Christ In His Suffering, Trial, and Crucified by Klaas Schilder: Schilder, Klaas - Vol 1 - Christ In His Suffering: 25. Chapter 25: Christ In Bonds

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Christ In His Suffering, Trial, and Crucified by Klaas Schilder: Schilder, Klaas - Vol 1 - Christ In His Suffering: 25. Chapter 25: Christ In Bonds



TOPIC: Schilder, Klaas - Vol 1 - Christ In His Suffering (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 25. Chapter 25: Christ In Bonds

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C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F I V E

Christ in Bonds

But this is your hour, and the power of darkness.

—Luk_22:53 b.

Then the band and the captain and officers of the Jews took Jesus, and bound Him.

—Joh_18:12.

CHRIST has performed His last wonder. His hands have done their service. What in the world could keep those hands out of the bonds now? He came into the world to be bound. Only the calling which gave His hands work to do could thrust aside the fetters. But now the series of wonders has been completed. And now the hour strikes in which Christ is to be bound. The privilege of unhampered passage through His own city and His own world is taken away from Him. The Lord of the vineyard must go about in chains. He is delivered into the hands and fetters of the faithless keepers of that vineyard. In other words, He is given into the hands of those who have profaned the oath. He who kept the king’s oath in His dealing with slaves, is surrendered into the hands of slaves who broke the oath in their relations with the King.

Ah, God, what can be done with hands for which Thou hast no more work, but to bind them? Alas, Jesus has done His duty to Malchus and is dismissed. That is His tragedy.

Christ is in bonds.

But I can hear Him speaking. For the Word of God is not bound.

I hear Him speaking. His words are awful, but also very comforting. Christ tells the Romans and Jews who have clasped Him in the bonds of death: “This is your hour, and the power of darkness”.

The utterance, we said, is one of awful import. For the statement does not mean as some have contended that Jesus was pointing merely to the fact that these came upon Him in the dark simply because the night was the only appropriate time for them to do their work. According to this explanation, Jesus would be saying to them: “I have always worked in broad daylight; even in these last weeks. I was publicly and openly instructing My disciples in the temple where everyone could see. Then you undertook nothing against Me. But, now that it is dark, now you come to the fore to take Me captive. I am not surprised: to you the darkness of night is the appropriate hour.” According to this interpretation, Jesus had nothing more in mind than to point out the contrast between His own unconcealed activity and the secret plotting of His enemies.

We have objections to such an explanation of Jesus’ words.

In the first place, it is impossible to determine, on the basis of that, just what Jesus means by the power of darkness. The original of the text really means the authority of darkness. And some think that by using this word Jesus is saying: This particular spot on which we are standing now is the province of darkness. According to this version of the matter, there would be a time of darkness (the night, not the full day) and a place of darkness (the secluded garden of Gethsemane, and not the temple). Others maintain that Jesus in speaking of the power of darkness is referring to the powers of Satan. These interpreters, therefore, do accept the phrase, “This is your hour,” literally, but look upon the second part of the utterance as a figure of speech.

We feel that the uncertainty attending each of these theories should admonish us to be very cautious. For if we compare this utterance of Christ with the very similar ones in Mat_26:55-56 a, and in Mar_14:48-49, we observe that in these the expression, “This is your hour, and the power of darkness,” is replaced by another: “All this was done that the Scriptures (of the prophets) might be fulfilled.” It is obvious that in this second statement, Christ plainly points to the fact that in the events of the moment He sees the fulfillment of what has from eternity been proclaimed. The hour of His captivity spends itself according to a holy, sovereign schedule: not one second of it is left to chance. Inevitability governs these events: they must come. God has for centuries proclaimed all this through His prophets; behind the Scriptural proclamation lay the counsel of God which from eternity willed and fixed what is taking place here.

The comparison of the statement in Matthew and Mark with the one we have read in Luke teaches us, accordingly, that the hour in which men put Him in bonds has been determined by God’s counsel. Why are they able to bind Him now? Because it is their hour. In the structure of the pre-historic decrees of the sovereign God this particular moment of time was fixed as the hour of God’s great active permission. Because He has willed it from eternity, He will reserve that province for the enemy. He will give them the full measure of their hour. God has arranged all of the preceding centuries, all of the intervolutions of time, all of the events from Gen_1:1 up to this moment— has arranged, has moulded them, has had them converge in such a way that there would be a place for this hour, the hour in which His Son will be bound. The hour had to be born from the womb of night. God had to shape the history of peoples, their coming and their going in a way which would leave room for this hour. He allowed neither the forces above nor the forces below to tamper with the clock of history. He directed the battles of Caesars, the conflicts of kings, the migrations of peoples, the world wars, the courses of stars and sun and moon, the change of epochs, and the complex movements of all things in the world in such a way that this hour would come and had to come. God reserved this hour for Satan. He is the prince of darkness. Hence this is “his” hour. God’s counsel has fixed it as the hour of Satan.

Hence the darkness referred to in the passage refers to nothing other than the power of sin: to the entire composite of hell; to the whole conglomeration of devils and demons which is poisoning the atmosphere of the Garden of Olives and pouring the curse between the luxuriant leaves and into the thick foliage of the Garden of Olives.

Of course, it is quite in keeping with the character of the devil and of those in his service to choose the night for their work.

But to say that the appropriateness of the nocturnal setting for the activity going on in it was all Jesus meant by His statement would be to miss the profound meaning of His utterance.

Furthermore, our interpretation of the statement is confirmed by the similarity existing between what Christ says in Gethsemane and these other passages of the Scripture in which He speaks of His hour having not yet come.

Again, then: How awful this statement is! It means that the hour has come. The hour of darkness has come. God gives Satan free rein in this province. Trembling angels, nervously fluttering their wings in their eagerness to administer God’s justice in the world, can do nothing about it; they must stand back. God’s will is permitting all this to accrue to Christ. Yes, as far as having the power goes, Christ, as He says Himself, could call down more than twelve legions of angels. But more important than what He can do is what He wills to do, and what He may do according to the justice of His God. And according to that justice He may not call down twelve legions of angels, or persist in summoning them. If His voice had implored the Father to send them, if His strong spirit had drawn them down from Heaven, He would have asked for another fulness of time than that which His Father had eternally willed. But God’s programmes are absolutely imperative for all things alive. They are being carried out at all places in all times up to this moment. How attempt to achieve anything against the God of Koheleth?[1] Hence the angels must fold up their wings, must step back, and be quiet. The law of isolation, to which the Son is now being subjected, begins to be binding throughout the universe. First of all the angels of God must be obedient to it, and declaim its magnificat. This is the hour of the devils. Michael must put up his sword; Gabriel may not unsheath his; neither of these two may move against Satan. Just as there had once been an hour of darkness in Heaven itself when the storms of the evil angels began to blow it, so there is now “the hour and the night of darkness.” All of the angels are held back in order that all of the devils can move upon Gethsemane and Golgotha freely.

[1] See Ecclesiastes. The word means: Strict inevitability by reason of God’s will.

The devils come. They beat against the Master with the vehemence of mighty waves. They are keenly aware that this is the white-hot center of the fires of time. They come. This is

their hour. On the one hand, this their hour is related to that other one, the original hour of darkness, in which sin first manifested itself in the world of angels, and in which these made their first attack in an effort to cause God’s throne to totter. And, on the other hand, this hour of darkness is related to that last hour of the world, in which the devils, when the “thousand years” (the time of the perfecting of God’s Church) have elapsed (are reaching their culmination), will for the last time be given free rein, be released from their bonds, in order to do their sinister work in the world.

The hour of Gethsemane—the release of the devils! They are coming now, for now they may come. Their privilege is not, indeed, the most pleasing application of God’s justice but, nevertheless, they come with His permission. This is the hour of high noon in the great world-day. They come; they have their hour; they have their authority. God allows them to come, for they must begin the battle against the Son of man. And they find Him, laden with sin. That is why they are authorized to let judgment accrue to Him. God is blowing the flames of judgment against His son, because He has made Him to be a curse. Hence, those who fan the furnace in God’s universe may employ their arts to blow the flame into a whiter heat, to drive the hot vapors of the Wrath of the Eternal quite up to and against the heart of Jesus. This is their hour and their province. God’s permission is absolute. The divine activity represented in that permission is also absolute. God Himself throws open the doors of the prison-house of hell; and all the ominous demons creep out of it and rush to Jesus, to hiss and sting Him into death.

In Rev_8:1 we read that there was silence in Heaven about the space of half an hour. That occurred in the crises when the seventh, the final, the definitive seal was opened. God’s angels had to be quiet then, for God kept them from activity the while.

The apocalypse wants to tell us that when the history of the world approaches its denouement in the seventh and perfecting seal, God first silences the angels. For the whole of the great world must know that even the most catastrophic judgment does not impinge upon it by an invasion of heavenly hosts, as though these introduced the alien ingredient into it, but that forces actively inherent in the world itself cause that judgment and “hour” to come.

It is just so at this unique hour in Gethsemane. By a glance of His eye God causes the angels to fold up their wings. The catastrophe is at hand; they in heaven may retire into God’s counsel-room.

A half-hour of silence weighs burdensomely upon Heaven; heavenly ears can detect the breathing of sighs under the wings of the angels, who keep their perturbance covered with them. Never had there been such complete silence in Heaven as now. Only one hour will supersede this one in the strictness of silence, and that hour is coming fast. That will be presently, when the Son will be forsaken, hanging, bleeding in darkness.

While Jerusalem is sleeping, and while in the lowlands by the sea, the Batavians and other tribes are whetting their hunting knives for the chase, and while the little world lightly goes on its way over the course of the centuries, a crisis is being realized in the spiritual world. The devils approach, while the angels are held back. Each has been given up to the power of hell. From now on it will be impossible for earth to escape from the heavy burden of its awful calling: in a spiritual sense to be the center of the universe.

For this is the hour and the power of darkness.

But in the kingdom of Heaven, the most awful and the most comforting things are found side by side. The very fact that this is the hour of darkness may be called the great manifestation of grace and the chief comfort—provided, of course, we only remember that God determined this hour.

The hour happens to the devils; but He who sent it to them lives. He is God.

Had hell disposed matters, it would have selected its own hour and by its own will have determined its authority. The satanic yearns for a formula such as this: Satan by the grace of Satan. But God writes instead: Satan, servant by the grace of God. God designated the hour Satan could have, and all that hell undertakes in it is at bottom only that which God allows it to do.

Hence, this particular space of time may be called Satan’s hour in one place and Christ’s in another. Nor is this a contradiction; it is simply looking at the same thing from two sides. This hour is Heaven’s; it is also the authorization of light. Why does Heaven give Satan free rein? Surely, in order that He can then vanquish Satan, after the devil has poured all of his venom into the body and soul of the Son of man. The volcano of sin must be exhausted before the angels may plant gardens of delight on its peak for the blessedness of God, and for the congregation of the first-born. That is why the hour of darkness is also the hour of light. And that is why the earth can no longer escape from the burden of its glorious calling, but, after its eternal election, must, in a spiritual sense, be the center of the universe.

Our salvation, accordingly, lies contained in Christ’s statement. The fact that He expressed it and that it actually lived in His soul is also our salvation.

Jesus is perfectly conscious of the fact that this hour is the great hour of crisis, in which God’s permission is simultaneously a mystery and a revelation. In His awareness of that fact we may observe a confession of His Messianic consciousness.

If Christ had doubted that this was the great hour, if His silent perseverance had been compelled to keep suspicion or doubt grimly down, He would have made Himself an exception to the silent angels, whose ability to be still is born from careful attention to God and from a sensitive knowledge of His will. Then Jesus would have doubted the crucial significance of His own hour. Then to His mind everything which was happening here would from this time forth no longer be fully informed by the counsel and foreknowledge of the heavenly Father. All this would then be a mere play of uncertainties and vacillations. Christ would then lose His faith in the firmness of God’s counsel and providence at the very moment in which God’s counsel was discovering its firmest bases and in which His providence was demonstrating its greatest certainties. If, in such an attitude, He had yielded up His hands unto death, and permitted Himself to be bound of men, He would have done so not as the great Fulfiller of God’s counsel but as the horrible defeatist—the great blot on God’s universe. By not resisting He would have proved to be the coward who turns both cheeks to the enemy, but only because He averts them from God who at this time wants to strike both of them. Indeed, if such had been His attitude, the Author of the sermon on the mount would have contradicted His own word.

In the sermon on the mount He does speak of turning the other cheek also when the enemy smites the first. But the implication of His utterance is that in turning both cheeks to the enemy, we must keep our eyes fixed upon God. Unless I keep my eyes fixed so, my non-resistance is a purely negative attitude. But if I turn my cheeks to the enemy coram Deo, that is, squarely facing God with my whole being, my non-resistance becomes positive in character. My attitude then is the most vigorous resistance which I can possibly give to the animosity in my enemy. Such resistance represents overcoming evil with good, and a reference of the eternal to every particular which arises in life. The word Jesus spoke on the mount demands more than mere non-resistance and keeping silence. Everything depends upon whether we have first allowed ourselves to be introduced into the atmosphere of eternity. For in His sermon on the mount Christ placed all things in an eternal light. In that sermon He gave the citizens of Heaven the great, life-consuming charge to see all things which happen in time in the light of the Kingdom’s laws. Every dynamo in our human life must be charged with energy by the eternal God, before it can be of use.

Now imagine the impossible. Suppose Christ had not known or had neglected to become sensitively aware of the truth that this shocking hour of injustice was an hour which God was sending upon Him. Then His silence would have been despicable, and His surrender and act of disobedience. He would have been stepping out of the atmosphere and possibilities of the sermon on the mount, a sermon of which He Himself was the Author. Then His putting the kind hands which had just performed a miracle into the hand-cuffs of the Jews and Romans voluntarily, would have been the act of a tired man who—we say it reverently —was letting God’s ocean inundate God’s field.

Again, everything depends upon a single word. If Christ’s surrender is to be the deed of the Messiah from the very beginning, He must be able to determine the momentous worth of this moment perfectly, in accordance with the Scriptures.

Therefore we thank Him for giving expression in His Messianic consciousness at this moment also, in order to comfort us greatly. Just because He has His eyes firmly fastened upon His father, He is able to really turn both cheeks to His enemies. To Him the whip of Assyria—to use the style of Isaiah—is the rod of God. His Messianic self-assurance deepens His joy in the beautiful moments of rejoicing in His God; it also makes more intense His trembling before the Chief Musician of death. Hence His non-resistance is the most vigorous resistance possible. This hero reserves His strength until Satan has time to enter the field, to sharpen his weapons, to take account of the situation. But afterwards these two will meet in a struggle of life and death.

This is your hour, and the power of darkness.

The Giants are coming.

Hence, we shall not ask, as a familiar line in Bach’s Passion of St. Matthew has it: Where does the thunder stay, and where the lightning? For the God who restrains the angels from acting also keeps His own hands from hurling out the lightning. God strains hard not to do so—we speak of it after the manner of men; He has given us the right to do so. If God had issued His bolts of lightning at this time He would have been unfaithful to Himself. His justice would have become an arbitrary whim. Then the biblical God who never hurls His bolts arbitrarily would have become an image of the Greek Zeus who plays wantonly with his lightnings. The activity which Greek imagination ascribed to the aristrocratic gods on high Olympus certainly was a wanton, a wild and arbitrary disposition of the fires of Heaven. What Greek hero, pray, could in reference to it speak of the hour and power of darkness? But our Gospel presents to us the holy God who has consumed the whole, blasphemous, aristrocratic swindle obtaining on Mount Olympus in the one concept of mediatorship between God and man.

That is why no lightning may fall at this place. Bach is not theologian enough.

What could bolts of lightning achieve? Smite Malchus whom Jesus healed? A stroke of lightning directed at Malchus now would have struck the heart of Jesus. And Jesus’ death at this moment would have been untimely: the world would not have been redeemed by it. If God had forcibly interfered with Satan now, God would have been doing Satan an injustice. For He has reserved this hour for hell. Hence, if Heaven had begun to protest by means of lightnings, these would have struck not only the Jews and Romans, not only the devils and the watchers of hell, but also the faithful soul of my Saviour and (this is saying the unreasonable again) the great faithful heart of God. For, now that the word of permission has been spoken, the fate of the world depends upon the emancipated slave of a priest and upon an unstartled band of Jews. If these are not given free rein in the “hour” of darkness, then Jesus superfluously lifted His hand over His people when He said: Let them depart in peace.

Therefore we thank God for the fact that Jesus not only reached the time of crisis but also knew it was that. “Surely, the Lord is in this place and He knew it well.” It is His keen awareness of it which makes every deed He is to do savor of a conscious Messianic act. He imparts the power of redemption to His work, and does it with the consciousness of the highest love, a love which proceeds to the sacrifice, well aware of its meaning. Not only in His passive but just as energetically in His active obedience, this keen awareness converts His captivity into liberty.

In this manner my King goes to captivity. So Christ, your King, goes handcuffed. The Lord of the world, who no longer has free passage in it, gives that privilege to move freely to the demons of the night. He who pays the ransom and purchases the year of jubilee for all of the oppressed is Himself made the servant of others. As soon as Malchus could go on, God declared Jesus an alien in this province. And God would issue no more passes..

This represents an altogether new experience for Christ. Until now He could go where He wished, and could escape from the snares of enemies as frequently as He chose. But now, in the hour of darkness, He is bound.

Whoever remembers this last emphasis will not put the foolish question: “But could not Jesus break His bonds?” For we must spontaneously reply: “No, He could not.”

Do not regard that statement as one which subtracts something from the omnipotence of God, or as a disparagement of the enormous strength of Jesus’ human nature. Oh yes, speaking generally, God can break all bonds; and, again, speaking generally, Jesus’ human will is able to tear fetters apart.

But note well that such knowledge is inert and unfruitful. It is a mistaken way of talking. It concerns what is irrelevantly possible, generally speaking.

You who are mortal: do not mention this poor objection again —not in Gethsemane. For, generally speaking, Gethsemane does not even exist. It is fatal for Christian theology and philosophy to talk anything “in general.” Nothing happens “in general.” Everything has specific bearing. Everything which occurs in Gethsemane is unique: it happens once and can happen only once, in Heaven and on earth. The things occurring here are all specific; they are all special; they are all peculiar. And that is why we dare to say that Jesus’ bonds can not be melted in any fire; not in God’s own consuming flames, and not in those of Jesus’ human soul, powerful and overwhelming as it is.

We have been naming two powers: God’s power, and that of the man, Jesus.

Whoever confesses the omnipotence of God, thinking of it as something independent of His other attributes, is blaspheming God. The omnipotence of God inheres in the fact that He can do everything He wills to do. But His will is one of perfect justice; and His justice is part and parcel of all his attributes. Therefore, if God’s justice, God’s love, God’s truth, God’s revelation, and everything included in God, has designated this hour as the one for the binding of Jesus, then God cannot break those bonds. How could a God who has no jurisdiction over His lightnings possibly sear the slightest ropes? His only means for igniting them is the lightning; even the frailest flames that sear the tenderest souls on earth, are, if the burning takes place according to divine justice, as potent as lightning, for the majesty of the Almighty does the burning. O painful miracles; the ropes which were, twisted together in a street of Jerusalem and are now used to bind His wrists cannot be broken by all the powers of Heaven. The suction of God’s whole being draws them tightly around those wrists; the will of the Almighty has tied the knot; the power which is above joined with the power which is below in the act of weaving the strands of this particular rope together. Those souls simply cannot be removed. Nazarene, say yea. Let your yea be yea and your nay, nay, for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. To say more would be to place the loom of the rope-maker in Jerusalem outside of the sermon on the mount which you derived from God. A mere rope suffices, Thou Preacher of the mountain. Whatever is more than that cometh of evil.

As for the strength of the man Jesus: that, too, cannot break these bonds. It would be folly to say that Jesus can do everything He wills to do, unless we add that Jesus wills to do only what is compatible with the will and programme of His Father. The man Jesus performed all of His miracles by faith, by looking firmly to God, with exalted self-assurance, by annexing to His own human capacity the strength of God. Take away His faith, and you take away His power to perform miracles. The moment it is certain that Jesus has no “faith” in a matter, the question of being able or unable to do it becomes irrelevant.

And now we return to His own word: This is your hour and the power of darkness. Jesus knows this is true; He is perfectly sure of it. Therefore it is quite impossible for Him to believe that God could give Him the strength to break those bonds. His human strength weakens, at least in respect to these bonds, because of His sure sense of the fact that His Father is binding His hands.

In this manner, then, Jesus is bound. God has bound the mighty Samson, even though He has not touched Jesus’ hair, and even though He will not in all eternity thrust out Jesus’ eyes. Now Jesus must set free all the Philistines who have been given Him, even though these must fall upon Him first in this temple of Dagon, which serves at the same time as the grinding-mill of sin, and as His prison-house. This—is—your hour.

Jesus is being bound. And these three are tying the knots: the devil, man, and God. In personal language this means that the three who are doing it are I, the devil, and God. But I shall not succeed in making that personal way of expressing it my own until I put my own flesh, which bound Him, in bonds. The bound Jesus is the beautiful King only to the spiritual man. To the flesh Jesus’ band is just as “offensive” and “foolish” as are the cross and His being forsaken. But to those who have learned to see and “distinguish” from the vantage point of the Spirit, the bound Jesus, who knew His Father’s hour and therefore the hour of the Tyrant of His Father, Satan, is .lovable only because of the bonds. In Him they look up to their God. Precisely by not playing wantonly with His lightnings, and by doing injustice to the rights of devils, the God of the Scriptures proved to be different from the God of the world. Let the gods of Greece and paganism clothe themselves in the garments of whim: The God and Father of our great Shepherd of the sheep, together with His Son, appears in the strict bondage of justice and truth, even in the moment when the devils are loosed.

To those who believe, therefore, the bonds of Jesus are the power of God and the wisdom of God. The ropes which are cutting deeply into Jesus’ wrists are a visible manifestation of the bands within which God is bound by Himself; the bonds, that is, which limit His infinitude in all of its virtues, including his justice, omnipotence, and love. To us Jesus’ bonds are a symbol of the unity of God and of the trinity. For the joyous limitation by which God restricts Himself to His own Being is the restriction which fettered His Son in the bands of death. This was done in order that the Father, Son, and Spirit, who limited each other in the counsel of peace, might strive together for the peace of the world. Together, remember, and on the night in which “He was bound in order that He might set us free,” these bonds maintain the counsel of peace.

This is your hour and the power of darkness.

We human beings will never be able to repeat those words unless we do it by faith. To anyone who has no faith in the unity of God there can be no offense greater than the bound Jesus. But to those who have the faith the bonds of Jesus will “utter abundant speech” and abundant knowledge.

As long as we are in the present we cannot know what will happen in the future. Hence we can say of no coming hour: This is the unique hour which is solely the province of darkness. It pleased God—and this, also, we call common grace — to bind Satan. And only at the time known to God, as we have observed before, will Satan be loosed once more.

Hence we may and hence we must oppose the satanical, in the power of the cross. And we must persevere in this opposition until the days of the Antichrist; for we can never be sure of when the definite crisis of the last day is at hand.

How should we who are mortal determine the time of God’s unique hour. For we can read the history of the world only from our human point of view.

That is why we want to take rest in the Christ of God, who, when He was bound, knew God’s hours, and who still knows them. For Christ, as man, experienced history, and again as man, by His strong faith in God and by His communion with the Father, illuminated it. Thus He shows what is a paradox to the unregenerated mind: that the bonds of Jesus are the devising of human arbitrariness but also the product of the fixed system of God’s all-wise counsel.

Jesus is bound: He is wonderful in counsel, and mighty in deed.

In His bonds He did see God. Therefore, He is fully aware of what is happening as God forsakes Him.

When Jesus was being bound, the angels kept silence the space of an hour. For this was the hour and province of darkness.

Patriarch Abraham, it pleased thee once to say

That hell and paradise too far apart did lay,

And a redeemed sinner ne’er near to it would stray.

But these are wonders which surpass our thought

That Heaven so close to the abyss is brought.

To show us the great patience Jesus wrought.[1]

[1] Heiman Dullaert (translation of H. Beets).