Hello, friends. Welcome back to Verity Podcast's Holy Week series. Today is Spy Wednesday.

I bet I have some kids watching this. Are any of you expert spies in your family? Do you like to pretend to be a spy? I love to be a spy when I was a kid. My siblings and I even had our own

spy club to spy on our mom and dad. I don't know if you were like me, if you have a spy club,

but we do know that there was a spy in the Bible and his name was Judas. You might be surprised to know that today is actually

called Spy Wednesday. Some people call it Holy Wednesday, but on the church calendar, around the

1800s is when it became called Spy Wednesday. And it's referring to what Judas did in betraying Jesus. He began to spy out a time when he could

betray Jesus into the hands of the religious leaders that we talked about yesterday on Holy Tuesday.

They've been plotting and planning for how to capture Jesus and to kill him because he's upsetting their plans

and he's he's not following their super secret way of of getting God's will to happen on earth

and instead he's actually accomplishing God's will according to what the Old Testament prophesied.

And so the Jewish leaders, they want to kill Jesus.

And Judas, he's decided that instead of being one of Jesus's 12 closest friends, he's going to play Jesus into their hands.

Why might Judas have wanted to do this? Well, some people

think that it's because he actually thought that Jesus was going to overthrow the Roman Empire,

which was currently overpowering Israel. And so he became a disciple because he thought Jesus was going

to give them physical rescue.

He didn't know that Jesus had come to bring spiritual rescue.

And then when he learned that, he was so disappointed that he decided to betray Jesus.

Ultimately, we don't know what Judas motivations were.

But we do know that in Matthew 26, 14 through 16,

he begins to look for an opportunity to betray Jesus. Then one of the 12, named Judas Iscaria,

went to the chief priest and said, what are you willing to give me to betray him to you? And they set out for him 30 pieces of

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