Jerusalem’s Visitations – Luke 19:41-48

The Jews revolted against Roman authority in 66 CE.  The Roman army fought them and eventually, in 70 CE the Roman army surrounded Jerusalem, laying siege to it, and eventually battered down its walls and destroyed the temple.  BibleHistory.com notes that the siege took five months and afterward the Romans executed over one million Jews and enslaved 95,000.  Christians, heeding Jesus’ warnings, had fled the city and found refuge outside of Israel.

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”

And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words.  (Luke 19:41-48 ESV)

Jesus is entering Jerusalem as her messianic king but she will not have him.  She has turned the temple into a place to do commerce, preying on those who come to worship by requiring them to exchange their currency for temple currency in order to buy animals and other things needed for sacrifice, but charging exorbitantly.  Instead of acknowledging him the chief priests and scribes and principal men of the city seek to destroy him.

God has visited Jerusalem with grace in Jesus.  But they have rejected him.  So, the only thing that will come to Jerusalem is judgment, the day of God’s visitation in wrath.  Jesus longed for their repentance with tears, longed for Jerusalem’s peace, but God closed her eyes to the truth.  Jerusalem was laid siege to by Rome in 70 CE, thirty seven years after Jesus uttered these words.  Prophecy indicates the same thing will happen yet again right before Jesus comes back (Daniel 9).