Israel (5) - Desolate

Jesus last words to Israel were terrible.

Look, your house is left to you desolate (Matt 23:38).

These are haunting words. Israel had always rejected the prophets and now after hundreds of year that rebellion is coming to an end in the rejection of Jesus (Mat 23:35).

When God’s chosen people reject God’s only son, they withdraw from the Father’s blessing. When Jesus is rejected, the Holy Spirit goes too. When the Holy Spirit is spurned, that nation’s house truly is desolate.

The problem is that house does not stay desolate. When the devil finds an empty house, he gathers up some friends and moves in.

When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied…. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there…. That is how it will be with this wicked generation (Matt 12:43-46).

A nation left desolate is a terrible thing, but it does not stay that way. Evil spirits come and dwell in the desolate house, and evil always follows evil.
Jesus went on to warn Israel what would happen.

How dreadful it will be in those days… For then there will be great distress, unequalled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equalled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive (Matt 24:19-22).

When the Holy Spirit moved out, spirits of anger, hatred and rebellion moved in. The people of Israel rebelled against Rome. In AD 70, the Roman army moved in and totally destroyed the nation. The temple was destroyed and Jerusalem was razed to the ground. Jesus warned that this would be the greatest tribulation ever. Nothing as bad has happened before, and nothing as bad will occur again. The Jewish historian Josephus described these events and it was truly a terrible time.