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Destruction of Jerusalem
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unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you
rest.” [
Matthew 11:28
.]
Regardless of indifference and contempt, he had steadfastly pur-
sued his ministry of love. No frown upon his brow repelled the
suppliant. Himself subjected to privation and reproach, he had lived
to scatter blessings in his path, to plead with men to accept the gift
of life. The waves of mercy, beaten back by the stubborn heart,
returned in a tide of untiring love. But Israel had turned from her
best friend and only helper. The pleadings of his love had been
despised, his counsels spurned, his warnings ridiculed.
The hour of grace and reprieve was fast passing; the cup of God’s
long-deferred wrath was almost full. The cloud of wrath that had
been gathering through ages of apostasy and rebellion, was about to
burst upon a guilty people, and He who alone could save them from
their impending fate had been slighted, abused, rejected, and was
soon to be crucified. When Christ should hang on Calvary’s cross,
Israel’s day as a nation favored and blessed of God would be ended.
The loss of even one soul is a calamity in comparison with which the
gain of a world sinks into insignificance; but as Christ looked upon
Jerusalem, the doom of a whole city, a whole nation, was before him;
that city, that nation which had once been the chosen of God,—his
peculiar treasure.
Prophets had wept over the apostasy of Israel. Jeremiah wished
that his eyes were a fountain of tears, that he might “weep day and
night for the slain of the daughter of his people.” What, then, was the
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grief of Him whose prophetic glance took in, not years, but ages? He
beholds the destroying angel hovering over the ancient metropolis
of patriarchs and prophets. From the ridge of Olivet, the very spot
afterward occupied by Titus and his army, he looks across the valley
upon the sacred courts and porticoes, and with tear-blinded eyes he
sees, in awful perspective, the walls surrounded by alien armies. He
hears the tread of the hosts mustering for battle. He hears the voice
of mothers and children crying for bread in the besieged city. He
sees her holy and beautiful house, her palaces and towers, given to
the flames, and where once they stood, only a heap of smoldering
ruins.
He looks down the ages, and sees the covenant people scattered
in every land, like wrecks on a desert shore. He sees in the temporal