Monday, March 11, 2013

We Shall Rejoice Together In Him





















Looking to him whom they pierced, the whole house of Israel will weep bitterly. And now, dear brethren, it will tend to increase the blessed sorrows which will then sweep over Israel, to think how the Lord has had patience with them, and still has never cast them away. To this day they are as distinct a people as ever they were. They dwell alone; they are not numbered among the people. Persecuted almost beyond conception, poor Israel, for many a century, has been the butt and jest of those - I shame to say it - who called themselves Christians, and yet despised the chosen people of the Lord. Alas! the precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, have been esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter! “How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger, and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel!” They have for centuries endured a terrible chastening; they have been turned upside down, and wiped as when a man wipeth a dish, but still they stand waiting for a vainly expected King. They would not have their true King, Jesus the Son of David, and they have no other - where is there any king of the Jews? The scepter hath departed from Jacob, and the lawgiver from between his feet, for Shiloh has come, even he who, as he did hang upon the cross, was thrice named, “King of the Jews.”

Jesus is the sole and only King of the Jews, and they are preserved and kept alive notwithstanding a thousand influences which threatened to make them lose their nationality; they shall yet be gathered again, and their restoration shall be the fullness of the Gentiles, and we and they shall rejoice together in him who hath made both one, and broken down the middle wall or partition, so that there is now neither Jew nor Gentile, barbarous Scythian, bond nor free, but we are all one in Christ Jesus.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "Mourning For Christ," delivered July 1, 1877. Image by Zach Dischner on Flickr under Creative Commons License.

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