John 19:15

They therefore cried out, Away with him, away with him, crucify him! Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your King? The chief priests answered, We have no king but Caesar.

Pilate here maneuvered the chief priests in a manner that enraged them and drove them to a blind fury. "Shall I crucify your King?" was his mocking taunt; but their blindness to the consequences of what they were doing was so complete that in their irrational rage they even renounced God himself.

We have no king but Caesar ... It was just as well that they said this, for in crucifying Christ they had indeed renounced the Father; but it is one of the ironies of their hardening that they were goaded into this public renunciation for the records of all subsequent sacred history.

We have no king but Caesar ... Where was all the professed devotion of those people for God as their only King? That they hated Caesar was known to all. That they claimed God as their true king was the major thesis of the whole history of Israel; but here they were shouting before the pagan governor:

We have no king but Caesar ... Caesar would crucify 30,900 of their young men on the walls of ruined Jerusalem within a generation (at the siege in 70 A.D.). Caesar would expel them from Rome; Caesar would perpetrate countless injustices and atrocities upon them; God had never done anything except love them, bear with them, and protect them throughout their wretched history; but now hear them:

We have no king but Caesar ...! What an avalanche of woe this unhappy people loosed upon themselves by their rejection of the Lord! As Hovey said, however:

We are thankful that it was not the whole multitude that made this profession, but only the chief priests. ...They who gloried in the Theocracy and boasted that whey were never in bondage to any man" (John 8:33) - THEY confess that Caesar is their only king.[11]