seventy years, and enabled once more to build the temple.
finally be closed. The narrow door will at last be barred and bolted. The day of grace will be passed and over. The day of reckoning with a sin-laden world will finally begin. And then will be brought to pass the solemn prediction of the Lord Jesus "Many will try to enter in and will not be able to."
All prophecies of Scripture that have been fulfilled up to this time, have been fulfilled to the very letter. They have seemed to many unlikely, improbable, impossible, up to the very time of their accomplishment; but not one word of them has ever failed.
The promises of "good things" have come to pass, in spite of difficulties that seemed impossible:
1. Sarah had a son when she was well past the age for the bearing of children.
2. The children of Israel were brought out of Egypt and planted in the promised land.
3. The Jews were redeemed from the captivity of Babylon, after seventy years, and enabled once more to build the temple.
4. The Lord Jesus was born of a pure virgin, lived, ministered, was betrayed, and cut off, precisely as Scripture foretold.
The Word of God was promised in all these cases, that it should be. And so it was. The predictions of judgments on cities and nations have come to pass, though at the time they were first spoken they seemed incredible. Edom is a wilderness; Tyre is a rock for drying nets; Nineveh, that "greater than great city," is laid waste, and become a desolation; Babylon is a dry land and a wilderness--her extensive walls are utterly broken down. In all these cases the Word of God foretold that it should be so. And so it was.
The prediction of the Lord Jesus Christ which I press on your attention this day, will be fulfilled in like manner. Not one word of it