Experience TRUTH - #16

This is Darren Kuhn with the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we search the ancient paths to find ways that God brings light into a dark world and helps set men free from the struggles that we all face on a day-to-day basis. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it.

Share it. But most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. When Christ showed up to your church, how would He respond?

How would you respond? Well, this week we're getting into it right here. Robbie Dilmore, it's good to have you as our wonderful special guest contributor as we look at Luke 19 and the triumphal interview of Christ, His weeping over the city, and His going in and cleansing the temple. A whole lot here, Robbie, and I'm going to ask you if you'll just read the Scripture for us. We'll jump into these questions, okay? Okay.

Okay. So this is the winding down of the earthly ministry of Jesus. He's coming to the Holy City. This will be His last time coming to the Holy City from the outside in. Next time He comes out of the Holy City, it'll be carrying a cross to Golgotha, which we'll cover in these later chapters of Luke.

Robbie, let's go ahead with these questions here to give us a context of what's happening, to bring everyone up to speed. We're journeying through the book of Luke here on Experience Truth, and we're so glad you're with us as we look at the Word of God and work through some of these really, really neat passages of Scripture. So how does the rejoicing of the crowd contrast with the weeping of Jesus?

Yeah, so He enters the city. He's got a whole mess of people with Him. Multitudes, it says.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of people. It's the Passover Feast of Jerusalem. This is what may have been called Palm Sunday, because they're throwing palm leaves down, big palm branches in His path. Many are throwing their coats, their clothing down for this donkey. The Prince of Peace is coming into the city of peace, Jerusalem, on a beast of peace.

An unbroken colt that had never been ridden or broken before, and He's coming to proclaim peace. And so they're excited. They're yelling, Hosanna, and the Pharisees are calling for rebuke, aren't they?

Isn't that remarkable that they're not very happy with this exuberance and this acceptance. And so they're saying, teacher, rebuke your disciples. Usually they told the disciples to tell the teacher in other cases, but in this case they speak correctly to Jesus. They tell Him to rebuke His disciples, but He says, I tell you, if these just keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.

And we spent some time last time on that. The inanimate objects of God's creation, the trees, the birds, the stones, if the animate objects, the ones He created to worship Him, the humans, us, you and me, don't proclaim His praise, do not sing Hosanna, then the rocks are going to cry out. And this is not uncommon with Old Testament language and the prophecies of the Messianic Kingdom. So this is how He responds to these Pharisees, but it's contrasted.

It's contrasted with verse 41. Suddenly you have this excitement, but then you have, as He drew near, He saw the city. So He did three things here. He drew near Jerusalem, the Holy City, the Temple Mount, this grand center of theistic worship, the only monotheistic kingdom in the world, Jerusalem. The City of God is coming into more focus as He's drawing near. So He draws near, He sees it, and He wept over it. So, why did Jesus weep? We speculate and we can argue that He laughed. Of course, He says a lot of things to make us laugh. We often say, Robby, God's got a sense of humor.

Look at Jesus and His questions and His polemics and all of His angling with the Pharisees and His disciples. So there's certainly things that we laugh at, but we do know that He wept. We do know that Isaiah calls Him a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And here He's looking over the Holy City, and it's interesting.

He tells us here a little bit about why He wept. It says, verse 42, "...if you had known, even you, especially in this your day..." Remember, they've just said, "...Hosanna blesses he who comes in the name of the Lord." He says, "...this your day." Well, what else does Psalm 118 say that Christ has fulfilled? It says, "...this is the day that the Lord hath made." That was a prophetic psalm of this day right here. When we say that, we quote that, we sing that, this is the day, as we talked about last time, we're referring to a beautiful fulfillment that Jesus Christ is fulfilling, because this is the day the Lord has made, the day the King comes to His city to bring peace.

"...the things that make for your peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes." Christ is weeping over their blindness. He's weeping over the fact that here He is, the Lord of life, the Lord of glory, the Lord who can just transform. The lover of their soul is right there! And they're absolutely rejecting Him, as seen in the hardness. And as we see in the last verse, the Pharisees trying to destroy Him. Robbie asked this question, which goes even more into this... So how could they miss the Savior of the world right there in their midst? Why has the city of peace been so full of conflict for so long?

You know, it's just interesting. It's almost as though our world leaders, all of the presidents, what do they all campaign on? We're going to solve the crisis in the Middle East, right? Is there ever going to be peace in the Middle East? You know, so you're the only one who could ever bring peace to the Middle East, peace to the world, and peace to our hearts is right here. The Prince of Peace. And they've outright rejected Him. And Jesus really gives us foreboding prophecy.

We won't get into it too much because it's touched on a lot and we've talked about it already. But He says again, He prophesies, Days will come when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you, and close in on every side, and level you and your children within you to the ground. And they will not leave you.

They won't leave one stone upon another because you did not know the time of your visitation. Your King is here, and you don't even recognize Him, and it's going to get real bad. And Christ, maybe He wept also because He saw the devastation that the Emperor Titus would impact this area with. You know, when He would come in and He would literally raze the city, burn it to the ground, build a wall around it so no one could get out, He would go in.

It would take a while because these people were stubborn and they fought hard. But He would trap them, cut off all water, cut off all food, and it was a massacre. Thousands were crucified. Crosses littered the whole Roman roads up and down outside of Jerusalem.

When people were burned, the very few survivors were sold into slavery. So that was heavy on Christ's heart. He knew what was coming because they rejected the One who came to set the captives free, the One who came to give them life, the One who came with healing in His wings, yet they didn't see it. So here Christ is weeping.

All of that's hitting, I think maybe the gravity, Robbie, of all of that. And the deepest absolute tragedy here is every Jewish man, woman, child prayed for this King to come into their city on this day. They prayed that for every day of their life. When they went to Sabbath, it was heightened. When they had the Feast of Passover, when they had the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Tents, and every feast they had, it was heightened because, come Messiah, come Lamb of God, come conquering King, come Son of David. And the prophecies all point to Him, and here He is, and they missed Him. So what a tragic thing.

And so Jesus gives this, again, another prophecy. By the way, one stone upon another, when Titus came in, when you burn the temple, Herod's temple especially, which even built up more than Solomon's temple, when you burn the gold that's everywhere in there, what happens to gold when you burn it? It melts?

Yeah, two questions. What happens to gold when you burn it? Question number two, how do you pay all these soldiers that have traveled from Rome, from Italy, to come in and conquer Jerusalem, and have staked their lives, and how do you pay them and their families? Apparently you get the gold out of the stones.

Robby, there's a word you and I are very familiar with. It starts with a P. Plunder. Plunder! So these soldiers went in, and how a fulfillment of this prophecy, Old Testament prophecy, even more words of Jesus prior to this, that's what happened. He said, destroy this temple, these words from Christ. They literally, Titus came in, burned the city, the gold would run between the rocks.

The only way to get that gold and detach it is to upturn every stone, because it would sink down, it would bleed down into there. So really a brilliant prophecy fulfilled by Jesus. And then, he went in the temple. And this is where we open with that tease, what happens when God comes to church? And this is the question, Robby, that really sets it up. So what led to such a radical cleansing of the temple?

Wow. So he goes in there, he went in the temple, and it tells us, he began to drive out those who bought and sold it. And there are so many, there's so much on this. There is so much on the merchandising of the temple. The connection of it that kind of strikes me is, he knew, had the temple been what it was supposed to be, then there wouldn't be so many people that weren't aware of the day. And so, there's still a connection to, he's weeping, and the next thing you know, he's got a reason to get these people's attention, because they're the ones who literally stole the big day for everybody.

That's exactly right. The thievery, the extortion that's going on will blow your mind. We're going to get into some of those particulars there next time on Experienced Truth.

But stay with me on this mood. We have Hosanna, we have this chorus of thousands of voices praising the king as he's coming into town. We have the hate, vitriol, and anger of these Pharisees and religious leaders who can't abide it. We have the weeping of Jesus, and then he goes into Jerusalem, he goes home, remember his first words were in the temple. I must be about my father's business.

Why are you bothering me? Luke 2.49. We have righteous, holy indignation. So you have excitement and cheer and praise. You have anger from the Pharisees and rebuke and bitter, sinful vitriol. You have weeping from Jesus, and now we have Jesus Christ grabbing a whip of some sort and driving him out like he did in John 2, his first trip in his earthly ministry to the temple when he was launching his ministry.

And it's a very similar account to that. We're going to get into that deeper next week when Jesus came to church on Experienced Truth. Thanks for being with us, Robbie. Thank you always. I'll have to have you next week, Robbie, because it's going to go deeper here. It's going to be intense. What if he came to your church? Wow. Hey, read the Word, study the Word, share the Word everywhere you go. This is God's Word, and we'll get back into it next time right here on Experienced Truth.