Joe Heschmeyer explores the complex theological implications of Judas’ betrayal, examining whether Jesus’ choice of Judas suggests a deeper, potentially troubling divine plan.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and today I want to look at the problem of Judas. What do I mean by that? At the last supper, Jesus says of Judas, the son of man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the son of man is betrayed. It would’ve been better for that man if he’d never been born and we might object here. Jesus, you are the one who caused Judas to be born in the first place, so surely there’s something mysterious here. Why did you create Judas if you think it would be better that he had not been born? But it’s not just that Jesus created Judas and caused him to be born. He called him to be one of the apostles, and Jesus doesn’t run from this apparent scandal either. He seems to lean into it.
At the end of John six, he says, did I not choose you? The 12 and one of you is a devil, and in case we miss it, John then explains, he spoke of Judas, the son of Simon Sct, for he, one of the 12 was to betray him. It almost looks like Jesus called Judas as an apostle so that he would betray him. So is that right? Does Jesus want Judas to sin or does he cause his sin in some way or it can certainly sound like that and frankly, there’s no shortage of Protestant ministers who suggest that might be the case. It might even sound like that from the words of the Bible. In addition to what we just saw, acts four has this really fascinating part in which the apostles and the early Christians are praying together and they praise God for the fact that truly in this city, Jerusalem, they were gathered together against thy holy servant Jesus, whom now dis anoint both Herod and punch his Pilate with the Gentiles and the people of Israel to do whatever thy hand and thy plan had predestined to take place.
Now, Judas isn’t mentioned by name there, but surely alongside Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentile and Jewish leaders of the day who are responsible for Jesus’ death, we can add Judas to the list and say somehow the biblical answer to the question appears to involve this thorny question of predestination. So I want to try to answer that today and explain what the Bible does and doesn’t mean by talking about God predestining things. But before we get there, we need to talk actually about two ways seemingly opposite, but I would suggest actually quite similar in which Christians have historically gotten the story of Judas wrong. These are the two, again, at the surface opposite, maybe not so opposite ways we can screw up in thinking about the story of Judas, the first way is to treat Judas as the hero. Now, most of us I think would not fall into this trap, but it can be sort of tempting to view the whole thing.
Look, Judas is betrayal led to the greatest act of human history. Jesus Christ laying down his life forth the salvation of the world. So maybe some people have claimed throughout history, Judas is actually an underappreciated good guy. Now, the most famous and maybe most notorious example of this is the so-called Gospel of Judas. This is one of those gnostic gospels. So it’s heavily influenced by the gnostic heresy. It claims to be a recording of what Jesus revealed to Judas. It’s actually from much later like the mid second century at least I would say. But in there it depicts Jesus secretly talking with Judas about how he’s going to go above and beyond the others because he’ll sacrifice the human who bears me. Now to make sense of that, you need to know something about gnosticism. It says the body is bad, the body’s a prison.
So in this view, what’s so good about the crucifixion is that Jesus, this divine spirit is free from the prison of the mortal body. Obviously this is not sound theology, but you’ll notice going pretty far back in Christian history, this desire to sort of want to excuse Judas or even to treat him as a hero because of the goodness that comes from Good Friday. The second view on the surface might seem to be the opposite because this isn’t early gnostics. This is modern day Protestants of the Calvinist variety, and I’m going to provocatively call their view. They view that Judas died for our sins. Now, that’s not how they would say it. I want to say that upfront. I want to suggest that’s where their theology leads and that this is something that if you’re inclined to view Judas in this way, you should watch out for because you can subtly without meaning to put Judas in the place of Jesus.
What do I mean by that? In John 11, Caiaphas, the high priest is part of a group conspiring to have Jesus killed in Caiaphas we’re actually told by John, inspired by the Holy Spirit prophesize to the people you do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people that the whole nation should not perish. Now, he means something evil by that, but John makes the point. This is actually prophetic. Jesus would in fact die for the nation and not for the nation only, but for the Gentiles as well to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So I want to have you think about that. So the classic Christian conception is Jesus undergoes the horrors of the cross and all of this in some way to die for our sins. Now how that works is a whole other can of worms Christians sometimes disagree about, but that’s the core idea and it strikes me that there’s something really similar going on in how certain Calvinist preachers talk about the role of Judas. Now, I’ve picked on John MacArthur before because he’s extremely popular and wrong on a lot of things, and I hope you’ll forgive me for picking on him one more time, but I can’t resist addressing some of the errors that he presents in his presentation of the betrayal of Judas. So he begins by talking about how Jesus treats Judas like a friend. Hey,
CLIP:
Judas had been allowed by our Lord to be in the position on his side where the honored guest would sit. And so our Lord in a gesture of amazing honor to Judas gives him the morsel as if he were some honored guest, a mark of special affection, place of honor, place of an intimate friend.
Joe:
Okay, so we’re going to get into this whole idea of Jesus’s friendship with Judas later on because that’s actually a really important theological theme that I don’t hear many people talk about at all. But MacArthur is going to present it as if Jesus is acting like he’s Judas friends, but then when he gets to John 13 where Jesus gives a morsel to Judas,
Satan were told enters Judas. No, in context, Jesus has announced that he’s going to be betrayed and Judas has already plotted to betray him. So it isn’t as if Judas was a really good guy and then he’s just overcome by the devil and can’t help himself. He’s already been planning to betray Jesus. It’s very clear from all four gospels at this point though, at the last supper we’re told that Satan enters into Judas. Jesus then says to him, what you’re going to do do quickly. Now when you or I read that, we might read that for what it is that he’s just saying, get this bad thing you’re going to do over with. He’s not encouraging him to do the bad thing, but in the same way that for instance, someone about to be unjustly executed might say, get it done with, they’re not saying, please execute me, but they are saying don’t drag it out. If you’ve decided you’re going to do the evil thing, that’s not an encouragement to do evil, right? Well, according to MacArthur, it not only is it’s actually a divine command to do evil,
CLIP:
But with the statement of Jesus, what you do do quickly, he activated his own death. That is step one in the activation of his own execution because nothing will be happening until the trigger is pulled, and Judas is the trigger
He
Judas acted. Verse 30, he had no choice, sovereign Lord,
Joe:
That’s a fascinating claim. He says Judas acted he had no choice, sovereign Lord, in those six words, John MacArthur has just turned Jesus’s self-sacrifice into a suicide that Jesus holds the gun to his head and pulls the trigger, and the trigger really is not responsible. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I’ve heard that a thousand times, Judas is just the trigger. Jesus is committing suicide. That’s the problem with this theology at the outset, but think about the implications for Judas. If a gun kills someone, you don’t put the gun on trial. It had no agency, it had no free will. He just said Judas had no free will. So surely you might think Judas will at least get off the hook. He won’t be punished for something he had literally no control over. Well, not so it says MacArthur,
CLIP:
As I said, Judas would never see another day and by the dawning of the next day, Jesus’ trial would be essentially over and he’d be on his way to death. Jesus would come out the other side of the grave to eternal glory. Judas would be damned to hell forever.
Joe:
Again, though, if Judas is just a trigger, why in the world is he damned forever? And for that matter, if Judas has no free will, why not at least bring him to redemption? This is a notoriously sticky problem for Calvinists that if the only thing that matters here is God’s sovereignty and Judas is presented as Jesus’s friend, why would Jesus not save his friend? Well, according to John Piper, it’s because he didn’t actually want to.
CLIP:
Judas didn’t repent because it was not granted to him by the father.
Joe:
This is what I mean where it appears that Jesus and Judas have been reversed. Whereas in the biblical account, Judas betrays the friendship of Jesus and sends him to his death so that one man can die for the nation, whether he knows that’s why that’s happening or not. In the Calvinist view, it almost seems as if Jesus is only pretending to be Judas, his friend, while having no intention of saving him, no intention of bringing him to regeneration, no intention of bringing him to eternal life, but instead is using him, pretending to be his friend and betraying him so that Judas will go to hell forever. Why? Because he needs a trigger to launch the plan of salvation. So Judas has to die so that we may live. Judas is the sort of substitutionary atonement in that theology. If you draw that logic out, that’s what it would appear to suggest. Now, again, I’m sure that people who say that don’t think that through to that conclusion, but nevertheless, they do say some bizarre things that make it sound like they’re really grateful for Judas or like what he did was actually good and not tremendously evil. For instance, here’s RC sprawl.
CLIP:
From one perspective, we see that the most evil action in the history of the world was committed by Judas. On the other hand, from a different perspective, the most glorious deed that ever was performed in our behalf was the betrayal of Jesus Christ. Because through that work that orchestrated by God’s sovereignty, our salvation came to pass.
Joe:
I want to make sure you don’t miss what he just said. He just said that the most glorious deed ever performed on our behalf was not Jesus’s self-sacrificial death on the cross. The most glorious deed ever performed on our behalf was the betrayal of Jesus Christ by Judas Escar, that Judas, not Jesus performed the greatest act in history. It would be impossible to get that more wrong. Judas did what Christians have historically believed to be the single worst act in all of history. And RC Spro says, actually, it’s the best. Sure, from one perspective it’s really bad, but because God drew good out of it, this is actually good. So it’s not surprising if these are the kind of preachers that you’re listening to that you find Calvinist YouTubers making bizarre claims like this.
CLIP:
I’m grateful for Judas because he was used in God’s divine plan. He was used in the sovereignty of God to redeem the elect. I want
Joe:
To be really clear, this is evil. To use another person as a means to an end without loving them as a person is objectification. Whether you’re looking at pornography or exploiting another person in a sweatshop or anything else, when you won’t treat the other person as a person, when you treat them as a mere means to your end, you’ve dehumanized them, and this is dehumanizing Judas, so they can proclaim how much they love. Judas Ray Comfort famously says Judas is his favorite apostle. That’s sick, that’s twisted, and this has both on the one hand, put Judas in the place of Christ and on the other treated both Judas and frankly, if you get into the theology, Jesus like mere objects to achieve the end of our salvation. So I want to suggest to the outset this is a bad way of doing it, but at the same time, I understand why someone reading the biblical evidence might come to this conclusion.
So we have to address the big problems like making sense of things like predestination. So I want to start with a simple question that’s not so simple. Does God cause evil? Because at the outset I know that there are going to be some of you already. If you haven’t jumped in the comments below making these kind of claims, you’re going to be like, well, God is the author of good and evil, and chances are there’s a tiny set of Bible verses you’re going to point to. One of the most common is Isaiah 45, verse seven, in which God declares I form the light and create darkness, and then as many translations have it, I make peace and create evil. Now, what you should know there is the Hebrew word there. Raw also means misfortune. And so that’s why other translations like the RSV say, I make wheel and create.
Whoa. Now, I wish wheel was a word we understood, but it’s like the idea that both whether things are going really well or whether there’s trial and tribulation and everything else, God is still God. He’s sovereign over all of that. He’s not saying that God is the author of moral evil, but rather that whether things are going well or badly, God is still in control. Like Ecclesiastes seven says in verse 14 that in the day of prosperity be joyful and the day of adversity consider God has made the one as well as the other so that a man may not find out anything that will be after Him, right? That God is still God, whether things are going really well or really poorly in your life. Now this makes sense of the actual context of Isaiah 45. Isaiah 45 isn’t saying, the God we thought was all good is actually all good and all evil.
He’s the author of both. No. The context of Isaiah 45 is that it’s during the Babylonian captivity and in the face of this challenge that Aha, the Babylonians won, therefore their gods are better than the God of Israel. Isaiah is prophetically responding that no, the exile was actually the result of God’s repeated threats. He said, if you keep acting this way, you’ll be punished and then they’re punished. This wasn’t showing that God was inferior to the Babylonian Gods rather God is someone who has the power to create the darkness and the evil of exile, not again, a moral that God is not doing something morally evil, but he’s allowing people to suffer trial and tribulation for their own good as he told them he would. So that’s one of the passages you regularly hear. The other one is about the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. Now, I was actually asked about this recently a week ago on Catholic Answers Lives. I want to play you the question and then answer it
CLIP:
Need start Bible study pretty soon, and we’re going to go through Exodus and one of the things is God saying, I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, so I want to know about that.
Joe:
So who did harden Pharaoh’s heart? Exodus gives us three ways of answering that question. One way of just putting it in the passive voice, Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. You get that in places like Exodus seven, verse 13 and 22, Pharaoh’s heart remained hardened. That doesn’t tell us authorship just tells us what happened. Other times it says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. For instance, in Exodus nine verse 12, the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh. It seems very clear, but then there’s a third way where it says Pharaoh hardened his own heart like Exodus eight in verse 32, but Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and so what’s going on here? Why does Exodus, I mean presumably the same author is using these three different ways of describing the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh. In fact, if you want to see a really fascinating bit, look at the end of Exodus nine and beginning of Exodus 10.
Now, remember, the chapter divisions aren’t original, so we’re just going to look at four verses in a row. This is at the end of the seventh plague and the beginning of the eighth plague, and the first thing you see is in Exodus nine, verse 34 we’re told that when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart, he and his servants. So Pharaoh and the servants of Pharaoh hardened their own heart. That’s what we’re told in verse 34. Verse 35 just says The heart of Pharaoh was hardened. That’s that kind of neutral passive expression. But then the next verse, which is the first verse of Exodus 10. In our Bibles, God says to Moses, I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants. So in the course of three verses, really you have Pharaoh hardened his own heart.
Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. How do we make sense of those three things? How can all three of those things be true? Well, for that, I want to turn to the 19th century extremely dapper Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon who said, I use this example all the time, but I want to give credit where it’s due. Spurgeon says, the same sun which melts wax hardens clay and the same gospel which melts some persons to repentance, hardens others and their sin. In other words, we can talk about the sun melting wax and hardening clay, but it would be a mistake for a person who doesn’t understand the sun to say, aha, the sun is really cold to one and really warm to the other. Nope, that’s not how it works at all. The sun is exactly the same to both. How they respond is different, and so likewise, God is all loving to both of us.
How we respond can differ, and so in this case that actually makes total sense of the passages. For instance, in the passage we just looked at the end of Exodus nine, we’re told that Pharaoh saw that the rain in the hail and the thunder had ceased. Well, who did that? God did that. God acts and Pharaoh reacts. So whether you want to call this God hardening Pharaoh’s heart because it was God who acted by stopping the plague, or whether you want to call it Pharaoh hardening his own heart because Pharaoh’s response to God’s action was to be hardened in heart. Neither of those is wrong, but as long as we know when we say that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, this is not saying God removed Pharaoh’s ability to choose Pharaoh is clearly choosing. He is clearly acting. He’s clearly hardening his own heart, but he’s doing this in response to things God is doing.
He doesn’t have to, but he chooses to in the same way that you can hear the message of the gospel and be totally turned off by it, and we could say both you were repulsed by Jesus’s teaching or Jesus’s teaching repulsed you, both of those would be accurate, but one of those is morally culpable. You were repulsed by Jesus’s teaching. The other one isn’t culpable. Jesus’s teaching repulsed you, Jesus’s teaching is not morally responsible for your reaction to it, but nevertheless, both ways make coherent sense. So when we talk about God hardening Pharaoh’s heart, Pharaoh hardening his own heart, you need to understand this Old Testament mode of expression. Now, I would actually love to hear your comments below if you’ve encountered verses like this. If there are other verses, you want me to address that kind of look like this? Because this is one of the most common misconceptions that God is morally responsible for evil, and if you get that wrong, you’re not just getting the Bible wrong, you’re getting God wrong in a really big way.
Let’s apply that now to Judas. Was Judas predestined for evil? This is going to get into a big distinction about what we mean by predestination. So again, remember that line in Acts four from the prayer of the early Christians about how those who betray Christ, and we can add Judas here, they do whatever thy hand God’s hand and God’s plan had predestined to take place that God’s plan of salvation incorporated the evil deeds that the others would do. Herod punches Pilate, the Gentile and Jewish leaders, and we can add to this Judas, when we talk about predestination or divine foreknowledge, we often have three different ideas of what that means that are maybe muddled together. So I’m not call out all three of them and then show you that they’re different. The first possible thing that could mean is simply God sees everything that has happened is happening or will happen straightforward, right?
God foreknows, he knows what’s going to happen. He knows the future. It’s not future to him. Second, God not only sees but permits, everything that has happened is happening or will happen so far these two should both be fairly uncontroversial and I’ll explain why, but then the controversial one is number three, that God doesn’t just see everything that’s going to happen has happened, will happen. He doesn’t just permit it, but he actually decrees or desires it. He authors it in some way that God decrees or desires. Everything that has happened is happening or will happen. Now, some people hearing this are going to say, look, this is a distinction without a difference. If one of those is true, all three are true, and I want to say that is logically wrong, that is invalid and we can see why it’s invalid. So if you’re going to be patient with me for a second, I need to go through the deep waters of predestination slightly.
I know that can be something where your eyes glaze over and your head spins, but we need to work through it somewhat or we can’t make sense of basic things like why Judas is even in the picture. But the first thing I want to say is the fact that one of these is true doesn’t mean the other two are. These are distinct logically. The first one, God sees everything including future events. The fact that God sees it doesn’t mean he permits it and it doesn’t mean he decrees or desires it. A good way to see that would be something like if you’re familiar with Greek mythology, the figure of Cassandra, Cassandra is cursed with the gift of prophecy, but prophecy nobody listens to. So she always knows what’s going to happen in the future, but everybody ignores her. She sees what’s going to happen, but she doesn’t permit it.
She actively tries to stop it but can’t. Being able to see the future is an aspect of omniscience being able to know everything. That’s the first sense of foreknowledge or predestination. But God isn’t only omniscient, he’s also omnipotent, meaning he doesn’t just know everything. He’s also all powerful and so therefore everything that happens, he has at least permitted it to happen. Now, some things he clearly wants to happen. He’s very clear about this, but there are other things that happen that he seemingly doesn’t want to have happen, things like sin, and yet because he’s omnipotent, he could act in such a way as to prevent it from happening. He could make every evil doer immediately drop dead the minute th... Read more on Catholic.com