Luke 22.1-6

Satan, judas and the providence of god

(Luke 22.1-6)

Jason Procopio

Last week’s text was a difficult one, so I’ve got good news for you: today’s text (Luke 22.1-6) is a narrative text, in which Jesus himself says nothing at all—we just see stuff happen—so it’s a lot more straightforward.

Sort of.

It’s straightforward if you’ve never read the rest of the Bible, or if you haven’t really taken into account a lot of what the Bible says about God. But if you know the rest of the Bible, the very simple things that happen in this text become absolutely staggering. 

So before we get into the text itself, we need to take a couple minutes here at the beginning to lay out a kind of primer for understanding what we see in this text—like a tiny course on systematic theology. I’ll talk about two essential ideas we’ll need to keep in mind first, and then afterwards we’ll see how Luke himself is trying to help us see these things.

Primer: Two Essential Ideas

The first big idea we need to understand is what’s called the doctrine of providence. Calvinists love this doctrine, and we’re right to love it. 

The doctrine of providence is fundamental to our understanding of God as Creator, and it says simply this: God created all things, and he governs and sustains everything he created. 

To put it another way: God did not create the world only to remove himself from the world once he created it. As someone put it, that would be like the guy who builds a car, but has no interest in driving it. 

The Bible says quite the opposite: that God created all things, and that he governs and sustains his creation. He intervenes in the affairs of men. He is active in the world he created. 

Now that’s not shocking in itself—most people know that's what Christians believe.

But it gets trickier when we start to ask ourselves just how active God is.

Which brings us to the second thing we need to understand: the idea of theological compatibilism. 

When you accept the doctrine of providence, you can take it one of several different ways. 

If you’re new to what we call the doctrines of grace, and you accept that God is sovereign over all things, then chances are you hold to the idea that God controls absolutely everything that happens, ever. That idea is called theological determinism—whatever happens, happens because God made it happen. There’s absolutely call for that kind of thinking in the Bible; his sovereignty is indeed described as that absolute.

But you need to go a little further, because if that’s all you say, it’s hard to know what to do with everything we see in the Bible about human responsibility. You’ll often hear the question, How can we be held responsible for our actions if we were never really free to choose right or wrong?

Theological compatibilism is a way of trying to take into account both sides of the argument—it’s the explanation which, in my opinion, most accurately takes into account the whole of biblical teaching.

Simply put, this is what it means: Human beings are absolutely free, yes—but it’s a specific type of freedom. We are free to act in accordance with our nature. I can’t choose to suddenly fly through the air, because I’m not a bird. I am free, but I’m only free to act in accordance with my nature.

So what is our nature?

The Bible says that because of the fall of man, which we see in Genesis 3, human beings are born with a sinful nature. (“Sin” is essentially rebellion against God, wanting to rule ourselves instead of living under God’s rule.) We are born with a sinful nature, which means that we are naturally bent toward rebellion against God—it’s what we want. We are free to do what we want, but what we want is to rebel against God. So all we ever do, if left to ourselves, is sin.

But when God saves us, he gives us a new nature—a nature which no longer desires to rebel against God, but to be holy as God is holy. A nature which desires to obey him as Lord. 

All that to say that in either case—whether we’re Christians or not—we always do what we want to do, because we are always acting in accordance with our nature and our desires.

Those two ideas need to be in the forefront of our minds as we read this text. Because in this text we’ll see two characters acting in a way that naturally makes us think one thing. But if we know the larger picture of what the Bible teaches, we’ll see that in fact something quite different is going on.

And as we’ll see, that’s exactly what Luke himself is trying to show us in this text, albeit more subtly.

Let’s read the text together—Luke 22.1-6.  

Now the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called the Passover. 2 And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to death, for they feared the people. 

3 Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve. 4 He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them. 5 And they were glad, and agreed to give him money. 6 So he consented and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of a crowd. 

The Growing Threat (v. 1-2) 

For several chapters now (and for us, several months), there has been tension brewing between Jesus and the Jewish authorities—the religious leaders in the temple. Jesus has been challenging their authority since the beginning of his ministry. He’s come on the scene telling the Jews, “These guys you’ve been listening to all this time have gotten it all wrong. For all they know about Scripture, they don’t understand it.” 

Now already, that would be enough to make the religious leaders angry—but it’s even worse than that. Here Jesus is, saying these nasty things about them, and they can’t argue with him, because he’s always right! Every time they think they have him cornered with an objection or a defense, he shuts them down, often with a single sentence.

So they want to get rid of him, and they have for a while now.

And to make matters worse, the Passover is coming up—so what was an already densely populated Jerusalem was about to get way more crowded.

The Passover was the opening-day feast of the seven-day-long Feast of Unleavened Bread. It was a feast to remember the last plague in Egypt, the means by which God convinced the Pharaoh to release the Hebrews from slavery in the time of Moses. It’s one of the most important events in the life of the Jews, every year.

Jerusalem was the center of Jewish religious life at the time, so hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would come to the city every year for the Passover.

That meant that Jesus’s sphere of influence was about to get way bigger. Hundreds of thousands of people who had no idea who Jesus was would be coming to the temple, where (as we see at the end of Luke 21) Jesus is preaching daily. So if nothing is done, all of these people will hear Jesus preach, and come to see how right he is about the religious leaders.

So that’s the context. The authorities are desperate to get rid of him, but they can’t figure out how to do it, because there are always people around wanting to hear what he has to say. 

But as it turns out, Satan has an idea about that.

Satan Makes His Move (v. 3-6)

In verse 3 we find this enigmatic sentence: 

3 Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve.

So there are two “actors” we need to be aware of here.

The first is Judas Iscariot. Judas was, as you may remember, one of “the twelve”—one of the twelve disciples Jesus called to follow him. Judas was the treasurer of the group: he was the one kept the moneybags and arranged payment for food and lodgings and the like.

The last time we saw him was in chapter 6, where Luke simply states that he “became a traitor” (6.16). And now we remember that this traitor has been following Jesus around this whole time as one of his disciples. He was close to him.

The second actor we see is Satan. If you haven’t grown up in church, you may have a picture in your mind when you think of this character “Satan”—the mischievous red guy with horns and a pitchfork, or Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate. You may think he’s merely a symbolic figure representing the evil of humanity, or a creature of legend. 

But the Bible never presents him this way. The Bible teaches, in no uncertain terms, that Satan exists. If you accept that the Bible is the Word of God, you have to accept the existence of things that seem like fantasy to us: including angels and demons. And the Bible presents Satan in real terms: he is a real, living, demonic being, hell-bent (literally) on our destruction. 

Satan has always been at work—we see him in Genesis 3, lying to and successfully misleading the very first human beings. And this isn’t the first time in this gospel we’ve seen him come after Jesus himself. Way back at the beginning, in chapter 4, we saw Satan tempting Jesus in the desert.

So now, he “enters into Judas.” We shouldn’t understand this as possession, but rather influence. If you read the gospels, you’ll see time and again that demon-possessed people are looked on with compassion, and healed by Christ; but the biblical authors judge Judas very harshly.

Satan exercises influence here, but influence alone can’t do anything. (James says in James 1.14-15 that each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.) Judas is judged harshly because he was already naturally inclined to do what Satan wanted him to do.

Klaus Schilder put it this way:

“It is the peculiar majesty of Jesus that he can conquer man without man’s first approaching him. But Satan’s frailty is proved by this, that he cannot approach a soul unless that soul has first turned to him.”

That’s what that big term we saw earlier—theological compatibilism—means. We are free to act in accordance with our nature. Satan influences, and what does Judas do? He did exactly what Satan had put in his mind to do, not because it was impossible to resist Satan, but because he wanted to do it. He was, as John said, “was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it” (John 12.6). Satan gives him an idea, or perhaps makes an idea he already had a little harder to resist…and Judas gives in. 

V. 4: 

4 He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them. 5 And they were glad, and agreed to give him money. 6 So he consented and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of a crowd. 

Luke’s Theological Storytelling

So it seems pretty straightforward, right? 

Satan tempts Jesus’s disciple to betray him, and it works like gangbusters—not only is Jesus betrayed, but he’ll be arrested, and charged, and tortured, and convicted, and crucified. Satan wins this round. He scores a big victory.

But we have to remember what Luke is doing here.  

As we’ve said several times since the beginning of this series, Luke (who wrote this gospel) isn’t just a doctor and a writer. In this gospel he’s doing the work of a theologian. That is, he’s not just saying, “Here’s the stuff that happened during Jesus’s life and ministry.” He’s organizing his narrative in such a way that by looking at where and how he decides to tell specific parts of the story, we can draw the right conclusions.

In other words, his storytelling here isn’t mainly chronological, but theological.

The text just before this one—chapter 21, verses 5 to 38—is Jesus’s teaching on the Mount of Olives. 

What did we see there? 

We saw Jesus predicting the fall of Jerusalem, the judgment of God on those people who had rejected his Messiah. We saw him remind his disciples of Daniel 7, where Daniel has a vision of the Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days—God the Son returning to God the Father—with power and great glory, to take possession of his kingdom.

The taste in our mouths at the end of chapter 21 is not one of defeat, but of approaching victory. It doesn’t inspire fear, but courage. As Jesus told his disciples in 21.28,  

“Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” 

In chapter 21, we are meant to remember that God is infinitely powerful, that he providentially reigns over the world he created, and that through events which seem horrible to us (like the destruction of Jerusalem), he is able to accomplish his good will, for his glory.

That comes right before today’s text.

In the text following this one—22.7-23, which we’ll see next week—we see Jesus instituting the Lord’s Supper with his disciples. He gives them the bread, and he gives them the wine, and he explains that this bread and this wine represent his body and blood, which are about to be given for them.

And in v. 22, he says this unbelievable sentence: 

For the Son of Man goes [to his death] AS IT HAS BEEN DETERMINED.

So on the one side, we have chapter 21—this amazing account of the glory and the power of God, which Christ will again receive when he goes to be with his Father; and on the other side, we have the institution of the Lord’s Supper, and this claim that the death he’s about to suffer will happen as it has been determined. 

And sandwiched between those two sections, we have Satan entering into Judas, and Judas consenting to deliver Jesus to the authorities.

Can you see what Luke is doing? What he’s helping us see?

He’s showing us that what’s happening here is not a victory for Satan, but a victory for God. Satan is not thwarting God’s plan by getting Judas to betray Jesus; he’s accomplishing God’s plan. 

I know that can be a shocking thing to say. The implications of that idea are very difficult for us to accept, because it means that, for reasons we don’t know, God sometimes chooses to accomplish his will through free and willful sins committed against him.

But as difficult as that truth can be, it is all over the Bible.

Let me give you a couple of examples. 

In the book of Acts (which Luke also wrote—it’s the sequel to this gospel), we see Peter preaching to the crowds in Jerusalem after Jesus has ascended to the right hand of God the Father. In that crowd are many, many people who were present at Jesus’s trial—they were among those who shouted “Crucify him!” to Pilate.

Early in his sermon, he says something that goes against every logical instinct in our modern brains. He says (Acts 2.22-23):  

22 “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— 23 this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

Do you see it? 

Peter says, YOU—you people, listening to me at this moment, Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, YOU had him killed. You delivered him up to the Romans. You accused him of blasphemy. You did this.

There is no more horrible sin than the murder of the Son of God. 

And yet, Peter says that this was God’s plan from the very beginning. 

And we don’t just see it in the New Testament—we see it in the Old Testament as well, long before Jesus ever came.

In Isaiah 53, we have this beautiful, prophetic picture of the Messiah, the Savior God promises to send, to save his people—Jesus Christ. And Isaiah says something which will shock us to our core if we're not expecting it.

Isaiah 53, starting at verse 4:  

4  Surely he has borne our griefs 

and carried our sorrows; 

yet we esteemed him stricken, 

smitten by God, and afflicted. 

5  But he was pierced for our transgressions; 

he was crushed for our iniquities; 

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, 

and with his wounds we are healed. 

6  All we like sheep have gone astray; 

we have turned—every one—to his own way; 

and the Lord has laid on him 

the iniquity of us all… 

9  And they made his grave with the wicked 

and with a rich man in his death, 

although he had done no violence, 

and there was no deceit in his mouth. 

10  Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; 

he has put him to grief; 

when his soul makes an offering for guilt, 

he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; 

the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. 

When we read that Christ was “pierced for our transgressions,” and “crushed for our iniquities,” who crushed him? 

The Jews in Jerusalem did, with the help of the Romans—we’ll get to that in just a few chapters. That’s what happened—they arrested him; they tortured him; they nailed him to the cross; they left him there to suffocate and bleed to death.

And yet, that’s not what Isaiah says here. He says that Christ was smitten BY GOD. He says that the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He says that it was the will of the LORD to crush him. HE has put him to grief.

We could go back even further. We could look at Genesis chapter 3, just after the fall of man, when God tells Satan that a man would be born one day who would defeat him. “You’ll get your licks in—you will bruise his heel—but he will crush your head” (Genesis 3.15).

Or we could go back even further than that—Paul says in Ephesians chapter 1 that the everything that Christ did for us, including his death for us, was God’s plan since before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1.4-6). The death of Christ was meticulously planned by God himself, before he ever created the world. 

So listen closely: what we see in Luke 22.1-6 is God sovereignly bringing every element together, so that Christ’s death would be fulfilled just as he had planned it.

We see the power and reign of Christ in Luke 21; in Luke 22 we’ll hear Jesus institution of the Lord’s Supper, saying that what is about to happen to him will happen as it has been determined. 

And between those two, we see how it will happen: through Satan tempting this man Judas to betray Jesus Christ, and deliver him to the authorities.

It is so easy to look at our world and see Satan in control. It is so easy to look at our world—and even the way the Bible calls him “the prince of this world”—and attribute to him power and authority that he does not have. Satan is the prince of this world in that he is the epitome of what has gone wrong here—but he does not reign here, Christ does. Satan can only do what God allows him to do.

So even though it’s easy to see this text as “Satan versus Jesus”, even though it’s easy to read this passage, and think, “Ooh, Satan got in a good right hook there…”, that is not what is happening.

Satan is not a threat to Christ. He’s an child getting in the ring with the heavyweight champion. 

This isn’t a fight between two nearly equal opponents. 

This is the fulfillment of God’s plan, which he preordained before the creation of the world.

Five Reasons to Affirm These Truths

Now, I want to be sensitive here, because I know how difficult it can be to hear these things, if you haven’t grown up with them. I didn’t grow up hearing this, and when I saw these things in the Bible for the first time, I had a very difficult time with it. Because it made me really uncomfortable, but at the same time, I couldn’t not see it in the Bible once I’d seen it.

That was over a decade ago. And I can tell you that this truth of God’s sovereignty over all things—including the acts of Satan and the sins of humanity—is the truth that I keep coming back to for assurance. It is the truth that brings me the most comfort, that stabilizes my shaky faith, that allows me to rest in God’s powerful hands.

Now of course, we don’t have to go that way. We could easily just close our eyes and only see the most superficial version of what happens here: Satan enters Judas, Judas goes to betray Jesus. That’s all. We could stop there.

But I believe that God inspired Luke to organize his narrative in this way to help us recognize some truths which are clearly taught in Scripture, and to remember why they are good news. 

The truths are these: God created the world, and he is sovereign over the world he created. In his providence, he actively accomplishes his will. And sometimes, for reasons he has not revealed to us, he accomplishes his will through the free, sinful choices of human beings, and even the acts of Satan himself.

But the big question remaining this: why is that good news? Why should we delight to affirm these truths?

I’ll give you five reasons. 

1. These truths allow us to stay faithful to the whole of Scripture. 

Whether we like it or not, these truths are in the Bible, and we will see them if we don’t cherry-pick, but rather look at the whole of Scripture. If we look at the whole of Scripture, we see these truths clearly taught. And affirming them—even if we don’t entirely understand how it all works—allow us to stay faithful to the whole of Scripture.

2. These truths help us acknowledge the role of Scripture. 

I know it can be frustrating to talk about these things, because they bring up so many other questions: Why did God create Satan? Why didn’t God create a world in which sin was impossible? Why didn’t he simply accomplish his will without going through all this “redeeming a fallen world” stuff?

The fact that the Bible never gives us concrete answers to those questions helps us understand what the Bible is trying to do. It’s not trying to give us a comprehensive explanation of everything that could be explained. It’s trying to focus our attention on what’s actually, truly important.

Or to put it another way (and we’ve said this before): We don’t come to the Bible to get answers to our questions. We come to the Bible to find out what the questions are.

And the main question the Bible is interested in answering, in regards to our salvation, is this: How does a holy God extend grace to a sinful people, for his glory? 

That’s what the Bible wants us to see, and that’s what these texts show us us.

3. These truths give us assurance in suffering.

It’s hard to fathom a more painful situation than the one Jesus faces towards the end of the gospels. He has done absolutely nothing wrong, ever—no sin, no rebellion against God. And yet he is betrayed by one of his closest friends, falsely accused of crimes he did not commit, publicly humiliated, tortured, and crucified. He takes on himself the sins of his people, in our place, and he is punished for those sins, in our place. The suffering of Christ is beyond anything we can fathom.

And yet, the truth we see here is that in all of that, God’s hand never left the wheel. God wasn’t surprised by these events. Remember that scene in Breaking Bad when Hank is on the toilet and found out that Walt is actually Heisenberg? Remember that face he made? God has never made that face.

This was God, fulfilling his sovereign will, exactly as he had planned it.

This is wonderful news for us when we suffer, because we know that God’s providence did not only apply to Christ; it applies to everything. In every situation, God is good, and God is wise, and God is all-powerful…and he is exercising his providence to bring about his good will in the lives of his people. 

So when we suffer, we can remember and trust that God’s hand has not left the wheel. He is good, and he is sovereign. So we can rest.

4. These truths give us assurance concerning our past and our present.

It is so easy to look at Judas and see ourselves. We see Satan entering Judas, and Judas giving in to temptation, and we can look back and remember multiple times in our past where we did something very similar. And when we see how the Bible talks about Judas, we can easily sink into despair.

Now on the one hand, that shame we feel is good and true. We were free to act in accordance with our nature—we did these things. We can’t blame it on God, and we can’t blame it on Satan. God doesn’t tempt us, and Satan doesn’t control us. 

We were free, and we chose to do what we did: we followed our sinful desires and did what we wanted to do.

And there is no excuse for that. No one can say to God, You made me do this, or, The devil made me do it. We are free to act in accordance with our nature. 

There is no excuse for sin. But at the same time, there is no sin too big for God to use for our good and his glory.

We all desperately need to hear this: if you are in Christ, then even in your failures you reflect the gospel to the world.

How?

When you fall, you own up. You confess it. Not just to God, but out loud, to other brothers and sisters who will remind you of the gospel and help you grow to be like Christ. You trust in the atoning, finished, and sufficient work of Christ for you.

And by his grace, you get up again, joyful in your Savior, and you learn to live like him.

You offend your colleague, or another Christian? You confess that sin to them, ask for their forgiveness, and put yourself back into God’s hands, trusting that the work of Christ is sufficient. Do you have any idea how incredibly strange it is in our modern world, to see someone owning up to their mistakes instead of trying to hide them?

The kids see Daddy losing his temper with Mommy? Well then, Daddy humbles himself and asks Mommy for forgiveness in front of the kids, and both of them sit down with the kids to explain to them why Mommy forgave Daddy—because she has received grace from Christ, she can give grace to Daddy. And because Daddy has received grace from Christ, he has nothing to hide, and nothing to defend.

Brothers and sisters, that preaches the gospel in ways I never could just by standing up here and talking.

And knowing that God uses even our sin for our good and for his glory should fill us with joy, and strength for holiness.

5. These truths give us assurance concerning our future.  

We saw it last week—Jesus is right now seated at the right hand of God, sovereignly ruling over his creation; and one day he will return, and restore his kingdom fully in this world, and we will reign with him forever in the new heavens and the new earth. 

The only way we can be sure of this is if God is actively sovereign over all things. If God’s providence is not at work in this world, then we can have no way of knowing that he will do what he promised to do. 

But because we know that God is always active, that he always accomplishes his will in the world he created, we can have absolute, iron-clad assurance that he will keep his promises. That Christ is seated at God’s right hand, and that he reigns as King, and that we are citizens of his kingdom, and that he will bring us where he wants us to be: reigning with him forever, in the new heavens and the new earth.