Piper's Notes

April 4, 1982 (Morning)

Bethlehem Baptist Church

John Piper, Pastor

HE SET HIS FACE TO GO TO JERUSALEM

(Luke 9:51-56)

Luke describes the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem at the beginning of that last week of his

earthly life:

As he was drawing near, at the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the

disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that

they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in

heaven and glory in the highest! (Luke 19:37,38)

There is no doubt what was in the disciples' minds. This was the fulfillment of Zechariah's

prophecy given centuries earlier:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king

comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt, the

foal of an ass. I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem,

and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his

dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zech.

9:9,10)

The long-awaited Messiah had come, the king of Israel, and not just of Israel but of all the

earth. Jerusalem would be his capital city. From here he would rule the world in peace and

righteousness. What a day this was! How their hearts must have pounded in their chests! And

must not their hands have been sweaty like warriors in readiness just before the bugle sounds

the battle! How would he do it? Would he whip up the enthusiastic crowds and storm the

Roman praetorium -- a people's revolution? Or would he call down fire from heaven to consume

the enemies of God? Would any of his followers be lost in the struggle? The tension of the

moment must have been tremendous!

The Pharisees had a double reason for wanting this kind of welcome silenced. On the one

hand this Jesus was a threat to their authority and they envied his popularity (Mark 15:10). On

the other hand they feared a Roman backlash to all this seditious talk of another king (John

11:48). Therefore they say to Jesus, "'Teacher, rebuke your disciples.' But he answered, 'I tell

you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out!"' (Luke 19:39,40). No, he will not

rebuke them for this. Not now. The hour has come. The authority of the Pharisees is done for.

If the Romans come, they come. He will not silence the truth any longer. To be sure the

disciples' understanding of Jesus' kingship at this point is flawed. But hastening events will

correct that soon enough. In essence they are correct. Jesus is the king of Israel and the

kingdom he is inaugurating will bring peace to all the nations and spread from sea to sea. The

book of Revelation pictures the final fulfillment of Palm Sunday in the age to come like this:

I looked and behold, a great multitude which no man could number, from every nation,

from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb

clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice,

"Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!" (Rev. 7:9,10)

The entry into Jerusalem with waving palms (John 12:13) was a short-lived preview of the

eternal Palm Sunday to come. It needed to be said. If the disciples hadn't said it the rocks

would have.

I like to think of all our worship in this age as rehearsal for the age to come. One day we, who

by God's grace have been faithful to the Lord, are going to stand with innumerable millions of

believers from Bangladesh, Poland, Egypt, Australia, Iceland, Cameroon, Ecuador, Burma,

Borneo, Japan and thousands of tribes and peoples and languages purified by Christ with

palms of praise in our hand. And when we raise them in salute to Christ he will see an almost

endless field of green, shimmering with life and pulsating with praise. And then like the sound

of a thousand Russian choruses we will sing our song of salvation, while the mighty Christ,

with heartfelt love, looks out over those whom he bought with his own blood.

Had Jesus taken his throne on that first day of palms, none of us would ever be robed in white

or waving palms of praise in the age to come. There had to be the cross and that is what the

disciples had not yet understood. Back in Luke 9, as Jesus prepared to set out for Jerusalem

from Galilee, he tried to explain this to his disciples. In verse 22 he said, "The Son of Man

must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and be

killed and on the third day be raised." And in verse 44 he told them, "Let these words sink into

your ears; for the Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men." But verse 45 tells us,

"They did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them that they should not

perceive it; and they were afraid to ask him about this saying." Therefore their understanding

of Jesus' last journey to Jerusalem was flawed. They saw him as a king moving in to take

control. And he was. But they could not grasp that the victory Jesus would win in Jerusalem

over sin and Satan and death and all the enemies of righteousness and joy -- that this victory

would be won through his own horrible suffering and death; and that the kingdom which they

thought would be established immediately (Luke 19:11) would, in fact, be thousands of years

in coming. And their misunderstanding of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem results in a

misunderstanding of the meaning of discipleship. This is why this is important for us to see,

lest we make the same mistake.

In Luke 9:51-56 we learn how not to understand Palm Sunday. Let's look at it together. "When

the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem." To set his

face towards Jerusalem meant something very different for Jesus than it did for the disciples.

You can see the visions of greatness that danced in their heads in verse 46: "An argument

arose among them as to which of them was the greatest." Jerusalem and glory were just

around the corner. O what it would mean when Jesus took the throne! But Jesus had another

vision in his head. One wonders how he carried it all alone and so long. Here's what Jerusalem

meant for Jesus: "I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following; for it

cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem"(Luke 13:33). Jerusalem meant

one thing for Jesus: certain death. Nor was he under any illusions of a quick and heroic death.

He predicted in Luke 18:32f, "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is

written of the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered to the

Gentiles, and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon; they will scourge him and

kill him … " When Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem, he set his face to die.

Remember, when you think of Jesus' resolution to die, that he had a nature like ours. He

shrunk back from pain like we do. He would have enjoyed marriage and children and

grandchildren and a long life and esteem in the community. He had a mother and brothers and

sisters. He had special places in the mountains. To turn his back on all this and set his face

towards vicious whipping and beating and spitting and mocking and crucifixion was not easy.

It was hard. O how we need to use our imagination to put ourselves back into his place and

feel what he felt. I don't know of any other way for us to begin to know how much he loved us.

"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

If we were to look at Jesus' death merely as a result of a betrayer's deceit and the Sanhedrin's

envy and Pilate's spinelessness and the soldiers' nails and spear, it might seem very

involuntary. And the benefit of salvation that comes to us who believe from this death might be

viewed as God's way of making a virtue out of a necessity. But once you read Luke 9:51 all

such thoughts vanish. Jesus was not accidentally entangled in a web of injustice. The saving

benefits of his death for sinners were not an afterthought. God planned it all out of infinite love

to sinners like us and appointed a time. Jesus, who was the very embodiment of his Father's

love for sinners, saw that the time had come and set his face to fulfill his mission: to die in

Jerusalem for our sake. "No one takes my life from me (he said), but I lay it down of my own

accord" (John 10:18).

So Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, and it says in the text that "he sent messengers ahead of

him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but the people

would not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem." It doesn't really matter

whether this rejection is just because Jesus and his companions are Jews and Samaritans

hate Jews, or whether the rejection is a more personal rejection of Jesus as the Messiah on

his way to reign in Jerusalem. What matters for the story is simply that Jesus is already being

rejected, and then the focus shifts to the disciples' response, specifically the response of

James and John.

James and John ask Jesus, "Lord, do you want us to bid fire to come down from heaven and

consume them?" (verse 54). Jesus had already named these brothers "sons of thunder" (Mark

3:17). Here we get a glimpse of why. I take this passage very personally because my father

named me after one of these sons of thunder. And I think I probably would have said what

John did here: "Jesus, we are on the way to victory. Nothing can stop us now. Let the fire fall!

Let the judgment begin! O, how Jerusalem will tremble when they see us coming!" Jesus

turns, the text says, and rebuked them (verse 55). And they simply went to another town.

Now what does this mean? It means first of all that a mistaken view of Jesus' journey to

Jerusalem can lead to a mistaken view of discipleship. If Jesus had come to execute

judgment and take up an earthly rule then it would make sense for the sons of thunder to

begin the judgment when the final siege of the Holy City starts. But if Jesus had come not to

judge but to save, then a radically different form of discipleship is in order. Here is a question

put to every believer by this text: does discipleship mean deploying God's missiles against the

enemy in righteous indignation? Or does discipleship mean following him on the Calvary road

which leads to suffering and death? The answer of the whole New Testament is this: the

surprise about Jesus the Messiah is that he came to live a life of sacrificial, dying service

before he comes a second time to reign in glory. And the surprise about discipleship is that it

demands a life of sacrificial, dying service before we can reign with Christ in glory.

What James and John had to learn -- what we all must learn -- is that Jesus' journey to

Jerusalem is our journey and if he set his face to go there and die we must set our face to die

with him. One might be tempted to reason in just the opposite way: that since Jesus suffered

so much and died in our place, therefore, we are free to go straight to the head of the class,

as it were, and skip all the exams. He suffered so we could have comfort. He died so we could

live. He bore abuse so we could be esteemed. He gave up the treasures of heaven so we

could lay up treasures on earth. He brought the Kingdom and paid for our entrance and now

we live in it with all its earthly privileges. But all this is not Biblical reasoning. It goes against

the plain teaching in this very context. Luke 9:23,24 reads: "If any man would come after me,

let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his

life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it." When Jesus set his

face to walk the Calvary road, he was not merely taking our place; he was setting our pattern.

He is substitute and pacesetter. If we seek to secure our life through returning evil for evil or

surrounding ourselves with luxury in the face of human need we will lose our life. We can save

our life only if we follow Christ on the Calvary road. Jesus died to save us from the power and

punishment of sin, not from the suffering and sacrifices of simplicity for love's sake.

Notice verses 57 and 58 (this is Jesus' way of correcting James' and John's misconception

about the glories of discipleship): "As they were going along the road, a man said to him, 'I will

follow you wherever you go.' And Jesus said to him, 'Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air

have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."' Why does Jesus tell a would-

be disciple that he has no place to lay his head? The answer is simple enough for a child to

see: because he expects disciples to be like him and he wants them to know it is costly; the

Calvary road is not the road of material prosperity. Now that doesn't mean disciples have to

sleep standing up, but it does have something to say about how many places you've invested

in to lay your head; and how much comfort and luxury you seek to surround yourself with.

Brothers and sisters, with 16,000 hidden people groups still waiting to hear the gospel and

millions of children starving through no fault of their own, and many people in our own country

hard-put because of joblessness and emptiness, it is unconscionable that disciples of Jesus

Christ can go right on pursuing the American dream. What excites me about Bethlehem

Baptist Church are the signs in many of you that you have an alternative dream-- a dream of

breaking loose from the shackles of this self-serving, consumer culture in which we live-- a

dream of doing something radical. Something radically loving with your house, something

radically loving with your portfolio and your income, something radically loving with your free

evenings, something radically loving with your job. Some of you are discovering such

wonderful freedom from the love of things. And hand in hand with that comes an amazing

freedom from vengeance. The more secure you are in God rather than things, the less inclined

you are to return evil for evil and the more open you are to nitty-gritty involvement with those

who are least lovely and most needy. The more this happens the more striking and fruitful will

be the witness of this church to Jesus.

I close with a personal word about where we are at Bethlehem. We have just come through

seven weeks of messages aimed largely at unbelievers. I have prayed earnestly that people

would be saved. I gave invitations every Sunday morning. I don't know to what eternal use God

may put those messages yet. I know that for myself they were a great nourishment. Jesus

Christ is all the more precious now: his truth, his taking away my guilt, his giving me the hope

of eternal life, his gift of authenticity, his presence in my family and his all-satisfying spiritual

beauty. I love Jesus Christ, and O, how I want to follow his footsteps on the Calvary road in

every part of my life, and bring others with me.

But for all that, my heart tells me now that it is a mistake to preach to unbelievers in our

worship services and to give regular invitations. One of the most important reasons is this: this

pattern builds into the mindset of Christians the idea that church services are where people

get saved and preachers are the people who win them to the Lord. I think both of those ideas

are wrong and self-destructive in the long run. Church services are for praising God and for

empowering saints to live lives of radical love in the world. If we praise the Lord from our hearts

and if we live all for love instead of retaliation or luxury, we will be the most compelling

invitations that Christ can give.

If Christ set his face to go to Jerusalem, we ought to help one another week after week to set

our faces like flint against the allurements of riches and retaliation and follow the King of kings

on the Calvary road.