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Okay, for those of you who have Bibles with you, please open them to Luke chapter 19. Luke chapter 19, we're in verses 28 through 44, and if you don't have a Bible, we will have the text on the screen. I do hope that font works for you. Let's pray before we begin. Jesus, I pray that as we as we hear again the story of the last week, that we would journey with you. That we would enter into the amazing redemptive story of our God going to a cross for us and rising again. As we begin this week with your entry into Jerusalem, I pray that you would open the eyes of our heart. That we could grasp, understand, and be moved again. In Jesus' name. Amen. There are some interesting what-ifs. And I realize we're where we're well clear of Christmas at this point, but maybe the best movie of a what-if ever is Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart. I know we're all fans. It's a great one. For those of you who don't know it, it's about a guy named George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, and he lives in a little town called Bedford Falls, New York. And he has deferred kind of his dreams to travel the world and all these things because he couldn't. He settled down and he took over his family's building and loan. Now, his building and loan is the main alternative in town to the rapacious lending practices of one Mr. Potter, the all-purpose bad guy. And things have gone horribly for George one Christmas to where he is really despairing and he's really down and he wishes that he never had been born and entered this angel who grants his wish and shows him his life and the world if he had never been born. So, for instance, you know, his little brother had drowned, because he saved his little brother from drowning in a pond when they were kids. He also prevented an accidental poisoning because the pharmacist was given to drinking. His entire platoon in the Second World War was wiped out because he wasn't there to save them. And most significantly, of course, his kids had never been born, his wife had stayed unmarried, and then you know, the town was now called Potterville because there had been no one to stop the spread and the acquisition of everything of Mr. Potter, and it's all these sort of slums in Potterville. And so you see, what would have been if he had never been born? That's one guy. I want to ask another what if. What if the cross had never happened? The cross of Jesus had never happened. Well, people wouldn't be using Jesus as a swear word, so it's not all that, I guess. But you know, in Harry Potter, Voldemort would have to be the hero. Because it was really because of Jesus and him being the ideal human being that we look at someone who sacrifices themselves and shows weakness as a positive. You see, the the Romans who came before, the strong one that bent the world to their will. That's their hero. Voldemort, they'd be like, that's quite a guy. He would stop at nothing to get power. Now, seriously, though, most probably, now I realize we wouldn't be here, but uh, most probably we'd all be slaves because by the time of Jesus and shortly after, the the majority of the West of the Roman world were enslaved, except for sort of a thin crust of very privileged people at the top. And also, because if you look at world history, the normal default setting of human beings is to enslave one another, but the only opposition coming from the Christian faith, and also our rebellious, estranged teenager humanism. Right? You're not my dad! But you know, kind of our whole our whole concept of human rights and human dignity comes from the idea that we're made in the image of God, and that went global because of Jesus, because of the spread of the early church. So all these ideas of equality and mercy and dignity and justice, those are those are very Jesus ideas that you don't find in the rest of the ancient world. So we'd have a completely different world. You'd all be slaves, me too. If we were still meeting for some crazy reason, I would tell all of you, instead of listening to the sermon, just go eat, drink, and be merry. Accept that you're all slaves. So maybe you can help, you can serve other people who are eating, drinking, and be merry. And most significantly, of course, we'd all be cut off from relationship with God. We would have no claim on God. We would have no relationship with God, we would have no hope of eternal life. And the reason I bring this up is because when we when we look at our text today, the people in it, this is exactly what they were hoping for. They were hoping the cross wouldn't happen. They were hoping for something uh entirely other. So in Luke 19, before we get into reading the actual text, just to give you a tiny bit of background, see that the Jewish people, the people of Judea, where Jerusalem was the capital, they had been under foreign occupation for almost 600 years. In 586, the Babylonians, of course, destroyed the temple and exiled the people. The Persians came after them, they were much nicer. They let them come back, but they were still under foreign domination. And then Alexander the Worst, who some call the great, came along, and you know, things got terrible again, and then the the kings who came after, right, the one of them named Antiochus Epithianus IV, actually set up pagan altars in the temple at Jerusalem. Think on that. If you were a Jew who who wanted to be faithful to God, the place where God's presence dwelt on earth was dedicated to pagan gods. They even sacrificed a pig in there to desecrate it. And that's where the story of Hanukkah comes from. You ever wonder what that's about? It's when they rededicated the temple and they kicked them out and they had this glimmer of independence. But then the Romans came. And they did such a thorough job of pillaging, destroying, and oppressing that for 80 years now they had been longing. They had been longing for freedom. And you see, the prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, they had foretold long before this that one would come, a king like King David, a savior king, an anointed king. The Hebrew word for this anointed one is Messias. And you hear we get the word Messiah from there, and they thought that what the Messiah was gonna do is he was gonna be like David. He was gonna start a revolution, he was gonna militarily overpower the Romans, kick them out, and reestablish their freedom and their kingdom of old. Now, when Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, it's the Passover which commemorates the exodus from Egypt, when the nation started. So if you can imagine this people who are desperate for this revolution to come, for their freedom to come. Can you imagine all of these Jews who come to Jerusalem, what the environment must have been like because there was this guy, Jesus, and God was with him, and they were talking, there was quite a hubbub. This could be, this could be David come again, who's gonna start a revolution. Not any sort of like modern marketing revolution or something like that, an actual swords in people's guts revolution. That's what they wanted, that's what they thought Jesus was gonna do. And when we look in verse in chapter 19, verse 28, we see that's what Jesus claims to be. Look with me. It says, when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he drew near to Beth Page in Bethany, that's about a mile out, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of his disciples, saying, Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a cult tied on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. Okay. He claimed to be king right there. You didn't see it? Alright. Why the focus on the donkey? There's gonna be a lot of focus on this donkey here, guys. And it's very, very significant. Jesus has been walking his whole life, through the last mile into Jerusalem, he says, fellas, go into the town. Bring me back a donkey. They were like, it's Augp. Here's why. There's two prophecies from the Old Testament that said that the Messiah would ride a donkey. First of all, there's Genesis chapter 49, where Jacob on his deathbed uh prophesies that from the tribe of Judah, one of his sons, there would be one who ties his donkey to a vine, which apparently in the ancient world is just a baller thing to do. They were requesting that. He's gonna tie a donkey to a vine, kind of like that. But also, and even more significantly significantly is Zechariah chapter 9, which was during the exile, or just after the exile, and and this is what it says. It says, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, your king is coming to you, righteous, having salvation is he, humble, mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. So this was written at a time where there was no king, when they were looking forward to the king who would come back and restore the nation. So when Jesus says, Bring me the donkey, they're like, Zechariah chapter 9 is coming true. And he's claiming it for himself. Also, when we look in verses 32 and 34 through 34, it says, So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, Why are you untying the colt? And they said, The Lord has need of it. Now they didn't say Jesus had need of it. They said the Lord. And this gives you an idea of how widespread the buzz was about Jesus. As he said, okay. He knows exactly who they're talking about when he says the Lord. Now, question: Who can just grab a donkey in the ancient world? You couldn't just go grabbing donkeys, guys. That's not something to do. If any of you ever time travel, don't try it. The king could. The king had rights over subjects and donkeys thereof. So Jesus is claiming kingship for himself, he's giving kingly orders, and then we look in verses 35 through 36, he gets a kingly victory procession into the capital. Says they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it, and as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. Okay. So Jesus is not resisting this, he is leaning into it, he is declaring himself king, the Savior King. Not only that, the people are proclaiming him king. In verse 35, where it says they set him on the donkey, that's a specific word. It's the word you would use for setting a king on a throne. It's not an ordinary word for setting. Okay, so the people are proclaiming him king. And also, you notice they're throwing down their cloaks. Doesn't mean as much to us. But if you were an ancient person, you probably had just one cloak. Are you throwing that down for just anybody in front of the hooves on the ground in front of the hooves of their donkey? No, just you know. If a council person was riding, came along on a donkey, you throwing your cloak for that? No. You throw it for the king only. No disrespect to Denver City Council. But I'm not even gonna throw a jacket. And I've got a few. Not only that, when we look at verses 37 and 38, we see what they're singing. It says, as he was drawing near, already on the way down the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord, peace in heaven and glory in the highest. Now they're singing Psalm 118, which is a specific occasion. You sing it when you're going up to Jerusalem with the king. That's right. Okay? So they're proclaiming him king. He's claiming to be king. Jesus is the Messich. He is the Savior. Isn't that great? Everyone's happy. Except, as it would turn out, Jesus is not a savior they want. They wanted a sword in your guts revolution to kill lots of Romans, to restore the kingdom of Israel, and make the Gentiles crawl. Right? They wanted a national military savior. Now I want you to just, sometimes the best thing you can do to read a text carefully is just use your imagination. If you're there that day, I want you to picture. There's this long road up to Jerusalem. It ascends, you know, switchback. So you're like, right? You're out of breath walking up, because we're all a shame. Um, not all of you, but I was in the mountains this weekend, and let me tell you, just walking around the camp. I was like, oh gosh, I'm getting old. All right, so you gotta imagine the singing. Like, like, like if you've ever been at Mile High Stadium when people are going nuts, it's deafening. Can you imagine the dust? Can you imagine the cloaks being thrown on the ground? This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. The salvation you have longed to see is happening. Your Savior is here. You're like, next? The revolution begins, right? He's gonna go into David's city, he's gonna sit on David's throne, he's gonna get a crown, and he's gonna whip up an army that's gonna set us free. But look what happens next. Verse 41. When he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it. So wait. You're sitting there all excited for the revolution, and then you hear someone crying. What's going on? And you look, and you see, it's the the the new David is crying? And and the word here for crying is not like the dignified tear, isn't this great? You know, it's ugly cry. It's it's lamenting. When we look also at verse 42, Jesus says, saying, he wept over it, saying, Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace, now they are hidden from your eyes. Does that sound like a resolute revolutionary? Someone who's ready to go jam swords and guts? This is not what they have in mind, is it? Guys, I'm reading a book on Tucson Louvatour right now. He's a great revolutionary leader. It doesn't record him crying when he's about to go hang by. But Jesus, the one who's supposed to be leading the revolution, starts weeping when he sees the city. And it's not happy tears. He's saying, if only you got it. And then what he says next, if you were there and you could hear it would absolutely shake you. He says, For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. They will not leave one stone upon another in you because you did not know the time of your visitation. What? So he's actually making a prophecy. In the year 70 AD, this is exactly what happens. The Romans would build a huge rampart around the walls of Jerusalem and bombard it, destroy it, burn the temple, like slaughter most of the population. But the revolutionary leader, the one who's supposed to be making Jerusalem independent, is prophesying its doom. And by the way, this entire crowd, I don't know if they turned on him in one week, but they certainly certainly weren't certainly weren't saying don't crucify him. Jesus. He's the savior. He's not the savior they want to do. This is so true. Often, Jesus is not the savior people want him to be. A lot of the time, we want Jesus to be a national savior for these United States of America. We think that somewhere in the Bible it somehow says that God promises the US will be number one always and forever. Could you imagine if someone else tried that, like the Danes? God promises, we'd be like, calm down, Danes. Get over yourselves. Right? Like, pray for your country. I love America, yes, hooray. And I don't mean that ironically, but nowhere in the Bible does it say that Jesus is a national savior. That he somehow guarantees our national greatness forever. He cares. But that promise is not in the scriptures. Sometimes we look to Jesus to be a social or a political savior. And we think that what God has guaranteed is that my party or my political agenda is the same as what God wants, and so it will happen. You know, it's like after every single election, depending on the church you go to, they're either saying, God is faithful or God is sovereign. You can still trust. The reason is that's not what Jesus came to do. He didn't come to save us from our political from our political opponents. Now, I want you to not hear what I'm not saying here with this next one. Jesus is not the savior from our personal problems. Does he care about us? Yes. Not a sparrow falls from a tree that he doesn't know about. But nowhere in the scripture does it say that Jesus is going to make sure that your life goes smoothly and that you never encounter problem, setback, or heartbreak. That's not the salvation he came to bring. Also, Jesus did not come to save you from failure. Contrary to what uh my great friend Joel Olstein says, I don't know him. Nowhere in the Bible does it say if you have enough faith, then your career, your family, all your endeavors are just gonna go swimmingly. But the thing is, a lot of the time that is what we understand Jesus to be. That kind of savior, the savior from those things, the savior, our national savior, our success savior. And when those things don't happen, we say, What did I do wrong? We say, Is God good to me? I'm I'm suffering all these setbacks, I'm encountering all these difficulties, my endeavors aren't working. But here's the thing. Often what we think is salvation ain't salvation. There was one time I was um, before Sharon and I were married, but we were dating, I was walking through an alley and uh to a coffee shop I like to go write music at. Um, and I saw an acquaintance, a young woman, sitting on the stairs in the alley. And she was wearing sunglasses in the shade. She didn't look like she was doing that well. And so I went up to her and I said, uh, I said, Gina, what's going on? And I as I got closer to her, I could see behind the sunglasses she was bruised up badly. She told me what had happened. She had been victim of domestic abuse from her boyfriend. I did not know what to do. I called Cher and I said, what do I do? And she had some great ideas. She was a social worker at the time. So I called my roommates, made sure they were home, and and uh and we, you know, let her let her hang out at our house when we figured out what to do. And so so I was like, uh, hey, should we call the police? She said, no, no, no, no, no cops. I said, well, there's shelters that can help you get out of this. She said, no, I'm not gonna go to that, go to a shelter. I was like, okay, well, we know you're from Texas. I'm not the richest man in Nashville, but we can we can definitely buy you a bus ticket to get back uh to Texas. She's like, no, no, no, no, I just want to borrow your phone. I said, okay. What do you need my phone for? She's like, I'm gonna persuade my boyfriend to take me back. That to her was what she needed. That was her hope. That was her salvation. I wonder if we could if we could hear ourselves with God's ears when we're asking for our type of salvation. We want Jesus to be our type of savior, what it would sound like. If it would sound as misguided. When we're sitting there saying, Oh, God, save me from my career setback, perhaps your career setback is the only thing saving you from your pride. God save me from this worry and from this stress, and perhaps that worry and stress is the only thing that is preventing you from ignoring God completely. And that's what he's saving you from. Oh, God, let me marry this person. And God may be trying to save you from that person. Or that person from you. I mean, that's fair, right? You know, the Jews of Judea did eventually get exactly the type of savior they wanted. Twice. In the year 66, there was an uprising. It was the zealots uprising. And guess what happened? Exactly what Jesus said. The Romans came in and bulldozed the temple, burned it. And then in 135, another guy who they said was going to be the Messiah, a guy named Barkochpah, he came and led another revolt, trying to re-establish the kingdom. And guess what happened? The final destruction of Judea. The diaspora happened. It backfired both times. Jesus instead, he did conquer. Isn't that funny? We're not talking about the kingdom of Barkochbah at this point, it never happened. But Jesus, by losing, did what? He like is he a king right now? Does he, like Zechariah 9 says, does he conquer by peace? By the way, a donkey is not exactly a fearsome warsteed, is it? It is traditional in the ancient world of a mission of peace. He's the one who comes and he conquers with peace. Think on this. Right now. If the cross had never happened. Right? If he had done what they wanted him to do, if he had gone and just started that little revolution. Think of right now. Like, I'm looking around, I'm guessing not too many of us are Jews. No judgment. I mean, maybe some of you. I got any tribesmen in here. Some of you guys, I don't know. Um Ed, you Jewish? Not one bit, right? So you would not be among the nation that was, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You'd be one of the Gentiles they wanted to crawl. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Barbarians and all that. Let me ask you, just out of interest, do you recognize that you have a king? Yeah. And would you say that Jesus, the one who died on the cross, is your king? Yeah. And guess what? Billions and billions of people on planet Earth to this day still declare that Jesus is the king. Boy, isn't that ironic? How the actual establishment of the kingdom required the cross. So, what could we conclude? So Jesus is the savior, not the savior they wanted, not the savior that maybe we want. But he is the savior we need. Our real need. Our real need is not for an actual savior. That's not a big enough salvation for Jesus. Our real need, God cares about our problems, absolutely. But let's say, you know, God says yes to all the successes of your life when really part of the design of your life, just like if the cross had never happened, what if some of the hard things in your life never happened? Would you like to see that outcome? When we believe that God is giving us the very things that we would ask for if we were wise enough to ask for them. Because Jesus addresses the real need. He doesn't just address the politics of the world, he addresses sin itself. He addresses the corruption of sin. You see, our the problem is not that the wrong political party is in power or out of power. It's that the world is bound in corruption to sin. If we're talking about what are the problems of the world, it's war, it's poverty, it's oppression, it's racism, it's human beings being cut off from God, is what all that is. And Jesus deals with the underlying issue. He deals with the virus, not just the symptoms. What's to be our response this Palm Sunday? Because, right, I don't want to say, oh, isn't Palm Sunday a real bummer? No, the king did come. And instead of giving a sort of spurious salvation, how how much how happy would we be if he didn't go to the cross and he just led a little revolution and for a time, you know, restored Judea to Judah. Big whoop. A lot of people have done things like that. It's to receive the salvation that Jesus brings. It's for us to receive our king and the salvation he did bring. What that means is that we say yes to the free offer of eternal life. We say yes to the free forgiveness of sin. He died on the cross to forgive our sin. That's the salvation he came to bring. We say yes to the kingdom of God. We say yes to participating in the renewal of all things. God is committed to undo the effects of sin in the world. And you and I are invited into that. That's what it means to be part of the kingdom. It's to join God in this, in the building of this kingdom, in the undoing of evil, in being forgiven. I'm going to close us with a great quote from C.S. Lewis, as he always has. He says this imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, you can understand what he's doing. He's getting the drains right with stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew that those jobs needed doing, and so you're not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. Throwing out a new wing here, putting up an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage, but he's building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. Jesus may not be the savior that you want, but he is the savior we need. This morning, let's receive our Savior. Please pray with me. Lord Jesus, you are the Savior. And I pray that you would reorient our hearts from always grasping at salvation you did not come to bring. And instead that we would receive and rejoice in the salvation you did come to bring. In Jesus' name. Amen.