DAY 1 — PALM SUNDAY - FaithBindsUs Daily Devotional For The Easter Week
The King They Wanted vs. The King Who Came
Applicable Scripture: 🙏 Matthew 21:1–11 (NKJV)
Primary Gospel Accounts
What do these 4 Scriptural accounts tell us?
The Full Picture (FaithBindsUs Insight)
When you put all four together, you don’t get repetition…You get a complete revelation:
Matthew → The King was promised
Mark → The King comes humbly
Luke → The King is worthy of all praise
John → The King is fully understood in hindsight
Together they declare: Jesus enters Jerusalem not to take a throne… but to go to a cross.
The crowd expected a conquering king. God revealed a redeeming King.
They shouted “Hosanna!”
But they did not yet understand what they were asking for.
They wanted rescue.
He came to redeem.
They wanted a king who would change their circumstances.
He came as a King who would change their hearts.
Jesus enters Jerusalem not in secrecy, but in full view—deliberate, visible, undeniable. This is not a quiet arrival. It is a public declaration:
The King has come!
But everything about how He comes challenges expectations.
No war horse.
No army.
No display of power.
Instead, a donkey.
Not weakness, but intention.
Not lack of authority, but perfect control of it.
He fulfills what was spoken long before—🙏 Zechariah 9:9 (NKJV)—revealing that this moment is not a reaction, but divine orchestration. God is not adjusting His plan; He is revealing it. This prophecy is directly fulfilled in the Triumphal Entry, revealing the coming King as righteous, victorious, and humble, riding on a donkey, not a war horse.
The crowd responds with truth:
“Hosanna to the Son of David!” “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”
They are not wrong.
But they are not complete.
They see a King—but not the kind of King He is.
They expect:
Freedom from Rome
Restoration of power
Immediate victory
But Jesus is moving toward something far deeper:
Freedom from sin
Restoration to God
A victory that will come through the cross
This is the tension of Palm Sunday:
Right words. Wrong expectations.
And if we are honest, it is not just their story.
It is ours.
We still want:
A God who fixes quickly
A Savior who aligns with our plans
A King who serves our vision of how life should go
But Jesus does not come to fit into our expectations.
He comes to transform them.
The city asks a question that echoes through every generation:
“Who is this?”
And the answer given is close—but not complete:
“This is Jesus, the prophet…”
But He is more than that. He is not just a voice from God.
He is God come near. Not just a messenger.
The Messiah. The King. The Redeemer.
Palm Sunday is not just a celebration.
It is a revelation.
It reveals:
What God is doing
Who Jesus truly is
And what the human heart often misses
Because the same voices that cry “Hosanna” will soon cry “Crucify Him.”
Not because Jesus changed— but because their expectations were never surrendered.
So, the question is not just what they saw.
The question is what we see.
Do we want a King who serves our plans?
Or a King we are willing to follow—even when we do not fully understand?
He did not come to meet expectations—He came to fulfill redemption. And only those willing to surrender their expectations will ever truly see their King.