FBCWest 582 | The Whole World Has Gone After Him
Recorded On: 11/26/2023
Bulletin
Hymn # 425 ”Heaven Came Down”
SCRIPTURE READING – John 3:16 & 17
Giving of Selves and Our Offerings
OFFERTORY PRAYER
OFFERTORY MUSIC – Pru Hungate
Praise and Worship
“Only King Forever”
“Living Hopee”
“Waymaker”
Proclamation of the Word
Message by Pastor Joe
“The Whole World Has Gone After Him”
“At the Cross (Love Ran Red)”
Benediction “There Is Freedom”
Sermon Notes
John 12:12 – 18
A great crowd is there to meet Jesus as He enters Jerusalem bringing palm branches and shouting Hosanna!
John 12:19 The Pharisees are concerned their plans are not working
John 12:20 – 22 Greek Jews want to meet Jesus and go to Philip
John 12:23 Jesus tells them now is the time for Him to be glorified
John 12:24 Jesus’ death is necessary to bear much fruit
John 12:25 Love your life, then lose it
John 12:26 To serve Jesus is to follow Him and if you do the Father will honor you
Scritpures
Transcript of Service
If you have your Bibles, please turn to the Gospel of John,
Chapter 12, we're going to start with Verse 12. As I always say, turn to your Bibles, because you should have your Bibles, because I could be reading something totally different.
And that's kind of what I want to talk about today.
Tradition, tradition.
Some tradition we do and we have no idea why.
So for instance, you've heard the story, but I'm going to tell it again. We're the young woman family, and it was her opportunity to cook the family meal. And they were going to have a ham. And so she cut the end of the ham off and her husband goes, "Why did you do that?" She goes, "Well, my mom always did, and the ham was always tasting good, so that's what you're supposed to do." And he goes, "I don't think that's right. Why don't you call your mom?"
And so she calls her mom and says, "Mom, you always cut the end of the ham off. You did that to make it taste better, right?" She goes, "No, I never had a pan big enough to put it in." And so sometimes we have tradition and we have no knowledge of why we're doing it. We just do it because we've always done it.
There's other tradition that I don't care whether it's right or wrong, just the way we do it.
And then there are those who want to destroy tradition because they just don't like it and they want new rules and whatever.
I don't mean to be cantankerous. I like to get along and just whatever.
But there comes a time when you look at the scriptures and you look at tradition and you go,
maybe the two don't know. Sometimes it's not that serious. So for instance, we're coming up soon on Christmas and all the Christmas carols say, "And the angels sing."
They don't sing until Revelation. It's always, "And the angels sing."
But you're not going to lose your salvation because you say, "Sing," whatever.
And the other one I always talk about is the three wise men. The scriptures never tell you that there's three. They tell you there's three types of gifts. There could be seven gifts and seven different people. They're just three types.
Again, I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to die on that hill. But we even have a hymn we three kings of the war in dark.
And then the other one is in that same vein
in the little Christmas manger scene. You always have the shepherds and Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus in a little hay broth. And you have the kings of the wise men,
except the scriptures say that they entered the house.
So they probably weren't there. But again, it's cute. Everybody puts-- so what I do when we do the manger scene is I take the wise men and I put them someplace else in the house because that makes more sense to me. But again, if you want the wise men at the baby manger.
Now we're going to come to a point where we've got tradition.
And I think it affects our view of this time that Jesus is going to go, which we would call the holy week or the passion week. And so I'm going to show you where there is tradition. And maybe the tradition is wrong. Or maybe it's right in a different setting.
But first off, I want to let you know, even though I'm going to look at this,
we're going to be talking about Jesus' triumphal entry, what we call Palm Sunday, into Jerusalem. I believe, as a matter of fact, that happened.
The tradition is around what happens. But I'm not questioning that Jesus entered Jerusalem and they entered as the way the scripture says.
I just find it difficult. And so the last example I'm going to give you is kind of like I'm going to simplify algebra.
I'm going to take away the A's and the B's and the X's and the Y's and just put in numbers.
But I'm going to make it a word problem, which everybody hates. So the word problem is this. Mary and Martha want to make an apple pie.
They have to have at least 20 apples in order to make their apple pie. If they don't have 20 apples, then the apple pie won't turn out. So Martha goes into the first door and she buys five apples. And she goes to the next door and she buys five apples.
Total 10.
Mary goes to the store and buys six apples. And then she goes to another store and buys three apples. And then you put down 10. Then you say 10 plus 10 is 20. Mary and Martha have enough apples to bake the apple pie.
Well, the problem is you got the wrong answer because you made a mistake in the calculation.
That's where we're going to go here. So if you got your Bibles and you've turned to the Gospel of John chapter 12, verse 20, it says this. "On the next day, a large crowd who had come to the feast, when they had heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem,
took branches of the palm trees and went out to meet him and began to shout, Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel." Now notice it says, "On the next day."
We are told previously that when there was that supper that was done in the honor of Jesus, it was six days before Passover.
They assumed that Passover was on Friday.
And so they backed up six days and they say the supper was on Saturday.
And therefore, the next day would be Sunday on Sunday.
Here's the problem.
Passover wasn't on Friday.
How do I know Passover wasn't on Friday? Well, they miscalculated because they said that they had to bury Jesus quickly because the Sabbath was coming, and so they couldn't tend to his body. And so because they say he died on Friday, they have to do all kinds of weird calculations to determine that he was buried for three days.
But what they failed to understand because they didn't understand the Scripture,
Passover is a high holy day. It is a Sabbath. So Jesus would not be crucified on this Passover because it was a Sabbath. So they had to crucify him the day previous when the Passover lands were being sacrificed because Jesus is our Passover land.
So at minimum, he was crucified Thursday
because if that's so, then Friday he would have been in the grave. Saturday would have been in the grave on Sunday.
So you've got Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then he arrives on Sunday.
So we've got a problem here.
If he died on Thursday, the Passover, he died on Thursday,
then six days would have been Friday and Palm Saturday.
So I'm saying, but let's not stop there. But if that's the case, we're celebrating Palm Sunday when the calculation was, no, it should be Palm Saturday.
So let me keep going. But notice they take palm branches out. Well, why did they do that? Because they do that as a victorious sign. They'd done it when some other people had rebelled against Rome and in the back of the east. And so it's kind of a sign of victory. The king is coming. We're going to have our country back, and everything's going to be wonderful. And there's shouting, Hosanna, which means save us.
So there's a crowd who is meeting Jesus, and there's a crowd who's walking with Jesus to Jerusalem from Bethany. So you have a lot of people who are screaming, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, which is a quote from a song.
So everything is going.
And so then it says, "And Jesus, find a young donkey, set on it as it is written, fear not, daughters of Zion, for behold, your king is coming seated on a donkey pole." And so in Zechariah, it is prophesied that the Messiah would come sitting on an unwritten donkey to the pole.
So Jesus completes the prophecy of him. Now, my view is Jesus didn't do this to fulfill prophecy.
Jesus did this, and the prophet said, when Jesus does this, you'll know it's the Messiah. So it looked ahead to what Jesus would do, not Jesus looked behind and say, what do I have to complete?
And it's going to save further. These things as a disciple did not understand it first. But when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of him, and that they had done these things to him.
So the writer is giving us a parentheses and said, well, this is happening, but they're not really understanding the scripture. They're just kind of caught up in the minute in a moment, and it's exciting. And people are screaming. And the disciples are thinking, finally, one of us is going to be on the right side, one is going to be on the left side, and we're going to rule this place.
So the people who were with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify about him.
So again, we've got all these people who are coming,
and not only are there a group who had gone to Jerusalem for the Passover, again, like I said, we have others who saw Jesus raised Lazarus. And so they're telling to people, and they're testifying about what had happened.
For this reason, also, people went and met him because they heard that he performed signs.
And so they've got all these people who are excited because the Messiah has come.
And the Messiah has come, and we're going to be victorious, and everything's going to be wonderful.
I want to step back a moment. Notice the scriptures previously said the day after.
I can get you to Sunday so that you'll feel better, so the pom Sunday.
This is how you can do it. What the scripture says was that they had the supper,
then some people who had seen the raising of Lazarus went and tattletailed on Jesus.
And then it said they met in a council to determine what they needed to do, and I office made his statement that one it is necessary for one person to die
for the sake of the nation.
You can say that then it said on the next day. So the next day is not the day after the supper. The next day is the day after the council meeting. And so now you have pom Sunday on pom Sunday. Don't you feel better?
Quite frankly, I don't care.
He could have come Saturday. He could have come Sunday. He could have come any day he chose.
But I want us to understand that when we have tradition, it should be based on the scripture so that we could defend the scripture, because when we go off and we make up things and we say, well, it must be this way,
then people who are critical to think saying, well, wait a minute. There's a big hole here.
So for instance, like I said, we wrap ourselves up a knot. When we say that Good Friday, which I think is a lousy term. It wasn't good for Jesus.
Good for us, but not for him.
They wrap themselves up the knots to get three days and three nights out of Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Let me give you a little secret because we're going to give you some advanced warning.
Passover celebration for the disciples was probably Tuesday.
Jesus was tried Tuesday night and Wednesday.
He was then crucified Wednesday afternoon when it got dark at about 3 p.m.
The earth shook.
Then he surrendered his life. He did not his life was not taken from him.
On Wednesday, but before sundown, which in in Jewish reckoning of time would have been Thursday, Passover. They had to get him buried for a couple of reasons. Passover was holy. You fit and if you touch a dead body, you are on clean. So you got to wash and do something.
So they took his body and buried him.
And then Friday was probably Passover.
Saturday.
There's a holy day.
So we've got Thursday as Passover. I'm sorry, Thursday is Passover. Friday as unleavened bread a day of rest.
Saturday a Sabbath and then Sunday.
Three days, three nights in the tomb, just as Jesus said when he said there will be no sign given to him. There will be no sign given to this generation except the sign of Jonah and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.
So when people ask you to go to a good Friday service.
You can thank him and you can go.
Just understand that he probably died Wednesday.
And they will never understand because tradition tells them.
He died on Friday.
If somebody is willing to listen, you can kind of talk to them and see.
But again, the most important thing whether it was Wednesday or Thursday or Friday.
It's a fact is to became to give his life a ransom for many.
And he did so.
And then after those three days.
That day which nobody knows about which is called first.
Not East.
Rose from the dead.
That's a pretty good tradition.
And I'll hold on to that because it's based in truth.
Based on the Scriptures, but the Pharisees weren't too happy with what was going on. So the Pharisees said to one another you see that you are not doing any good.
Look the world has gone after him.
They're determining.
We made all these plans.
To stop him.
We're not stopping. As a matter of fact, he's getting more and more and more famous.
A greater threat to us.
A concern to us about our position.
And our.
Nation.
Because after all they had already paid spies and sent spies out and say when you see Jesus report it.
So that we can season.
Trouble is they can't season now. There's too many people are saying who's Anna Davis too many people are waving on branches and saying is it the one that I know the bulletin says that I'm going to go on.
But I'm going to stop here.
Because I think I've given you enough to think of.
What I want you to do.
Not take my word.
I do this.
Is.
Hassel.
They hold.
Check out liberty.
Is Saturday the only.
How do you get three days and three nights?
Look at the script.
Look at the script.
Scripture is not afraid of you looking at.
He'll stand the best.
He'll stand critical.
Because.
We have a savior.
Who came.
Die.
Who came not to judge.
But to redeem.
Call this his own. To change us.
From sinners.
Thanks.
From.
People who do not know him. People who are called children.
What an awesome awesome God that we can.
We just sang a song called way me.
We didn't make a way. He.
That is why we need to worship him.
Study what his words are. To live a life that he is.
On us.
Not one. That we think is right. But one that he has.
Constructed.
All God's people say.