Luke 19:28:44 And when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. 29 When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, 30 saying, “Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ you shall say this: ‘The Lord has need of it.’” 32 So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. 33 And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, “Why are you untying the colt?” 34 And they said, “The Lord has need of it.” 35 And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. 36 And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. 37 As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, 38 saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” 39 And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” 40 He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
Good morning, Grace Church! We gather this morning at what is known as Holy Week, the “beginning of the end” of Jesus’ work on earth, the week leading up to Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection for the salvation of His people. Blessed be our King!
As we gather each Sunday, our hearts and minds should be about praising God for another day. I will admit that is not always my first thought. Often the distraction of the morning, lack of sleep, pressures for the upcoming day, or stresses from the day before pull my affections away from God. There are days that we simply have expectations of God that can be unmet – we expect He will fix a circumstance, He will answer my prayer exactly how I want, or that He will give me an easy day (whatever that means for you). Yet we must hold any desire open-handed because our Father knows best, even as we pray and ask these things of Him.
May God Himself, this morning, stir our affections to worship God as He has been, is, and will be according to His word. May we worship Him with the open hands of faith, with a right heart and mind this week as we reflect and seek gratefulness at the work He has done to provide a way of salvation, a way of hope through His Son Jesus. This is the Way.
Jesus entered Jerusalem, knowing what coming at the end of the week. In the earlier chapters of Luke, it is said that Jesus set His face toward Jerusalem. He was following the will of God, His Father. How easy to be distracted this day of His entry – crowds of people shouting His name, cheering, laying down their cloaks and palm branches – Jesus was here! Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory to the highest! Even though Jesus knew their hearts, for He is God and knows man’s heart, he does not stop their worship which is skewed.
The Main Point is keeping an eternal perspective, seek to worship Jesus as He is, not how we want Him to be. Through the scriptures and power of the Spirit, you see Him as the Messiah King over your life and Savior of your soul.
Jesus was clear on His purpose
Jesus came for a reason – to fulfill the Father’s will (John 4). We see the details of His mission in the gospels, prophesied in the Old Testament, and in Luke with much detail. In the last days of His earthly life, Jesus “turned his face, was resolute in setting out for Jerusalem,” where He knew He would be killed (Luke 9:51). It should be said that the mission of Christ’s time on earth was to fulfill God’s plan of saving the lost. The Apostle Paul encouraged Timothy saying Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Jesus put it this way in Luke 19:10: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Jesus’ mission was to save people who needed saving. Their reputation for sinfulness was not a reason to avoid them; rather, it was a reason to seek them out. Saved from what? Saved from sin? YES. But also from God. We are saved from “wrath,” that is, from God’s judgment of sin (Romans 5:9). Our sin has separated us from God, and the consequence of sin is death (Romans 6:23). So, we will soberly celebrate Jesus’ willingness to die for God’s enemies, namely you and I, on Good Friday to reconcile us back to our Creator – God the Father. Saved by God the Son in the plan of God the Father from God’s wrath on our sin and rebellion, bringing us back to God in right relationship, so that we can enjoy Him and bring glory to Him. So, one could say: God saves us from God to God and for God. That was Jesus’ purpose and He willingly and joyfully obeyed the Father to accomplish it.
Expectations of the people (disciples/others)
Has anyone ever fallen short of your expectations? Not because they failed, but because what you expected from them was never in the cards in the first place.
Jesus for the first time, became a clearly public figure…allowing people to openly worship Him. Jesus’ purpose in riding into Jerusalem was to make public His claim to be their Messiah and King of Israel in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. Matthew says that the King coming on the foal of a donkey was an exact fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9, “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
The shouts of the crowd, “Hosanna in the highest!” carried deep meaning. The word hosanna comes from a Hebrew word meaning “save now” or “save us, we pray.” By saying “hosanna” as Jesus passed through the gates of Jerusalem and referring to Jesus as King, the Jews were, in a short-sighted sense, acknowledging Jesus as their Messiah. The Jews had been waiting a long time for the fulfillment of God’s Davidic covenant, and their shouts of “hosanna in the highest” were coming from the hope that their Messiah had finally come to set up God’s kingdom then and there. By saying “in the highest,” the crowds were invoking heaven’s blessing on them and the salvation that the Messiah was bringing. The phrase also echoes the song of the angels in Luke 2:14: “Glory to God in the highest.” To paraphrase the shouts of the crowd: “Save us, our Messiah, who comes to fulfill God’s mission! Save us, we beg you, as you take your rightful throne and extend heaven’s salvation to us!”
They welcomed Him out of their desire for a Messianic deliverer, many saw Him as the one who would lead them in a revolt against Rome. They were looking for political salvation, not a spiritual salvation. This is short-sighted view of Jesus, not seeking or understanding our true need. There were many who, though they did not believe in Christ as Savior, nevertheless hoped that perhaps He would be a great deliverer in this life. These are the ones who hailed Him as King with their many hosannas, recognizing Him as the Son of David who came in the name of the Lord. But when He failed in their expectations, when He refused to lead them in a massive revolt against the Roman occupiers, the crowds quickly turned on Him. They went for shouts of joy to shouts of ‘Crucify!”
I think it helpful today, this Palm Sunday, that we are not alone in expectations of God, met and unmet. Our account from Luke shows a crowd worshipping Jesus with these bent expectations…they were missing the point of Jesus. Even a desire to worship God, but with our hearts intent that He will do things for us that He has not promised…or that it will look different than our expectations. Yet, even in that – it is a sign that our hearts were created to worship God. It is in our sin and flesh that we pervert our worship to God with those falsehoods or to turn away from Him when what we want is not given.
Do we not fall into the same trap of looking to Jesus for salvation in this life alone? Do we not seek Him to be the Savior of America? Minnesota? If He could come back and oust the modern-day Romans, we can finally live in peace today in this world. We need saving, but from our sin, friends. In this salvation, we have peace eternal. We have a King who reigns and is preparing a place with the Father for those who believe in Him (John 14).
We were made to worship.
When Jesus rode into the city, he receives the worship and praise of the people because only He deserves it. There is nothing else on earth that deserves the praise we are to give Jesus, our Savior King. A theologian once described our desire to worship and shortcoming of it like this: “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols….The human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; as it labours under dullness, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God. To these evils another is added by another action. The god whom man has thus conceived inwardly he attempts to embody outwardly. The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth.” Friends, let me be clear on this point. We worship. The reality for all mankind is to worship something…and we do in our sin and ignorance worship other things when we were made to worship someone, that is God alone. Even redeemed, our hearts will turn toward idols. Even as God has truly circumcised our hearts as He promised to do from the Old Testament, we still live in the flesh and must mortify it.
C.S. Lewis pointed out that man’s desires are not too strong, but too weak. We are far to easily pleased. We must be in awe of God and like a deer pants after water – seek God alone, satisfied in Him alone. When we sense distance from God, a lack of joy in Him, focus on Him, desire for Him…we must seek out prayer and help from our brothers and sisters. We must cry out, “Holy Spirit, renew my mind! Create in me a clean heart and help me to praise Christ alone!”
Jesus made a statement to the Pharisees. They told Jesus to rebuke His disciples to which Jesus replied, “I tell you if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” The Heavens declare, even rocks would have shout praises to God. The expression the stones will cry out seems to be a well-known statement of the time and isn’t to be understood as a literal statement. The meaning is likely that the impossible would happen for the King of kings to enter His capital city in honor, like inanimate objects starting to worship. This is poetry in motion. In Psalm 114:6, the mountains leap. Isaiah 55:12 says, “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.” Throughout Psalm 148, there are numerous examples of created things praising their Creator—the sun, moon, stars, heavens, water, sky, animals, and people. Everyone and everything was created for the pleasure of the sovereign Lord, to worship Him. It is the reason we do missions – that the gospel would be brought to the nations, people saved, thus worship God like they ought. Missions = worship! Since God loved us so that we love Him in return and worship Him….we love our neighbor by speaking of the person to which their hearts will be fulfilled in their desire to worship something. We point them to the best, the treasure, the God-head.
He weeps (vs 41-44)
Our God is full of compassion. The God-man Jesus knew He would be rejected, and in His humanity, He feels it more fully. The people had heard and seen Him teach and heal for 3 years…but they missed the point of why He came. He weeps because of their rejection of Him and that this same city would be sieged by the Romans in 40 years. He weeps because love feels when those around us miss the bigger picture. Jesus had an eternal and present viewpoint. Within just a few days, their hosannas would change to cries of “Crucify Him!” Those who hailed Him as a hero would soon reject and abandon Him, even his closest disciples. It is important to note the sadness of Jesus as He knows the people do not understand what is happening. They think Jesus will give them earthly comfort, unconcerned with eternity. Jesus also knows that judgement is coming for them, rightly so in their rejection of the stone, which would become the cornerstone. We must have eternal eyes and a very present viewpoint. We need Jesus. Our neighbors need Jesus. This is an eternal matter – men’s souls on the line. But this is also a very present issue. Jesus brings healing today. Jesus brings peace today. Jesus renews hearts and minds today. Seeds are planned and the Spirit sows today. Salvation is today.
In the kindness of God, He has given us a glimpse into the future. The Triune God is always working toward something better, in the case of our faith – someday it will no longer be needed as it turns to true sight. The hope that we have in Christ has and is accomplishing the redemption of souls for the glory of His name. Someday soon, we will worship with perfect hearts, minds, and song.
Turn to Revelation 7:9-12:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10 and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” 11 And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.
This worship is going to be real for all those who believe today. Right worship – to see and know God Father, Son, and Spirit as they are. We will be waving palm branches in the consummation of God’s Kingdom. This is our blessed and assured hope in Christ. So, Grace, today, let’s seek slices of that future worship. Let’s seek moments resting in the glory of God, not for anything other than a recognition of who He is – the only God whom worship is due. We can worship Him for blessings and grace, but let’s worship Him because He is God. Almighty, glorious, and holy.
The saints in the Bible are described as fearing the name of God; they are reverent worshipers; they stand in awe of the Lord’s authority; they are afraid of offending Him; they feel their own nothingness in the sight of the Infinite One. Yet, through Christ, they boldly approach His throne, they sing to Him, serve Him, love others in Him, and extend the invitation to the greatest feast that will ever be when our King comes to bring us Home. Onward!