Suffering, Then Glory

1 Peter 1:10-11.

You don’t have to turn there, but just listen to what the Apostle Peter says,

“Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.”

One of the truths of life that we cannot always understand is that of glories without the suffering. We cannot understand the joy of our salvation without knowing the cost of that salvation. Can I say that again….We cannot understand the joy of our salvation without knowing the cost of that salvation.”

The first time I can remember going to a very expensive restaurant with my parents… In fact a restaurant where there are no prices on the menu. Be afraid. Be very afraid. When the prices are not on the menu, they’re saying, “If you need to ask, you don’t need to be here. Trust us. We’ll charge the right amount.” Now, I saw that my father had the prices. He bristled a little, it was actually in Disney World of all places….but we were there, and so we were going to go ahead with it. I never knew the cost of that meal. I don’t want to know the cost of that meal ’cause there were something like 8-10 of us there, and so it was very, very expensive.

Friends, can I tell you right now, we don’t know the cost of our salvation, not fully.

We don’t know what it cost Jesus. We have an idea. We have an idea, but we don’t really know, do we, what it cost him to save our souls, and we will not know until we see the glories and the holiness of God one day. That’s when you’ll understand the cost that was paid for your salvation, a cost hidden from us like it was for me that night. I remember that was a feast. I enjoyed that food, but Jesus is spreading a banquet for us. That’s very much the language, the image laid out for us here. There’s a banquet being spread for us, a banquet of glorious worship, for all eternity, and he’s preparing it. The people on the streets of Jerusalem would know this Psalm. I’m quite sure that a lot of the hooting and hollering that day was in response to the fact that they knew the Messiah was preparing a banquet for them too. The problem was however that they didn’t at all consider the cost of that. But as we know, it had a price, and that price was his sufferings in blood for us, for our sins.

Without that, we could not sit at table with God. Do you understand that?
Without the shedding of his blood, there could be no forgiveness of sins, and without the forgiveness of sins, we would not be “qualified,” to use the language of the Apostle Paul, to sit at table with God. And so very quickly, in verses 1 through 21, what we have, is the prophecy of the sufferings of Christ, and then in verses 22 through 31, the glories that would follow those sufferings.

Read Psalm 22:1 – 31

Yes, this psalm famously begins with the awesome words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There Christ, the eternal Son of the living God, appears to be forsaken by his Father. And why? Because He was our sin-bearer. He was our substitute. He stood in our place like a lightning rod. He took the strike of God’s wrath for us and carried it safely away from us, because the guilt of the sins of all humanity were laid on him, and he suffered for them.

This is Psalm 22:16. This was written 1,000 years before Jesus was born. “They have pierced my hands and my feet.”

That’s centuries before the Assyrians, even invented crucifixion. What was David thinking about? I don’t know. I don’t think he knew. He just wrote those words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Peter says, it was revealed to him. He wasn’t serving himself only, but all of us as well.

But this Psalm ends with the a declaration of a promised victory:
future generations will be told about the Lord.

³¹ They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it! 

Suffering….and then Glory….And then David writes these words…

Read – Psalm 23

There is so much in Psalm 23 that we could spend even more time on it than we plan to do this morning and still not exhaust it. As we said earlier about Psalm 23 – it’s a psalm that tells us about Jesus’ role as our compassionate Shepherd.

Psalm 23 opens with the familiar words:

“The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want”

So, who is our Shepherd?

Jesus said in John 10:11

“I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd gives his life for his sheep.”

The Psalm reminds us that when we come to Jesus as our Shepherd, we can trust him totally.

We need to know the Good Shepherd…. We need to trust the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd looks after his sheep.

For so long, the nation of Israel had been without a Shepherd, Moses and Joshua were long past, the Judges and Kings of Israel were often the farthest thing from compassionate or Shepherd like…and then as Marlee pointed out last week – for 400 years there was nothing – only silence from God.

The people in Jerusalem that day knew this Psalm too. They knew of and longed for its promises….to lie down in green pastures seemed so much more inviting than their current posture under the boot of Roman occupation.

What are you longing for as you prepare yourself for the coming easter season?

Jesus, our Good Shepherd provides for all our needs – He is the food and drink that we need. And He is that place of quiet that might seem so distant today.

Do you have that place – where we can pull away from the bustle of the day – to have your soul restored?

In a society where our worth is measured so much on what we do – and how busy we are – do you allow yourself to have time to draw aside to those still waters with Him.

Even Jesus needed to get away from the bustle of life.

In the Gospels we read how Jesus after a busy time of ministry often got up very early in the morning, while it was still dark and found a solitary place where he went to pray.

If Jesus needed time out – how much more do we!

In our busy life we need to retreat to the haven of God don’t we…

Finally, we come to Psalm 24

Read – Psalm 24

It’s not exactly clear when David wrote Psalm 24 or for what occasion. Some have theorized that it was for when the Ark of the Covenant came to the city of Jerusalem. Perhaps it was a psalm written with the idea that it would be used at the dedication of the temple when his son, Solomon, completed that project. Perhaps it didn’t have such a specific purpose as much as it was meant to celebrate God’s goodness, promises, and faithfulness to his people.

Regardless of the original purpose or idea behind it, the points made in the psalm are clear. David begins with a reminder of why we matter at all to God: The earth is the LORD’s and everything that fills it, the world and all who live in it, because he founded it on the seas, and he established it on the rivers.

Have you ever asked yourself, why do we matter to God? The answer is because we are his cherished creation. We are the people he made. As we’ve seen in many of our Sunday morning studies, human beings were created not just as part of the creation, but as the creation’s crown, it’s pinnacle. More than the plants and animals, more than the mountains and rivers and oceans, and even more than the angels themselves, God created human beings as the most important part of creation and tasked us with taking care of it. You are important to God because he made you and you belong to him. And in a special way that goes beyond anything else in nature. As Jesus once observed comparing God’s care for us to his care for the rest of the world:

“You are worth more than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31).

This special status is something we need to treasure and value. You are not an afterthought to God; you are his dear one! What great love he has for us!

So, this morning, we too in our own way, stand with the crowd on the road as Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. We join our voices in shouting, “Hosanna!”, a Hebrew word of praise that means, “Save us, please!”
We wave palm metaphorical palm branches, the ancient symbol of victory, as this King enters the city.

Oh people of First Baptist Kingsville, Lift up your heads, you gates. Lift yourselves up, you ancient doors, and the King of Glory will come in. Who is this King of Glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD mighty in battle.

So, Lift up your heads, ….and the King of Glory will come in. Who is he, this King of Glory? The LORD of Armies – he is the King of Glory.

The King of Glory is the promised Messiah.

The King of Glory is the covenant God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, or in our English Bibles, the all-capital-letters LORD.

The King of the Glory is the one who promised to save us from sin and death.

The King of Glory is one who did just that.

As we journey into this Holy Week, we will see the King of Glory do everything you and I needed him to do to save us from our sins. He enters amid shouts of praise, but the cries of “Crucify!” that people will shout later will be the appalling way in which God rescues us.

Because the King of Glory comes – to die.

The gates receive him, only to see him leave their protection carrying a cross.

Before this coming week is over, it will not be the gates of Jerusalem welcoming Jesus, but it will be the rough opening of a cave tomb that will receive his lifeless body. The King of Glory will look defeated, and we will hear from his own lips that this death means that his work is finished.

We look forward and invite each of you into a Holy Week that will be a roller coaster.

We will delight in the intimacy of Maundy Thursday – “this is my body… this is my blood… love one another.”

We will struggle with greatly mixed emotions on that horrendous Friday that we dare to call “good” because we know that despite the brutality of his suffering and death, there will be Jesus’ love for us as clear as it can be – that there will be our victory in what appears to be his defeat.

And then, a week from today, we will gather again, not in sorrow and anguish over the death of our Savior, but in shouts of praise that outshine the Palm Sunday shouts of “Hosanna!”

On Palm Sunday, the praise is a request for the King of Glory to save us. On Easter? It will be praise and thanks that he did just that.

Church family here comes the King of Glory! Let’s follow him through this week to see what our sins cost him, a price he willingly paid. You already know this – The King of Glory will triumph! And in His triumph is found yours!