TRIALS IN THE BIBLE

I started thinking about the few examples of actual judicial actions in the Bible and figured that I could easily write a short blog about them. Then I happened to re-read a collection of short stories titled Verdict of 13 written by thirteen members of the Detection Club. That was a loose organization of mystery writers founded in 1932 with two of their past presidents including the noted Christian apologists G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. Each of the stories in this particular collection was supposed to contain some sort of jury in them. But the way in which the thirteen chosen writers carried out this assignment varied so widely that I realized I might have to rethink how many “trials” actually appear in the Bible.

As I began reviewing the stories in the Old and New Testament, I realized that one could almost view the whole Bible as a series of trials. And to recount them all would result in a commentary on the complete Scripture. But at least I will offer the following thirteen trials as examples.

God on Trial

The Book of Job has often been compared to a trial in which the title character is the defendant, God is the judge, Satan is the prosecuting attorney, and Job yearns to have a defense attorney who could plead his case for him. But in fact, Job 1 reveals that it is, in fact, God Himself who is on trial and has been accused by Satan of being the sort of person who can only get followers by bribing them with promises.

C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay called “God in the Dock,” in which he explained that we put God in the defendant's dock all the time. In James 4:11-12 it is explained that when we argue with God's laws we are in effect setting ourselves up as judges and attempting to judge God Himself.

Mankind on Trial

The whole Bible is bracketed with two trials, which turn out to really be one long trial which is still in session. Adam and Eve are only given one “law” by God that they are not to disobey on penalty of death. Of course, they fail the test miserably upon the promise by the serpent that they themselves can become the equal of the Judge, and they are condemned to death. Fortunately for them, God delays the actual execution date for hundreds of years before they meet their earthly fate. But for the eternal fate for our parents in Eden and ourselves, we must wait for the very end of the story. Thus, at the conclusion of the Book of Revelation, we come to the final judgment of all humanity in which each person is judged as guilty or innocent, with quite different eternal sentences for each group.

Lynching Mobs

More accurately, these should be called “stoning mobs.” And this represents cases in which a group of highly emotional people decide that they have enough information to act as judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one without waiting for the wheels of justice to turn their slow course. Two similar occasions from the Book of Acts come to mind which provide great examples of how very easy it is for a group of uninformed and confused people to get whipped up into a violent mob. The first takes place in Ephesus started by a silversmith in town who is afraid that Paul's teaching will lead to a decrease in his business and ends up with the entire populace of the city filling the colosseum and demanding Paul's blood (Acts 19). The second occurs back in Jerusalem where an unfounded rumor against Paul by one ignorant person leads to similar results (Acts 22).

Uncooperative Clients

There is nothing that a defense attorney hates more than a client who will not cooperate, but insists on coming to trial and conducting his defense in the way he wants despite what it might do to harm his case. One such person was Stephen, who probably didn't even realize that he was on trial for his life at the time. Stephen subjects a Jewish crowd to a long litany of sins that they have committed as a people over the years and continues to the point that they stop up their ears and proceed to stone him to death. It is as if a defendant were allowed to speak in court and then proceeded to purposely antagonize the jury by telling them what horrible people they were. The verdict becomes a foregone conclusion (Acts 7).

Paul proves to be another uncooperative defendant when he insists on conducting his own defense before the Sanhedrin and various Roman magistrates (Acts 23-26). At each trial, Paul appears to get deeper and deeper in trouble, and finally in Acts 26:32, Agrippa sadly admits, “This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to the emperor.”

Guilty Judges

There are two stories in the Old Testament which involve kings who are confronted by petitioners with cases to decide. But unbeknownst to the judge-kings, the stories that are narrated are not factual ones at all. Instead, they are in the form of parables which, in fact, describe the sinful actions of the judges themselves. And the question is, how will the judge decide the case?

The most famous story of this sort is the confrontation of King David by Nathan after the king has had a man killed in order to marry his widow Bathsheba. Nathan couches the story in terms of a poor man whose only lamb had been stolen by a rich and powerful man. When David condemns the rich man to death, Nathan proclaims, “You are the man!”, causing David to repent. (II Samuel 12)

The same thing happens to David later in life when he is mourning so much for his dead son Absalom that he totally neglects his duties as king. It is only when Joab convinces a wise woman of Tekoa to come to David with a made-up case she wishes him to adjudicate for her, that he snaps out of his destructive behavior. Only this time, the guilty judge catches on what is happening since it is the second time that trick had been played on him. (II Samuel 14)

Royal Judges and Difficult Cases

There are two more occasions when Jewish kings are confronted with cases they must decide, but these both concern real rather than fictional stories. And there are a number of other similarities between them. In each occasion, it is a civil case between two mothers who both have a child, one of which dies. This is then a custody battle as to whom the remaining child rightfully belongs.

The first narrative is the most famous; it is the case Solomon is given in which two prostitutes living in the same house both have a child at about the same time. In the middle of the night, one of the babies dies. Each woman swears that her baby is the surviving one. Solomon's famous decision confirming his reputation as the wisest man alive is to cut the live baby in half so that each woman can at least get one-half. One prostitute immediately agrees to such a proposition while the other pleads with Solomon not to do it, but instead give the baby to the other woman. By their respective actions, Solomon immediately recognizes which is the true mother of the remaining child (I Kings 3:16-28).

Despite the similarities between this case and the next one I am going to tell, there are quite drastic dissimilarities as well. Samaria is in dire straits since they are in the middle of a devastating siege (quite different from the halcyon days of Solomon's reign) during which practically everything edible in the town is gone. At that point two women make a horrific pact that they will boil and eat their babies one at a time. After both consuming Woman 1's baby, Woman 2 refuses to sacrifice her child as well. And so the two women go to King Jehoram and ask him to judge between them: should the second child be given up as food as well? It would take a king even wiser than Solomon to make a satisfactory decision in this case, and king tears his clothes and breaks down in despair when he realizes the depths to which his country has fallen. (II Kings 6:24-30) This is the only one of the cases that I have presented in which no verdict was given by the judge.

The Thirteenth Trial

If you have been counting correctly up til now, you will realize that I have only presented twelve trials yet. I have saved the most famous (or infamous) trial for last, that of our Savior. That is because I realized that there were similarities between that trial and each of the above situations. Taking them in the same order:

When mankind attempted to kill Jesus and get his inconvenient presence out of their way, they were actually putting God Incarnate on trial.

But at the same time, Jesus as the Son of Man took all the sins of the children of Adam and Eve on Himself so that we would not have to suffer the eternal death that we all deserve.

As much as the Jewish and Roman authorities may have wanted it to appear that all the proper legal procedures had been followed in convicting Jesus, the fact was that it was really just a “kangaroo court'” no better than a lynching and filled with lying witnesses, inadequate defense, and the underlying threat of mob violence.

There are two opposite types of uncooperative defendants: those who insist on handling their own defense and those who refuse to even open their mouth to help their own case. We have already seen examples of the former, but in Jesus' case “He was like a lamb silent before the shearer, he does not open his mouth.” (Philip in Acts 8:32-33 quoting from Isaiah 53:7-8)

Jesus' various trials before the Jewish Sanhedrin and different Roman magistrates present us with a succession of “judges” who are either prejudiced against Jesus and dead set on killing him, or do not really care much either way what happens to him, or who like Pilate are afraid of the crowd and how they might react to a verdict of acquittal. They all condemn themselves by their actions.

The most “Royal” judge of all in Jesus' trial is the ultimate Judge, God the Father. And when confronted with a situation in which one son had to die, He made the most difficult decision of all in telling Jesus at Gethsemane that his decision was that there was no other way out of the quandary but to go ahead.