Jesus Wept over Jerusalem

By Richard

In Luke 19: 41-44) we read that as Jesus approached Jerusalem He was overcome by emotion and wept openly because Jerusalem would be judged severely for not recognising Him to be the Messiah. Jesus describes how the city would one day be besieged and totally destroyed.

In 70 A.D., forty years after Jesus had wept over Jerusalem, following a 143 day siege, which began at Passover, a Roman military force consisting of about 30,000 troops under the command of Titus battered the walls and entered the city. They destroyed everything, including Herod's Temple. The population and the great number of Passover visitors who had been trapped there were brutally slaughtered, with an estimated 600,000 people killed. The rest of Judea was flattened, and over 90.000 people were taken captive, including the historian Flavius Josephus who recorded the events in his, Wars of The Jews.

The reason I mention this is not to show Christ’s great ability to foretell the future but to point out that God’s judgment is never gratuitous, it always comes with great sorrow. God longs, desperately, that people will accept his salvation, repent, produce fruit and be rewarded by God.

It reminded me to have sorrow, not anger, about the millions in Spain (indeed the whole world) who fail to recognise that Jesus as the Messiah.