalem (Mat 27:51-53).
[1] In the next volume of this work.
We shall give separate attention to this activity of the souls of departed saints later, but here, in connection with the death of Judas, a part of the concealing veil is removed for us. On the morning of the same day in which God sent out the souls of the redeemed who had to go from heaven to earth at the moment of Christ’s death, God calls the soul of Judas before Him in judgment, There is a disturbance on the way of the souls. It is a mighty disturbance, and no wonder. The stone which God is throwing into the sea of all the worlds today sends its generous wave out everywhere. That is evident here also. There are souls who must go down to earth. They stand ready to carry out their mission faithfully. That mission is to present the testimony of the saintly dead. They will come. Presently they will go out upon their mission. The moment the King of glory enters heaven, they will leave it. The great “loss” of the moment — not to be present at the welcome given the soul of Jesus when it enters heaven — is something they gladly endure for God’s sake when obedience to Him demands that they go on an errand for Christ. But what folly is such language. The word “loss” is in no sense compatible with that other phrase which characterizes heaven, “perfect blessedness.” But heaven and the redeemed souls regard obedience as being blessedness. When the will of God sends them on a mission, it is their great delight to carry out the errand. At this time, however, while these souls hold themselves in readiness to descend to the earth as soon as the soul of Jesus has entered heaven, the soul of Judas makes its appearance in the world of spirits, in that world of invisible things.
Judas’ soul had enjoyed the company of Jesus’ soul throughout the three years of Jesus’ official career. The earth quaked, the deep was moved, a shudder disturbed the world of spirits. Judas’ soul stepped ahead of that of Jesus and confronted the judgment. This event represents the transplanting of the offense and foolishness of the cross to the supersensuous world. The same heaven and the same God who must forsake Jesus, and are beginning to forsake Him now, and the same angels whom God withholds from giving any service to Jesus’ human soul, must all join in judging the soul of Judas, for he has betrayed Jesus. Those who together forsake Jesus must arise in judgment against him who also forsook and abandoned Him. Judas forsook the soul of Jesus, and that will be his condemnation. Moreover, the condemnation must come from heaven itself, from God, from all the angels who pronounce their amens upon it and who, nevertheless, basically and absolutely forsake and abandon the Son also. In this the offense of the cross became tangible in heaven and in this the folly of the Friday of the great death became concrete. Christ is regarded as an offense on earth, and heaven itself punishes Him for being such. But in the soul of Judas the offense of the cross is simultaneously punished with the bitter and grievous cup of death. A wave of restlessness moves through the company of the angels and the heavenly souls. But when Judas enters into judgment, heaven can only judge this last great representative of the Old Testament who helped build the gates of the new. Heaven has no choice but to judge him according to all that is written in the books about the justice and truth of God. That, if we wish to use the word, is a paradox. Heaven holds vials of wrath in each of its hands, and will pour them upon the head of Jesus Christ very shortly. Nevertheless the same heaven confirms and seals with an oath in the hearing of the ravaged soul of Judas, the question: He who does not love the Lord Jesus, let him be accursed: maranatha ....
It took great faith on the part of the redeemed souls and on the part of God’s bravely faithful angels not to be offended by the condemned Judas. By faith in this connection we of course mean simply that in heaven, too, one must cleave to God perfectly and not to the self; one must cling not to what one experiences in each particular moment, but to God’s single inclusive plan for the future. In heaven also one may not let oneself be governed by anything but the will of the Eternal which has been revealed. Heaven, too, although it has of course attained the full measure of the luxury of manifest revelation, must live by faith. It must live by the Word, the same Word which curses the very Jesus whom Judas had to bless from Zion. Judas’ soul appears before God, and all God’s servants must pronounce their amen upon the sentence of that God who rejects Judas because he has rejected the one whom God also has cast out. A strange judgment of heaven! Never in the invisible world was there a moment in which the divine judgment passed upon a son of man was as strange, as “foolish,” as much of an “offense” to the flesh as it was now that Judas entered into the radiance of manifest revelation above.
Yes, if you wish to use the word, all this is paradoxical. But that after all is little more than a word. Rightly considered the speech and the utterance of heaven in this moment of Judas’ entrance upon the spiritual world is quite in accord with its usual tenor. Just what, after all, is it for which heaven is blaming Judas? Not for the fact that he has forsaken Jesus whom heaven also has forsaken. Heaven’s charge against him is that he has not accepted this forsaken Jesus as the Surety for his own soul. For that and for the fact that Judas did not seek his own blessing in the curse of Jesus Christ. When heaven condemns and forsakes the One whom Judas has also condemned and forsaken, heaven is condemning Jesus as the Mediator, is condemning sin, the sin of Judas and of all men. But Judas denied and betrayed and despised Jesus because he never acknowledged the Mediator in Him. Hence it is safe to say that heaven never affirmed the mediatorship of Jesus Christ as being the content of faith more strongly than when it rejected Jesus and Judas on one and the same day. This tension which was caused by the darkest of Fridays was not limited to the earth; heaven which judges the world and angels and men and all things in the shadow of the Almighty, fully shared in this tension. Heaven was involved in all of our problems. Father Abraham, rejecting his own child, Judas in the hour in which God is forsaking the holy child Jesus, greatly desired to see the end of this day. He saw it and rejoiced. The end of the day brought the soul of Jesus into heaven. But Abraham never proved to be a father of faith more than when he, before the end of this day came, cast off that idler of Abraham’s fleshly generation, although he knew that Judas’ destruction was the beginning of the destruction of Abraham’s fleshly race. In rejecting Judas, Abraham disowned his own fleshly children, and greatly desired the spiritual children who are by faith in Abraham. Hence he could sing now of the sacrifice of the Great Isaac from whom a knife was not averted, and could at the same time reject: Judas who thought the sacrifice of the Great Isaac was folly, and who would have averted the knife from him, had he still been able.
Abraham was the father of the faithful, and he was that after his death also. In this hour of Judas he is also the father of the church of the New Testament. He is Abraham, the father, who leaves the eldest Son, the great Doer and Meriter outside, and who celebrates the festival with the youngest son, he who would be freed from sin. That is the redemptive event which is celebrated in heaven as it is on earth. That is faith. So great is not found on earth. Nor was so absolute a preaching of the Mediator ever heard on earth as took place now in this court of judgment.
We must add, however, that thick veils hide very much from our view here. We do not know whether Judas, as he opens his eyes on the other side, wishes that one of the dead may descend to the earth in order to tell his brethren that Jesus is truly the Christ. We do not know whether that profound longing of the rich man which Jesus pointed out in the well-known parable also stirred in the heart of Judas at this time. But if that prayer of the rich man was also the prayer of Judas’ heart, we can say that his prayer was heard. For when Judas appears in the presence of God, the souls of many departed saints stand ready (Mat 27:52) to descend to the earth to enter the holy city and to preach to the “brethren” of Judas among others that Jesus is indeed the Christ.
Nevertheless, the holy city will not turn to God because of the preaching. This was the great confirmation of the judgment. Judas enters the invisible world to find that an unimpaired view of Jesus Christ is possible only to him who looks upon the Mediator from the vantage point of the Word.
It was very quiet in heaven that day. Two souls entered into judgment beside Christ: the soul of Judas and that of the converted murderer. Two entered into judgment: the one had much in his favor, the other had much against him. God pronounced judgment upon them, declaring that Jesus Christ cannot be discovered in human experience neither above nor below the clouds, but that even in heaven He explains Himself only in terms of Himself and always with divine authority. When Abraham added his amen to the verdict which decided against Judas and in favor of the murderer, he desired to find his own seed only among the generation of his great Son, the Greater than Isaac. Thus He again by faith put Isaac to death, relying in spite of the judgment against Judas on the assurance that God would raise Him from the dead, and confident that He should see the seed which Judas had refused to look for in Him. The report of the suicide of Judas on the day of Christ’s sacrifice opens up another perspective for our thoughts when we take note of the history of special revelation as it has been realized thus far. We have spoken more than once of the place which Christ occupies in the house of David. It was His glory, we said repeatedly, to be the great Son of David and to be his crown. Again and again, we observed, this royal lineage of the Christ was pointed out in prophecy. Hence we are not looking for more or less coincidental analogies and parallelisms, but are simply touching on the significance of sacred history when we compare the story of the man who betrayed the Son of David with the text of that other Biblical record of the suicide of the man who betrayed David himself. In other words, we are to compare Jesus and Ahithophel. You remember the story. When David had to flee from Absalom, his own son, it was Ahithophel who betrayed him. This treachery on the part of Ahithophel was, doubtless, the bitterest cup which David had to drink. For Ahithophel was certainly the man who had lived intimately and in close contact with David; he had counseled David on many matters; as David’s close friend and cabinet member his advice to David was like the voice of an oracle. Now this Ahithophel with whom David had eaten bread at one time rises to take exception to his king. As long as Ahithophel hoped that he could cause David’s destruction, he, together with Amasa, had been the very soul of the revolution against David. However, when the tables were turned eventually, when it became evident that God had not given David into the hands of his enemies, Ahithophel, hearing that David was returning to his capitol at Jerusalem victoriously, left the city, went to his home, arranged such matters as needed arranging, and then hanged himself.
Therefore we can say that two gallows hang suspended over the row of graves belonging to the house of David. One stands at the head of the row, and one at the end. At the head, raising its sinister beams into the sky over David’s grave, stands the gallows of Ahithophel; and at the end, suspended over the grave of David’s great Son, we see the gallows of Judas. Between these two suicides all the princes of David’s house lie buried. When the first of the royal funeral processions comes into the house of David, the celebrities present rub against the corpse of Ahithophel, who committed suicide because of David. And when the last grave opens to receive a king of the house of David, that is, when it opens to receive Jesus, the dead body of Judas is put on display next to that grave. This is the body of Judas, who committed suicide because of Jesus, because Jesus was not what in Judas’ opinion He ought to have been. The first father of the king, and the founder of the house of David had to die with his face turned towards a traitor who had hanged himself in protest against David’s life. And now the last to bear the crown in the house of David must die with his eyes turned towards a traitor who hanged himself because of Him.
These comparisons are sombre enough. The circumstances are analogous in many respects. Just notice them. Ahithophel was one of David’s confidants and Judas was one of the inner circle of David’s Son. Ahithophel had a place in David’s advisory cabinet, and Judas was one of the advisory group of the apostolic circle surrounding David’s Son. Ahithophel had conspired with David’s enemies against him; Judas had done the same over against the Son of David. And finally Ahithophel hanged himself when it appeared that his plans had run aground on the will of God and on the logic of the events in the life of David himself. And Judas similarly commits suicide when it appears that his conduct is incompatible with the will of God and with the logic of the evangelical events in the life of David’s Son.
There are similarities enough, as we see. But there are also tremendous differences. The most important, the most essential difference is that Ahithophel can reproach David for good reason, but that Judas can find nothing blameworthy in Jesus Christ inasmuch as the great Son of David is guiltless over against Judas of Kerioth.
Yes, David was not guiltless in his relations with Ahithophel, and, for the matter of that, with the whole people. He had not continued to be the ministering, theocratic king, but he had become like the oriental despots of his time. He was beginning to resemble a sultan. That becomes apparent especially from his shocking transgression with Bathsheba. Bathsheba herself may have been ever so culpable, but David scandalously abused his power when he had her come to him, and when he craftily, and under the guise of justice, sent Uriah to his death. Ahithophel’s relation to all this, you ask? He was involved in it in two ways. In the first place it must have grieved Ahithophel, as an earnest counselor in shaping kingdom policies, to see David trifling with the blood of his best and most faithful officer (for Uriah had not only been a good soldier for David, but he was also a member of David’s bodyguard). It must have offended Ahithophel that the king who certainly had not supplanted Saul purposelessly, now falls into Saul’s sins and dares to tread upon the marital happiness of a son and daughter of his people. A king who conducted himself and publicly forgot himself as David did was setting a bad example, and was abusing the kingship for personal gain. To this another consideration must be added. If we may be allowed to share the opinions of various authentic expositors of the Bible and students of history in the combining of certain Biblical data, we will say that as a person, too, Ahithophel was most intimately concerned in David’s transgression with Uriah and Bathsheba. Ahithophel was Bathsheba’s grandfather. She was the daughter of Eliam, and Eliam was the son of Ahithophel. Now it certainly was a painful discovery to this punctiliously refined, this able, this highly honored grandfather, to find that the king with whom he was on such friendly footing, had played with the life and the honor of his granddaughter, and in such a way that it would soon become a public scandal. Could it really be that the king was interfering as audaciously as this with the family relations of his own courtiers? Were Ahithophel’s rank and intellectual competence not sufficient to protect a young granddaughter? For another reason, too, David’s sin with Bathsheba had deeply wounded Ahithophel’s soul. The name of Bathsheba’s husband was Uriah and when Uriah had refused to degrade himself before the king by covering up the king’s scandal with his own name, David had hit upon the diabolical idea of putting Uriah out of the way, and of using the sword of the enemy for the purpose. He decided that he would have the man put on the “firing line,” on the “front,” we would say today. Meanwhile the king lived on in his luxurious palace ... In comparison with such a tyrant, Saul seemed a paragon. But — to return to Uriah — this man was a colleague of Eliam, Ahithophel’s son; the two together were strong men who belonged to David’s bodyguard. And when David put his own bodyguard to death, solely in an attempt to cover up his personal shame, and to be able to marry Bathsheba, the “war-widow,” — well, then it was as clear as day that the blood and even the honor of David’s best defenders counted for little with him.
Ahithophel, accordingly, was seriously wounded in his deepest soul. Moreover, who could blame him? A family scandal had completely spoiled his old age. David had demonstrated with a shocking frankness that the life and honor of his most intimate confidants and aides were not sacred to him when it pleased his despotism to dally with them. This is the tyrant who is no longer serving theocratically, but thinks only of being served himself. Whoever pauses to think how deeply this must have grieved an aristocrat like Ahithophel — and, remember, he had to keep it all to himself for David’s sake — must be inclined to agree with Ahithophel and to feel an aversion to David’s psalms. If only we had experienced what this old man had felt ....
Indeed, Ahithophel could reproach his king for good reasons. Hence, when David presently returns to his capital from his exile, and everyone knows that God is not going to make this tyrannical hedonist an object of public disgrace, but is to return him to the throne, Ahithophel cannot stand it any longer. He does not want to live in the same world with this David any more. His repressed ire, his thwarted sense of justice, and his scandalized family pride — all these had cried aloud for justice when David had gone into exile — all had prayed God that He who had dethroned Saul, depose David also. Tyrants and despots, Ahithophel felt, had no right to parade in God’s country, or in God’s city. But the fact proved to be that God did not dethrone David; Jaweh returned him to the throne. Therefore Ahithophel complains against God, and curses the government which lets such people live. Finally he hangs himself by way of protest against heaven and against David. His act is a protest against the throne in heaven and the throne on earth. And we can say that this protest contains several truths. It is an expression of astute if impotent objection to an attack on his personal integrity; there is something in it of the “die-hard” aristocrat who would rather make a public break with David than ignore his sins for the sake of the meager comfort of the thought that his great-grandchildren will be of the royal blood. So much for Ahithophel.
Now we must return to Judas, and to the Son of David, to Christ. What faults can Judas find in Jesus? He has betrayed the Son of David. He has said, just as Ahithophel said of David, “The title of king is not safely His; He does not deserve a king’s office.” But after the betrayal the pendulum swings to the other side for Judas. Jesus is to be sent to His death. You see that what happens is the exact opposite of what happened to David himself. David is betrayed by Ahithophel, but before long Ahithophel sees David returning to the throne. Judas betrays Jesus, and before long sees him entering into inevitable death. That is the first difference. There is another. Although Ahithophel obstinately insists that he has betrayed guilty blood, Judas must confess that he has betrayed innocent blood. God forces Judas to this confession; He does so in order to vindicate the history of the house of David in Christ Jesus. When Ahithophel surrenders David, he has much to complain of, many charges to make. But when God finally yields His son into death’s hands, after Judas has betrayed Him, this same Judas, the second Ahithophel, cannot substantiate a single charge which he directs against Jesus, the Son of David.
Frankly now, was this comparison of Judas and Ahithophel a too far-fetched inquiry or an analogy which simply “happens” to be coincidental? Not for the person who is looking for the perspective of prophecy, not for those who know that God, to whom a thousand years are as one day, sees the grave of Ahithophel standing next to that of Judas, and the grave of David beside that of Jesus. No, this is no place to speak of coincidences. God draws the line of David through the centuries, and He makes manifest the essence of the struggle which all flesh again and again conducts against the sovereign good pleasure which comes to place David and his Son upon the throne. He comes to all those who have the patience to think through to the deepest implications of the Ahithophel-David relationship in its bearing on the Judas- Jesus relationship, to demonstrate that the opposition which the enmity of the flesh opposes to the bearers of the Sovereign will and to the seed of the woman does indeed have its origin in what that seed of the woman did amiss, but that the essence of the enmity is the sin, is the perverse will, is unbelief, is enmity itself. Take all the sin which David did out of David’s house, and give David a perfect son, and you will find that the generation of Ahithophel will nevertheless refuse to live in the same world with David and his Son. The death of Ahithophel was occasioned by David’s sin, but the most fundamental cause of the suicide arose in Ahithophel himself. It was inherent in his bitter anger which refused to acknowledge God’s government as it proceeded to vindicate David solely in terms of God’s sovereign pleasure. Ahithophel refuses to live with David any longer, because he is warring against God’s will, because he cannot endure the Gospel of free grace, as it returns David — mark how the penitent weeps — to the throne, and accompanies the return with a message that God justifies the ungodly — freely. And this is also true of Judas. God has taken all guiltlessness away from him. The blood of Jesus was innocent, perfectly innocent; Jesus had done Judas no wrong. To Jesus all semblance of oriental despotism was entirely alien. That became abundantly clear in the room of the Passover, where Jesus, knowing full well that Judas would prove to be His Ahithophel, nevertheless breaks bread with him, and raises not as much as a finger against him. And that is saying nothing of the incident of Malchus, even though Judas was present on the occasion when Jesus refused to countenance any form of despotism in His relation to that slave. Moreover, Jesus had called Himself the Son of David.
Now, you ask, does Judas hang himself, nevertheless? Yes, he went out and hanged himself. Why? By way of self-accusation, self-condemnation? But a genuine self-accusation, surely, can proceed only from the Spirit of Christ; therefore, at bottom, the suicide of Judas also represents a rebellion against God’s sovereign good pleasure which Christ is revealing in His own way. It is this which goes against Judas’ fabrications, which causes him neither to laugh nor to gnash his teeth as he sees the ruins of the Messiah of God’s sovereign will. Those ruins Jesus Himself had predicted. But Judas refuses to believe. He does not want to accept a Gospel which justifies the ungodly — freely.
We can say, therefore, that the house of David and the seed of the woman are always a rock of offense in the world. Take all of the sin out of the picture, if you will, and demonstrate that at bottom no other conflict exists between David and Ahithophel, between Judas and Jesus, than that of an acceptance or a rejection of the law of election and reprobation. Even then — no, then especially — the children of the flesh will set themselves grimly against the house of David of both father and Son, and will go to their death as they gnash their teeth. Ahithophel reproaches David, saying: You are too much of a despot, and are guilty of great sins. And Judas blames the Son of David while asserting: You are not despot enough, although you are sinless. But both commit suicide because they do not want to breathe the same air that is breathed by God’s elect, the companions of David, the invited ones of David’s Son. Apparently the death of these traitors is a protest against the house of David, but actually it is an expression of their grim opposition to the election of God — an election which causes fruit to spring forth out of dry ground — and to a Good Pleasure which establishes the kingdom according to the counsel of God and not according to any human philosophy. Ahithophel lies next to Judas in the grave, and on the countenance of each of them a grim, malicious expression of protest against the Gospel of free grace may be seen. Theirs is a protest to a free grace that placed an unworthy David back on his throne, and that causes Jesus to say he is a king, but of a kind which Judas does not want to see. He is a king of cripples and of blind men, of the poor and the maimed; a king not according to outward appearance but according to the spirit of meekness, crowned with a mediator’s honor.
God lives — hence the death of Judas becomes a new suffering to the Christ. Satan throws the dead Judas at the foot of the throne of God, just as once before he laid the body of Ahithophel at the foot of David’s throne. The world of spirits — do not fail to reckon with that. Just notice: Satan has done the impossible. He desired greatly to contaminate the fragrance of God’s love with the stench of a corpse, and he desired to do it in heaven. He quarreled against Jesus, appealing to Judas’ arid death. In one and the same day the death of the apostle Judas is called into judgment with the death of Jesus, the Great Apostle of God. In the presence of God, Christ Himself is being confronted by the dead Judas. Do not Thou be perturbed by it, O Saviour, Son of David. Thou didst not murder Judas, didst not even incite him to murder; Thou hast done him no wrong and this truth, too, is being written into God’s book today.
Jesus, Jesus, theodicy of God, apology of the house of David. The angels know it; the great book contains a record of it: Thou needest not to blame thyself for anything over against this dead body of Judas. Thou hast purged the house of David. Thou hast atoned for everything that flesh could reproach in David and then Thou didst stand before the world, asking all Ahithophels: Have you any other objections to raise? In answer, I hear them all testify against Thee. Yes, we have this against Thee: Thou art the bearer of God’s good pleasure. That is the foolishness, that is the offense in Thy life. Because of it, we refuse to sleep with Thee under the same roof of stars. We would rather die than do that.
Thus the “foolishness” and “offense” of the cross of Christ has not only, as we have observed already, been transferred to the heights of heaven today but also to the depths of hell. The soul of Judas has made its appearance while on the way to judgment in the world of spirits. The man who has souls in heaven, who can thank God for what Judas has done for them — that man is destroyed, and Christ is his rock of offense. This makes the foolishness of the cross and its offense more patently apparent in the spiritual world of heaven and hell than it ever was before. When Judas is swallowed up in darkness because of the judgment, his downfall proclaims the offense and foolishness to all the souls in heaven above, and to all the recesses of hell below. The wonder, in the last analysis, is that Jesus’ soul was able to remain entirely poised when God confronted Him with the corpse of Judas. We may believe that Jesus, who saw a Nathanael sitting under a fig tree, and who always sees clearly the fatal issue of sin, knew that Judas committed suicide. Can it be that He knew everything about Simon when that disciple denied his master, and nothing at all about Judas? Surely, that is untenable. But, in His unfathomable grief, He maintains His own unimpeachable integrity as He and His conscience face the dead Judas. He can look straight into God’s eyes, and straight into the future of His long way of suffering without blinking.
There are people who find it very easy to pray for strangers the petition, “Father, forgive them.” But to their immediate neighbors these people frequently are an offense. But when Jesus, a little later, prays the same prayer for strangers, His prayer does not curse what He has done for Judas, His neighbor. For He did Judas no wrong. Yes, there are those — in fact, we are all such — who must immediately smother all their fine prayers and all their philanthropical intercessions when one calls their attention to the misery of their wives, of their children, of their next-door neighbors. But when Jesus, in the very moment perhaps in which Judas falls to the ground becomes the intercessor for those strangers who are His murderers, and knocks at the gate of Paradise to ask admittance for the man crucified next to Him, the Father cannot dismiss Him by pointing at the body of the dead Judas. For Jesus did Judas no wrong. This precisely is His justification before God. Jesus was the Mediator, and as Mediator He vindicated Himself over against Judas.
Now broad perspectives open up before us. Judas and Ahithophel are not two exceptional cases about whom decent people must shake their heads. God buried them and He placed no special marker over their graves. They are buried quite ordinarily next to all those others who ruin themselves by taking offense at the mediatorship of God’s good pleasure. God did not compel Jesus to face the dead Judas by way of testing whether it would cause a flush of shame to cover His face, as though He were one suspected of murder. God was summoning you and me into court. We, we must make our appearance in judgment, we must learn to see those two next to each other before the throne of God. We must learn to see the broken Jesus and the broken Judas, must learn to see the house of David that has been destroyed and the bodyguard of Saul, an Ahithophel who simply cannot live with the poet of God’s psalm. We must be present at this confrontation. All the angels must give us their undivided attention, must see how we conduct ourselves there. For the angels want to know whom we choose, and in whom we believe. It is fortunate if we can still blush in shame because we have so often raised objections to David and to Jesus, even though we reach the conclusion: innocent blood, innocent blood! Then we will know that the only escape left us after this most painful experience of soul is the avenue of humble prayer. As we face the dead body of Judas, our one escape will be a prayer asking to be confronted by the broken body and shed blood of the Son of David. Except for that we should be lost eternally; because of that we can confess our faith in the Mediator of God and man. The death of Judas is the beginning of Christ’s Passover feast. We should remember that the first cantos of the Hymn of the Passover are full of references to justice. And one learns to scan God’s verses of justice and grace only in the school of sovereign good pleasure. Such scansion is the great stumbling-block. But what else would one do on the Friday which puts Judas to death in the morning and Christ in the evening? I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Only-Begotten, David’s high-born Son. I believe that He was cast into hell, but also that He Himself descended into hell. No, Judas, you did not want Him, but the feast of the Passover could not wait for you. The serpent on your grave argued in vain against the second Adam, and confessed that she was more effective in paradises than on graves.