Powerpoint Pictures: Church; Restaurant; Park; Prison; Courtroom

Where am I?

Gradually reveal pictures of a church, restaurant, park, prison, and courtroom, and see how quickly the children can work out the location.

These pictures remind us of the different places we’ve seen Jesus as we’ve worked our way through the story of how He died.

Saw him in a church – actually the temple – where he upset the religious leaders.

Saw him in a restaurant – in an upper room, having a meal with his disciples – where he explained to them that He was about to die.

Saw him in a park – the Garden of Gethsemane – where he prayed and said He was willing to die in order to save people.

Last time we left him in prison, sort of, as he was arrested.  And now we are in a courtroom where we pick the story up.

Jesus had been taken to the religious leaders who were looking for evidence to put Him to death.  The problem they had was that there wasn’t any!  So they got people to lie and make up stuff about him, but even these statements didn’t agree.

Finally, the High Priest asked Jesus, “Are you the Christ?”  Jesus who up to this point hadn’t said a word, replied “I am”.

Jesus was saying He was God’s Son (God Himself).  But the religious leaders did not believe Him.  They thought He was lying and so accused Him of blasphemy (saying wrong things about God).  This was enough for them to come to this verdict.

“They all condemned him as worthy of death.” (Mark 14:64)

But there were a couple of problems.

One was that they had no authority to put Jesus to death.  Only the Romans could do that.  So they sent Jesus to Pilate, the Roman Governor.

Also, the Romans wouldn’t put Jesus to death for being guilty of claiming to be God.  So they needed to come up with another charge.

Before we find out whether they did, we’re going to hear about something that took place while this trial was going on.