Why does man worship an image instead of the reality? It is easy to see why he does so. He worships that image, because in worshipping it he worships himself, it being a part of himself. He loves that image because he himself has made it, and because he loves all the things of his own creation. He is willing to do the supposed mandates of that self-created fetich (provided they are not too difficult of performance), because those mandates spring fundamentally from his own imagination, and because he likes to do as he himself wills to do. Just so we worship, not the real Christ, but an imagined Christ that is not alive. Christ entered into the city upon Palm Sunday. This is the way we love to imagine that vast and tremendous fact--the final entrance of divinely human truth into the citadel of life. We love to think of Him as a white-robed, majestic figure crowned with glory, with smooth hair and shining face--mild, benignant, exalted. We love to picture to ourselves how young men and maidens and little children ran before His coming and spread their garments or fragrant branches of trees in His triumphal way, shouting with multitudinous cadence, "Hosannah in the highest!" How splendid it is to think thus of the King of Glory coming into His city of holiness. Thus imagined, it is a grand and beautiful picture, and we wonder how those scribes and pharisees, those priests and Levites, blinded with their own wickedness, should not have seen the splendor of it all--should have denied and crucified One who came thus gloriously into their city. But in so depicting that divine coming we bow in submission, not to the living fact, but to a picture of that fact which we ourselves have created in the imagination. That is how we would have liked to see the Messiah of Jehovah-God come into His glory. That is how we would have arranged it if we had had the shaping of events, and we can bow before that image easily enough. But, alas! for us it is not the way in which He really comes. For God does not shape His events as we would have them shaped; He shapes them exactly different. Read for yourself the truth as it stands written in the Divine Word of Jehovah-God, and then ask your own heart whether you would not have rejected Him as the scribes and pharisees of that day rejected Him.