Destruction of Jerusalem
31
The Saviour’s prophecy concerning the visitation of judgments
upon Jerusalem is to have another fulfillment, of which that terrible
desolation was but a faint shadow. In the fate of the chosen city we
may behold the doom of a world that has rejected God’s mercy and
trampled upon his law. Dark are the records of human misery that earth
has witnessed during its long centuries of crime. The heart sickens
and the mind grows faint in contemplation. Terrible have been the
results of rejecting the authority of Heaven. But a scene yet darker is
presented in the revelations of the future. The records of the past,—the
long procession of tumults, conflicts, and revolutions, the “battle of the
warrior, with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood,” [
Isaiah
9:5
.]—what are these, in contrast with the terrors of that day when the
restraining Spirit of God shall be wholly withdrawn from the wicked,
no longer to hold in check the outburst of human passion and Satanic
wrath! The world will then behold, as never before, the results of
Satan’s rule.
But in that day, as in the time of Jerusalem’s destruction, God’s
people will be delivered, “every one that shall be found written among
the living.” Christ has declared that he will come the second time, to
gather his faithful ones to himself: “Then shall all the tribes of the
earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds
of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels
with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect
from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” [
Matthew
24:30, 31
.] Then shall they that obey not the gospel be consumed with
the spirit of his mouth, and be destroyed with the brightness of his
coming. [
2 Thessalonians 2:8
.] Like Israel of old, the wicked destroy
[38]
themselves; they fall by their iniquity. By a life of sin, they have placed
themselves so out of harmony with God, their natures have become
so debased with evil, that the manifestation of his glory is to them a
consuming fire.
Let men beware lest they neglect the lesson conveyed to them in the
words of Christ. As he warned his disciples of Jerusalem’s destruction,
giving them a sign of the approaching ruin, that they might make their
escape, so he has warned the world of the day of final destruction,
and has given them tokens of its approach, that all who will may flee
from the wrath to come. Jesus declares, “There shall be signs in the
sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of