Palm Sunday – The Untold Story

0:00:00     Hey, Palm Sunday, it’s the time we wave a Palm branch and yell hosanna, right? Well, maybe, but you might just want to tune into today’s podcast and find out. Palm Sunday, the untold story. Hello, everybody. Welcome again to another more faith, more Life podcast. Today I want to talk to you about Palm Sunday, the untold story. Now, you know some of the story. Most people know a little bit about Palm Sunday, a little bit more about Easter, maybe, but the untold story we’re going to talk about, at least for today, maybe even next time.

0:00:30     But as that season, Palm Sunday, Easter, it’s all approaching and going to be here soon, so thought we’d visit about it a little bit. And the untold story is not just to educate you, but to make the story that you already know more meaningful and you know more what it means, what’s going on, why they did what Jesus did, and all that stuff. All right, so let’s go right into it where the part we know about, and it’s the triumphal entry in the gospel of Mark. In the book of Mark, Jesus tells the disciples to go find a cult that no man has ever sat on before. And that’s real symbolic because he’s going to enter Jerusalem like a conquering king.

0:01:13     And if you don’t know the background of that, which most don’t and probably shouldn’t, wouldn’t normally, this is not an unusual moment, it’s a historical moment of the way they’re going to treat him. Okay? So they get the colt and he rides in and as he goes, we know this part, particularly the palm branches. That’s why we call it Palm Sunday. But actually they also threw their coats and cloaks on the ground, also on the colt and on the ground.

0:01:45     But it just doesn’t sound very good to call it cloak Sunday. So we call it Palm Sunday. But they did. They had branches and they laid them down. Now, this is all symbolic. And they didn’t just do this for Jesus. This is the procedure that is done a lot for a conquering king or warrior to come back from battle, or conquering or taking over a country, or taking over a city and about to enter the city that they just conquered.

0:02:21     Okay, now what would happen, depending on circumstances, the conqueror or the king or whoever it is, would go outside the camp, outside the city, and wait and be there until ready. And then when the conqueror decided to come in, march into town and make like a parade of it, then all the people would come and throw down their coats and cloaks and branches and do that, and not just for Jesus, but they’d do it for any conqueror back then, or if he was entering the city that he just conquered, then the people that would honor him or whatever. Okay, so that’s the picture we’re getting. He’s coming as a conquering king, and so he waits, gets on, the cold, comes in, and then the people are shouting.

0:03:09     They begin to shout Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father, David. Hosanna in the highest. When I was in a kid in grade school, went to a method, a Methodist church, and on Palm Sunday, they all gave us palms to wave in the service and stuff. And that’s about all we knew a little bit about Hosanna. I didn’t know the significance of when the people yelled that there. Actually, those are Messiah phrases.

0:03:41     They’re claiming he is the Messiah, by the way they’re acting. The conquering Messiah. The messiah has come who conquers the whole. So they go ahead of him just like a conquering king. They’ve seen others in other cities. This is the way they treated conquering kings and rulers. And now the story really takes off, though, because that’s the part we celebrate on Palm Sunday, at least they did in my Methodist church.

0:04:07     And so Jesus is riding on a colt. He’s going somewhere, but he never goes anywhere. That’s. I mean, the story I got when I was a kid, he never goes anywhere. He’s just going. But he was actually going someplace. Okay, so we keep reading in Mark, then it says he entered Jerusalem and went to the temple. So he goes to Jerusalem like the conquering king, like, know he’s the king of the universe, the messiah, whatever, and he enters Jerusalem, goes into the temple.

0:04:40     But I never knew that. I didn’t know he’s going somewhere. I thought he was just riding around to get hosannas and stuff, but he was actually going, like, the king to the temple. So he’s claiming, really, he’s the ruler of the temple, he’s the king of that temple, the way he’s acting. So he goes in, but it’s late, okay? It’s late in the day, so it says he just looked around and left. Nobody noticed too much and said anything. After they did all the hosannas, and he goes back to Bethany, and then the next day they come back.

0:05:13     So I guess he had all night to think about it, what he saw in the temple. And the next day they come back and then says he’s hungry and as he goes, he sees a tree without any figs on it. And so he curses this tree because he was hungry and didn’t have any fruit and it had leaves. That’s all symbolic, too, is like leaves mean they’re supposed to be fruit or something? It’s long story on that. But the main thing is he cursed the tree.

0:05:41     And then he goes back into the temple again after the tree incident. And now he starts driving out the money changers and overturning tables, it says, and driving out those who are buying and selling and selling doves. And he wouldn’t let anybody carry any merchandise in and out. So he’s really acting like he owns the place, which he does, but they don’t know what he’s doing. So what we have is first picture is Jesus entering the city with God’s approval.

0:06:19     There’s an approval moment, okay? When he enters the temple the second time, there’s disapproval. Right? It’s showing God’s disapproval. So here’s the approved king, Jesus, among disapproved religion. That doesn’t work, for one thing. And so when he goes in the temple, he’s got all these money changers and they’re selling, and it’s okay in some ways because they’re going to do the sacrifices. And people were buying and selling so they could do sacrifices. That’s why they got doves and sheep and stuff like that around merchandise.

0:06:56     But it was total corruption. And the main reason why the sacrifice was empty sacrifices is because the holy of holies is empty. Okay? So you go into the temple, and way back in Moses’ day they built the tabernacle in the wilderness, and it had the holy of holies, and there was the glory and presence of God and the power of God and the ark of the covenant. But now they’re going through the motions of religion and they’re going through the motions of sacrifice. So people are spending their money on sacrifices, but God’s not in the house.

0:07:38     The holy of holies is empty. All right, so there you’ve got another picture to deal with. We’re going to deal with the tree in a minute, the fig tree. But another picture you got to deal with is here’s a temple built for God and God’s not there. But the people are still doing religious stuff. So what does that mean? Religion can go on. This is the untold story a little bit. Know this. Religion can go on without God, or it can go on with people who believe in God, but it’s compromised religion that God won’t participate in.

0:08:16     So here we have it. He does all the things. He turns everything over. And what do you think the other leaders of the synagogue are? The temple and the priests and the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. How do you think they’re going to respond to him coming in and doing that? Yeah, they don’t like it. And so at that time, they begin to really plot to kill him. Okay, so this little incident story we just told you we’re talking about is huge.

0:08:47     He starts out acting and being called, recognized as the king of king the Messiah, Hosanna in the highest. Okay, does that. But he’s also doing something else. He’s setting into motion his own death, sacrificial death. He’s going to put the last, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say. He’s going to come in and clear the temple and declare it a room full of robbers, a den of robbers and thieves.

0:09:17     And it’s supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations. And he’s prophesying that. And also that’s a scripture from the old testament, but it’s not for all nations. They don’t want all the nations. They want just the Jews there, exclusive. And it has to be a light to the whole world. So there’s another thing wrong. But the main thing is he’s going to act that out and he’s going to trigger the crucifixion, basically, because this is the last straw.

0:09:46     He came into the temple, messed up, turned over the tables. All right? And so they decide they’re going to kill him. All right, that’s going to happen. The speed is going to happen pretty fast now, because as you know, you celebrate Palm Sunday on one Sunday, the next Sunday, then Good Friday, then Sunday’s Easter. So things move along pretty fast in this story, in what happens then after they decide they’re going to kill him.

0:10:13     So then they leave. And they notice then as they do it, they notice that the fig tree, remember, the fig tree that he cursed was withered from the roots. I mean, it’s dead. Dead. He cursed it and it died and it looks dead. And they said, look at that, the fig tree that you cursed has withered. And Jesus answers them and says, have faith in God. Have faith in God. Well, there’s a reason for that is because up to that point now, we’ve had all this picture drawing the picture of the Messiah coming in on the cult cleansing of the temple, the cursing of the fig tree. We have all these symbolic things and other things going on.

0:10:56     But that tree represents God’s opinion of the religion of the day, okay? It’s a tree with no fruit. It does not bear fruit. The tree is not bearing fruit, so it’s going to be cursed and it’s going to wither. Now get this. This doesn’t mean Judaism is going to wither or the Jews are cursed. It means the religion that is compromised and still acting out religion without really the presence and glory of God there, that is no good. That’s got to go.

0:11:29     And so Jesus begins to announce it and he says, have faith in God. And they mentioned the fig tree, and he says, if you have faith, you can say to this mountain, go throw yourself into the sea, and it’ll do it. It’ll do what you say. And there’s a lot of great scriptures on that. I mean, sermons on that of what that mountain is, right? Because we’re able to symbolically say, okay, the mountain. Well, mountains are funny, right? Because one thing, we look at them like, we climb up high and Moses went to the mountaintop to meet God.

0:12:04     And then in other symbolic pictures, a mountain is something standing in our way, stopping us from succeeding, or know, a mountain of debt or a mountain of physical ailments. You got a lot of mountains in your life. And so then in that case, we want to get rid of that mountain when climb the mountain with God and get rid of this mountain of circumstances. And that’s mainly how it’s been preached, but it’s really stronger. Here’s the untold story.

0:12:30     When he comes out of the temple and they look around and they do all these things. The temple was built on a mount. In fact, today it’s still called what? The Temple Mount. Okay? Now, this temple is not there, and there’s a reason for that. There’s another temple there from another religion, but it’s still called the temple Mount, okay? And so when he says this mountain will be removed, he’s not talking about a mountain of circumstances or a mountain of debt or ailments or unforgiveness or whatever you need to remove. And that’s legitimate. You do need to move those things. We want you to get those mountains out of your life.

0:13:08     But in reality, the untold story that you need to know if you really want to get down to the depth of what’s going on here is he’s talking about the mountain. The temple Mount is going to be removed. You can cast it in the sea. He’s speaking a prophetic word about that temple. All right. So he’s the Messiah. He has the right to come in and straighten out things, but there’s no power of God. There’s no glory of God. There’s no cloud of his glory. Shakina in the holy of holies. It’s empty, but they’re still doing sacrifices.

0:13:42     So then he says, here’s what the story is. It’s like this withered tree. This is what’s going to happen to this part, this form of religion, the compromised religion. And so he prophesies that. And of course, 40 years later, then Jerusalem is destroyed, the temple is destroyed, a million people are killed. It is a really disaster. And he’s prophesying this in my book here, if you only knew, which you can get now right online.

0:14:16     It’s a small booklet, but it actually helps understand what we’re talking about today because, yeah, Rome did destroy the temple. And Judaism as they knew it in that time ended there. But in this, in my booklet, if you only knew. It describes how it was preventable. Okay? Because Jesus spoke a lot of other words. He said, this doesn’t have to know, but how you could get peace instead of Rome coming and killing a million people.

0:14:47     It’s hidden from your eyes. They’re clueless. They don’t know, but they could have had it. They could have saved Jerusalem, they could have saved the temple. They could have saved, you know, from disaster. So that’s the clue to this book, and I’m telling you about America today, is we’re facing a lot of disasters. We’re facing possible wars, trouble, inflation is going crazy, all kinds of things. But in this little book, it helps you understand these disasters are preventable in most cases.

0:15:19     And so if we’re not clueless, then we can figure out what to do to avert a disaster. And this destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, 40 years later, after what we’re talking about here was preventable, but it was hidden from their eyes. They didn’t get it. They didn’t understand what they needed to do. That temple Mount, right, that mountain is going to be thrown into the sea. As symbolic, it’s just going away.

0:15:45     And so this religion as they know it, is going to go away. And they have to have faith in God because they’re going to walk through Jerusalem 40 years later and there’ll be no temple, there’ll be a lot of dead people, and there will be not only an empty holy of holies, it’s just empty, empty. At that point, then they question Jesus authority and they’re going to start planning his death. Right. They probably already had, but this really did it. This.

0:16:16     So what we got to do to help apply this now to us, the untold story is this is a great picture of where we are today, not only in America, but in our churches. We have churches everywhere. Everywhere. But people go in and here they’re doing religious things, they’re having sacrifices, they’re giving money, doing all those things. And it’s a busy place, but God’s not there. And God, things aren’t happening.

0:16:47     Right. Commerce is happening. He said it should be a house of prayer. It’s not. Prayers aren’t happening, not really. So all the things that should be happening in there are not happening. And the things that shouldn’t be happening in there are happening. Okay? And so it was religion on the flip side, it was all backwards. And so Jesus tells them in other places, this is preventable. You can repent and you can turn and you can do things God’s way and really get this and get it right.

0:17:17     But that’s hidden from your eyes. And so therefore, he says, your enemies are coming. Your enemies are coming because they were clueless, not because they were sinful. Because if they had to recognize their sinfulness and what they were doing wrong, they could have fixed it and avoided all this. But they didn’t see it. They were clueless and they didn’t want to see it anyway. And so the city temple people all killed 40 years later, including the children that are now children at this age, they’re going to grow up and they’re going to die, too.

0:17:50     The children of these leaders who are wanting to kill Jesus, well, their kids are going to get killed, too. Yeah, a lot of them. And so here we have. What does this apply to you? Because here we want to have more faith, so we have more life. Right. Okay. So here’s what your faith has to do. You have to see this in perspective of what’s going on in America. America is a lot of falling apart areas, right.

0:18:15     But it’s not supported by a religion that can help change the course of a country, change the course of a river, change the course of the future. Because Jesus is telling you can change this. Rome will come, but they don’t have to come. You can change it by your prayers, by your attitude. But what we have now is churches everywhere. Good thing. Good, I’m glad we got them. But we don’t have a lot of changed lives, and we don’t have the power of God in our churches to change our nation.

0:18:47     And that’s the order of things. It’s not the government changes and then it changes the church. But the church changes a nation, and it changes a nation. How? How does a church change a nation? Or churches? Right. How do you change a nation? By changing yourself. And that’s what he was going to do. Yeah, Rome occupied. But he’s not talking to the Romans. He’s not telling the Romans to repent. He’s not telling them you need to change your ways. He’s not saying you got corruption.

0:19:14     He’s telling his own people that they can change all this, they can alter the future of Israel if they will start doing it God’s way and take it seriously. But they didn’t want to change. Their religion was prosperous, just like ours is today. We got beautiful buildings everywhere and successful ministries, big ministries, medium ministries, small ministries, churches everywhere. Right. And yet with that, our country is falling apart.

0:19:44     And same thing there. See, they have the beautiful temple, they have synagogues and cities. And the Jews are practicing the best they can because it’s not the people’s fault. They don’t know they’re following along, but it’s the religious system. And the leaders got corrupt. And so it began to bring corruption into the city to where Rome occupied. And they couldn’t get rid of Rome. Rome occupied because of compromised religion.

0:20:11     Right? Because that shouldn’t have happened. Not to Israel. We got great stories of Israel winning great wars, and this one they can’t win because they need to win it on the inside. They need to change and take over their own country again. In our country today, we have clueless people that they still go to church and people still believe in God and things like that, but they lack what was really wrong.

0:20:39     And what was really wrong was the commitment and loyalty. Because today if you hear people saying, we need to repent or we need to change things, it always goes back to, we need to change our lifestyle, like stop being so immoral or so worldly or whatever. And that’s not what this is about at all. This was not anything about that. This was about they needed to change their attitude and their level of loyalty to God. Their commitment.

0:21:06     Their commitment was off. They believed in God, but they weren’t committed to God. They believed in him, but they weren’t loyal. Right? They were loyal to themselves. And they start creating a religion around themselves rather than the one that God gave them. And so disaster came, and it was preventable. So I hope you get my book. If you only knew. The guide to the clueless generation. So you’re not clueless because if the churches just want to keep going the way they are, just like in Jesus day, the synagogue and the temple, and just fight what’s being said.

0:21:42     Fight. God’s calling us to a different kind of church with a different kind of commitment. He’s not trying to send us to hell because we’re so sinful, because he’s got a plan for sin. But what’s the plan for clueless? What’s that plan? There isn’t one. The people just go ahead and remain clueless and just the flood comes and there they go. They float away in the flood. Or Rome comes and they die in Rome, in Jerusalem. The Romans come in Jerusalem and they die.

0:22:14     So get the book. And what you can do the most is get the true story of Palm Sunday. It’s. Yes, the triumphal entry. He is the messiah. He has a right to do what he wants. And what he wanted to do was show disapproval for compromised religion. That doesn’t bear real fruit. Right. It’s got a lot of money changing going on, a lot of fellowship, a lot of home groups, a lot of good stuff going on. It’s not all bad stuff for us, but it misses the point.

0:22:42     Right? We’ve compromised loyalty and we’ve compromised our love for God. And so we can try to become better people, but better people, better people still focused on ourselves is not Christianity. So he comes in as the king. Let’s treat him as the king. And there’s a whole lot more to tell. We’ll see what we do next time. But for now, that’s enough to get you in line of what really was going on. And that’s the untold story of Palm Sunday. Till next time. Bye.