Untitled article by Dr. H. Bonar

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, November 26, 1867

Historical Department.

By Dr. H. Bonar

Prophecy is History in Advance.

JERUSALEM TRODDEN DOWN OF THE GENTILES.

Jerusalem, as it now stands, bears no mark of being anything save a city of the Gentiles. There is nothing Jewish about either the inhabitants or their dwellings. It is as truly Gentile in its aspect, and customs, and buildings, in its bazaars, and thoroughfares, and costumes, as Alexandria or Cairo. In passing through it no one feels this is Israel’s capital; nay, no one would be led to say this is a city of Israel at all. It does not retain one Jewish feature, save in those parts which cannot change—its rocks, its valleys, its hills. These are the same as in other ages, and they are the only unchanged memorials of the wondrous city—beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.

Yes, Jerusalem, as it now stands, is a Gentile city. Its walls, and towers, and gates, and streets, are all in the hands of the stranger. One cannot pass along its streets, or look down from some height upon its desolations, without feeling that the “times of the Gentiles” have not yet run their course. Jerusalem is the standing proof of this transference of dominion from Jew to Gentile; the great exhibition of Jewish degradation and Gentile supremacy in the earth. These times of the Gentiles have lasted long; they may be said to have begun in the age of Nebuchadnezzar; they may, perhaps, be fast running out; but they are not yet ended; and the evidence of this (even were there no other) is Jerusalem.

The Turkish empire may be feeble and ready to crumble into fragments; still its sovereign is the Lord of Jerusalem. The Egyptian Viceroy may be a hated tyrant, ruling over his own Arabs with an iron rod; still he bears sway in Jerusalem. The kingdoms of Europe may be divided among themselves, some of them hardly able to maintain their own throne and crown; still the Consul of the weakest of them exercises more authority in Jerusalem than all the Jews together. The Arab, the Egyptian, the Greek, the Latin, all have some kind or amount of influence in Jerusalem; the Jew alone has none. The various nations of East and West have their political representatives in Jerusalem; the Jew alone has none. Without power, or influence, or weight, he is exposed to the oppression of every Gentile, whom covetousness, or malignity, or pride, may stir up against him. He has no protector, no friend, no impartial judge.

It is not, however, of the Jew himself, but of his City that we mean to speak. On him, no doubt, the rod of the Gentile has lain, in all its weight and sharpness, for ages; on his hands and feet have the fetters of the stranger been fastened; but still it is specially of his city, his metropolis, that the Lord speaks, when he uttered the prediction, “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” It was specially of the city and its temple that he had been speaking in the commencement of the chapter, and hence it is especially on its doom that he dwells. It was the magnitude of its buildings that had called forth the admiration of the disciples, as if its greatness could never be affected by time, nor its glory turned into shame; so it is specially the desolation of this their magnificent metropolis that he predicts—destruction to be perpetrated by Gentile hands; destruction not such as that wrought by Nebuchadnezzar or Antiochus,—from which the city was, in the course of a generation, to rise with renewed splendor,—but destruction to be prolonged for ages—ages during which Israel was to be scattered like the leaves over all the earth; and Israel’s city was to be not merely in the hands of, but under the feet of, the Gentile oppressor.

All the four Gentile monarchies have, in their turn, trodden down Jerusalem. First came the Babylonian, then the Persian, then the Greek, and then the Roman; and the representatives of these may be said, at the present day, to have their feet upon the city. Every part of it they have trampled down, and on every part of it they are still trampling. Hence, it is that every vestige of ancient Jerusalem has been obliterated. Its stones, indeed, are there, vast and massive, but they are tossed hither and thither, and some of the finest and greatest occupy the obscure corner of a wall, or are buried under some modern structure, as if these only relics of former greatness that survive were to be used for the treading of Gentile feet, or the foundations of Gentile walls and towers. No place of honor has been assigned by the Gentile to these stupendous fragments. He has treated the very stones of the Temple as only fit to be trodden on or cast out of sight.

Ancient Jerusalem has completely passed away, or rather, we should say has been buried under ground; and it is upon the top of this city that the modern Jerusalem stands. Hardly has any city been so completely ruined as has Jerusalem by the various Gentile nations that have held it in subjection. In token of the utter ruin to which they had reduced it, it is said that the Romans ploughed it up, or, at least, made their plough to pass over it, as an emblem of its complete and hopeless overthrow. Thus it may be said that each Gentile possessor has acted. They have driven their ploughs remorselessly over its ruins till every trace of the beautiful city has been obliterated, so that it stands before us not like Samaria, a city that has fallen into ruins, and sunk, as it were, by its own weight; but as a city which has been first laid in ruins by some hostile hand, and then had these ruins tossed hither and thither, mingled and remingled in wasteful confusion, till nothing has been left which might tell either of the splendor of its early greatness or of the grandeur of its sad decay. Across its ruins first went the plough of Rome in the first century. In after centuries came the so-called Christian occupants, the Greeks and Latins, who defaced it with their wretched superstitions. Then came the Saracen, and drove his plough across these ruins once more. Then came the Crusader, and ploughed up the ruins once more. Then, again, came the Turk, and re-ploughed the whole. Since that, during the last three or four centuries, all Gentile nations may be said to have been doing this same work. The Gentile does what he pleases with the dust of Jerusalem. The Jew looks on, but can only sigh. He sees the Gentile turning the very foundations of his city upside down, and casting out the memorials of the once glorious Jerusalem; but he cannot utter a word. He is, no doubt, the descendant of David, the representative of its rightful lords, the true heir of the city and the land; but he dare not interpose. The Gentile is his lord, and he may do with himself, with his city, and with his dust, all that caprice, or cruelty, or pride may dictate. “Jerusalem is trodden down of the Gentiles.” When looking on such a scene, or hearing the report of such desolations, with what point, as well as power, do the words of Scripture come home to us, “Behold, I am bringing evil upon Jerusalem and upon Judah, that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle . . . and I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down.” (2 Kings xxi, 12, 13.)

The foot of the Gentile is everywhere, both in Jerusalem itself and in that region which surrounds it; that girdle of hills and valleys that formed at once its ornament and its bulwark. Look where you will, and you will find the traces of Gentile lordship, if not of Gentile oppression.

Suppose we take our seat upon the slope of the Mount of Olives, which commands so full and so fair a prospect of the city. Look behind you, before you, around you, beneath you, you see the traces of this down-treading. Look behind you, and there upon the top of Olivet you have two things: first an Arab village filled with poverty and filth, whose inhabitants hate the Jew and worship the Impostor of the East. Then you have what is called the Church of the Ascension, pretending to mark the spot from which the Lord ascended, but desecrating the scene by its Gentile mockeries of superstition, and holding up before the eye of the Jew and in full view of Jerusalem an amount of abominable idolatry, such as even Babylon of old did not surpass.

Look beneath you, where the valley of the Kedron winds along, and there, just at the extremity of Gethsemane, and hard by that bridge by which the Lord must so often have crossed on his way to Bethany, you see another Latin or Greek erection—the tomb of the Virgin—as if the Apostate Gentile Church had seized upon the holiest spots for parading its mummeries before the eye of the Jew.

Lift up the eye, and you see the slope of Moriah, from Kedron up to the walls of the city, covered with the tombs of the Gentile. It is the Moslem burying-ground. They have chosen Moriah for their place of sepulture, as if to defile the sacred hill with ashes—as if to prevent its being recognized as a spot which Israel had ever occupied. The whole side of the hill is hidden by the white tombstones which in thousands lie scattered over that sloping platform, where not the debris of the city, but the dust of the temple lies buried. The bones of the Gentile unbeliever have been scattered over the most sacred spots of the city. Nay, and it would seem, too, as if this spot had been chosen in mockery of the Jew; for, while the Gentile burying-ground thus occupies the temple-hill, the eastern slope of Moriah, the Jewish burying-ground, where they and their fathers had laid their dead from time beyond memory, lies opposite, on the slope of the valley of Jehoshaphat, which ascends to the Mount of Olives. The ashes of the Jew seem cast out of their own city and precincts, and the Gentile occupies the place where they should have been.

But look a little higher still, and there, on Moriah itself, stands the Mosque of Omar, enclosing the whole area of the Temple. That Mosque alone, into which no Jew can enter, and hardly ever any Christian—were there nothing else—points to the treading down of Jerusalem by the Gentiles. The great temple of the Eastern impostor, the finest Mahometan structure in the world, save Mecca, stands upon the ruins of Israel’s shrine; and that strange mass of rock, which seems to have been the spot where the Holy of holies was, and which remains to this day untouched by the tool of man, as in the days of Araunah the Jebusite, has been fixed upon by the Moslem as the place over which the spacious dome of the mosque has been built. The Gentile has not merely entered into the sanctuary and made it a desolation; he has not merely trodden it down and desecrated it; but he has erected over the holiest spot of all the great monument of his false faith—the manifestation of his hatred to the Jew, and his determination, not merely to defile their city and their temple, but to make that defilement and down-treading perpetual.

But pass beyond the Mosque, and look over the city. There you have mosques and minarets—I was almost about to say without number—all of them symbols of the great down-treading. Besides these you have the churches and convents of the Greek and Roman apostasy rising in different parts; and in these there is even bitterer enmity to the Jew than in the Moslem mosque. They have planted upon the ruins of the desolate city, and on the head of the hapless Jew, the foot of more remorseless hatred and persecution than has been done by the blind devotees of Mahomet. They are the great treader-down of Jerusalem; nor are they less to be accounted so because they take the name of Christ into their lips, dedicate churches to his name, and build tombs in honor of his saints.

Look again over the fair city as it lies before you on that sunny slope, and see the flags of many nations waving in the wind. At each Consulate these banners are flying; but they are all Gentile, and seem as if waving over a conquered city. The banners of all Europe are there, and distant America as well, with all varied symbols—such as the French eagle and the British lion. But in all that array of banners the Jew has no place. He has no emblem, no banner. The lion of the tribe of Judah, the wolf of Benjamin, the stag of Naphtali, or the vine-branch of Joseph—these have no place in that gay display of national emblems. For this is the day of Gentile sovereignty; and the Jew is reaping the sorrow and the degradation which

he has sown. Their sin has found them out, and has been tracking them for ages. Blood is upon them! The cry of innocent blood has risen up against them. “We have no king but Caesar!” was their shout when they rejected their own Messiah; and that Gentile supremacy which they thus chose for themselves has been manifesting itself, age after age, in a hundred various forms—oppression, persecution, contempt, extortion, bondage, denial of privilege, and ruin, and dishonor,—even in their own city. Not only does the Jew not rule the Gentile anywhere, but he is not allowed to rule himself, even in his own land. The sceptre of Judah has departed, and in its place has come the iron rod of the Gentile—the prison, the chain, the sword. And the centre of all Jewish calamity, the scene of Israel’s lowest humiliation, has ever been Jerusalem, whose special doom has been to be trodden down of the Gentiles.

Different from all other desolations has been the desolation of the once holy city—a sorrow and ruin peculiar to herself. Her ruin has not been like that of Sodom, which the Lord overthrew in a morning and covered with a veil of waters which has never since been removed. Not like Samaria, whose glorious beauty was to be a fading flower, as the hasty fruit before the summer (Isaiah). Not like Gaza, on which baldness was to come (Jer. xlvii, 5). Not like Ar or Kir of Moab, which were to be laid waste and brought to silence (Is. xv, 1). Not like Bozrah, which was to be a perpetual waste (Jer. xlix, 13). Not like Damascus, of which we read, “I will kindle a fire in Damascus” (Jer. xlix, 27). Not like Babylon, which was to be a desolation—a dry land, a wilderness, a land where no man dwelleth (Jer. li, 43). Not like Sidon, of which it is written, “I will send unto her pestilence and blood” (Ezek. xxviii, 23). Not like Tyre, of which it was prophesied, “I will bring up the deep upon thee, and great waters shall cover thee” (Ezek. xxvi, 19). Not like Egypt, of which it is said, “I will spread out my net over thee with a company of many people; I will leave thee upon the land; I will cast thee forth upon the open field, and I will lay thy flesh upon the mountains” (Ezek. xxix, 3). Not like the doom of these nations or cities has been the doom of Jerusalem, but something altogether her own. Her sin was peculiar, and so has been her judgment. She exalted herself above the Gentiles; she has been trodden down by them. She gloried in her honors as if she were the mistress of all the kingdoms of the world; she has been placed not merely under the power, but under the very feet of the Gentiles; and the spot which of all others has been most degraded by the Gentile has been that very temple of which she boasted as the badge of Jehovah’s favor, which could never be taken from her.

How true do we find it to be that as each sinner has his own sin, so has each sin its own judgment. For God does not smite at random, nor punish without special reason and meaning; but not less truly is there judgment for each sin, and condemnation for each sinner, than there is the one great cleansing from all sin—a cleansing which would have sufficed even Jerusalem if she would but have known it in her day—a cleansing which suffices, to this hour, for any sinner upon earth, whether Gentile or Jew, for there is no difference; for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.—Dr. H. Bonar.