AP

Isaiah 64:11-12  Our holy and glorious temple, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned with fire, and all that we treasured lies in ruins.  After all this, LORD, will you hold yourself back?  Will you keep silent and punish us beyond measure?

You have probably deduced from yesterday’s TQW on Psalm 126:1-2, and my involvement with IMJP, that I have a real soft spot for the Jewish people.

I read today’s verses and my heart goes out to Orthodox Jewish people reading them in 2026.  Not only would they identify with Isaiah’s contemporary readers who were faced with the fact that their ‘holy and glorious temple’ had been totally vandalised and burnt by the ruthless Babylonians, but they now have the added gut-wrenching distress that its replacement, the Second Temple rebuilt by Zerubbabel and Joshua the High Priest and completed by Herod the Great in AD 20, has now also been totally destroyed by the Roman General-Emperor, Titus, in AD 70.  The period of great distress over the loss of the First Temple was only 70 years (586-516 BC), but it has now been almost 2,000 years since God’s ‘Chosen People’ have been without their ‘holy and glorious temple’!

And, even more devastating and discouraging for them, there is now a ‘glorious’ mosque built on its site!  Yes, I think I can understand how Orthodox Jewish People must struggle with God’s enigmatic Providence and ask, with even greater feeling than their ancestors: “After all this, LORD, will you hold yourself back?  Will you keep silent and punish us beyond measure?”

The importance of this to Jewish evangelism today is that there IS an answer to these stressful, enigmatic questions.  The answer is that ‘the LORD, has NOT held himself back’.  He has literally come himself, in the person of his own dear Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and has ‘punished HIM beyond measure’ on a cruel cross, so that God no longer has to punish us.

When this Child was born in Bethlehem, in fulfilment of God’s promise in Micah 5:2, Mary’s husband, Joseph, was told by the Angel of God: “You are to give him the name Jesus [‘Yeshua’, ‘One who saves’] because he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21)  This is why I have such passion for, and support and pray for, Jewish evangelism today.  I hope you share it!  While ever they are rejecting Yeshua as THE solution to Isaiah’s expression of grief, the LORD will seem to them to be ’silent’ and ‘punishing them beyond measure’ – there will be no other solution!  As the Author of Hebrews still pleads with them: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.” (Hebrews 1:1-2)

– Bruce Christian