Page 103 - Satan in the Sanctuary

Moses to Moshe—A Bloody Site 105
here for the reader to appreciate its true magnitude. "The
Lord was as an enemy," cries Jeremiah:
He hath swallowed up Israel, he hath swallowed up all
her palaces: he hath destroyed his strong holds, and hath
increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamen-
tation. And he hath violently taken away his tabernacle,
as if it were of a garden: he hath destroyed his places of
the assembly. . . . The Lord hath cast off his altar, he
hath abhorred his sanctuary, he hath given up into the
hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces. . . . The Lord
hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of
Zion ........... Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath
destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes
are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets
also find no vision from the LORD (Lam 2:5-9).
Too late now for the visions of prophets! Jeremiah's re-
portage is touching:
The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground,
and keep silence. . . . They have girded themselves with
sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads
to the ground. Mine eyes do fail with tears. (Lam 2:10-
11)
So the brilliance of Jeremiah is finally consummated in
a woeful funeral dirge. His assignment was limited to fore-
seeing the tragedies surrounding the first Temple. Imagine
his tears if he could have foreseen the events of the second
Temple—the literal starvation of a million people and still
another desolation of the holy site.
But even the lamentations following that catastrophe
would be mild. Suppose Jeremiah could look ahead, as
we are now able to do, to the destruction of the third
Temple—the Tribulation Temple. Now there's something