The Yellow Legal Pad

John 18:29-32 - So Pilate went outside to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?” They answered him, “If this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you.” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.” The Jews said to him, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death.” This was to fulfill the word that Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die.

On the afternoon of November 8, 1981, a man sat alone with a yellow legal pad and started writing out everything he had found. Lee Strobel was the legal editor of the Chicago Tribune. He held a Master of Studies in Law from Yale, and he was an atheist. His wife Leslie had become a Christian, and he set out to take the whole thing apart. He dated the investigation himself: January 20, 1980 to November 8, 1981. Twenty-one months. He studied history, sifted archaeology, asked questions and went after the answers.

Strobel was building a case. He’s putting on paper, in his own handwriting, the things that cut against the conclusion he walked in with. Nobody does that unless they’re willing for the answer to come out other than they wanted. So he put the evidence down on paper where he could look at it. Hold that legal pad beside verse 30.

Pilate comes out of his own residence to accommodate a crowd that won’t come in, and he asks the first question any court has to ask. What is the charge? What did this man do? Their first answer isn’t a charge at all. “If this man were not doing evil, we would not have delivered him over to you.” Which means: trust our verdict. They hand Pilate their authority in place of the evidence he asked for. They will produce actual accusations before the morning is out, but that isn’t what comes out first. What comes out first is who they are.

And consider the night behind that answer. They had spent hours questioning Jesus and trying to assemble testimony. Matthew says they went looking for false witnesses. Mark says the witnesses couldn’t get their stories to agree. Then a Roman administrator who deals in charges and statutes asks them to name the crime, and what they have ready is their own certainty. They were never gathering evidence. They had the verdict before the sun went down and spent the night shopping for something to hold it up.

We do the same thing, and rarely about Jesus. We form a settled conviction about a coworker out of one bad meeting. We decide what a family member's motive was and never once ask them. We hear one version of a story and file the verdict, and then spend months quietly collecting whatever holds it up. We might even be right. That’s the part that keeps us from seeing it. A verdict reached badly can still land on the truth, and from the inside, doing the work and getting lucky feel exactly the same.

Now watch what happens next in the passage, because it’s the best thing in it. Pilate tries to hand Jesus back. Your law, your problem. And the leaders have to say out loud what they actually came for. It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death. Whatever authority they still held under Roman occupation, the execution they wanted required Pilate's sentence. And John tells us that this was to fulfill the word Jesus had spoken to show by what kind of death he was going to die.

Back in chapter 12 Jesus said that when He was lifted up from the earth He would draw all people to Himself, and John tells us plainly He was speaking about how He would die. A Jewish sentence for blasphemy meant stoning. Rome crucified. Rome lifted condemned men up where a whole city could see them. So the limitation these men resented, the one authority they didn’t have, is the exact instrument that fulfilled what Jesus had already said. They think they’re working the system to get the outcome they want, but they don’t realize that even their limitations are serving a plan settled before any of them were born.

And there’s the gospel underneath the courtroom. They’re working to make an innocent man carry a guilty verdict. He’s walking to the cross to carry ours. Strobel wrote it down and lost his case. It cost him his atheism, and eventually his career, and he has said for forty years that it was the best trade he ever made.

Head: A verdict I never fairly investigated is still a verdict I am responsible for.

Heart: Ask God where certainty has quietly replaced curiosity about somebody.

Hands: Take the person you’ve already decided about, and write down what you know, what you were told, and what you filled in.

Prayer: “Father, I praise You that Your Son was never for one second at the mercy of that courtroom. Forgive me for verdicts I have reached without ever looking. Make me slow to accuse and honest about what I actually know. In Jesus' name, Amen.”

-PK