Today we look at the fourth part of our studies in Judas Iscariot, the apostle. Today we're going to see Judas as the son of perdition, as after the evil he did against the Lord, he ends his life by hanging and goes into the very perdition the Lord said he would go into. Our reading today is Matthew chapter 27, and we begin at the first three verses. Matthew 27 verses 1 to 3 say, “When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death: And when they had bound him, they led him away and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor.” “Then Judas, who had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders,” Matthew 27:1-3 (KJV).

We see how Judas had remorse and regret after he had betrayed the Lord. When Judas saw that the Lord was actually handed over to Pilate and condemned to death. He regretted what he had done. It seems that he wanted the money and the Lord's release. He did not realise it would go so far. But nevertheless, he had done that evil deed in betraying the Lord. He wanted the Lord destroyed; there's no doubt about that. But afterwards he starts regretting what he had done. The word used here is not the usual word for repent. Repentance to salvation, change in one's mind. But here is a word, a different word in the Greek language meaning more emotional. Just feeling a remorse and a regret over what he had done. See Peter repented. He was restored for denying the Lord. Judas betrayed the Lord. He never repented. He only had remorse and regret, and he committed suicide. We see Judas return the money. He had sold the Lord for a price, for the price of a slave. We read about the price of a servant in Exodus 21 in verse 32. “If the ox shall push a manservant or a maidservant, he shall give unto their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.” Exodus 21:32 (KJV).

So the Lord was sold, was given, was sold, and betrayed for the price. of a servant the price of a slave. The Lord Jesus was there when Judas came and vindicated the Lord before them as the one who was innocent. Judas's confession in verse four is, “Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.” Matthew 27:4 (KJV). Many in the Bible said these words, I have sinned, but never really repented of their sin. King Saul was one who said, I have sinned. Pharaoh too said, I have sinned, but neither of them repented. Though he said I have sinned, he had never repented. He went out into a lost eternity. Judas was just like so many today who go to a human priest to confess. their sins. He didn't confess to God like King David did when he said, Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.” (Psalms 51:4, KJV).

Judas doesn't go to God. He goes to a human priest and says, I have sinned. Like so many do in this world today, they don't go away forgiven. They don't go through Christ for forgiveness. They don't go to God. They go to a human priest. Judas testified to the innocence of Christ, the innocence of His blood. This is another reason. We saw reasons last time that Judas insured by his betrayal that Jesus would die on the Passover day, just as the Scriptures had prophesied that He's the Lamb of God; He's the Passover Lamb. Now here's another reason that shows why Judas was chosen to be an apostle, though he was evil. So that within the apostolic band there will be a testimony to the purity and holiness and innocence of Christ. When we think of politicians and film stars or whoever is very famous, often tends to be politicians wanting to be presidents and prime ministers and so on in this world, they will always portray themselves as a person dedicated to the nation, a person who's honest in all their business, they've never been fraudulent, they've never taken bribes, they will show their family and they will show their children that they're faithful to their wife and they're good fathers to a good father to their children and they've been very good in their community, doing good things for their community and so they go around canvassing for votes so that in the election they'll become Prime Minister or President.

However, when they do become Prime Minister or President of their country, oftentimes we hear in the newspapers that someone comes forward after some time and says, You think he's so innocent? Some woman will say, I had an affair with him. He's an adulterer. We were together all the time, behind his wife's back. The newspapers will get the story. And the man who looks so pure outside, he really wasn't pure inside at all. He wasn't pure privately at all. Or someone else will come and say, I was in business with him, and he cheated me out of money. He's a fraud. He's been a fraud all his life. And when the evidence is given, all the outward show all goes. He was just a hypocrite. Outwardly seemed to be pure, but privately and inwardly was a different person. So God allowed Judas to be amongst the apostles. He received the same love all the apostles did, the same privileges, and the same powers and responsibilities to preach the gospel. Yet at the end of those three and a half years where the Lord trained and taught the apostles, Judas, though he became such a bitter enemy of the Lord Jesus, even willing to have him destroyed, betrayed, he said this publicly to his enemies: I betrayed the innocent blood. And so even Judas, in his betrayal, even in his statement he made, brought glory and honour to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord Jesus Christ was innocent and holy and pure and perfect in front of all the crowds in public, but he was also pure and perfect and holy in secret amongst his own disciples. He wasn't a different man privately from what he was obliquely. He wasn't different inwardly from what he was outwardly. He was inwardly and outwardly, publicly and privately, holy and harmless and separate from sinners. Blessed be his name. So even in the betrayal of Judas, even in the statement he made, it was that glory might be brought to the perfections of our Lord Jesus Christ. Look at the chief priest's callous response. They were unspeakably cruel. even though Judas had helped them achieve what they wanted. But look at their reply. They didn't care much for him either, as they did for the other apostles. What is that to us? You've done what we want. We don't care for you. You do what you want now with that money. They didn't care for his guilty conscience. for they had no conscience at all; they had seared their conscience with a hot iron. So Judas cast the silver into the temple and hung himself. In verse 5 of Matthew 27, “And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed and went and hanged himself.” (Matthew 27:5 KJV).

So it appears that Judas followed the priests into the holy place, where only priests were allowed to enter, and he threw the silver pieces of betrayal straight down into the very temple. He polluted the temple by walking inside. Only the priests were allowed to walk in there, but he went in there. Well, it was no different from what they had done. They had committed sacrilege as well, these wicked men. Jesus said these words. “Jesus answered and said unto them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up…. But he spoke of the temple of his body.” John 2:19, 21 (KJV). John chapter two, verses 19 and 21, tell us. Yes, they had committed sacrilege. In handing over the Lord Jesus to the Gentiles to be crucified, spat upon, beaten, and scourged. Yes, they had committed sacrilege. Now in this was fulfilled, as we are told in this chapter, Zechariah's prophecy; it is attributed to Jeremiah. Now Zechariah acted out what the Lord Jesus did in his ministry. In Zechariah 11 verse 4 we read, “Thus saith the LORD my God; Feed the flock of the slaughter” (Zechariah 11:4 KJV).

Feed this flock that is going to be slaughtered. And so in this prophecy, Zechariah was to act as a shepherd, acting out the feeding and taking care of sheep. what the Lord Jesus would do in His ministry, how He would love, how He would care, how He would come to seek and to save the lost sheep. but that nation was going to reject him. And in AD 70, we're going to be slaughtered by the Romans when they besiege Jerusalem. So Zechariah was told to act out this prophecy, feed the flock of the slaughter. So in Zechariah 11, verse 12, we read that the earlier verse was Zechariah 11, verse 4, then Zechariah 11, verse 12, we read, “And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my price; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.”Zechariah 11:12 (KJV). So as Zechariah acted out this prophecy, impersonating the Messiah, now he says he was their shepherd no longer. Six sheep will be allowed to die, that chapter shows us. The rest are given up to starvation and cannibalism. And this was fulfilled to the letter when the Romans seized Jerusalem.

And the word covenant used there in Zechariah 11, if you look at it, is used in the unrestricted sense, symbolising the restraint the Lord had placed upon other nations overrunning Jerusalem. Now that restraint would be no more, the most terrible slaughter would be inflicted upon them by the Gentiles. God would restrain them, but then they did not want the Lord anymore. That restraint was gone. So the prophetic reenactment by Zechariah is believed by the faithful few and the faithful few who would see the historical prediction towards the end of our Lord's earthly ministry. They will see Jerusalem surrounded by your armies. They will know that this is what the Lord spoke about, that not one stone will be left upon another. They would escape, but that nation would suffer. So when Zechariah acted out the role of a shepherd, he said, What is my price for all my faithful labors?" if it be good in your eyes literally, but their eyes were blind to any good they saw. So the price they gave was out of contempt for his love. It was not even the price of a freedman, just the price of a slave as we saw gored by an ox. In that prophecy, the last act that the nation did showed that they were ripe for judgement, betraying the Lord for thirty pieces of silver.

So in that prophecy of Zechariah, Zechariah acts out the role of a shepherd, and then he asks for his wages, and this is what they give him: a pathetic 30 pieces of silver. That's all they thought all his love and care was worth. That's all the nation thought of the Lord of all the dead He raised, the lepers He cleansed, the sick He healed, the blind He made to see, the deaf He made to hear, the dumb He made to speak, the lame He made to walk, and the thousands He fed with bread and fish. This is what they thought all that love and that care was worth: just 30 pieces of silver. So literally it says there in Zechariah to cast that price, or God says fling it, fling the fancy price, that pathetic price, fling it, throw it down into the house of the Lord that it may end up in the possession of the potter, and that's what was fulfilled in this chapter what Zechariah prophesied in Zechariah 11. And then Zechariah 11 also predicts the various factions of the Jews that would be at war with one another when the Romans were besieged in Jerusalem. So they would be besieged on the outside, and within they were fighting each other as well.

So we learn that Judas hangs himself. The Lord Jesus said in John 17, verse 12, “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 (KJV). It's the same word as waste. Judas said in Bethany when Mary poured that ointment on the Lord, he said, Why this waste? His money could have been sold for 300 denarii and given to the poor, but he wanted it for himself. Perdition and waste. What a waster Judas was. Even the 30 pieces of silver he had to throw down in the end. And going to eternity with nothing. but utmost damnation. Even the man of sin, the other person in the Bible who is called the son of perdition, is the Antichrist. Both have perdition and destinies in the lake of fire as their destiny. In 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 3 we read, “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition” (2 Thessalonians 2:3 KJV). The only other person to be called the son of perdition. What a dreadful, dreadful end came upon Judas and will yet come upon him in the lake of fire. No wonder the Lord Jesus said it would be better for that man that he was never born. Words not spoken of anybody else. Dreadful, dreadful end of the man who betrayed the Lord Jesus Christ.

But there are many like him even today. As there was in the past when Ahithopel, who betrayed David, he hung himself. And Judas does the same, having betrayed the Son of God, having betrayed the Son of David. Just like Ahithopel betrayed David, Judas betrayed the Son of David, our Lord Jesus. He also hung himself. In our next study, we'll see further details of how Peter describes how this man had purchased the field with the reward of iniquity. He had already purchased this field to be his possession with all the stealing he did from the bag. Then he went to that very field to hang himself and met a very dreadful end, as we shall see when we look at Acts chapter 1. In verse 6 we read, “And the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, ‘It is not lawful for us to put them into the treasury because it is the price of blood.” Matthew 27:6 (KJV). So here we see the chief priest's dilemma. The hypocrisy of these men stands out yet again, as they consider the money too polluted to be put into the treasury. The Old Testament forbade them to put polluted money in the treasury.

In Deuteronomy 23:18 it said, “Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow: for even both these are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” Deuteronomy 23:18 (KJV). So they said this is polluted blood. It's too polluted; this money is too polluted. We can't put it in the treasury. But it was money that they had given themselves, so that their own Messiah's blood might be shed. As the Lord said, they were like whited sepulchres, full of corruption and death within. So it seems that the priest would take that money and give it to the potter from whom Judas had purchased the field. It seems that he hadn't paid the money yet to him. He had purchased it, maybe made a down payment, but never gave the full money. So they went and gave it to him and turned that field into a place of burial. As F.B. Hull writes in his commentary, Judas never profited by his thirty pieces of silver. Seduced and ultimately possessed by the devil, he threw away everything for nothing. This is always the end of the story when silly little men attempt to drive a bargain with a giant spirit of evil. The silver was now again in the hands of the priests and became the occasion for them to crown their other sins with supreme hypocrisy. Look what they called it, the price of blood. That was the blood of Jesus. The blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's the price of blood, they said. To them, Christ's blood was just 30 pieces of silver. But not to us believers and not to God.

1 Peter 1:18 and 19, which we know so well, says, “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19 KJV). To God, that blood was precious. To us it is precious. No money on earth, no silver and gold, can compare with the infinite value of the blood of Christ. So they take counsel in verse 7. “And they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field to bury strangers in.” Mathew 27:7 (KJV). That was for the burial of Gentiles. Many Gentiles came back and forth to Jerusalem, and sometimes they would die. And therefore they felt Jerusalem was too, they didn't want to bury Gentiles where the Jews were buried. They wanted to bury these unclean foreigners away from the Jews, and they would bury them in that. place the potter's field. Wherefore that field was called a field of blood unto this day, Matthew 27 verse 8 says, the field of blood, accledema, as Peter says in Acts chapter 1.

How little they realize that Gentiles will one day overrun the whole land and fill it with their blood. Truly, the whole land will become a field of blood for that guilty nation. 30 years later, in AD 70, 40 years later, sorry, in AD 70, judgement would come upon those who cried, His blood be on us and our children. Someone has written these words: Judas died a loathsome suicide; the house of Annas was destroyed some years later; Caiaphas was deposed a year after the crucifixion, and Pilate was banished soon after, banished to Gaul, and there died in suicide. When Jerusalem fell, her wretched citizens were crucified around her walls until, in the historian's grim language, space was wanting for the crosses and crosses for the bodies. The horrors of the siege of Jerusalem are unparalleled in history. Truly, that whole place became a field of blood. Verse nine of Matthew 27, “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value;” Mathew 27:9 (KJV).

Now this verse has caused some difficulties because it seems to be a Zechariah prophecy about the law being valued for thirty pieces of silver, but why does Matthew say it was Jeremiah? Well, some say that because the Bible was divided into sections and the prophets in the Jewish Bible were headed by Jeremiah in some of the copies, they would say that was that part of the Bible from Jeremiah, of which Zechariah was one of the prophets. Others might say possibly Jeremiah preached this prophecy that Zechariah wrote down. But a better understanding is this: we see it in other scriptures where the Holy Spirit takes a little verse from even part of a verse from Isaiah here, another part from over there, and puts it together. He can do that for he's the author of scripture. And so what we can see when we look at Jeremiah and we look at Zechariah together is that this verse combines various things from Zechariah and Jeremiah together. You know that Jeremiah spoke often about the potter and smashing pots in the potter's house.

And in Jeremiah we read of him purchasing a field as well. And in Jeremiah 19, verse 4, he speaks of innocent blood. And in Jeremiah we speak about the purchase of a field. Whereas in Zechariah we don't read of the purchase of a field, simply that Zechariah was given thirty pieces of silver. So I think the best way to understand it, as others would, uh, other good commentators would agree, is that it's a combination of themes and verses from Jeremiah and Zechariah put together that show what Judas did and what happened to the Lord, betrayed for thirty pieces of silver, the money thrown down in the temple, but ultimately ended up in the hands of the potter, a field that was bought, a place where strangers would be buried in. Verse 10 tells us, And gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me. Matthew 27:7 (KJV).

So the field belonged to the potter. and the chief priest gave him the thirty pieces of silver to buy his field, and scripture was fulfilled. Every detail of scripture was fulfilled concerning the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. God was in complete control to bring salvation to us, and though we can't understand how God would choose such a wicked man called Judas, yet we can see that even in the choice of Judas, God arranged it so that his son would die for our sins on the Passover day, and 30 pieces of silver would be given for his value, and that the Lord Jesus would be glorified even by the words of Judas saying, "'I betrayed innocent blood.'" May the Lord bless this study to us. And in our final part, we should look at the replacement for Judas in Acts chapter one, amen.