GOD AT WAR: Day #1 of the Passion

THE WAR COMES TO JERUSALEM

On Palm Sunday Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey. This humble entrance with great celebration is usually contrasted with a victorious king riding in on a war horse. Jesus comes not to kill his enemies, but to die for them, it is often preached.

But I’m not so sure. I believe Jesus desired to utterly destroy his enemy and all his works. But the enemy was not the flesh and blood who lived in Jerusalem. But the powers and principalities ruling over Jerusalem; indeed, over all of humanity—Satan and his lies.

Jesus doesn’t come on a war horse. But that doesn’t mean he’s not entering the battle. When it comes to his true enemy—the Father of Lies—there will be no mercy. When it comes to the prisoners of these lies, there will only be liberty.

Indeed, all of Jerusalem “was in turmoil” at his entrance (Matt. 21: 1), kind of like when a controversial politician comes to town to hold a rally, kind of like when a crisis stirs the news cycle and we can’t look away.

Jesus comes as GOD AT WAR.

And this must be the case if we believe that Jesus’ death is more than to appease God’s wrath. If we believe he achieves victory over sin, Satan, and death, then surely, Jesus was in the throes of battle the moment he entered Jerusalem.

To think anything else says more about ourselves than it does about Jesus.

BATTLE IN THE TEMPLE

Jesus had already been at war with the powers and principalities—of the spiritual, social, or personal kind—all throughout his ministry.
But on the first day he goes to the Temple and opens a major campaign—cleaning it out, disrupting business as usual. “Is it not written,” Jesus says, quoting Isaiah 56:7, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.”

Jesus was making war on the idea that God could not be worshipped by all people, that God could be the exclusive possession of one people. Jesus, God in Jewish flesh, declares that God is the God of all flesh, of all people.
It is for this action in the Temple that Jesus got a bullseye on his back, when the chief priests and scribes decided that Jesus needed to go, needed to die (Mark 11:18).

After establishing his beachhead in the Temple, we see Jesus pressing the fight each day from this location.

Tomorrow we’ll look at what he does next.