The Greatest Trial On Record

Spurgeon walks his congregation step by step through Christ's three trials — ecclesiastical (before Annas, Caiaphas, and the Sanhedrim), civil (before Pilate and Herod), and popular (the choice between Christ and Barabbas) — pausing at every detail to draw out its significance: the bound cords that cut to the bone, the mockery that challenged Christ to name his blindfolded striker (whose challenge he met with a silence that was itself omnipotence under control), the false and contradictory witnesses whose testimony could not even agree in its lies, the high priest who spit in Christ's face the moment the court's verdict was given, and Christ being dragged back five separate times to be mocked, beaten, and spat upon — not one death but a hundred. He argues throughout that the absolute certainty of the death sentence from the start, the inability of paid witnesses to find a charge that would stick, Pilate's repeated declarations of innocence, and above all Christ's own calm claim to deity at the climactic moment — sealed with his blood when he could easily have denied it — constitute together the most powerful possible proof that he is exactly who he claimed to be, since no false religion would dare ask its followers to believe that the despised, beaten man before Caiaphas was very God of very God. He closes by bringing the three trials home as three present-day choices: will you accept Christ or reject him as the Sanhedrim did; will you acquit him as innocent or hand him over to please the crowd as Pilate did; and will you choose Christ or Barabbas — Christ or your sins, Christ or your pleasures — insisting that every sinner who has ever truly said "I would have him" has already been renewed by grace, and that the only act remaining is simply to trust him, since he has never yet cast out a single soul that came.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on February 22, 1863.