The Pharisees and the lawyers are warned that they are on the very brink of being judged. There is a calculation that the hypocrite makes that he can get away with his sin a little longer, that he can manipulate the patience of God a little more, but he is playing with his own eternal soul. Such foolhardiness is truly frightening. They were an evil generation, and they were going to have to experience God’s accumulated anger at what the many generations had done before them, including their spiritual ‘fathers’ with whom they identified. The warning comes, but for many it would not be heeded.
God has not forgotten the persecution of his children; he is not indifferent to their sufferings. During their lives they prayed to him in their troubles, and he heard them, and yet they still had to lay down their lives for his sake; they were not spared from that. What was their consolation? To know that God saw them and loved them, even though he did not step forward to deliver them at the time. That was the measure of their patience. They waited until his time to act came. It was as if God collected up all the sufferings of his faithful martyrs and dealt with them all in one go. Christ says here that the blood of the martyrs, which has long waited for the vengeance of God, is going to be avenged in fall of the nation of Israel. The blood of Abel which cried out for the punishment of Cain immediately it was shed, was obliged to wait until much later, when the blood of all the other martyrs was added to it, and the guilt was so great that God’s patience with the nation was exhausted, and Israel would lose its land. Abel was the first martyr, and Zacharias the last, as recorded in the Jewish canon, which has 2 Chronicles as the final book of the Old Testament (2 Chronicles 24:20-21). There were local punishments before, but the fall of the nation would take into account everything. The Romans would come and destroy Jerusalem, as Christ foretells in more detail elsewhere.