If They Do These Things When The Tree Is Green What Will Happen When It's Dry?

I once had a friend tell me that he never liked finishing good books because they were sad to him that the story would be over. That sort of the mark of reading a good book was that you related to the people in the story. I've heard this said often of Martin Lloyd-Jones' biography, that people don't want to finish it because they go, but I love that guy and I don't want it to be done. I don't want to get to the last page. And so they'll leave it sit, wherever they leave their book sit. And they don't read the end of it. Because it's all sort of coming to a climax. It's all sort of coming to a resolution. And they go, I don't want it to be over. I don't want it to be done. And sometimes we're that way with good stories. And sometimes we're that way with bad stories or scary stories. You ever read something or see something and you go, no, I can't handle that. Right now is not the time. And so we don't continue on. Well, we're coming to the end of the gospel.

And we're coming to the climax of Jesus' life and ministry, which is his death. And it's the heavy part. It's the hard part. It's the sad part. And what I don't want us to do is to brush over it, keeping our hearts away from what's actually going on. I also don't want us to ignore it. And so I say all of this to you this morning because our passage is a grievous passage. It's very sad. Jesus has just stood before Pilate. He's just been condemned. Even while Pilate knew that he was innocent, he was handed over to be killed. And so our text this morning is Jesus carrying his cross out of the city, out of Jerusalem, up to Golgotha, up to the place where he'll be killed. And so this morning, we're going to start by looking at the suffering that Jesus endured. And then we're going to dig into the warning that he gives to the women in the crowd that are following him. And it's a helpful warning to them. It's prophetic to them.

But that warning is still intact for us today. And I don't want us to neglect it. I don't want us to miss it. I don't want us to make light of it. Because in this passage and in the weeks to come, we're going to see what our sins required, what the payment was for them. And it's a terrible cost. It's a terrible cost. And as we look at that, I don't want us to go, that shouldn't have been that way. Because when we do that, we question a holy God. And not only a holy God, but a loving God. One who sent his son to go through all of the stuff we're going to read about so that we wouldn't have to. And the end of it ought to produce in our hearts and in our lives a greater affection and a greater warmth for our Father in heaven and for his son Jesus. I can't remember where it's at in Proverbs. I think it's in Proverbs. Where it talks about mourning and weeping. And it says that...

That there are times when our faces mourn, but our hearts are glad. And that's the sort of thing that goes on as we're studying the end of Jesus' life, the culmination of his ministry. There's grief associated with it. If we can envision, even for a moment, what we've done to cause this to come upon him, there's grief. But brothers and sisters, that's not what we're to be left. There's a gladness that ought to be planted and rooted and growing in our hearts. that none of that had to happen. None of it had to happen. It could have been that we were simply left to deal with our problems and our guilt and our sins ourselves. This was the chosen plan of Jesus' Father and ours to reconcile us to himself, to make peace with us. And so there ought to be a gladness and a joy mixed with the sorrow as we study these things this week and in the weeks coming. I don't want you to shelter your heart from it.

There's no easy way. Sometimes in sermons you try to work your way into the hard part. There's no working your way into the hard part. We closed the book right in the middle of the action and we opened it right back up right in the middle of the action. So it may feel a little jolting. It's not my intention for it to feel that way. But this is the hard part of the story. And I want you to give your hearts to it. Would you please stand now for the reading of God's word from Luke chapter 23. Verses 26 through 31. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. When they led him away, Jesus, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene, coming in from the country and placed on him the cross to carry behind Jesus. And following him was a large crowd of people and of women who were mourning and lamenting him. But Jesus turned to them and said, daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for me, but weep for yourselves.

and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed. Then they will begin to say to the mountains, fall on us and to the hills, cover us. For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it's dry? This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. As I mentioned briefly already, I want to reiterate what came before this. Jesus had been, you know, after they'd eaten the Passover meal, after he'd eaten the Passover with his disciples, he went out into the countryside to pray in Gethsemane. And he took a couple of his disciples with him. And they kept falling asleep while he was praying. And the third time he comes to them and says, you need to wake up, it's time. And a crowd came out of the darkness with clubs and swords to arrest him as a robber. And Judas is the one leading that crowd.

And Judas goes up to Jesus and he gives him a kiss and they arrest Jesus. And as they try to do that, Peter pulls out his sword and he goes to lop off the high priest's servant's ear and does it. And Jesus says, stop, enough of this. And he heals the man, he puts his ear back on. And at that point, all of Jesus' disciples, all the people who are with him, they all scatter. They all take off because they're scared. And they bring Jesus in chains down to the high priest's house in the middle of the night. And they work hard all night to try to get...

some group of witnesses to have a believable story because they didn't have the right to kill him. They were under Roman rule and the Romans didn't allow the Jews to kill people, to exercise capital punishment. And so the Jews needed the Romans to do it. And so they tried Jesus before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, trying to find a charge that Pilate would believe so that he would then execute judgment against Jesus. So they try and they try. And eventually the day breaks and they can't get any of their stories straight. And so they say to Jesus, are you the king of the Jews? And he says, it is as you say. What more need do we have of this? And they whisk him off to Pilate, first thing in the morning. This angry mob's out in front of Pilate's residence or wherever he's staying. We need you to pass judgment. So he comes out. He listens to the testimony. And he looks at Jesus and he says,

is it true, are you the king of the Jews? And Jesus says, it is as you say. And you would expect at that point that Jesus would then be condemned, that Pilate would say, off with your head. But Jesus then turned, or immediately, Pilate turns to the crowds and he says, I find no guilt in this man. He's not done anything worthy of death. And the crowds cry out back against Pilate saying, crucify him, crucify him. And in the midst of that, they say something about Jesus being a Galilean and Pilate finds this out and he says, oh. He's from Galilee. We'll send him to Herod. Herod's the one over Galilee. We'll let him do the nasty work. So he sends Jesus off to Herod. And Herod hears all of the same accusations. He mistreats Jesus, but in the end, he doesn't condemn Jesus. And he sends him back to Pilate. This is all happening in one day. Passover, arrest, Sanhedrin in the morning, Pilate, Herod, back to Pilate. Then on to the crucifixion. One day. It's a busy day.

So last week we studied Jesus' second trial before Pilate, where Pilate ought to have exonerated Jesus, ought to have freed him, and ought to have protected him against the crowd. But he doesn't. In the end, he allows the crowds to have their way. He both condemns Jesus to death, and he frees Barabbas. And so that's where we pick up this morning, when they led him away. Pilate has passed his sentence, and they're now going to get what they want. So they're taking him out of the city. to the place of execution. Now Luke doesn't record some of what happens in the interim there. One of the things that happens is after Pilate passes judgment on Jesus, condemning him to death, he gives his soldiers, his soldiers are the ones in charge of Jesus and they do a lot of terrible things to Jesus. This is where they weave a crown of thorns and they put it on Jesus' head and they dress him in a fine robe and they bow down and they worship him, they mock him.

And they take reeds and they beat him on the head, which might not sound that bad considering all things, except that he had a thorn of crowns on at the time. And they were beating those thorns into his head. And they were spitting on him and mocking him, treating him terribly. And at the end of all of it, they took all of the fancy garb off and they put his clothes back on to him, having beaten him. And now they're taking him to the cross. And one of the things I want you to understand about carrying this cross is these crosses would have been big and they would have been heavy.

These are not little four-by-four posts. These are sort of things that you could hang a grown man from, and it would support his weight. And it would have to be dropped into a hole, and so it would be very tall. You'd have the height of a man plus the height he was going to be off the ground plus the height of the pole going down into the ground. Think of trees, logs being nailed together. This is the sort of thing that Jesus is carrying after having not slept, after having been beaten and mocked and shamed. This is what Luke doesn't record, but Matthew and Mark, John, do record.

He says, when they led them away, they seized a man, Simon of Cyrene. And I want you to understand everything I've just said so that you understand at this point, the reason they seize this man is because Jesus can no longer carry his cross. He no longer has the physical strength to bear his cross. And they don't want him to die before they get him to the mountain and to crucify him. And so they seize a man, Simon of Cyrene, who's coming in from the country. And they place on him the cross to carry behind Jesus. Now Simon was made to carry his cross. There was no choice about it. He was going to do it or face consequence himself. And I want you to know that carrying a criminal's cross, being associated with a criminal, would have been a shameful thing at that time. This is not, in the people's eyes, this is not a privilege for Simon. This is a shameful thing. This is a difficult thing, a sad thing. Think of it like this. If you had a

publicly known convicted felon in your family. And everyone knew what they had done. And they weren't repentant. They weren't sorry. They were just wicked. And they were like, oh, that's your brother? That's the sort of shame that would have gone along with Simon, being associated with Jesus. Never mind the things that Jesus was accused of. He wasn't guilty of. But there's a whole crowd of people who are intent on his death. And to be associated with him at this point, in this way, it would have had lasting consequence. It would have been bad. It wouldn't have been the sort of thing that there would have been a long line of people signing up for. And so they seized Simon to carry Jesus' cross because he was unable to do it himself. Just as an aside or a point of application at this point, how do we handle our association with people who have bad reputations or who we think have bad reputations? Are there people around us in our lives, whether they're in our families,

Are there our neighbors or there's that one co-worker or classmate or what have you? Are there the people that you're like, yeah, I don't know, not you. I don't want people to know. I don't want to be associated with you. Maybe you're the person that nobody wants to be associated with. It's a painful thing. It's a hard thing. As I was preparing, I thought, you know, this is what children do when they often do when they become teenagers. They don't want to be associated with their parents anymore. They don't want to be hugged and kissed and they don't want to be, They don't want to obey and they don't want to take showers. Mostly that's for boys. They don't want to do their homework. They don't want to be associated. They don't want you coming and embarrassing them at their sporting event or their play. They care about their reputation and you could harm it. So they're like, no, I don't want you to be associated with me. I remember when I was a teenager.

My mom pointed out to me one time, helpfully but painfully, that she said, you know, you always walk ahead of me at these things. It's like you're ashamed of me. Now, was I ashamed of her? Well, no, not really. But, yeah, like every teenager is tempted to be. There's this idea of guilt by association. Oh, they're not one of the cool kids. I don't have one of the cool parents. We don't drive one of the nice cars. We don't have one of the nice houses. And so we all face this sort of, we're all aware of our associations and what they mean about us. And we're all managing it. Who are we willing to be associated with? Who are we willing to be known by? I remember a pastor talking one time about fundamentalists, which is like a curse word. Oh, those fundamentalists. And he was being accused of being a fundamentalist. And he said, well, I don't agree with everything that...

fundamentalists are about. But if my choice is to be a fundamentalist who at some level care about what God's law says and think you actually ought to do what God says, or on the other hand, none of God's law, none of obedience, do whatever you want, be whoever you want, then I'm a fundamentalist. I'll be associated with them. I'll wear the badge. You can call me that and it's okay, even though it's not entirely true. In the same way that if you had a sibling who was a convicted felon, everything that's true of them may not be true of you. The question is of association. Who will you associate with? Who do you distance yourselves from and why? It would not have been a good thing for Simon to be associated with Jesus. Not for him personally, not for his reputation. So then I want to come back and ask, so the impression would have been that it was shameful for him to associate with Jesus, been bad for him. But I want to come back and ask the question,

Was it shameful for him to carry Jesus' cross? And we all say, no. That was his privilege. We look back on it and we see what a privilege. We know more about Simon than we do about a lot of people. We know where he's from. Not in this passage, but we know his children's names. We know more about him than we do about a lot of people. And you have to wonder, why did those apostles put those details in about him? Simon is from Cyrene. He has a son named Rufus. They honor him. And they say what he did was a privilege. So what did he get to do? I'll tell you what he got to do. What he got to do was bear Jesus' cross. And you're like, well, yeah, that's what it says. He carried Jesus' cross. And I say, you're right. He carried Jesus' cross. He wasn't ashamed to be associated with Jesus. He wasn't ashamed to carry what Jesus couldn't carry anymore. And this work of carrying what others can't carry.

is incumbent on us today still as Christians that we would bear one another's burdens. That when we know of each other's crosses and each other's troubles and each other's pains, it's incumbent on us that we would be, as Simon, seized to come and to bear alongside. If it was his privilege to carry Jesus' cross, then it's our privilege to carry our brothers' crosses and to not leave them to carry them on their own. The cost is association. And will we be associated? There's another wrinkle in carrying one another's crosses. If we have a principle against showing our crosses or our burdens, it makes it much harder for other people to carry them, right? How are you? I'm fine. Busy week? Yeah, it was just busy week. If you were in Sunday school, I asked, James asks in his epistle, is any among you suffering?

And I asked the Sunday school class, I said, do you think you could get a group of people together and have it be true that no one was suffering? Of course people were suffering. Another way of saying that is, of course we have crosses to bear, each one of us. And so it's a privilege for us to be able to carry other people's crosses. It's also a privilege to have other people carry our crosses for us or with us. But we've got to be willing. You have to wonder, could Jesus have actually carried his cross all the way to the... to the mountain? And of course the answer is yes, he could have. Of course he could have. He could have called down 20 legions of angels to deliver him from the angry mob if he'd wanted. He could have carried his cross if it had been his design. But what we see here is his weakness in his flesh that you and I share. And you see God's design in how to remedy that problem, that we would carry each other's crosses, just as Simon carried his.

And so when we bear one another's burdens, when we allow other people to bear our burdens, we do exactly what Simon did for Jesus. If we think Simon did a good work, then we ought ourselves to do the same work as the Lord gives us opportunity. So that's the first part, bearing each other's burdens, looking for opportunity to do it, being constrained as Simon was to do it. Then we move on in our text and it says, following him was a large crowd of people and of women who were mourning and lamenting him. And you get the understanding from this that not everyone who was there was in favor of his crucifixion. They were in the minority, but they were not in favor of it. And so they're following behind and they're weeping in their mourning. And Jesus, in his weakness, having been beaten and mocked and spat on, turns to them and speaks to these women. And he says to them, daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.

For behold, days are coming when they will say, blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed. And so Jesus gives them a warning. I hope you see it. It's a tender warning. It's a brotherly, fatherly, kind warning. But what is the substance of the warning? The substance of the warning is it's going to get much worse for you and for your children. And what worse thing can you say to a mother than things are going to get bad for her and for her children? He says it's going to get so bad. that everything's going to be flipped on its head. Under normal circumstances, those who have children are the blessed. Those are the ones that everyone, you know, that's what everyone wants to be. And he says, it's going to get so bad that it's going to be flipped. And people are going to be, say, blessed are the barren. Because the grief and the pain and the destruction is going to be so bad that it would have been better not to have had children. Don't weep for me, weep for yourselves. So what is Jesus talking about? Well,

He's talking about, most directly, he's talking about the destruction of Jerusalem that's coming just a few decades later. When the Romans absolutely level the city and kill tons of people, women and children. This is most specifically what he's talking about. Just a few chapters before this, in Luke 19, it says when Jesus approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and he wept over it, saying, if you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace, but now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days are coming when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you. And they will not leave in you one stone upon another because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.

And I want to note to you that Jesus did what he told these women to do. He wept over Jerusalem. Now, what was Jerusalem's sin? Why were they going to be destroyed? That's the question we have to ask. If this utter destruction is going to come, and Jesus on multiple occasions has warned the people that this is what's coming, you have to say, well, why is this terrible thing happening? Why is there going to be such bloodshed, such destruction, such loss? And what Jesus says in Matthew 19 is he said they're going to do all of this because you did not recognize the time of your visitation. And what he means is that there was a season, there was a time when he was there among them that God came and visited with his people, sent his son, and that city rejected it. They refused Jesus. What we're reading in our text now is it's the same city who's killing Jesus. And Jesus says, Jesus says to these women, don't weep for me. There are more difficult times coming for you. God's judgment is about to be poured out on this city, and it's going to be the most awful thing you can imagine. So what do we learn from this passage about the judgment of God? Well, the first is that it's directed at the unrepentant. Jerusalem is an unrepentant city. They've rejected Jesus. And everyone who rejects Jesus is going to face God in judgment, and there will be no mercy for them.

That's the first thing we learn from this passage, and it's a scary truth. It's a hard truth. This city was going to be consumed, destroyed, and her inhabitants were going to be killed. And we have to see that God, you see in this passage, there's God's judgment being executed in two different places. Neither one of them have come to fruition just yet, but it's happening in two places. On the first side, you've got the destruction of Jerusalem. and saying, this is what's going to happen. And we look at it and we go, this is going to be terrible. This is going to be awful. I wish that no one would face such destruction. This is the same sort of desire that Abraham had about Sodom and Gomorrah. If there be 50 righteous, don't destroy them. 20, 10, 5, can my family get out of there? There's this intense desire to not see this destruction.

wrought on these people and on this place. Jerusalem had neglected their time of visitation. They had rejected Jesus. They've refused his mercy and his salvation and therefore they receive only his wrath. And it's the sort of thing that we can't wrap our minds around, the intensity and the severity of. Our text tells us that when these days come and they're crying out, that it would have been better never to have children. It says that they're going to begin to say to the mountains, as Jerusalem lays in a valley, they're going to be saying to the mountains, fall down on us, and the hills cover us. To what end? To the end that they would be shielded from the judgment of God. They would rather be crushed by the earth than face the judgment of God. This is what Jesus says is going to happen, and this is what happens. So this is the first sort of judgment you see going on.

The judgment of God being exercised, it comes in the form of a prophecy that's going to be fulfilled in years to come. There's another judgment going on here as well, and it's Jesus being led to the cross. You're seeing the judgment of God being executed against God's people. You say, what do you mean against God's people? And I say, judgment has to be executed for our salvation. God's wrath has to be satisfied. When you look and you see what Jesus has gone through, and you see the thorn of crowns, and you see the mocking, and you see him being spit on in the face, and beaten with rods, you see one small picture of what our sins rightfully deserve. And it's a horrid sight. It's horrid. Who wants to look at that? And yet there had to be judgment for us to be saved. And it was a severe judgment, a costly judgment. It was our father's own son had to die, had to be beaten, had to be mocked, had to be shamed. So Jesus ends by asking,

If they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it's dry? Who are they? They are the Jews. They are the Romans. You could apply it to both of them. But what he's saying to them is, if these people will refuse me and kill me and treat me with such contempt to my face, what do you think God is going to do to them? There is life and salvation in the person of Jesus, in their presence. And they led him away like a lamb to the slaughter. And the life and the hope that Jesus represented has gone away. The green tree has become dry. Salvation has been removed from them. What do you think will happen to them then? It's a rhetorical question. What do you think is going to happen to them? And we can kind of scratch our heads and go, well, I think it's going to be bad for them. And I say, you've just...

just started down the trailhead of what it's going to be like for them. It's going to be the worst kind of thing we could imagine. There's going to be horror that Stephen King can't hold a candle to and judgment that never ends. That's what's going to happen when it's dry. And so this is all meant to be a preparatory warning to these women that they ought to prepare, that there's a judgment coming, and they do not. They do not want to be found on the wrong side of it because there will be no relief. There will be no mercy. There will be no end to it. So what's our takeaway from this? Our takeaway is the same as it is to the women, to the daughters of Jerusalem, those who are weeping at the mistreatment of Jesus. We ought to take heed and we ought to weep for those who are going to face destruction. We ought to see to it that we're not numbered among them. It's very easy to take people who,

How would I say it? It's easy to hate sinners. It's really easy to just go, well, you made your bed, too bad for you, and go on with our life. But when Jesus looked on the apostasy of Jerusalem, he wept because he knew what their end was going to be. And he tells these women to do the same thing. Their end is going to be destruction. It ought to be grievous to us, the destruction of the wicked. It ought to be terrifying to us and grievous to us. We ought not to desire the destruction of the wicked. We ought to desire their repentance. But you can rest assured that if they don't repent, they're going to face their judgment. And they'll wish they had listened. And it'll be too late. But what's natural to our flesh and natural to our minds is just to despise those who are different. Despise those who are caught in the snare of sin. And yet Jesus says to weep for them. You know, we cry about the things we care about, right?

get in an argument with your husband or your wife, start crying, because you care about the relationship. You care about your marriage, so you cry. Somebody dies, you cry, because you miss them. Someone gets in a bad car accident, you cry, because you love them, because you care about them, because you don't want the pain and the suffering that they're going through to be the way it is, right? And what this text lays out for us is that we would have that disposition toward the wicked, that we would actually love them, that our hearts would go out to them. That we would minister to them. But also, and finally, that we would prepare our own hearts. That when we would see this, we wouldn't go, oh, well, glad that's not for me. Glad I don't need to worry about that. Think of it this way. When other people around you are given to sin, even when they face judgment for that sin, now maybe that's at work and they get fired. Or maybe that's one of your children who has a hard heart toward the Lord. Does that affect you? Does that matter to you?

Do you receive some negative consequence because of their action? You're at work. You're on a team of four. One of the people's a dog and doesn't do their work. Does that affect you? In a word, yes. And negatively. And so what kind of foolishness is it for us to say, well, they're on their own? These daughters of Jerusalem, these women who are weeping after Jesus, he tells them to weep for themselves and their own children, not for those other people, because they're going to be affected by the judgment that comes. There's lots of people who would like to talk about our nation and how bad it is and why it's bad and how it's supposed to be fixed and all of that. I'm not opposed to talking about ways to improve and make our government better. But I simply want to ask you, if it goes poorly as a country, will you be affected by it? Will your children be affected by it? And we're all like, mm-hmm. And I say, then weep for our country.

Weep for the wicked, that they would repent, that God would have mercy, that he would save and not destroy. Instead of getting up on your soapbox and pounding on it and saying, well, they're stupid idiots. They don't know and they don't understand and they're destroying everything. I say, if you're right and they do destroy it, it's going to have a really negative effect on you and your family. And what's laid out for us here is engagement and love. This is our place as Christians. This is our work. This is what it means to take these warnings to heart. And this is what I want us to take away. I want us to prepare our own hearts. I want us to not have hard hearts toward the destruction of the wicked. I want us to have compassion and mercy. I want us to warn with the same warnings that we've been warned. I want us to love with the same love that we've been loved with. But I want our hearts engaged in this work. I don't want us to go, oh, well, that's going to be really bad when that happens.

Because to believe that is to think that you won't be affected by it. And to believe it is to believe a lie. And so we ought to take warning from this. That our hearts would be prepared and that we would be agents of reconciliation. That we would carry Jesus and his mercy and his love to the people who hate him. You say, I don't hate him. And I say, yeah, they do. They hated him. And you know people who hate him. And they need to not hate him. Because it's going to go really, really poorly for them for all eternity if they hate him. Let's pray.