Luke 19:43 Commentary and Bible Study

The judgment of God traps us so that we cannot escape. The fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70 was still forty years away, but nothing could prevent it coming. The plan of God is sure and must be fulfilled. It is futile for us to go ahead and do evil, and then to imagine ways in which we can avoid judgment and punishment, when God has said that is what we must face. Events so fell out in Jerusalem, that it was impossible for any to get out of the city once the Roman siege was laid. They were kept in on every side, and they were surrounded. This was according to the will of God, who knows all things, and plans all things. He pities us in our misery but he knows we cannot escape. Christ expands on what he had said before – ‘in this thy day’. It is ‘the time of thy visitation’, the time when the Lord would come to Jerusalem as the incarnate Son of God to be formally received by them as their King. That is what the nation had so long been promised. ‘What is man,’ the prophet David had asked, ‘that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?’ (Psalm 8:4). How undeserved was this visit! And yet, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people’, says Zacharias, for the Son of God has been born in human flesh. Here at the end of his ministry the nation should have been ready to receive him as their King, and yet they crucified him. Israel tragically missed a God-given opportunity, and failed to recognise the Messiah when he came.God has visited his people in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. That visit involved him leaving the courts of heaven, and coming down to earth. He did not visit in a single appearance, or a vision on a single day, but he came in the fullest sense, and was born, and grew up, and lived among us. He visited in person, in a way that cost him dearly.