Good morning. Welcome to our
continuing Bible study in Luke chapter 23. We're in that point
of time in the Scripture leading up to the crucifixion. He's left the Praetorium. They've
taken him from the Praetorium. They've laid the cross on one
Simonus Cyrenian that we looked at in a previous lesson there,
and what might be happening with him later on. So he's on this path from the
Judgment Hall, the Praetorium. on his way to Golgotha, the last
few steps that he was going to take in this manifestation. And so we'll begin reading in
verse 26, and we're going to read down through verse 31 today. And as they led him away, they
laid hold on one Simon the Cyrenian. That was that region just out
of Libya in North Africa, close to Tripoli. And coming out of
the country and laid on him the cross that he might bear it after
Jesus. And there followed him a great
company of people and of women, which also bewailed and lamented
him. But Jesus turned unto them and
said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for
yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming
in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs
that never bear, and the paps which never gave suck, Then shall
they begin to say unto the mountains, fall on us, and to the hills,
cover us. For if they do these things in
a green tree, what shall be done in the dry? What a terrible prophecy
that he foretells there. And not the first time he'd mentioned
that. We'll cover that a little bit here later. And he mentioned
that in Luke chapter 19, if you'll recall. And so today's lesson is titled,
Jerusalem in Heaps. And that's what Jeremiah called
it. He was foretelling the fall of
Jerusalem in the time of the Babylonians and that era. But we find many of the same
things happening here, just a repetition, and for the same reasons. They
went away from God. They went to idol worship. They
turned from Him. and they were the nation, they
were punished for that. In Jerusalem 6.6 it says, hew
down trees and cast a mount against Jerusalem. They cut down all
the trees around there and used them to wage war against them
and they built In Jerusalem they had these three layers of walls
around the city, except for the places where there was a real
steep slope off into a valley where it was tough terrain to
approach the city to attack it. So the Romans just kind of filled
it all in and they built kind of ramps up to the wall in 70
A.D. when this invasion took place
that we're talking about here today. But because of idolatry, God
used the Nebuchadnezzar in a punitive way against Jerusalem and the
nation. And then he turned around later
and punished them for that. And the same thing is happening
here in the time of Luke in this gospel of the the atoning death
of Christ. And for the most part, the people
were caught up in this religious folly of works and pretending
to keep the law. And as Norman mentions, I don't
think very many people brought sin offerings. I didn't. I'm not admitting to anything. And they waited. They waited centuries for the
Messiah to come. And when He came, they rejected
Him. And their preconceived idea of
the Messiah was to lead an army and overthrow the Romans. And
instead, He attacked the temple and cleaned it out. You made
it a den of thieves. He threw out the money changers
and those that sold livestock. And he attacked their religion
instead of the Romans. That's not right. And he condemned the religious
works of the Jews and verbally assaulted the chief priests and
the rulers of the Jews for their, you worship me with your lips,
but your heart is far from me. That's not our idea of the Messiah. You should be on our side. So
he wasn't attacking who they thought he should attack, and
so doom for him. And he tells them, though, that
here's the doom that's coming to you here in Romans 23, 28. And back in Luke 19, we read
the same thing. It's interesting that the tactics
of the invaders are almost exactly the same. It's almost like they
studied history and say, well, if you want to sack Rome or Jerusalem,
here's how to do it. The battle plan has already been
successfully used. So we're going to do it again.
Hew down trees and cast a mount against Jerusalem. And so the words that were spoken
by Christ as recorded in our text today gives many details,
both physical and spiritual in context. And he says, don't weep
for me. I'm going to be fine. Three days,
I'm going to rise again. Weep for yourselves, because
this place is doomed. And because you knew us, not
the time of thy visitation. That's what tells us in Luke
chapter 19, verse 44. And you know, Luke 19 and 23
are just real closely linked in this same issue regarding the state of
affairs in Jerusalem and in religion and the fulfillment of the gospel.
The time was coming. The days shall come upon thee.
You know, in Jeremiah, when he wrote about the Babylonians and
the siege that they had back then, in Jeremiah 14, he says,
there was none to bury them. Famine and sword killed them. In Luke 19, let's read back there. Let's turn back to Luke 19, 41
there. And as Jesus made that triumphant
entrance into Jerusalem, Amir, when we studied that, He came down from the Mount of
Olives. And, you know, during the siege
of Jerusalem, there was, I can't remember how, Josephus recorded
there was like a thousand Roman soldiers stationed on the Mount
of Olives. They were just jammed up there
waiting to attack. And he said, when he was come
near, he beheld the city and wept over it. And he said, if
thou had known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the day
when I'm actually standing here in front of you looking you in
the eye and preaching the gospel and raising people from the dead
and healing and giving sight to the blind and allowing the
deaf to hear and all those things that he expounded from the Old
Testament, the things that he actually did. If thou at least
in this thy day, if you had known the things which belong to thy
peace, But now they're hid from nine eyes and he was talking
about the peace between. one that's born again in God,
not national wartime peace like what's not going on over there
in Israel right now. They're having a little war over
there right now. And he says, "...for the day shall come upon
thee that thine enemy shall cast a trench about thee, encompass
thee around, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay
thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee, and
they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another, because
thou knewest not the time of thy visitation." John wrote in
chapter 1, he says, he came unto his own and his own received
him not. In verse 45, then he went into
the temple, and he began to cast out them that sold therein and
them that bought, saying unto them, It is written, My house
is the house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.
And he taught daily in the temple, but the chief priests and the
scribes and the chief of the people sought to destroy him. His own received him not." You
know, so it's no surprise when he later says, they sought to
destroy him. He says, destroy this temple.
In three days, I'll raise it up again. And they said, this
temple took like 46 years to build, and you're going to raise
it up in three days? So they had this over the, they didn't
have any idea what he was talking about. In Luke chapter 21, speaking
of that temple, some spoke of the temple, how it was adorned
with goodly stones and gifts. And He said, as for these things,
which ye behold, the days will come in which there shall not
be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.
So He keeps adding drips and drabs of these things that are
going to befall Jerusalem in 37 years. It's not that long
away that these things are going to occur. All according to His
purpose and all according to His timing. destroy this temple in three
days, I'll raise it up." What a picture. What a great description
we have of the view that God had of the goings-on. The temple had been made into
a den of thieves, and the purpose and design of it, they had destroyed. It was physically there. But
the intent of it was destroyed. The purpose of it was destroyed
by the people that had no knowledge really of God or grace or the
gospel. They just turned it into a thing.
They just turned it into a ceremonial showpiece. It was of no spiritual
value the way that they were utilizing it. It had all the,
it was a lot like religion today. It had all of the surface external
characteristics. They said the Jesus Word, they
said the Messiah Word, they said the God Word, and they had the
place where the Gentiles couldn't go no further, and they had the
Holy of Holies, and they had all the boxes where you could
put your money in, and the Court of the Women. All these things that were originally
designed to be a part of declaring the gospel of grace were all
just turned into things that you do or you don't do, or places
you can go or you can't go. And only certain ones are allowed
here and not there. And if you pay me enough money,
we'll abracadabra you and forgive your sins. They destroyed it. Spiritually,
it was gone. And it was only a matter of time
before it was gone physically as well. And so we have that revelation
from Luke 19 and Luke 21 and then in Luke 23, Weep not for
me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold,
the days are coming, thirty-seven years, in which they shall say,
Boy, you're just going to wish that you didn't even have any
kids. You're going to wish that You were just buried. Hills fall on us, cover us. If they do these things in a
green tree to the very Christ that was standing there, the
Romans and the people are going to do these things to a green
tree. What will they do in this dead old dried up stick? it's going to burn up like crazy. So some things that we want to
consider today, there are certain ones that are identified as they
here in the two texts. First, the they that in Luke,
back in our text in Luke 19.42, which alludes to Christ and His
atoning work saying, If thou had known, even thou, at least
in this day, the things which belong to thy peace, but now
they are hid from your eyes." You didn't know them, and without
revelation you can't know them. And when it gets to this point,
it's too late. There's going to be some judgment
coming. They're hid from your eyes. Secondly,
we have the daughters of Jerusalem that are foretold what they're
going to say during this time in 70 AD is when this actually
comes to pass, 37 years later. These daughters of Jerusalem,
these women that are weeping and lamenting as he's going along
on his way to be crucified. They're going to say, oh, blessed
are those that don't have kids. I have a kid, but I wish I didn't.
I wish I was dead. I wish I was
covered up. And lastly, the third reference
is to the people who, along with the chief priests and the elders
that were gathered together to do whatever the Lord determined
before to be done, they demanded the Romans execute. And the Romans
were seemingly connived into executing Jesus to appease the
Jewish leaders. You know, Pilate, he gave two
or three attempts at saying, nah, we don't, he's not done
anything worthy of death. But then he went ahead and did
it anyway, and then he had him beat, had him scourged. But all these things were happening
according to the purpose of Him who willeth all things to happen
after the counsel of His own will from eternity. I find no
fault. He's done nothing worthy of death.
And all the people yelled, crucify Him, crucify Him. He says, OK. Let it be on your head. And that's
what they said. Norm brought that out this morning. It's on our head, us and our
children. We take responsibility for this
act. away with this man and release
unto us Barabbas." And we covered that. So as we're looking at
this, Jesus is walking along or trotting along this path to
His execution, and this multitude of people and the women that's
described here in Luke 23, as He's given over to... a certain crucifixion by the
command of the Romans. You know, he's saying, God is going to use these same
Romans to punish you guys. You're using them to have me
killed. Well, God's going to use them
to have you killed. The Romans are carrying out what
God before determined to be done. It's what it tells us in Acts
4. the people, Herod and Pontius Pilate, all these people were
gathered together to do what he had before determined to be
done. But he said, That's going to happen, but it's not going
to be good for you by whom it was done. The green tree again
typifies Christ versus the dry tree, which typified the Jews
as religiously dead. So dead they were dried up. They're
like those bones there in Ezekiel's valley of the dry bones. He said
they're not just dry, they're like very dry. They're just like
dust. no visible sign of life. That's
what that metaphor is for. If they do these things in a
green tree, what shall be done in the dry? But you know, in
the midst of all this is just the wonderful miracle of the
gospel. The miracle of a remnant, according
to the election of grace, revealed in time a people foreknown of
God, predestinated and called and justified by the death of
the Son, ready to be manifested when it pleased God. Many of
these people were there. Many of these people were in
that crowd that followed Him along. Many were the ones that
said, crucify Him, crucify Him, because they, like all of us
before we're born again, were at enmity against God. And so
it's no great marvel that they would say, we will have this
man over, crucify him, crucify him. And you know, we remember
that there was It was commanded that if you were a Jew, you had
to attend these three feasts every year, if you're a male
Jew. And so every Passover, there was millions of Jews that came
to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast. And it's no different
right at this time of this writing in Luke. We had Simon the Cyrene. He was
from Libya. And people from every nation,
people from all over the world were there that were proselytes
and Jews, as it tells us in Acts chapter 2. This crowd following Jesus from
the Praetorium to Golgotha, and right along behind him are
two thieves. mocking and shouting at him.
They cast the same in their teeth that said when they were crucified,
if thou be the Christ, save us and save yourself and come down
off the cross. And yeah, you're no God, you're
nothing. You're dying just like us. And
then the big change for the one. But you know, as Christ was going
along and he had this multitude around him, I was telling Norm,
so I think he looked out there and he could see. I'm dying for your sins, and
you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you. You're
mine, you're mine, you're mine. God gave you, and you, and you,
and you, and you, and you. He gave all of you to me to redeem. He could look out in that crowd
and see them. He could look behind him and see one of those thieves
and say, you're mine too. even though you're cursing me
right now. You know, I like what Lance said.
You know, he just had gentle things to say. He didn't curse
the world. He didn't curse the people and
say, you guys are all... When he came into Jerusalem,
he looked over and wept because of unbelief. He knew not the
time of thy visitation. you didn't know when I was here.
And he didn't have anything terrible to say except, Father, forgive
them for they know not what they do. All these gentle things,
as Lance pointed out, that he said when he could have knocked
them all down and killed them all and turned them all into
charcoal and walked away and rose on, went back to heaven
and all those things. But he just said, Someone has
to pay. Sin must be paid for. And I'm
paying for yours. I'm on my way to do that. I'm
the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. So even as they rejected Him
and He wept over the blindness of the people and the fake religion
and the worship that was by lips only and not the heart, He wept
over what was to come. Over Jerusalem, His city. What it was meant to be and what
sin and the fall had turned it into. What opposite. It just turns out that Sin generates
things that are just the opposite to God in enmity with Him. And so they took those things
that were supposed to be telling the gospel and declaring
grace and turn them into useless vanity and works. And in time,
you know, the pilot, he did some atrocious things in the temple
and with some of the people. He had some people slain and
mingled their blood with their sacrifices. Remember we read
about that? You know, the Jews were getting
all these things adding up that were against their religion,
and they didn't like being under the control of Rome, and so they
were kind of in this mutinous mode all the time, seditious.
That's what they finally accused Jesus of was, He said He was
king. He's a seditious person. And so finally the Romans had
enough and they sent Vespasian and his son Titus into the country
to quell all this unrest. They went to Galilee first and
killed a lot of people there. And then they went to Gadara. And they stomped out all the
insurrectionists in Gadara. Remember the maniac of Gadara? And Jesus went across the Sea
of Galilee just for that one guy, because he said, you're
mine. From Gadara, they encircled Jerusalem. And you know, that doesn't happen
in secret. The people, they all said, oh, we better get inside
the wall so we'll be safe. So they encircled, they encamped
them roundabout, just like Jesus said in his version there in Luke 19 and
Luke 23. And they did what they call,
they besieged them. And they just blocked, nobody
could come in and no one could go out. And three days before the Passover
in April 70 AD, the siege of Jerusalem began. Jerusalem would
be in heaps. The days will come upon thee,
thine enemy shall cast a trench about thee and encompass thee
around and keep thee in on every side. No one could go in and
no one could go out. And remember, there's like a
millions of Jews in there because it's Passover. So it's not like
just the normal population of Jerusalem, but it's got Jews
from every part of the world are there for this Passover. none, no one could come in and
no one could go out. And for the time, you know, for
a time it wasn't that bad. But eventually
food began to run out. And armed mobs of gangs prowled
the city. It's kind of like Baltimore Portland
and Seattle and just going around looting and pillaging at will
with no consequences. There wasn't anybody there to
make them behave because everybody was against everybody. Nobody had any friends at this
point. They broke into homes to loot
food and valuables. If they didn't find any, they
would torture the people that lived there to make them talk.
And if they looked well-fed, like me, they would say, you
obviously have a larder. Where is it? And if you were
rail-thin, kind of weak-looking, they'd torture you anyway, just
in case. And so there wasn't any right
answer. You couldn't say, yeah, I have
food. Go ahead and take it. Or no, I don't have any food. So it doesn't matter. They killed
them. They tortured them and then killed them anyway, just
because they could. And there was no moral compass. There was nothing of civilization
left in there. People began to die. Criminals
killed at will with no repercussions. People swallowed their valuables
sometimes. If you had some gold coins or
jewelry, you'd just guzzle them down so that the thieves wouldn't
find them. But they got onto that, and so
they just killed them, and then they did exploratory surgery. see if you had swallowed any
jewels or coins or whatever. Some of them, early on in the
siege, sometimes the Romans would let them, if they could escape
the city, they would come out and the Romans would say, okay,
so you're not part of this, you may go your way, go back to wherever,
Antioch or Syria or wherever. But they would swallow their
stuff and then they would go out when the Romans release them
and they go out in the bush and evacuate and get their money
back and go their way. But pretty soon the Romans said,
hey, you know what? They're not giving up in the
city. So these people that are coming out, let's just kill them
and crucify them and post them in the valley. here and everywhere
so that they can be seen from the city walls. And that'll be a object lesson to
the people in the city that you should give up. And the people
in the city said, if we give up, that's what they're going
to do to us. So we're not doing that either. So just the atrociousness
of the whole thing is is beyond our capability to understand
and believe and to imagine in our current stage where we are
right now. And eventually the number of dead
people from starvation after months goes by, months are going
by, people are starving. And some of them have money,
but there's nothing to buy. They bought up all the grain
and the food, and they bought stuff that you and
I would not think of putting on the menu. it just got worse and worse and
worse. And people were, if you were old and not in good shape,
you were just, you were dying. And eventually the number of
dead eclipsed the ability of those inside to deal with, and
they just ended up throwing the bodies over the wall and down
into the valley. And it got so bad that even Vespasian
went by there and he just wept. The Roman general and his son
Titus, they just looked at the mayhem that was going on there
and they just said, why won't they give up and just surrender
and just we'll be done with all this stuff? But they wouldn't. Starvation and murder and mayhem
was the norm now and cannibalism began to occur. because there was nothing. You
think that, you know, you think that, no, we would never do that. Josephus recorded that 1.1 million
Jews were killed in that siege, and not all by the Romans. A
lot of them were killed by their own people. 97,000, at the end
of it, 97,000 were enslaved and sent away. At the time, Jerusalem, the city
of Jerusalem, encompassed about the area of one square mile,
which is, doing the math, was 3,097,600 square yards. So a
square yard is nine by nine, nine feet by nine feet. 1.1 million
Jews dead. So one dead Jew for every three
square yards, if you do the math and figure out. About every other
square yard there was a dead Jew for that, if you do the math. So like a lot of dead people
in a pretty small area. So you can just imagine the scope
of the awfulness. And, you know, as we noted in
a previous lesson that Herod had greatly enhanced the temple
with gold plating and silver and all kinds of wonderful decorations
and things. To display his greatness and
when the Romans when they finally entered the city, they set fire
to the city in the temple. Surface gold was looted by the
soldiers and then the fire caused it to melt and run between the
cracks of the stones. And so the soldiers took the
little short swords and they pried the stones of the temple
apart with their swords to get at the gold that had melted and
ran down between the cracks. Not one stone will be left upon
another. That's what Jesus said. Jerusalem
shall be in heaps. In Luke 21, 5 it says, And some
spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and
gifts, gold and silver. For these things which ye behold,
the days will come in which there shall not be left one stone upon
another. He was through with their religious
fakery. He said, you turn this into a
den of thieves, tear it down, it's not coming back. We're not
building it again. It's destroyed. Awful beyond
belief. Nothing compared to eternity without Christ. You
know, in 2 Kings, to show you that there's nothing new and
that all this stuff just gets repeated. When Ben-Hadad sieged
Samaria in 2 Kings 6.25, you can go to your Bibles and read
this. It was awful. There was a great famine in Samaria,
and behold, they besieged it until an ass's head was sold
for four score pieces of silver. The head of a donkey, the part
that they usually just throw away, bury, haul off to the boneyard. four pieces of silver, and the
fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver. Now, I don't know who's going
to have dove's dung on their menu after church today. And
we wouldn't pay five pieces of silver for it. I'm always washing
that off by the orchard. They're always pooping on my
pickup all the time. I've washed that off. I'm not
eating that for lunch. But that's the level of desperation
that was going on. And it gets worse in 2 Kings
6. We just read that part about
them buying all these atrocious things because they were starving.
But in 2 Kings 6, we're about out of time. I'll just quickly
give you the cliff notes of it. A couple of women got together
and one of them said, hey, you know what? If we eat your son
tomorrow, today, we can eat mine tomorrow. So the first woman
says, OK. So we boiled my son and ate him. And then the next day, the other
woman says, I don't know what you're talking about. And so
she went to the king and said, hey, you know what? We agreed
to eat our children, and we ate mine. And then she's like gone
back on her word. The king said, what, Alethi?
And she answered, this woman said unto me, give me thy son
that we may eat him today, and we'll eat my son tomorrow. You
know, we just can't imagine that level of desperation. But it
happened, and it was recorded in 2 Kings. Same thing happening
here in Luke 23, where he's saying, this is what's going to happen
in 70 AD. And you're just going to say,
you're just going to wish you didn't have any children. How awful. 37 years later, that's going
to come to pass. But you know, through this there
was that election according to the remnant of grace. God looked
out there and some of His people were there. There was Simon the
Cyrenian bearing the cross, and the thief behind him, and the
centurion at the cross later that said, truly this was the
Son of God. You know, in Acts chapter 2,
we're out of time here, but all these people got together 50
days later at the Feast of Pentecost, and Peter was preaching the gospel
to all these Jews that were still there. And the crucifixion was
gone, and Jesus was resurrected. And he preached to them the gospel
and said, this same Jesus which you have crucified is Lord and
King. They said, oh, what shall we
do? And he said, repent and be baptized,
every one of you. And that day there was 3,000
of them added to the church. And the Lord added daily, such
as should be saved to the church. Acts chapter 2, 36 through 47.
So out of that multitude, He was walking by that was gaping
on him. There was 3,000. There was more. And I'm sure
he was looking out there and saying, I'm going for you. with his stripes were healed,
remnant according to the election of grace. So we'll stop there
until next time.