Jesus often referred to His generation. He called it an “evil and adulterous generation,” and He prophesied that all of the bloodguilt of previous generations, from the time of Abel to His day, would be charged to it.

Consequently, He warned men of the consequences that would come upon that generation when it had filled up the cup of God’s wrath. Like the iniquity of the Amorite which was not yet full, he saw the iniquity of the Jews coming to its completion. God gave them a period of forty years to “flee the coming wrath,” as John the Baptist put it.

Jesus predicted all the things that would come upon that generation, when God’s fury would be released, the pinnacle of which was the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple (see Matthew 24, Luke 21, Mark 13; Luke 17).

In 67 AD, the Romans surrounded the city, laid siege to it, and in 70AD finally took it. The description of the horrors that eyewitness Josephus details in his account of the destruction is almost unimaginable: three vicious factions within the city slaughtering one another on sight, starvation at its worse; cannibalism to the extent that a mother boiled and ate her child, disease . . .

How is it that all this happened to one generation? This was the generation in which the culmination of growing evil was evidenced in crucifying the Lord. It was so boldly sinful as to call down God’s curse upon themselves: “His blood be upon us and our children.” God took them at their word!

It is dangerous to reject God, to oppose Him, to kill His servants in His Name. What will happen to our generation—one blessed with such dissemination of truth-that has been neglected, rejected, opposed?

Who, but God, knows?