Isaiah 33:17-22

1.1 I still vividly remember my high school days. Back then, I actually didn’t like school festivals and special events. The reason was simple: my parents worked so hard that they could never make it. In a class of about 40 students, there were always just a couple of parents who didn't show up, and mine were unfortunately always among them.

1.2 I remember one specific festival where I was the lead singer of our school band. Even though I was on stage pouring my heart out, I wasn't truly happy. Instead of focusing on the music, I was scanning the crowd, searching for a face that wasn't there. I really wanted my family to hear me, but the seat I had saved for them stayed empty. That 'festival' felt more like a lonely desert to me. How about you? When you look back at the 'festivals' of your life—moments that were supposed to be full of joy—was there a sense of 'absence' that made you feel lonely?

1.3 I'm sharing this because today's text is about people who felt that same overwhelming sense of absence. For the people of Judah, their 'festival city,' Jerusalem, was under siege. Their king was nowhere to be seen, and all they could see were the terrifying faces of foreign invaders. They were longing for a King who would actually show up.

1.4 Today is Palm Sunday. it marks the start of the greatest festival in human history. It’s the day we stop scanning the crowd and finally look at the One who enters the gates. Next week is Easter, but today, we need to understand why we are cheering. Isaiah 33:17 gives us an incredible promise: 'Your eyes will see the King in His beauty.' Today, we’re going to talk about the King who didn’t just 'show up' for the festival, but became our Judge, our Lawgiver, and our Savior. Let’s read Isaiah 33:17-22 together.

Isaiah 33:17–22 ESV

Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty; they will see a land that stretches afar. Your heart will muse on the terror: “Where is he who counted, where is he who weighed the tribute? Where is he who counted the towers?” You will see no more the insolent people, the people of an obscure speech that you cannot comprehend,

stammering in a tongue that you cannot understand. Behold Zion, the city of our appointed feasts! Your eyes will see Jerusalem, an untroubled habitation, an immovable tent, whose stakes will never be plucked up, nor will any of its cords be broken.

But there the Lord in majesty will be for us a place of broad rivers and streams, where no galley with oars can go, nor majestic ship can pass.
For the Lord is our judge; the Lord is our lawgiver; the Lord is our king; he will save us.

2.1 To understand today's passage, we need to sit with the darkness first. The year was 701 BC. The Assyrian Empire — the most ruthless superpower of that era — had already swallowed up the northern kingdom of Israel. Now they were at Jerusalem's gates. But what made this moment truly devastating wasn't just the military threat. It was the betrayal. Assyria had made a treaty with Judah and then broken it (v.1). Every diplomatic option was exhausted. Every human hope had already collapsed.

2.2 Look at verses 7-9.

Isaiah 33:7–9 NIV

Look, their brave men cry aloud in the streets; the envoys of peace weep bitterly. The highways are deserted, no travelers are on the roads. The treaty is broken, its witnesses are despised, no one is respected. The land dries up and wastes away, Lebanon is ashamed and withers; Sharon is like the Arabah, and Bashan and Carmel drop their leaves.

The brave ambassadors who were sent to negotiate — they came back weeping. The highways were empty. The land was mourning. Lebanon, Sharon, Bashan — places of beauty and abundance — all withering. And where was King Hezekiah? Powerless. And where was God? Silent. The people were haunted by the memory of Assyrian tax collectors counting their treasures, measuring their towers, calculating exactly how much they could take. Verses 18-19 show us a people with trauma — they could still hear that harsh, foreign language ringing in their ears.

2.3 This was not a people waiting for a festival. This was a people who had run out of options. And it is precisely here — at the bottom — that Isaiah shouts: "Look up! Behold Zion!" Not because the walls were strong, but because the Lord Himself would be their broad river, their unshakeable foundation. The King who shows up when every other help has failed.

3.1 Now we come to Palm Sunday. The crowd lining the streets of Jerusalem that day was not simply excited — they were desperate. For generations, they had lived under foreign occupation. Roman tax collectors. Roman soldiers. The humiliation of a conquered people. Sound familiar? It's the same trauma we just read in Isaiah 33:18-19— foreign voices, foreign power, the feeling that your own land no longer belongs to you.

Isaiah 33:18–19 ESV

Your heart will muse on the terror: “Where is he who counted, where is he who weighed the tribute? Where is he who counted the towers?” You will see no more the insolent people, the people of an obscure speech that you cannot comprehend, stammering in a tongue that you cannot understand.

And into that crowd, Jesus rides in. And they cry: "Hosanna!"

3.2 We often hear "Hosanna" as a shout of celebration, like "Hallelujah." But the original Hebrew — Hoshiya-na — is not a cheer. It is a cry. It comes from Psalm 118:25, and it means: "Save us. Now. Please."

Psalm 118:25 NKJV

Save now, I pray, O Lord; O Lord, I pray, send now prosperity.

This is not a crowd welcoming a hero. This is a people who have run out of options, throwing everything they have at the only One who might actually help.

3.3 Think about what that really sounds like. Not "Hosanna!" with a fist pump. But "Hosanna" — the way you cry out when you've tried everything else. The way my heart was crying that night on stage: "Please, just show up." The way Judah cried under Assyrian siege. The way anyone cries when they are truly, finally, at the end of themselves. That is the cry Jesus rode into. He didn't come to a celebration. He came to an answer a desperate prayer.

3.4 And Isaiah 33:22 tells us exactly how He answers. Not with one promise, but three:

• The Lord is our Judge — He deals with our past

• The Lord is our Lawgiver — He directs our present

• The Lord is our King — He secures our future

3.5 And then the final word — the direct answer to every Hosanna ever cried: "He will save us." Jesus didn't ride into Jerusalem to put on a show. He came because the cry was real, the need was real, and He is the King who actually shows up.

4.1 Now let's walk into Matthew 21. As Jesus approaches Jerusalem, He does something striking. He doesn't ride in on a warhorse. He chooses a donkey — the animal of peace, of humility. Matthew tells us this fulfilled Zechariah 9:9: "Your king comes to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey." The crowd expected a military conqueror. What they got looked nothing like that. And yet they still cried out.

Matthew 21:6–9 NIV

The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

4.2 That cry — "Hosanna to the Son of David!" — was not a cheer at a parade. Think about what was actually happening in that crowd. These were people who had lived their entire lives under Roman occupation. Roman taxes. Roman soldiers on every corner. The constant, grinding humiliation of a people who had no power over their own land, their own lives.

4.3 Some of us here, or our families, know what that feels like. Korea lived through decades of Japanese colonial rule — a period Koreans call the "dark age." It wasn't just political control. The Japanese occupation reached into every corner of life. Korean culture was suppressed. The Korean language was banned in schools. And it went even deeper than that — my own in-laws had to abandon their Korean names and take Japanese names instead. Think about that. They couldn't even keep their own names. That is what total occupation looks like. That is what it feels like to have no voice, no identity, no freedom — to exist only on someone else's terms. That was the world the Palm Sunday crowd was living in. They had tried everything. Political movements had failed. Religious leaders had no answers. And now this man was riding in, and something in them broke open.

Matthew 21:9 ESV

And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

4.4 Here's what strikes me: if a Roman soldier standing on the sidelines had truly understood what Hosanna meant — 'Save us now,' shouted at a man the crowd was calling the Son of David, the rightful King of Israel — he would not have dismissed it as mere religion. To Roman ears, that was the language of insurrection. That was a conquered people declaring that their true King had arrived.

4.5 And that is exactly what Jesus rode into. Not a celebration — a cry. And He didn't turn away from it. He received it. He wept over Jerusalem. And then He kept walking — straight toward the cross. Because the answer to Hosanna was never going to be a sword. It was going to be a sacrifice. This is Palm Sunday. Not the beginning of a festival. The moment when the cry finally reached the One who could answer it.

5.1 So here we are. Palm Sunday, 2026. We are not so different from that crowd in Jerusalem. We may not be living under Roman occupation, but many of us know what it feels like to be at the end of ourselves. Maybe it's a relationship that has been broken for so long you've stopped believing it can be healed. Maybe it's a burden you've been carrying quietly, trying to hold everything together, and you are exhausted. Maybe it's a fear about the future that you can't shake — about your health, your family, your finances. You've tried everything. And nothing has worked. That is exactly the place where Hosanna is born.

5.2 And as a church, we are no different. We live in a world that is fragmenting. Communities are lonelier than ever. Families are under pressure. The foundations that people used to build their lives on are shaking. And sometimes, if we are honest, even the church feels like that shaking tent — wondering if we have what it takes, wondering if we are enough. We are not so different from Judah, looking over the walls and wondering where God is. But here is what Isaiah 33 tells us — and what Palm Sunday confirms: that is not the end of the story. The shaking tent is exactly where God shows up.

5.3 This week, we will gather for our Annual General Meeting. And like any honest gathering of God's people, there will be things to celebrate and things that feel unfinished. There will be numbers and reports and conversations about where we are. In moments like that, it is easy to focus on what is lacking — what we haven't achieved, where we are struggling, what feels uncertain about the future.

5.4 But Palm Sunday reframes the question. The question is not "what do we see when we look at our situation?" The question is "what do we see when we look at what God has done?" Isaiah's promise was not that the circumstances would look impressive. It was that "your eyes will see the King in His beauty." The same King who showed up for a desperate crowd in Jerusalem shows up in the middle of an ordinary church meeting in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. The invitation of our AGM is not just to review what we have done — but to recognize what He has been doing among us.

5.5 Palm Sunday is not an invitation to pretend everything is fine. It is an invitation to stop pretending. To let the Hosanna rise from wherever you actually are — not from a place of triumph, but from a place of need. The crowd didn't clean themselves up before they cried out. They cried out because they couldn't. And Jesus rode straight into that.

5.6 So today, I want to invite you to do the same. Whatever you are carrying right now — bring it. Not as a performance. Not because you have the right words. Just the honest cry: "Hosanna. Save us. We need you." Because Isaiah 33:17 says this: "Your eyes will see the King in His beauty." That is the promise of Palm Sunday. The seat is no longer empty. The King has shown up. And He is more beautiful than anything we could have imagined — not on a warhorse, but on a donkey. Not with a sword, but with a cross. The answer to every Hosanna ever cried.

Reflection Questions — Isaiah 33:17-22 / Palm Sunday

Personal Reflection

1. In your own life right now, where do you feel like you have "run out of options"? What would it look like to bring that specific place to God as a Hosanna — not a polished prayer, but an honest cry?

2. The crowd on Palm Sunday had been carrying their desperation for generations before they finally cried out. Is there something you have been carrying quietly — afraid to admit, even to God — that Palm Sunday invites you to finally say out loud?

3. Isaiah 33:22 describes God as Judge, Lawgiver, and King — the One who deals with our past, directs our present, and secures our future. Which of these three feels most personal to you right now, and why?

Community Reflection

4. As a church, what does it look like to "look up" rather than just look at our circumstances? In our AGM this week, what would it mean to come not just to review what we have done, but to recognize what God has been doing among us?

5. The shaking tent in Isaiah 33 was not a sign of abandonment — it was exactly where God showed up. Where do you see God showing up in the places where our church feels most uncertain or unfinished?

Wider World Reflection

6. The Palm Sunday crowd cried Hosanna under Roman occupation — a world of political oppression, economic inequality, and broken systems. Looking at our world today — rising anxiety, fragmenting communities, the pressure of rapid technological change, economic uncertainty — where do you hear the same desperate cry rising from people around you? How does the church's Hosanna speak into that?

7. Isaiah's vision in 33:17-22 was not just personal salvation but the restoration of an entire city, an entire people. What would it look like for the gospel to be good news not just for individuals, but for our communities, our society, our world — and what role does your local church play in that larger story?