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In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear saints, our Lord Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem, and he’s headed that way. He starts in Galilee, and he’s gone down south. But the text in Luke 13, we find him in Perea. That’s the area where John the Baptist was baptizing; that’s on the east side of the Jordan. It’s the area where Elijah was taken up into heaven. It’s the area where the children of Israel came and crossed over the Jordan. Jesus is down in that area, which is also the region of Herod, the king, and the Pharisees find him there.
It’s really curious when they say, “Hey, you better get out of here because Herod is seeking to kill you.” Now, I just, first of all, don’t think that that’s true. I don’t think that Herod was seeking to kill Jesus. We learn later in the passion that Herod was wanting to see Jesus because he wanted to see some sort of miracle. But also, I don’t know why the Pharisees care about this because they themselves are trying to kill Jesus. But here Jesus responds, and his response is pretty, I guess the kids would call it salty.
First, he’s salty towards Herod. He says, “Go tell that fox that I’ll do what I want. I’m going to cure people, and I’m going to help people, and I’m going to do it today and tomorrow. Then I’ll leave. None of his business.” And then he says, “But I can’t, I don’t have to worry about being arrested here because I’m a prophet, and so I have to die in Jerusalem.” Right?
It’s a pretty amazing thing. Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” A prophet can’t die outside of Jerusalem. And imagine that. I mean, imagine here Jesus is talking this way about Jerusalem, the city of God, on the mountain of God, with the people of God, and the house of God, and the temple of God, and the service of God. Jerusalem is that holy place.
It would have been incredibly offensive to the Pharisees to hear Jesus saying, “I must go my way today and tomorrow and the day following, for it can’t be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.” Now, what is it, and this is what we need to think about today, what is it about Jerusalem that murders prophets? Why is it impossible for a prophet to be murdered anywhere but Jerusalem? They all have to die there. What’s going on?
And what’s going on with the Pharisees who are so ferocious about murdering Jesus? They just have to, I mean, this is their plotting, and it’s not going to be over until they do this work. Now, I want to step a little bit back to give some historical perspective on this thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but if you just start reading through the Bible and kind of getting the history of it, you notice that there’s this huge change that happens right around the time of Jeremiah, maybe a little bit later.
If you’re reading the history of the kings, even when there were good kings like David and Josiah and all these guys, there were still all these strange pagan worship practices that were happening. There were the high places. There were the groves where they would go, and they’d offer sacrifices. And that’s at the best times. But at the worst times, there was all sorts of crazy pagan stuff. I mean, they were bringing in Baals and Ashtoreths and Molechs and all of this stuff even into the temple in Jerusalem.
I mean, when Jeremiah was preaching, there was this temple prostitution that was happening in the temple. And there was one king who goes in the, I think he visits Damascus, and he’s so impressed with a pagan altar in Damascus that he comes back to Jerusalem and has the altar of the Lord moved so that he can build this replica of this big pagan thing. It’s crazy. If you were to go to Jerusalem, say, the year 600, and you look at what’s going on there, you’d say, “I don’t even recognize this place” if you compare it to what Moses said ought to happen.
But then fast forward. Fast forward to the days of Jesus, or even a couple of hundred years before Jesus, and you would go to Jerusalem and you couldn’t find an idol anywhere. They were not practicing any pagan stuff. You would find all of the people, the priests, dressed like they were supposed to be dressed, according to the law of Moses. And you’d find all these laymen, the Pharisees, who were these students of the Bible, who had dedicated their entire life to living righteously before the Lord. It was a completely different picture.
Now, what happened? The thing that happened is that, well, it’s the exile, the conquering of Jerusalem and all the Israelites under King Nebuchadnezzar in 586. Remember, Nebuchadnezzar comes in there, surrounds the place, utterly destroys the temple. He carts off most of the people over to Babylon, and the rest of the people are scattered all over the world.
In that context, this is what happens. The people have to ask themselves, “How can we be Jewish if we don’t have a temple? How can we be Jewish if we can’t offer sacrifices? How can we be Jewish if there’s no priesthood, if there’s no Passover, if there’s no Day of Atonement, if there’s no morning and evening sacrifice, if there’s no pilgrimage up to the temple, how can we do it?”
What comes out, and here’s the interesting thing, is what comes out of that contemplation and that consideration is Phariseeism. Here’s the idea. That we can’t offer our sacrifices to God because we don’t have a place to do it. We don’t have a temple. We don’t have an altar. We don’t have a priesthood. We can’t offer the sacrifices that the Lord established in his law with Moses on Mount Sinai. We can’t do any of that.
So what’s the best that we can do? Well, we can offer to God the sacrifice of our obedience and of our good works and of our keeping the law. And what happens then is this complete change of things. So that when you would visit Jerusalem before this, it was full of all this kind of pagan stuff. And then you visit afterwards, and it’s not. It looks like, if you were to just walk around Jerusalem in Jesus’ day, that people are getting pretty close to at least trying to follow the law of God.
And you know who the best of those guys were trying to follow the law of God? The Pharisees. If you would have met a Pharisee, now, this is one of the disadvantages we have of coming to the New Testament as children and learning these stories in Sunday school, because we know who the bad guys are: the Pharisees. But if you were to show up in Jerusalem in the days of Jesus and you didn’t know how the story ended and you were walking around and you met a couple of Pharisees, you would say, “Wow. That’s pretty impressive. I’ve never met anyone so dedicated to the law of God. I’ve never met anyone who’s so convinced of the word of God. I’ve never met someone who’s so dedicated to keeping God’s law, to keeping His Word.”
The Pharisees were the good guys. The Pharisees were the guys that you hoped would ask your daughter out on a date because you knew that they’d be home before curfew. This is who the Pharisees were. Now, this, though, is… This Phariseeism, which looks so good to our outward eyes and outward appearance, is what kills the prophets. This Phariseeism is what hypocritically tells Jesus to leave the area to avoid Herod.
This Phariseeism is what’s going to arrest Jesus and hand him over to Pilate to be crucified. This Phariseeism is why Jesus says, “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” Phariseeism looks so beautiful. In fact, Jesus compares it when he’s woeing the Pharisees, saying, “Woe to you, Pharisees, you’re like whitewashed tombs. You look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside, you’re full of dead men’s bones and rotting corpses and filth and stench.”
It looks so good on the outside, but on the inside, it’s dead and dying and murderous. Why? Now, this “Y” question is so important because, remember, each one of us has a little Pharisee that’s living in our own heart. Each one of us is part Pharisee. Each one of us is tempted to this way of thinking. Each one of us says, “The best I can do, I should offer to God and be pleasing to him by my own efforts, by my own works, by my own acts of atonement, by my own acts of purity and cleansing, by myself, that I can make myself through my own efforts, through my own deeds, I can make myself pleasing to God.”
And that little Pharisee that lives in you and in me hates Jesus. It hates the gospel. It murders the prophets. It stones the people who are sent to it. And this is why. There are times that… You guys will ask me sometimes after the service, and if there’s some good, clear gospel preaching about the kindness of God and the forgiveness of sins and the love of God and Christ and the fact that we’re going to stand before the Lord in eternal life and receive his glory by his grace and his mercy and his love.
And when that captures your own hearts and your own imaginations, you’ll walk out of the service or come and see me up here after the service and you’ll be smiling and you’ll say, “You have the joy of the gospel.” And you’ll say, “Pastor, why isn’t it that everyone doesn’t believe this good news? It’s so good. It’s so wonderful. Why doesn’t everyone believe it?”
And the answer is that before you are a forgiven sinner, you have to be first a sinner. Before you have Jesus as your Savior, you have to be in need of saving. Before you’re delivered by the kindness of God and his death and his resurrection, you have to need deliverance. Before the gospel is good news, you have to be the one who needs the good news. To be resurrected, you have to be first put to death.
And that little Pharisee, that little part of your own sinful heart that loves yourself and loves your own works—that’s in mine too—does not want to be put to death. It does not want to admit that it’s a sinner. It does not want to stand and confess that it needs saving. And it will do anything, like a bear pinned in a corner—it will do anything rather than admit that it needs the forgiveness of sins. It’ll plot, it’ll stay up all night, it’ll plan, it’ll arrest, it’ll hand over, it’ll crucify, it’ll kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to it.
Now, this is a clear call then to us to repent and recognize that the repentance that’s needed… I mean, if you would have gone back, remember what we’re talking about, if you would have gone back to Jerusalem in the year 700 and walked around, you’d say, “Boy, these pagan idol worshippers need to repent.” But if you were to fast forward 500 years and walk around Jerusalem, you’d say, “Well, I think they did. They did repent. It looks great. Looks good. Looks like they’re all obedient and following the law.”
It’s this whitewashed tomb with dead men’s bones that is so hard for us to see, but we have to see it. Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that kills the prophets. The Lord Jesus often wants to save us more than we want to be saved because we cling to some sense of our own self-righteousness and self-worth and self-whatever.
So we today, dear saints, repent of all of it. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot impress God by our own works and efforts. We cannot achieve a resume that would commend us before the Lord on the judgment day. We cannot rescue and deliver ourselves. We need a Savior from our sins. And we have that Savior in Christ.
Look at what he says to the Pharisees and to the whole city, the whole prophet-murdering city of Jerusalem: “How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. But you would not.” I’ve never seen that happen, a hen gathering her chicks under her wings. I’m too urban, I think, right? But I have seen a picture of it on YouTube. In fact, I heard a story of this one time, and I think this is maybe one of the most profound pictures of the gospel.
There was a farmer one time, and there was a fire that went through the farm. He went out to look at the damage that happened after the fire, and he found there in the ashes the burned body of one of his chickens. As he picked up the body, the corpse of that chicken, the hens all ran out from underneath the safe that she just sat on her hens and was burned so that she could protect her chicks.
And this is exactly what Jesus says he wants to do, and exactly, dear saints, what he has done, in fact, on the cross. That he has endured God’s wrath for your sin so that you could live and live forever with him.
You will not see me, Jesus says, until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” And that’s exactly what the crowds will say in the triumphal entry of our Lord into Jerusalem. And dear saints, it’s exactly what we say every week: “Blessed is he, blessed is he, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” With those words, you confess that you’re a sinner in desperate need of a Savior. And with those words, you confess that you have a Savior: Jesus Christ, your Lord.
May God give us this confession, this confidence, and this peace through Christ our Lord. Amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.