Additional texts: Isaiah (52:13-53:12); Psalm 22:1-21; Philippians (2:5-11)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
Today is really a combination of Palm Sunday and the Passion. This is a fairly recent change. We combine Palm Sunday with the Story of the Passion in these modern times because we know that most people will not come to church on Good Friday. Many Christians come to church services on Palm Sunday to get their Palm fronds and crosses and then return the next Sunday for Easter. So they would hear on Palm Sunday about the exalted greeting Jesus received, and then hear about the resurrection the following week on Easter Sunday without hearing the story of the crucifixion.
What happens between those two events is very significant, so the Passion narrative has been added to Palm Sunday, creating two perspectives: The gathering and procession outside the walls of our building symbolizing the people greeting the arriving Jesus outside the walls of Jerusalem, and the reading of the prophetic announcements of his death called for in the Passion narrative by the very same people who praised him outside the walls.
A Methodist minister I served with in prison ministry used to tell us that in our eagerness to embrace the risen Christ on Easter we need to remember that we can’t sneak around Calvary to get to the resurrection.
The crucifixion was the ultimate reason for Jesus’ ministry on earth. He did not come down from heaven to start a new religion, or to create a different branch of Judaism. He came down from heaven for the ultimate purpose of saving us all from sin — every one of us who will accept his sacrifice for us.
Everything Jesus did during his life on earth was a fulfillment of God’s promise of salvation for us through his prophets over more than 15 centuries.
The Old Testament is full of promises from God about the future arrival of the Messiah. Those promises are described in prophecies by dozens of prophets.
Jesus lived the scriptures. Almost all of the recorded sayings of Jesus in the Gospels originated in the Old Testament. Even his dying utterance on the cross, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” is from the fifth verse of Psalm 31, written by King David about a thousand years before Jesus was crucified. It reads: Into your hands I commend my spirit; redeem me, O LORD, the God of truth.
But Jesus didn’t just recite prophecy, he also prophesied himself, proving his anointing by God as a prophet. A few verses before the start of today’s Gospel Jesus tells Peter that despite his protests to the contrary, Peter would deny him when the going got tough. A few hours later Peter did exactly what Jesus had foretold.
Christ, by the way, means “anointed one.” There were only three offices or positions in biblical times that required anointing. Prophet, Priest, and King. Only one person in the entire Bible filled all three roles: Jesus. The Gospels show Jesus as priest in his ministry, and the Apostle Paul refers to him as our great high priest. And even Pontius Pilate recognized him as King of the Jews, and Christians recognize him as the King of Kings.
Our readings today provide some of the evidence that those of us with legal minds demand to see before we can believe. I’m not going to go through all of the more than 300 messianic prophesies mentioned in the Old Testament, but I will highlight a handful of the more recognizable ones.
The “Suffering Servant” passage from Isaiah was written abut 750 years before the crucifixion and King David’s Psalm 22 was written about a thousand years before it.
When those biblical passages were written, the usual method of execution was by the sword or by stoning. Crucifixion was imported to the region by the Romans after they conquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C. The Old Testament describes quite accurately how the Messiah would be killed, by a method that would be created centuries later and would last for only about 130 years. One of the prophecies also required that the Messiah be present at the temple — the temple that was destroyed by Rome in 70 A.D. and hasn’t been rebuilt since.
Isaiah 53 is perhaps the greatest prophetic passage, and shows Jesus’ dual nature, his impoverished lifestyle, and humble origin. He was forsaken by humanity yet bore our punishment.
He made himself a guilt offering for our sins, and was “pierced for ourr transgressions.” This is the Christ God promised, albeit not the one Israel expected at the time.
Other messianic prophecies abound in various styles and formats throughout the Old Testament. There are prophecies of Jesus’ ancestry, of his birthplace and time, of his character, of his ministry, and of his death, resurrection, and ascension. Some prophecies are more amazing than others, but all show a deliberate link with a loving and merciful God who has made himself available to all who will seek Him.
Herbert Lockyer describes more than 300 prophesies in his Book, All the Messianic Prophesies of the Bible. But let’s talk about the odds of anyone fulfilling just eight of them.
It’s possible that Jesus could have deliberately fulfilled some prophecies himself by maneuvering his life to make sure he was mistaken for the long awaited Messiah. Zechariah 9:9 says the Messiah would ride a donkey into town, so He could have told his disciples, “Go get me a donkey, so I can ride into Jerusalem and fool these people into thinking I’m the Messiah.”
But most of the other prophecies he had no control over during his life. In fact many were written hundreds of years before his birth, describing his birth, ancestry, betrayal for a specific amount of money, his method of execution hundreds of years before the Roman Empire or crucifixion even existed, that soldiers would gamble for his clothing, that his bones would remain unbroken (unlike the two criminals next to him).
A science professor at Westmont College wrote a book explaining how only one person could possibly have fulfilled the prophecies. He worked with 600 students to calculate the mathematical probability of just eight of the Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled in any one person up to the present time. The probability is one chance in 10 to the 17th power. That’s a one with 17 zeroes after it.
That’s too big a number for me to comprehend. But Lee Strobel put it in a form that my simple, non-mathematical mind can understand better.
Imagine the entire world being covered with white tiles. Every bit of dry land was covered with little white tiles, one-and-a-half inches square. The bottom of just one tile would be painted red. A person would be allowed to spend their entire life walking around all seven continents until he found the tile he wanted to choose.
He would be allowed to bend down and pick up only one tile. The odds of him picking up the red-bottomed tile are the same as one person fulfilling eight of the Messianic prophecies.
That should be impressive enough. But then Stoner analyzed the probability of 48 prophecies being manifested in one person. He concluded that the probability is one chance in 10 to the 157th power. That’s a 1 with 157 zeroes behind it.
Again, Lee Strobel came to my rescue with a more concrete example. He interviewed scientists about their estimate of the number of atoms in the universe. An atom is so small it takes about a million of them to equal the width of a human hair. So he ended up with a very large number — but still too small. It turns out that the odds of 48 Old Testament prophecies coming true in any one individual are the same a someone randomly finding a predetermined, specific atom out of all the atoms in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, billion universes the same size as our own.
To anyone who bothers to read the Bible, the evidence is clear that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies and is the Messiah. But that’s really the problem. Not enough people bother to read the Bible.
A 2003 study from the Barna Research Group shows that many of our country’s moral and spiritual challenges are directly related to the absence of a biblical worldview among Americans.
Barna’s study of 2,033 adults showed that only 4 percent have a biblical worldview as the basis of their decision-making.
In order to be disciples of Jesus, to live as Jesus lived and do what Jesus did, we need to know about Jesus. Although nearly all Americans have multiple copies of the Bible, most of us don’t read it. Barna’s research shows that most Americans don’t know how to integrate core biblical principles into their daily lives.
His research indicates that only 9 percent of born-again Christians have a biblical worldview. They defined a biblical worldview as a belief that:
• absolute moral truths exist and are defined by the Bible,
• that Jesus Christ lived a life without sin,
• that God is the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the universe that he still rules today,
• that salvation is a gift from God that cannot be earned,
• that Satan is real,
• that Christians have a responsibility to share their faith in Jesus with other people,
• and the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.
That 9 percent figure for born-again Christians was the good news. Protestants from mainline denominations came in at 2 percent, and Catholics were less than half of 1 percent.
Protestants from non-denominational churches were the highest at 13 percent.
Our worldview impacts our behavior. When Barna compared the perspectives of those who have a biblical worldview with those who don’t, he found that those with a biblical worldview were:
• 31 times less likely to accept cohabitation (2% vs. 62%)
• 18 times less likely to endorse drunkenness (2% vs. 36%)
• 15 times less likely to condone gay sex (2% vs. 31%)
• 12 times less likely to accept profanity 3% vs. 37%)
• 11 times less likely to describe adultery as morally acceptable (4% vs. 44%)
• 78 times less likely to describe pornography as morally acceptable (.5% vs. 39%)
• 12 times less likely to have cheated on their spouses in the past month (<1% vs. 12.5%)
It’s not totally their fault, however. Clergy can claim a lot of the credit, or discredit. Barna reports that only half of our Protestant pastors (51%) have a biblical worldview. In some denominations, the vast majority of clergy do not have a biblical worldview.
Hal Lindsay reports that one of the first exposés of the beliefs of our nation’s clergy was made by Redbook magazine in August 1961. The publishers surveyed our seminaries preparing people for Christian service in the Protestant churches. Of the seminarians that they surveyed, 56 percent rejected the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, 71 percent rejected that there was life after death, 54 percent rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and 98 percent rejected that Jesus would personally return to earth.
You may have read the following on a bookmark or plaque, but it has special significance today.
He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in still another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a house. He didn’t go to college. He never visited a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things one usually associates with greatness. He had no credentials but himself.
He was only thirty three when the tide of opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a grave through the pity of a friend.
Nearly 20 centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race and the leader of mankind’s progress. All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life.
Jesus Christ is that one solitary life. Our reading from the Apostle Paul today sums up his life and fulfillment of prophecy, and what he expects from us, in just a few sentences.
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
That is whole purpose of the Bible, to show our salvation through Jesus. All the evidence points to it, and that evidence demands a verdict. When we truly understand the sacrifice that Jesus made for our sakes, and really that everything he tells us was prophesied centuries before in the Bible, we realize that we will also rise with him.
If we accept his sacrifice for us, then our old selves will have been crucified with Christ, and our new selves are alive in him forever. That is what we celebrate next week at Easter. But if we don’t go with him to Calvary, we can’t rise with him in glory. We can follow the Jesus of the Bible, or ourselves, but only one choice leads to salvation. The choice is yours.
God bless you.
