Greatest Story Never Told

The Roman army approached. They would soon attack Jerusalem. Jews gathered together, confident that their God would deliver them from their enemies as He had so many times before. A new sect, however, was confident in the exact opposite. They believed Jerusalem was about to be destroyed. Their leaders had been given a secret message by the sects' founder, warning them when to escape the doomed city!

Sounds like a good fiction, eh? But it's actually documented history. An amazing piece of history that many Christians are unaware of and/or uninterested in for various reasons.

On Tuesday evening of the passion week Jesus and His disciples were leaving the city for the night. One of the disciples told Him to look at the massive & magnificent temple. But Jesus didn't agree with that beautiful assessment. In fact, He shocked His followers by predicting its impending destruction. This elicited the obvious questions: When will this happen and what sign will precede it?

Jesus answered both questions. He assured them that all this would occur before their own generation passed away*. He predicted many signs that would occur before and after the destruction of the temple. And, most importantly, He told them to flee as soon as they saw the Roman army approaching.

Just less than a generation later Rome surrounded Jerusalem. Civil war at the capital caused their leader, Cestius Gallus, to turn back. The Jews of Jerusalem understood this as God's faithfulness. The new sect, however, heeded the warnings of their founder and understood it as a God-given opportunity to escape.

Eusebius tells us about that time (just prior to the war on Jerusalem for, indeed, the Roman's came back)

But before the war, the people of the Church of Jerusalem were bidden in an oracle given by revelation to men worthy of it to depart from the city and to dwell in a city of Perea called Pella. To it those who believed in Christ migrated from Jerusalem. Once the holy men had completely left the Jews and all Judea, the justice of God at last overtook them, since they had committed such transgressions against Christ and his apostles. Divine justice completely blotted out that impious generation from among men.

Amazing! At the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, God accomplished both judgment on physical Israel (those who rejected His Son) and salvation for spiritual Israel (those who accepted His Son). It is, in my opinion, a sad reality that this truth has been hijacked by the recent use of the entire Olivet Discourse as an 'end of the world' prophecy** and by a general ignorance of the context in which the New Testament was written.

*Even CS Lewis, perhaps exposed to only the futuristic interpretation of such verses, called it the most embarrassing passage in Scripture for Christianity (Essay "The World's Last Night" (1960), found in The Essential C.S. Lewis, p-385.)

**Click HERE for a great cyber commentary on Matthew 24.