Part 3: Burning Questions
The Book of Revelation and its related scriptures paint the picture of two women. One is an adulterous wife, which is Old Covenant Israel (the center of which is the city of Jerusalem), who becomes a widow when she kills her husband (Jesus). After God’s copious patience and mercy toward her (demonstrated throughout the Old Testament books), this wicked woman is destroyed. God allows her enemies to come upon her, and she is replaced with the New Covenant Bride of Christ, the New Jerusalem, who is a faithful wife.
The Holy Bible, in a very basic sense, can be described as a detailed, long-developing love story — one in which our Creator God eventually comes to have a true family, and they share in a mutual love and relationship based upon free will. Few Old Testament people truly knew and appreciated God for who He is. Otherwise, they never would have gone astray from Him. It took Jesus — and everything surrounding his life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension — to reveal God. It is this theme that runs central to the Old and New Testaments, including the Book of Revelation, and it is in appreciation of this theme that we can most effectively worship and serve the Lord.
This doesn’t mean, however, that we should be ignorant of helpful historical facts. It’s shocking and sad to think of how many contemporary Christians have little or even no knowledge about the 70 AD destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the significance thereof (including what occurred prior, during, and following). Unfortunately, when these people come across prophetic and highly symbolic scriptures, especially those with vivid imagery, they tend to conjure up imaginations (or easily buy into others’ thoughts) that do not reflect Truth.
There are so many scriptures that accurately describe the events both preceding and during the 70 AD desolation. These scriptures (some of which use various terms such as the end times, last days, Day of the Lord, etc.) had a two-fold purpose — to give multiple warnings of the coming judgment upon God’s unfaithful wife (i.e. the rebellious nation of Israel) and to offer hope of a new marriage, made way through Jesus (including the future this union would usher in).
The ignored warnings culminated in profound sorrow for the Jews, for it caused the annihilation of the system of law (the Mosaic law, or law of Moses) that they followed at the time. With the temple records utterly destroyed along with every element of the temple structure, the Jews (who are not a race but are, rather, a portion of the descendants of Abraham) could no longer fulfill the requirements for sacrifices and other operations of the law. God came upon the city of Jerusalem with great wrath in return for rejecting His Son (although the obedient Christians heeded God’s warnings and escaped in time) and to prove that the Mosaic Covenant had been done away with.
To say this is “huge” is an understatement. The stark reality of what happened in 70 AD was that the old way of serving and worshipping God was gone. God had divorced His people, and they no longer had access to Him via the temple because it no longer existed. His presence was no longer among them. To this day, many Jews want to resurrect the old, yet the events of 70 AD made it very clear that there is only one way to God — Jesus is the door, the pathway is the Way of His Kingdom, and Jesus’ presence in us through the Holy Spirit gives us 24/7 access to God.
While the events preceding, during, and following 70 AD are fact, detailed in many historical writings, it is Scripture that enables us to appreciate the intense love story between God and His two different wives, and it is Scripture that helps us to understand just how much of a spotlight the finality of 70 AD put upon Jesus.