As Jesus is entering Jerusalem the Monday before His crucifixion, He is coming off a high point in His ministry which centered on His “Triumphal Entry” and the celebration of the people of Jerusalem proclaiming Him to be their Messiah. Yet, like many of us, Mondays always seem to be the one day of the week we don’t look forward to. Maybe it’s because there’s a feeling of being stuck in a dead-end job and you’re back to the “old grindstone.”

But this Monday was different for Jesus. He was on His way to cleanse the Temple of His Father. You see, the Temple in Jerusalem had become a “den of thieves,” and Jesus was going to put things in order. The Temple was a “House of Prayer” and a place for worship to take place, however, there was “fleecing” going on, and people were being taken advantage of, and that was the furthest thing from what God desired. This wasn’t going to be a good day!

So, on His way into town, Jesus noticed a fig tree off in the distance, and He was hungry. But when He approached the tree, He found it had no fruit. Even though it wasn’t the season for fruit, Jesus still had expectations, and that fruit tree wasn’t meeting them, so He cursed it by saying, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”

The next day, as Jesus and His disciples approached the city once more, they ventured past the fig tree and Peter, one of His disciples, remarked that the tree which He had cursed the day before was completely dead. It had withered up, even to its roots.

As we look back on that miraculous event, we can see an illustration concerning the people of Israel and their unwillingness to serve God through His expectations; particularly, the Jewish religious leaders.  God had ordained their existence and purpose, yet they strayed so far from what God had instructed, they were, in essence, a shadow of what they should have been. This is the reason why the majority of the religious leaders were anti-Christ. This is why the high priest and the chief priests would try Him illegally and demand that He be crucified!

Because of their unfaithfulness to Christ, Israel had been cut off from the “Root of Jesse,” and the Gentile world was being grafted in. God would be served, one way or the other.

In our text this Sunday, we will be examining the branches that were pruned and the branches that were grafted in for the service of bearing good fruit for God’s kingdom.

John