[0:00] The following sermon is from Grace and Peace Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Grace and Peace is a new church that exists for the glory of God and the good of the northeast suburbs of Hamilton Place, Collegedale, and Ottawa.
[0:16] You can find help more by visiting gracepeacechurch.org. Right, taking a break from our study in the book of Acts and looking at a few passages that fit the season this week and next week.
[0:41] And so I wanted to look at this great Palm Sunday triumphal entry passage, but I wanted to read Psalm 118, which is the portion of the psalm that those who shouted at Jesus' triumphal entry, part of what they were singing.
[0:58] So Psalm 118 is here, and then we'll look at this as well as the passage that our children read earlier. So let me read this for us.
[1:09] Psalm 118. O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His steadfast love endures forever. Let the house of Aaron say, His steadfast love endures forever.
[1:20] Let those who fear the Lord say, His steadfast love endures forever. Out of my distress I called on the Lord. The Lord answered me, and He set me free. The Lord is on my side.
[1:32] I shall not fear. What can man do to me? The Lord is on my side as my helper. I shall look in triumph on those who hate me. It's better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man.
[1:44] It's better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes. All nations surround me. In the name of the Lord, I cut them off. They surround me, surrounded me on every side.
[1:54] In the name of the Lord, I cut them off. They surrounded me like bees. They went out like a fire among the thorns. In the name of the Lord, I cut them off. I was pushed hard so that I was falling, but the Lord helped me.
[2:08] The Lord is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation. Glad songs of salvation are in the tents of the righteous. The right hand of the Lord does valiantly.
[2:20] The right hand of the Lord exalts. The right hand of the Lord does valiantly. You can hear this as a song that you would sing. These repetitions. I shall not die, but I shall live and recount the deeds of the Lord.
[2:35] The Lord has disciplined me severely, but He has not given me over to death. Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them.
[2:46] And give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous shall enter through it. I thank you that you have answered me and have become my salvation. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
[2:59] This is the Lord's doing and it's marvelous in our eyes. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Save us, we pray, O Lord. O Lord, we pray, give us success.
[3:12] Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord. The Lord is God. He has made his light to shine upon us. Bring the festal sacrifice with cords up to the horns of the altar.
[3:27] You are my God and I will give thanks to you. You are my God. I will extol you. O give thanks to the Lord for he is good. For his steadfast love endures forever.
[3:40] Amen. Friends, this is God's word. He gives it to you because he loves you and he wants you to know him. Well, Jesus, as our children read earlier in this passage where he comes into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, if you've been around the church for any length of time, you've seen that kind of passage and you know that there's a lot of details.
[4:06] But here's what I want you to see is that Jesus is incredibly intentional about portraying himself in a very clear manner to the people there.
[4:16] Whether they understood it or not, we can see it. Jesus is super clear. Here's what he's saying. I'm not the king that you want.
[4:28] I'm the king you need. That is the entire point of the passage that our children read earlier of the triumphal entry. Jesus saying, I am not the king that you want. I'm the king that you need.
[4:39] So I just want to sit with that thought and meditate on that for a couple of moments this morning. First thing, Jesus is not the king that you want.
[4:50] Now, you've got to see what's going on here. Jesus has been making his way from Galilee up in the north, down, zigzagging down through the towns and the villages, making his way to Jerusalem for the Passover feast.
[5:04] Now, from the various gospel accounts, Jesus has visited as many as 35 different towns and villages along the way. Isn't that amazing? It's kind of like Kobe's farewell tour, you know, hitting every city along the way, stopping in.
[5:19] This has taken him a couple of months to make this trek down, but he's timed it just perfect so that he is coming into Jerusalem at the very time that all the roads heading into the city are swelling with worshipers who are headed to the Passover feast.
[5:37] He's just been in Jericho, which is just kind of to the northeast of Jerusalem where he healed a blind man named Bartimaeus. You maybe remember that story.
[5:48] He healed the soul of a tax collector named Zacchaeus. And so now, along with those pilgrims, they are all traveling up from the valley where Jericho is up into the hill country where Jerusalem was.
[6:04] They're singing songs together. The Psalms of Ascent come from that traveling up to Jerusalem. And Jesus and his disciples stopped about two miles from Jerusalem because that was on the back slopes of the Mount of Olives.
[6:20] And there was a town there, Bethany, because that's where Jesus and his disciples stayed. They stayed at the house of Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. Lazarus, whom Jesus had already raised from the dead.
[6:31] They stayed at their house and that's where they'd stay every week. And then they'd walk the other two miles into Jerusalem each morning. So, as they're going in, these crowds, they're just like buzzing with anticipation with Jesus coming.
[6:48] Why? Why had this, had the anticipation reached a fever pitch? What's going on with that? Well, here was a guy that they thought that they could buy into.
[6:59] Jesus was the kind of guy they thought that they wanted. They thought that he would give them their desires. What kind of desires did they have? Well, I think the first one that's clear is that they wanted someone who would be strong.
[7:12] They wanted strength. They wanted a strong man because they hated the Romans. The Romans were, you know, the Romans were like, you know, that bullying older brother that sits on his younger brother's chest, you know, and holds his arms down and slaps him and grabs his arm and slaps his own face.
[7:30] Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? It's just a, they were bullies. They took every advantage that they could to brutalize the people of Israel. They wanted someone who was strong.
[7:41] They wanted stability. They'd spent hundreds of years being kicked around by whichever the new local strong power in the region was.
[7:53] And Israel wanted their own land. They wanted to be free. They wanted peace to be able to pursue their own way. They wanted the stability of freedom. The third thing was they wanted purity.
[8:06] They were living in this world that for the last couple of hundred years had seen a growth in the spread of Greek culture, Greek language, Greek society. And to them, the Greek society was like they were immoral.
[8:21] They were perverse. They were a sexually open society. They were a society that didn't honor the Jewish traditions and Jewish morality. And so Jews felt a great sense of threat at Greek culture.
[8:36] And remember, these people who are going up to Israel, these are the religious people. They highly valued this kind of purity. They wanted to see God's presence among them and to purify them and them as a people.
[8:51] That doesn't sound so bad. You know, I kind of want God to do that. Strength, stability, purity. Like that sounds pretty nice.
[9:02] I would love for God to do some of that even in our own day and time. I don't know if you all have noticed, but it has been striking to me that over the last couple of years, one of the pieces of language that has become pretty common, I think, as you look at particularly politically conservative evangelical Christians, has been the desire for there to be someone who would be a defender of their values.
[9:31] I mean, I'm really not trying to talk in a political way. I'm just making the observation that for many of my friends and relatives and others who love President Trump, one of the things that is most impressive to them about Trump is that he is a defender of the faith.
[9:51] That they see him as being bold and ready to fight and determined to win no matter the cost. And it's not just, this kind of language is not just an American or a Republican thing.
[10:03] Did you know that the Queen of England, one of her titles, she has lots of titles, one of her titles is defender of the faith. Isn't it interesting? I just marvel at that idea that rooted in our kind of Western society, our Western kind of way of thinking of ourselves in society, is that Christians in particular have thought of their leaders as defenders of the faith.
[10:31] As our defenders. I find that to be particularly interesting because it represents that even us now, what we're looking for are the same kinds of things that the people of Israel were looking for.
[10:46] We're looking for strength. We're looking for stability. We're looking for purity. We want a defender to help our culture become what we want it to be.
[11:00] And so into that kind of excitement and expectation, Jesus walks into it and he walks in in a very different way. Excuse me. He's presenting himself as something totally different.
[11:13] There are three images that you need to see of what Jesus is doing, of how he's presenting himself. The first one is he's showing himself as peaceful. He's riding a donkey.
[11:25] That was the fulfillment of Zechariah 9. The fulfillment that in that passage, the prophet Zechariah is prophesying that God's Messiah, that Jesus' Messiah would be one who would bring peace in Israel.
[11:40] And at that time, it was a time of tremendous upheaval and conflict. But the victory would come, not through this incredible warrior, but would come through a gentle and a humble king.
[11:52] And so Jesus rides this donkey, not a war horse. Isaiah, when Isaiah prophesies about the Messiah, what does he call him? A prince of peace.
[12:03] The government will be upon his shoulders, not because of his sword, but because of his peace. So that's the first detail. Just the very fact that he's riding a donkey.
[12:16] The second detail is the fact that it's a donkey that had never been ridden on. Why would that matter? Well, it's because in ancient cultures, it would have been very clear.
[12:27] This doesn't come across to us. But in ancient cultures, it was very clear that if you had an animal that you wanted to set apart for a holy or a sacred use, you know, you were going to sacrifice them, you would never use them for a common use before that.
[12:42] You wouldn't go take the old mule, you know, that you'd been using to plow your fields for years and go sacrifice them. No, no, no, no. If you were going to make a sacrifice to God, it had to be something that was pure.
[12:52] And so Jesus riding this donkey is signifying that he has a religious or a sacred purpose that he's going to fulfill. And of course, we know that that is his sacrifice, the sacrifice of himself.
[13:06] That his victory is going to come through sacrifice. He's a king that his victory is a win through sacrifice, that it is an understated kind of royalty that he's bringing.
[13:23] So that's the second thing. The third image is one that you may not have picked up on. Jewish readers would definitely have picked up on it because all the way back in Genesis, you remember Jacob, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.
[13:37] Jacob the patriarch, he had 12 sons, he had 13. And his sons, he took Judah, which was not the oldest son, but he was one of the sons on whom when Jacob was dying, he blessed all of his children.
[13:55] But on Judah, he said that through Judah was going to become a king. And this king, though, was not going to be a conquering king. He was going to be a king that was known by gentleness and humility.
[14:08] But he was going to be called the Lion of the tribe of Judah. That's where we get that name, the Lion of the tribe of Judah. But then you skip from the very beginning in Genesis, you skip all the way forward to the book of the Revelation, and the apostle John sees the Lion of the tribe of Judah standing on the throne.
[14:28] And what does he look like on the throne of heaven? He looks like a lamb who's been slain. See, the biblical writers are using these images and they're weaving them together, attempting to show what the Messiah was to look like, what the true king of Israel was to look like, was not this conquering warrior, but was a humble king who had power, but his power rested in his sacrificial love.
[14:59] See, this wasn't what they were expecting. It wasn't what they thought that they wanted. Now, the people of Israel, they tried to fit this image in. They picked up palm branches like this.
[15:10] These were national symbols. In fact, 200 years before this, there was a big revolution in Israel. It lasted like five or six years. It was called the Maccabean Revolt. They were revolting against Rome.
[15:22] But one of the things they did was serenade Joseph Maccabeus as he came into Jerusalem with palm branches like this. They were a national symbol. Something like Zeke said, like a bald eagle swooping in.
[15:40] Like Lee Greenwood playing under fireworks, you know, going over the sky. It was something that was uniquely communicating to the people of Israel that this is what we're about.
[15:54] This is what life is about for us. It's about this kind of Messiah. But Jesus wasn't playing along. Dallas Willard is a writer, and he says this, that Christ is generally outside the boundaries you would set for Him.
[16:12] The problem, of course, is that we tend to assume that our priorities for Jesus are the same as Jesus' priorities for Jesus. We tend to assume that the way that we think life ought to work out for us individually or for us as a culture are the desires that Jesus would have for us.
[16:37] You know? Why wouldn't Jesus want my family to be healthy? Why wouldn't Jesus want my family, my children to be safe? Why wouldn't Jesus want my community to prosper and not deal with rampant addictions?
[16:54] Why wouldn't Jesus want His church to be in a central place in the culture? But we really need to sit with that question. Is our vision of Jesus' priorities actually the priorities that Jesus has in mind?
[17:10] One of the questions that Tim Keller asks that has always stuck with me is, he says, if Jesus wants all the same things you want, you may not actually be dealing with Jesus, but the image, a self-imposed image of Jesus that you've created.
[17:29] A Jesus that is made in your own image. If Jesus agrees with you on everything, you might be the one who has the problem. You know, it may be that Jesus' priorities for us as Christians, for American Christians, is to go the path that Israel went on, a path of decline, of alienation, and maybe repentance.
[17:59] It may be that faithfulness to Jesus in the next season of your life might actually mean that you're holding on to a king that no one else in the culture acknowledges.
[18:16] It may make you look a little weird. It may be that you have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death in order to hold on to the Jesus who meets you in the midst of it.
[18:30] Even if that's not the vision you had for your life. It may be that Jesus is going to bring you and us as a people to a place where He can be the thing that we needed Him to be all along and didn't realize it.
[18:46] Jesus is not going to be the thing that we want. But what He says is He's going to be what we need. That's what He says. He's going to be what we need. So the crowds, they took this psalm, Psalm 118 that I had read to serenade Jesus.
[19:02] And the psalms were the prayer book of Israel. You know, they didn't have Bibles. You know, this was before the printing press. They didn't carry around like scrolls. You know, hey kids, grab the scrolls from the car.
[19:13] You know, they didn't. That's not how they operated. They memorized things. Most Jewish children would have memorized the entire book of Psalms. These were the songs that they sang in worship.
[19:25] They were the songs that they sang to one another. And so it was normal that they would sing this at this time. The Psalm 118 in particular was a song that was sung at the Passover feast because it reminded the people of their desperate cries to the Lord for rescue and Him rescuing them from slavery in Egypt.
[19:46] And so it began with Hosanna. Hosanna, which literally means just save us. It's a cry of help. Save us. We need to be saved. And sandwiched in between the two Hosannas are two lines that begin the same.
[20:01] Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the kingdom of our father David. Blessed is the person who is named after this great king, King Jesus, and who lives in His kingdom.
[20:16] And sure, we should expect that we would be blessed if we live in the kingdom of the great king. But there's something kind of surprising about this. About these songs that maybe they didn't even realize what they were singing.
[20:31] Look back starting at verse 19 with me. So Jesus takes this section on and He applies it to Himself.
[20:43] It's a prophetic section. He says, instead of the people saying, open to me the gates of righteousness, Jesus speaks this later on about Himself.
[20:54] Open to me as Jesus, the only one who could come through the gates of righteousness. Open to me the gates of righteousness that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord.
[21:07] This is the gate of the Lord and the righteous shall enter through it. Speaking about Himself, I thank you that you have answered me. You have become my salvation. And you remember this, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
[21:20] And then look down at verse 27. The Lord is God. He has made His light to shine upon us. Bring the festal sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar.
[21:32] What Jesus is saying is, as I enter into the gates of Jerusalem, the gates of the presence of God, He's going to go straight from here to the temple. But I'm coming as one who is bringing not just my own righteousness, but I'm bringing the festal sacrifice.
[21:49] I'm bringing the sacrifice to God. The perfect sacrifice. The sacrifice that He is going to be on the cross.
[22:02] You see, Jesus was saying that He is the humble King who is coming, not as the victorious one, but the one who is coming to lay down His own life for His people.
[22:13] He's going to become the true Passover Lamb, the final Passover Lamb. See, this whole thing with people waving branches, this was not a victory parade.
[22:26] This was a funeral procession for Jesus. They just didn't know it yet. The disciples didn't even know it yet.
[22:36] You see, the reason that Jesus was doing this was to conquer an enemy far more terrible than Rome, far more pervasive and perverse than the culture of the Greeks.
[22:50] Jesus was coming to conquer the power of sin and death that has hold over this world and over you and me. See, through the cross, through the tomb, through the empty tomb, Jesus is rewriting the story of the world.
[23:10] Sin and death are written into the very fabric of this world. Sin and death is why the world is the way that it is. It's why we have these terrible storms that wake us up in the middle of the night, make us wonder if another tornado is coming.
[23:25] It's why we have wayward children that make poor choices. It's why we have a microscopic illness that kills millions of people.
[23:39] It's why we have a pornography industry that's tearing apart our children's imagination and our imagination as a people.
[23:52] It's why we have pervasive drug abuse and sexual abuse. It's why we have racism. It's why we have everything that we see in our own souls and in the people around us goes back to the power of sin and death that's in this world.
[24:12] It has distorted God's world. One of the things that we like to say is that the power of sin has distorted our souls in such a way that we are turned in upon ourselves.
[24:25] I said that last week in our class that it takes us and it bends our preoccupation back towards ourselves so that we can't see out past our own desires our own selfishness without a tremendous amount of work.
[24:47] And Jesus has come to root out sin in the deepest of places. And so you ask the question well, okay, that's great that Jesus has come to do that but why then is the world still so messed up?
[25:00] Why am I still so messed up? I mean, hasn't Jesus come to do anything really about that? And I want to say this, I think that's the same question in form that the crowds were asking that day.
[25:13] Okay, you're coming so aren't you going to do something about this? Jesus walks into Jerusalem that day and for the next five days He's in Jerusalem but He's not doing anything.
[25:26] He's just teaching people. He's not going in and taking control like they thought He was going to do. He's not gathering up the crowds and having a big rally and getting everybody's attention. He's not rolling out a plan to get rid of the Romans and to actually do something.
[25:42] You know? We could lob the same criticisms to Jesus as we could to our politicians. Those do nothing people. You know? They're not doing anything for us. And by Friday they were going to turn on Him because He didn't come in.
[25:59] They could not see the way that Jesus was going to solve their problems in any way that they wanted to. And the reality is for most of you when you look to Jesus He's not solving the problems the way that you want Him to.
[26:13] You know? Your relationships are still hard. You don't have all the money in the bank account you want. You know? Life doesn't work the way that we want it to.
[26:24] So what is it that Jesus has actually done? He's come to meet our deepest need and to begin a work that will transform everything.
[26:36] Every time I talk about this it seems and probably if you've heard me talk about this you've probably heard me use this illustration but I'll keep using it because it's the best one and that's D-Day.
[26:48] June 6, 1944 the largest armada of ships over a thousand ships ferried across the English Channel and dropped more than 200,000 soldiers on the beaches of Normandy over the course of a couple of days.
[27:03] The largest invasion amphibious invasion in history and the most significant because if you were looking at that as a dispassionate observer what you would have seen is that that was the moment that Germany lost the war.
[27:19] That was the moment. The fact that they could land 200,000 men and equipment on the shores meant that that was the death of Nazi Germany.
[27:33] But it took 11 more months and if you asked one of the men who was on the ground on the beaches that day or fighting in the Battle of the Bulge or fighting somewhere in France they would not have thought that the battle was already won.
[27:48] In fact it was incredibly dangerous. They might have still died. It was an incredibly difficult time of fighting. But the battle the major part of the victory the major problem to overcome had been already overcome and they were just doing the work of making it complete.
[28:09] And in the same way the cross of Jesus and the resurrected grave has begun that has initiated the victory over sin and death in this world that is now being completed and will one day be finally accomplished.
[28:27] And it may outlast us. And we may be in one of those places where the fighting is the hardest and we can't see what's up ahead. But that doesn't mean that the victory isn't certain.
[28:43] You see actually seeing his victory gives you the ability to step out in faith every single day and to see his work on a daily basis.
[28:55] Because it does three things for us. It gives us a different kind of strength. strength. Not the strength that is victorious over all those things we dislike out there, but the strength to persevere in the face of them.
[29:11] Jesus' victory over sin and death allows us, he has through his victory given us the spirit of Christ which empowers us to stand against every temptation that will come, to persevere against every bit of suffering.
[29:28] Here's the thing, like Winnie the Pooh says, you are stronger than you think. You are stronger than you think in this world. You do not have to give in to the despairs and the frustrations and the temptations that come around you because of what Jesus has done.
[29:44] It's a different kind of strength. It's a different kind of stability. See, because of Jesus, our future is absolutely secure.
[29:57] You do not need to fear what will come. Remember Psalm 42, the mountains, if the world trembles and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, nations rising and falling, all of these movements that we don't understand can't get our hands around.
[30:20] There is a stability for the Christian in the midst of that because Jesus has accomplished something and it will come to its completion.
[30:32] It is certain. You know, Christians, we don't need another defender. We already have one and he sits in heaven and he does as he pleases.
[30:46] He is the king of this world. You do not need to go looking out in this world for someone else to be a defender for you. He brings us strength and stability of a different kind and he brings us a different purity.
[31:05] See, through Christ, you have been made righteous before God. You have been made right through his accomplishment.
[31:17] You are no longer defined by all the things that you lack in this world. you are defined by what you have received and been given.
[31:29] That the victory of Jesus is his obedience and his goodness and his victory given to you. You know, sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that this Jesus is not really giving you what you want.
[31:49] But don't doubt that he is giving you what you need. He doesn't look like what we might want. He doesn't look like the defender of the faith, the British crown.
[32:05] He looks like the humble king who has come to bring new life to us. This is the blessing. When they were saying, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, this is the blessing. True strength, true stability, true purity comes through him for us.
[32:22] So as you go with your families this week, as you think this week about what Christ is doing, what he's come to do, I want you to really lean into the idea of Jesus as king.
[32:34] And if he is king, he's bringing a different set of expectations than what you might have thought. But you should ask yourself this, what is it that you want from this king? Because I think you'll see it may be different from what you've wanted, but he's giving you something that you desperately need.
[32:55] Okay, I'm going to stop there and going to pray for us. Father, we do ask that you would give us what we desperately need. Show us more of yourself, we pray. In Christ's name, amen.