“Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.” (John 19:11) Judas Iscariot’s sin was greater than Pilates, and so our mind says that his punishment would be greater. Judas had been given more light than Pilate had.
It’s difficult to think of anything more punishing, if you will, than the Lake of Fire, eternal pain and torment, complete and utter hopelessness, but is our mind along the same path as the truth here, is there a “cooler” or not as hot fire reserved for those who lived what we will call a good life, albeit one devoid of the acceptance of the Lord Jesus as Savior, and is there a, for the lack of a better set of words, a “white hot” place in the Lake of Fire reserved for Judas, and so then, in our minds, the hottest, most terrible place would of course be reserved for Satan.
From the account of Lazarus and the rich man, (Luke 16:19-31) we know that hell is hot, that there’s no water, that the torment is almost unbearable, and that those that are there have retained the complete use of their mental faculties, along with many, if not all, of the physical ones. Pilate could do nothing to our Lord unless he was granted the power to from the Most High, yet from this verse it sounds as if Judas had a choice in the matter of his life, for those that have the ability of free will, and choose poorly, in this case of Judas, choose evil, are held more accountable for their actions. “The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.” (Matt. 26:24)
Now, no offense, but in that, we have no choice, and to top it off, so to speak, the Lord God is omniscient, He knows everything that has ever been, or ever will be, He has always known the choice that Judas was going to make.
Some questions must be raised here, and I will offer no answers, for they are not recorded for us in the Word of God, so I will place them in front of you only for the sake of your growth in Christ, so that you may contemplate His marvelous ways and His majesty in even greater detail. God knew what Judas was going to do before He ever created the heavens and the earth, He knew he was going to betray His Son for the price of a slave in those days, thirty pieces of silver, and He let it happen.
You may use this short sentence as an analogy the next time you meet someone who believes that God is only love.
The second conjecture point, or cause for debate if you like, is this, Jesus walked with Judas for more than three years, Jesus is God, He knew who Judas was the moment He met him, He knew what he was going to do. “While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.” (John 17:12) Did our Lord spend any time trying to talk Judas out of what He knew he was going to do, and even if He tried, could He have succeeded?
I believe that some of the most in-depth, heartfelt conversations never recorded for us were those that Christ had with Judas, staring into the eyes of the man who was, in a sense, responsible for Zechariah 13:6, “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.” Sins that we have not yet committed, but will, sins that if we knew about beforehand, we would never intentionally commit, Christ died for, and He knew about long before we were ever born. The next time the urge, that unclean thought comes into your mind, think about that.
