This morning, we are experiencing a divine coincidence. It just so happens, as you all know by know, that this morning we are celebrating and remembering Palm Sunday—the day when the pilgrims to the Feast of the Passover cut off palm branches to hail and welcome the King of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, as He officially presented Himself as the nation’s, and the world’s Messiah. And it just so happens, and I trust not by accident, that the passage we have come to in our year-and-a-half journey through the Gospel of John is, of all things, John the apostle’s account of what happened on Palm Sunday!
So, God is up to something this morning, and it’s a good thing! The Holy Spirit is at work, if we’re only open to what He is all about this morning—glorifying and calling us to receive Jesus Christ as our Messiah, our King, and our God!
Now this is an incredibly significant event in the annals of history and of Scripture. This was the day of all the days in the 3 ½ year ministry of Jesus Christ when He finally, officially presented Himself to His people, the Nation of Israel, as their Messiah, their King and their God. His entire life, and especially His entire ministry had been designed to climax at this point. He had repeatedly been demonstrating that He was indeed Israel’s Messiah and the God-man throughout his ministry—his credentials were his incredible miracles of every kind—He never failed to heal anyone who came to Him seeking a healing, whatever the problem, His incredible wisdom and His impeccable character. For the last six months, beginning in John 5, He had repeatedly done incredible miracles in Jerusalem, that resulted in sizzling debates between him and the wicked spiritual and political leaders of Israel, repeatedly revealing that He was indeed God in the flesh, repeatedly exposing them as hypocrites who only cares about their own power, position and wealth. He has demonstrated He has every credential that anyone who would ever claim to be the Messiah could ever hope for. And finally the day has come when He would offer Himself to His people as their Messiah-Savior-King. And this is the day.
It is the day that God showed up in person, as a human being, and offered Himself as Israel’s and ultimately the World’s King and deliverer. Yes, there were other days that God had showed up for individuals, and even for the nation of Israel—He had shown up for Abraham on a number of occasions, He had certainly shown up for Moses and Israel at Mt. Sinai. But this was different. On this day, God showed up in person, as a man, as the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, and offered Himself as the solution to the nation’s and the world’s problems. It was a day which Old Testament prophecies specifically spoke about on two different occasions, giving the exact time, manner and location of the day God would show up. So, it’s an event we ought to give much thought to and consideration.
And a question we ought to ask before we go any further is since this is a day of such incredible historical significance for mankind—the day God showed up personally—exactly how would God present Himself? What would God want to say about Himself in relationship to mankind? What would He want us to know about Himself as He offers Himself to be our King and our Deliverer? Because the answer to these questions are answers that each of us here can take very personally and individually. These things are the things that God would want each of us here to know as He comes to us and presents Himself to us today, not in human form exactly, but in Spirit. How does God present Himself to you, what does He want you to know about Himself and how He will treat you if you agree to make Him king of your life, your deliverer and your savior.
Now I recently had a very brief but surprisingly helpful experience—helpful in the sense that it provided me with some understanding of the dilemma that God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, faced as he officially presented Himself to His people and offered Himself as their King. It came two weeks ago late on a Sunday afternoon just before the Newcomers Class. I was hurriedly spreading weed-preventer on the hill behind our house in preparation for the coming of spring. And as I did so, at the top of the hill, at the fence between our yard and the yard of a home at the top of the hill, I encountered a dog, a Border Collie, on the other side of the fence. Now if you don’t know it, Border Collies are regarded as the single most intelligent breed of dog there is. But this Border Collie, as kind-looking as he was, was skittish, fearful. He had come close to the fence for a moment because he was interested in me, but the moment I turned to see him, he ran away from me, carefully maintaining a distance of perhaps eight to ten feet from me, even though he was, as it seemed to me, safely on the other side of the fence. And I found myself wondering how I could, as a different creature, somehow assure this creature that I meant no harm, that I wanted to be his friend, and that he could come close and I would be kind to him, maybe even pet him. And so it occurred to me that what I needed to do was to make non-threatening gestures toward him, to speak to Him not with a loud and threatening voice, but to speak sweetly to Him, with re-assuring words, and rather than making myself look bigger than I already was, I needed to get down low, and make myself small, and bring myself to his level, and reach out to Him with gentle and humble sorts of movements. I made a brief attempt at this, with every good intention, but had very little time, and the dog remained skeptical, and ultimately I failed to befriend Him.
But it’s struck me that this was exactly the situation God, the Almighty Creator was in on this incredibly important day, in relationship with His creatures, humankind. He strongly desires a positive, personal relationship with us, with each one of us personally, as well as all of us as a whole. But He’s so big, He so powerful, and He is so holy and He hates sin. He is fearfully awesome and beyond our comprehension, and if He came to us with all of those characteristic so terribly evident, our reaction to Him would doubtlessly not be nearly as positive as that Border Collie’s reaction was to me. We would not only keep our distance, we would probably run for our lives. But on the Day that God showed up for us—they day he showed up personally, He presented Himself as quite the opposite, as loving, and understanding, and gentle and humble and peaceful as He could possibly be.
On the Day God showed up in person—He showed up as undoubtedly the God who would deal with each of us personally, helpfully, humbly and as gently beyond what any mere human being ever could.
The first thing you need to know, and be convinced of, is that this man Jesus, was indeed the Messiah, the God-man. God knew from eternity past that the first challenge associated with this Day when He showed up as a man was to convince each of us that this man was truly Him, truly God, and leave nothing to doubt.
And so knowing how big deal this Palm Sunday would be—the Day God Showed Up as a Man and offered Himself as our King and Deliverer—He made sure that whoever wanted to know whether it was really Him or not could and would know that it was.
And in effect, He took out his big eternal calendar and made an appointment with us no less than 571 years in advance of the day—and he made the appointment to the day, March 30th, 33 A.D. And the fact that He made this appointment is documented for us in the Scriptures, in the Word of God, most specifically in Daniel 9:25-26 in combination with the events as they eventually began to play out in Nehemiah 2:1-8.
Now let’s look at Daniel 9:25-26. It’s part of a revelation given to the prophet Daniel in 538 or 537 B.C. At the time, Daniel was in exile along with the rest of his nation in Babylon and various parts of Media-Persia. The capital city of the Jews, Jerusalem, and the Temple, had been destroyed in 586 B.C. as a consequence of Israel continued idolatry. Daniel has just prayed and asked God’s forgiveness for his nation’s great sin and sought God’s restoration of the nation. In response, God sends an angel with a revelation of the key events of Israel’s history until the coming of the Kingdom of God. As part of this revelation, God pinpoints the exact time, even the precise day that Messiah would come and present Himself to Israel as its great King and Deliverer.
We don’t have time to get into detail about the prophecy, but we will read it and also explain what scholars of our day dating back to the 18th century have come to realize about it. The prophecy is about 70 sevens of years, seventy weeks of years that the Lord had decreed for a number of major events to take place in the history of Israel. We start in the middle of the prophecy, in verse 25: “So you, Daniel, are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks, it (Jerusalem) will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. (Notice that there are 7 sevens of years and 62 sevens of years between the decree and the coming of Messiah to Jerusalem, which brings us to a total of 69 sevens of years between the decree and the coming of the Messiah.) “Then, after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cutoff and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end, there will be war; desolations are determined.”
Now the most important part of this prophecy that I want us to focus on this morning is the fact that there would be 69 sevens of years between that decree and when the Messiah would come. That amounts to 483 years total between the decree and Messiah’s coming. As it turns out, the decree to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem came from King Artaxerxes on March 5, 444 B.C., and the events surrounding it are recorded in Nehemiah 2:1-8, when Nehemiah himself requested that the King of the Media-Persians allow him to go and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Scholars such as Sir Robert Anderson of the 19th Century, and more recently, Professor Howard Hoehner of Dallas Theological Seminary in 1977, who refined Anderson’s work, have shown that 483 Jewish prophetic years of 360 days each amounts to precisely 173,880 days. And to make a long story short, 173,880 days brings us to March 30, 33 A.D., the very Palm Sunday upon which these events written about by the Apostle John occurred—to the very day!
In other words, this day when God showed up as a person and offered Himself to Israel and the world as it’s King and Deliverer, was precisely predicted by the Word of God, to the day—571 years before it came to pass! God knew this was going to be a huge day! He knew it would be incredibly important for us today to know that this day, Palm Sunday, as no accident! He had planned it out from eternity past, he had made the appointment known to us nearly 600 years in advance, He had made it clear that the Messiah would come on this day, before the Messiah was executed, as is also predicted here in prophecy, before the Messiah was left with nothing—in other words, no kingdom, and before the city and the temple were again destroyed, as it happened in 70 A.D. at the hands of Titus and the Romans. And He even wants the Jews to understand to this day that they missed their Messiah, because there’s no possible way He would come after the destruction of the temple, as noted in their own Bible, the Old Testament. And all for what reason?—so that there could be no doubt in the mind of any objective and reasonable man’s mind that the person who showed up on that day was no accident, and no impostor, but actually God in the flesh, doing exactly what God would do in offering Himself to mankind as it’s King and Deliverer.
Do you recognize, that according to the Laws of probability, that there’s only one chance in 173,880 chances that this could have accidentally come to pass on this day—and that’s only counting the days from the decree until March 30, 33 A.D.? This was God’s plan, only a supernatural God could see this happening and bring this about as He did. In other words, once again, it takes more faith not to believe Jesus was the God-man than it does to believe it. And all for what reason did God make this appointment with us in the manner that He did—so that we would be convinced Jesus was God in person offering Himself as our King and Messiah!
So, first of all, this morning, know this about why God did it this way—He did it this way so each and every one of us could be convinced without a trace of a doubt that this Jesus was God in person offering Himself as our King and Messiah.
Now, as to the precise events of that day, what did they say about how God wanted us to perceive Him when He showed up? Well, it was such a big event that the story occurs in all four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. As John tells it, it takes place the day after the big banquet thrown for Jesus in Bethany, just two miles outside Jerusalem, probably especially to celebrate the recent resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. Jesus had done this miracle in Jerusalem’s backyard, where His great enemies, the Jewish chief priests and Pharisees resided. He had done the miracle in the plain sight of hundreds of witnesses from Bethany and Jerusalem and the surrounding area. So there was buzz going on about Jesus, many had believed on Him, and many were even coming to Bethany to see Lazarus and believing in Jesus on account of seeing Lazarus. And the Feast of the Passover was at hand, a week-long feast that began on the next day after the banquet, Sunday, Palm Sunday. Now, the Passover, of course, also foreshadowed the coming of the Lamb of God who would take away sins, and this day, the real Lamb of God, the Messiah, would come to be the Lamb who would take away the sins of the world by being sacrificed later in the week on the cross.
At any rate, what happened at this time of the year was that pilgrims from all over Israel, and even all over the world, would come to Israel for the feast, as the Old Testament required. And it was these who made up the crowd that is spoken of in verse 12. It says that when they heard Jesus was coming to Jerusalem that they took up palm branches and went out to Bethany to meet Him. Now waving palm branches was a typical way in ancient times to recognize the coming of a king. These pilgrims were not the hardened unbelievers of Jerusalem but having heard of the many great miracles Jesus had done and later hearing of the incredible Resurrection of Lazarus, and then hearing Jesus was actually coming to the Feast despite the great opposition to Him, went out to Bethany and shouted “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel.”
Hosanna is the transliteration of the Hebrew verb that means to Save Now. And then they welcomed Jesus with the words that were the typical welcome at the time for any worshipper who came to Jerusalem for one of the feasts. “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” But it fit Jesus better than any worshiper in history, and they sensed this, because they added to Psalm 118:26 this revealing phrase, even the King of Israel!
And according to the passage, it was there they not only met with Jesus, but they also encountered a throng of people who were with Jesus already, the believers, the eyewitnesses who had actually seen Lazarus resurrected, who were ready to proclaim the same thing, in light of what Jesus had most incredibly done. And when these pilgrims met with the crowd of believers who were already with Jesus, they stoked one another even more, as now the news of this great resurrection came to the pilgrim’s attention, and people began to treat Jesus as great royalty, welcome him as a great king. And of course, the other Gospel writers relate that people threw down their outer garments on the donkey so that Jesus could sit on them, and they threw down their garments and their palm fronds before the donkey as Jesus rode into Jerusalem, as though they were laying out the red carpet for a king—a king which they all, at least for the moment, under the power of the Holy Spirit and a Sovereign God who had orchestrated all of his from eternity past, they acknowledged Jesus as only Jesus was worthy of being acknowledged.
But again, our focus this morning is going to be on how God presented Himself on this momentous day—How God presents Himself for all of us. And the first thing to notice and appreciate that we see in this passage is that God came to help. As Jesus accepts these proclamations about Himself, and even the Hosanna, the call to save them now, as King of Israel, He acknowledges by not rejecting any of these proclamations, by rather even defending them as He did in the other Gospels, that, indeed He had come to help. In fact, He had come to do more than help. He had come to save us from our desperate predicament. And as history and Christ’s life panned out, that’s exactly what He accomplished in the course of this Passover week. He died to save us from our sins and the death that would result from them, and He rose again to prove that He had done so.
And so the first thing to notice here, among many things which could be pointed out, is that on the day God showed up personally and offered Himself to us—it was clear and confirmed byHim that He had come to help. He had come with a helping hand. And actually, that is understating the case. God came to save us from our desperate circumstances. And our desperate circumstances consist of this: We are sinners, subjedt to the sin and evil of other sinners and even the consequences of our own, which ultimately result in physical and spiritual death. And when the Great God of Heaven shows up, what’s one of the things that is so evident about Him? That He came to help, more than that He came to save us from these very things which afflict every one of us. When the crowd called out to Him and asked Him to Save Now—Hosanna, Jesus ultimately answered that call, answered that prayer, and did the one thing we all so desperately needed—He took away sin and its consequence by his death on the cross, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the World. He died on the cross, so that you and I would not need to.
And so our second point this morning. When God showed up in person—He came to help—He came to save us, and He did what was necessary for that. And so as you think of God—think of how He presented Himself in Jesus. He came not to hurt, to destroy, to damn, but to help us, but to save us. So appreciate that about Him and come to him for help in your time of need, for that is why He came—to help, even to save you from all that you need to be saved from.
And then the third thing to notice is that He came as a man among men. He came as one of us. Only human beings ride donkeys. This Jesus was a man, though He was also God. And so when it came to doing what needed to be done to achieve a relationship with us, Jesus went all the way, God went all the way, and became a man, so that we would not be so frightened, so that we would not be blown away at the revelation of Himself to us. He became something familiar to us, he became one of us so we could understand Him and know Him in much the way we would understand and know any other man. What better way to be known and fully understood than for God to show us what He was like as a man among men.
This is exactly what Scripture says about the incarnation of God; John 1:18 for instance says, “No one has seen God at any time, the only begotten God (Jesus) who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” He has explained Him in a way that no other revelation about God could ever have explained Him so that we could understand Him, as we understand men. And what a great man He was, what an incredible loving, good and understanding man He was—and therefore we know what a Great God it is who created us and was willing to humble himself before us and become a man so that we might know Him even as He knows us.
Imagine, for instance, on that day I encountered the Border Collie. How could I have best communicated my desire for good relationship, to be kind, to be a friend to that dog. By having become a dog, even a border collie, myself, and then knowing how to act as a Border Collie and how to communicate to another Border Collie, I could have communicated and likely connected with that dog as a friend of his—if only I had had that ability. Well, God has that ability, and God did that for us! Wow. Third point this morning—you can draw near to God, knowing He wants to know you and do good to you, if only you will give him a chance.
And then notice the prophecy, another prophecy fulfilled, which explained exactly how God would present Himself to us. It was written by the prophet Zechariah about 500 years before the event actually took place. John abbreviates his quotation of the prophecy in verse 15, but the full prophecy reads, “Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Shout in Triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold you king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt the foal of a donkey.”
The prophecy was written in the context of descriptions of another great King, Alexander the Great, and how he would conquer the kingdoms around Israel, but spare Jerusalem and its temple as God was protecting it. And why was God protecting it. Because Jerusalem and the temple needed to be there for the day of His visitation, for the day when God would show up in person, as the yet greater and eternal King, in the person of Jesus.
Now Jesus could have showed up on a great prancing white horse, an Arabian Stallion, with a sword on his belt and followed by a great and threatening and overwhelming army.
But what would he have been saying about us and Himself—that He wanted to conquer us and brutalize us and subjugate us for His benefit. But that is not at all how God chose to show up. Instead, he rode a donkey, a lowly animal that, yes, in fact, Israel’s kings had used in time of peace. In this case it was a donkey, which had never been ridden by anyone else, set apart appropriately for the King alone. But he came riding slowly into Jerusalem on this peaceful beast, humbly, gently, threatening no one, only offering to help, indeed offering to save.
Indeed, remember what Jesus had said about Himself in Matthew 11:29—that He was gentle and humble in heart.” And this is exactly what Jesus was saying about God, about Himself, when He showed up in person as He did on this great day. He was saying to Israel; He was saying to the world, and He was saying to you and me personally; you can trust me as Your King, Your Messiah, Your Savior, because I will deal with you and your life with gentleness and humility. I will not barge into your life without your permission; I will not brutalize you but rather treat you and your concerns with great respect, and great gentleness. And even when it comes to your sins, I will deal with you gently and humbly; I will do you no harm.
And indeed that’s a promise He had fulfilled by the end of this Passover Week. For when it came to our sins, it was Jesus who dealt exceedingly humbly and gently with them. He humbled Himself not only to become a man subject to the sins of others, but He humbled Himself to the point of death, even death on cross, and died to pay for our sins Himself—humbly, though as Almighty God who had never sinned, He took the wrath of the Father against Himself so we would not have to. How much more humbly, how much more gently, could anyone ever deal with our sins, than by paying for them Himself so we wouldn’t have to.
And that’s our final point this morning. Trust Jesus completely, knowing He will deal with you (and even your sins) with ultimate humility and gentleness.
Yes, Jesus came as King and the Messiah, your Savior and your Lord. But, oh boy, what a king, what a Savior, and what a Messiah! One whom if only you could know him, you would trust Him, and trust Him with your life.
That’s what Jesus was saying to Israel, and to the world on Palm Sunday, March 30, 33 A.D. And on Palm Sunday, April 17, 2011 A.D. that’s what He’s saying to you. That’s what He’ll do for you, if only you will make Him your Savior Messiah, if you haven’t already, if only you will make him Your King and Your God, if you haven’t already.
It’s time to receive as your Messiah, your King and your God today. Respond to his invitation to come to Him, and trust Him and follow Him today, as your Savior, your King and your God.
