Episode 566: Persist | Tim Henderson

The Greatest Leaders in World History

History. Who are these people that have led the world and might literally, given our generally poor knowledge of world history, our only standard to include them in the list of the greats is that we've heard of them. So if you know their name and I know their name and they've been dead for a thousand years, they probably were pretty great at leading the world.

Who are the people greats in world history? Julius Caesar. Charlemagne. Julius Caesar of the Roman Empire, Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the world and then wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. Genghis Khan took over Asia, like all of it. And some enormous percentage of the people alive in Asia today are descendants of Genghis Khan. Did you know that? He got a lot of people pregnant. It's crazy if you look that up.

Do Pay? I don't know. I'll be honest, this is where I get dumb. From the Empire of Shu who united the three kingdoms? Is that a real place? Does anyone here know about the Empire of Shu? You guys are all smarter than me. Shu, Wu and Wei—these are things I did not know. I'll have to read a book about this. It seems we are underrepresented in the Asian lands.

We also have King David. David, Solomon could have been mentioned. These are some of the great leaders throughout history.

Julius Caesar

I want to talk to you this morning about Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar may be one of the most popular political leaders in world history. Do you remember in 1984 how many states Ronald Reagan won in his reelection campaign? 49 states. That is almost impossible to imagine. Julius Caesar was more popular than that. He was so unbelievably loved. Pick a category and Julius Caesar dominated it.

Militarily, he was a great Roman general. He led Rome's armies during the Gallic Wars as they conquered Gaul—basically a supersized version of France. His conquest was so great, so complete. His armies killed a million of their enemies and then enslaved a million more. It was a massive victory against a ferocious enemy and it won him enormous acclaim throughout the world. What he was able to bring into Rome in terms of plunder and gold and slaves was just so immense that he was overwhelmingly celebrated.

As a populist, despite his exalted standing, he really was a populace. He advocated for and accomplished unbelievable levels of generosity for the common man. He grew so much wealth and then gave it away. He was incredibly generous granting Roman citizenship to people. The urban poor of Rome just adored him.

In terms of charisma, he was known for that personal touch that just makes people feel incredibly loyal to him. He remembered names. He treated his soldiers like they were individuals. You might think in our own history of George Washington at Valley Forge, or Robert E. Lee, who was probably the most beloved military commander in American history. Those men were Caesar-esque. His soldiers absolutely adored him. They were ragingly loyal to him.

Finally, Caesar was known for his magnanimity. If you've ever been to the Lincoln Memorial and read the Gettysburg Address on one side and the second inaugural address on the other, we have so much admiration for Lincoln due to his incredibly gracious orientation to the defeated South. His words carved in stone: "with malice toward none and charity to all. Let bind up the nation's wounds." That magnanimity is really Caesar-esque. He was famous for being incredibly forgiving toward those that he had defeated. He issued pardons. He would give high positions of influence in his government to those that had been opposed to him.

His reputation was one of security and magnanimity, not pettiness and vengefulness. Just to give you an idea of how great he was, Caesar was simply his name. It has no more meaning than Henderson does. But his name became imbued with so much power that Caesar Augustus and all of the Caesars thereafter bequeathed to themselves the name Caesar. His name became a title. His very person became the representation of superior leadership. So much so, the Kaisers of Germany and the czars of Russia also draw their titles from his name. It would be as if for the next two thousand years, the heads of state in nations across the globe called themselves Reagans.

His name became imbued with power. He was deeply loved—so deeply loved that in February, he was granted something that had never been given to any other Roman in history. His image was placed in the temples alongside the gods, essentially deifying him. A special golden throne was made for him to sit upon in the senate. His birthday was declared a public holiday, and then shortly thereafter, not just the day of his birth, but the month of his birth was renamed in his honor. That's what July is. July is Julius' month.

None of those honors, as much honor as there is in that, were his greatest honor. The new title that he was granted was Dictator Perpetuo. What does that say? Dictator forever, baby. Rome was a republic. It didn't have lifelong dictators. But for Julius Caesar, there was absolutely no limit to the adoration that the people would give him. They cried out for him to be their king forever. And then three weeks later, on the Ides of March, they murdered him.

Welcome to our celebration of Palm Sunday. This is the day that we celebrate and honor another great man who also lived in the Roman Empire right around the same time, who did all things well, and who was deeply loved. He was admired. This man was humble and he was generous to ordinary people. He was merciful and forgiving to all. He was worshipped and acclaimed as king by the adoring crowds until they turned on him and murdered him. And his initials were also JC.

The parallels between Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ are worth knowing both because of how Caesar's life and story mirrors the life of Jesus, but then as we will see even more so because of how Jesus inverts the story.

The Triumphal Entry

The events of Palm Sunday are pretty well known to many of us. We call it the triumphal entry and it's recorded in all four of the gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all record this climactic day. This morning we're gonna look at Luke's version of it, which is in Luke 19. We're gonna briefly read it and spend a little bit less time in the text because my assumption is that it's a pretty familiar story to many of you.

You might recall that Jesus told his disciples to go and get a donkey, which seems strange. They're gonna walk up to that guy, he'll have a donkey, and he'll just give it to you. They're like, that's odd. But they did it and it worked. And then as he rides this donkey into the city, the crowds gather around and they extol him and they proclaim him. They cry out to him and they lay coats and branches on the ground so that his donkey's feet don't get hurt. This is a time of great exaltation as they cry out to him to be made their king.

Here's how Luke puts it:

And they brought the donkey to Jesus and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near, already on the way down the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest." — Luke 19:35-38

And yet, for all that, within days, he too would be murdered by those he loved, betrayed and disowned by his closest friends.

Now Caesar's story would have been known by his contemporaries. Caesar was around forty-four, forty-five BC. Jesus is doing all this around thirty AD. So we're talking about a lifetime from the story of Caesar. This would have been known. We're in the Roman Empire. Jesus' story is playing out in the Roman Empire within a generation of one of the greatest betrayals in human history. It would have been known and understood and recognized at that time.

And they also would have known about a guy named Simon Maccabeus. I don't know if you guys can tolerate not only Roman history but Jewish history. The good news is you get both.

The Four Hundred Silent Years

Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament. It ends around April and the New Testament's not gonna pick up until around April when Jesus is born. So you got this four hundred year period and we sometimes call it the four hundred silent years because what we mean by silent is not that nothing happened. Lots of stuff happened. It's just there's no biblical record of it. But there is a book, actually there's a number of books, Jewish books that are written in that period of time. One of which is called First Maccabees.

Now some of you might recognize Maccabees is included in what we call the Apocrypha. Our Catholic friends think that it's part of scripture. Protestants do not and I do not. However, nobody thinks it's bad. These books in the Apocrypha and Maccabees in particular—it's just a history book. So we don't include it in scripture because we don't think it's inspired by God. But we do not view it like some of the other creepy books that are also in this general early time like the Gospel of Thomas, these Gnostic heretical books. Maccabees is nothing like that. There's nothing bad about it. There's nothing wrong about it. We just don't think it's written by God, unlike our Catholic brothers who do. This book, you could read it. There's no problem. Take a look. You get history. You find it to be reliable history. And if you do choose to read it, among other things, you'll find a record of the family of a man named Mattathias. His sons in particular had a huge impact on Jewish culture. And in fact, what they did shapes things that actually happen in the New Testament.

If you've ever heard of Hanukkah and you've got to find it in the Old Testament, you won't find it. But our Jewish friends aren't making that up. This happened in that silent four hundred years. And the events of it are described in that book. And Jesus himself celebrated that. He celebrates in the New Testament, you see it called the festival of lights. What was going on in that period of time in the second century BC is the Romans weren't the ones that were giving the Jews grief—it was the Greeks. And in particular, there was one really bad guy that everybody hated. Antiochus Epiphanes. And his famous act was his act of desecration: slaughtering a pig in the Jewish temple just to desecrate the thing. They did not like him and he did not like them.

The Maccabees and Simon's Victory

The sons of Mattathias, the Maccabees, rose up in rebellion against the Greeks. Now the Maccabee was not their family name, it was a nickname. And it means the hammer, if that gives you any insight into their personality. Judas was the older son, and honestly, Judas is the one that gets most of the glory. He was really kind of the leader of the band, but he dies. And the youngest son, Simon, kind of picks up the torch and continues this work to free Israel from their oppressors.

I'm gonna read you a passage from First Maccabees 13 that describes a bit about Simon's contribution:

Then they cried to Simon to make peace with them and he did so. But he expelled them from there and cleansed the citadel from its pollutions. And on the twenty third day, the second month in the hundred and seventy first year, the Jews entered Jerusalem with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel. Simon decreed that every year they should celebrate this day with rejoicing. And he strengthened the fortifications of the Temple Hill alongside the citadel, and he and his men live there. — First Maccabees 13

Does that sound familiar at all? Even though you probably literally never read that? This whole notion that he's coming into Jerusalem and there's waving palm branches and they're honoring him—that is existing absolutely in the minds of the people as they see Jesus coming into the city. They would have known not only Roman recent history, they would have known their own history. And if that picture looks strange and idiosyncratic, it's not. Because what they were doing for Simon is simply an expression that's described in Leviticus 23, the passage we also heard that Stan read to us. When Dave and Landon the last couple weeks were talking about the festival of booths, one of the elements of that celebration was they would take a splendid tree.

Grab a split fruit from a splendid tree and they would grab palm branches and they would wave them. So the honor that they were showing to Simon was really just a normal Jewish manifestation of celebration and delight in the things that the Lord was doing, the things that the people of God were doing. And so they honor him, they celebrate him, they wave palm fronds to him. And then, does anybody want to guess what ends up happening to Simon? Do you know? He gets betrayed and murdered by his son-in-law. He and his sons were invited to a banquet to honor them. They got them drunk and then slaughtered them in their intoxication because they were threatened by their power.

So why am I giving you a bunch of history lessons this morning? Well, first, because I just think it's really interesting. I like this stuff. I think this is cool. And I think knowing these things can help give color and texture to a story that you've probably heard so many times that you might lose the ability to see the meaning in it. Second, because I think the parallels are actually instructive. They help us make sense of what we might find puzzling. Why would an adoring crowd that's acclaiming him as king so quickly move from adoration to anger? Why would the cries of "crown him" turn into shouts of "crucify him"? You guys, as it turns out, it's not that unique. People are fickle.

Do you know what happened to Winston Churchill, the great British leader during World War Two? When the day that victory is declared over Europe, it was weeks after that that Churchill was voted out of office. They kicked him out even before victory over Japan was declared. He was the guy that led them through this enormously difficult struggle to an unbelievably significant victory. And as soon as the war was won, they're like, "Out with you. You're gone." This is human nature.

Look at the way they treated Jesus. The crowds are following him as long as the free food is flowing. And as soon as he challenged what they loved, back in John 6, they walk away. You guys, when Jesus came in on Palm Sunday, I think the people really did want a king. And they really did think that Jesus was the one that they wanted. And I suspect that they were sincere in that. I don't think they were making it up. But even then, after three years of hearing him teach, of seeing his miracles, of living their life among him, they still didn't understand. They didn't want him to become their king because they were so grateful that he was about to die for them. They wanted him to be their king so that he would go kill their enemies. It wasn't him that they wanted. It was their imaginations about him that they wanted fulfilled.

And my fear is that that is so deeply embedded in our nature that it still persists today. Many of us want a Jesus of our own making rather than the Jesus who made everything. And so I think the parallels between Jesus and Julius Caesar and Simon Maccabees help us see ourselves. And I think that can be a really important step in discovering who Jesus really is and the needs that he actually really meets.

The Difference That Matters

But even more important than the lessons that we can draw from the similarities between these men, I think are the lessons that we can draw from the differences. You guys, Caesar and Simon were men that were grasping for power. But Jesus was God, emptying himself of power. Caesar and Simon's power came from their strength, their military might. But Jesus' power came from his weakness. Caesar's ambition was to conquer the world and enslave it. But Jesus' mission was to be conquered and thereby to free the world from slavery. Caesar was a man who would be God. Jesus was God who became man. Simon Maccabeus cleansed the citadel. But Jesus Christ cleanses human hearts.

You guys, Jesus' great enemy and your great enemy is not Greece and it is not Rome. It is sin. And Jesus came to be conquered by Rome so that he himself could defeat sin. And he fulfills the hope of his own people, his own worshipers, and Caesar's worshipers, and Simon's admirers at a depth that they could not imagine while completely confounding the surface level expectations that the crowd brought to his entry.

All of which I think is fascinating, but none of which matters unless we take it one step further. My goal here is not simply to beg, "Hey, look at this bunch of interesting trivia. Isn't this fun to think about?" But rather is to invite you to look again at the story. And I wonder this, can you see in their imaginings the contours of your own imaginary Jesus?

The question I want to challenge you with this morning is where does Palm Sunday live in your own heart? You guys, we all paraded into this room today waving palm branches. And I wonder if it occurs to you that in so doing, we are necessarily imitating the crowd that in less than a week will shout "crucify." Are we at any risk of continuing to imitate them?

What I have to ask myself when I study this story and I'm troubled by it is what suffering? What disappointment? What disillusionment, what boredom, what impatience, what temptation lurks around the corner of my life? What is it that might cause me to realize that I'm not worshiping him, I'm worshiping a vain imagination about him? And what might turn me back from him and back toward myself?

Do you have the courage to ask that same question of yourself? Suss it out and put to death your own fickle heart.

Friends today, right now, this Sunday, what illicit relationship? What unlawful pleasure is your real treasure? What is it that either you think Jesus is a means to this end but that is the thing that I actually want. And he's really only useful to me provided he continues to be a means to that real treasure.

Or what is the thing that you're like, I think I can get away with it? I know Jesus isn't gonna help me do this, but I think I could just fake it long enough and nobody needs to know. But really, that is the thing that I worship and long for and must have at any cost.

Because whatever that is, if it gets pitted against him and you choose it over him, you will imitate this crowd, not just on Palm Sunday, but on Good Friday. So friends, identify it, see it for what it is, and let it go. Let him conquer you, that you might be free to see him in all of his beauty, in all of his splendor, in all of his delightfulness. Let all of his worthiness to be the true king become your real delight.

See him as he is, delight in him as he is, so that we will worship him forever and enjoy him forever. For he is the king of kings and the lord of lords. He is dictator perpetual.

And friends, never forget this. In Revelation, John is told to behold and see the lion of Judah. But when he turns, he doesn't see a lion. Do you remember what he does see? You think it's gonna be some ferocious scary lion who's ruling the world in might, but what does he see? A sacrificed lamb. He sees a lamb as though he had been slain standing on the throne.

Friends, the one who rules the world, the one who has earned the right to rule the world, not only has unmatchable power, but unmatched lowliness, gentleness, kindness, and mercy. He died for you to win you from the things you love too much, and that is why we adore him. How could we not?

Let us adore him forever that we would not have fickle hearts. Lord Jesus, you are better than all the things that tempt us and tease us. You are more to be desired than all these things that we hope you're gonna give us. Than all these things that we hope we can get away with.

Lord, we ask for your mercy, for the grace, for the supreme grace that you would draw us to yourself, that we would see you as you are, that we would not have higher longings than you. And then whatever they are, we invite you, we ask you knock them away, fix us before we do something so foolish as to misjudge your infinite value.

Let us worship you, love you, adore you today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day. That forever you will be what you are. The dictator perpetual. We love you. We praise you. Thanks for loving us. Amen.