October 1st

Job 19:1-21:34; Matthew 21:1-17; Psalm 18:1-6

One month in, a twelfth of the Bible done. Some hard stuff and some really great stuff. One thing that has struck me a number of times is the way that the Holy Spirit weaves its way through what we are reading in the here and now. Yesterday I was speaking about the magnificent God coming as a servant and the very next day we have one of the ultimate expressions of that, the king riding on a donkey.

In the 1993 League Cup final, Arsenal won and in the celebrations Tony Adams dropped Steve Morrow, doing the poor lad an injury. Adams was henceforth referred to as a Donkey! The humble donkey has come in for a lot of stick in it’s time. Compared to its cousin, the horse, the donkey was the transport of things and peasants – not kings. In this passage here, the king of kings humbles himself and rides upon the lowliest of animals. A bit like the queen riding a scooter or a clapped out ford transit van!

And then from this humble entry he moves on to the temple where “MY house” should be a house of prayer. This is God’s house and this bloke has just come into town on a donkey. But it is God’s house and it’s his house for our God rode that donkey to the cross. Follow it through to the Psalm, that same bloke on the donkey is also the rock on which our whole lives are built. When everything is going belly up for David it was God who pulled him out of it and this Psalm is a song of praise for that, just soak up the words, read them again.

So, would you trust “white van man” with your life, would you turn to dodgy Dave in his dodgy van when all around you is going wrong? Well you better start because Jesus came into town on a dodgy donkey in order to save us and He is the rock on which we can always trust.