And he said, I will hide my face from them
Now the Lord proceeds to pass sentence on the Jews for their ill
treatment of his Son, and of his followers; which respects
judgments that should come upon them, both spiritual and
temporal, or corporeal; the former lies in ( Deuteronomy
32:20 Deuteronomy
32:21 ) , and the latter in ( Deuteronomy
32:22-25 ) ; and this the Lord said in his own heart and
mind, decreed and determined it within himself, and declared it
in his word by his prophets, as here and in other places: and
this first part of the sentence denotes the withdrawing of the
gracious presence of God, and the manifestation of his favour,
from the people of the Jews, his dislike and contempt of them,
having taken out from among them the remnant according to the
election of grace, the disciples and followers of Christ; and the
removal of the Gospel, and the ordinances of it, from them, the
means of light and knowledge, joy and comfort, and the giving of
them up to blindness and hardness of heart, which continues to
this day; they have a vail of darkness and ignorance upon their
hearts while reading the books of the Old Testament, which will
be done away when they turn to the Lord, and not before; likewise
this was fulfilled when all the symbols of the divine Presence
were removed, when the temple was destroyed, and all things in
it, or carried away; and this house, which was formerly the house
of God, and where he dwelt, was left desolate by him; and it is
remarkable, that a little before the destruction of Jerusalem, a
voice was heard in the temple, "let us go hence", as Josephus
relates F26:
I will see what their end [shall be]:
their destruction, called in the New Testament "the end of the
world"; the end of the Jewish church state and commonwealth: this
the Lord said, not as ignorant what it should be, or when it
would be; but the sense is, either that he would cause them and
others to see it, when he should bring wrath upon them to the
uttermost; or that he would look upon it with pleasure and
delight, which would be an aggravation of their punishment, (
Proverbs
1:26 ) ;
for they [are] a very froward generation;
men of perverse spirits, of a contrary and contradictory temper
and disposition, who pleased not God, and were contrary to all
men; as well as contradicted and blasphemed the Gospel of Christ,
were men of distorted principles in religion, implicated and
inconsistent, they wresting the Scriptures to their own
destruction; and were obstinate, stubborn, and inflexible in
their notions and practices, and that to the last, which was
their ruin:
children in whom [is] no faith;
for though they had faith in one God, in the Scriptures of the
Old Testament as the word of God, in the law of Moses, and in a
future state, the resurrection of the dead, and judgment to come;
especially the Pharisees, the greater part of the Jews; yet
though they were the children of Abraham, and would be thought to
be the children of God, they had no faith in Jesus, the true
Messiah; him they disbelieved and rejected; and as their fathers
could not enter into the land of Canaan, whose carcasses fell in
the wilderness, because of unbelief; so these were cast out of
the land, and from the Lord, because of their unbelief in the
rejection of the Messiah. Aben Ezra observes, that it may be
interpreted there is no men of faithfulness, or no faithful men
among them, as in ( Psalms 12:1 ) ; they
were a faithless generation, covenant breakers, broke their
covenant with God, and therefore he rejected them.