Satan is at work all the time. He has many who are delighted to help his cause. The chief priests and scribes wanted Jesus dead, for they feared the people (2). The religious establishment was the obvious adversary on the outside.
After over three years of intense ministry, Jesus had become a household conversation. The lips of the people on the street often spoke of him. Jesus’s popularity and words of repentance gave his adversary a choice. Repentance was not a choice they wanted to make, for they were content with being the rich, big hot shots. Jesus’s popularity threatened to take that away. They were willing to murder Jesus to keep it (2).
Judas was more like the chief priests and scribes than Jesus. Jesus was not enough for him. Perhaps he wanted to be like the religious establishment. Most likely, he had had enough of Jesus’s current ministry. Perhaps he tried to force Jesus’s hand. Perhaps he just wanted the thirty pieces of silver (5). Perhaps all of these are correct. His motive is not to be our focus. Crime is, for the most part, the result of a hundred motives rushing with bewildering fury through the mind of the criminal. Definitely, Judas was like Satan and so became one with Satan (3). Judas was the secret adversary within (4).
The Apostle John wrote, “He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.” (1 John 3:8-10)
