Mark 11:1-25
Date: April 23rd 2023
Speaker: Samuel Crites
Scripture: Mark 11:1-25
Exegetical Outline
Main Idea of Text: Jesus finally enters Jerusalem as a king, he curses the temple, and teaches his disciples about prayer and forgiveness.
11:1-11: Jesus enters into Jerusalem like a king as the people sing of his salvation and he enters the temple.
11:12-25: Jesus curses the temple, like the fig tree, and teaches his disciples how to pray like they were supposed to pray in the temple.
11:12-14: Jesus encounters a fig tree with leaves but no fruit; he curses it.
11:15-19: Jesus goes to the temple and drives out the moneychangers, because the house of the Lord is supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations.
11:20-25: Jesus uses the withered fig tree to be an object lesson for his disciples on prayer and forgiveness.
Homiletical Outline
Main Idea of Sermon: Jesus, the long-awaited king, has come to bring salvation, judgment, and direct access to God.
Jesus, the long-awaited king, has come to bring salvation. (1-11)
Jesus’s triumphal entry is centered on his salvation (i.e., Hosanna).
The irony of the moment.
Jesus, the long-awaited king, has come to bring Judgment.
The fig tree is the temple.
The judgment is that they have abandoned the original purpose of the temple.
Prayer
Evangelistic forgiveness (Jeremiah 56:6-8)
Jesus, the long-awaited king, has come to bring direct access to God.
Jesus transfers the priestly duty to his disciples.
Jesus teaches them to pray and forgive.
[Evangelism begins within God’s people.]
Introduction
The king has come. The one we have waited for has arrived. Listen to the people’s praises. They sing, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!” Smiling faces crowded around the donkey as they paved his way into the holy city with palm branches and the shirts off their own backs. The king has come, robed in righteousness, bringing his salvation. This is a day to rejoice and celebrate, because the righteous branch of Jesse has bloomed in the fullness of his beauty. God has made provision for his people; the good shepherd has come and will lead them out of the shadow of death into eternal life.
And yet, you and I know the end of the story. Despite Jesus’s three prophesies to his followers, he is the only one in our sermon text this week that truly understands what is about to happen. What must he have been feeling as he rode the colt into the city? How bittersweet were the praises of the people? Those very smiling faces that called him Blessed today and cried out for his salvation will be the same jeering faces in less than a week that will curse him and cry out for his crucifixion. They will set a convicted criminal, a murderer, free in order to send their innocent king to the cross. Jesus knew this, and yet, he rode into town any way. He came to his people knowing they would reject him.
When we read Mark 11, we should allow ourselves to feel both the joy of the coming of the king, and the sorrow of his inevitable betrayal. Consider that as we read our sermon text this week. Let’s read Mark 11:1-25 together.
Mark 11:1-25
11 Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples 2 and said to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it. 3 If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.’ ” 4 And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street, and they untied it. 5 And some of those standing there said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” 6 And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go. 7 And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. 8 And many spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. 9 And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! 10 Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”
11 And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
Jesus Curses the Fig Tree
12 On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. 13 And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. 14 And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.
Jesus Cleanses the Temple
15 And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 16 And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. 17 And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” 18 And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. 19 And when evening came they went out of the city.
The Lesson from the Withered Fig Tree
20 As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. 21 And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” 22 And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. 23 Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. 24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. 25 And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”
The main idea of our sermon today is this: Jesus, the long-awaited king, has come to bring salvation, judgment, and direct access to God.
The sermons will have three main points. First, Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings salvation to his people. At the beginning of the Passover week, we see Jesus entering Jerusalem as a king of old. The way the people treat him, the mount that he rides, the praises they proclaim all point to the fact that Jesus is the king. He is not just a king, but the king that the Psalmist promised in Psalm 118 would bring salvation to his people.
The second point of our sermon is that Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings judgment. Jesus rides through Jerusalem, straight into the Temple. Just like the fig tree, there is an outward sign of life, but no tangible fruit. The next day, he curses both the fig tree and the Temple. Jesus is not cleansing the Temple; he is beginning the process of replacing it. Its original evangelistic purpose is going to be replaced by his body, the Church. Its priests are replaced by a royal priesthood that includes every Christian. By 70 A.D., it’s very presence is going to be raised to the ground.
The third and final point of our sermon is that Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings direct access to God. The disciples are astounded that the fig tree is withered. We will see that the basis for their amazement is not merely that Jesus can wither a tree with his very words, but that they understand that what Jesus has done is a fulfillment of the prophet Hosea’s prophecy from Hosea 2. Israel, and specifically the Temple, is the withered fig tree. In a sense, this leads the disciples to despair, but Christ encourages them by commanding them to trust God. With the temple removed, they have direct access, through faith and prayer, to the one, true, and living God.
Jesus, the long-awaited king, has come to bring salvation, judgment, and direct access to God.
Jesus, the long-awaited king, has come to bring salvation.
When we began the Gospel of Mark, we established that the book has three primary divisions. The first major division was Chapters 1-8. This first act is primarily focused on Jesus’s private ministry to his disciples. He has to teach the disciples who he is. He is the Messiah, the Son of God. Everything Jesus does is to support his claim to the disciples that he is who he says he is. This section concludes in chapter 8 with Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah.
As soon as the disciples come to the realization that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus begins to set his sights on Jerusalem and the work that the Father has prepared for him to accomplish there. He shifts his training the disciples away from understanding his identity to understanding the work he must accomplish. He prophesies three times to the disciples that when they arrive in Jerusalem, he will be rejected by the chief priests and elders, he will suffer, be crucified, and on the third day, he will rise from the dead. The problem is that the disciples do not understand what Christ is trying to tell them. Every time he prophesies his death, the disciples respond poorly and reveal their ignorance about the kingdom of God. This whole section can be summarized by simply admitting that the disciples are a self-centered group of individuals. They are not the spiritually mature apostles of the book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament. In the same way that Christ did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many, Jesus wants his disciples to become servant leaders in the kingdom of God.
The third and final act begins with our sermon text today. This last part of the book is going to focus on the selfless sacrifice of Jesus. We will see all the events of the passion week as Christ makes the slow, deliberate journey to the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.
This brings us to our first point: Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings salvation to his people. I say that Jesus is the long-awaited king, because all the promises of the Old Testament find their culmination in the coming of the promised son of David. We are going to see that the main point of the triumphal entry cannot be understood unless we read it against the backdrop of the promises of the Old Testament. Without help from the Old Testament, we will miss the imagery in this passage that reveals the meaning that Mark intends for us to learn. Let me quickly take you to a couple Old Testament passages that illuminate what is taking place in the Triumphal Entry.
The first thing we must learn from the Old Testament is that the way that the Messiah entered Jerusalem mattered. This day was planned out. He was supposed to enter in a very particular way as prophesied by the patriarch Jacob and the prophet Zechariah.
Let’s first turn to Genesis 49:8 and look at the moment Jacob blessed Judah. Go there with me. Judah is not the first born, but Jacob makes his tribe the tribe that will rule over all the other tribes. You will see that Judah is going to be the tribe that all the kings come from. Pay attention to verses 11 and 12. Let’s read.
Genesis 49:8-12
8 “Judah, your brothers shall praise you;
your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies;
your father’s sons shall bow down before you.
9 Judah is a lion’s cub;
from the prey, my son, you have gone up.
He stooped down; he crouched as a lion
and as a lioness; who dares rouse him?
10 The scepter shall not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until tribute comes to him;
and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.
11 Binding his foal to the vine
and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine,
he has washed his garments in wine
and his vesture in the blood of grapes.
12 His eyes are darker than wine,
and his teeth whiter than milk.
Judah, the tribe of kings, will have his donkey bound to the choice vine. Not just any donkey, but a donkey’s colt. Now this prophesy is obscure, but like all prophesy, it becomes more clear throughout time.
Zechariah brings that clarity in Zechariah 9. Turn with me to Zechariah 9:9. If you will remember, this was the Call to Worship that Liz read for us at the beginning of our service. This is what the text says:
Zechariah 9:9-10
9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
10 I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
Israel was promised that their Messiah King would come to them, bringing righteousness and salvation, humbly mounted on the foal of a donkey. This will be a cause of great joy to the people, and they will rejoice and shout aloud at the sight of him. When he comes, he will end all wars and establish peace with all the nations. His kingdom will stretch from sea to sea, all the way to the end of the earth.
As you were reading our sermon text this week in preparation for our service, you might have wondered, why did Mark spend so much time explaining how Jesus procured the mount on which he rode into Jerusalem? It seems odd that Mark records with great detail Christ’s instructions to his disciples and then the actual procurement of the donkey’s colt. But, if you were a first century Jew, being familiar with the Torah and the teachings of the prophet Zechariah, this would have been a signal flare. It explains why the crowd responded the way that they did.
Now you have to imagine that the reputation of Jesus has preceded him. Given his popularity in Galilee and the crowd that followed him, the people of Jerusalem knew that he was on his way. Many of them are probably hoping that he is the Messiah, but are uncertain. When they see him fulfilling the prophecy of Jacob the patriarch and Zechariah the prophet, they treat him like the king they have been expecting. They throw palm branches and their cloaks to do him honor and pave the way for his entrance into the city.
So, the way that Jesus entered the city matters. He is fulfilling prophecy and communicating to the people that he is their long-expected king. This is a perfect example of the providence of God. God has orchestrated this moment from before time began.
But it is not just in how Christ enters Jerusalem. It is also important to see understand what the people are singing. The kingly picture in Mark 11 is completed by what the people are saying. Look with me at verses 9 and 10:
Mark 11:9-10
And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! 10 Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”
I am going to be honest. As a child, I thought the word Hosanna referred to a woman. But the people are actually quoting a famous Messianic Psalm. Turn to Psalm 118 beginning in verse 25:
Psalm 118:25-29
Save us, we pray, O LORD!
O LORD, we pray, give us success!
26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD!
We bless you from the house of the LORD.
27 The LORD is God,
and he has made his light to shine upon us.
Bind the festal sacrifice with cords,
up to the horns of the altar!
28 You are my God, and I will give thanks to you;
you are my God; I will extol you.
29 Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures forever!
Now some of the Psalm may seem familiar, but I didn’t see the word Hosanna in the Psalm 118. This is because the New Testament was written in Greek, but the people that are singing to Christ as he enters Jerusalem are not speaking Greek. They are quoting Hebrew. Instead of translating everything they said, Mark left the first word untranslated. This is what we call a transliteration. He just wrote the Hebrew word in Greek letters. We do this in English. The word baptize in your Bible leaves the Greek word baptizo, which means to immerse, untranslated and just rewrites the Greek word in English letters.
So, here is the point. The Hebrew word that begins verse 25 is hosiah which is translated in my Bible as the plea, “Save us!” What the crowd is saying to Christ is not some random chant or a generic praise like Hallelujah. They are quoting Psalm 118 to Jesus. They recognize him as the Messiah, and they are crying out to him for salvation. He is here. The stone that the builders rejected, the true cornerstone of God’s new temple. He is with us. The day of their salvation has come.
And this is exactly what Christ has come to do. He has come to bring salvation to his people. But look at the part of Psalm 118 that they do not sing to Jesus in Mark 11. Verse 27 says:
Psalm 118:27
27 The LORD is God,
and he has made his light to shine upon us.
Bind the festal sacrifice with cords,
up to the horns of the altar.
The salvation he brings is not deliverance from political oppression. He has come to be their festal sacrifice. The feast in question is Passover, the moment when the Jews remember how God delivered them not only from the Egyptians, but from the Angel of Death. On this most special of Passovers, the Passover that was prefigured in all Passovers, they will begin the week singing “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” and by the end of the week they will be crying “Crucify him.” They will drag the true Passover lamb onto the altar of the cross and bind their sacrifice with nails through his hands and feet.
At the beginning of the week, there is no way to differentiate those that love the Messiah and those that just love the idea of the Messiah. It would have been impossible for any of the disciples to be able to tell who in the crowd was a true follower and those that were going to turn on Jesus by the end of the week…but Jesus knew. Imagine what he must have felt, looking into those faces singing his praises and knowing who was truly worshipping him and who was worshipping themselves.
The triumphal entry is typically seen as this great high point in the Gospels, and it is that! The king is here, and he has arrived in his glorious humility. But it is also a horrible moment. Not horrible as in despicable or deplorable, but horrible as in horrifying. It should strike fear into every professing Christian’s heart. Hypocrisy is so easy! It is so easy for people to deceive themselves that they are following Jesus. When the times are good, when people are throwing flowers from the rooftops and singing praises in the sunshine, who wouldn’t want to follow Jesus. He is here to do us good. He is here to bring us salvation.
But we also know that Jesus has taught us in the Gospel of Mark that following him does not just mean following him in the sunshine. We must follow all the way to the cross, pick up it cross, and die the same death that he died. Following him costs his disciples everything.
So let me give you two things to learn from this passage about hypocrisy. First, Christ knows all the hypocrites in his Church. In that crowd, he was not fooled by the smiling faces singing his praises. He knew those that were sincere and those that were false. This is a comfort to us because it forces us to trust him. We do not know. We must trust our Savior and leave it in his capable hands. It is also comforting because Christ has promised not to leave us or forsake us. He is in our midst, helping his Church.
The second thing we can learn about the nature of hypocrisy. There were two types of people in that crowd: the people that loved Christ for what they thought he was going to do for them and the people that loved Christ because of who he truly was. The litmus test for hypocrisy is simply this: who is at the center of your life? This is what Jesus has been teaching us the last two weeks. In the kingdom of God, the last will be first and the first last. Selflessness is the mark of those that are truly in the kingdom of God.
I don’t think I have made this point as clear as I would have liked to in the last couple weeks. Some of you hear me say self-centeredness is a sin and you hear me say selfishness is a sin. Self-centeredness and selfishness are similar but very different things. In fact, I would say that self-centeredness is necessary for selfishness, but selfishness is not necessary for self-centeredness. Someone could be extremely generous, the opposite of being selfish, and be as self-centered as the devil himself.
Self-centeredness is a disposition of the heart that puts the self at the center of one’s life. It could manifest itself in selfish actions like hoarding and envy, but it could just as easily manifest itself as hypocritical worship as we see in our sermon text this week. In the same way that the opposite of selfishness is generosity, the opposite of self-centeredness is God-centeredness. Those that are in the kingdom of God are inherently selfless because they have come to the end of themselves and submitted to God as the center of their lives.
This is the kind of salvation that Jesus brings. He entered Jerusalem, not to free the Jews from the oppression of the Romans, but to free them from the sinful tyranny of the self. This is the irony of the triumphal entry. The long-awaited king has come, in all his humble beauty and majesty, and brings them the salvation they need, but not the salvation they want.
Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings judgment.
This brings us to our second point: Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings judgment. The triumphal entry ends with Jesus arriving at the temple. The king’s arrival at the temple is what ties the first part of our sermon text, verses 1-11, to the rest of the passage. Jesus is the long-awaited king that has come to judge Israel, particularly in this text, he has come to judge the temple. We are going to see that the temple has failed God in fulfilling its original evangelistic purpose. Jesus has come to put an end to fruitless worship taking place at the temple.
Verses 12-19 can be difficult to understand. At first glance, it seems like you have two things that do not go together: a cursed fig tree, and Jesus clearing out the riff raff in the temple. The key to understanding this passage of Scripture is that these are not two separate things, but the exact same thing. Again, by understanding the Old Testament background, we are going to see that when Jesus curses the fig tree, he is also cursing the temple. Both the fig tree and the temple are fruitless, so Jesus curses them both with a withering judgment that kills both the fig tree and the fruitless worship taking place at the temple.
This morning at our Prayer Meeting, we saw in our sermonette that Hosea prophesied that there was a day coming when God would remove all his blessings from the nation of Israel. She was his adulterous wife that had left her true husband and worshipped the false gods of Baal and Azeroth. Israel had left her true husband, YHWH, and chased after false gods. He promised to put an end to all her sacrifices and feasts as judgment against his adulterous wife. This is what he said in Hosea 2:11-13:
Hosea 2:11-13
11 And I will put an end to all her mirth,
her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths,
and all her appointed feasts.
12 And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees,
of which she said,
‘These are my wages,
which my lovers have given me.’
I will make them a forest,
and the beasts of the field shall devour them.
13 And I will punish her for the feast days of the Baals
when she burned offerings to them
and adorned herself with her ring and jewelry,
and went after her lovers
and forgot me, declares the LORD.
We can begin to see from the prophet Hosea that this was something that God had promised from long ago. As a judgment against Israel’s idolatry, God was going to end cultic worship at the temple. Hosea 2:11 says that he was going to put a stop to feasts, new moons, Sabbaths, and all appointed feasts. All of these things were essential elements to Jewish worship that God said would come to an end.
Immediately after Jesus curses the fig tree, he goes to the temple. Everything that takes place in Mark 11, takes place in the court of the Gentiles. This was the part of the temple that was supposed to be available to everyone: Jews, Gentiles, even the ritually unclean. It was meant to be a place of teaching and evangelism. We know this because after Jesus drives out the money changers, he makes two very important quotations from the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Jeremiah.
It is important for us to take a look at these two references, because we often misunderstand this text. Your Bible might say that Jesus is cleansing the temple. This gives the impression that Jesus is fixing a problem that is preventing the temple from functioning properly, like he is cleaning house or tuning up the engine on a car. This is not what is taking place. By quoting Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jesus is not cleansing the temple, he is ending it.
We can see this in the Old Testament. Turn with me to Isaiah 56:6-8. Jesus is quoting Isaiah to show us the problem, namely, that Israel was never meant to be a religion that excluded other nations and ethnicities. They were meant to be evangelistic, a conduit between the nations and God. Let’s look at this in Isaiah 56, beginning in verse 6:
Isaiah 56:6-8
6 “And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
and to be his servants,
everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it,
and holds fast my covenant—
7 these I will bring to my holy mountain,
and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.”
8 The Lord GOD,
who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares,
“I will gather yet others to him
besides those already gathered.”
You might think that the Jewish faith was always the exclusive religion that it is today. You may not know this, but modern Judaism teaches its people not to proselytize. They will take converts if someone seeks to become Jewish, but they do not seek out new followers.
This is not what God originally intended. God chose Abraham, not to exclusively deny salvation to the rest of the world, but in order to be a blessing to all nations. The Jewish people lost this along the way. Salvation was not exclusively for the Jews, it was to come exclusively through the Jews. They were always meant to be a city set on a hill, and it was always God’s intention to gather the nations to the beacon of their witness in Jerusalem. The problem that Isaiah brings to the forefront is that the Jews had abandoned their responsibility to evangelize the nations.
Jesus also quotes Jeremiah 7:8-15 to show us God’s solution for Israel’s failure. You will see that the consequence for the idolatry of the Israelites is that God promises to bring the temple to an end. He is going to make it as desolate as the original tabernacle that the temple replaced. Read with me Jeremiah 7 beginning in verse 8:
Jeremiah 7:8-15
8 “Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. 9 Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, 10 and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the LORD. 12 Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first, and see what I did to it because of the evil of my people Israel. 13 And now, because you have done all these things, declares the LORD, and when I spoke to you persistently you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, 14 therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, and in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15 And I will cast you out of my sight, as I cast out all your kinsmen, all the offspring of Ephraim.
Shiloh was the original location where the tabernacle was established. But it was eventually replaced by the Temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem. Shiloh became a desolate place. God is promising that he will make Jerusalem as desolate as he has made Shiloh as judgment for the unfaithfulness of the Israelites.
By quoting Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 7, Jesus is declaring that he is the king that has come to fulfill these prophesies. He is taking up the authority of God, himself, to pass a judgment on the temple that God promised in the time of Isaiah and Jeremiah. The fig tree is the illustration of the curse that Jesus is proclaiming on the temple. This is the beginning of Jesus ending the ministry of the temple because the Jews have rebelled against and corrupted God’s original intention. They were supposed to be an evangelistic light to the nations, and they became a self-centered, prideful den of robbers, profiting themselves when they should have been profiting the world. Now this desolation is not going to take place over night, in fact, it won’t be until 70 AD that it is finally wiped off the planet by the Romans. But in our third point, we are going to see that Jesus moves the spiritual significance of the temple as the place where men go to meet God, to all of his followers. The temple is no longer needed because every disciple is a priest and has direct access to God.
It would have been a dark day indeed if Jesus had ended the ministry of the temple and not replaced it with something else. The good news for the people in this room is that Christ did not put an end to man’s ability to commune with God. He replaced the Old with something New, and far better.
The first thing we see in Mark 11 is that Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings salvation to his people. It was not the salvation that most of them expected or even wanted, but it was the salvation that they needed. In our second point, we have seen that Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings judgment on the false shepherds of the house of Israel that have not been faithful to the original mission that their God gave them to be a blessing to all nations. They have turned his house of prayer into a den of robbers, stealing the blessing that was meant for the nations and hoarding it for themselves.
Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings direct access to God.
But this judgment is not a cause for despair, it is actually the best news possible. Let’s look at our third and final point: Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings direct access to God.
Not only did the crowds and spiritual leaders understand what Jesus was teaching in the temple, the disciples also understood, and it terrified them. It might seem that Peter’s astonishment is that the fig tree miraculously withered at the word of Jesus. However, I do not think that is what is going on. Peter has seen Jesus do far more stunning and miraculous things at this point.
Peter’s shock goes deeper. He is putting together all that he has seen and heard over the last three days and sees the connection between the fig tree and the temple. Peter’s concern is more practical. If the temple has been cursed, if it withers up and dies, where will the people go to meet with God? Where will they go to pray to him?
Remember, at this point, the people of God did not meet with God directly. From the time of Moses, God has chosen to isolate his own presence to the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and then in the temple. So the people had to come to the priests who met with God on their behalf. They needed the temple, because it was the place where the people could go to have their sins forgiven and have the priests intercede on their behalf. If Christ destroys the temple, how with the people commune with God?
How Jesus responds to Peter’s concern has strong allusions to Habakkuk 3:17-19. Turn to Habakkuk 3 and let’s read, beginning in verse 17:
Habakkuk 3:17-19
17 Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
19 GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.
Jesus’s encouragement to Peter is basically an exposition of Habakkuk 3. Instead of addressing Peter’s concern, Jesus simply says, “Have faith in God.” This has to be challenging for Peter, because the temple has been the center of Peter’s worship of God for his entire life. Instead of addressing the withered tree or the curses that he pronounced against the temple, Jesus tells Peter to trust the promises of God.
In fact, according to Habakkuk, the withering of the fig tree is not a time for despair, it is a time for rejoicing, because what is coming is far better than what you had before. Instead of leaving you in the valley, the God of your salvation is going to make you to “tread on high places.” If God takes away the one way that they had to commune with him, he is not going to cut them off from his presence. Jesus is about to show them that the house of prayer will be replaced by a people of prayer.
Jesus is abolishing the old way of the priesthood and the prophets and creating a new way to access God. As you have heard me say before, this is not a new thing, it is a very old thing. When God promised the New Covenant to Israel in Jeremiah 31, one of the promises that he promised in verse 34 was this:
Jeremiah 31:34
34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
This is something that they had been waiting for, and the king is here to give it to them. No longer will they need another person to encourage them to know God. There will be no go between to deal with theirs sins and bring you the word of the Lord. God will be intimately involved in every one’s lives. He will give them his own Spirit to live within them and they will each become their own priest. They will commune with God personally and they will no longer need to have their sins dealt with, because God will not remember their sins anymore.
Jesus’s response to Peter’s fear is faith. Trust that your God is good and has a plan. If you just have faith, you will see that he is faithful. He will do the impossible.
What follows in verses 23-25 is instruction for how to pray. How to make the most of this new access that God has granted through Christ to replace the temple. Let me draw your attention to two lessons about prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples.
The first thing to notice is that this access to God is dependent on faith. The faith that Jesus calls the disciples to exercise is not an obscure, generic faith in God, but a specific faith. Peter is supposed to trust in the promises that God has made. The example from this text is that the disciples are to trust in the promise that God is going to replace the Mosaic Covenant with a New and Better Covenant. It is that promise that allowed Christ to do the impossible and wither the fig tree with just his words.
This means that prayer is not a blank check. Faith is not obscure. To trust is to trust in something. In verse 23, when Jesus says
Mark 11:23
Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.
He is not saying that if you just believe that God can do anything, then anything you ask for will be given to you. He is saying that if you trust the promises that God has already made that seem impossible, then when we ask him to do the impossible our faith will be confirmed in our prayers. This is why it is so important to pray Scripture. God has revealed his promises to his people in his Word and when we pray, we are exercising our trust in the promises he has already made to us by asking him to bring them about in our lives. Faith is prerequisite to effective prayer.
If you are not praying for God to do what he has already promised to do, you will be sorely disappointed because your prayers will be self-centered, not God-centered. Your faith will be in yourself and not in God.
The second thing to observe is that sin affects our prayer. We see this in verse 25. It would be easy to misunderstand what Jesus is saying. We have to keep in mind that the context is prayer, not salvation. Jesus is saying that unforgiven sins between brothers and sisters in the kingdom of God will inhibit the effectiveness of our prayers.
If faith is prerequisite to effective prayer, our sin can inhibit our ability to clearly see and trust God. Sin is inherently self-centered, not God-centered, so sin in our lives prevents us from being effective in turning our attention on God because sin focuses our attention on ourselves.
This is especially true when we feel that others have sinned against us. We are so concerned with how we have been wronged that we cannot see how we have wronged God. So when we pray, we are so focused on ourselves that our prayer becomes useless, not to God but to us. Your self-centeredness robs you of the peace that comes putting your trust in God. So if you have been praying earnestly for something and feel that you are just talking to your ceiling, perhaps it is because you have not gotten right with your brothers and sisters in the kingdom of God. Sin is lingering in your life, not effecting your eternity, but inhibiting your prayers.
So, Jesus says, deal with it. There is never a situation where Christians are allowed to withhold forgiveness. Human beings can do horrible things to each other, but there is nothing that another person can do to you that would compare to what you have done to God. The forgiveness that you have received so far surpasses the forgiveness that you could offer someone else that, to withhold forgiveness shows that you do not understand the Gospel. Your hard heartedness lessens the value of Christ’s sacrifice, because inability to forgive says that Christ’s sacrifice is good enough to deal with the sins that you have committed against God, but not the sins that others have committed against you.
That does not make forgiveness easy. I would even say that the comprehensive way that God has forgiven us is impossible if attempted by your own strength. But the fact that it is impossible does not make it any less necessary. Was it not Jesus himself that told us two weeks ago in Mark 10:27
Mark 10:27
“With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.”
If you want the direct access to the Father that your King purchased for you on the cross, you must forgive your brothers and sisters in the Church.
Conclusion
Mark 11:1-25 has shown us that Jesus is the long-awaited king that brings salvation, judgment, and direct access to God. He brought salvation to his people, even though the majority of them rejected him. But their rejection does not mean the Father has failed in his plan for salvation or that the Son’s kingship is diminished in any way. Jesus is still their king, whether they acknowledge him or not. So when that king pronounced judgment on the temple and ended the fruitless worship that was taking place there, it was binding. To this day, there is no temple in Jerusalem where the Jews can go to commune with God. Even if they rebuilt it, he would not be there, because in the same moment that the king ended the old way, he brought about something new and better. He has given his people direct access to God the Father through faith and prayer. We no longer need a priesthood, because we are all priests that minister to each other and commune with God directly.
We started this sermon by thinking about the joy and sadness of the first coming. However, let’s end with this thought. We are still waiting for the coming of our king. Only, on that day, there his coming will not be sad. It will only be a day of rejoicing as we meet him in the sky. The dead will be raised first and then all the followers that are living will be transformed in an instant. We will be like him, and we will enter an eternal land where we will be with him forever.
Let’s pray.