The Cry of the Human Heart

Pastor Brian picked up where last week's message left off, asking what would finally soften the heart of national Israel so that they would say, "Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord." The answer he worked toward was a single Aramaic word: Hosanna. And before the evening was over, that word had stopped being about Israel and started being about everyone in the room.

What was said

Last week closed with a question left unanswered on purpose. Jesus told the religious leaders of His day that they would not see Him again until they said, "Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord." The question Pastor Brian carried into this Sunday was simple: what would it take to get them there? Because right now, he said, the Bible is clear that Israel is experiencing a hardening of heart, and the gospel largely glances off the surface rather than sinking in.

He opened in Jeremiah 30, reading through verse 17, and used it to introduce a way of reading the Old Testament prophets that he said had unlocked the books for him. The prophets, he explained, work like a "now and later." Some of what they wrote was fulfilled within their own lifetimes or shortly after. Some of it we now look back on as history. But tucked inside those same chapters are things that still have a future, greater fulfillment ahead, and the clue to spotting them is the phrase "in that day" or "the day of the Lord."

That future fulfillment for Israel, he said, is what Jeremiah 30 calls "the time of Jacob's trouble." He connected it to what Jesus described as a coming tribulation, and argued that this period of unprecedented devastation will be the catalyst that finally brings national Israel to the end of themselves. He was careful to note that the chastisements of God are always, as he put it, "the least severe measures taken to bring about the maximum possible correction." He traced Israel's history of being chased from country to country, of the Holocaust, of the Jewish response of "never again" rather than a turning to God, and said the coming time will eclipse even that, and will finally produce surrender.

He moved to John 12 and the triumphal entry to land on the word itself. The crowd shouted what most English translations render as "praise God," but Pastor Brian pointed out that the actual word in the text is Hosanna. It is an Aramaic cry that means "save us." He described it as the sound of someone with a terminal illness who has tried every doctor and every treatment and is finally desperate enough to ask for real help.

That desperation, he said, is exactly what national Israel will reach. At the end of themselves, with what he called "their last gulp of air before sinking under the waters of annihilation," they will cry Hosanna, and Jesus will come. He shared a photo from a recent climb he guided up Cody Peak, a group of Israelis, only one of whom knows Jesus as Messiah, and said he believes that is going to change, possibly within our lifetimes.

He brought it home to the congregation by asking whether anyone in the room was already in that place, not theologically but personally. Whether the stubbornness that Israel has shown on a national scale might look familiar, because most people had stepped on enough rakes of their own before they finally stopped and asked for help. The invitation he extended was not complicated: whatever the situation, whatever the crossroads, try the word. Hosanna. He defined it one last time as "the cry of the human heart that finally realizes we can't save ourselves."