Morning Star Chapel
who would be a great king, a man who would lead them to triumph and victory. They knew this because it was prophesied in the Old Testament. This man would be called the Messiah. Messiah was a Hebrew word which means the anointed one or, simply, the king. The Greek translation for Messiah is Christos or Christ.
Many people were wondering, therefore, whether or not this Jesus of Nazareth was this Messiah. Was He indeed that great King who was to come to rule them and lead them? Many suspected this but did not know for sure.
Now the time had come for the Lord to reveal to them who He was. Instead of going straight into Jerusalem, He stopped about two miles before He got there, on the slope of a mountain called the Mount of Olives. The Mount of Olives rises about 200 feet above Jerusalem. It was really not much more than a hill. There were two small villages there: the village of Bethany, and the village of Bethphage. And from the village of Bethphage, the Lord sent two of His disciples to Bethany to get a donkey. The donkey was be a female with a colt. The Lord told His disciples to bring both the mother and her colt back with them. After they had gotten the donkeys, they put some of their clothes on them, and then the Lord then rode on one of the animals. He may well have sat on both of them at different times -- the Word speaks of Him sitting on both of them. Then, with the young colt following its mother, and with the Lord riding on them, He finished His journey into Jerusalem.
Now, a donkey, or sometimes a mule, is what the Jewish kings would ride on. For example, when King Solomon rode to his coronation, he rode on a mule. So it is that when the Lord entered the city upon a donkey, an ass, He was declaring to the multitudes that He was indeed a King. He was the Messiah, the Anointed One, who had come to save them..
This is why all the people then thronged around Him. This is why they spread garments in the road in front of Him, and why they also held palms and spread tree branches in the road. These were all ancient customs, ways of welcoming a king riding in a procession. They were welcoming their King, the Messiah, who had been promised in the Word. They now knew that the Lord was that King who was prophesied to come to save them. And so the people rejoiced, and they shouted out to the Lord, "Hosanna." which means "Save us!" in Hebrew. The Lord had come to save them, and be their King.
The Lord, then, was the King of the Jews. But He is, of course, far more than this. The Lord is the King of heaven and earth. He is our King as well. And for us to bring up palms in church is not simply a sentimental reenactment of something that happened two millennia ago. It is, in a way, a confession that He is indeed our King.
In our hearts we can rejoice. We have an omnipotent King. He protects us from evil. He watches over each of us every least moment. He leads us to do what is good. And no matter how bad things might seem at times, we can know that He is with us. He is governing over all things. He will look after us if we but follow Him. Palm Sunday, is the day that the Lord rode into Jerusalem, and a day in which we also can rejoice in the government of the Lord.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE LORD AS OUR KING is to be more than just a feeling of joy, though. If we are truly to allow the Lord to rule us, then we must acknowledge Him as the supreme authority in our lives. What is a king if he is not allowed to rule, if he is not obeyed?
To submit to the government of the Lord is not at first an easy thing to do. It does not come naturally. While giving lip-service to the idea that the Lord is to govern us, and while feeling warm, outwardly, toward Him as our King, we tend, in actual practice, in day to day life, to act according to our own thoughts and feelings. And when we become aware that some teaching in the Word does not agree with what we think or want, our natural tendency is to try to explain away that teaching in such a way that it does not conflict with what we already think and know and feel.
This sets us against the government of the Lord. If we explain away or ignore the teachings of the Word, we in effect make it impossible for the Lord to govern us through His Word. We make it impossible for Him to be our King. And so we must learn to subordinate our thoughts to the teachings of the Lord.
In general, the thoughts of our natural minds are based upon two things. First of all, there are the things we have come to know through experience and through other kinds of learning. Then, there are the conclusions we have reached from this experience through the use of reason. The first kind, the things we have learned through experience, are represented in the Word by a donkey. On the other hand, the conclusions which arise, or are born, from this experience, and born from our reasoning about this experience, are represented by the offspring or colt of that donkey. To use the language of the Writings, the donkey represents natural truth, and her colt represents rational truth.
This is why the Lord rode on a donkey as He came into Jerusalem. In face, the Word talks of the Lord sitting on both of these animals. The Lord, as King, rode on both the donkey and her colt, representing both natural and rational truth. Both the natural and rational thoughts of our minds -- the things of experience, and the things we reason about -- are to be subordinated to Him. Similarly, the garments and branches that were strewn in the Lord's path also represent truths, and our thoughts about what is true. These also are to be subordinated to Him. They are laid before Him in the road.
This subordination is at the very heart of all government. All of us are content with a worldly government as long as we agree with its actions. Nobody minds a worldly king who does just what we want him to do. But as soon as that government or that king does something that we happen to disagree with, then our tendency is to grumble, and complain and rebel. We don't like being told to do something we don't want to do, or being forbidden to do the things we like to do.
And it is the same with the government of the Lord. As long as the Lord's Word agrees with us, we are content. But as soon as there is a conflict between the teachings of the Word and our own thoughts and feelings, we tend to rebel. We insist on our freedom to think what we want to think.
Now we live at a place and time in history in which there is freedom not only of thought but also freedom of speech. To be free to speak our minds, to be free to have our own opinions, is a most precious thing. One of the very reasons the Lord executed a Last Judgment in the spiritual world at His Second Advent was to restore freedom to the human mind.
Just because people have opinions, though, does not mean that these opinions are true. Some people will assert that, in their experience, everybody is basically good deep down inside. And they will reason from this that there cannot possibly be a hell. Others will say that marriage is just a social arrangement, with nothing particularly holy about it. They see all kinds of marriages around them, with all kinds of problems, and conclude from this that there really is nothing special about marriage. There are those people who will say that there cannot be a loving God, because their experience tells them that there is too much injustice, too much pain and suffering in their own lives and in the lives of others.
What you see, so often, is people using their own limited experience, represented by the donkey, to bring forth mistaken conclusions about life, represented by the donkey's colt. People, in using their own freedom of thought, a freedom that is so precious, can come up with the most ridiculous ideas. The donkey, and the colt of a donkey, are a picture of the lower degrees of the human mind. It is no coincidence that we tend to associate these animals with stupidity, for human experience, and human reason based on this experience, can reach the most stupid conclusions if left to themselves.
This is why we need the guidance of the Lord. The Lord does not ask us to give up our freedom of thought. He does not ask us to believe Him blindly. What He does ask us is to listen to Him, and be guided by Him, in freedom. Our own experience is so very limited. Our own powers of reason cannot, themselves, rise above the plane of life in this world. If we are to be guided in our lives by what is true, then we need the Lord. We need to submit, in freedom, to His government. We need to welcome Him as our King.
To invite the Lord to be our King requires that we acknowledge, with humility, and in our hearts, that our own experience and own understanding of things, are necessarily limited, and often mistaken. Our own experience and our own understanding -- the donkey and her colt -- are to be subordinated to the Lord. We must realize, and accept, that the Lord, who is eternal, and who created all things, is not fallible like we are, and is not mistaken, as we so often are. The Lord is God, and He is to be our King.
When the Lord was born on earth, He came in the form of Divine truth. He came to teach people. So great was His love of the people on this earth, that He came to rescue them from themselves, and teach them the way to heaven. And during His ministry, the things that He taught amazed the multitudes who followed Him. He taught from His own authority. He taught them the truth. And those things that the Lord taught when He was on earth would change the whole course of human history. They made it possible for people to worship Him, worship God, in an entirely new way.
And these teachings of the Lord are still with us. They can be found in the Gospels: in Matthew, in Mark, in Luke and in John. And the deeper meaning of these Gospels can be found in what the Lord reveals in the Heavenly Doctrine.
He has blessed us with His truth. He has blessed us with His presence in His Word. And it is through His Word, through His truth, that He can govern us as our King. If we turn to Him in freedom, turn to Him in His Word, and listen to Him, and do those things that He teaches us in His Word, then He will enter into our minds -- He will ride into our minds -- as our God and our King, and bless us with His peace forevermore. Praise be to the Lord.
"Lift up your heads, O you gates! Lift up, you everlasting doors! And the King of glory shall come in.
Amen.
Lessons:
Lessons:
1 Kings 1:32-40 32And King David said, "Call to me Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada." So they came before the king. 33The king also said to them, "Take with you the servants of your lord, and have Solomon my son ride on my own mule, and take him down to Gihon. 34There let Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anoint him king over Israel; and blow the horn, and say, 'Long live King Solomon!' 35Then you shall come up after him, and he shall come and sit on my throne, and he shall be king in my place. For I have appointed him to be ruler over Israel and Judah."
36Benaiah the son of Jehoiada answered the king and said, "Amen! May the LORD God of my lord the king say so too. 37As the LORD has been with my lord the king, even so may He be with Solomon, and make his throne greater than the throne of my lord King David."
38So Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet, Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the Cherethites, and the Pelethites went down and had Solomon ride on King David's mule, and took him to Gihon. 39Then Zadok the priest took a horn of oil from the tabernacle and anointed Solomon. And they blew the horn, and all the people said, "Long live King Solomon!" 40And all the people went up after him; and the people played the flutes and rejoiced with great joy, so that the earth seemed to split with their sound.
Matthew 21:1-11 1Now when they drew near Jerusalem, and came to Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, 2saying to them, "Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Loose them and bring them to Me. 3And if anyone says anything to you, you shall say, 'The Lord has need of them,' and immediately he will send them."
4All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying:
5 "Tell the daughter of Zion,
'Behold, your King is coming to you,
Lowly, and sitting on a donkey,
A colt, the foal of a donkey.'"
6So the disciples went and did as Jesus commanded them. 7They brought the donkey and the colt, laid their clothes on them, and set Him on them. 8And a very great multitude spread their clothes on the road; others cut down branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9Then the multitudes who went before and those who followed cried out, saying:
"Hosanna to the Son of David!
'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!'
Hosanna in the highest!"
10And when He had come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, "Who is this?"
11So the multitudes said, "This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth of Galilee."
AC 2781:8. To "ride upon an ass" was a sign that the natural was made subordinate; and to "ride upon a colt the son of a she-ass" was a sign that the rational was made subordinate. (That the "son of a she-ass" signified the same as a "mule" has been shown above at the passage from Gen. 49:11.) From this their signification, and because it belonged to the highest judge and to a king to ride upon them, and at the same time that the representatives of the church might be fulfilled, it pleased the Lord to do this: as is thus described in John:
On the next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet Him, and cried, Hosanna, Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel. And Jesus, having found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written, Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold thy King cometh sitting on the colt of a she-ass. These things understood not His disciples at the first; but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things unto Him (John 12:12-16; Mark 11:1-12; Luke 19:28-41).
Sermon from March 28, 2010 continued from the home page