“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 heaven!”
Mark 11:9-10
That is what the people shouted when Jesus entered Jerusalem, humbly, riding on a donkey.
They were joyful, thinking he had come to set up an earthly kingdom. They thought he was going to kick out those pesky Romans and declare Himself king right there.
But He had something else in view - He came to die. He suffered the death we deserved as sinners who have rebelled against a holy God.
Jesus is God, and death can't hold Him - He rose again, victorious over death forever! He came to save the souls of all those people who would repent and believe in Him, all down through the ages.
Palm Sunday WAS a happy day. It WAS the beginning of His Kingdom, and His return is coming, when He will reign on the earth as King of kings forevermore.
But that first Palm Sunday? They missed it.
"It should have been evident to everybody that His Kingdom was not of this world. But they were so hysterical that they never got the point of the donkey.
You know, I hate to say it, but so many people through history have been just as mistaken as the mistaken multitude. Just like they thought Jesus was nothing more than a social reformer, there are people today who think the same thing. They look at Jesus as sort of a patriot, a reactionary, a revolutionary, somebody who has got a social message to proclaim, and they forget that Jesus didn’t come to remove poverty from the world...If you think that Jesus came into the world just to heal the social institutions, you’ve missed the point...
His kingdom is not an earthly kingdom, His kingdom is not a kingdom of physical power, His kingdom is a kingdom of spiritual reality; He rules the hearts of men."
-John Macarthur, The World's Rejection Of The King
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