The leading priests and the teachers of religious law saw these wonderful miracles and heard even the children in the Temple shouting, "Praise God for the Son of David." But the leaders were indignant. (Matthew 21:15 NLT)
From the Mount of Olives He went, and in that meek and lowly way presented Himself as King. The fickle multitude, of course, jumped at earthly possibilities, and again the disciples are all in it. But when you get to Matthew 21:15, you get to the true situation in Israel among the Jews, and it will be found that even the fickle multitude will come to that presently when they discover that He did not mean a temporal, political kingdom at all. And when all that prospect seems to be more than doubtful, the crowd will join the ruler’s cry, “Away with Him!” The real thing deep down behind is in verse 15: the positive antagonism towards Him; no desire to have Him, of course stimulated by envy and jealousy. The place where it was really drawn out as to what people wanted was the Mount of Olives....
Really their thoughts and His are very far apart, and that becomes very clear in the end. The Mount of Olives first of all gets down into the truth as to what people are after. You never know the truth about a situation. It may look all right, it may seem to be quite favorable, but in fact it may be all wrong, false, and untrue. You never know until you obtain the heavenly position of higher ground, and then from that higher ground you can see the truth about things. That works in principle; that works in history. If you present the high ground of God’s full thought for His people and the hearts of the people are really set upon having a work for God down here that is flourishing and prosperous and well-spoken of, you find that people are really, after all, only going with Him so long as He comes into line with their ideas and ambitions. But immediately that runs counter to thoughts more earthly, thoughts even in relation to Him, something deeper rises up. They are not going to have that. You have seen that many times; you must not touch their things. They say it is for the Lord, but you must not touch it; it is their own. If you are not coming to help their thing or things with your ministry or presentation, of course they won’t have it, and it resolves itself into this: they won’t have Him; that is not the kind of Lord they want. They want a Lord who is going to make their thing for Him successful down here. You can only know and discriminate between the true and the false when you yourself are on the higher ground.
By T. Austin-Sparks
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