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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles in your homes. Open up your Bibles to the book of Zechariah 9, verse 9. Zechariah 9, verse 9. This is the word of the Lord from the prophet Zechariah. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you, righteous and having salvation as he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. May God add his blessing to the reading of his inspired, inerrant and infallible word, and may he write its eternal truths upon our heart as we study together today.
This is the prophecy of Zechariah, which came some 500 years before Jesus Christ came into the earth, born of the Virgin Mary, to live a perfect and sinless life and to go to the cross for his people.
We have four written Gospels that are all witnesses to the life of Jesus Christ. We have Matthew's Gospel. Matthew is an apostle of Jesus Christ, one who was radically converted out of the tax booth. We have Mark, who was a follower of Jesus Christ, and he, we believe, was writing from the account of the apostle Peter.
Thus, Mark's Gospel can be seen in a sense as Peter's Gospel. We have Luke. Luke was an associate of the apostle Paul. He was an educated doctor, as well as being a historian. He is a historian of the first rank.
And then, of course, we have John. John, the beloved disciple, the one whom he says himself he was amazed at the fact that he was a man whom Jesus loved. And so he said it over and over. Each of their Gospel accounts highlights a different aspect of Jesus's life and ministry.
Matthew focuses on the fact that he is the king of the Jews, and we see over and over in Matthew's Gospel prophecies that are being fulfilled. This was what was said, thus saith the Scriptures, and this is how it was fulfilled in Christ.
Mark focuses on the fact that Jesus came as the suffering servant of Yahweh. Luke focuses on the humanity of Jesus as the Son of Man. John focuses on the divinity of Jesus as the Son of God. It is in John's Gospel where we get that tremendous statement, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in Him will not perish, but will have everlasting life.
These are the four Gospels and the four Gospel writers, and there are honestly very few accounts that make it into all four Gospels. In fact, some accounts only come in one Gospel, such as the miracle at the wedding feast of Cana.
And then, of course, there are times when only two Gospels will record one narrative, such as the birth of Jesus Christ is only recorded in Matthew and Luke. We read nothing of it in Mark or John. But there are times when there are events in the life of Christ that take such center stage in history that all four Gospel writers provide for us their vantage point, their perspective, their narrative of that particular event.
And one of those events is our subject today, that which is often referred to as the triumphal entry. This is a scene with which most Christians are very familiar. Jesus Christ rides into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.
His disciples lay their cloaks before Him as a ceremonial greeting for a king. They wave their branches in the air as He goes by, and they shout, Hosanna! Hosanna means save us. Every year, churches all around the world celebrate this day.
We call this day Palm Sunday. It's the beginning of what we refer to as Holy Week. Holy Week, Palm Sunday. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the back of the donkey. Maundy Thursday, the night that Jesus had with His disciples in the upper room.
Good Friday, the day that He went to the cross. And then, of course, Resurrection Sunday, the day that He rose from the tomb. Holy Week is a very important week in the Christian church, and it begins with the triumphal entry.
Each of the Gospel records carries this account under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but each one of the Gospel records tells the story in a little different way. Now, if you've been with us this whole time, you know that we read the accounts earlier.
I'm not going to read them again because they have some length to them. So I want to just remind you that there are four accounts. One is in Matthew 21, 1 -11. One is in Mark 11, 1 -10. One is in Luke 19, 28 -44.
And one is in John 12, 9 -19. And we should note these are not carbon copies of one another. The two that are closest are Matthew and Mark, and then Luke, of course, includes some additional information, and John tells the story from a completely different perspective.
And our goal is to harmonize these accounts and understand how these accounts all work together to explain what is happening. So what I want to do for just a moment is I want to point out some of the similarities, and then I want to point out some of the differences in these accounts.
The first thing to recognize is that all of them put Jesus in the same place in this narrative. They talk about Bethany and Bethpage and the Mount of Olives. So there's commonality in where Jesus is in the narrative.
And Matthew, Mark, and Luke all talk about the fact that Jesus sent two disciples to go and to get the donkey. Matthew tells us that when he sent them, he says to go and take the donkey, and Matthew mentions two animals, actually, that he brings the donkey and the younger foal.
And he tells them, if anyone asks you why you're taking them, say the king has need of it. Jesus has need of it. And then, of course, no one does in Matthew. We don't hear that in Matthew, but in Mark and Luke, we see that there are those who challenge.
Luke even tells us it's the owner of the donkey. He's just saying, why are you taking the donkey? And they say the Lord has need of it. And so we don't know exactly. Maybe Jesus had spoken to these people beforehand and had set up this situation, or maybe they just knew and heard of Jesus, and Jesus knew that his reputation would precede him.
And so whenever he said, tell them the king has need of it, the people would say, okay, he may have it. John doesn't mention any of this. John only says that, John says Jesus got a donkey and sat on it.
It doesn't say how it happened. It doesn't talk about the two disciples. It doesn't make it wrong. It's just different. It's a little different part of the narrative because that's not John's focus. But here are some things that we need to recognize.
Matthew focuses greatly on Zachariah's prophecy. Now, why would Matthew focus on Zachariah's prophecy? What did we already say about Matthew? Matthew is writing to show that Jesus is king of the Jews.
Matthew is writing to show that Jesus fulfills the prophecy. Mark and Luke don't even mention the prophecy. Amazingly, they don't even mention what Zachariah wrote. And when we get to John, John mentions it, but he doesn't even quote it verbatim.
He almost gives it as if it were an afterthought. He quotes it loosely. But Matthew focuses in on the quote from Zachariah 9 .9, proving this is who Jesus is. He is the one who Zachariah said, your king is coming to you.
Jesus is that king. And Matthew wants his Jewish brethren to know. And again, Mark does not mention the prophecy at all. Neither does Luke. But Luke tells us something entirely different. Luke tells us that when Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, he pauses for a moment and he looks at Jerusalem and he weeps over Jerusalem.
This is right after something else has happened. The Pharisees have told Jesus to shut his disciples up. That's something Matthew didn't tell us. It's something Mark didn't tell us. But Luke tells us that Jesus responded that if these were to be quiet, the stones themselves would cry out.
What an amazing thing to say. The stones themselves. If these people were to be quiet, because today is the day. Today is the day of my coronation. Today is the day of my announcement of Messiah. Think of it like this.
Up until this point, when Jesus had interacted with people, Jesus had said to people, don't tell people about me. Don't tell people that I'm the Messiah. Don't say this. But now that has changed. Now he's coming in and he's fulfilling this prophecy that everyone would have known.
Everyone would have understood. In fact, I want to quote from a commentary now. This is in the Believer's Bible Commentary. It says this, He fulfills intentionally a prophecy which at his time was unanimously interpreted of the Messiah.
If he had previously considered the declaration of his dignity as dangerous, he now counts silence as inconceivable. It was hereafter never possible to say that he had never declared himself in a wholly unequivocal manner.
When Jerusalem was afterwards accused of the murder of the Messiah, it should not be able to say that the Messiah had omitted to give a sign intelligible for all alike. So what's that commentary saying?
This is Jesus' announcement. He's fulfilling the prophecy, a prophecy they all knew and a prophecy they all would have understood. This is Jesus saying, I am the King. And had the people not cried out, the very stones would have cried out, Jesus says.
But then he looks. He looks out at Jerusalem and he says these words. I want to read them again from the Gospel of Luke. It says,. And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, Would that you, even you had known on this day the things that made for peace, but now they're hidden from your eyes for the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and him you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you because you did not know the time of your visitation.
Now, there are other accounts of this, but this particular one I'm pointing out as it's tying in Luke's narrative, it's tying into the triumphal entry and I think about the fact that this is Jesus' prophecy of something that is going to happen not a generation later.
Jesus is prophesying about the fact that in A .D. 70, there's going to come destruction upon Jerusalem and he's weeping over this destruction. And why is the destruction coming? Because when the Messiah came, he came and was rejected.
He came to his own and his own received him not. John 1 tells us that. And so Luke includes this as part of the triumphal entry. Now, John's gospel again, completely a different narrative, not again different in the sense that it's telling us something that is untrue or saying anything else is untrue.
No, but it's different in the sense that it includes some information that we would not know otherwise. In John's narrative, in John 12, we see that the triumphal entry is actually tied to the raising of Lazarus from the dead.
You'll remember not too long before this event happened, Jesus had raised the man from the dead. Again, you would think that narrative would be in all the gospels, but it's not. We find the raising of Lazarus in John's gospel.
And John tells us that this was actually the reason why people came out to meet Jesus. It says in verse 9 of chapter 12, it says,. When the large crowd of Jews learned that Jesus was there, they came not only on account of him, but also to see Lazarus whom he had raised from the dead.
So Jesus is coming and he's coming as the king and Lazarus is there. Lazarus is as it were his demonstration of his power. Here is proof that he has power not only over sin, but he has power over life and death.
And John's gospel says that the Pharisees wanted Jesus dead. And not only did they want Jesus dead, they wanted Lazarus dead because Lazarus was the testimony of who Jesus was. It's interesting that in John's gospel is where we see the word palm branches used.
The people are holding up the palm branches. They're laying them down at the feet. And they're letting the king ride as it were into Jerusalem on the back of the donkey celebrating him. Hosanna! Save us!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is he who comes in the name of our father David. Blessed is the king. Jesus, you're the king. And they're announcing him and proclaiming him as the king.
They're excited. They're extolling. They're expressing. This is a man who raises the dead. This is a man who tells us the truth. This is the man of power and dignity. This is the man who is coming in humility on the back of a donkey, but he's coming to save us!
But almost as quickly as he is welcomed, he's rejected. Almost as soon as the crowds that are thronging about him begin to quiet down. Almost as soon as the shouts cease, the tide of public opinion begins to change.
And within just a few days, many of the ones who cried out Hosanna would cry out crucify him. This is one of the great historical question marks for many people. How does someone go from tremendous popularity to tremendous hatred in a span of just a few days?
Well, we read that when Jesus came into town on the back of the donkey, he didn't go to Pilate's palace and dethrone the Roman governor. He did not go to the house of Herod and dethrone the pretender to the crown.
No. Jesus went to the temple and he cast out the money changers. He didn't cleanse the palace. He cleansed the temple. He did not do what the people expected him to do. They expected him to unseat Rome, but he did not.
They had a wrong expectation of what Messiah was there to do. They thought Messiah had come to give them liberty over their physical oppressors, but no. Messiah did not come to grant liberty over the physical oppressors.
No. Messiah came to grant liberty over those who were in spiritual bondage. The people of Israel had been in bondage to the false teaching of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And Jesus had already spent much of his ministry challenging them and chastising them and calling them out.
And he had spent much of his ministry telling them how wrong they were. And now he comes in to the very temple itself and he cleanses the temple and in that moment there is great hatred for him. And that hatred grows and grows and grows to a fever pitch to where just a few days later he can be drugged before the people, sat down beside a known insurrectionist.
Who will you have? Jesus, who is called the King of the Jews, or Barabbas? And the people would say, give us Barabbas. Crucify Jesus. Jesus didn't meet their expectations. Jesus didn't do what they thought he ought to do.
And therefore they turned from those who would praise to those who would reject. It is easy. In our modern world it's easy to find ourselves in that same place. We expect God to do something and something else happens.
We expect our lives to go a certain way and something else happens. None of us expected to be where we are today just three months ago. We all heard the news stories. There's a flu. There's a sickness.
There's a virus. We've all dealt with it before in years past. We've seen the bird flu and we've seen SARS and we've seen these things. And never has our world been turned so upside down as it has this time.
Many of us started 2020 with great expectations. And now those expectations have been changed. Some of us had great expectations for our businesses and our businesses have closed. Some had great expectations for our success in athletics and now the athletics are closed.
Many of us had great expectations for success in growing ministries and now the church's doors are not open. And so there's great disillusionment. Will we too look to the King and say what have you done?
Why have you not fulfilled my expectation of you? Will we like those who stood with palm branches in their hands be so willing and so quick to turn away from Christ when our expectations are not met? When we think about Palm Sunday, this was a great day in redemptive history.
This was a day where the Savior, the King, the Messiah announced His Messiahship by riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey just as it had been prophesied of Him 500 years before. This was an unmistakable announcement of His being King.
This was a great day. But I want to remind you this morning that a greater day is yet to come. A day is coming when Jesus is going to mount another animal. He is going to ride again. But this time He is not going to come into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey but He is going to ride into human history on the back of a great white horse.
Turn in your Bibles with me to Revelation 19 and I want to begin to draw to a close by looking at what the Bible says we have to look forward to. You see, Jesus came once in humility, but He will come again in victory.
He came once on a beast of burden, but He will come again on a beast of battle. He came once as Savior. He will return as Sovereign. He came once and His enemies plotted His destruction. He will come again and they will be the subjects of His wrath.
The first time He came, He came as the Lamb, but He will return as the Lion. Revelation 19 verse 11. Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and the one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war.
His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on His head are many diadems, and He has a name written that no one knows but Himself. He is clothed in a robe, dipped in blood, and the name by which He is called is the Word of God.
And the armies of heaven are reigned and find linen white and pure were following Him on white horses. And from His mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron.
He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written King of Kings and Lord of Lords. This is Jesus Christ. This is the Messiah.
This is the One who was the Lamb but will come as the Lion of Judah. That day is coming. That day is coming, my friends. And every day we live, that day draws closer and closer and closer. I've had many calls since all of this began.
Many people wanting to call and talk to me about the Bible. And one question that keeps coming up. Brother, do you believe that all the things that are happening now have end time significance? I want to tell you I don't know.
And I always look with suspicion at those who say they know for sure. Jesus told us no man can know the day nor the hour of His return. But I will tell you this. His return is closer now than it's ever been.
We are one day closer to the day when He will split the eastern sky and He will return as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We're not told to calculate that day. We are told to be ready for that day. So, beloved, I would ask you today as I draw this sermon to a close, are you ready for that day?
If the King came right now, if He split the eastern sky, if you looked up and you saw your King on a horse, would you be ready for His return? Jesus told a parable of the ten virgins and He said some of them had their lamps full of oil and some of them did not.
And when the bridegroom came, those who were not ready were cast out. Are you ready for the King to come? Could all of this be a sign? I don't know. But I will tell you this. Ever since Jesus ascended into heaven, we have been in the end times.
For ever since He ascended into heaven, we have been looking for the day of His return. And we should live every day as if He could return today. The Scripture says, watch for you know not when the Master of the house comes.
Are you ready? Are you ready for when the Master will come? Beloved, I pray. I pray that you would be ready. And there is only one way for you to be ready. And it's not by good works. It is not by church membership.
It is not by giving money. It is not by anything that you can do. The only way that you can be ready for the King to come is to receive Him through repentance and faith. So I would encourage you today.
Recognize yourself as the sinner that you are. The Bible says, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Recognize that you cannot save yourself. By works of the law will no man be justified.
Recognize that your sin deserves death. For the wages of sin is death. And then realize that there is one who came and the only one who can give you life and victory over death. And that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
And the Bible says that we are to repent of our sins. That means turn away from our sins. To see them as God sees them. To hate them as God hates them. To turn from our sins and turn to the Savior in faith and take hold of what He has done.
Not what we have done. For we have done nothing that would merit salvation. All we have contributed to our salvation is the sin that makes it necessary. But Jesus Christ has come and He has provided salvation for everyone who believes in Him.
Won't you believe in Him today? And thereby have no fear. No fear of anything in this life or in the life to come. For neither death nor life nor angels nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor life nor death nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Won't you come to Him today? And won't you know that your eternity is safe in Him? Father in Heaven, I thank You for this opportunity to preach about Jesus' coming into Jerusalem on a donkey and the fact that He will return on a great white horse in power and judgment.
Lord, may we be ready. May we not be as many of those in Jerusalem who had wrong expectations of our Messiah and who were disillusioned and turned away. But may we receive Jesus as He is and understand that we are but servants of the King.
He is the Sovereign. We are the servants. And Lord, may it be that if there are those listening to my voice that have never bowed the knee to Jesus Christ, that today would be the day that You would change their hearts and draw them to Yourself.
I pray this in Jesus' name and for His sake. Amen.