SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/16/2023 12:00 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4 “The Intense Compassion”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
23:37-38
Message of the verses: “37 "O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to
her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers
her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. 38 “Behold, your house is
being left to you desolate!”
I mentioned in the last SD that I still have some
more to quote from John MacArthur’s commentary and then we will look at the
last verse and comment on that.
“During
the days of Isaiah the Lord reminded Israel of His great love and care in
calling them out and building them up as a people, using the figure of a grower
who carefully planted and cultivated a vineyard only to find that it produced
worthless grapes. Because of their
unfaithfulness and unfruitfulness, the Lord declared that He would remove the
protective hedge around the vineyard, break down its wall, and lay it
waste. God went on to explain through
the prophet, ‘For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and
the men of Judah His delightful plant.
Thus He looked for justice, but behold bloodshed; for righteousness, but
behold, a cry of distress’ (Isa. 5:1-7).
That prediction was fulfilled when Judah was conquered by Babylon in 586
B. C. and had many of its inhabitants, including three of its kings, taken into
exile by Nebuchadnezzar over a period of years.”
Now
we will look at verse 38 “Behold, your house is being left to you desolate!” Jesus is saying that there will be something
similar that is going to happen to Israel, and it will happen in 70 A.D. when
Titus and his Roman legions came into Jerusalem and destroyed it along with the
beautiful Temple as he tore it down block by block and those blocks are still
there today as a reminder of what the Lord said would happen to Jerusalem
through His prophets.
It
was just a few days earlier when Jesus came into the Temple in order to judge
it that He had called the Temple His Father’s house, and no He says “Behold,
your house.” This also refers to the
nation of Israel as a whole. Let us now
look at 1 Samuel 4:21 “And she called the boy Ichabod, saying, "The glory
has departed from Israel," because the ark of God was taken and because of
her father-in-law and her husband.” This
is said by the son of Phinehas’s widow, and it would be seen again in the book
of Ezekiel, and now this similar thing said by the Lord Jesus Christ.
I
have mentioned in earlier SD’s about the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy
and that chapter is filled with blessings and curses, but toward the end mostly
curses. By reading through this long
chapter one can see what was going to happen to Israel, and as Jesus, I would say,
is cursing Israel for not recognizing their Messiah, and the curses of
Deuteronomy 28 will come on them in 70 A. D.
MacArthur
concludes this section by writing “In the end times the persecution of Jews
will escalate into a holocaust like no other they have experienced. That suffering will occur in a period called
the time of Jacob’s distress (Jer. 30:7) and the Great Tribulation, a time ‘such
as not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever shall’
(Matt. 24:21).”
11/16/2023 12:21 PM
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