2 Samuel 7; Matthew 21:1-11
Our scripture will be Matthew
21. Speaking of Jesus’ triumphal
entry, this pairs well with 2 Samuel 7. Of course, King David, King
Solomon, and all the kings after would only point and they would
show the great need for a righteous king. Perhaps you’ve been reading
through Kings and Chronicles and king after king did what
was evil in the sight of God. But ultimately, in Jesus Christ,
we find the righteous one who pleased God in all his works
and in all his ways. Before we read God’s word, let’s
ask for God’s help and blessing. Pray with me. Our Lord and God,
through your beloved Son, you call those blessed to hear your
word. And so how fitting it would be,
eternal and merciful Father, for us to with joyful hearts,
honor you and give thanks to you and praise you, that you
have treated us weak creatures with such kindness and such fatherly
care, and that you would speak with us concerning the greatest
and highest matters, which are eternal life and salvation. Lord, we ask that you would bless
those who hear the word of God and keep it. We ask this now
in Christ, the living word, in his name we pray, amen. hear
God’s word from Matthew chapter 21. Now, when they drew near
to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, Jesus
sent two disciples saying, go into the village in front of
you and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt
with her. Untie them and bring them to
me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say the Lord needs
them. and he will send them at once.
This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet saying,
say to the daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming to
you, humble and mounted on a donkey and on a colt, the foal of a
beast of burden. The disciples went and did just
as Jesus had directed them. They brought the donkey and the
colt and put on them their cloaks. And he sat on them. Most of the
crowd spread their cloaks on the road and others cut branches
from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that
went before him and followed him were shouting, Hosanna to
the son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the
name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. And when
he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up saying, who
is this? And the crowds said, this is
the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee. Amen. God’s great
and mighty word. A couple Thursday nights ago,
I was standing in the grocery store line at Harris Teeter.
It was the night of the eve of the storm when everyone goes
out to buy their milk and their bread. Still haven’t figured
out why. Maybe they’re making French toast.
But then they need eggs. And then what do you do 24 hours
later when it warms back up? What do you do with all that
milk and bread? I don’t know. I guess you feed the birds. But standing
in the line at the grocery, you know, you read the magazine headlines. There’s the cooking magazines.
You know, there’s the Woman’s Day magazines. There’s the newsy
ones. And then, of course, there’s
the whatever they are, the tabloids. And on the face of the tabloids
are always the royals. Always the Royals, and it’s usually
nowadays Meghan and Harry. Thought they wanted out of the
limelight, but somehow they always get out there and their picture
gets made. Well, looking at the Royals reminded
me my whole life, my whole life has been marked. You can mark seasons and changes
of life by all the years. I remember summer of 1981, my
mother watching Princess Diana marry Prince Charles. What a big event that was. Only
four years old, but I remember that well. And then in the summer
of 1997, I think I was walking back into my dorm late one night
and the news came that Diana had died in an automobile wreck
in Paris. And then of course, spring 2011
was a happy event. We saw The heir apparent to the throne,
maybe then second in line after his father, but we saw William
marry Catherine. And then spring of 2019, we had
the joy, or perhaps you skipped it as I did, the wedding of,
was it Harry and Meghan. And then a couple of years later,
Prince Philip dies. And then a couple of years ago
now, Queen Elizabeth, who reigned for 70 years, died. That’s my
whole life. the monarchy on the headlines,
on the front of the magazines in the grocery store. And in
the last year or so, we’ve heard the sad news of the king and
the princess having cancer battles. And you compare that with the
pettiness of the son and his wife, They’ve come to the United
States to pull back on their public life, though they seem
to have a very public life. In fact, I think one of them
was out there helping put out the fires in California. If it
wasn’t for her, where would we be? But why the interest? Why the endless supply of tidbits? The royals did this, the royals
did that. Sometimes we want to say, who
cares? Who cares? But apparently a lot of people
do. Apparently it sells a lot of magazines and it captures
people’s attention to the television channels. But behind the institution
of the monarchy, behind the pomp and the circumstance of the royals,
these are just people. These are just flesh and blood
people who have warts and they have blood in their veins and
they do like the rest of us, they put their pants on one leg
at a time. But we are fascinated with them,
even though they are humans full of human faults. And it’s certainly
true, isn’t it, in the line of Jesus? Perhaps over Christmas,
you read the genealogies found in Matthew and Luke. Maybe at
a point in time, you’ve read those long genealogies of the
people who returned from exile, from Babylon to rebuild Judah
and Jerusalem. Uh, you, you see the names and
you connect them to the Bible stories. And you remember that
the line of Jesus, the Royal line of Jesus would have sold
just as many magazines had they the printing press, it would
have filled the internet had they had that technology, uh,
the life of the people in the line of David through the line
of King Jesus were certainly tabloid worthy. Here’s a few
headlines. Abraham was an old childless
pagan and Ur of the Chaldeans. And God promised to this old
man, if you go and you live in this land, I will make your offspring
outnumber the sand on the seashore. Well, eventually he has Isaac
and his wife bears two wrestling cheaters. Remember Jacob and
Esau in the womb, they come out one grasping the heel of the
other. And then Jacob has all those
children, those 12 boys, the sibling rivalry. Remember, they
sold Joseph, the baby brother, the dreamer. They sold him to
the caravans of Midianites who were making their way to Egypt.
And he was sold to the house of Potiphar. We know the rest
of the story and how God used him. I’m not sure when National
Sibling Day is. I think every day is a national
holiday of sorts. But every year on National Sibling Day, my sister
sends a picture to my brother and me of Joseph looking up from
the pit at his brothers. But that was the princely line
of King Jesus. But then there’s Joseph. After
escaping the hands of Potiphar’s wife, spending 15 years or so
in an Egyptian prison, he interprets by God’s power the dreams of
the Pharaoh and he prepares Egypt and all the land, including the
land of Canaan. He prepares seven years of good
and stores food for those seven years of famine. And from his
12 brothers, 11 of them, they come and they serve as shepherds
in the land of Goshen on the edge of Egypt. And their 70,
70 offspring from Abraham turned
into a couple million. And that couple million greatly
feared Pharaoh, where you remember, he said to the midwives, if it’s
a boy, they must be cast in to the Nile. And so these 70 grow
and grow and grow, these shepherds, these outcasts, and God hears
their cries. He rescues and redeems them.
And I love that word that was used in 2 Samuel. It’s also found
in the book of Isaiah. God planted them in the promised
land. Remember how in our studies in
Isaiah on Sunday nights that began last spring, we looked
at how God said, took Israel, and I planted them like a choice
vine. I gave them the best hill. I dug it up. I prepared its soil. I tossed out all the rocks. And
I didn’t go to the Walmart nursery. Sorry if you get your plants
there. I didn’t even go to the Lowe’s or Home Depot nursery. No, we
went to the good one up in a big city. And he says, I bought the
best grape vines I could plant. And I planted them on this hillside
where they had sun and they had rain and they had tending. And
what did I get? I built a wall. I built a vat
and I expected a good wine, but instead I got wild grapes. That’s
what God says of Israel. But God planted his people in
the promised land. Moses led them out of Egypt. Joshua led them into the promised
land. The elders after Joshua led the
people in righteousness. But then there was that ugly
stretch. Remember again, thinking of the tabloids, the grocery
store headlines of the line of Jesus. The people did what was
right in their own eyes. They did what was evil in God’s
sight. And so he would raise up judges to rescue and to redeem
them. And they would get back into
another cycle, another period of wickedness. And another judge,
12 sets of judges would rescue and redeem Israel until finally
they said, we want a King. Well, couched in the story of
all the judges, couched in that story of all the wickedness.
There is a story of a famine in Bethlehem and a family, a
husband and wife and their sons escape to Moab where the boys
marry Moabites. You know, it is the story of
Ruth. You know, there’s death and Naomi and her two daughters-in-law
are the only ones left. And Naomi hears that God has
been good. He’s visited the people of Bethlehem. And so they’re
going to return and live again in the promised land. And he
says to these daughters-in-laws, you stay here with your families.
This is your homeland. And one of them says, okay, that’s
fine. That’s great. But what does Ruth say? Where you go,
I will go. And where you lodge, I will lodge. And so Ruth and
Naomi go back to the promised land, back to Bethlehem. And
you know, the story of how Boaz, is her kinsman, Redeemer. And
then at the end of the book of Ruth, we are told that Ruth is
the grandmother of King David. Boaz fathered Obed and Obed fathered
Jesse. And of course, we know Jesse
to be the father of the eight boys, David being the youngest. And so out of the chaos of sin
riddled Israel in the promised land, they forgot to rid the
land of all the ites, all the wicked ones. So all the chaos
of the judges, there’s sin and there’s crying out for deliverance
and there’s judges. These enemies, because Israel
forgot God’s command to clean them out. Well, there’s the glimmer
of hope in Jesse and David, ultimately. Remember how it worked out. Israel
wanted a king and Samuel got upset. God says to Samuel, don’t
you be upset. It’s me they’re rejecting. Sometimes
we might think Israel was never supposed to have a king. They
just begged for one because they wanted to be like all the other
nations. But think back to Deuteronomy 17, where God put it right in
the Mosaic law. One day you will have a king.
And you’ll want this King to remember the book of the law,
live by the book of the law, not get too many horses, not
get too much silver and gold and not take more than the one
wife. Well, we know the rest of the
story, don’t we? They all love their gold. They all love their
silver. They all love their wives and their concubines and their
horses and their chariots. In fact, David’s downfall was
taking a census of his fighting men. Solomon’s downfall was the
700 Wives and 300 concubines, or have I got that backwards,
or does it even matter? Boy, no tabloid in the grocery
store has ever topped that one, has it? I mean, poor Prince Charles
and his brother to mention, boy. Boy, that brings up all kinds
of issues, doesn’t it? Well, God says, you want a king? I’ll give you one. And so who
do they pick? They pick the tall, good looking guy. They pick Saul. And Saul was a Benjamite. He
was not from the tribe of Judah. Now think way back into the end
of Genesis where Jacob, old man Jacob is blessing Joseph’s boys. That was Ephraim and Manasseh.
And remember how he crosses his hands and he blesses the younger
over the older. And Joseph says, no father, no
father. That’s not how it works. And
he says, but yes, this is how it will be. And then he issues
blessings and curses to his boys. I remember Simeon, you know,
cause Simeon and I forget which brother it was. They, they killed
all those boys that wanted to marry their sister. I mean, that
makes some tabloids, doesn’t it? And then there was Reuben.
You know, he slept with one of his father’s concubines. And
so he wasn’t blessed. Who did God bless? He blessed
Judah the least. And at the end of Genesis, it
says, blessed is Judah from him the scepter won’t depart. So
we get Saul. They picked a king. He was tall
and good looking and, you know, probably went on a platform of
hope and change. You’ve forgotten about that,
haven’t you? Well, Saul didn’t work out. God took his spirit
from Saul. And he told Samuel, go see Jesse,
have a sacrifice and invite Jesse. And so Jesse comes and Saul starts
to pick out a king and boy, number eight’s out there, boy, number
seven, boy, number six, boy, number five, boy, number four,
three, two. They’re all tall, good looking and the ones you
would pick, right? They got the white teeth, the
winning smile. you know, full head of hair, all the things,
you know, they played full back and, you know, went to army or
citadel or something. These are the guys you want to
be king. And Samuel says, no, no, no. God looks at the heart.
Y’all are looking at the outside. Is there another boy? Well, there’s
David and David’s the little ruddy one, right? He plays his
lute as he’s following the sheep around the promised land. And
so here he comes, that’s the one. And so Saul or Samuel anointed
him with the oil. And later, 2 Samuel chapter seven,
when David finally gets to be king, he’s anointed, but it takes
a while. He’s got to fight off the house of Saul. He’s got to
fight off the house of all Saul’s family until he can finally be
established as king. David says in 2 Samuel chapter
seven, remember how I brought you. from the pasture to make
you a prince over my people. Doesn’t that tell you something
of the kind of king God wants? He wants a shepherd. He wants
someone who can fight enemies, someone who can sing praise to
God. He wants a man after his own
heart. And so after all this rigamarole,
all the kids with concubines and all the birthright stealing
and all the wrestling with angels and working seven years for the
wrong wife and seven years for the right one. having to face
Esau after he snatched his birthright some years later, after selling
a brother into slavery and escaping Potiphar’s house and Potiphar’s
wife, living in prison, going through a famine. Finally, here’s
King David. And what does God promise to
him? Let me give you the big picture and then some details.
Basically, what God is promising David is through you, through
you, the King, and through your kingdom, Israel, and through
your throne, which will have successive sons sitting on it,
you will make visible in the land of Israel, what is invisible
to every human eye. Or to say it another way, you
will show in a small way, the realities of heaven on earth.
Now that was the kingdom of Israel, the theocracy that God ruled
people. And we say the very same thing
today, that the job of the church is to make manifest, to make
known, to make visible the invisible realities of heaven. And so what does God tell David
that he will give him as a covenant? He says, I will be with you.
So when you go out to war, you’ll have me, my strong hand, my mighty
arm, my outstretched hand will be with you. I will give you
a name, King David. Everybody knows David. We kind
of forgotten Saul, haven’t we? I’ll give you a name. I’ll give
you rest. During the height of King David’s
reign, kingship, Israel’s borders stretched as far as they ever
could. And finally, 500 years after the original conquest into
the promised land, David finally did what Israel failed to do,
and that was defeat all the Hites. The Philistines should have been
dealt with years ago, centuries ago. But remember, David was
fighting with Goliath. He was fighting with the Philistines.
So God says, I’ll be with you. I’ll give you a name. I’ll give
you rest. And David says, maybe in the moment of inspiration,
here I live in a palace. He had finally kicked the Jebusites
out of Jebus and made it Jerusalem, the city of David, Zion, the
great hilltop fortress. And he had built a house. Hiram,
the king of Tyre, sent all this wonderful cedar. David builds
a glorious house. And he’s sitting in his house
one day and says to himself, why do I live in a house of cedar?
And God dwells above the chair of him on the ark in the tent.
that was made five centuries ago in the wilderness. Why shouldn’t
I build God a house? And that’s when David is told
by Nathan, if that’s in your heart, do the thing. But God
came to Nathan in the night and said, not David, it’ll be Solomon. And somewhere else it says that
David had too much blood on his hands. But God says, I love David
that you want to build me a house. And he’s meaning a temple. But
he says, I want to build you a house. And he’s not meaning
a palace. He’s already got that. A house
is in a dynasty. A house is in a kingdom and a
kingship that will last forever. And so eventually the house,
the temple does get built by Solomon, but the beginnings,
of David’s kingdom, of Jesus’ kingdom show up. And so remember that in God’s
covenant promise to be with David, to give him a name, to give him
a kingship, to give him a throne, to give him a dynasty, to give
him the desires of his heart. This is all to make the realities
of heaven visible on earth. I think sometimes, and it comes
with our obsession with the royals, We love the pomp and the circumstance.
We love the ceremonies and the rituals. We love the weddings.
We love the funerals. I think we even love the crazy
stuff. But with David, he was supposed
to live in a faithful way, obedient to the law, and to show not just
the people of Israel what a righteous king looked like, but to show
the nations all around who looked in what a righteous king would
look like. And so the kingship and the kingdom
and Jerusalem and the palace, the promised land, the stretched
out borders, the peace, the victories in war, were all supposed to
point to the coming of Jesus, who would subdue a people to
himself and gather them to himself in spirit and truth through faith
in him. And he would eventually bring them into the royal city,
not the one on earth, but the one in heaven. And so David,
as God’s royal representative, point to the greater son, Jesus.
We’ve just gotten through Christmas. We’ve just gotten through singing,
Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. Once in Royal David City, a little
town of Bethlehem, we’ve read the genealogies and all the Christmas
passages. We just sang a poem, Sunday hymn
or two. And we realized that in Jesus,
all the promises of God to David, All the promises of God of kingship
and kingdom and great name and blessings come to fulfillment
and fruition in Jesus. But go back a few centuries before
Jesus, 500 years or so after David and 500 or so years before
Jesus, there’s the exile where Jeremiah writes in his lamentation,
the city is burned. The temple is destroyed stone
upon stone and rubble and the smoke rising from the city, perhaps
seeing Rembrandts, Jeremiah, where he’s lamenting over the
burning and the destruction of the great city of God, the temple
of God, the palace of King David. And why was that done? Was that the end of God’s promise
to David? No, there’s always the reality
in heaven isn’t there? There’s always the throne in
heaven. There’s always the king on the throne. There’s always
that reality. But sometimes because we are
unfaithful or the king is unfaithful, the church or Israel in its day
did not adequately or faithfully represent the reality of heaven
on earth. Our confession of faith says
of the church that in some ages and stages, the church looks
more or less pure. The church looks more or less
like God. instituted it to be. And so there
are times in the kingship, there are times in the church where
because of our unfaithfulness, we are a poor witness. Now, at the height of David’s
kingship, at the height of Solomon’s kingship, things were pretty
good. I mean, you had the Queen of Sheba coming and visiting
and looking in. You had kings and all kinds of
dignitaries from all over the world coming. And we forget,
don’t we, that the same thing happens at the cradle in Bethlehem. The wise men come from the east
and see this new born king. But after David, after Solomon
and the kingdom split because of their sin, God left a remnant,
Judah and Jerusalem. And you read and read and read
a bunch of kings. They did what was evil in the sight of God.
They lifted their hearts up to idols. They worshiped at the
high places. They did not tear down the towers
and the the idols and all those sorts of things. And every once
in a while, a Josiah pops up, you know, they find the book
of the law. It’s read to him by the priest. There’s weeping,
there’s sackcloth, there’s ashes, there’s the tearing of the robes.
And then what does that King do? He tells the priest and the
Levites, he says, do this thing right. And so Israel has a little
reformation and then it drops again. But in the exile, The
people really suffered for disobedient kings because they got taken
out of the land. The city, the temple, the palace, everything
was destroyed and they were hauled off to a foreign land. And their
lament was this, as they hung their harps by the river in Babylon,
how can we sing the songs of Zion that our captors taunt us
to sing when we are away from Jerusalem? This was a big chastening. This was a big act of discipline. But it’s preparing the people
for Jesus. It’s preparing the people for a faithful king. It’s
preparing the people for a righteous king. It’s preparing the people
for the seed of Eve, the seed of Abraham. It’s preparing people
for Jesus, the righteous one who will obey God’s law perfectly. He will usher in a kingdom of
righteousness. He will be a covenant keeper.
He’ll be a perfect and faithful mediator. But most importantly,
he will be the king. that through the preaching of
the words subdues us to himself. You know, in American evangelicalism,
the last 150, 200 years, you know, we’ve sung softly and tenderly,
haven’t we? To use a phrase. And we act as
if God gives an invitation. But kings don’t say pretty please
with sugar on top, do they? And I love how the shorter catechism
says that Jesus, as King, subdues us to himself. And perhaps you
think back to when you were converted. And like Saul, you said, Lord,
what shall I do? And perhaps like the disciples,
when some are scattering away and Jesus says, you want to go
too, you’ve said in your heart, where else would I go. It is Jesus and Jesus alone that
offers and makes available eternal life. And when he says repent,
that’s with an exclamation point. When he says repent, it is a
command. It’s remember what commands are. That’s like when your mom opens
the back door and hollers dinner, that means get in the house,
get washed, get to the table. The King makes commands. He does
not say pretty pleased with sugar on top. And he doesn’t sing 97,000
verses wooing you. He says, Lazarus, And the dead rise, the dead come
forth out of the grave. And so Jesus as King subdues
us to himself. And if you take a peek at the
larger catechism on those same questions we read today, it speaks
of him as King, how he rules his people now through the laws
of the scripture, through the officers of the church, through
the censures of the church, when we go astray, through his saving
grace, through his offer of rewards for obedience and crowns in heaven,
through his correction and his chastening in this life. Sounds
like the words he gave to David, doesn’t it? He preserves us. He supports us. He restrains
all his and all our enemies. And his powerful sovereign kingship
gives us all things necessary for life and for salvation. This is the greater King David. This is the greater son. This
is the greater one who would come and would conquer. Think
of this. Tomorrow, we’ll see a little
pomp and circumstance. You’ll be in the grocery store
and read the headlines of what the royals do next. Probably
in my lifetime, I’ll see Prince William become King William and
all the rest. We need to remember that in this
life, though, we may not have good rulers or good stretches.
of national life. We need to remember God’s mercy
and we need to remember life is always dependent on Jesus
Christ. We should be thankful that our
salvation is not tied to faltering yet faithful Abraham. We should
be grateful that our salvation is not tied to mighty Moses.
who didn’t finish well. We should be grateful that our
salvation is not tied to David, though he was a man after God’s
own heart. He muddled it up, didn’t he?
We should be thankful, especially that our salvation is not up
to us. Our salvation is up to the sovereign grace of God and
his never stopping love. The promise of the seed to Eve,
the promise of offspring to Abraham, the genealogy that passes on
through David shows us that nothing will stop God from saving his
people. Not darkness, not death, not
exile. Not the rod of chastisement and
not even the cross. They put Jesus on the cross,
but it was the will of God for our salvation. And so I pray
that today your faith is strengthened in King Jesus, but perhaps you
have not yet listened to his voice, his command and come to
him and found rest. I pray that that would be so
as well. Let’s go to God now in prayer.
Lord, you know just what we need because you are sovereign. You
give us just what we need because you’re powerful. You do not hold
any good from us because you are perfect love. And so we ask
that you would write these eternal truths on every one of our hearts,
that we would bow our knee to King Jesus. And that everything
you command, we would do. Everything that you voice, we’d
be willing to do because you’ve put a new spirit in us. We thank
you for King David and for Solomon and all who followed, even the
good ones. But we thank you most of all
for King Jesus, who alone can save us. And so hear our prayer
as we make it in Jesus’ great and mighty name. Amen. We want
to respond to God’s gracious provision by singing 668, who
trust in God a strong abode. Let’s stand to sing.