Bruce Collins, Evangelist

The personal website of Bruce Collins

He Cares
 
Now as He drew near, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” (Luke 19:41-44, NKJV)
 
Weeping at the tomb of Lazarus
Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus.  There is disagreement as to why He wept, but I don’t think He was weeping for Lazarus.  I think He was weeping because of the sorrow of the sisters who thought He could heal but who didn’t realize that He could raise Lazarus from the dead.  I think He was touched by the feelings of their infirmities (Hebrews 4:15).  He cares.
 
Weeping in the Garden
Jesus also wept in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Again, most think He wept as He anticipated the cross and that might be true.  But Hebrews 5:7 indicates that His prayer was heard and that He was saved from death.  That passage would indicate that the strong crying and tears had to do with Satan’s last attack against Him before going to the cross.  Satan knew that the Lord had the power to lay down His life.  If He had laid down His life before going to the cross none of us could have been saved.  The cross was where Satan was truly defeated.  The Lord was tested in the wilderness at the beginning of His public ministry and again at the very end of His public ministry.  The Lord was a real man with real emotions.  He could have avoided the cross but He didn’t.  He cares.
 
Weeping on Palm Sunday
Now we see Him crying over Jerusalem as He makes that trip into Jerusalem that we call the triumphal entry.  He knows that Jerusalem is going to suffer for their rejection of Him.  All that the Lord predicts in these verses was fulfilled when the Roman general Titus destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  The Jews didn’t realize that Daniel’s prophecy ending the first 483 years (69 weeks of years) of the Jewish calendar of events as found in Daniel 9:26 was being fulfilled to the very day according to the calculations made by Sir Robert Anderson in his book, “The Coming Prince.”  Even though the Lord knew that judgment would come and that it would be brutal, it was His desire to save and not to judge and destroy.  In Isaiah 28:21, His judgments are considered a strange work according to the King James Version.  In John 3:17, it is clear that the Lord came to save and not to condemn.  But the Lord does get righteously angry with nations and individuals that reject His love and His sacrificial death.  But He doesn’t punish without crying over the consequences that men bring on themselves when they reject Him.  He is the only way of escape from the judgments of a God who demands that sin be punished but Who also provides a way for that sin to be punished without punishing the sinner.  He cares.
 
Personal Application
The Lord really is One who loves. One way that He proves it is by HIs compassion.  He loves the whole world.  He loves those of different skin colors and of different cultures and of different economic means.  He loves the homeless, the mentally ill, and those in prison and those taken with addictions.  What He doesn’t love is self-righteous religious people who see no need for their sins to be forgiven and who use religion as a club.   For those who reject the Lord’s love, their destiny is going to be eternal damnation.  None of us deserve to be in heaven with the Lord who loves us.  But the cross was the place where our sins were put away.  True worship begins with personal faith in the Lord and His sacrificial death.  He came to save because He cares.
 
Bruce Collins
 
Meditation for the week of April 24. 2022

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