Jesus' Last Words to Israel, Part 2
Matthew 23:37-39
Let's open our Bibles this morning together and we do so with great joy to study God's word and to learn His truth, what a privilege. Let's open to Matthew 23. This morning we come to the last few verses of this very, very powerful Chapter. We're going to look at verses 37-39. But I want you to just kind of hold your place there for a moment and I want to set up if I may in your thinking a scene that will help you grasp the very great significance of this passage. Let me begin by saying no one could possibly have a greater love or a greater compassion for the nation Israel than a truly committed Christian. And that's the way I feel.
I find myself almost inordinately favoring Jewish people. And I guess it has to do with the fact that all the favorite people in my life are Jewish, Jesus, Paul, Peter, Moses, Abraham, and a few folks here at Grace Church, many in fact. And I have such a great heart for Jewish people. I...because they're God's special people. And a great sense of compassion over the plight of Jewish people. I feel in my own heart the pain of their unbelief, the pain of their persecution. The tremendous distress of a people who down deep inside believe they have a covenant with God and can't understand why it never turns to blessing. But why it always seems that they're under a curse. A people who believe themselves to be unique who believe themselves to humanitarianly sensitive and yet seem always to be oppressed, always beleaguered, massacred, persecuted, harassed and asking themselves why. Why?
I had the privilege a few months ago of being in the land of Israel and everywhere you go in that land you are overwhelmed with the fact that those people have known centuries and centuries and centuries of difficulty. You can see the remnants of the devastation of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. when you look at the western wall, which is all that was left after the city was raised to the ground at the order of the Roman emperor. And here and there across that country, you see the remnants of their wars and their terrible slaughters, remnants that run from ancient times to very modern times. All the way from rubble of a city to tanks overturned and sitting in the desert, reminders that the battles are still raging in that part of the world.
This people has suffered like no other nation in history. And it seems so strange that all through these centuries God has preserved them. They're never exterminated. They're never wiped out. They're never even lost in the process of inner-marriage. They just keep perpetuating themselves, and yet it is a perpetuation and punishment. It is a continual existence in chastening and you can see it written all over them all the time. Why? Why? They cry out to a heaven that never answers. Why? If indeed we are the covenant people, if indeed we are the chosen, if indeed it is us to whom they oracles of God are committed. If we are the people of the adoption and the promises and the covenants and the law and the services and of whom even the Messiah came or is to come, why? Why have we suffered so?
Let me give you a little bit of background. The contemporary picture of the Jews in suffering really begins with the destruction of Jerusalem. In 70 A.D., Titus Vespasian came the Roman General, sieged the city and before it was over, over a million Jews were killed according to Josephus. Two years before that in 68 A.D. the Gentiles of Caesarea had slain 20,000 Jews and captured thousands more and sold them into slavery. And that really began the 2,000 years of holocaust that the Jews have suffered.
For example, around that period of time in one single day, the inhabitance of Damascus slit the throats of 10,000 Jews. It wasn't long after that, a couple of centuries, that a man came into power by the name of Theodosius. And Theodosius, under his reign, developed a legal code. And that legal code has inherent in it anti-Semitic viewpoints which state the inferiority of the Jews and unfortunately Theodosius legal code penetrated all of western law so that there was built in from that fourth century period and anti-Jewish feeling underlying much of western culture. The sad history really took on unbelievable proportions in the crusades. The first crusade occurred in 1096 and I'll just give you a brief background. You can remember your history course. The crusades were basically supposed to be holy pilgrimages on the part of the western European Christians. And I used the word Christians loosely because they were not Christians in the true sense, but only in the name of religion. And they decided to march to the holy land to recapture the holy land from the pagan Turks who possessed it.
The holy land had fallen into the control of the Turks and they thought that was a desecration of the Christian holy places. Now the fear that they had was that as they went back and laid claim to that the Jews would then make demands on them. And the Jews would want also to lay claim to the land. And so to prevent the Jews from exercising any of that, they just went across Europe and massacred all the Jews they found. So here they are in the name of Christ massacring Jews across Europe.
Now that might give you a little idea why the Jews have a distaste in their mouth for Christianity. Secondly, why the very word crusade conjures up all kinds of evil things to a Jew. So the crusades were a very disastrous event. Let me tell you what they did basically. They would go into a town, they would find a Jewish settlement. They would find a small group of Jews or a large group in a town. They would give them very often two choices. Choice number one convert to Christianity and be publicly baptized. Choice number two, die. What happened was many Jews who didn't want to do that died. Many others falsely converted to Christianity to save their lives. Some of the Jewish leaders tried to prevent false conversions and so they told the people you're better off dead and in many towns and villages, the people committed suicide as families when they knew the crusaders were approaching their village.
They were guilty of no crime, they were victims of unbelievable persecution. In one particular case that I read about this week in one village, at least, some of the women and young girls decided that they would rather die than go through what would happen in the crusades and many of them didn't have the option of being baptized. It was just a question of being killed. And so they loaded rocks on these young girls tying them in their garments and dropping them in the river so that they would drown rather than be in any way humiliated by the crusaders.
They were accused of crucifying Christian children. They were accused of drinking then the blood in the Passover of Christian children which they executed. All kinds of unbelievable horrors. In the city of Verns later famous because of Martin Luther. The Jews refused to be baptized, so they were murdered by the mob and their corpses were dragged from one end of the city to the other to desecrate their bodies. In 1236 still in the time of the crusades, there were several of them, they went into two villages, the crusaders did Anjou and Poitou and they trampled 3,000 Jews under their horses hooves, and the worst was yet to come.
In England, there came to be a king by the name of Edward the I and under him the Jews were somewhat safe. They by now had scattered all over Europe and the dispossession of Jerusalem and their land. And they found their way into England and they had a modicum of safety there for a while until a Dominican monk, in the Roman system, the Dominicans were a very well-known and proud group, a Dominican monk decided to study the Hebrew scriptures in order to convert to Roman Catholicism. In the process, he became converted to Judaism and was circumcised. The result of that was that the Roman Catholic Church was irate, the Dominicans felt that they had been betrayed and disgraced and so they sought to take vengeance on the Jews and they did.
They expelled them from Cambridge, laws were passed against them. They were charged with counterfeiting coins. They were hanged. They were exiled. They were made, those who weren't hanged or exiled to wear a badge saying, in effect, I'm a Jew. A badge of inferiority. In London, they took Jews and they tied horses to their extremities and sent the horses in opposite directions ripping their bodies in half and then hanging the remnants of their bodies on the gallows for all the town to see. Finally, around 1290 the king made a decree that if any Jews were left they were to be expelled. The fled, the went further into Europe into France, which already had expelled Jews under the reign of Louis the XI, but by now had released a little bit of its animosity and so the Jews could find at least a place to stay in France where they could live. They too had to put either a red felt or a yellow cloth badge on indicating they were Jews so everyone would know they were inferior.
That didn't last very long. Within about 15 years after that, Philip the Fair expelled over 100,000 Jews from France. Some of them managed to hang around and stay and when the terrible black death came in the 14th Century, the plague that went all across Europe and tens of thousands of people were killed with that terrible plague, the Jews were blamed. And it was said that the Jews had poisoned the wells in France and caused the black death. And so they began again to kill the Jews. One entire congregation was together meeting and they burned them all in that one place.
As a result of this they fled further and this time they fled to Poland and to Russia. And in our contemporary time today we know about Polish Jews and Russian Jews, very commonly. They were chased there. Poland really became a homeland for them. It was in Poland that they established Talmudic schools. It was in Poland that they built seminaries that they did much of their work and so forth. They then came into great conflict with the Roman Catholic Church in Poland and there was tremendous persecution there. They pitted themselves on one occasion against the Cossacks in a war which the Cossacks won and therefore, the Cossacks took out their vengeance on the Jews and massacred them.
Some of them managed to flee to Spain, but historians tell us that Spain could be "the hell of the Jews," and the two people who heap the most hatred and horror on the Jews were a king and queen by the name Ferdinand and Isabella, who were the same two in power commissioning Columbus to sail, who later found the western hemisphere. So while they were giving the world the benefit of the western hemisphere, they were doing all they could to massacre the Jews in their own country.
One of the things they did in Spain that's inconceivable is they found the names of proselytes who had converted to Judaism under the influence of the Jews and if they were dead, they dug up their graves, desecrated their bodies and confiscated all the property of their heirs to make sure no one every proselyted to Judaism. This was the mark of being a Jew. All across Europe Jews became known as maranaused, swine. A mark had to be warn in Spain by every Jew compose of a series of flaming crosses. Finally in 1492, when Columbus was sent west, the Jews were sent east out of Spain. The ones that wound their way to Russia to this day have been persecuted. And we've all read about the terrible, terrible plight of Soviet Jews, haven't we? I mean, folks, it's been 2,000 years like that for these people. You can back up a little bit in the middle of the 17th Century, the first persecution broke out in Poland. That had had some safety there for a couple hundred years and then it all of a sudden changed.
Germany began to massacre Jews. Periodically through the centuries Germany had done that. Accusing them again, also of using Christian children's blood for their Passover. And the German Catholic Church said that they took knives, the Jews did, and pierced the host in the mass until blood poured forth. In other words, they excused them of stabbing the body of Christ. Persecuted and massacred them for that. So the anti-Semitism just flowed through western civilization finally in a contemporary setting reaching somewhat of an apex in the terrible Dryfus affair in France when Dryfus who was an officer in the army was put out of the army and humiliated as a traitor simply and only because he was Jewish. An unjust accusation of treason meant to get all Jews out of the high ranks of officers in the French army.
Now in spite of all of this, the marvel of it all is this. You have all these centuries of endeavors to exterminate the Jews; and by the time you come to World War II there are 16.5 million Jews in Europe. So while God is allowing all of this, God is not allowing it to exterminate this people. So they are perpetuated in punishment. And then, of course, Hitler came and then the unbelievable, indescribable Holocaust exterminated nearly six million Jews. Only this time there was a difference.
This time it wasn't hatred based on religion. It was hatred based on race and that was a whole new thing. It had always been religious until Hitler or most always. Now it was based on race and secular society picked up the legacy of religious anti-Semitism and gave the world racial anti-Semitism. And these people still suffer from it even today. It's tragic. Now all of that to say this, why? Why? And that is the question on the lips of Jews throughout their history. Why? Why is it this way with us? Why so long do we suffer?
The answer is in our passage. Look at verse 37. "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them who are sent unto thee how often would I have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her chicken under her wings and you would not. Behold your house is left unto you desolate." Stop there at that point. What do you mean your house is left unto you desolate? The Lord Jesus is saying Jerusalem, nobody is going to plow your ground anymore. Nobody is going to cultivate your field. No one is going to plant the crop. No one is going to concerned about noble vine. No one is going to water you. No one is going to prune you. No one is going to build a hedge around you. No one is going to protect you. You are on your own left to the elements.
It's very similar to Isaiah Chapter 5 where Isaiah said to Israel just before the Babylonian captivity, a holocaust of another kind. Earlier in their history, Isaiah says God made you all that you could be. God planted you a noble vine in a very fertile hill. He put a mote around you. He protected you. He did all He could to preserve you to cause you to bring forth grapes and you brought forth sour berries and the judgment of the Isaiah was and now God's going to take away your hedge and no rain's going to rain on you and you're going to be left to the elements and whatever's going to happen is going to happen.
For 2,000 years nearly the nation Israel has had to live its life without God and without His protection, that's the difference. Why is it the way it is? Because God has removed His protecting hand. He has preserved them as a people. He has left them unprotected from all the holocausts that the world could bring to bear. Why? Because of what it says in verse 37. Jesus came and said I wanted to gather you. I wanted to protect you. I wanted to bring you under my wings and you would not. That's the issue right there. Why? Because they refused their Messiah. That's right, because they refused their Messiah. You want to hear something very, very important historically? If the Jews had received Jesus Christ, the kingdom would have come; therefore, in rejecting Him, they have gotten what they have gotten. Jesus said He came to bring the kingdom. They refused the king, they forfeited the kingdom, they got what they got.
Instead of entering into the blessing of God, God took His hand of blessing off and left to the fate of an evil world. They have suffered immeasurably. Another way to say it is in the words of 1 Corinthians 16:22 where Paul says "If any man love not the Lord, let him be Anathema. If any man love not the Lord, he's cursed. He is cursed. If any man love not the Lord, he is cursed. Privilege was given to Israel unequal to any privilege ever given to any nation, unbelievable privilege. And with it came tremendous responsibility. Now we have gone through 23 chapters of the gospel of Matthew, 23 chapters of the coming of Messiah. His birth, His ministry, His message, His miracles, His call and His cry to Israel; 23chapters, and the sum of it is this. When it's all said and done and the Messiah has come in human flesh and He has taught and He has healed and He has preached and He has loved and He's demonstrated all that God is, they reject it totally, totally. And He says that's it. You are desolate.
Now this passage closes the sermon of Chapter 23. It is a sermon, its one sermon this Chapter, and it's the final sermon the Lord ever gave publicly. And it is a sermon against false spiritual leaders who have lead the nation to this point of rejection. Who have led the nation in their sin. It doesn't mean that the people weren't as guilty. They were for following, but nonetheless the leaders led them there. And so the chapter is against those leaders. It is a furious diatribe against those leaders. But it ends with this pathos. It ends with this grief. It ends with this lament, because though God is going to judge that nation by removing protection and letting Satan go full blast at them.
And may I suggest to you something very important here. You say God has His hand of protection off a lot of nations, that's probably right. You say why is it worse with Israel? Because Satan wants to exterminate Israel more than other nation, because they are the nation in the plan of God which Satan wants to thwart. Therefore, for God to remove His protection from Israel is to expose them to the worst furies that Satan could ever bring upon any nation, because he desires to eliminate them so that Christ can never inherit them and fulfill the promise of God to them, you see.
So these false leaders have led the people in a rejection of their Messiah. And God has removed His blessing. But the heart of God is grieved as ours ought to be. We don't gloat over that. God says I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. In Jeremiah Chapter 13 God speaks through Jeremiah the prophet and calls for the people to glorify Him and to obey Him and then says and if you don't mine eye will run down with tears. You see? This does not make God happy. This grieves Him. Now last week we looked at verses 34 to 36 and we saw there the imminent condemnation.
We saw there that God says because you have rejected the Messiah, because you have filled up the cup of sin and guilt, because you've not only rejected the Messiah, but all the prophets of the past, you have cumulatively rejected all of God's revelation. You have all the Old Testament in front of you. You have all the preaching of John the Baptist. You have all the ministry of Jesus Christ. You've rejected it all. You've filled the cup in verse 32. That's the image there. You have filled the cup of wrath to the brim. This is it. And the cup that it took centuries to fill is going to take centuries equally to pour back out.
They filled it up with centuries of sin. It's being poured out with centuries of chastening. You say well, how could this group of people be guilty of the sins of the past? Because they knew the sins of the past and didn't learn from them, they inherited their guilt. Because they not only didn't listen to Jesus and the apostles, they didn't listen to John before Jesus and the prophets before John. They accumulated the guilt of all of it because they followed in the sins of their fathers never learning lessons their fathers pain and deprivation and punishment should have taught them. So they had a cumulative guilt.
They had rejected full light, full revelation. They had come so far as...in the words of Hebrews 6 to be exposed to the whole of the gospel, tasting the heavenly gift. Being partakers of the Holy Spirit's power and of the things of the age to come. In other words, they had a full revelation of Christ and they rejected and said He was from Satan, He was from hell, He was from the pit. And they, therefore, became the apostates of all apostates rejecting the accumulation of all revelation to them, which are summarized, epitomized, and maximized in the coming of Jesus Christ.
So He says because of this, verse 36, all these things are going to come on this generation. This is the most guilty generation in the history of Israel, because it rejected the light that had accumulated through thousands of years of divine revelation. And it's all going to come on you. You have filled up the cup and now it's going to poured out. And it started in 70 A.D. in that terrible destruction of Jerusalem and it's still going on right now. Still going on right now.
And you want to hear something else, folks? It will get worse. That's right. The persecution of Israel isn't over. The hand of God is off and Satan's doing his thing. And you want to know something? There's a time described in the Bible as the tribulation, the great tribulation. It's also called the time of Jacob's what? Trouble. We're going to learn more about when we get into Chapter 24, but that is going to be a holocaust like no other holocaust Israel has ever seen. The worst is yet to come. The cup is still being poured out.
Now may I say as footnote here, that doesn't mean that because that nation as a nation is going through this with the hand of blessing off and Satan doing all he can to destroy them to thwart the plan of God. That doesn't mean that individual Jews can't come to Christ. They can and they do and they will. Because always God has His, what? His remnant, always, always. There are some true Jews who see the Messiah, but for the whole, for the nation, for the greater part, terrible time of judgment.
Now we said verse 34 to 36 could be called imminent condemnation. Imminent in the sense that it's coming immediately and it didn't. In 30 some years it started. But the second thing, and what I want you to look at today is intense compassion, verse 37 and 38. From imminent condemnation to intense compassion, and this is an outpouring of grief equal to the outpouring of wrath. It is the climax of great emotion and compassion. It provides for us an essential balance and an essential understanding of the character of God and Christ. We have heard furious words of judgment. And now we're going to hear words of grief. God never rejoices in punishment in the sense that He gloats over the doom of the people.
No, He is grieved and so we read in verse 37, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem," and there is pathos in the repetition isn't there? Those words are filled with sorrow. And if you parallel that passage, for example with the Luke 19 passage where it says "And when He was come near He beheld the city and wept over it saying if thou hast known even thou at least in this thy day the things which belong to thy peace, but now they're hidden from thine eyes." He wrote in that day of triumphal entry, that Monday of the passion week and He saw the city and began to weep and weep and weep and say oh if you only knew. If you'd only known who was here, who was visiting you, but you didn't know and now you can't see. Your eyes are blind.
So He sorrowed, He wept tears and it may well be that He wept here again on Wednesday as He had on Monday when He cried "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem." The tears of lament over a people about to have the hand of God's protection removed from them, to be turned over to Satan who more than other people would want them to be destroyed. Just the idea of the repetition is interesting. Very often in scripture repetition like that is an indication of great emotion. For example, "Martha, Martha," in Luke Chapter 10, verse 41 or in Luke 22:3, "Simon, Simon," says the Lord. Or in Acts 9 from the voice out of heaven we hear "Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me." Or perhaps best 2 Samuel, the cry of anguish and the heart of David over his son. He says, "Oh my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, if only I had died for you oh Absalom, my son, my son."
And so that repetition is the repetition of grief, the repetition of emotion. And so He says, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem." And He characterizes the city not as the city of peace, not as the holy city. He characterizes the city with present participles. "You who are killing the prophets and you who are stoning them who are sent to you, that's the city you are. You are the city that kills prophets and stones messengers." What a characterization of the holy city.
People who prided themselves on being the city of God, the city of purity, the city of peace, the city of God it's called the city of killers. In fact, later on later on in the book of Revelation God calls Jerusalem Sodom and Egypt. Sodom, perversion, Egypt pagan. So Jerusalem is the Sodom, the Egypt, the murderous city. It's not the holy city. It's not the city of peace. It's not the city of God. It's not beautiful for habitation. It's not lovely among all the cities of the earth. It's not Jerusalem the golden. It's Jerusalem the killer, Jerusalem the murderer. And the present participles are most interesting who are killing the prophets. They were about to kill Him and He was the supreme prophet. Who are stoning those who were sent to you, they would also very soon after they killed him, kill Stephen and they would stone him to death. They weren't through doing it.
They were still doing it. They were definitely the sons of their fathers in terms of where we see earlier in the Chapter verse 29 to 31, they deny that they would kill the prophets and yet they're doing it. They think they're better than their fathers who did that, but they're not. If you remember their fathers had wanted Jeremiah dead. They hated Jeremiah because he spoke the truth. They wanted to get rid of him. Justin Martyr in Dialogues of Trifo says they sawed Isaiah in half with a wooden sword, the prophet of God. Apparently, they murdered Zechariah the prophet between the temple and the altar. I mean, they killed the prophets rather than hear their message. And so they are characterized as a city of murderers and indeed they were because they were about to murder the Son of God.
Earlier in a parable back in Chapter 21 the Lord had said you're like a group of tenant farmers who've come into a vineyard that someone else owns and when the owner sends back his servants to give you a message, you kill the servants. And finally after you've killed all the servants, the owner sends the Son, you kill Him too. That's the kind of people they were. They were killers of those who spoke the truth and represented God. Unbelievable. Murderers of the righteous. Now you ask the question, why has Israel suffered so long? This is why. Because for so long they rejected God. For so long they killed His messengers. For so long they stoned those that were sent. Finally, they filled the cup up when they executed their own Messiah. And God says, that's it, you are desolate. I take my hand of blessing off and all hell will break loose on you. Culminating in the tribulation time when Revelation tells us the mouth of the pit is open and the demons that for centuries have been bound are released to run ramped across the earth.
And you have not only the persecution of men, but the persecution of hellish supernatural demons, culminating this terrible time of Jerusalem's chastening. By the way, it's important to note that Jerusalem here is a symbol for the whole nation as it was very often in the ministry of the prophets. When He says, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem," He gathers up in Jerusalem's symbolic use the whole of the people and the nation. And then you see the heart of the Savior. Look what He says.
"How often would I have gathered thy children together?" I wanted to bring you into safety. Like we read in Psalm 36 this morning, I wanted you to come unto the shelter of my wings. I wanted you to be protected. I didn't want to take my hand of blessing off. I didn't want to expose you to the elements. I didn't want to leave you unprotected. But often I wanted to gather you. Does He mean just when He visited Jerusalem? No, John...the gospel of John records His several visits to Jerusalem, but He isn't only referring to that. He's saying how often? In other words, it's a way of saying so many, many times I wanted to gather you. In fact, all the time of His ministry, He wanted to gather them. He wanted to gather them. He wanted to call them to Himself. "Come unto me all ye that labored heavy laden, I'll give you rest."
Even as He dies on the cross, He gathers a thief into His arms who is willing to believe. I mean, that's the way it was until they silenced His voice in death. He was always wanting to gather them and gather them into protection, into safety from judgment. And then He gives a beautiful analogy of that, "even as a hen," and the word in the Greek is actually a bird, "gathers her chickens or little birds under her wings." It's kind of like a little farmyard maybe and little hen and some little chicks. And the hen looks up and sees a chicken hawk flying across, gathers those little ones into protection in a private corner where she can't be seen and they can't run around unprotected and unwitting to be consumed by that preying bird.
Or maybe a storm is approaching and a crash of thundering and lightening, she gathers those little ones in the warmth of safety. The Lord would have done that. There's a beautiful intimacy here. There's a tenderness here. It isn't just some theological thing of which He speaks. It's something very personal, very intimate, very warm. He wanted to give them security and the key to the whole deal, underline it in your Bible, the last part of verse 37, "and ye would not." That's the key. You wouldn't do it.
Let me just say to those of you who tend to be hard-line Calvinists, I find no absolute determinism in this verse. I find no fate here. I find no predetermined destiny here without thought for a response. I find here that God would, but you wouldn't. That's what I find here. And somewhere in the midst of that incredible apparent paradox of sovereignty and volition, we've got to see this passage. "I would," He says. "How often I would have gathered, but you would not." And every soul that spends eternity outside the protection of God, every soul that spends eternity in hell is there because they would not, they would not.
The gospel gives no place for absolute determinism. Go back to the parable of Chapter 22, verse 3. The king sent forth servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding and they would not come. And again He characterizes the time in which He lived in the people of Israel. You got called, you got invited, but you wouldn't come. You refused to come. You find it in the parable of Luke 14. A certain man gave a great supper and called many. "Come for all things are ready," and they all with one consent began to make excuses. I have bought a piece of ground. I have to go see it. I pray have me excused. Another said, I have yoke of oxen, I have to prove them. Have me excused. Another said I've married a wife, I can't come. So the servant came and showed his lord these things and the master of the house said all right. Then go in the streets and lanes of the city and bring the poor and the maimed and the lame and the blind. In other words, if the ones that were supposed to come don't want to come, we'll just go take anybody that will. They wouldn't come.