Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3520
“It cannot be that a Prophet should perish out of Jerusalem.” Luke 13:33.
I CAN scarcely tell you under what singular feelings I am led to adopt this text. It has entered my mind, whispered in my ears and I might almost say, it has haunted my thoughts, for all the day long has it been fresh in my memory, and again and again it has recurred to me in the night watches. There is no comfort that I can extract from the meditation, and not much instruction that I can deduce from the oracular sentence. Conscience, however, lays on me a strong constraint. Any portion from the Word of God that comes forcibly home to my own soul, I am prone to accept, as it were, in trust for your sakes. So I aim to deliver unto you that which I also received. Be it void of comfort or charged with rebuke, God grant it may be acknowledged to your profit and accepted to His praise!
“It cannot be that a Prophet should perish out of Jerusalem.” Probably this was a proverb among the Jews which our Savior used and endorsed. For many years Jerusalem had been stained with the blood of Prophets. These godly men might have lived securely in the rural districts of Judah and among her various towns and hamlets, and though sometimes annoyed, never exposed to violence—but so had the seat ofjudgment become the throne of iniquity that vengeance was reeked where justice should have ruled! Jerusalem, the metropolis of government, the center of religion and the priests, became notorious as the scene of judicial murder and vindictive martyrdom! It had been, through a number of years, the place where one after another of God’s servants had been stoned and put to death. Our Savior seems to have felt that He was safe while in Herod’s jurisdiction, but that when He got to Jerusalem, He was in imminent peril from conspirators—that there a baptism of blood awaited Him, when His life would be sacrificed and He would become, as it were, the Prince of Martyrs—an offering of the noblest life, a shedding of the richest blood that ever was poured out on the altar at Jerusalem! It seems strange that Jerusalem should have sunk so low as to monopolize the sin of murdering the Prophets—that it should have become renowned for persecution and vindictive cruelty—a city within whose walls God’s servants might look in vain for shelter. Where popular feeling and the public courts were alike against them. Where summary indictment and certain conviction were sure to be their lot! “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You that stone the Prophets and kill them who are sent to you!”
From generation to generation had they thus framed mischief and done violence—until our Lord accuses and holds them guilty of the slaughter of His servants from “the blood of righteous Abel unto that of Zacharias, the son of Bara-chias, whom they slew between the Temple and the altar.” What a fearful contrast this presents to the name that Jerusalem had received, and the position that had been assigned to her! Was she not called Jerusalem, the place of righteousness and of peace? Her bards had praised her in glowing sonnets as, “beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.” How did the Psalmist draw lively, lovely images of her security, surrounded by mountains that served as natural fortresses to protect her! And did he not even picture the little hills that environed her as companions of the mountain on which the Temple stood? “Why leap you so, you high hills? This is the hill which God delights to dwell in.” Where else did acceptable sacrifices smoke? As for the altars of the high places, they were an abomination to the Lord! The one altar at Jerusalem God had ordained for acceptable sacrifice. There the tribes came up to worship. It was the meeting place and rallying point of all the families of Israel at their annual festivals—
“Unto her gates, with joys unknown
Did Judah’s tribes repair.
The Son of David held His throne
And sat in judgment there.”
Her mountain was illustrious in history. It was on one of her pinnacles that Abraham drew the knife to slay his son! And on the spot where the plague was stopped in David’s day when the outstretched hand of the angel was arrested at the threshing floor of Araunah, the Jebusite, was built, stone by stone, the Temple where God delighted to dwell! It was the source from where light went streaming through the land as from the sun, and at the same time it was the great lake into which the rivers of sacred prayer and praise constantly flowed, gleaming in their fullness! Oh, Jerusalem, your very name was dear to the captives as they sat mournfully down by Babylon’s streams and wept, saying, one with another, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember you, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joys.” You seem so fair a city, so perfect a chrysolite! Your halls seem so truly made of agate, and your gates of carbuncle that in your glory we see a type of the abode of the saints of God—
“Jerusalem, my happy home! Name ever dear to me. When shall my labors have an end, In joy, and peace, and thee?”
And has it come to this? Well, then, might the Savior, whom you did despise and reject, weep over you! Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Has it come to this? “You kill the Prophets and stone them that are sent to you.” Has it come to this? No marvel that your house is left unto you desolate, that the holy city is given up to the abomination of desolation, and is left to be trodden under foot by the Gentiles! Has it come to this? Oh, horror of horrors! What sorrows are too sad and heart-rending to follow at the heels of sin! Look, my Brothers and Sisters—that same sin which once cast down Lucifer from his throne, degraded him from the royalties of Heaven and doomed him to the Pit that burns with fire and brimstone forever—that same sin has plucked this pearl from the regal diadem of the King of Kings, subjected it to the direst dishonor and made it a byword in the earth! So is her beauty spoiled! So is her sacredness and such are the wages of sin, and such the recompense of transgressions! As you think of this city of the great king converted into a place of butchery and a shamble for Prophets, I would have you recollect that—