Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Happy Palm Sunday.
[00:00:01] This is a good day. It's the start of Easter week, and I hope you're as excited as I am to celebrate its culmination next week. It's the best day of the year as far as I'm concerned.
[00:00:13] It's something that I know many of us have been preparing for over the past few weeks, and that is as it ought to be. I believe we ought to be primed and ready to worship a God who is a risen savior.
[00:00:29] And we have little to look forward to without him having been resurrected. And so next week is a huge big deal.
[00:00:38] So I'd like to prep us a little this week for next week, and I'd kind of like to launch us into the week with a bit of a civics lesson.
[00:00:47] So, Winston Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.
[00:00:59] While Winston is not my favorite historical figure, his observation kind of perfectly captures the problem of human systems of civil governance.
[00:01:09] If you personally get to choose a system under which to live, it's pretty much kind of a name your poison sort of choice.
[00:01:17] Every structure that man has tried contains the seeds of its own destruction, including ours. History is full of examples of all of them. I'm sure you can name a few off the top of your head.
[00:01:29] Now, don't get me wrong. This is where the civic spark comes in.
[00:01:33] The American federal public system was brilliantly conceived by men who were far wiser than I ever would hope to be. Our founders were uniquely suited and placed to the task. And there are really few areas in history that are more interesting, unlikely, or impactful than the founding of the American Republic. If you haven't read about it, you ought to. It is a uniquely unusual time with uniquely unusual people that in many ways were used of God to build what we have. But, and here's the kick, the brilliance of the structure that they laid was really built on two foundationally negative principles.
[00:02:16] And it would have fallen or failed without them. Number one man, both individually and collectively, is inherently flawed, sinful, and irredeemably prone to corruption. That's a simple fact that was universally acknowledged by these guys back then. And number two, governing power placed in the hands of a single person or a group of people will inevitably descend into. Into tyranny.
[00:02:42] They launched the American experiment with those two presuppositions foremost in their mind. It formed their thoughts and their philosophy.
[00:02:52] But given those two rather bleak truths, if you ask me, the founders were forced to come up with a system that was somewhat messy. And it basically pitted competing interest groups against one another in this perpetual dance of influencers, all with differing missions, goals, and centers of power and influence. There were state governments against the federal government, the legislature against the judiciary against the executive. There was the north against the South. There was rural against urban. That was all built into the system purposefully to create a scenario where no single interest group could ever gain supremacy. It was a safeguard against the very presuppositions that these men proceeded from.
[00:03:38] But despite its pragmatic genius, and it was pragmatically genius, it was flawed from the beginning because of those two immutable realities of the human heart. Our own system carries the seeds of its own destruction, just like every other one does. And there's a deep irony to all of that that we shouldn't miss as believers. That the irony is in so building that the founders explicitly and kind of profoundly rejected the very form of government that will dominate eternity, and that's absolute monarchy.
[00:04:18] From 1776 until 2026, Americans have been supremely skeptical of anyone resembling a king. It's built into our DNA. We whether you perceive it or not, you've inherited this skepticism yourself.
[00:04:34] It's just part and parcel of the civic reality in which we lived and from which we were born. And while we're used to thinking about that as a good thing, in some ways it is. It carries practical dangers for believers.
[00:04:48] You're probably kind of seeing where I'm going with this already.
[00:04:51] Because of course, as it is patently self obvious to us this morning, Christians already have a king, right? His name is Jesus.
[00:05:03] Scripture is crystal clear as to the kingship of this Jesus. Philippians 2 reads this way. Therefore God exalted Jesus to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, what every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. We could go everywhere in scripture and see that same thing, but that's one of the more compelling. Jesus is the supreme king, not only of us, but of the universe. Everything above the earth, on the earth, and below the earth will one day inevitably bow the knee to this Jesus.
[00:05:49] In God's economy, in God's civil governance, there are no competing interest groups.
[00:05:56] Jesus is incomparably powerful.
[00:05:59] There are no opinions that are contrary to his.
[00:06:02] There are no agendas that are in tension with his. Jesus is the complete antithesis of our own lived experience with civil governance, particularly here In America, his authority is in absolute opposition to our desire for personal or collective liberty. Liberty in Jesus realm is the freedom to willingly bow the knee to the One who made us to be a part of his kingdom. Do you see the deep and wide chasm between our own lived experience and the one that we have to look forward to in eternity?
[00:06:40] It's all through the Scriptures.
[00:06:43] And the passage that we're going to be in today is going to speak to that. So what does all this have to do with Palm Sunday? Why am I bringing this up in this particular context? Well, I want to pull you back in time to Palm Sunday, if you will, to the account of Jesus entering Jerusalem in John chapter 12. Commonly, as you know, we refer to it as his triumphal entry, if you will. And I'm sure most of you are really familiar with the story, but I would like to read it together starting in John 12:12. If you don't have a Bible, there are Bibles conveniently placed in your rows. If you don't have one of your own, please feel free to take one with you. If.
[00:07:23] If an Ariel.4 font is too small for you to read, then we can get you one with a bigger one.
[00:07:29] Okay.
[00:07:31] One way or another, we'd like everybody to walk out of here with the Scriptures.
[00:07:35] So let's pray together first, and then I'd like to read this passage we're going to be going through today. Lord, we are so thankful for the way in which you have graced us with your truth in the Scriptures. Thank you, Lord, for offering it to us. In addition with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to allow us to understand it. Lord, use the feeble words that come from this mouth to speak truth to the hearts of your people. As we open it, give us awe and respect for what we read and for the one who authored it to us.
[00:08:04] We pray that in Christ's name, Amen.
[00:08:07] All right, this is John 12, starting in verse 12. The next day, when the large crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they took palm branches and went out to meet him. And they kept shouting, hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel.
[00:08:27] And Jesus found a donkey, and he sat on it just as it is written, do not be afraid, daughter Zion. Look, your King is coming. Ascending on a donkey's colt.
[00:08:38] His disciples did not understand these things at first.
[00:08:41] However, when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him.
[00:08:49] Meanwhile, the crowd which had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify.
[00:08:58] This is also why the crowd met him, because they heard he had done this sign.
[00:09:03] And then the Pharisees said to one another, you see, you've accomplished nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.
[00:09:12] The story's pretty simple, especially in John's text here. It's very brief and short. Jerusalem's filled with crowds of people. They're all there to celebrate the coming Passover.
[00:09:24] News of Jesus coming draws a crowd to meet him. They had heard of his exploits raising Lazarus from the dead. That news had preceded him. And he makes the decision to enter Jerusalem through the east gate on the colt of a donkey, which fulfilled prophecies in both Ezekiel and in Zechariah. We'll talk about those a little later. The people hail him as their king.
[00:09:50] And that's pretty much John's description of the event. It kind of sort of ends there. There's no frills to speak of really. But what's interesting about the story and kind of what I want to highlight this morning for our benefit, are the responses of the three different groups of people that are there witnessing this manifestation of Jesus kingship.
[00:10:11] Actually, the text spends as much time talking about that as it does describing the events that are actually taking place. So I'm going to hone in on those three, and I would offer up to you all that all of them are in some way shape or form a type of each one of us. And so there are lessons that we can draw about our response to the kingship of Jesus from their response to it.
[00:10:34] So let's jump into that and see what we find first in line. And maybe kind of the most predictable are the Pharisees.
[00:10:45] They're the last ones that are mentioned, but the first ones I'd like to bring up, you know, the Pharisees, they were the religious orthodox of the day.
[00:10:52] They set the standard for visual holiness, if you will, in the minds of the people.
[00:10:59] They held a great deal of religious influence in their day.
[00:11:04] And they knew how to wield wasn't just influence, it was in many respects, power and authority as well.
[00:11:12] They had spent the prior three years, at least a good share of their time, trying to undermine the ministry of Jesus.
[00:11:21] They saw him as being in competition with the status quo, of which they were very zealous guardians. They were the gatekeepers of the status quo that benefited them. And of course, we all know Jesus perspective on The Pharisees. He reserved some of his most difficult language, if you will, for people who pose as holy when in fact they don't have the heart of God in their minds.
[00:11:47] They'd done their best to trip Jesus up with clever questions intended to drive wedges between Jesus and his following, which often was large.
[00:11:56] And they spent three years pretty much stalking him in hopes of discrediting his ministry because he was a threat.
[00:12:05] And the irony of that was they never really succeeded. And this exclamation at the end of the passage kind of was their own admission that nothing they had ever done seemed to do anything except increase the crowds that that followed Jesus. It's ironic that that the thing that was the most successful in driving fickle people away from Jesus were Jesus own words.
[00:12:28] That that happens often, and it actually happens quite often in the preceding chapters in John compared to the one that we're looking at now in chapter six. Many disciples stopped following him when Jesus told them that they had to eat his body and drink his blood if they desired internal life. You can only imagine what the response of people of a Jewish culture and religion would have had to that statement. They didn't understand what he was saying. They didn't understand he was speaking metaphorically. And it says that large numbers of the crowds left him because of that statement. In chapters eight and ten, he was nearly stoned to death by the crowds for blasphemy.
[00:13:11] Again because of his own words. His own statement that before Abraham was I am was a scandalous statement in the eyes of people who believed in the one God. Here was this man naming the name of God and identifying it with himself and saying that he pre existed their father Abraham.
[00:13:33] You can imagine the responses of the crowds to that. It was Jesus own words again that created the most rejection, if you will, in the chapter immediately preceding this one. In chapter 11, after Jesus very publicly resurrects Lazarus from the dead, there's a detailed description of a plot by the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin to kill him, to kill Jesus and to frame him as a martyr to their own cause, which is deeply, deeply sinful. If you ask me. When you read through it and try and understand what it is they're talking about when they're saying we want to kill Jesus and make it look like it's something that benefits us, it's scandalous.
[00:14:17] They want to do it to avoid the Roman interference that they fear. If Jesus comes in and the crowds claim him as king and revolt against Rome, Rome protected their own status in The Jewish civil economy, if you will.
[00:14:34] So despite being a wanted man by so many people, Jesus decides to very publicly enter Jerusalem in a really specific manner that was guaranteed to cause a scene. And here we go again. Another thing that we see from Jesus all over the place. Jesus was not uncontroversial. He was purposefully controversial because. Because his words and his truth were controversial. And so he comes into the city, the news precedes him. A crowd gathers.
[00:15:04] The Pharisees witness this and basically just go crazy. They can't understand why every effort that they have made has done nothing but make Jesus more popular. Notice verse 19. The Pharisees said to one another, you see, you've accomplished nothing. Look, the world has gone after him. If there's not a more. If there's not a more biting statement of jealousy than that, I don't know, I don't know what is. Nothing they had done to Jesus had avoided the very thing that they feared the most. The crowds hailing Jesus as their king. It's the last thing wanted, and it's the first thing they got.
[00:15:43] So what was the essence of their frustration? What caused that reaction? Now we come to the first lesson. It's really pretty simple. The Pharisees didn't want a king.
[00:15:54] They didn't want a king, certainly not this one.
[00:15:58] Their highest priority was the maintenance of their own authority and autonomy. They wanted to retain the influence that they had. It was part and parcel of their identity.
[00:16:09] It was the one thing they wanted the least, and it was the one thing that was going to happen regardless of what they did. They didn't want a king.
[00:16:19] So it'd be easy right now to spend another 10 minutes dumping on the Pharisees.
[00:16:24] That really would be too easy. And we probably in our own days spent plenty of time doing that. So I'm just going to suggest that the Pharisees are in fact simply a type of every single one of us.
[00:16:36] Are there not realms in each of our lives where we zealously or unconsciously guard our own autonomy and our absolute authority?
[00:16:47] Maybe it's our social circles or our finances.
[00:16:52] Perhaps it's our favorite worldly vice, or how we manage and prioritize our time.
[00:16:59] And while we're certainly not plotting Jesus downfall or trying to kill him like the Pharisees were, we are supremely good at avoiding the implications of Jesus absolute authority over every aspect of our lives.
[00:17:14] We welcome a king in abstract, but often not in practice.
[00:17:21] Even when we do try to operate under Jesus kingship, often the best that we can do is to come up with some wishy washy form of constitutional monarchy where the king's authority is constrained by our preferences and our sophisticated rationalizations for them. We are supremely skilled at rationalizing our own personal autonomy in the realms of life that we choose to keep for ourselves.
[00:17:50] Just like the Pharisees, they had a sophisticated, lengthy rationale for why they were the way they were.
[00:17:57] But Jesus saw through it.
[00:17:59] He saw through it and understood it for what it was.
[00:18:02] They didn't want a king.
[00:18:04] They didn't want a king. They wanted to be their own kings.
[00:18:08] Are we not the same in some area of our life? Are we not in some respects holding back the very thing that Jesus wants us to give over to him completely because it benefits us in some way, sadly at the expense of the kingdom.
[00:18:33] Paul's appeal to the Romans, by contrast, is clear.
[00:18:37] Says this in Romans 6. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires and do not offer any parts of it to sin as weapons for unrighteousness. But as those who are alive from the dead offer yourselves to God and all the parts of yourselves to God as weapons for righteousness.
[00:19:03] Jesus kingship over you and me is constrained neither in its breadth nor in its depth.
[00:19:11] He is our absolute ruler, worthy of our complete obedience.
[00:19:17] And honestly, it's only his grace that constrains his judgment against rebellion.
[00:19:23] Being at the big rebellion of the Pharisees or the small rebellions of our own, it's the grace of God that preserves us in the face of a rejection of God's kingship of Jesus. Kingship.
[00:19:40] All right, so lesson number one.
[00:19:43] There are places in our lives where we don't want a king.
[00:19:46] We need to be convicted by the Scriptures to find those areas in our lives and to give them over to God. That's radical. That's a choice that's difficult. It's one often that's costly.
[00:19:59] We've all experienced it in some realm or another. There will always be more of our earthly realms to give over to God. That in some ways is the story of our lives, is it not?
[00:20:12] Where we search with the help of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures, for the places we have failed to give to God yet and that we choose and purpose to give to him as we grow in our faith.
[00:20:24] So that's number one. Okay.
[00:20:27] Second group I'd like to draw attention to is the crowd. They're interesting. Scripture has a lot to say about the motivations of the crowds that follow Jesus all throughout his ministry. We find out a lot about them. Even by their own responses and reactions, many individuals sincerely believed the words of Jesus.
[00:20:48] Collectively, though, the crowds were often fickle in their loyalty, and they were temporal in their priorities, and they were impatient in their expectations.
[00:20:58] And this crowd was no different from any of the others that we're all too familiar with the praise that they offered Jesus, which was really brought to a fever pitch by this resurrection of Lazarus and the news of what had happened. There were so many witnesses to that event that it was indisputable that something had happened. The religious leaders themselves had seen it and responded to it. Everybody was talking about it. Everybody was wondering. If you look in the account in Luke, you see that there was a question on the minds of everybody in Jerusalem. Is he going to come to Jerusalem? What's going to happen if he does?
[00:21:37] There was a fever pitch of anticipation. And is Jesus going to come? If he does, no one knows what's going to happen.
[00:21:46] And this crowd was the apotheosis of that. It was the culmination of all of that expectation.
[00:21:55] Their praise, though, was. Was motivated by an overwhelming desire for deliverance from earthly oppressors, namely the Romans. We see that over and over and over again. Even the disciples failed to understand that. We'll talk about that a little later as well.
[00:22:11] Jesus obvious power and influence at this point in his ministry, in their minds, was their pathway to temporal freedom.
[00:22:19] That's what it was going to achieve for them.
[00:22:23] Now, Jesus, as again we all know, repeatedly disabused the crowds of this notion, and their enthusiasm was always greatly diminished by it. We talked about a couple of those a minute ago in John, chapter six, when he's trying to tell them, my kingdom isn't physical, it's spiritual. He says the same thing to Pilate in a few. A few chapters later in John, my kingdom is not of this world.
[00:22:50] Jesus repeatedly disabuses the crowds of that notion, and they don't like it.
[00:22:56] Jesus made it clear that his kingdom was a spiritual one, not a physical one. And he emphasized that the oppression that he came to relieve was the oppression of the sinful human heart, not the oppression of the Romans.
[00:23:10] So what was the crowd's mistake?
[00:23:13] What did they not understand about Jesus as king? Well, the crowds wanted the wrong kind of king.
[00:23:20] They wanted a king of their own making.
[00:23:22] They wanted a king that they had built, custom built to their purposes and not to God's.
[00:23:30] And we could dig on them as well, but we're just going to dig on ourselves anyway if we dig deeply in our own desires and our expectations of faith. That kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it?
[00:23:42] Jesus is here to prosper me now, perhaps if I have enough faith to make me rich.
[00:23:49] Jesus saved me to help protect me from physical suffering.
[00:23:53] Jesus is there so I can have a perfect marriage and perfect children.
[00:23:58] Funny how Jesus so often seems to inhabit the essence of my temporal expectations rather than the eternal ones.
[00:24:08] Sadly, I often see Jesus, my king, as being there for me rather than me being there for Him.
[00:24:17] We all at times want the wrong kind of king.
[00:24:20] It happens often. We want the king to inhabit our kingdom rather than us inhabiting his.
[00:24:27] And remember, his kingdom isn't of this world.
[00:24:30] His kingdom is not the same as the one we see every day.
[00:24:34] Jesus reminds Pilate, as I said, of that. His kingdom isn't political or civil or economic.
[00:24:41] His agenda isn't earthly human thriving, though that does inevitably follow. If his spiritual agenda is followed by.
[00:24:50] My mission on earth under the authority of Jesus isn't to protect my kingdom.
[00:24:56] It's not to fix the world.
[00:24:58] My mission is to be used in such a way that Jesus can fix human hearts.
[00:25:05] That doesn't mean we don't show mercy to the poor or endeavor to heal the sick.
[00:25:11] But if we think those are our primary missions or. Or if we subtly believe that Jesus is here to serve our own desires, we're crafting a king of our own making rather than submitting to the king whose kingdom is ultimately not of this world.
[00:25:29] Don't be like the crowd.
[00:25:33] Don't serve the wrong kind of king.
[00:25:36] Listen to what Jesus actually says about himself in the Gospels. That is transformative. When we encounter the Jesus of Scriptures, we see the antithesis of human expectation and hope and dreams. Is the temporal real? Sure it is. But there's something more real, is there not? It's the kingdom of God, and we can't see it completely. And yet Jesus testifies that that is his kingdom. The kingdom of God is the realm where Jesus rules in the hearts of men and women.
[00:26:13] It is temporal, but it's also eternal. And it's way more eternal than it is temporal.
[00:26:20] Way more. We need to look to the eternal future to understand the mission that God has given to us today.
[00:26:27] What's at stake is the fate of human hearts. What's at stake even more is the glory of God.
[00:26:35] And those become our missions because we have a king that we didn't define. We have a king who defined us and gives us that.
[00:26:47] Okay, so finally, and I'm way ahead of time here, finally, we have the disciples, those poor guys, it seems like they always get the short end of my stick anyway.
[00:27:01] Maybe yours too, in a way that kind of have my. My greatest sympathy. So here I am riding on the backs of like 2000 years of Christian heritage and. And hindsight, and I'm thinking every time they come up, it's like, guys, how could you possibly have missed that one?
[00:27:20] And then, of course, what I'm doing is I'm forgetting that they were the very first people to receive the teachings of the one man who was utterly, fantastically and maddeningly unique in all of human history. It's a miracle that the disciples understood anything that he said. The only bigger miracle would have been if I had been among them.
[00:27:42] And so I see myself in the disciples when I'm thinking clearly.
[00:27:47] They're always confused. There's always a question. They always get something wrong.
[00:27:52] They're muddling through it in a circumstance that doesn't look anything like mine because they've got nothing, virtually nothing to build on.
[00:28:02] But they did miss something here. They missed something big.
[00:28:08] What did they miss?
[00:28:10] What did they miss?
[00:28:12] Well, the disciples didn't realize they were with the king.
[00:28:18] They missed it.
[00:28:20] They missed it. And John actually incriminates himself in verses 14 through 16. Read it again. Jesus found a donkey and sat on it, just as it is written. Do not be afraid, daughter Zion, look, your king is coming. Sitting on a donkey's colt. His disciples, John among them, did not understand these things at first. However, when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him. Now, it's probably not fair to single out the disciples in this one. I will admit it doesn't sound like anyone made the connection between Zechariah's very detailed messianic prophecy and Jesus entry into Jerusalem. But the simple fact is that these 12 men had been with Jesus for three years.
[00:29:10] They'd experienced countless hours of his teaching about the kingdom, and they witnessed how many miraculous events that no one had ever seen before.
[00:29:22] Nobody.
[00:29:24] That John includes this admission in his own text. Kind of hints that he's kicking himself for not having seen it sooner as it was happening. Since the scene was so unique.
[00:29:37] I kind of like to imagine the disciples. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago. I'd like to imagine the disciples sitting in the upper room after Jesus resurrection, kind of mulling over the events of the past seven or eight weeks and trying to make sense of all of it. There had been so much that had happened, they couldn't possibly have taken it in. At some point in that conversation, somebody remembers these verses in Zechariah and blurts out, hey, wait a minute.
[00:30:03] And a furious discussion ensues.
[00:30:06] A true light bulb moment, if you will. How much fun would that have been?
[00:30:13] And how many of those did they have?
[00:30:17] And remember, Jesus, among his last words, promised them the Holy Spirit, who would bring to mind all of these things. Right at the culmination of Jesus mission on earth, at his ascension, the Holy Spirit comes and all of a sudden, reality explodes to these guys. I can't imagine what that must have been like to realize after the fact what they had been experiencing and what it had meant. It's no wonder they turned the world upside down because of what Jesus had revealed to them as their king. Anyway, as you can suspect, there are parallels to our own experience, of course, in the disciples, how often are we unmindful of Jesus presence?
[00:31:07] Every minute of the day, Jesus sits with me at breakfast. Every morning, he's on the exercise bike next to me. Every time I go to the pointe with Jer, he is.
[00:31:20] I don't want him to be, but he is.
[00:31:25] He's sitting in the passenger seat. This is even worse. He's sitting in the passenger seat of my car while I'm driving. And that is not a pleasant thought.
[00:31:35] It really isn't. Don't ever drive with me, please.
[00:31:39] I'm sorry, Charlie.
[00:31:43] He knows he's with me in my least beautiful moments and in my most praiseworthy ones.
[00:31:54] Everywhere you go at all times, the sovereign ruler of the universe and the Savior of your soul is right by your side.
[00:32:03] How often does that fact come to your mind?
[00:32:07] Far too often. It doesn't to me.
[00:32:11] How much would our. How much different would our lives be if the first thing we thought of in every situation was that Jesus is sitting right next to me?
[00:32:20] I know what my answer to that question would be. I would shudder at the sheer weightiness of that reality.
[00:32:27] I'd also breathe, probably a breath of secure, confident peace.
[00:32:31] And there's a huge contrast there, is there not? You know what? Jesus is my comforter. He is my security.
[00:32:39] He is my confidence and my salvation. He is also my sovereign king.
[00:32:48] He is the one I am there to serve. I am there for his benefit, not he for mine.
[00:32:58] Jesus is with us every minute of every day.
[00:33:06] So how do we sum all that up?
[00:33:09] There's so much in this passage, we could take a month to go through this very passage. The prophetic foreshadowing in it alone would take us a couple of weeks to get through. There is the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. His first entry of Jesus into Jerusalem is just rife with meaning and foreshadowing.
[00:33:29] It's actually pregnant with contrast as well.
[00:33:33] And Jesus is kind of a study in contrast, is he not? So look at the account of Jesus first coming in our text today. He arrives unannounced, although expected.
[00:33:44] There's no fanfare. He's riding on a little donkey.
[00:33:49] That's not what a king rides on.
[00:33:51] He's escorted by 12 odd looking dudes walking behind him.
[00:33:56] And the only fanfare in the arrival of this king is the adulation of people who have no idea who he really is or who they're really dealing with.
[00:34:06] He arrives humbly and in peace, knowing his fate at the hands of his own people a few days hence, actually.
[00:34:16] And yet he's willfully pursuing it in full knowledge of the terrible trials that he will soon endure for you and for me.
[00:34:24] That's the humble servant Jesus that came to Jerusalem the first time.
[00:34:35] And before I conclude at the worship team, just wants to come up in preparation for the next.
[00:34:43] So compare that with the account of his second coming in Revelation 19.
[00:34:49] The contrast is absolutely stark.
[00:34:53] If you'll allow me the privilege of reading it. It says, then I saw heaven opened and there was a white horse, not the colt of a donkey, and its rider was called Faithful, True, and with justice he judged and made war.
[00:35:13] And his eyes were like a fiery flame and many crowns were on his head.
[00:35:20] He had a name written that no one knows except himself.
[00:35:25] I wonder about that one.
[00:35:27] He wore a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God.
[00:35:33] The armies that were in heaven followed him on white horses wearing pure white linen.
[00:35:39] Sharp sword came from his mouth so that he might strike the nations with it.
[00:35:45] He will rule them with an iron rod.
[00:35:49] He will also trample the winepress of the fierce anger of God the Almighty.
[00:35:55] And he has a name written on his robe and on his thigh.
[00:36:00] King of kings and the Lord of lords.
[00:36:06] Both of those Jesuses are your king.
[00:36:12] Ponder that contrast for a few lifetimes.
[00:36:18] He's matchless in his mercy and he's matchless in his majesty.
[00:36:24] He's incomparably both humble and mighty.
[00:36:30] He came the first time to serve.
[00:36:33] He's coming the second time to be served.
[00:36:40] My prayer this Palm Sunday is that you encounter all of those Jesuses this week. Strange way to say.
[00:36:48] Both your servant Savior and your sovereign Lord.
[00:36:53] And my prayer is that it changes you every minute of every day.
[00:36:59] As you consider his presence with you in the week, you prepare for his resurrection.
[00:37:09] That's it.
[00:37:10] Let's just take a few minutes to respond to God's word in prayer.
[00:37:15] In a few minutes, Jesse will come up and lead us into communion, which is the logical next step as we praise Jesus Arcane.
