Before the Stones Fell

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Intro

Introduction

Imagine standing on a hill overlooking a city that has been conquered, burned, rebuilt, and fought over more than any place on earth. A city that has seen Babylonian armies tear down its walls, Roman legions level its temple, Crusaders wade through its streets, and yet — somehow — it is still there. Still standing. Still contested. Still significant.

That city is Jerusalem. And it is no accident.

Long before Israel ever set foot in the Promised Land, there was already a city on that hill. The Jebusites had fortified it. They called it Jebus. And for two hundred years after Joshua led Israel into Canaan, no one could take it. Until David — not by military might alone, but by divine appointment — captured it, brought the Ark of the Covenant into it, and understood something that would shape all of history:

God had chosen this place.

He chose it before the temple was built.

He chose it before Solomon laid a single stone.

He confirmed it at a threshing floor when a plague stopped and David fell on his face and built an altar on the very mountain where Abraham had once raised a knife over his son.

The ground itself was soaked in covenant history.

And then Solomon built the temple, and the glory of God filled that house like smoke, and heaven touched earth in Jerusalem.

But here is what breaks your heart when you get to Matthew 23 — after all of that history, after all of that faithfulness, after centuries of God pursuing this city and this people —

According to Lukes Gospel: Jesus stands overlooking Jerusalem, and he weeps. Not with anger. Not with judgment alone. But with the grief of a mother.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you — how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”

Those words carry the weight of a thousand years of history. Every prophet silenced.

Every warning ignored.

Every invitation refused.

And now the Son of God himself stands at the door — and the city that was chosen to be the dwelling place of God is about to reject God in the flesh.

This morning I want us to feel the weight of that lament — because the same God who wept over Jerusalem is still pursuing people today.

Body

Section I: The Lament — Matthew 23:37

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you — how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” Matthew 23:37

Let’s not rush past the address. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”

The repetition is not rhetorical flourish — it is the sound of grief.

It is the way you say the name of someone you love who is walking toward a cliff.

There is tenderness here that should stop us cold, because it comes at the end of the most withering indictment of religious leadership in all of Scripture.

Seven woes.

Seven pronouncements of judgment against men who had turned the house of God into a performance and the people of God into a burden.

And then — this.

Not rage.

Not cold dismissal.

A broken heart.

But before we go further, we need to understand who is speaking. Because if we hear these words only as a first-century rabbi grieving three years of rejection, we will miss the staggering weight of what is happening on this hillside.

John tells us that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God — and that nothing that was made was made without him.

Paul tells the Corinthians that the rock that followed Israel through the wilderness was Christ.

Jesus himself told the Pharisees, “Before Abraham was, I am.”

When Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple — John tells us in his gospel that Isaiah saw his glory.

This means that the one standing on the Mount of Olives weeping over Jerusalem is not a newcomer to this story. He is the author of it.

Every prophet sent to Israel — he sent them.

Every burning bush, every still small voice, every word that came to Jeremiah like fire shut up in his bones — that was his voice.

When Elijah sat exhausted and suicidal under a juniper tree and an angel appeared and said arise and eat — that was his provision.

When the glory filled Solomon’s temple like smoke and the priests could not stand to minister — that was his presence.

He was there at the Red Sea.

He was there in the fiery furnace.

He was there in every moment of divine pursuit that stretches back across a thousand years of Israelite history.

So when he says “how often I have longed to gather your children” — he is not talking about the weeks he spent in Jerusalem during his ministry.

He is speaking as the eternal Messiah looking back across centuries of love that would not quit.

Every rejected prophet represented another moment of his longing.

Every stoned messenger carried his words.

Every ignored warning was his voice falling on deaf ears.

This is not a man grieving three years.

This is God grieving generations.

And now notice carefully who Jesus is addressing and who he is speaking about. He says “you who kill the prophets” — that is the leadership.

The scribes and Pharisees he has spent all of chapter 23 addressing. They are the ones with blood on their hands. They are the ones who shut the door of the kingdom in people’s faces. They traveled land and sea to make converts only to make them twice the sons of hell they already were.

Then he shifts: “how often I have longed to gather your children together.”

The children. The people. The ordinary men and women of Jerusalem who were hungry for God but were being starved by the very men appointed to feed them.

This is the tragedy layered inside the tragedy.

Many of the people did not reject Jesus — they followed him, wept over him, laid palms before him.

But they were sheep without a shepherd, and their shepherds had already decided.

The leadership would not allow it.

This should put a holy fear in the heart of every person in spiritual authority.

I am not just talking about the Pastors and Deacons. I am talking about Those who hold spiritual authority due to years of growing up and attending church. just like the scribes and Pharisees, who did not see themselves as enemies of God. They see themselves as its defenders — protecting orthodoxy, preserving tradition, guarding the faith. And in doing so they position themselves between the people and the Son of God himself.

Bad leadership doesn’t just harm individuals. It can damn a generation.

The hen does not stop wanting to gather her chicks.

That is the mercy buried in this image.

Jesus says how often I have longed — this is repeated, persistent, patient, eternal pursuit.

The God who walked with Adam in the cool of the garden.

The God who called to a hiding Abraham.

The God who wrestled with Jacob through the night and refused to let him go without blessing him.

That same relentless, pursuing love now stands in human flesh in the city he chose to be the foundation of the world — and he is weeping.

“But you were not willing.”

The “you” collapses back onto the leadership. The people were never given the chance to be willing. The shepherds made the choice for the flock.

And so judgment would fall — not only on those who rejected, but on an entire city that bore the weight of their decision.

The eternal Messiah had come in the flesh.

He had walked their streets, healed their sick, raised their dead, and wept over their children.

And the men who held the keys to the kingdom had locked the door from the inside.

This is precisely why we have spent so much time in the gospel of Matthew.

Not simply as an academic exercise.

Not merely to understand ancient history or prophetic timelines.

But because in these pages we encounter the incarnate Son of God —

God in flesh, walking dusty roads, touching lepers, weeping at tombs, turning over tables, and now weeping over a city.

Every passage we have studied, every sermon preached from this gospel, has been an invitation.

An invitation to do what Jerusalem’s leaders refused to do.

To hear his voice and not harden our hearts.

To see the one who has been pursuing us across eternity and run toward him rather than away.

Because the hen is still calling.

The wings are still open.

The goal of sitting under this Word week after week is not information — it is transformation.

It’s Participation!

It is that we would heed his call to follow him.

That we would step under his righteous covering and find, perhaps for the first time, what it means to be truly sheltered.

That we would stop trying to manage our own lives and submit to the leading of his Lordship — and discover that his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

Jerusalem was offered this. They refused it.

We are being offered it still.

Do not let this be your generation’s moment of “you were not willing.”

Section II: The Departure — Matthew 23:38–39

“Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

One word carries the weight of this entire passage. Desolate.

In the original Greek it is eremos— a word that means abandoned, empty, stripped of life. It is the word used for a wilderness. A wasteland. A place where something once lived and no longer does.

And notice what Jesus calls the temple. He does not call it God’s house.

He does not call it my house.

He says your house.

That single possessive pronoun is one of the most devastating statements in all of Scripture.

Because every Jewish listener standing within earshot understood exactly what had just happened.

God had vacated the premises.

This had happened once before. Ezekiel watched it.

He recorded it in excruciating detail across chapters 8 through 11 of his prophecy.

First God showed him the abominations being committed inside the temple itself — idol worship, secret rituals, women weeping for the false god Tammuz, men bowing toward the east with their backs to the sanctuary of the Lord. Wickedness had not invaded the temple from outside. It had taken root from within, among the very priests and leaders appointed to guard it.

And then Ezekiel watched the unthinkable. In Ezekiel 10:4 the glory of the Lord rose from above the cherubim and moved to the threshold of the temple — pausing, as if reluctant to leave. Then in Ezekiel 10:18–19 the glory moved from the threshold to the east gate of the temple courts. And finally in Ezekiel 11:22–23 — “the glory of the Lord went up from within the city and stopped above the mountain east of it.”The Mount of Olives. The glory hovered over the very mountain where Jesus would later weep, where he would pray in Gethsemane, and from which he would one day return.

Ichabod. The glory has departed. And within years Nebuchadnezzar’s army reduced Solomon’s temple to ash and rubble.

But here is what most people do not realize about the temple Jesus was standing in.

This was the second temple — rebuilt after the return from Babylonian exile.

And when they rebuilt it, something was missing.

Actually, several things were missing.

The Jewish Talmud records that there were five things present in Solomon’s temple that never returned to the second:

1.The Ark of the Covenant

2. The sacred fire that came down from heaven.

3. The Shekinah glory.

4. The Holy Spirit of prophecy,

5. The Urim and Thummim. (Priestly devices used in determining God’s Will for the People.)

The second temple had stood for centuries as a magnificent religious structure that had never been fully filled.

The Holy of Holies — that sacred inner chamber where the high priest entered once a year trembling before the presence of God — was empty.

There was no Ark.

There was no mercy seat.

There was no cloud of glory between the wings of the cherubim.

Just an empty room behind a thick curtain.

And yet the prophet Haggai had spoken over this very temple and declared — “the glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former.”

For centuries faithful Jews held onto that promise without seeing it fulfilled.

How could a temple with no Ark, no fire, no Shekinah possibly surpass the glory of Solomon’s temple?

The answer walked through its doors one morning in the arms of a young mother from Nazareth.

When Mary and Joseph carried the infant Jesus into the temple to present him to the Lord, the glory of God entered the second temple for the first time.

Not as a cloud.

Not as fire.

But as flesh.

As a child.

The eternal Word who had been present at creation, who had led Israel through the wilderness, who had filled Solomon’s temple with smoke — now wore a human face and was carried in human arms.

Old Simeon took him in his hands and wept and said “my eyes have seen your salvation.” He knew. The glory had finally come.

And for thirty years Jesus walked in and out of those courts.

He sat among the teachers as a boy.

He turned over the money changers’ tables as a man.

He healed the blind and the lame in its porticos.

He taught the crowds in its colonnades.

The glory of the latter house was not a renovated building — it was the incarnate Son of God who dwelt among them.

Which means when Jesus walked out of the temple for the last time in Matthew 23, something far more catastrophic than architecture was being lost.

The second temple didn’t just lose a rabbi.

It lost the only glory it had ever truly possessed.

The building that had stood empty for centuries had briefly, miraculously, been filled — and now that presence was departing.

Quietly.

Without a cloud.

Without a sound.

Just sandals on pavement and a broken heart.

Your house is left to you desolate.

Now it was not only empty.

It was abandoned.

And this time the departure was final.

What happened to those stones forty years later we will see in a moment — but understand that the physical destruction was simply the outward completion of what had already spiritually occurred the moment Jesus walked away.

But Jesus does not end on desolation.

He never does.

“You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

Embedded inside the judgment is a promise.

A future.

A door left open.

The very words Jesus quotes are from Psalm 118 — the same psalm the crowds had shouted when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey just days earlier.

The same words that had been on the lips of those who welcomed him and were silenced by the leaders who refused him.

Jerusalem’s story ends with an open door.

A future until.

A promise that the pursuit is not finished.

And

You are living inside that until right now.

The words that city will one day say — you can say today.

Because here is what the rest of Scripture makes unmistakably clear — God has never stopped pursuing his covenant people.

Not for a single generation.

Not through a single exile.

Not through four hundred years of prophetic silence.

Not through the destruction that was coming.

Not through centuries of diaspora, persecution, and unspeakable suffering.

The covenant God made with Abraham has never been revoked.

Go back to Genesis 15. God told Abraham to cut the animals in half and arrange them — the ancient covenant ritual that required both parties to walk between the pieces, binding themselves to its terms under penalty of death.

Abraham prepared everything. And then he fell into a deep sleep.

And God alone — as a smoking firepot and a flaming torch — passed between the pieces.

God bound himself to this covenant unilaterally.

He signed it alone.

Which means Israel’s failure could not dissolve it. The leaders’ rejection could not nullify it.

Even the crucifixion of the Son of God could not break what the Father had ratified by himself before Abraham took a single step.

Paul understood this.

In Romans 11 he asks the question that must have been burning in the hearts of every Jewish believer watching Jerusalem fall — “Did God reject his people?”And his answer is immediate and without hesitation: “By no means.”

He goes on to explain that Israel has experienced a partial hardening — not total, not permanent — until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

And then he makes a declaration that should stop every preacher in his tracks: “All Israel will be saved.”

The olive tree is still standing.

The root is still holy.

And the God who grafted Gentile believers into Israel’s covenant story has not finished writing Israel’s chapter.

Jeremiah heard God say it this way: “Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of all they have done.” (Jeremiah 31:37).

In other words — never.

The pursuit will not end until the pursued are home.

Zechariah points to the very moment Jesus referenced in Matthew 23:39. Chapter 12 verse 10 — “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.” There is a day coming when the city that said crucify him will see him for who he is and weep with the grief of recognition. The untilwill be fulfilled. The open door will finally be walked through.

And here — right here — is why this matters for everyone in this room today.

The reason God’s faithfulness to Israel is not just a theological footnote is because it is the most powerful demonstration of his character we have.

If he has pursued a people who rejected him across thousands of years

If he has kept covenant through exile and silence and crucifixion itself.

Then his faithfulness is not contingent on ours.

His pursuit is not defeated by our rejection.

His wings do not close because we have been slow to run to them.

What he has done for Israel he will do for you.

Jerusalem’s story is not over.

And neither is yours.

You are living inside the until.

The door that stood open over that city stands open over this room right now.

The words that Jerusalem will one day say — Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord— you can say today.

Willingly.

Freely.

While there is still time.

That is the mercy inside the lament.

That is the promise buried in the judgment.

The eternal Messiah who wept over Jerusalem is still pursuing his children.

He has not stopped.

He will not stop.

Until every last one has been presented the opportunity to come home.

Section III: The Stones — Matthew 24:1–2

“Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. ‘Do you see all these things?’ he asked. ‘Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” Matthew 24:1-2

Watch what happens as Jesus walks away from the temple.

The disciples catch up to him — and they want to talk about the buildings.

It is almost impossible to read this without feeling the weight of the disconnect.

Jesus has just wept over Jerusalem.

He has just declared the temple desolate.

He has just walked away from it for the last time with the grief of a broken heart.

And the disciples are pointing at the architecture.

To be fair — the temple was breathtaking.

Herod the Great had spent decades expanding and beautifying it. The historian Josephus wrote that the stones used in its construction were white marble, some of them forty feet long and twelve feet high.

The entire structure gleamed in the Jerusalem sun like a mountain of snow and gold.

Rabbis of the day said that whoever had not seen Herod’s temple had never seen a beautiful building in his life.

It was one of the most magnificent structures in the ancient world.

And the disciples wanted Jesus to notice it.

“Do you see all these things?” he asks.

It is a gentle but piercing question.

Because what Jesus sees when he looks at those stones is something entirely different from what the disciples see.

They see glory.

He sees rubble.

They see permanence.

He sees ash.

They see as the house of God.

He has just called it your house — empty, desolate, abandoned.

“Not one stone here will be left on another. Every one will be thrown down.”

Forty years later in 70 AD the Roman general Titus fulfilled those words with devastating precision.

The city was surrounded, starved, and breached.

The temple burned.

The gold melted into the cracks between the stones — and Roman soldiers pried every stone apart to retrieve it.

The destruction was so thorough, so complete, that the prophecy was fulfilled exactly as Jesus said.

Not one stone left on another.

Everything the disciples had pointed to with such pride and wonder — gone.

Leveled.

Scattered.

But here is the lesson the disciples needed to learn that day — and the lesson we need to carry out of this passage:

Do not confuse the building with the presence.

The disciples were so dazzled by the structure that they had not fully processed what Jesus had just said inside it.

The glory had departed.

The temple was already desolate in the most important sense before a single Roman soldier set foot in Jerusalem.

The stones were still standing.

The rituals were still being performed.

The priests were still burning incense.

But the presence of God had walked out the door in sandals and was now standing on the hillside telling them it was all coming down.

This is a warning that echoes across every generation of the church.

It is possible to be surrounded by impressive religious infrastructure — beautiful buildings, full calendars, packed programs, polished services — and be completely unaware that the glory has quietly slipped out the door.

The stones can still be standing while the presence is gone.

Religion can keep its form long after it has lost its power.

The disciples were asking about stones.

Jesus was talking about something that cannot be thrown down.

Because what could not be destroyed was already in motion.

In a matter of days Jesus would go to a cross.

Three days later he would walk out of a tomb.

And fifty days after that the Holy Spirit would fall on one hundred and twenty people in an upper room — and the presence of God that had dwelt in a building behind a thick curtain would take up permanent residence in human hearts.

The temple made of stone would fall.

The temple made of living stones would rise.

Paul would later write to the Corinthians — “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?” (1 Corinthians 6:19).

The presence that once filled a building on Mount Moriah now fills every believer who has said blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

The stones fell.

The presence never left.

Conclusion

We began this morning standing on a hill overlooking a city that has been fought over more than any place on earth.

A city chosen before its people arrived.

A city David captured and consecrated.

A city where the glory of God filled a temple like smoke.

A city where the eternal Messiah walked in human flesh, healed the sick in its courts, and then stood on its hillside and wept.

We have watched the glory depart from Solomon’s temple in Ezekiel’s vision — rising slowly, reluctantly, hovering over the Mount of Olives before it disappeared.

We have seen the second temple stand for centuries without the Ark, without the fire, without the Shekinah — until the morning a young mother carried the glory of God through its doors in her arms.

We have heard the lament of the eternal Son — not just grieving three years of rejection but centuries of it — how often I have longed to gather your children. We have felt the weight of your house is left to you desolate. We have watched the disciples point at stones while Jesus pointed beyond them to what cannot be destroyed.

And through all of it — through every act of rejection, every silenced prophet, every broken covenant, every stone thrown down — one thing has remained constant.

God has not stopped pursuing his people.

The covenant cut in Genesis 15 still stands.

The promise embedded in judgment still echoes — you will not see me again until.

The door is still open.

The wings are still spread.

The eternal Messiah who wept over Jerusalem is the same one who is present in this room right now — still calling, still gathering, still longing.

Jerusalem’s story is not finished. And neither is yours.

The words that city will one day say — Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord — you can say today.

Not because you have to.

Not because judgment is coming.

But because

He is worthy.

Because he has been pursuing you longer than you know.

Because the God who would not let go of a rebellious city will not let go of you.

Say it today. While the door is open. While the wings are spread. While the pursuing God is near.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

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