Mark 14:56

_ _ For many bare false witness against him — From their debasing themselves to “seek” them, we are led to infer that they were bribed to bear false witness; though there are never wanting sycophants enough, ready to sell themselves for naught, if they may but get a smile from those above them: see a similar scene in Acts 6:11-14. How is one reminded here of that complaint, “False witnesses did rise up: they laid to my charge things that I knew not” (Psalms 31:11)!

_ _ but their witness agreed not together — If even two of them had been agreed, it would have been greedily enough laid hold of, as all that the law insisted upon even in capital cases (Deuteronomy 17:6). But even in this they failed. One cannot but admire the providence which secured this result; since, on the one hand, it seems astonishing that those unscrupulous prosecutors and their ready tools should so bungle a business in which they felt their whole interests bound up; and, on the other hand, if they had succeeded in making even a plausible case, the effect on the progress of the Gospel might for a time have been injurious. But at the very time when His enemies were saying, “God hath forsaken Him; persecute and take Him; for there is none to deliver Him” (Psalms 71:11), He whose Witness He was and whose work He was doing was keeping Him as the apple of His eye, and while He was making the wrath of man to praise Him, was restraining the remainder of that wrath (Psalms 76:10).