The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 19

beauty” it stood, the pride of the Jewish nation. What child of Israel
could gaze upon the scene without a thrill of joy and admiration! But far
other thoughts occupied the mind of Jesus. “When He was come near,
He beheld the city, and wept over it.” Luke 19:41. Amid the universal
rejoicing of the triumphal entry, while palm branches waved, while glad
hosannas awoke the echoes of the hills, and thousands of voices declared
Him king, the world’s Redeemer was overwhelmed with a sudden and
mysterious sorrow. He, the Son of God, the Promised One of Israel,
whose power had conquered death and called its captives from the grave,
was in tears, not of ordinary grief, but of intense, irrepressible agony.
His tears were not for Himself, though He well knew whither His feet
were tending. Before Him lay Gethsemane, the scene of His approaching
agony. The sheepgate also was in sight, through which for centuries the
victims for sacrifice had been led, and which was to open for Him when
He should be “brought as a lamb to the slaughter.” Isaiah 53:7. Not far
distant was Calvary, the place of crucifixion. Upon the path which Christ
was soon to tread must fall the horror of great darkness as He should
make His soul an offering for sin. Yet it was not the contemplation of
these scenes that cast the shadow upon Him in this hour of gladness.
No foreboding of His own superhuman anguish clouded that unselfish
spirit. He wept for the doomed thousands of Jerusalem—because of the
blindness and impenitence of those whom He came to bless and to save.
The history of more than a thousand years of God’s special favor
and guardian care, manifested to the chosen people, was open to the
eye of Jesus. There was Mount Moriah, where the son of promise,
an unresisting victim, had been bound to the altar—emblem of the
offering of the Son of God. There the covenant of blessing, the glorious
Messianic promise, had been confirmed to the father of the faithful.
Genesis 22:9, 16-18. There the flames of the sacrifice ascending to
heaven from the threshing floor of Ornan had turned

18