I have enjoyed having different types of conversations with many of the people that we have met over the last several years. One of the conversations in particular I have had have started with a simple question:

Who killed Jesus?

This isn’t a “whodunnit” type of mystery. The issue is to think through the answer to this question so that we can arrive at a true answer. Who was it that really killed Jesus?

Was it the Romans? Pilate took Jesus, judged him, and having recognized Jesus’s innocence, sent him to his death anyway. Yes, I suppose we could say that the Romans killed him. Without their authority, it wouldn’t have happened as only the Romans had the legal authority and the power to kill him.

Yet while the Romans acted wickedly and unjustly, they didn’t act on their own. They weren’t the ones who went looking for Jesus, looking for a way to kill him. No, those were the Jewish leaders.

So were the Jewish leaders the ones who killed Jesus? They were jealous of him and the Gospel accounts have several accounts of the Jews seeking a way to kill Jesus. They went searching for him and with Judas’s help, they found him, questioned him, and took him to Pilate, demanding that Pilate put him to death.

The Jewish leaders couldn’t have killed Jesus without the help of the Romans though, so were they really at fault? Well, like the Romans, we can probably arrive at the same conclusion: Yes and No.

So who is the real killer? Is there a true smoking gun? Who really has culpability?

In our law today, we would give culpability to not only the person who physically killed the other person, but even more so to the person who made the plan and set the plan in motion. However, in Jesus’s case, is there such an individual? Is there someone who actually made such a meticulous plan such that he knew that through a specific series of events, Jesus would be sent to his death?

Yes, there is. It was God himself:

This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

Acts 2:23

It was God’s plan that he set in motion. He plan was deliberate. His plan was thought through in eternity past, and God used the Israelites, in fact his own people, to carry out his plan to kill Jesus with the help of the Romans.

But why?

God knew that the only way to save humanity from itself was to release us from the Law, and to release us from the punishment owed to us for breaking the Law. As our creator, God is the only one who can judge us, judge our eternal destiny. God is also a holy God. He is perfect and in him there is no evil whatsoever. As he judges us, therefore, he judges based on his holiness. That is the standard and so for our rebellion against him in our sin, our punishment is death.

God, however, made a plan so that we could live. He would take the punishment upon himself. It wasn’t that our sin and rebellion would go unpunished. No, instead, God saw that we could only live if he took the punishment for us. That was the point of God’s plan, that because he loved us, he would take the punishment that we deserved in our place.

It was God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge that killed Jesus. He carried out his plan for our good, and most of all for his glory.