Jerusalem Trodden Down and Coming Glory

    Jerusalem "Trodden Down."

 A Bible Reading by Henry Dyer, of Bath.

 Throughout the period that government in the earth is given into the hand of the Gentiles, Jerusalem, the city and centre of Israel's rule is, as the Lord Himself tells us, to be "trodden down."  And this word not only means that it is oppressed, but also defiled.  This applies to the people as well as to the city.  The Jew is oppressed and hated in many lands, but he is more "trodden down" in accepting from the hand of a Gentile King a patent of nobility and having his family name Gentileized, than when his forefathers suffered in the Roman Ghetto and in the Spanish dungeon. The suffering Jew was "trodden down" under the heel of Gentile oppression, but the modern Jew who, laden with the "thick clay'' (Hab. ii. 6) of gain, becomes a millionaire through bargaining with the Gentile, is "trodden down" as mire in the streets of such commerce as costs him his national honour.  Jerusalem is at this hour groaning under Turkish misrule, with its Jewish population in poverty.  But if it rose to wealth and splendour, and Jewish millionaires should rebuild its temple with a more than Herod magnificence, it would still be "trodden down of the Gentiles," because in the sight of God, it would be only a defiled city. This was what our Lord meant when He said to its people just before His crucifixion, "Behold your house is left to you desolate" (Matt. xxiii. 39). It was "adorned with goodly stones and gifts" when He uttered these words, and thus it stood for some forty years, but it was spiritually  "desolate," for its priests and rulers had rejected the God-sent Messiah.  If the Jew should soon return to his own land, and under better culture, find it regain much of its fertility; he will assume that he is again the object of God's favour.  But he will, under these conditions of being enriched by Gentile trading, be even more "trodden down" in the sight of God than when he was made poor.  Even now, the Jewish people in many lands are being "holpen with a little help," and many "cleave to them with flatteries" (Daniel xi. 34).  This is helping to deceive them, and the still Christ rejecting Jew vainly imagines that these are tokens of his restoration to the favour of God, instead of being abandoned to his own delusions, which will lead him on to the acknowledgment of Antichrist. And this, the darkest hour of his degradation and national guilt, will be a time of great earthly but godless prosperity.  The last guilty monarch of these "times of the Gentiles" will be obeyed by the Jews in Jerusalem as their king and his image worshipped in their temple as their God.  But the period of Jerusalem's downtreading will come to an end, and the day of her glory and of Israel's blessing will follow as surely as the Word of the Lord has said it.  No real solution of the "Eastern Question" can ever take place apart from the replacing of the Jew in his land, with the restoration of the city of Jerusalem to her place of pre-eminence as the centre of God's rule in the earth.  Then her period of being "trodden down" will cease, and her glory will again break.

 Jerusalem's Coming Glory.

 Notes Of An Address by Henry Dyer

 The day on which the Lord returns, when "His feet shall stand" upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east (Zech. xiv. 1-5), will be the greatest day in Jerusalem's chequered history.  Since the day that the children of Judah smote it with the sword, and set the city on fire (Judges i.), it had, during the fifteen centuries between then the time that the Lord told of its fall by the Romans, been besieged seventeen times, and twice razed to the ground.  No city on earth has had such a history. But its last deliverance, on that day, when the great oppressor of Israel is "trodden under foot in the land and on the mountains of Israel" (Isa. xix. 24-27), when the Lord will perform His whole work upon Mount Zion and on Jerusalem (Isa. x. 12), will be the greatest.  Her darkness will end in the solemn overthrow of Antichrist, and all who sighed and cried for her abominations (Ezek. ix. 4), the faithful remnant within her, watched over by God, and kept from participation in her sin, will become the nucleus of the new nation and the beginning of the marvelous spiritual as well as temporal blessing, which will characterize the millennial kingdom of a thousand years.  Purged of her dross, Jerusalem will put on her "beautiful garments" as the "holy city," into which no more shall come the unclean (Isa. li. 17; lii. 9, 10).  "Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth," God is known in her palaces for a refuge (Psa. xlviii. 2, 13), and throughout the whole period of the thousand years' reign of the Lord Jesus, her blessing never flags.  Every child born within her gates; becomes by birth of the Spirit, a child of God (Jer. xxxi. 34).  Boys and girls playing in her streets (Zech. viii. 5), all "know the Lord," and all within her walls are secure.   She will be a city of peace (Isa. lxvi. 12). No wars will ever disturb her.  She will be a city of holiness (Zech. xiv. 20, 21), nothing unclean will enter her gates.  Living waters will flow out from her, all the year, to give life and health to the inhabitants of the land (Zech. xiv. 8).  Her very typography will be changed.  No longer embedded as now among hills, and as it were hidden from view, but "lifted up" with the whole land "turned as a plain" (Zech. xiv. 10), she will be conspicuous from afar, and thus exalted, "all peoples shall flow into" (Micah iv. 1) her.  All the "families of the earth" shall assemble there to "worship the King" (Zech. xiv. 17), and the power of the reigning King will compel their homage without a sound of war or the clash of swords.  Thus a worldwide and beneficent rule will go go forth from restored Jerusalem for a thousand years, and from Jerusalem, "a greater than Solomon," who is "King over all the earth," will send forth His sceptre to rule the world.  Thus Jerusalem, the scene of our Lord's bitterest sorrows and of His rejection and His death, becomes the centre of His earthly glory and of God's delight.  Man's long guilty day of murderous war will be ended, and under the true Solomon, the weary earth will cease its groan, and know its sabbath of rest.