Theologia et Vita

Late last night I was watching something that suddenly brought a few pieces into sharp focus. Think about that moment in John 13 when Jesus tells Judas, "What you are doing, do quickly." There is more going on there than resignation. John has already told us that Satan had entered Judas. In that light, Jesus is not wringing His hands, not losing control, not being swept along by dark forces. He is speaking with absolute authority, even over the evil that is driving the betrayal forward. That is what struck me. Satan is never a free agent in the ultimate sense. He rages, schemes, deceives, and destroys, but he does not operate outside of divine sovereignty. In Job, Satan could not touch a thing without permission. Here again, at the threshold of the cross, evil does not lunge forward on its own terms. It moves only as far as God permits. And if that is what is happening in this scene, then it becomes one more quiet but thunderous witness to Christ's deity. Jesus is not mer...

Zechariah wrote it down around 520 BC, give or take: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (Zech. 9:9). Five centuries later, on a Sunday in April of roughly AD 30, Jesus staged the most deliberately choreographed prophetic act in the Gospels. He sent two disciples ahead specifically to retrieve an unridden colt, gave them a prearranged password of sorts, and rode down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem while the crowd spread garments and palm branches in the road. Matthew quotes Zechariah explicitly (21:5). John notes that the disciples only understood what was happening after the resurrection (12:16). Even the eyewitnesses were operating with incomplete theological software in the moment. The crowd's cry, "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of Yahweh...