Skip to main content

 

This Sunday is Called Palm Sunday as well as Passion Sunday.
Jesus entered Jerusalem fulfilling the prophecy from the prophet Zechariah (chapter 9 verse 9), "Rejoice, O people of Zion! Shout in triumph, O people of Jerusalem! Look, your king is coming to you.
He is righteous and victorious, yet he is humble, riding on a donkey, riding on a donkey’s colt".
That is only one of over 300 Old Testament prophecies that Jesus Christ fulfilled. God was not doing things in the shadows where no one could see. He was displaying His powerful work of salvation for all to see.
This Sunday is called Passion Sunday because the record of Jesus' trial, crucifixion and death are read from one of the eye-witness accounts from the Gospels.
Here is an amazing thing! As Jesus hangs, nailed to a Roman cross,
He cries out the first words of Psalm 22.
Some say that here, Jesus was showing His “Hebrew-ness”. In any kind of painful struggle, the lament psalms would come to the mind of any Hebrew. It was a God-given way to cry out in real honesty…not pious patter!
The common folk around misunderstood Him thinking He was calling upon Elijah to come and save Him. The Rabbis, Pharisees, Sanhedrin, lawyers and scribes knew better. And at that very moment Jesus made it VERY clear to them who He was and what was going on. They couldn’t run from it.
How deep the Father’s love for even the prodigals who had stubbornly refused to “come to their senses” and turn again toward home. Luke records in Luke 23:48 that after Jesus died, when the people there saw what happened, they went home beating their breast in deep sorrow because they SAW!
Here is why the remorse: Remez. That’s right, remez! It so happens that Rabbis, when discussing theological matters would speak to each other in what was called: remez. The word in Hebrew means “hinting”.
If, as a Rabbi, I wanted to give you my thoughts on a doctrinal issue, I’d use a phrase, a sentence or sometimes just a specific word of Holy Scripture and in the mind of the other Rabbis in the conversation, a whole body of the biblical text would come to mind. I would thus make my point clear from the text I had used to answer.
Rabbis memorized the Old Testament backwards and forwards. The test they were given to establish themselves as Rabbis was to give them a short passage of the Old Testament and they had to quote massive passages before and after the passage in question.
The Chief Priests and rulers were there wagging their heads at Jesus and mocking Him, and He quotes the first verse of Psalm 22. All of the following was brought to the forefront of their memories in blazing color.
Psalm 22 uses these images:
A worm…not a snake that strikes back (Jesus never fought back)
Scorned and despised by all
Sneered at and mocked
Wagging their heads
Enemies surround me with no way out
Life (blood) is poured out like water
Bones are all out of joint
Strength dried up
Tongue stuck to roof of my mouth
Dogs surround me (Gentile Roman soldiers)
Pierced my hands and feet
Divide my clothes and gamble for my clothes
His righteous acts will be told to those not yet born. They will hear about everything He has done!
Isn’t that amazing! All of Psalm 22 was immediately called to mind when Jesus cried out.
The very things happening before them, their actions, the very words coming out of their mouths were recorded centuries before they happened. Crucifixion was not even a means of execution when David wrote this Psalm.
God wanted it to be clear. He wants to make it clear to us and the world around us.
May be an image of 9 people and people standing
0
People reached
0
Engagements
–
Distribution score
Boost post
Like
Comment
Share

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY Martin Luther said that the human heart is an idol factory. The truth is that we were created to know and live by the gracious rule of and in the Presence of God who created us. Our peace, our understanding of meaning and purpose can only be truly grounded in God who created us for that meaning and purpose. The rebellion of Adam and Eve, their decision to do the opposite of what God said would make for life, resulted in spiritual and ultimately physical death. They chose to believe they needed something more than what God had provided. Their doomed attempt to try and live life without reference to God as the ground of meaning and purpose did not make life fuller, but emptied it. They wanted to decide what was good and what was evil without God and the disintegration of human life was the consequence. Rather than living in the Presence of God and by the gracious rule of God all around them, they turned from wholeness to brokenness, from fulfilment to scarc...
Post a Comment
Read more
  TIMING Years ago, I head an old preacher say, “The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.” That statement is an offense to the culture being worshipped world-wide today. There is a lust for the immediate, as a line from an old movie stated, “Immediate gratification takes too long!” We want faster internet, immediate responses to our texts, mobile orders at the ready when we walk into Starbucks. What we want, we demand to have NOW. We are masters at justifying ourselves. “Well, we’re engaged already and we’re going to get married anyway, so what’s wrong with us living together and being sexually intimate now?” God’s timing in human relationship is not arbitrary, it is protective and covering. Sad to say, even some who call themselves followers of Jesus Christ choose to justify their living in sexual sin now, because they promise that they will one day get married. The context where sexual intimacy finds its true meaning and purpose is in the covenant of marriage. ...
Post a Comment
Read more
  WORKING AGAINST ALL HUMANITY 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 “They fail to please God and WORK AGAINST ALL HUMANITY   as they try to keep us from preaching the Good News of salvation to the Gentiles. By doing this, they continue to pile up their sins.” WOW! What a startling statement! St. Paul is making it crystal clear that those who oppose and work to prevent the proclamation of the Gospel are actually “working against ALL HUMANITY.” Why would he write that? It is because the only means of the restoration, reclamation and salvation of humanity is what God has done for all people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the essence of the Gospel: Jesus Christ. To oppose and try to silence the presentation of the Gospel is to work against the reclamation of all humanity. Who would want to work against ALL humanity? Satan is the name by which he is known. He hates ALL humanity because every human being still bears the image of God, albeit that ima...
Post a Comment
Read more