the passover (ver. 28), at the very moment that they were giving up the true Paschal Lamb to be sacrificed. Scruples are not conscience. We must not break through scruples, if we have any, but conscience looks to God and to His word. Conscience did not prevent the Jews buying the blood of Christ for thirty pieces of silver; but a scruple forbade them to put into God's treasury in the temple, the money rejected by Judas, because it was the price of blood. (Compare Rom. xiv.)

Pilate asks Jesus if He is the King of the Jews. The Lord explains that His kingdom is not of this world, otherwise He would have made good His rights as the world does. But in every sense, His kingdom, at this moment, was not being set up in this world as a worldly kingdom. Christ's presence as an accused man before Pilate was a proof of it. Jesus does not fail to confess openly that He is King, when Pilate asks it of Him. He will set up, later on, a power which nothing will be able to resist, but the

time was not yet come. In truth, He was King, and He bears witness to the truth. According to the work of God at that moment, He was numbered amongst the transgressors. For Pilate, an infidel and a reasoner, what was truth? He was very guilty in giving way to the urgent demands of the Jews, but the Jews themselves were the instigators of the death of Jesus. They accomplished the counsels of God without knowing what they were doing, and Jesus was there in His perfect obedience. We have before us the truth, the King, the propitiatory Victim, accomplishing a far deeper and more important work than royalty; we see too the head of the Gentiles, representing the emperor, and then the furious hatred of the poor Jewish people against God manifested in grace, their Saviour. Everything bears its true character, God's counsels are fulfilled, and every actor in this scene takes his true place. But the actors, Jews and Gentiles, must disappear as judged, unless grace can save them;

and the condemned malefactor, who disappears, humanly speaking, leaves the present scene in order to take His place as Lord of all, to sit upon the Father's throne.

Thus things go on even on a smaller scale, in this world. It is striking to see that these poor Jews use at the cross the same words that are put into the mouth of atheists and of God's enemies. (Compare Psalm xxii. and Matt. xxvii.) But wisdom is justified

of her children.

Every one's position is clearly marked out. Pilate, a judge, convinced of the Lord's innocence, wished to get rid of the Jews' importunity, and avoid enmity without profit. The Jews rage against the Son of God come in grace into the world, and prefer a robber to Him. Jesus submits to everything: condemned on His own testimony, He must be cast out of the camp, and undergo that kind of death of which He had spoken, and the Gentiles must be guilty of it. But the acts of Pilate and of the Jews would shew still more

clearly the spirit that animated them : Pilate without conscience, the Jews full of hatred. They wished at all cost, to put Jesus to death. This follows, as we shall see at the beginning of chapter xix.

“OF HIM ARE YE IN CHRIST JESUS."

WHEN the Lord Jesus Christ was a Man upon earth, He was surely a test for man, for those among whom He walked down here in that wonderful path of light, and love, and blessing, every step of which told out what God was for man, and only brought with it as an answer, the hatred that was in the heart of fallen man for God. But He who was Son of God and Man of sorrows, went on unswervingly in that path, not only because there were poor lost sinners to be saved; but because, first of all, there was the outraged glory of the God from whom and for whom He came, to be vindicated. Everything

in which the first man who sinned and came short of that glory had failed, every responsibility taken up by him, only to shew how hopeless and helpless was his state, and how absolute the impossibility for him to meet the requirements of a holy God, must be made good, or that God would have been dishonoured without remedy in the world of His own creation, and by the creature of His own hands.

More than that, the man that had sinned must himself disappear from the scene, to make way for the second Man, who would for ever be the centre of a new creation, which neither sin nor death could stain or darken. But in order to be this, He must first pass through this scene where all is blighted by the failure of the first man; pass through it for the glory of God; and He could not be here without being a test to those among whom He was. Hence we find that in whatever company He found Himself, He made Himself the test. If men, in their ignorant speculation as to who He was,