From the triumphal entry into Jerusalem and onwards through Gethsemane towards a yet greater triumphal return: Palm Sunday April 13th 2025

We are joining with Christians from around the world today to celebrate Jesus’ triumphal arrival at the feast of the Passover, when He entered into Jerusalem riding on a colt, and being cheered by enthusiastic crowds. It was such an important event that it features in all four gospels, and it marks the start of what is known as ‘Holy Week. This morning I will be stopping off to explore some major considerations that arise from these momentous eight days, that were a season of intense spiritual activity when God was, as it were, speeding everything up – and Jesus packed a very great deal into His final week on earth, leading up to the climax and consummation of His mission which was to die on the cross and so bring about the salvation of countless millions through His sacrificial death on the cross. And this triumphal entry into Jerusalem is itself a forerunner of His yet greater entry into Jerusalem when He returns to reign on Earth.
The week begins in a rather strange way, with Jesus telling two of His disciples to go to a village that lay on their road to Jerusalem, and to find a donkey that was tied up there, with her young colt beside her and bring them to Him, explaining to their owners that the Lord needed to borrow them, and would return them soon.

Being out and about in the villages with Jesus healing the sick and seeing miracles was one thing, but dodging donkey droppings was something else! But by this time his disciples had grown used to obeying Jesus when He told them to do odd things, like being sent to catch a fish in order to find the money they needed to satisfy the demands of the Sea of Tiberias Inland Revenue Service. We are also used to seeing Jesus seeing and knowing things that He could not have known by purely ‘natural’ means a. He was operating in what we might call a supernatural realm but which for Him – and indeed as it can be for many of us today too – is meant to be part of the way we seek to lead naturally supernatural and supernaturally natural lives. Jesus had known in His spirit that this was the right time to go up to Jerusalem, and now He knew that the time had come to fulfil Zechariah’s enigmatic prophecy that had been given hundreds of years earlier, about Israel’s king coming to Jerusalem not on a powerful white charger but on a colt. Just to remind ourselves of those words from Zechariah 9:9, which John quotes in his gospel:

Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O Daughter of Jerusalem! See, Behold, your King comes to you, righteous and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zech 9:9)

If the disciples were even remotely aware of that prophecy, they certainly would have had no idea that Jesus was about to fulfil it. They had their work cut out bringing a donkey a frisky untamed colt to Jesus. People often picture Jesus riding a gentle white donkey, but this would have been a Syrian ass, a tricky proposition at the best of times, but to risk taking on an unsaddled unbroken-in young creature in the midst of an excited crowd and the noise of the city is astonishingly daring – not to mention a great feat of horsemanship, even though its mother was there to reassure and chaperone it.

But God never speaks lightly, there is always a reason for the things He asks us to do, and they soon they found themselves embarked on the adventure of a lifetime, entering Jerusalem to the accompaniment of great cheering crowd, who had suddenly materialised, as they do in gregarious Middle Eastern societies when rumour spreads that something unusual is happening.

And really unusual things had been happening. Jesus had recently raised Lazarus from the dead, and people were brimming over with curiosity to see this young miracle worker who appeared to have authority even over death itself. It was the talk of the town. But the people who rushed to greet Him weren’t the dignitaries of the day, but for the most part just ordinary people, including many women and children, for these had always been the ones who had heard Jesus gladly, and received His words into their hearts.

It is not that the Lord does not love those who dwell in penthouses, palaces, and academic ivory towers, but people in such places rely so readily on their own resources and trust so much in their own judgement. Intellectual pride, along with the quest for worldly status make it hard for people to entrust themselves fully to the Lord: it’s a battle that has to be fought and won, for God has designed us to be branches in the Vine, which is Christ, not to live independently of the vine.

Who and what we put our trust in shapes our character and ultimately determines our eternal state. But these people knew that Jesus loved and served them, and taught and healed with an unheard-of authority, and that if He was entering Jerusalem in this fashion now on a young donkey, then He must have some great purpose in mind. And so they waved palm leaves as a symbol of and joy, and shouted,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

And they spread their cloaks on the ground before Him, rather like Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have done for Queen Elizabeth 1st to protect her from the mud, and explained to less well-informed bystanders that this was ‘Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth up in Galilee.’ Too bad if He did not fit some people’s expectations of what a ruler of a kingdom should look like, coming not in a stretch limousine but, in our terminology, more like a six-foot man riding a kid’s mini bike!

You see, everything about Jesus’ offer to people leaves room for us to make our own response of faith, whether to offer Him the central place in our hearts, or to go on serving our own interests. Jesus’ teaching, and the miracles He had performed had awakened and revived centuries-old messianic hopes, but people could only imagine His kingdom in purely physical terms, and so they hoped that this time Jesus would do what He had hitherto steadfastly refused to do: take matters into His own hands and allow them to crown Him king so that He could accomplish what they saw as being the all-important work of turfing out the Roman occupation force. As we will be seeing, it was so important that He did not fall in with their wishes, for God had something infinitely greater and more important in mind than physically overthrowing Rome.
God’s revelation of Himself comes piece by piece and stage by stage, and, for most of us, only gradually dawns on us. Although it appeared to be a lavish way to celebrate the purely Jewish feast of the Passover, Jesus knew that He was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophesy that God would send an anointed Suffering Servant to make atonement for their sins, (at-one-ment!) and make Israel a light to the Gentiles, because the salvation that God was offering up the world was too great a thing to keep within Israel’s borders. (Is .53 and 49:5-7)

All this was possible on this day because Jesus had what we would call a word of knowledge to go and find a donkey and its colt. When Jesus said in John 5:19 that He only did what He saw His Father doing, as I shared in a talk of that name recently, that is our call too: and it is good to ask the Lord that we may grow in this same ability to sense things even at a distance.

A few days later, Jesus would give two of the disciples another commission to go and meet a man who was carrying a pitcher of water. That too, like leading a donkey, was normally a task reserved for women or children, so the man would have stood out to them. It was an important word, too, because the disciples were told to follow that man to the house where they could share the Passover Feast together in the Upper Room, free from being interrupted by the crowds. (Lk. 22:10-14)

The Lord does not always speak as clearly as that, but He does love to speak to His children, and He delights to see us attempting to recognise His voice and to follow His leading. I have a friend just coming back from a retreat at the moment on Iona, where St Columba set up his highly influential missionary community back in the days of the Celtic church. Columba was so in tune with the Lord that he knew in his spirit when something urgent was happening back in Ireland in his home monastery. He used to ring the bell to gather the monks together and they would pray until the burden lifted and they sensed that God had dealt with whatever need or danger it was that He had alerted them to.

May we grow in such alertness, to sense when people are in distress, or in need of prayer, whether or not these people are known to us personally or not. They won’t necessarily mention the matter to us, so it’s important that we keep our spiritual radar switched on – and, if we are in a position to contact them, when someone or some situation comes particularly to mind that we follow up on this prompting, and say something along the lines of, ‘The Lord has been laying you on my heart; is there something special going on that I can pray for?’

This is all part of what it means to be living in close touch with the King of the Kingdom. May the Lord quicken the desire for such a close relationship with Himself so that we willingly respond with all our heart when He says, “Come! You who are thirsty, come and drink.” (Jn 7:37-8) This is an invitation with an RSVP attached to it. Jesus does not force Himself on people. He wants to be gracious to us, but He waits to be asked. But now is the time to respond, now is the day of salvation.

Jesus, whose eternal home is with his Father in Heaven, and whose mind and power is incomparably greater than anything we can even remotely imagine, whose hands flung stars into space, as Graham Kendrick so memorably put it in one of his songs, totally understood that He had come to earth to lay His life down and to die for the sake of it. He laid aside His majesty and entered the world as a humble baby, ready to serve and offer friendship and fellowship with anyone who, whether swiftly or as the result of a prolonged inner battles, overcome their pride, and will lift their heart to Him and make Him their Lord. Those who do so are so grateful to discover that the God of gods has time for them! (Matt. 12:37)

But most of the superficially respectable religious leaders were not prepared to humble themselves. So far as they were concerned, a man who stooped to eat with tax collectors and who welcomed prostitutes amongst His followers could not possibly be sent by God – and they hated the adulation that was coming His way. Stopping their ears against these shouts of hosanna they told Jesus very firmly to rebuke His disciples and to shut them up.

In all this, God was exposing and amplifying what was in the hearts of all the people we see in the course of holy week. People as different in character as well as role as Simon Peter, Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate and his wife, Herod, and the centurion who witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion less than a week after his triumphal entry all responded in different ways as they did in the course of that week – and those choices in many cases confirmed their eternal fate.

How important it is to live in the light of eternal realities, for sooner or later, what is in our hearts will be exposed; whether our hunger and desire for God, our lust for power and influence, our desire to opt out of commitments – our courage (or lack of it) to own the name of Jesus, or even our deceitfulness and wickedness – all will be exposed. As Jesus tells us, there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, and nothing hidden that will not be made known. What you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the housetops. And that is why He went on, ‘I tell you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more but I will show you whom you should fear: Fear the One who, after you have been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear Him!’

There’s never a good time to put things off with regard to our spiritual standing, for we will all stand before the judgement seat of Christ – and we never know when our time may come. It’s so good to bring as much of ourselves as we can to as much of God as we understand, and trust Him to make up the difference. He has promised to never turn away those who turn to Him.

Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and cleanses the temple

Luke tells us that one day in this momentous week as Jesus came closer to Jerusalem and saw the city ahead, He began to weep. (Lk. 19:41)

I had the privilege of visiting Jerusalem a few years ago, and when I walked down from the Mount of Olives and I took a short detour to the Dominus Flevit Church, which is where Jesus is said to have looked out over the city and wept as He foresaw its coming destruction in his spirit. You see, the events of Holy Week were not only concerned with the hearts of the people I mentioned just now: they also touched God’s own heart.

I also had the privilege of spending a night in a Christian hostel on the Via Doloroso, which Jesus walked on His way to the cross. That was when Jesus told bystanders to weep because the consequences of not heeding Hod’s hour of visitation would be so dire for the city, because they had rejected His message and spurned the inner peace that He would have loved to have given them. (Luke 19:41-44) There was nothing He could do now to save Jerusalem from its fate, but He could save His own followers, and He gave them clear instructions to flee the city when they saw certain warning signs. And so it proved to be. When General Titus put the city to the sword in AD 70, no Christians were amongst the thousands slaughtered. But all the followers of the movement that Jesus had refused to participate in to throw off the Roman yoke perished, and with it Jewish occupancy of the Holy Land for nigh on two thousand years.

And Jesus. Back in 1980, when I had been working for a few years as an evangelist with a church in Oxford, when I had an experience which changed my life in which I came to understand this concept of the Lord Himself grieving over the state of both church and nation in an entirely new way. In a short space of time it led to an entirely new different emphasis in my ministry as I began to understand the spiritual danger that we are in in an entirely new way. I was already committed to praying for the nation, but this took the burden from head to heart: twelve inches or twelve miles.

And I had a new message to preach concerning the urgency of our times and to round up more prayer for national and international situations, and to recognise that our repentance means a lot to God. It almost felt like preaching bad news, but because I was emphasising the need to focus on Him, He went to great lengths to bless, and to raise up many intercessors for His Kingdom. People’s hearts were being touched, and doors opened up all over the place to share this message.

We called the ministry team that sprung up in the wake of this MFOT: A Message for our Times, and we shared this message far and wide, including here in Malvern, where the Lord made it possible for us to have the use of the Winter Gardens for week-long conferences three years running free of charge in August back in the mid-1980s. We made worship and prayer as well as teaching our focus, working on the basis that if we would do our best to focus on what was on God’s heart, He would take care of our needs. He really did! Some of you will have attended some of these meetings. God’s presence was very strong.

Seeking God seriously involves recognising things that are not pleasing to Him. A few days later, in an open declaration of war against Mammon not only intruding into the place reserved as a house of prayer for the nations but actually taking it over, Jesus, full of white-hot zeal for His Father’s house, knotted a whip of cords, overthrew the money changers’ tables in the temple and drove the moneychangers out.

Jesus may be a Servant King, but He demands absolute allegiance. He warned people clearly that they could not serve two masters – and while our money can be used most effectively to serve the Lord, when it dominates our hearts and lives, we become the slaves of a tyrant.

After that dramatic episode we see another remarkable glimpse of heavenly light shing through. For a brief moment in time we see the temple becoming what the Lord had always intended it to be, fulfilling its ultimate purpose as ‘the blind and the lame came to Jesus there, and He healed them.’ (Matt. 21:14) How wonderful that must have been!

But the warfare was intense. Once again, the chief priests and scribes were indignant when they saw these wonders being performed, and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (Matt. 21:15). They were jealous. ‘Anger is cruel, and fury overwhelming,’ the Proverb reminds us, ‘but who can stand before jealousy?’ It’s an occupational hazard for many ministers to be tempted to envy the success of other people’s ministries.

The religious leaders were so enamoured of their own position, that they could not see that compassion for people and love for God mattered far more than buying the ‘proper’ sacrifices.

And so we find the servant King on the one side, and proud religious rulers on the other. It is only the details that have changed in our own day, where we have a Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Moscow who endorses everything Vladimir Putin does, and who persecutes evangelical believers. In the political sphere, Herod and Pilate found it convenient to join together for the first time in order to dispose of Jesus. Until then they had been at odds with each other. And today are facing the extremely serious situation of two proud seventy-year-old rulers braying at each other from Washington to Beijing and back again, both struggling with their pride to pick up the phone and try to sort their differences out.

Since pride is the thing above all others that lies at the dark heart of Satan, and which keeps God at a distance, it is important to pray that this mutual arrogance will not lead to horrendous consequences that it did in 1914, when proud and vain rulers led the world into the horrors of a world war that itself led inexorably to the Second World War.

When the tale is told, it will be found that there is great corruption as well as a great deal of aggression at the heart of this present American administration. And the Lord, who dwells with the humble and those who tremble at his word, sees it all and knows it all. But if pride reaps its own harvest, and it really does, repentance and self-humbling allows Jesus to purify peoples’ hearts, and makes room for Him to fill them with His own wisdom and compassion. Because so many will not humble themselves, however, click God has to do a deep work of cleansing, beginning with His people in the Church, for the sins of even one person affect the purity and flow for everyone, just as the sins of just one man – Achan – caused Israel to lose a crucial battle in Joshua 7.

It is so important to recognise this corporate aspect. None of us live as self-contained islands. There have been many prophecies in recent years that the Lord was going to expose sin in high places in the church – and in this past year or two He has been doing exactly that. It has been very sad and uncomfortable to read and hear about, but a wind of holiness is blowing through, and half measures in trying to deal with them may be like putting up a flimsy windbreak on a beach in a gale. The worst of it is that so many outsiders are put off when they hear of these things and want to have nothing to do with Church as a result of them. May the Lord forgive us.

The wonder is that God’s grace and power are ultimately still greater, and He is still reaching out to people who have not even heard of Jesus, but who are quick to respond to Him when they do. That’s why it may actually be more helpful to say not so much that we are a post-Christian society – though we are – but also, a potentially pre-revival one.

The Last Supper and Gethsemane

Knowing how this first ‘Holy Week’ was going to end, Jesus’ mind was filled with thoughts of the end of this world era, as the many parables that He taught in that final week testify, for He was using every last minute to prepare people for a time when they would need to operate by faith without His physical presence, and to trust the Holy Spirit to lead them when opposition to being a Christian became official policy. Near the end of the week He told His disciples that He was eagerly desiring to eat this Passover with them in that quiet secluded upper room that had been set aside for them, where no crowds would intrude upon them, spelling out for them that He would not drink wine again until He did so in the kingdom of God, no doubt at the marriage banquet of the Lamb. (Luke 22:14-16) He loved being with them as much as they did with Him.

It’s great to make space and room just to be with Him. When you are with your Christian friends, do make time and space to do it. That’s when ordinary times of fellowship have the potential to become encounters with the Lord. It’s as easy and as precious as saying ‘Lets pray together.’

But the wind of the Spirit was still blowing strongly, drawing out what was in the hearts of those present. In the very midst of this intimate time, this Last Supper, which was effectively the first communion, evil was present as satan goaded Judas to act on his plan to betray Jesus.

After singing a hymn Jesus and His disciples went to the garden of Gethsemane, His favourite trysting place in Jerusalem, and there, as we know, He experienced profound, gut-wrenching emotion at the prospect of the ordeal that lay immediately ahead, as intense pressures bore down on Him. In many ways the mental suffering this caused was even worse than the physical.

The name ‘Gethsemane’ derives from a word which means olive oil press. I have seen a replica olive oil press at Nazareth Village. It achieves its results as a result of intense pressure being exerted by pressing the olives between the millstones. For us too, it is the pressure which either crushes our faith and hope or which releases a deeper anointing.

We can imagine there being crowds of demons gathered there from all over, buffeting Jesus’ mind. Previously, in the Wilderness, they had sought to provoke Him into acting as a miracle-working wonder man, and so mislead people about the true nature of faith, now they would surely have been suggesting that He could avoiding drinking the cup of suffering and taken the easy way out by escaping the danger He was in by heading back to the relative safety of Mary and Martha’s house in Bethany.

When we allow fear to cut in, it makes us hesitant to speak up for the truth – and the enemy takes much ground. But Jesus was resolute. John put it like this: ‘having loved His own, He loved them to the end.’ Knowing what lay ahead, and knowing that the Father had given Him authority over everything, and that He had come from God and would return to God.’ (John 13:1,3)

And Jesus cried out to His Father for strength to endure. When the writer to Hebrews looks back on what happened in Gethsemane, He says that Jesus offered up loud tears and cries to God, using the Greek word krauge. (Heb. 5:7) It is a very strong word, which conveys the sense of a cry being wrung out of a man under intense mental physical pressure, such as under torture.

He was not taken by surprise when a SWAT team turned up to arrest Him – and neither was He surprised, when the chief religious officials brought a raft of trumped-up charges against Him – although as a human being having false allegations brought against you is profoundly painful.

He was not taken by surprise either when another crowd jeered and demanded at the tops of their voices that He be crucified. He knew how fickle some people can be, and how strong and subtle the forces were that were seeking to turn people against Him. Praise God that He had the courage to stay put and face the agony the next 24 hours would bring. Praise God for all who ever are or have withstood and overcome such pressures and remained faithful to Him.

Little did the High Priests and Pharisees realise that killing Jesus would fulfil God’s plans to save the world, and make Him still more famous – this time around the whole world rather than just in Israel.

[I thought you might appreciate this track from our Spirit of Prayer album that I have called ‘Gethsemane’.

Many of you will have gone through your own Gethsemane-like times. As my great uncle wrote in a one of his retreat addresses a hundred years ago, ‘Gethsemane needs no olive trees to make it Gethsemane, needs no band of disciples gathered round the gates, no band of priests and soldiers to give it its reality. Gethsemane needs only one thing: it requires a world hostile to God, in whatever form it shews itself to you, and your head bowed to accept the inevitable suffering, your heart filled with trust in the hidden Father. That is all.’

The night before the first of those conferences I mentioned earlier at the Winter Gardens back in 1984, I suddenly felt as though a great weight of darkness was pressing down on me. I am quite sure that this wasn’t pre first night stage fright, but rather the powers of darkness pressing in trying to stop what God was about to release over the course of many years.

We should certainly not underestimate the intensity of the spiritual warfare though. Even from its purely secular standpoint, Time Magazine commented a few decades ago that there were no demons left in hell because they were all in Rwanda, stirring up the terrible civil war between the Hutsis and the Tutsis.  Have you come across Immaculée Ilibagiza? This remarkable young woman survived the Rwanda genocide by remaining hidden in a tiny bathroom with several others for an astonishing 91 days, while the massacres were going on around her, which left a million people dead, including her own mother and brother.

When Immaculée later came face to face with their murderer, she made the costly decision in her will to forgive him. It was surely that decision which led to the Lord opening doors for her in every direction, so that today she is a worldwide ambassador for Christ, sowing seeds of peace and reconciliation. It is an extraordinary story, and a brilliant example of what I shared in an evening talk, that if we suffer with Jesus we will also reign with Him: which is why I like to spell suffering ‘suffer-reign’. There are many such stories. He is the God of new beginnings, of the impossible, of revival power.

Although the Cross appeared at the time to be a the end of Jesus’ mission, in reality, it was the hinge-point of history and the start of a complete reconciliation between God and humankind – and the gate through which Jesus entered Jerusalem in what I call His first triumphal entry is the very one that He will enter through again at the end of this era when He returns in glory with His saints. Amen! Jerusalem will hear the sound of hooves again at the end of time, and this time Jesus will comes riding on a white charger.

With that in mind, let me skip forward to the amazing encounter the women had when they came to anoint Jesus’s body with spices on the Easter Sunday morning. You will remember how they found the stone rolled away in front of Jesus’ tomb, the tomb itself empty, and two shining angels asking them a penetrating question: “Why are you seeking the living among the dead?”

It sounds a slightly downbeat way to announce the most wonderful news imaginable, but God never speaks casually, and His angels were challenging the women, as they challenge us, to redirect their whole focus around the fact that Jesus is alive, and that He presides over a kingdom of faithful people who are now very much alive in with Him. With 99.99% of our lives and more awaiting us in eternity, we are wise to base our whole life around seeking Him, and seeing what exactly it is that He wants us to focus on – and not to be unduly swayed by the highs and lows along the way, but to endure all things as we seek to make Him known.

This is the verse I felt the Lord has given me to emphasise in that context, from Hebrews 10:36. “You have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God (the things that God has called you to do) you may receive what is promised.” May God grant us that endurance.

And this same Jesus who welcomed children into the temple courts, and healed the sick is doing extraordinary things around the world to this day. Praise God for all who are coming into His kingdom every day. One Assemblies of God church is being established every 3 minutes around the world – and that is just one denomination of very many: and we pray for the many who are facing their own Gethsemanes and Calvaries. His heart and his face are turned towards them.

This is our God: Isn’t He mind-blowing?! May we not make Him too small in our sight. Thank You Jesus. Thank You for Holy Week. Thank You for extending Your forgiveness and mercy toward us through the Cross.

I wonder what effect your own sufferings have had on you? Have you found the grace to forgive those who have hurt you? To deal with feeling disappointed and let down?

This is my idea for rounding off this morning, a meditation that we can begin now but do more fully back home later. Imagine that you yourself are one of those lining the route into Jerusalem. Imagine Jesus looking at you as He enters the city. He will not ignore or look away from you. He knows your heart, and the areas in which you feel a failure, and the Gethsemane like circumstances that may be bearing down on you.

For a moment now, but then again later when you are back home, at some point during this week, take time to pause and say, ‘What would You say to me now about all these things, Lord? My eyes are on You!’

Notes that didn’t make it into the talk:

I came across this rather lovely translation of “Hallowed be your name” this morning. “May the glory of Your name be the centre on which our lives turn.” Thank You Lord that we can turn to you to worship you at any point. May we not stay on the rim as it were but be eager to press in and touch the holy place.

When sin reaches its full measure

The Lord directed intercessors to pray for Germany to invade Russia and so saved Britain from the full force of German’s attention in the last war.

When the Task Force set sail set sail for the Falklands, (in the day when we still had just about enough naval units) the Lord told me that there was going to be a limited war, and that this was His will, because He intended to bring down the Argentinian junta on account of los disparados – the many who disappeared under the cruel regime of the dictator. This the Lord very remarkably did – and it led directly to a very long running revival in Argentina as a result of the nation being humbled in their pride.

The time came when the sins of the Amorites, or in this case the Argentinians(!) had reached their full measure, and God intervened.

Upside down or right way up?

With this emphasis on it being those who hunger and thirst for righteousness being the ones who are blessed in God’s sight rather than the well-fed and proud, and the meek and the weak being the ones who will be honoured and inherit the earth, rather than the proud and the pugnacious, it might seem to many as though the standards of God’s kingdom are completely upside down. By worldly standards they are, but in reality Jesus came to proclaim not to turn everything upside down for the sake of it, but rather to proclaim the right-way-up Kingdom.

His teaching reached far beyond social boundaries, being simple and memorable, and by His Spirit’s indwelling utterly life-changing. The earliest church was full of ordinary people like fishermen and servants – as well as just a handful of Pharisees and other leaders who recognised in Jesus the Messiah in Jesus and humbled themselves to ask Him into their lives. He continues to look for those whose hearts are sincere in seeking Him, because He knew that what He was going to do on the Cross would do all that was necessary to cancel out the effects of their sins and shortcomings. So long as we are not intentionally making room for the things in our hearts, but are instead willing to face and confess them, then the Lord is always willing to pass over them, the real meaning of the Passover, because He has paid the price to remove the eternal penalty for them through His atonement for our sins, we are at one with him the real meaning of at-one-ment.

Jerusalem’s beautiful gate

Jesus knew where He had come from and where He was going back to. He knew the Father would not allow His holy One to see corruption, and that He would raise him from the dead. That is faith in action. No one had ever put that theory to the test before, but Jesus trusted His Father who had looked after Him all the way through His life, would fulfil His word and to raise Him from the dead, and that one day He would return to Earth, in the same way He was taken up into Heaven forty days after the resurrection. (Acts 1:11)
Jewish tradition has it that the Shekhinah glory of the Divine Presence) used to appear through the ‘Golden Gate,’ the oldest of the current gates in Jerusalem’s Old City Walls, and that it will do so again when Messiah comes. (Ezekiel 44:1-3) It was known in biblical times as the Beautiful Gate. (Acts 3:2) and it is the gate through which Jesus is believed to have entered the city on Palm Sunday.

Jews used to pray for mercy at the former gate at this location, which is why it was called Sha’ar HaRachamim: the Gate of Mercy. In Arabic it is known as the Gate of Eternal Life.

The present gate dates from the early sixth century, and is located in the middle of the eastern side of the Temple Mount. Read what Dr David Reagan has come to understand about the significance of this East Gate.

On the last morning of my visit to Jerusalem, we walked along the city walls past that East Gate Ezekiel had prophesied that it would be blocked up, and so it was by Ottoman Sultan in the 16th century. (Ezek. 44:2) Not content with that, the Muslim authorities established a cemetery there, knowing that no Jew would ever step over a grave. But the Lord’s return will not be deterred or deferred! He will return to the Mount of Olives and, together with His chosen saints, and walk down through the Kidron and into the Temple area. Jerusalem will receive her King – and He won’t be riding a colt this time! It is not for nothing that it is known as the ‘triumphal entry!’ – This triumphal entry was not the high point of His earthly ministry. He was not fooled by warm welcome; He knew it was His destiny to die in Jerusalem, as has the prophets before Him. He knew too that the next time there would be a crowd like this would be at Pentecost, when the Spirit was poured out on three thousand people!

Seeking God and loving others

The most important prophetic Scriptures are not laid out neatly all in one place in the Old Testament, we have to search them out in order to gain understanding. He invites us to dig deep to explore the whole counsel of God, and develop a heart of understanding by spending time pressing in to seek Him. The Holy Spirit delights to interpret the meaning of both the Bible and events to us. Jesus saw beyond the way things appeared, and was able to discern – judge, if you like – correctly all the facts and facets of a situation. So He knew that Zechariah not only spoke of the Messiah riding into Jerusalem on a colt, but also that the Lord desires that we ‘administer true justice to one another, and show compassion, kindness and mercy to each other.’ (Zech. 7:9) He who had Himself been a refugee in Egypt as an infant took the Levitical instruction to heart to ‘Love the stranger in your midst as yourself.’ (Lev. 19:34)

Jesus rode into Jerusalem, victorious and triumphant over the naysayers – but not to crow over them, or even to rebuke the crowds, for He was weeping for the city even as He remained silent when His physical suffering began.

The Significance of the East Gate

Photo by Brady Leavell on Unsplash