[ Lament over Jerusalem ]
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!
How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
– words of Christ Jesus – Mathew 23:37
[ Lament over Jerusalem ]
The Temple of Herod would be destroyed when Jerusalem again fell in the year of our Lord 70, not even four decades after the Crucifixion and Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross; followed by His glorious resurrection of the body, appearances to many believers and physical ascension into the clouds.
Yet prior to the controversial proclamations of John the baptizer and miracles of Jesus in the Temple and throughout Judah and many places, God had remained silent for centuries while Jerusalem suffered the consequence of a disobedient people who always rejected God and ridiculed or killed the Prophets of the LORD.
Captive Jerusalem before Christ lay vulnerable to the swords of the nations, even prior to the conquests of Rome. The LORD allowed its fall into ruin, for His people had not listened to their Prophets; therefore the LORD kept silence beyond their generations into the centuries.
These are the words of Jeremiah the Prophet, after the LORD had warned the people… after the people refused to listen… after the LORD allowed the calamity of which His Prophet had warned:
Lamentations 1
How Lonely Sits the City
1 How lonely sits the city
that was full of people!
How like a widow has she become,
she who was great among the nations!
She who was a princess among the provinces
has become a slave.
2 She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
she has none to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her;
they have become her enemies.
3 Judah has gone into exile because of affliction
and hard servitude;
she dwells now among the nations,
but finds no resting place;
her pursuers have all overtaken her
in the midst of her distress.
4 The roads to Zion mourn,
for none come to the festival;
all her gates are desolate;
her priests groan;
her virgins have been afflicted,
and she herself suffers bitterly.
…
18 “The Lord is in the right,
for I have rebelled against his word;
but hear, all you peoples,
and see my suffering;
my young women and my young men
have gone into captivity.
19 “I called to my lovers,
but they deceived me;
my priests and elders
perished in the city,
while they sought food
to revive their strength.
20 “Look, O Lord, for I am in distress;
my stomach churns;
my heart is wrung within me,
because I have been very rebellious.
In the street the sword bereaves;
in the house it is like death.
By the time Ezra and Nehemiah returned to the site of the destroyed Temple, God’s chosen people had completely forgotten the Law.
For a time they repented. Then once more God was forgotten in the land and Jerusalem remained only a dark shadow of promise once made to a people who failed to keep the Law in the words of their mouth and meditate on it every day and every night.
Have contemporary believers in Jesus Christ also done what is evil in the eyes of the LORD in these last days?
Hear the hastening approach of our Lord, King of the New Jerusalem…
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