Portland, Oregon Church  -  Affiliated with the Intercontinental Church of God and the Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

SUBJECT:  Judas

QUESTION:  What are your feelings about Judas?  Did he commit a sin worthy of the second death?

ANSWER:

No, he did not.

Clearly, God can see into the future.  The plan to have Christ come to this earth, become human and die for our sins was thought up a long time before it happened.  In looking into that future, they saw that Christ would be betrayed by someone.  That someone was Judas.  Judas made up his own mind to do this thing.  He thought he was doing a harmless thing.  When he saw what he had done, he repented and went and hanged himself.

Matthew 27:3-5

3 Then Judas, which 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,

4 Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that.

5 And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.

The point is Judas had not been given the Holy Spirit of God.  Because of this, he will be raised in the second resurrection and be given the whole truth.  One cannot know the truth of God without being given first the Holy Spirit.

As to the question, if Judas had not betrayed Jesus who would have?  Clearly, knowing human nature as we do, someone would have surely betrayed Him.

Jeremiah 17:9

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Here is what the Matthew Henry Commentary says about the part of the verse where Christ says that this man who betrays Him is cursed:

Matthew 26:17-25 

            (3.) that it would prove a very dear bargain to the traitor; Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed. This he said, not only to awaken the conscience of Judas, and bring him to repent, and revoke his bargain, but for warning to all others to take heed of sinning like Judas; though God can serve his own purposes by the sins of men, that doth not make the sinner's condition the less woeful; It had been good for that man, if he had not been born. Note, The ruin that attends those who betray Christ, is so great, that it were more eligible by far not be at all than to be thus miserable. ~from Matthew Henry's Commentary

Portland, Oregon Church  -  Affiliated with the Intercontinental Church of God and the Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association