Good morning. My name is Matthew Capone and I'm the pastor here at Cheyenne Mountain Presbyterian Church and it's my joy to bring God's word to you today.
Special welcome if you're new or visiting with us. We're glad that you're here and we're glad that you're here not because we're trying to fill seats,
but because we're following Jesus together as one community. And as we follow Jesus together, we become convinced there's no one so good.
They don't need God's grace and no one so bad they can't have it, which is why we come back week after week to look at God's word together because we believe that God has something to say to all of us.
This Sunday, we're entering the season of Advent.
By the way, I realized recently this is my third, not my third, my fourth Advent at Cheyenne Mountain.
And so you've heard me say this a lot of times now. Advent comes from a Latin word, which means to come or to arrive.
During the season of Advent, we focus on Jesus coming and arriving to the earth.
And we do two things with that. First, we celebrate. We celebrate the fact that he has come.
So we sing Christmas hymns like a joy to the world. The Lord has come.
We don't just celebrate, though, at Advent. We also look forward to, we long for what has not yet happened, that Jesus is coming again.
And so we sing other Christmas songs like that. We sing things like, Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel.
So there's a celebration of what's happened. There's a looking forward to what's going to happen.
And really, that's all of the Christian life. In the Christian life, we are celebrating what God has done in the past.
We are looking forward to what he will do in the future.
We combine both of those things together so we can live faithfully now in the present.
So Advent, in a sense, is what we do all of the year in the Christian life.
This Advent season, we're going to be looking in the book of Zechariah.
You can turn with me. We're going to be in Zechariah chapter 9.
And Zechariah is a prophet. He prophesied to the nation of Israel in the late, or just in general, in the sixth century.
He prophesied to Israel during the sixth century.
And during that time, there's a lot of things going on.
Some of it was the rebuilding of the temple after they returned from exile in Babylon.
In this portion of Zechariah, we're going to be looking just at chapters 9 through 13.
So I'm not going to go into everything that the book of Zechariah covers.
What I am going to tell you is this.
We are going to look at pictures of the coming kingdom.
Zechariah is telling these Old Testament people,
here is what God's kingdom is going to look like.
Here are some pictures.
In chapters 9 through 13, there are four places that are referenced in the New Testament about Jesus.
There are four weeks that we have in Advent.
I'm on the talk mic.
Okay, good.
Four weeks in Advent.
So we're going to look at those four different passages.
All of them, Jesus as our king.
And as we look at this passage, of course, we're going to be reading a large section.
I believe you have verses 1 through 17 in your worship guide, which is the entire chapter.
We're going to focus especially on verses 9 and 10 and a little bit of verse 11.
There's a lot going on here.
We're reading the whole thing to give us some context.
But our focus is going to be verses 9 through 11.
And if you're familiar with the Bible, you know there's these things that we call hard sayings or hard commands.
There's things that Jesus tells us like, take up your cross and follow me.
Jesus also says things like, if you don't abandon your family for my sake, you don't have part of my share with me.
Now, there's another hard saying in the Bible that doesn't typically make that list.
And it's things that show up in verse 9.
It's commands like this.
Rejoice greatly.
Now, you might not think of the command to rejoice as a hard saying.
But if you think about it, that's something that's challenging for many of us.
Even as we come on the Christmas season.
Maybe it's hard for you to rejoice because you've seen a lot of Christmases come and go.
And they just tend to wash over you at this point.
Maybe it's hard to rejoice because the Christmas season, rather than a season of celebration, actually highlights how isolated you are.
Maybe it highlights some of the brokenness in your family.
Some of the relationships that aren't working the way that they're supposed to work.
And so this command, rejoice, may feel like something that's impossible.
Maybe you're tired from COVID.
But you've hit a point of exhaustion like many people have.
And you just want it to be over.
You can't imagine actually being excited or delighted about something.
And yet that is the command of this passage.
It's the command to us.
We're told in verse 9 that this is for the daughter of Zion, the daughter of Jerusalem.
Which is a way of referring to God's people, the Israelites.
Now we take it as God's people, the church.
And so that's going to be our question this morning as we read this passage.
How is it in the Advent season, faced with all sorts of things going on in our hearts, can we rejoice?
What is it about Jesus as the coming king that causes us to have great joy?
It's with that that we're going to turn together to Zechariah chapter 9.
I invite you to turn with me in your worship guide or in your Bible or in your phone.
No matter where you turn, remember that this is God's word.
And God tells us that his word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.
Which means he has not left us to stumble alone in the dark.
But he's given us his word to show us the way to go.
And it's for that reason that we read now, starting at verse 1.
The oracle of the word of the Lord is against the land of Hadric.
And Damascus is its resting place.
For the Lord has an eye on mankind and on all the tribes of Israel.
And on Hamath also, which borders on it.
Tyre and Sidon, though they are very wise.
Tyre has built herself a rampart.
And heaped up silver like dust.
And fine gold like the mud of the streets.
But behold, the Lord will strip her of her possessions and strike down her power on the sea.
And she shall be devoured by fire.
Verse 5.
Ashkelon shall see it and be afraid.
Gaza too, and it shall writhe in anguish.
Ekron also, because its hopes are confounded.
The king shall perish from Gaza.
Ashkelon shall be uninhabited.
A mixed people shall dwell in Ashdod.
And I will cut off the pride of Philistia.
I will take away its blood from its mouth and its abominations from between its teeth.
It shall be a remnant for our God.
It shall be like a clan in Judah.
And Ekron shall be like the Jebusites.
Then I will encamp at my house as a guard, so that none shall march to and fro.
No oppressor shall again march over them.
For now I see with my own eyes.
Verse 9.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion.
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem.
Behold, your king is coming to you.
Righteous and having salvation is he.
Humble and mounted on a donkey.
On a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem.
And the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall speak peace to the nations.
His rule shall be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.
As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope.
Today I declare that I will restore to you double.
For I have bent Judah as my bow, I have made Ephraim its arrow.
I will stir up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece, and wield you like a warrior's sword.
Verse 14.
Then the Lord will appear over them, and his arrow will go forth like lightning.
The Lord God will sound the trumpet and will march forth in the whirlwinds of the south.
The Lord of hosts will protect them, and they shall devour and tread down the sling stones.
And they shall drink and roar as if drunk with wine, and be full like a bowl, drenched like the corners of the altar.
Verse 16.
On that day the Lord their God will save them as the flock of his people.
For like the jewels of a crown, they shall shine on his land.
For how great is his goodness, and how great his beauty.
Grain shall make the young men flourish, and new wine the young women.
I invite you to pray with me as we come to this portion of God's word.
Our Father in heaven, we thank you again that you speak to us, that you spoke through the prophet Zechariah in the 6th century.
And you speak to us this morning, November 29th, 2020.
We ask that you would use your word in a powerful way among us this morning.
That you would show us our need for your mercy.
You'd show us how you meet us with that mercy.
And you'd use it to cause us to rejoice and to praise you from our hearts.
We ask these things confident that you hear us because we ask them in Jesus' name.
Amen.
This past year, as you thought through the calendar, of course there's many things that come with each month.
And if you think back to last month, the month of October, there might be a variety of things that stand out.
Maybe you were someone who was excited about Halloween.
Maybe you were excited about Reformation Day.
If you were like some of us, though, there was another date on the calendar that was so exciting.
Season 2 of The Mandalorian.
You've been waiting.
Now, I've talked about The Mandalorian before.
I won't give you the full backstory.
Of course, as you know, it happens after Episode 6, The Return of the Jedi.
After the fall of the Empire.
If you don't know anything about The Mandalorian, you at least know one thing.
You know about Baby Yoda.
The problem, though, is that its name is not Baby Yoda.
In fact, the makers of the show have tried to clarify this for us.
If you search on Google that you want to buy something related to Baby Yoda, it will not be called Baby Yoda.
You'll be buying something called what?
The child.
Baby Yoda's not its name.
And in fact, you might be confused at some point.
If you don't watch the show, you might actually think that this small green animal is Yoda in young form.
Of course, we would laugh.
True Star Wars fans know that is chronologically impossible.
Yoda has already died.
So if its name is not Yoda, and it is not Yoda, why do we call Baby Yoda Baby Yoda?
Well, for obvious reasons, right?
It looks so much like Yoda.
There's so much continuity.
It has the same shape as Yoda.
It has the same color as Yoda.
It has the same ears as Yoda.
It has some of the same powers as Yoda.
And so we assign this name to a different creature.
We don't even know, by the way, at this point, if Baby Yoda is even related to Yoda.
Apparently, that's being saved for a future episode.
If you watched on Friday, of course, all sorts of things were revealed about Baby Yoda.
I won't spoil any of it for you except to let you know that we find out Baby Yoda's true name.
Now, why am I bringing up Baby Yoda when we come to Zechariah 9, verse 9?
Because when we come to Jesus arriving at Advent as a child, we could refer to him as Baby David.
In fact, this is something we would know as good Israelites looking throughout the Old Testament.
There is supposed to be one to come who will have surprising, great similarities to David.
He will have looked like David.
He will have things in common with David.
And so that's why Jesus is referred to again and again in the New Testament as the son of David.
If you're familiar with the book of Matthew as we went through it together as a church in 2017 and 2018,
you know Matthew refers to him in this way over and over again.
And if you were with us last year during Advent as we went through the book of Micah,
we talked about this on December 15, 2019.
We were in Micah chapter 5.
We talked about the fact that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
Why does that matter?
Because we know from 1 Samuel chapter 17, Bethlehem is the birthplace in the hometown of David.
Jesus is coming as a king.
And he is coming as a king in a way that is in line with King David, the great king of Israel.
And in fact, we know this from the very beginning of the story.
And we hear about these donkeys from the very beginning of the story.
In Genesis chapter 49, verses 10 and 11, we find out that there is one day going to come a king from the tribe of Judah who will rule over the entire earth.
We find out in the next verse, verse 11, that he's going to have some donkeys.
This king obviously isn't David because David did not rule over the entire earth.
Now we could spend all morning going through the different places that donkeys and kings show up in the Old Testament.
I'll just give you a few more in continuity with David.
So Genesis 49, verse 10.
Tribe of Judah is going to have a king.
Then we see in 2 Samuel, verse 16, David is fleeing from Absalom, his son.
What does Mephibosheth's son bring out for him to ride on?
He brings out some donkeys.
1 Kings chapter 1, Solomon takes over from King David.
To show his continuity, King David makes sure that Solomon rides in on David's donkey.
We are continuing to see the fulfillment of the pattern that Jesus is following after King David.
And it's important for us to remember that as people who are not Israelites,
because that is in the background for us what for them would have been in the foreground.
Their expectation was for a great king to come.
And like baby Yoda looks like the greater Yoda from before,
baby Jesus is going to look like David who came before,
but be even greater.
And so that's why Jesus is often spoken of as great David's greater son.
Now if baby Yoda were to exceed Yoda in some way,
in all ways,
in this illustration we become even more perfect.
We don't know yet.
We'll have to stay posted.
But we know this.
Jesus follows in the line,
he is a great king.
And so we're looking this morning in Zechariah about what kind of king he is actually going to be.
He's going to be a different kind of king than David.
He's going to be a greater king.
And it's what makes him this type of king that causes us to rejoice.
We're going to look at two things.
First, he is going to be a humble king.
He's going to be a humble king.
We're also going to see that he's going to be a peaceful king.
We are going to rejoice about him as our king because he's a humble king.
And also because he's a peaceful king.
We see first his humility here in verse 9.
Of course, we're told it explicitly.
Your king is coming to you, righteous and having salvation,
humble and mounted on a donkey.
Now, this donkey, as I mentioned, is showing us this continuity with King David.
It's highlighting the fact that he's going to be a king with a real rule.
But it's not just any donkey.
It's the colt, the foal of a donkey.
So this king, he doesn't come in on a regular donkey.
He comes in on what we might call a baby donkey.
Baby David is going to come in on a baby donkey.
And so opposite of what we might expect, this great king coming in with great pomp and circumstance,
he actually chooses the opposite.
He doesn't just fill the pattern.
He goes below it.
He chooses something even more humble.
He chooses something even smaller.
Just having a donkey is not low enough.
It has to be a small donkey.
Because that's the kind of king he's going to be.
He's going to be a humble king.
And that, of course, is what we see in Jesus' life, right?
He comes.
He's born not in some palace, not with fanfare.
He's born in a manger.
He's not raised with great wealth.
He's raised in a very modest family.
Jesus then goes on to spend his ministry moving from place to place.
He doesn't have a house.
He's going out and serving other people.
And so he doesn't experience comforts and pleasure.
That's not the characteristic of Jesus' life.
Instead, he experiences opposition and suffering.
He is of this humble king.
And, of course, we're told the same thing both in the New Testament and the Old Testament.
In the Old Testament, in Isaiah chapter 53, we're told this.
He says,
to become a part of it.
And then we're told in the New Testament in Hebrews chapter 4,
for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
Jesus came.
He experienced all the tragedy of human life just like us.
He brings salvation through his humility.
He is a humble king.
Now, I have a friend who says that there are two kinds of people in the world.
There are here I am people and there you are people.
Now, here I am people, when they show up, of course, what are they saying?
Here I am.
Pay attention to me.
I need to be the center of the attention.
Guess what I can give to you and provide?
A there you are person.
What do they do when they show up in a room?
They're interested in other people.
They're moving towards them.
They're for them.
They want to know about what's going on in your life.
They're not the person who's there to announce their presence,
to make the biggest entrance that they can.
What we're told here is Jesus is not a here I am king.
He is a there you are king.
He does not stand far off from us in heaven.
Instead, he comes down.
He doesn't announce his presence, but instead he's born in a manger.
He does not perform miracles to call attention to himself,
but to heal and bring restoration to the world.
And ultimately, he comes not for himself, but for us.
He finishes his ministry by dying on a cross for his people.
And so he is a there you are king rather than a here I am king.
And so we can rejoice because unlike so many kings in this world,
Jesus knows what our existence looks like.
He knows what it is like to be human, and he's with us in it,
and he cares about it.
We've seen, of course, during this season, plenty of hypocrisy, right?
We've seen kings who are not with us.
We've seen kings when it comes to the coronavirus
who say one thing and do another thing.
The motto is, good for thee, not for me.
It becomes clear they actually live a very different life, right?
COVID restrictions are for other people, not for them.
Social distancing, that's for other people, not for them.
Staying away from restaurants, that's for other people, not for them.
They use their privileges as kings to serve themselves.
Not so with Jesus.
Jesus actually takes more suffering on himself.
He exceeds what he asks of us.
We long for kings who serve their people, not themselves.
King Jesus is that kind of king.
He understands and he knows.
And so we bring all of our things from the weak to him.
In fact, I'm going to show you.
We've already done that this morning.
Open up your worship guides with me.
This is what we do with a humble king.
Okay, in our call to worship, verse 2,
we said together,
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.
Okay, so we brought the sickness of this world to our king.
We brought that to him in worship.
Verse 3 at the very top.
He upholds the widow and the fatherless.
God cares about people who are financially in danger.
We are able to come to him with that in worship.
Lower on verse 3.
Come thou long expected Jesus.
What are we bringing in worship?
Line 2.
From our fears and sins release us.
Jesus is a humble king.
We can bring our fears to him without any shame.
Lower down on page 3.
Hark the herald angels sing.
Line 2.
God and sinners reconciled.
We bring our alienation here to worship.
We bring our alienation from God,
knowing that he's restored us to him.
And then by implication,
we bring our alienation from other people.
If we have broken relationships during the Christmas season,
we know we can bring that to God in worship
as the one who reconciles,
the one who's lived in this world
and knows exactly what broken relationships look like.
He is a humble king.
We can come to him.
He knows and he understands.
In fact, we sung that at the end of our chorus.
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus our Emmanuel,
Emmanuel meaning God with us.
He doesn't stand far off.
He comes close.
And so if we get COVID this week,
we can remember this.
Jesus lived in a frail human body.
He knows what it looks like.
He knows what it's like to get sick.
He knows what it's like to suffer.
And so how do we rejoice in Jesus as king?
Why do we rejoice?
We rejoice because he's Emmanuel.
He's God with us.
He's a humble king who serves his people
rather than using them.
Now the donkey here in verse 9
tells us that he's a humble king.
That's not the only thing it tells us though.
The donkey also tells us that he is a peaceful king.
The donkey would have been understood
in the Old Testament as a sign of peace
because it's the opposite of what?
It's not the war horse.
If you think I'm making that up,
look on the very next verse.
Verse 10.
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim,
that's Judah, the northern kingdom of Israel,
and the war horse from Jerusalem.
This king isn't just coming in humility.
He's coming bringing peace.
The donkey tells us both of those things.
He is going to do something negative.
He's going to end wars,
and he's going to bring something positive.
He's going to speak peace.
That's in verse 10.
He's cutting off this chariot,
this war horse, this battle bow,
and then he's going to speak peace to the nations.
His rule shall be from sea to sea.
In other words,
he's going to fulfill what we've been expecting
from the Davidic king,
from the Messiah,
from this Judah king,
from Genesis chapter 49.
He, like the king that was foretold
in Genesis chapter 49,
is going to rule over the entire earth.
He is going to have a worldwide rule.
We see that, of course, in verse 10.
That's what's meant by his rule
being from sea to sea.
But we saw it earlier in this same passage.
I told you I'd touch on this briefly.
Verses 1 through 8.
This king is retaking the land of Israel,
moving from north to south.
And so he's coming, conquering his enemies
so he can bring peace to his people.
And, of course, that's what we see
in this last section, verses 14 through 17.
He's restoring his people and bringing them peace.
Jesus is coming as a worldwide king
in his second coming to conquer his enemies,
what we talked about in our confession of faith,
to rule over his people,
giving them full and final peace once and for all.
And so rejoice, not just because he's a humble king,
but because he's a peaceful king.
By the way, you might have seen
the two different movements of Advent there.
Remember I told you in Advent,
we celebrate things and we long for things.
We celebrate that he's humble.
We long for the peaceful kingdom.
We do both at once.
Now, if you've been with us for a while,
you've probably heard me talk many times
about Jesus' second coming.
The fact that he's going to return.
In fact, we talked about it in 2 Peter.
Remember last week, we talked about the day
that shows up in 2 Peter over and over.
By the way, if you look closely,
a day shows up in this passage as well.
Look at verse 16.
And that's the day, as we discussed,
when Jesus is going to come back
and make all things right.
We find out what that right is going to look like
because we're told also, verse 9,
he's righteous.
He's going to bring justice to the world.
He's going to restore what's been broken.
He's going to punish what's been wrong.
And he's going to vindicate his people.
And if you've heard me say this over and over,
it might become something that's rote, right?
It might become something that just washes over your head.
Why is Jesus coming as the great king,
something that can move us to joy
as we're living right now?
November 29th.
Well, I want you to do a thought experiment with me.
What would life look like if we did not believe
Jesus was coming back as the king,
the righteous king who would bring peace to the earth?
What would be different about our lives today,
November 29th, if we stopped believing that?
And I'm going to add something to that for you.
All humans look for the world to be restored.
We all know something is wrong with this world.
We're looking for someone or something to restore it.
So what would happen if we stopped believing that?
Well, we'd have to fill it with something else.
We'd have to put in another narrative.
There's a book that I've been reading
that came out this summer called Strange Rites,
which is called, the subtitle is
Religions for a Godless World.
And it gives us a picture of what people do
to fill in the rest of this story.
I'll give you a little bit of an extreme example at first,
and then we'll go to some more common examples.
One of them, right now, witchcraft is on the rise
in the United States.
There's a chapter about this in the book,
and they talk about a witch named Dakota Stockfleet.
And should they tell us about her,
she provides a series of spells for cursing evildoers,
characterizing them as, listen to this,
the only avenue for justice available to the downtrodden.
She says this,
If you practice witchcraft
and you have never considered cursing someone,
I have to assume you haven't been through much
in the way of violence, trauma, or abuse.
Folk magic is what arms the poor,
the downtrodden, and the outcast.
Why do we rejoice that Jesus is coming back
as a king with worldwide rule
to bring peace to the earth?
We rejoice that he's doing that
because it means we don't have to.
It is not our job to bring peace to this world.
Our only hope for justice
is not casting a spell on someone.
It is on our great king, Jesus.
We don't have to bear up under the weight of that.
Now, you might be thinking,
okay, great, that's a little bit of an extreme example.
I wasn't gonna become a witch
if I stopped believing in Jesus returning.
Well, you're in luck.
This book continues to go on
and present us other options,
the ways that people fill in their need
for the world to be made right,
their need for a utopia.
She identifies two competing civil religions
going on in the United States right now,
sort of opposite extremes.
One of them she calls social justice culture.
She says this,
The solution to the problem of society
is through struggle,
tearing down the bastions of what has come before.
All of society is the script that must be rewritten.
The arc of history bends towards a new Eden.
So social justice culture on the one hand,
a new Eden, right?
New Eden, that's biblical language.
We're restoring the world to the way it was meant to be.
The other extreme is rationalists
and the transhumanists of Silicon Valley,
and their goal is to hack, improve upon,
and even optimize elements of human nature.
And then she tells us this,
Both groups are fundamentally eschatological.
That's a fancy word meaning they look towards a future world.
They look to the end times.
Yet thoroughly materialist.
They seek not salvation out there,
but a purification down here,
a kingdom of heaven that can be realized fully on this earth
rather than in a world to come.
Ultimately, human beings and only human beings
are the arbiters of goodness in these new faith systems.
The techno-utopian faith in intellectual potential
and the social justice movement's faith
in the priority of lived experience
both place the fundamental judgments of goodness,
morality, and progress
in the hands of human beings, not God.
The point is this.
We cannot escape visions of a restored world filled with peace.
That is what it means to be human.
The question is,
which vision are we going to latch onto?
Is it a vision where it's up to us to purify the world,
or it is a vision where God is going to come and purify the world?
It is not a question of whether we'll have a vision.
It is a question of which vision we'll have.
If you think the idea of Jesus returning
in a physical body to this earth
to reign as king over the entire globe
bringing peace sounds crazy,
think about how even crazier it sounds
that we as humanity are going to be able to do that by ourselves.
And yet that is exactly
what the culture and the world around us is telling us.
It takes less faith to believe
that Jesus is coming back to make things right
and to rule over this world
than it does to believe in these other alternate visions.
And as humans, we must have a vision.
We're told in Ecclesiastes chapter 3
that God set eternity in our hearts.
In other words, we must as human beings
look to a future.
Look to a world.
Long for a world in which there's good kings
and full justice.
And so outside of Jesus,
justice is up to us
and goodness is within us.
Outside of Jesus, justice is up to us.
Goodness is within us.
And if you know anything about humanity,
you know how terrible that sounds.
Take any two of those movements,
any three of those movements that we've mentioned,
and you know how quickly they lead to injustice,
how quickly they lead to violence,
how quickly they're unable to live up
to the utopia that they claim to bring.
Jesus is the one
who presents a vision
that's more realistic and more beautiful.
Jesus' vision is the only one
in which rather than just conquering his enemies,
although he does,
he also dies for his enemies.
Jesus' vision is the only one
that allows us to be human
because you and I cannot bear up
under the burden of being fully responsible
before purifying everything that's wrong
with this world.
We can't even fix what's wrong with ourselves.
Jesus' vision is greater,
more realistic,
more beautiful,
and more powerful.
There is a reason he tells us
that his yoke is easy
and his burden is light.
And so why do we rejoice
in Jesus as our king?
Because our king, Jesus,
promises us a more sure utopia
than anyone else can.
He promises a more realistic one
than anyone else can.
And he promises one that does not rely on us,
but relies on him.
And so, no matter what's happening in this world,
we can truly rejoice.
We can do what Jesus tells us to do.
We can turn the other cheek
and we can actually love our enemies.
We don't have to curse them
as that witch described
because we trust Jesus to bring justice.
We can be patient.
The season of Advent is about waiting.
Waiting as we long for Jesus to return.
Our hope does not hang on a thread.
Why have we seen so much violence
in our country recently?
Partially because there are people
who have placed their ultimate hope
on political leaders
and political movements.
We can have peace and patience instead.
Those things are important.
They're not our ultimate hope.
Our longing for justice
does not rise or fall on any election.
And so we rejoice.
We rejoice because Jesus is coming
to make all things right
so we don't have to.
We rejoice because he is a humble king
and he is a peaceful king.
He gives us a better
and more sure hope
than any of the other narratives.
He gives us a better story
than the other stories in this world.
Of course, we also see how he does that
in verse 9.
I've mentioned that he was righteous
and that he's coming mounted on a donkey.
We also see that he has salvation.
If Jesus is going to bring justice,
that means justice for us as well.
And justice for us means judgment.
Except that Jesus takes our place.
Part of him being a humble king
is not that he just suffered in general as a human,
but he suffered specifically
when he died on the cross
after living a perfect life,
taking God's punishment
that was meant for us
so that we could be part of his peaceful kingdom.
He is a humble king ultimately
because of his death.
And that is the death by which he brings peace.
He brings peace between us and God,
reconciling us to him.
And so he can bring peace to a world
that includes us rather than excludes us.
That is the hope of the gospel.
It's the hope that's offered to anyone and everyone
who repents of their sins
and has faith and trust in Jesus Christ.
And so it's a humble king
who dies for his people.
And it's the death of that king
that actually brings about peace.
There's a man who's still alive
whose name is Joe Stoll.
And at one point he was the president
of Moody Bible Institute.
And Joe had a friend named Bud Wood.
And Bud was famous for having founded
what's called the Shepherd's Home in Wisconsin.
This was in the 1960s.
And this was a home for children
who had developmental disabilities.
And they were friends, Joe and Bud.
And so at one point Joe asked Bud,
what is the greatest problem
that you have at the Shepherd's Home?
Now given the children that they were dealing with,
he expected probably some sort of answer
maybe about behavior,
maybe about dealing with parents.
But that's not the answer that Bud gave him.
Instead Bud said,
our greatest problem is dirty windows.
Joe was confused by this,
so he asked him,
what do you mean?
Why is it that your greatest problem
is dirty windows?
He said, well,
the reason we have dirty windows
is a couple weeks ago
we taught the kids at our home
about Jesus' second coming.
And we told them that he's coming back to this world
and he's going to be with them.
And so now,
they are running out during the day,
pressing their noses up to the glass,
looking to see
if this is the day
that Jesus is finally going to come back.
Brothers and sisters,
we can rejoice
in Jesus' first coming
because he's a king
who is with us.
And we can press our noses
up to the glass,
rejoicing and longing
and looking forward
to his second coming
because he will return
and bring peace
to this earth.
Please pray with me.
Our Father in heaven,
we thank you
for this word from Zechariah
that tells us
that you are a good
and faithful king.
We ask that you would use
these words
to stir up our hearts
that this season
would not wash over us,
but it would find us rejoicing
in you
in your first coming
and longing
for your second coming.
We thank you
that you have given us
these things
by your son,
our humble king,
and so we don't earn them,
but instead we ask for them
with confidence
in Jesus' name.
Amen.