And
when he was come near, he beheld the
city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at
least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are
hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies
shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on
every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within
thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou
knewest not the time of thy visitation (Luke 19:41–44).
COMMON GRACE ARGUMENT:
Luke 19:41-44 is used frequently to support
a compassion of Christ upon the reprobate. Christ, it is said, is here in His
special office as Mediator. He is speaking here as the Messiah—the Godman—and
in grief and sorrow He is said to be lamenting a city already lost. Christ
Jesus is said to have wished that His coming might bring salvation to all.
One commentator writes: “with tears and sighs
He bewails the ruin of Jerusalem. He desires not their ruin. He delights in
their repentance.” Another writer says this passage is evidence of God’s
“favourable disposition.”
For what other reason, it is asked, did
Christ “weep” in this passage other than as an expression of earnest compassion
and lovingkindness and a concern towards the salvation and well-being of many
who ultimately perished?
Matthew 23:37 (“O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem”) is
often thought to be parallel passage to this one. However, Luke 13:34-35 (“O,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem”), is likelier to be the parallel; Matthew 23 and Luke 19
must surely then be two separate occasions …?
(I)
Regarding
the difference and similarities between Luke 19:41-44 and Matthew 23:34-39,
while it might be true that these are two separate occasions, the difficulty is
the context of both passages lead many commentators to link the two together in
the last week of the Lord’s life. However, it seems difficult to miss the
similarity in the content of what Jesus says in either passage. That similarity
is helpful in the exegesis of both passages, especially in Luke 19 in which the
exegete faces the task of an explanation of “wept over it” whereas this is not
found in Matthew 23.
One
thing that helps guide the exegesis of the Luke 19 passage is the earlier
context. In the earlier verses in Luke 19, Jesus had just entered Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem that receives Jesus cries out, “Blessed be the King that cometh
in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest” (vv.
37-38). The Pharisees rebuked this outcry (v. 39), but Jesus replied that if
these loud Hosannas had not been uttered, then the rocks of Jerusalem would
have cried out (v. 40), indicating that this was the will of the Father that
Christ be received into Jerusalem as the King, as the Christ, as the Son of
David. Over the Jerusalem that received Jesus as the Christ in Luke 19, Jesus
wept. He takes the organic view of the Jerusalem, that OT revelation of the
Church, from the viewpoint of its receiving the King.
Among
what has been written by Reformed commentators in harmony with the Canons of Dordt and all of Scripture
regarding double predestination and the particularity of God’s mercy, we see in
the weeping of Jesus over Jerusalem a revelation of God’s righteousness and
judgment against Jerusalem. Jerusalem could never say in the judgment that they
were not told that judgment was coming upon them. Jerusalem (neither reprobate
nor elect) could not accuse God of failing to warn them of judgment and
destruction related to the cross, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost
because God sent them the prophets and even His only begotten Son to warn and
call to repentance and faith, but even Him they would not hear. Jesus
faithfully declares that God is righteous in the destruction of Jerusalem in
the day of her visitation. But, Jesus weeps for His own who rejected Him, but
through that coming judgment, would be redeemed. Jerusalem is redeemed through
judgment. Through the death and atonement of Christ, God justifies ungodly
Jerusalem, that must receive the King, by faith alone. God does not justify
everyone, but the Jerusalem of His elect, who by nature crucified Christ, but
must be justified through Him and sanctified by His Spirit and glorified with
Him.
When
the Man of Sorrows weeps (Isaiah 53; John 11:35), He weeps always in connection
with His humiliation and the curse which He bore His whole life as the Mediator
of His elect. His weeping is not merely a human emotion with no basis or a very
superficial knowledge. His weeping and sorrow, even at the grave of Lazarus,
was part of the work of the redemption of His elect from sin, guilt, death, and
grave. It is connected to His cross and resurrection.
Further,
because Christ made plain that His death is particular for His sheep only, it
is important exegetically that we work from that starting point to interpret
Luke 19:41-44 or Matthew 23:34ff or even Ezekiel 33:11 (more difficult
passages). Let us not do, as others have mistakenly done, and take our starting
point in Luke 19 and interpret it how we might like it to mean, and then use
that as a basis then to figure out for whom Christ died and what He meant by “sheep”
in John 10. That does not follow the rule: clearer passages of Scripture must
be used to interpret more difficult passages. A simple rule. Safe. And, by it
we develop sound interpretations and confessions. And, as is the case in Luke
19, the context will help us interpret the text. The context helps us interpret
over what Jerusalem Jesus wept and why. (RJS, 26/03/2018)
----------------------------------------------------------
(II)
Prof. Herman C. Hanko
(a)
Someone asks, “How do some people try to use this
text to say that God weeps over the destruction of the reprobate?”
A similar passage is found in Matthew 23:37:
O Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto
thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
The biblical key to the right interpretation of
this text is to note—as did Augustine—the distinction it makes between
“Jerusalem” (whose religious leaders were the unbelieving Pharisees) and
Jerusalem’s “children” (the true, spiritual, elect Jews) whom Jesus desired to,
and did, save. For more on this, see “Does Matthew 23:37
Teach the Well Meant Offer?”
Both texts are wrongly cited as proof for the
notion that the gospel is a gracious expression of God’s love for all men and
of His desire to save all men, including the reprobate. It is so adamantly
promoted by its proponents that anyone who disagrees is the object of some
nasty name-calling: “Hyper-Calvinists! Unable to do evangelism!”
The argument that finds a gracious and well-meant
gospel offer in these texts is this: If Jesus was sorrowful at the impending
judgment of Jerusalem, which would leave Jerusalem lying in heaps of rubble,
His sorrow must have been born in His desire to save the inhabitants—and His
failure to do so. He was stymied in His desires and failed to accomplish His
purpose in spite of His best efforts. Thus some, claiming to be Calvinists and
claiming, therefore, that God always accomplishes His purpose, have no other
recourse available to them than to conclude that a sovereign God failed to save
those whom He loves and desires to save. No appeal to “apparent contradiction”
or “higher logic in God than in us” can escape the conclusion that our Lord was
bitterly disappointed that His best efforts to save Jerusalem were stymied by
Jerusalem’s unbelief.
It has also been argued that Christ, according to
His divine nature, willed and desired the salvation of the elect only but that
according to His human nature He desired the salvation of all men. This
interpretation was offered in an important church case in Australia. But the
one who taught this view was rightly charged with Nestorianism, that is, the
error, condemned already by the church at the Council of Ephesus in 431, that
our Lord had two persons. When this heresy of Nestorianism is applied to the
gracious and well-meant gospel offer, the result is confusion. Our Lord Jesus
Christ, who is personally the Second Person of the Trinity, and who is (to use the
words of the Nicene Creed) “true God of true God,” was fully sovereign in all
that He did, especially in His salvation of the elect for whom He died. But
that same Lord Jesus Christ was also a human person who earnestly desired the
salvation of all men and in love and mercy for all sought their salvation. Our
one Lord Jesus Christ living in a state of constant contradiction! How can that
be?
But Scripture does not teach such “paradoxes” and
“apparent contradictions,” and those who claim that it does, do so only because
they have an axe to grind: they want to spread abroad the notion that God loves
all men and would save them all if He could.
The reason for our Lord’s sorrow is relatively
easy. Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. Israel was the one people that God
had chosen to be His own possession and to whom He had given special gifts (cf.
Rom. 9:4-5). Furthermore, Jerusalem was filled with pictures of Christ Himself:
the throne of David and Solomon, the temple, the many sacrifices that were made
daily in the temple, the feasts celebrated in the holy city and Mount Zion
itself, beautiful for situation and the joy of the whole earth (Ps. 48:2). All
these pictures had served a very good purpose throughout the entire old
dispensation.
That these beautiful pictures of Christ were marred
badly by the wicked scribes and Pharisees was the reason for Christ’s sorrow.
Is not this understandable? Would you not be grieved if some wicked person took
your best photograph and spoiled it so terribly that you looked like a monster?
Would you not be very sorrowful if someone in hatred painted a beard on a
photograph of your mother?
Christ was like us in all things, sin excepted. He
was also a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, who could weep over the
death of His beloved Lazarus—even though He knew He was going to raise Lazarus
from the grave.
The pictures were hopelessly ruined, with no chance
of proper restoration. Our Lord could see Jerusalem in all its splendor as it
pointed to Himself. He was saddened by what was about to happen to it.
But He was also angry. When He saw the temple, a
picture of His own blessed body, made a den of thieves, He was infuriated. In
His anger, He drove out the buyers and sellers and the animals that were sold
within its precincts (John 2:13-22).
It certainly is not strange that Christ, Himself true
God of true God, was grieved at the sin that made Jerusalem the ugly spectacle
that it had become. God certainly was grieved with Israel when they constantly
rebelled against Him in the wilderness (Heb. 3:10, 17; Ps. 95:10). Surely,
there is no one who would dare to say that God delights in the sin of man, much
less His own people. Surely, no one would hold to the position that God is
filled with joy when the church corrupts His truth and makes a caricature of
His sovereignty. The very idea is blasphemous.
But to conclude from God’s anger with sinners and
His abhorrence of sin that He desires to save all men is a monstrous corruption
of simple logic. The truth of Scripture is that God loves His elect with a love
revealed in the cross of Christ and God so greatly abhors the sinner that He
punishes the sinner with eternity in hell.
* * *
* * *
* *
The gracious, well-meant gospel offer claims that
God desires the salvation of all men (including the reprobate). The preaching
of the gospel is, according to that view, intended to demonstrate God’s love,
mercy and grace to everybody in the hope that men might be persuaded to forsake
their wicked ways and believe in Christ. According to that view, Jesus’ weeping
over the city in Luke 19 is evidence of His disappointment that all He had done
for the city had ended in failure.
Many serious objections can be brought against the
well-meant gospel offer, not the least of which is that the omnipotent God in
Jesus Christ is unable to accomplish that which He wishes: He wishes to save
all, but is successful in saving only some. Some theologians, more inclined
than others towards the teachings of Calvinism, have had to cope with two wills in God: one will of election
according to which God wills to save only some, and another will according to
which He desires to save everybody. Not only does God have two wills in this
view, but the two wills are contradictory!
We need to remind ourselves that Jesus’ tears over
Jerusalem are explained in the text, not as tears of disappointment because He
failed in His attempt to save the city. His tears were over the imminent
destruction of the city for its unbelief. Verses 43 and 44 teach us that:
For the days
shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and
compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even
with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee
one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.
We need also to note that the destruction of
Jerusalem was according to God’s eternal purpose. This too is taught in the
text. Jesus bemoans the fact that Jerusalem’s destruction would not have taken
place, “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things
which belong unto thy peace!” These things that belong to Jerusalem’s peace are
“hid [by God] from thine eyes.” This is sovereign reprobation.
In connection with the clear teaching in the text
of the doctrine of reprobation, we must emphasize that reprobation does not
cancel out man’s accountability before God for his sins. God accomplishes His
eternal decree of reprobation in such a way that man is culpable for his sins
and deserves eternal damnation for them. While God had hid from the leaders in
Jerusalem the “things which belong unto thy peace,” these things were also
well-known to the leaders who were guilty of rejecting them.
When Jesus says, “If thou hadst known, even thou
...” He refers not to the mere formal knowledge of the Old Testament
Scriptures, which the Jews surely possessed, but to the saving knowledge that
gives the spiritual ability to believe these things and act accordingly. The
distinction is the same as Paul uses in Romans 1:18ff. The wicked know that God
is the only true God and that He must be served, but they suppress the truth in
unrighteousness—and in this sense do not know it.
Jerusalem was to be destroyed because the Jews did
not know (and believe) the things that belonged to Jerusalem’s peace. The
things that belonged to Jerusalem’s peace were Jerusalem’s status as the
capital of the nation and the centre of God’s worship in the temple as these
things in Israel’s life signified, typified and pointed ahead to the Messiah,
the Christ, the One who had now come to fulfill all these types. They wanted no
part in the Messiah and clung firmly but foolishly to the pictures, despising
their reality in Christ. They were like a man who worships the photograph of
his wife while treating her with cruelty and being unfaithful to her. But if
Jerusalem’s destruction because of Israel’s unbelief was God’s sovereign work,
why did Jesus weep when He saw the city’s unbelief and its subsequent
destruction?
It is completely in harmony with God’s Being and
with Christ’s divine nature to say that sin makes God “sad”—as it made Christ
sad and brought about His tears. The decree of reprobation as it is sovereignly
carried out in the way of man’s sin does not preclude God’s hatred of sin and
His “distress” at man’s refusal to obey Him. God has no pleasure in the death
of the wicked but that he turn from his evil way (Eze. 33:11). God has no
delight in disobedience to His law and takes no pleasure in man’s rebellion. It
is difficult for me to imagine that anyone would teach this hateful doctrine.
To take an opposite position would mean—would it
not?—that God is pleased with man’s sin and rubs His hands in glee when men
transgress. Reprobation is sovereign, but man is accountable for his sin, and
his iniquity brings down upon him God’s judgment. If God would not punish man
for his sin, then He would not be God—holy and true, righteous and spotless,
rejoicing in purity. We belong to and worship the one true God who takes
pleasure in holiness and rejoices in uprightness.
Jesus was sad because Jerusalem had rejected Him to
whom the whole Old Testament pointed for He was the one who had come to fulfill
it all.
God’s sovereignty, also in reprobation, must not
obscure His hatred of sin and His just punishment of the sinner. That Christ,
also in His divine nature, was sad because of Jerusalem’s wickedness must not
be interpreted as disappointment or frustration—as with the well-meant gospel
offer. It must be interpreted as God’s hatred of sin and determination to
maintain that which is pleasing to him, namely holiness.
(b)
[Source:
Common Grace Considered (2019
edition), pp. 373-375]
There
were at least two reasons why Jesus was saddened by the impending doom of the holy
city. The first reason, though by no means the most important, was a sadness
that the important place Jerusalem occupied in Israel’s history was going to be
destroyed. It is the kind of sadness that one feels when the ancestral home, or
village, or city is destroyed. Jerusalem represented the Jewish nation of which
Paul speaks in Romans 9:4-5: “Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the
adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the
service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as
concerning the flesh Christ came.” Those thoughts moved Paul to speak of a
“great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart” (Rom. 9:2).
I personally have that same heaviness and sorrow when reports come of the wide-spread apostasy of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands. From that country came my ancestors, and God gave that country the privilege of being the cradle of the Reformed faith, the same faith that we confess and love today. The sorrow that this has happened is real. And those who came from other countries in which once the truth of Scripture was held high, but have now departed from the faith know what that sorrow is like.
Our
Lord was like us in all things, except for our sin. He, too, knew sorrow. One
might say that the Lord should not have been sorrowful, because He, as God, had
foreordained such apostasy; but that
is not the point. As a man who possessed with us all human emotions, Jesus
experienced sorrow. A forceful illustration of this is found in the gospel
according to John, chapter 11. Jesus came to Bethany to raise Lazarus who had
died. He knew that He had come to perform the miracle of raising Lazarus, but
that knowledge did not prevent the Lord from weeping at the grave (John 11:35).
Jesus knew the sorrow that comes to us all when God takes from us one we
love.
It
is not, therefore, strange that our Lord, remembering the past glory of
Jerusalem wept over the city, even though He knew that Jerusalem’s apostasy and
coming destruction were according to the purpose and plan of God.
But
more is implied in Jesus’ sorrow. Jerusalem was dreadfully wicked. It had been
wicked almost all the days of its existence. It had forsaken God’s law,
worshipped idols, committed sins worse than the heathen, and repeatedly
persecuted those who came to warn Jerusalem of its sins. The sins of Jerusalem
saddened Christ. They did not sadden Him because He was “disappointed.” He was
not so sad because He had wanted Jerusalem to be saved, and had even given them
grace to do what was right and pleasing in God’s sight. Sin saddened our Lord. Jerusalem’s sin
saddened Him; our sins sadden Him as well.
The
opposite is unthinkable! Is God delighted
when men sin against Him? blaspheme His name? make idols to worship instead of
worshipping Him? The very thought is blasphemous. Even the Psalmist expressed
such grief at the sin of those whom He knew. “I beheld the transgressors, and
was grieved; because they kept not thy word” (Ps. 119:158). David sang this
Psalm in which he expressed his grief at the wickedness of those around him;
but he also, in this same Psalm, speaks of God’s sure judgments upon the
wicked, and other of his Psalms express his fervent desire that God will bring
judgment on all the workers of iniquity. His sorrow for sin was not
incompatible with his desire that sin be punished.
----------------------------------------------------------
(III)
Prof. David J. Engelsma
In the parallel passage of Luke 19, Matthew 23:37,
with which Luke 19 must be compared, Jesus teaches His will to gather
Jerusalem’s children, distinguishing Jerusalem and her children. Jesus did
not will to gather all “Jerusalem,” that is, the members of the Jewish nation,
but her “children.” Despite the nation’s opposition in its officials, Jesus did
gather Jerusalem’s children. Jesus’ will to salvation was definite—Jerusalem’s children—and this will was accomplished
despite the opposition of Jerusalem’s officials.
Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem was not sorrow over a
frustrated will to save all, but characteristically human grief over the fatal
wickedness of a city and people that had once been the city and people of God.
The sin of unbelief with its certain
consequences of destruction grieved Jesus, as a man, deeply. This in no way
implied the failure of Jesus as God’s Savior to save all whom the Father had
given Him in the decree of election, namely, Jerusalem's “children,” the elect
Jacobs in distinction from the reprobate Esaus.
----------------------------------------------------------
(IV)
More to come! (DV)
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