37  Jesus’ Last Words to  Israel  (23:37-39)

“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. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! For I say to you, from now on your shall not see Me until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’” (23:37-39)

Since the call of Abraham, the Jews have been God’s special people, and a Christian who truly loves God cannot help loving the Jewish people. He has deep concern for their plight in our day and a heavy burden for their salvation in Christ, their Messiah.

Throughout all the centuries of their oppression, including attempts to exterminate them, as in the Nazi holocaust, they have survived and been divinely preserved in their racial identity. Although they have been scattered to every part of the world, have become citizens in countless different countries, have intermarried with Gentiles, and even have differing opinions among themselves as to who a real Jew is, they continue as a distinct people.

To those who know and believe Scripture, their perpetuation is not surprising, because, since He made His covenant with Abraham some four thousand years ago, God has pledged to preserve His chosen people and one day to call them permanently back to Himself.

In the meanwhile, they cry out to a God who never answers. They wonder why, if they are indeed His chosen people, they have suffered so much at the hands of the world’s most wicked people? Why, if their Scriptures are truly the oracles of God, have they been so abandoned by God, who in those oracles so often promised to be their Provider and Deliverer? Why, if He called all of His holy prophets from among them, has He since deserted them to the prejudice and malice of ungodly men? If they are the apple of God’s eye, why has so much hatred arisen specifically against them and caused them incalculable misery and anguish?

In the close of this His last public message, Jesus gave the sobering answer to such questions, yet He gave it with intense compassion and with the assurance of Israel’s ultimate conversion.

THE INTENSE COMPASSION

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. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! (23:37-38)

As Jesus had entered Jerusalem the morning before, “He saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for Peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes’” (Luke 19:41-42). Jeremiah expressed similar grief when He considered the prospect of Judah’s being taken captive by Babylon because of her defiance of God: “My soul will sob in secret for such pride; and my eyes will bitterly weep and flow down with tears” (Jer. 13:17).

Now Jesus expresses grief at the hardness of His people. There was great pathos as well as rebuke in His repeating the name, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. It was much as when He had said, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things” (Luke 10:41); and when He had said, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like wheat” (Luke 22:31); and when He would say some years later, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” (Acts 9:4). The name Jerusalem means “city of peace,” and it was often called the holy city. But over many centuries it had become the city of violence and of unholiness. In the book of Revelation it is called, “the great city which mystically is called Sodom and Egypt” (11:8), Sodom representing moral perversion and Egypt representing pagan religion. The city of God had become the city of Satan.

Using Jerusalem as representative of all Israel, the Lord again reminded the people of their rebellion against Him, manifested in their killing the prophets and stoning the other messengers He sent to her. The verbs kills and stones translate two Greek present active participles and could be rendered, “who are killing . . . and stoning,” indicating a process that was still continuing. Unbelieving, rebellious Israel had been killing God’s righteous people from Abel to Zechariah (v. 35), and they would soon kill God’s Son and then continue to kill the “prophets and wise men and scribes” that the Son Himself would send to them (v. 34). In the parable of the vineyard grower, Jesus described them as tenants who beat and killed the servants the owner sent to them and even killed the son and heir when he came (Matt. 21:33-39).

It was never God’s ultimate plan and desire for His people to be punished but for them to return to Him in faithfulness and devotion. “How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,” Jesus lamented. He longed to draw Israel to Himself and protect her just as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings to protect them from a storm that would batter them or a hawk that would devour them. There was a beautiful intimacy and tenderness in Jesus’ words and no doubt in His voice as He mourned over His people. He had come “to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him” (John 1:11).

David exulted, “How precious is Thy lovingkindness, O God! And the children of men take refuge in the shadow of Thy wings” (Ps. 36:7). It was God’s great desire that all men, especially His beloved children Israel, would take refuge under His wings. At many times and in many forms Jesus had often given invitations such as, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:28-29).

But you were unwilling, He said. He came to His people in truth and light and love and offered them the kingdom God had long promised, but they rejected the King and forfeited the kingdom. Instead of inheriting the blessing God proffered for their faith, they inherited the judgment He promised for their unbelief.

Nothing in Scripture is more certain than the truth that God is sovereign over all things; but God’s Word nowhere teaches determinism, as this verse makes clear. God was abundantly willing for Israel and all men to receive and follow His Son, but most of them were unwilling. They did not turn from Christ because of fate but solely because of their own unwillingness. When a person rejects Christ, it is never God’s desire or God’s fault but always his own.

A privilege was given to Israel that is absolutely unique in the history of mankind, and with that privilege came great opportunity and responsibility. The incarnate Son of God came into her midst as the Son of David, her own Messiah, Lord, and Savior. He taught and healed and exhorted and entreated. In His unparalleled truth and love He demonstrated God so perfectly that He could say, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9; cf. 12:45). Yet Israel rejected that revelation and forsook that opportunity, and in so doing brought upon herself God’s wrath and judgment.

Because Jews are God’s chosen people they are the objects of Satan’s fiercest hatred. Therefore when God removed His protective hand from Israel it was to expose her to the worst furies that Satan could bring upon a people. It is Satan’s continual desire to eliminate them, because they are specially beloved by God and because to destroy them would be to frustrate God’s promise of bringing them back to Himself (Rom. 11:26) and giving them to Christ as an inheritance.

Yet although Israel as a people has suffered because God withdrew His blessing from them, many individual Jews have come and continue to come to Christ in saving faith. God has never been without a chosen remnant (Isa. 10:22; Jer. 23:3; Ezek. 6:8; Zech. 8:12; Rom. 9:27).

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.

In declaring, “Behold, your house is being left to you desolate!” Jesus was saying that, much as in that earlier time of judgment, Israel would be left devastated and desolate. Only a few days earlier Jesus had referred to the Temple as His Father’s house (Matt. 21:13; cf. 12:4), but it had been so long profaned and desecrated that He now called it your house, a reference also to the nation as a whole, the house of Israel. Like the son of Phinehas’s widow (1 Sam. 4:21), the Temple and all Israel could soon be called Ichabod, because God’s glory would depart from them. In the present age, while God’s glory and protective hand are withdrawn from Israel, the house of God is Christ’s church, “the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).

Early in her history God had warned Israel that if she would not obey Him, “to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes,” that the curses He was about to enumerate would come upon her (Deut. 28:15-68). Because she not only had forsaken God’s commandments but even His own Son, Israel would now be left desolate, subject to the vagaries of an ungodly world that would mock her, despise her, and persecute her people from city to city just as she would soon do with the prophets, wise men, and scribes Christ would send to her (v. 34).

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 has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever shall” (Matt. 24:21).

THE INSURED CONVERSION

For I say to you, from now on you shall not see Me until you say, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” (23:39)

Jesus’ farewell words to Israel were, “From now on you shall not see Me.” For the unbelieving Jews listening to Him that day and for all the other unbelieving Jews of that generation (v. 37) and for countless generations to come, those words were final. Because they rejected God, God rejected them. He would no longer be their God, and they would no longer be His people.

Were it not for Jesus’ qualifying word until, that would have been their final moment in history, and the theology of the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, would be radically altered. In addition to that, men would have had good reason never to trust God’s word again, because He repeatedly promised that His chosen people would ultimately be saved, restored, and blessed (see, e.g., Jer. 23:5-6; Isa. 66:10-22; Zech. 14:1-11).

Jesus did not say “unless,” making Israel’s restoration only a possibility, but until, making it a certainty. Even in the context of His most severe curses upon unbelieving Israel and her false leaders, that word offered hope. One day Israel will finally say in faith, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,” and in that day she will be forever redeemed, restored, and blessed.

Only a few days earlier those very words from Psalm 118:26 had been shouted at Jesus by the multitudes as He came into Jerusalem seated on the donkey (Matt. 21:9). They were words that all Jews associated with acclamation of the Messiah when He came to establish His kingdom on earth. But true and appropriate as those words were on the occasion of His triumphal entry, they were not spoken in faith by most of the people who uttered them. The Messiah they wanted was not God’s kind of Messiah but their own, and when Jesus soon demonstrated that He had not come to remove the Roman yoke as they expected, the cries for His coronation turned to cries for His crucifixion.

But one day with those same words Israel will hail her Messiah in faith, and the Lord’s hand of blessing and protection will once again be upon her. “In that day the Lord will defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem,” declared Zechariah, the prophet whom the forefathers of those inhabitants had “murdered between the temple and the altar” (Matt. 23:35). Continuing to describe that great reversal in the last days, He said,

And the one who is feeble among them in that day will be like David, and the house of David will be like God, like the angel of the Lord before them. And it will come about in that day that I will set about to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem. And I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him, like the bitter weeping over a first-born. (Zech. 12:8-10)

When the cup of God’s wrath is empty, He will sovereignly overturn and destroy the evil world system of Satan that He has given temporary rein to tyrannize His people. When Israel turns back to Him, He will turn back to them and pour out upon them His Holy Spirit of grace and blessing, and they will both rejoice and weep. They will rejoice in thanksgiving for their new-found Savior and Lord, but they will weep in penitence as they remember what they had done to Him. “In that day there will be great mourning in Jerusalem, . . . And the land will mourn, every family by itself” (Zech. 12:11-12). Their grief will be overwhelming and their sense of sin totally consuming.

In gracious response to that penitential grief, the Lord will pick them up and take them once again to Himself. “‘In that day a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for impurity. And it will come about in that day’, declares the Lord of hosts, ‘That I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, and they will no longer be remembered; and I will also remove the [false] prophets and the unclean spirit from the land” (Zech. 13:1-2). “Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle. . . . And it will come about in that day that living waters will flow out of Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and the other half toward the western sea; it will be in summer as well as in winter. And the Lord will be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord will be the only one, and His name the only one” (14:3, 8-9).

Speaking of the Jews, who were his own people, the apostle Paul wrote, “I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make them jealous. Now if their transgression be riches for the world and their failure be riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their fulfillment be!” (Rom. 11:11-12).

Israel has not permanently fallen away from God. “They also, if they do not continue in their unbelief,” Paul says, “will be grafted in; for God is able to graft them in again. . . . For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery, lest you be wise in your own estimation, that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fulness of the Gentiles has come in; and thus all Israel will be saved” (vv. 23, 25-26).