“I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your forefathers as the earliest fruit on the fig tree in its first season.” – (Hosea 9:10)
The regathering of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is prophesied repeatedly in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus offered another clue to the timing of the end of the age when He mysteriously cursed a hapless tree. What was the Lord communicating — to His surprised disciples and to us — by His seemingly uncharacteristic action?
When Jesus walked throughout the Promised Land 2,000 years ago, Israel was already past its prime. The golden era under David and Solomon had come and gone. Divided into Israel and Judah, the Jews had been conquered by the Assyrians and Babylonians and carted off into exile. Fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah, Cyrus had encouraged Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Waves of exiles returned from the east, repopulating the Land — even as Samaritans and others now shared the territory once known as Israel.
Then came Alexander and his generals, followed by Rome and its legions. To the Caesars, the Jews of Judea were a bothersome population in a backwater territory who were frustratingly insistent on maintaining their own religion. Convictional Jews longed for the Messiah. Zealous Jews sought a military leader to throw off Rome’s yoke. None of them were expecting the Anointed One to lay down His life on a cross.
While He ministered, Jesus consistently challenged the expectations of His disciples and His followers. He showed them that God is not pleased by sanctimonious religiosity, but with repentance and obedience. Through His death, He offered the innocent blood needed to ensure that God’s wrath would pass over anyone who put their faith in Him.
Jesus’ message was clearly for the Jews first, even as He demonstrated a willingness to bless Gentiles as well. However, His love for individual Jews was matched by impatience with the Jews as a collective whole. That is why He offered His disciples a dramatic object lesson by cursing a hapless fig tree on His way to cleanse the temple of money-changers.
Seeing a lone fig tree by the road, He came to it and found nothing on it except leaves only; and He said to it, “No longer shall there ever be any fruit from you” (Matthew 21:19).
That fig tree, found barren of figs even though it was not the season for figs, withered dramatically at Jesus’ command.
Approximately 40 years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, Rome’s 10th Legion put down a Jewish insurrection with an iron boot, destroying the temple in the process. Those Jews who were not slaughtered in Judea were driven out of the Land.
For the next 1800 years, Jews became known as outcasts and vagabonds. They were persecuted and ostracized. They were forcibly converted and then accused of heresy. Inquisitions, pogroms, and edicts kept them down and out in most of the places they dared to try to live. Lacking much fruit in the season of His first Advent, the Jewish nation was cut off and cast aside for almost two millennia. The lesson of Luke 13:6-9 was applied to God’s own chosen people.
But that is not the end of the story.
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