Give Thanks for God's Deliverance, Matthew 21:1-10
What I want to
do is give a little bit of a flyover of the next five or six chapters. The next
five chapters cover what is going on during the time of Christ's last week in
Jerusalem, and then starting in chapter 26 we see the events leading up to the
crucifixion, and then the resurrection in chapter 27. Chapter 28 covers the
last period of time with His disciples. Then we are going to go to Psalm 118
because that psalm sets the backdrop for what happens in chapter 21.
What we have to
understand is that the Old Testament prophesies, predicts, and also displays
various patterns of things that are related to the coming Messiah and His
person and work. As they develop their arguments for who Jesus is and what he
did they quote from the Old Testament—especially Matthew who quotes from the
Old Testament more than the other three Gospel writers do—it shows us that what
Christ did was grounded in what was predicted and prophesied in the Old
Testament. And in order to appreciate what Matthew is telling us we need to go
back and look at these Old Testament passages so that we can see how the Bible
fits together, and that the Old Testament compliments the New, the New
Testament fulfils the Old.
Too many
pastors just teach these little topics and go here and there but nobody sees
how the text is interdependent and interrelated so that you have to trust it
all or you can't trust any of it. We can trust all of it.
We see in
chapter 21:1-17 at the beginning of this last week of Christ leading up to the
crucifixion we see Jesus presenting Himself to Israel as the King, as the
Messiah, as the Son of David. In the first seven verses we see that our Lord
prepares the circumstances for His presentation. That is just going to be the
details of how He sends the disciples ahead to Jerusalem to find the colt of a
donkey on which he would ride into the city, in fulfilment of Old Testament
prophecy from Zechariah. That is the first seven verses.
In the next
four verses He is entering into the city on the donkey in fulfilment of the
prophecy, and as He approaches the city there will be a multitude of His
followers who will speak out, praise Him, sing from Psalm 118, throw their
clothes upon the road, cut down branches from the trees and spread them out in
front of Him; and all this time they are singing from Psalm 118:24-26: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD”. We need to ask
the question: What is significant about that? What are they saying? What does hosanna mean?
This
celebration as Jesus is entering in causes other people to ask the questions:
Who is this that is coming into the city? Who is Jesus? Why is He important?
Then our Lord
begins to explain His messianic credentials. He cleanses the temple, heals the
blind and the lame in fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, and this in turn
sets off a hostile reaction among the chief priests and the scribes. That is
the focus of 21:11-16.
Another thing
that is going on there as a lead-up to the Passover at the same time that Jesus
enters into the city is the day that they would be selecting the lamb that
would be the offering for the Passover, the lamb that was to be without spot or
blemish. This period of time, from the 10th of the month Nisan on
the Hebrew calendar to the fourteenth, was the time when the lamb would be
evaluated to see that it was without spot or blemish.
What is going
to happen as Jesus comes into the city is that He is going to be tested,
examined, evaluated and criticized by all of the religious leaders—the scribes,
the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians and the chief priests. All of them
are going to evaluate, challenge and question Him, and He is going to come out
of that demonstrating that He has a firm understanding of the Scripture, that
He is who He claims to be, and He is there to bring things to a conclusion in
terms of God's plan of paying the penalty for our sins.
This
confrontation between the Messiah and the religious leaders goes on through the
end of chapter 22. It includes the judgment of the fig tree when He sees the
beautiful full fig tree and curses it. What is that all about? He is going to
have confrontations with the chief priests, the Pharisees, the elders, and in
this He has three parables that are significant for understanding God's plan
and purposes for the Jewish people. There is a lot of confusion over their
meaning.
This is
followed by another confrontation with the disciples and the Pharisees and the
Herodians in 22:16-22, a confrontation with the Sadducees in vv. 23-33, a
conversation with a lawyer (a Torah expert) from the Pharisees trying to trip
Jesus up in vv. 34-46. All of that basically shows that Jesus is being rejected
by the religious leaders of Israel. The Lamb of God, the savior God has
prepared for the past 2500 years or so of human history, is rejected by the
religious leaders.
Then in chapter
23 Jesus condemns the religious leaders. He shows why in the discourse against
specifically the religious teaching of the Pharisees. They have rejected Him
and He rejects their religiosity, and this is a blanket indictment and
condemnation that the leaders of Israel have rejected the Messiah. For this
reason they will come under divine discipline.
In chapters
25-25 is the Olivet discourse. Jesus is answering the question from His
disciples: What will be the signs of your coming? Here we get into prophecy and
some significant parables as well in that section that we have to understand.
But remember, it is all related to Israel; it is not related to the church yet.
In chapters
26-27 we have the crucifixion and the resurrection of the Messiah, and then in
chapter 28 we have the closing comments and challenge to His disciples.
In the chapter
before us, chapter 21, we have to understand that the backdrop for this is
Psalm 118. It is the last psalm in a set of psalms referred to as the Hallel psalms. The Hebrew word hallel means praise. If you take the
verb to praise and make it a command, and you are commanding a group of people,
rather than saying “y'all praise”, they would say hallelu. It is that u at
the end that is the second person plural imperative; it is a command to praise.
And then if there is an object to the praise that is added. If you are praising
God it is hallelujah. Hallelujah isn't praising God; it is a
command to praise God.
Sadly, we live
in a world where so many Christians are shallow, superficial and untaught, who
think that by simply saying, Praise God or Hallelujah,
they are praising God. But the term is a command to praise God, and what should
follow is a description of what God has done in your life—how He has answered
prayer, how He has delivered you, how He has provided for you, how He has given
salvation; but there is content that should fill out the content, the meaning,
the whys and wherefores of praising God.
These
particular psalms from 113 to 118 are psalms that are particularly focused on
calling the people of Israel as a community of believers to praise God. And
these were psalms that were sung at the various feast days. There were three
feast days when all the men of Israel were commanded to come to Jerusalem and
to worship God there. The first of those was the Passover; the second was at
Pentecost, and then the Feast of Tabernacles. It was from those Psalms, 113-118
specifically, that would be sung at the end of the Passover meal. We are told
in the Gospels that when the disciples finished eating the Passover meal with
the Lord they sang and then went out. This is the psalm that they sang.
Jesus would
have sung this, as He was going out and was going to the Garden of Gethsemane,
was going to get arrested, go through trials, and then be crucified. Psalm 118:27 NASB “The LORD is God, and He has given
us light [Jesus is the light of the world]; Bind the festival sacrifice with
cords to the horns of the altar.” He is singing this, and He is the sacrifice.
He is going to be bound to the altar the next day. So this shows that everything
here ties together and fits together.
In the original context of these psalms they
were sung in the Old Testament as a group of believers would be in a
procession, going up the temple mount and to enter the temple, and to praise
God and offer sacrifices at one of these particular feasts. That procession of
people in the period before the Babylonian captivity would have been led by the
king. After the Babylonian captivity there was no king so they were led by a
political leader, the governor, or maybe by the high priest. We don't know what
the specifics would have been at that particular time.
This psalm was written to celebrate God's
deliverance of the nation from a time of intense discipline. You may not catch
that by reading it through in the English. There is a lot of debate among
scholars as to who wrote this, when it was written and what the occasion was,
but most scholars believe that it was a post-exilic psalm.
When Jesus was entering Jerusalem we are told:
Matthew 21:9 NASB “The crowds going ahead of Him, and those who
followed, were shouting, 'Hosanna to the Son of David; BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD; Hosanna in the highest!'” This was not just
something they decided was a good thing to say. It was out of a particular
psalm (Psa. 118:26) and they understand what it is that they are singing. They
understand its significance to some degree as they are welcoming the messianic
King into Jerusalem.
Remember, Matthew presents Him as the messianic
King. He offered the kingdom, the kingdom was rejected by Matthew chapter
twelve, and Jesus announced the judgment on the people. But He is still
training His disciples after that, focusing them on the fact that there is
still a future for Israel even though that generation had rejected Him.
Matthew 21:9 says, “Blessed is He who comes in
the name of the Lord”. We have to understand what that means. This phrase
brackets a lot of these events in the last week of Jesus' ministry. It is
stated here as He enters the city, and then in Matthew 23:39 when Jesus has
rejected the religious leaders of Israel what does He say at conclusion of that
rejection? “For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD!’”
See how that statement brackets everything that
is in between. It is all going to be ultimately related to the fact that He is
the one who comes in the name of the Lord. And this phrase, the one who comes
in the name of the Lord, by the first century had become an accepted title for
the Messiah: that He is the one who was to come; He is the coming one. The
woman at the well refers to Him this way: “Are you the coming one?” And that
comes out of this passage, Ps. 118:26.
Let's take a look at the opening verses of Psalm
118. This is a great praise psalm and it is a communal thanksgiving psalm,
which means it is to be used by the community of believers as a whole as they
come together giving thanks to God and worshipping Him. In the commentary of
the Psalms by Keil and Delitzch – Franz Delitzch was a German Jew who became a
believer in Jesus Christ, and this is a classic commentary written in the 19th
century—Delitzch commented:
“It was Martin Luther's favourite psalm: his beauteous Confitemini (a Latin term for a particular
type of praise or thanksgiving psalm), which had helped him out of troubles out
of which neither emperor nor king, nor any other man on earth could have helped
him. With the exposition of this his noblest jewel, his defence and his
treasure, he occupied himself in the solitude of his Patmos.”
Patmos was the island where the apostle John was
exiled. Luther had a similar experience in that he was imprisoned as he was
going to be tried by the Holy Roman Emperor for heresy.
The psalm begins in verse 1 with the call to the
people to give public thanks to the Lord. This is used in several different
psalms.
Psalm 33:2 NASB “Give thanks to the LORD with the lyre; Sing
praises to Him with a harp of ten strings.” The way you are praising God is to
give thanks, and to give thanks to the Lord is to praise Him.
Other verses: Psalm 105:1; 106:1. Psalm 118 is
bracketed by this statement in vv.1 and 29. So what is this psalm going to be
about? Giving thanks to the Lord and describing how God is merciful to Israel,
and how that will endure forever. In seven of these verses where this is found
we have the same phrase: “Give thanks to the Lord for His mercy endures
forever”.
We don't know who wrote this psalm. There is not
an ascription to identify either the author or the specific occasion for the
psalm, and this has led to a lot of debate among scholars. It appears to have
been sung by a Davidic leader, a political leader over Israel who represents
them and then leads them into the temple to praise God for His act of mercy in
delivering them for some extreme, dire circumstances. This isn't just a
standard deliverance from battle but something that threatened the very
existence of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. The language that we
will run into in the psalm indicates that this was an extreme and distinct kind
of situation. In fact, it was a disciplinary action upon Israel by the Lord;
one of the most extreme.
That is going to help us because we need to
understand some things about why this psalm was written and the historical
circumstances so that we can properly understand what is going on when we get
into Matthew chapter 21.
The writer of the psalm is speaking as the
representative of the people. He refers t himself through the first person, but
what gives this away is many times in the Hebrew he shifts inadvertently to
plural verbs, because he is viewing himself as the representative of the
community. We know that it is not talking about him because in some passages it
says, “the nations surrounded me”. The nations don't surround an individual;
they are surrounding Israel with the intent to destroy her.
What this leads us to conclude is that there is
an extreme set of circumstances that is the result of God bringing severe disciplinary
action against the nation, which would threaten their very existence, and God
has restored them. There are only a few times in Scripture where this could
possibly take place. One would be God's deliverance of the nation from slavery
in Egypt. Another might be the deliverance from some severe battles that took
place during the period of the judges. The scenario that fits it best is the
return from the exile. God brought discipline on the nation and took them out
of the land and it looked as if the nations had won, the Gentiles had destroyed
them and there would be no return or resurrection of the nation; yet God is
faithful to His covenant and has brought back. That which was insignificant,
the stone the builders rejected has been brought back and has been made the
chief corner stone again of God's plan and purpose for Israel.
So it fits a post-exilic declaration of God's
grace. Also there is the mention of the chief cornerstone. One of the most
important projects after the return was rebuilding the temple—laying the
cornerstone; that this would be an allusion that would that would bring this
idea to mind for the psalmist.
That brings us to the occasion for the psalm,
which was God's deliverance of the people from a time of severe divine discipline.
Almost all scholars agree that this was a psalm to celebrate the victory that
God has given His people in battle, and that the psalm itself calls for a
national procession up on the temple mount to praise God. Something along these
lines:
This is an earlier victory at the time of king
Jehoshaphat of Judah when the Israelites had victory over the Moabites, the
Ammonites and the Edomites, and we are told that on the fourth day after this
victory the people assembled in the Valley of Berachah [the Valley of
Blessing]. “... for there they blessed the Lord, therefore the name of that
place was called the Valley of Berachah until this day. Then they returned
every man of Judah and Jerusalem--with Jehoshaphat in front of them, so this is
the procession that the king is leading—to go back to Jerusalem with joy, for
the Lord had made them rejoice over their enemies”. This was the same kind of
situation, but it is most likely that this is the return after the exile and it
is the rebuilding of the temple.
There are four different times that this is
suggested and summarized. The first is that this took place with the
celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles in the seventh month of the first year
of their return. In 538 Cyrus issues the decree for them to return and they
came back in 537-536. Then in the seventh month of their return when there was
only a plain, simple altar was erected on Mount Mariah where the temple was
located. This is described in Ezra 3:1-4. But not much more was done, and what
we see in this text is that the use of the grammar indicates that the temple
has been completed and they are celebrating. So that is probably not the time.
The second option would be when the foundation
stone for the second temple was laid, and this is described in Ezra 3:8-13.
The third option would be the dedication of the
completed temple in the twelfth month of the sixth year of Darius. This is
described in Ezra 6:15ff.
These references don't quite fit all the facts.
I think the great Feast of Tabernacles described in Nehemiah 8:13-18 is the one
that is observed and the temple been completed at that time.
So from all of this we conclude some important
points. First that this psalm refers to a historical event. It must be
interpreted first and foremost in terms of that historical event. That is going
to be critical, as we will see.
Remember, when we talk about how the Old
Testament is used in the New Testament there are four basic ways the Old
Testament is used in the New Testament. Briefly, you have a prophecy in the Old
Testament that speaks about the future and is fulfilled as a future prophecy.
That would be a passage like Micah chapter five: the Messiah would be born in
Bethlehem, and it is fulfilled when Jesus is born in Bethlehem.
Then there is another example where a historical
event, such as the Israelites coming our of Egypt, a historical event which is
used typologically to foreshadow a future event and is applied to a future
event. Hosea 11:1 talks about “Out of Egypt I have called my son”. That is
referring to a historical event but it is applied logically to Jesus and His
family coming out of Egypt after the death of Herod the Great.
There is also an application type of situation
like where Matthew quotes from Jeremiah when Jeremiah speaks of Rachel weeping.
This was a historical situation, not a prophecy. As the exiles were being taken
off to Babylon the mothers are on the road and they are weeping because their
sons and daughters have been taken off to Babylon and they will never see them
again. It is as if they were dead, so their mothers are weeping. In Matthew
chapter two there are significant differences but the mothers are weeping
because Herod had killed their infants. So this is like that scenario.
Then the fourth was, you don't really have a
specific event in the Old Testament; you have a summary of things that are said
about the Messiah: that He would be rejected by the people. And so when you get
into the New Testament He is called a Nazarene. Nowhere in the Old Testament
does it say that, but the idea was that anyone who was from Nazareth would
not really have a high IQ; that sort of thing. Nothing good come out of
Nazareth! So the summary of Old Testament teaching was that the Messiah was
going to be looked down upon. That is why He would be called a Nazarene.
It is important to understand that the psalm
probably fits either category two or category three which are talking about
historical events. The reason that is going to come up is that when you look at
this psalm we are going to see a number of things that are referenced in the
psalm. One of the things we are going to see is in verse 24 NASB
“This is the day which the LORD has made [historically]….” This is a historical
psalm, it is referring to when God restored the nation and they completed the
building of the temple. It isn't referring to just any old day. The day that
the Lord made was the day that He brought Israel back into the land and
restored them, and restored the temple.
And this has a future application and
significance. It is applied to what Christ does on the cross, and the
fulfilment of this typologically is when Jesus does come in when they say,
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord, when He establishes His
kingdom. It isn't just any old day; it is the day when God's redemptive work is
fully developed.
This is the background, and the New Testament
applies this as a type of future event related to God's messianic plan of
redemption for Israel and the world.
Psalm 118:1 NASB “Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; For His
lovingkindness is everlasting.”
This psalm is about something that God did in
the past that is going to be used in the New Testament to talk about what we
have in Jesus Christ and who He is as the messianic King. This is why this
psalm is quoted in Matthew chapter 21.