Well, good morning and welcome
to our continuing Bible study in the book of Luke. And we're
in chapter 19. And as we've been going through
this, remember that we come from Jericho, 800 feet below sea level
and up to the Mount of Olives, which was a couple thousand feet
above sea level, so quite a distance. and elevation change. And in
one of our lessons, we passed around a picture, a graphic,
looking down on Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and across
the Kidron Valley. And you were looking at Jerusalem
toward the east gate there. So, in Luke 19, Verse 41 is where we're at today. And when he was come near, he
beheld the city and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known,
even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong
unto thy peace, But now they are hid from thine eyes, for
the day shall come upon thee that thine enemies shall cast
a trench about thee, encompass thee round, 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." You know, he speaks of Jerusalem as more than
a city there. It's a city that's comprised
of people, and it's comprised of It should have been mostly
comprised of people that believed him, but it wasn't. So as he came near, he beheld
the city and wept over it. So I wanted to spend some time
today talking about Jerusalem and Matthew. In Matthew's record, he says,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem thou that stonest the prophets and kills
them that got sent to you. how oft I would have gathered
you together as a hen gathers her chicks, but you would not.
You would not." And that's just kind of the sum of the story
there, that without divine grace, without revelation, without divine
intervention in salvation, that's just where we'd all be. We would
not. In our last lesson, Thy King
cometh in Luke 19.38, Blessed be the King that cometh in the
name of the Lord. Peace in heaven, glory in the
highest. And that comes to us from Zechariah 9.9, that quotation
from the Old Testament there. So we begin from there with a
reading from Psalm 2. kind of as an introduction verse
for today's lesson on Jerusalem. In Psalm chapter 2, verse 1,
it's written, Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine
a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against
his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder and
cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens
shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall
he speak unto them in his wrath and vex them in his sordid pleasure. Boy, it would be a pretty grim
scripture if it wasn't for the next verse. Yet have I set my
king upon my holy hill of Zion. Hallelujah for that, you know. And he would come near the city,
just looked at it, and just wept. And we mentioned Matthew here
in chapter 23, 37, where You would not, and that's also
recorded in Luke chapter 13, 34. You would not. As we look at this, we kind of
look at Symbolical Jerusalem and National Jerusalem. and Jerusalem was kind of a symbol
of national Israel ruined by the fall, and that's where they
were. The heathen are raging. The people are imagining a vain
thing. They said, he's going to come to Jerusalem, and that'll
be our capital city of Israel, and he'll be the king, and he'll
throw off the Romans. All those things that they imagined
in a physical way, That he said, that's not why I'm here. That's
not what I came for. I came to seek and to save that
which was lost. And so they're imagining of any
things and as we read this at that time, the rulers are taking
counsel together against the Lord. And we read that last week
in our scripture that they took counsel together to take him
and kill him, but they were afraid to do it because of the multitude.
And then we read where Judas came to them and talked with
them and said, well, we need to do this in a time when the
multitudes are not around. So they came by night They came
after everybody had supper and gone to bed, and they came up
to the Mount of Olives. And we'll get to that later on
in Luke as we get there. So that's just where national
Israel is. Those same people that were shouting,
Hosanna, many of them are going to be shouting, crucify Him,
crucify Him, there at the trial. It's also symbolical of spiritual
Israel redeemed from the fall and in the midst of all the evil
which resulted from the fall, yet God has sent his King. upon
Mount Zion. And even now, as the Scripture
says in the Old Testament, He says, I'm doing a marvelous work
among these people in Isaiah 29 and 14. We'll read a little
bit more of that later and also in Psalm 2, 6 there. In Hebrews 12, 22 says, You're
come to Mount Zion And then to the city of the living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels. And then,
John, there's three references to Jerusalem and New Jerusalem
in Revelation. And we'll just read one there
from Revelation 21 to John. And I, John, saw the holy city,
New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven. Prepared as
a bride adorned for her husband. What a glorious picture. And
when the Lord looked down and saw what it had become, he just
wept. He said, this is what it should
be. But it is not. And so much of what we read here
in Luke 9, 41 through 44 deals with Jerusalem of national Israel,
as did Luke chapter 13, where he says, how often I have gathered
you and you just, we wouldn't, you killed everybody that I sent
to you with the gospel. And for a city whose name declares
peace, few other places in history have been the site of so much
conflict. And so we just have to draw the line there between
spiritual peace with God and what the world conceives of peace
on earth, a state of no conflict among ourselves. the people of
the world. And yet, the peace that the Lord
always speaks of is peace with God through the reconciliation
that Lauren talked about last week. That's the only way that
we have peace with God is when we're reconciled, when our views
come into line with His views. And whenever we speak about reconciliation,
I always think of Giovanna. Every month she gets her statement
from the bank, and then she gets the checkbook thing out that
I have messed up, and says, this does not equal that. One of these
is right and one of them is wrong. So she goes through it line by
line by line and finds all my mistakes and changes them till
they line up with the one that's over here. And when she gets
all done, she says, oh, congratulations, your checkbook has been reconciled.
It's been made together. It's been made the same. And
that's what happens through the blood of Christ. We're reconciled
to God. And our view of Him is very much
changed. And so this Jerusalem has been
the site of so much conflict. It's been built up and destroyed
time after time because of iniquity. Conquered time after time by
Assyrians, Egyptians, the King of Israel. Those are all recorded
for us in 2 Kings and Chronicles. if you have time to read that
sometime. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed it and
burnt it to the ground because they did evil in the sight of
the Lord, tells us in 2 Kings chapter 24 and 25. It's pretty
graphic about they came and laid siege to it and took everyone
captive and some fled down to Egypt, but most of them were
taken captive and hauled off to Babylon and made slaves of
the ones that weren't killed. a pretty graphic description
of what happened there in 2 Kings 24 and 25. Then the walls of
Jerusalem were rebuilt in troublous times, we find, as was predicted
in prophecy of in Daniel chapter 9 verse 16. And then we have
the record of that that Norm brought us in Nehemiah and Ezra,
where they actually came because of the decree of God. They were
sent back The Lord spoke to Cyrus, king of Persia, and said, go
and rebuild your city. Go and rebuild your walls. And
what, 50,000 of them went and partook of that endeavor. The Romans would destroy Jerusalem
three different times because of rebellion. And the destruction
that Jesus referenced in this text was really accomplished
by Vespasian who became the emperor in 69 AD and his son Titus. And they engaged in the systematic
subjugation of Palestine because there was just rebellion all
over the place. The Jews took up arms and said,
we will not have them reign over us. And they just got squashed. And
in 70 AD, the Jewish historian Josephus, in volume one of Wars
of the Jews, records that they came to Jerusalem, the Romans
came to Jerusalem at the time of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
the Passover and besieged it. And they camped completely around
the walls and cut them off. And during this time, a few people
were able to escape But mostly not. And the ones that escaped,
they caught them and they crucified them right in front of the walls
so that the people could... Vespasian said, well, you know,
if we make an example out of these escapees, then the rest
of the people will just give up. and they won't keep fighting
us, and the arrows are shooting down over the walls at the Romans,
and the Romans are shooting arrows and launching rocks back at the
city with their machines, and this constant fighting's going
on, and it's besieged all the way around, and seven months,
and there's all kind of political things going on at the same time,
There was a faction of the Jews said, well, as long as we're
fat and sassy here inside the walls, nobody's going to do anything.
So they destroyed all the food supplies. They burnt them. And they said, OK, we're forcing
the people's hand. They're going to have to fight
to survive now because we haven't been able to talk them into taking
up arms and fighting the Romans. But now it's either fight or
starve. And so they really weren't in
a position to fight. And they were starving. And after
seven months, horrible things happened. There were bands. It's
just kind of like Chicago and Seattle. There were bands of
people roaming around the streets, just burning and looting and
breaking into people's homes and searching to see if they
had any food. Sometimes they would snatch it
right out. People would say, oh, they're coming through the
door. I've got to eat this quick. And they would come in and grab it
right out of their mouth and take it and torture them and
beat them up. Sometimes they would kill them
trying to get them to say where they had their secret stash of
groceries at. And sometimes if they were really
starving to death, they'd say, well, we're not even going to
kill you because you're going to die soon enough anyway. We'll just let
you suffer. And it was just horrible, horrible. After a while, the lanes of the city were just
clogged with dead people. And people were too weak to bury
them. They tried burying them at first, but they couldn't keep
up. People were dying faster than they could take care of
it. And so eventually they just started pitching them over the
wall, just down into the valley below the walls there. As Jerusalem was built on two
hills, we'll look at that here in a minute, but they just threw
them over the wall. And the stench was just awful. Titus, he was the general under
Vespasian at the time, I believe. It was his Vespasian son. He was making a tour around the
city, checking on his troops and looking at the situation,
and he just groaned. And he even cried. Josephus said
he cried out to God, you know. How awful. I wish they would
give up, you know. 500 a day were trying to escape and
they were crucifying 500 a day as an example to the people in
the city. It got to the point where the
Romans were running out of room to put sticks up to crucify people
on. That's how bad it got. Josephus recorded that as many
as a million people were killed. A million one hundred thousand
were killed, Jews were killed. And remember at the time of the
Passover you had Jews coming to the city from all over the
world for the Passover. So there could have been a couple,
two or three million people in there easy And 1,100,000 of them
were recorded as dead from this conflict. And 97,000 were captured
and reduced to slavery, and 70,000 of those were taken to Rome to
build the Colosseum. So at the same time, Josephus
and his in his journal, recorded the richness of the temple. And
the various kings that had been there, that had been placed in
charge of the Jews, they wanted it richly adorned, and they had
their royal residence there nearby, and the Jews wanted it richly
adorned. And a lot of it was plated with
gold. The gates and the door frames
and a lot of it had gold and silver cladding of the surfaces. And when the Romans finally gained
entrance to the city, they built a big ramp up to it and got their
siege machines right close and finally broke their way in. When
they finally came in, they just rampaged through the city and
burned the temple and they burned the the chief residences of the
people, and all that gold kind of melted and ran in the cracks
of the stones, and the Roman soldiers took their swords and
fried those rocks, those big stones apart to get at the gold
and the silver that had melted and run down in them. There will
not be one stone left upon another. That's what Jesus said. That's kind of the second half
of this block of Scripture that we looked at. Here's what really
happened and here's how many Jews were killed and taken into
slavery and the results of the siege. And Jesus looked down knowing what
was going to happen because it was foreordained, it was determined
in the Council of Eternity that that would happen, because they
knew not the time of their visitation. You know, Jerusalem was built
on two mountains, or they're called mountains in the Bible,
but they're also kind of referred to as hills, and they're kind
of more what we would refer to hill-like things. And, you know,
a lot of that area, surrounding area, looks kind of like what
you see across the river there, and the Klikitets and those mountains,
where they're just kind of deserty looking, nothing growing there. Sometimes I look at those pictures
and I thought, where's the milk and honey part? Where's all the
grapes? And of course, down in the valley
where the river was, there was quite a good agriculture and
everything, but a lot of that land was pretty desolate looking.
But it was built on two mountains, Mount Zion and Mount Moriah. And they called it kind of Upper
and Lower Jerusalem. One mountain was a little higher
than the other, and the one part was called Upper Jerusalem and
the other was Lower Jerusalem. And Mount Zion is called the
City of David. We have that hymn that we like
to sing, Zion, City of our God. That's just another name for
Jerusalem. David bought a threshing floor
and built an altar there and sacrificed to God for sparing
the people because he numbered the people when he wasn't supposed
to, and God kind of took issue with it. And so he prayed to
God and repented. So he bought this threshing floor. In 1 Chronicles 21-25, David
gave to Ornan for the place 600 shekels of gold by weight. And David built there an altar
unto the Lord and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings
and called upon the Lord. And he answered him from heaven
by fire upon the altar of the burnt offering. And David also
brought the ark to the city of David in 2 Samuel 6.16. And so the ark of the Lord came
into the city of David. As it came in, Saul's daughter,
Michael, looked through a window and saw King David leaping and
dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart. And they brought in the ark of
the Lord and set it in his place in the midst of the tabernacle
that David had pitched for it. And David offered burnt offerings
and peace offerings before the Lord." Not peace as we know it,
but peace through the blood of Christ, and he was acquainted
with that. And then in chapter 3 of 2 Chronicles,
Solomon, remember that David wasn't allowed to build a tabernacle
because he was a man of war and he said your son can build it.
So Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem
in Mount Moriah where the Lord appeared unto David his father
in the place that David had prepared in the threshing floor of Ornan
the Jebusite. And Jebus was another name of
Jerusalem back in the Old Testament days. Therefore, Jebusites. In Psalm 76, verse 1 and 2, the
chief musician on Naganoth, a psalm or a song of Asaph, it says,
In Judah is God known, His name is great in Israel, In Salem
also is his tabernacle and his dwelling place in Zion. So Salem,
an early Old Testament name for Jerusalem as well as Zion. Mount
Moriah, you might recall Mount Moriah is the place where God
told Abraham to take his son up and sacrifice him. And you're
all aware of that passage of scripture. And then we saw that
Solomon built his temple on Mount Moriah. In Genesis 22, verse
1 and 2, we have that text that says, And it came to pass after
these things that God did tempt Abraham and sent unto him Abraham. And he said, Behold, here I am.
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
lovest, and get thee to the land of Moriah, and offer him there
for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will
tell thee of." And so Mount Moriah, the land of Moriah in Jerusalem,
the capital of that land. It's also mentioned as Shalem
in Genesis 14, 18. And Melchizedek, king of Salem,
brought forth bread and wine, and he was the priest of the
Most High God." And we went through that here in our Wednesday night
study somewhat. So that is referenced in Hebrews chapter
7 for this Melchizedek, Hebrews 7.1, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God who
met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed
him, to whom Abraham also gave the tenth part of all, first
being by interpretation king of righteousness, And after that
also, King of Salem, which is King of Peace. So we have the
interpretation of that name of Melchizedek and the name of Salem
as peace. In the etymology of that early
name of Jerusalem, it's Shalom, peaceful, it means
complete, to be safe, in body, mind, and spirit, and to causatively
make, complete it. And Melchizedek was king of righteousness
and king of Salem, the sovereign of peace. And another name that we find
for Jerusalem is Ariel, as recorded by Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 29. We referenced that a few minutes
ago earlier in the lesson there, but Ariel means Lion of the mighty
God. Ariel. And he talks about the
siege of Jerusalem in Isaiah chapter 29. Woe to Ariel, to
Ariel, the city where David dwelt. Add you year to year. Let them
kill sacrifices. They just kept building it up
and building it up. And they just kept killing more
sacrifices with no idea why, what they were doing. No idea
of the gospel. So I will camp against thee round
about, and I will lay siege against thee with a mount, and I will
raise forts against thee, for the Lord hath poured out upon
you the spirit of deep sleep. Isn't that what Jesus just got
through saying in Luke chapter 19? If you'd known, but now those
things are hid from your eyes. He's poured upon you the spirit
of deep sleep and has closed your eyes. The prophets and your
rulers, the seers hath he covered. Wherefore the Lord saith, Forasmuch
as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips
do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and
their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men, Therefore,
behold, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people,
even a marvelous work and a wonder, for the wisdom of their wise
men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be
hid." Boy, how prophetic that was of just where we're at in
Luke 19, as Jesus stands on the Mount of Olives and looks down
on the holy city, the holy city of God, the Zion city of our
God, and just wept. because of the impact of the
fall was just so much greater than anybody could anticipate
except for him. He knew full well what the impact
was and he knew full well what the only remedy was. His sacrifice
on the Cray's blood had to be shed. to cover the sins of those
people whom God gave Him from before the foundation of the
world. Jerusalem below and Jerusalem which is above. Norm mentioned
this in one of his messages from Galatians
chapter 4 verse 25 and 26 for this Agar. Remember the bond
woman and the free woman and the two children? Agar was the
bond woman that Abraham had a child by, and Sarah had the true heir. For Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia,
which answereth to Jerusalem, which now is, and is in bondage
with her children. That's where that whole program
takes you. That whole program of legalism,
that whole program of works, that whole program of the law,
trying to get salvation through that. It's just bondage. But Jerusalem, which is above,
is free, the spiritual Jerusalem, which is the mother of us all,
Galatians 4.26. And in view of this, what should
have been but was not because of sin in the fall, Jesus looks
down on that holy city, the city which should have told of his
sacrifice, which would be the peace between man and God. Shalom,
peace. The very gospel message, he looked
down upon it and wept because they couldn't see the kingdom
of God. Unless a man be born again, he can't see the kingdom
of God. The effects of sin, the consequences
were and are greater than can be imagined. So when he was come near, he
beheld the city and wept over it, saying, If thou had known,
even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong
unto thy peace, but now they're hid from thine eyes. For the
days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench
about thee, and compass thee round, 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
the other, because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation."
You know, all the things, it just struck me that when I was
reading Josephus about all the cladding and the gold cladding
and the ornamentation and all of the fine thing, and even a
little bit later in Luke, one of the disciples says, man, that
is some spiffy temple. It is good looking, don't you
think? And he just said, It's just not
that outward thing that counts, you know, and all the gold and
all the cladding doesn't cover up all the iniquity that's going
on inside. It just doesn't. And so they
knew not the time of the visitation. So that's the end of our message
for today, and we'll take it on next time when he chases all
them money guys out of the temple and all those things. So, until
next time, as always, be free.