The Visitation of God

The other morning I was reading Matthew 23. The chapter ends with Jesus making a nebulous statement: “You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’” (v.39), NIV. It’s one of those verses that has always seemed to me to be obscured in a fog of religious meaninglessness. But suddenly I thought I glimpsed, through the mist as it were, something taking shape before my eyes.

Context is everything. Let’s go back to the beginning of the chapter. It starts with Jesus speaking to the crowds and his disciples about their spiritual leaders. He affirms that they are the legitimate interpreters of the law of Moses, so, essentially, “Go ahead and do what they tell you. But,” He adds, “don’t do what they do, because they don’t practice what they preach” (v. 3).

Then He thoroughly scolds these leaders, the Pharisees, who are ever-present in the crowds that follow the Teacher. Over and over He declares, “Woe to you! Great sorrow awaits you!” Now he outlines their faults. They are hypocrites: that is, they say one thing and do another. They are full of pride, Jesus says, caring more about being approved by people than being commended by God. They look righteous on the outside but are inwardly full of corruption.

They zealously proselytize, but then subject their converts to impossible standards of behaviour that even they themselves cannot keep. They don’t know what it means to have a change of heart, to be truly regenerated by the Spirit of God. They nit-pick about technicalities of the Law and yet miss the whole heart of God’s instruction.

They honour posthumously the prophets whom their very forefathers persecuted and murdered, saying, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would never have joined in the killing” (v. 30, NLT). And yet, says Jesus, “Your words and deeds testify that you are just like them and prove that you are indeed the descendants of those who murdered the prophets” (v. 31, The Passion Translation).

In what way did their words and deeds show that they were like their forefathers? In their attitude toward Jesus. They resisted Him from the get-go. Like their fathers before them, they did not realize when God was among them. They failed to recognize the day of His visitation.

He calls them a brood of vipers. This doesn’t just mean a bunch of snakes; it means the offspring of such. Like father, like son. (Interesting that one of the dictionary definitions for snake is “a treacherous or deceitful person.”) Jesus was saying in so many words, “We all know what your fathers did to the prophets, and I know what you’re going to do to Me.” In The Passion Translation, He says, “Go ahead and finish what your ancestors started!”

He wishes longingly that this broods of snakes would behave like another species instead: a brood of chicks, gathering trustingly under His wings:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem—you are the city that murders your prophets! You are the city that stones the very messengers who were sent to deliver you! So many times I have longed to gather a wayward people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings—but you were too stubborn to let me (Matthew 23:377-39).

Another account of the same event, in Luke 19:42, adds to Jesus’ soliloquy over Jerusalem: “How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace. But now it is too late…. Before long your enemies will … close in on you from every side… because you did not recognize it when God visited you” (NLT).

He was foretelling the overthrow of Jerusalem by Titus, the future emperor of Rome, which would happen in 70 A.D. At this time, the temple, the centre of Jewish worship, built by Solomon a thousand years earlier and rebuilt after Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion, was completely destroyed. “Not one stone will be left upon another,” Jesus said of this future event (Matt. 24:2), and that was exactly what unfolded. 

Why did God let this calamity befall His people? We find a clue in these haunting words from John’s Gospel: Jesus “was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own [the Jews] and his own received him not” (John 1:10-11, KJV). The nation of Israel as a whole rejected Jesus, failing to recognize the visitation of God, and so falling under His judgement.

But we mustn’t think of this type of judgement as “punishment,” not as a churlish and retaliatory reaction. God’s heart is always toward correction and reconciliation. When He sends judgement in this way, He is trying to rouse people to spiritual reality.

I looked up definitions of visitation on merriam-webster.com. Here is the one that fits the context of this article: “a special dispensation of divine favor or wrath.” I found eleven references to God’s visitation in the Old Testament: ten of them refer to God’s judgement falling on a continually disobedient people. There is only one where it is used in a positive sense, when Job says, “Thou hast granted me life and favour, and thy visitation hath preserved me” (Job 10:12, AKJV). The only reference to visitation in the New Testament is used in the positive sense, that of blessing, and it is in the passage that we are looking at here. However, that blessing, in the person of Jesus, was rejected, and so judgement still came.

I commented to Greg on these scriptural examples of the two different kinds of visitation, and he said this: “The visitation of God always comes with both blessing and judgement. It’s all part of the same God. His blessing comes to those who love the truth. When the same visitation falls on those who reject the truth, it manifests as judgement.”

To explain this seeming contradiction, I think of an illustration I once heard James Robison give. He spoke of holding a cat in his arms and stroking its fur, much to the contentment of the cat. But if the cat turns around and faces the other direction, the same stroking, now against the fur, becomes an irritant to the cat.

When we align ourselves properly with the movements of God, they are a great blessing to us. Even His judgements, which are “true and righteous altogether” (Ps. 19:9, KJV) are the fire that burns off impurities and refines our faith. That is why David, who wrote Psalm 19, goes on to say regarding God’s judgements, “more to be desired are they than gold” (v. 10, KJV). We see him embracing and inviting God’s judgement at the end of Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (v. 23-24). He loved the truth, and he welcomed God’s refining fire.

The Pharisees, however, did not. We don’t have to read much of the Gospels before we recognize that they are almost always the bad guys. We sure don’t want to be like them. But perhaps we sometimes are. Look again at the list beginning in the third paragraph above. Do we preach one thing and practice another? Do we sometimes care too much what people think of us and consequently turn away from what God is prompting us to do? 

Do we pretend to be something we’re not, acting upright on the outside but refusing to show our faults—for fear of rejection or loss of status. James encourages us to be transparent: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16, KJV). Did you catch that? Healing is what comes when we drop our facades and show who we really are. What a blessing we will miss if we refuse to do so!

The invitation to transparency comes with the promise of wholeness and restoration. This was readily sensed by the so-called sinners that flocked to Jesus. Not so their religious leaders. Jesus said at one point to the Pharisees, “I have not come to call those who think they are well but those who know they are sick (my paraphrase); not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners” (Matthew 9:12-13, NLT).

Also like the Pharisees, we become focussed on and critical of the behaviour of other believers, trying to get them to live up to our arbitrary standards. We “regard [them] according to the flesh” (2 Cor. 5:16, ESV) rather than by the Spirit, judging by our own faulty senses how well they are following God, failing to recognize that they are new creations in Christ (5:17), that they are God’s workmanship (Eph. 2:10), and as such, above our reproach.

(There are exceptions: when we see a brother or sister “overtaken in a fault,” if we have the discernment and spiritual maturity ourselves to go to them in true humility, we may be effective in helping them along their path [Galatians 6:1, KJV].)

Our criticism of other believers, our Pharisaical contempt, is rooted in our inability—or our refusal—to see the Kingdom of God at work in other people and in the world around us. We feel unable to relinquish the workmanship into God’s capable hands and must express our own opinions or interfere in the process instead of simply and powerfully interceding. We fail to discern His presence and His movement among us—His visitation, and in that, we fail to recognize Him for who He really is.

Like many of the Jewish forefathers, and like the Pharisees who came after them, we often fail to recognize the day of God’s visitation. We sometimes fail to recognize the true authority of God’s prophets, of His Word, and of His Son. We fail to see the presence of God in the people we come across, fail to recognize His hand in—think about this—the circumstances that overtake us. We don’t understand that “the kingdom of God is at hand.”

That’s why Jesus said to the hard-hearted that day, “You will not see me again until you are able to say, ‘We welcome the one who comes to us in the name of the Lord’” (TPT). We will really see Jesus when we have the humility and discernment to recognize the people who come in His name—and receive them, honour them, and bless them as such.

As I finished writing this article, I pondered on it for a few days. I asked the Lord if I had said what I wanted to say, if I had stayed on track from beginning to end with what I was trying to get across. I had begun with a single verse, and when God opened it up to me, the thoughts had come gushing with such abundance that I couldn’t get it all down.

It had all been about coming to understand one specific sentence in scripture that I had always had difficulty getting anything out of. God, is there any other thought you wanted me to add?

Then after a few days of thinking about it, I woke up one morning with a thought coming suddenly to mind. Yes, it was initially a tough verse for me to understand, hard and impervious like a rock. And then right on the heels of that thought came this: When the Israelites thirsted in the desert, God brought water out of—of all the unlikely places—a rock. Talk about hard and impervious! And yet from that seemingly unyielding rock, God refreshed a couple of million people. And the New Testament tells us (1 Corinthians 10:4) that that Rock was Christ.