What is the meaning of Luke 23:29? Look, the days are coming Jesus speaks these words on the road to Calvary, turning to the “daughters of Jerusalem” (Luke 23:28). • They have been weeping for Him, yet He redirects their tears toward what is soon to befall their city. • Earlier He had foretold the temple’s ruin (Luke 21:6) and wept over Jerusalem’s blindness (Luke 19:41-44); now He names the approaching judgment in the plainest terms. • The phrase “the days are coming” echoes the prophets (Jeremiah 7:32; Amos 8:11), underscoring the certainty of God’s announced discipline. when people will say • A time is coming when public opinion itself will invert: what was once pitied will be envied. • Isaiah foresees a day when people cry, “Hide us in the rocks” (Isaiah 2:19); Hosea pictures them pleading, “Cover us!” (Hosea 10:8). Jesus cites that same picture in the very next verse (Luke 23:30), tying His warning to a long-standing prophetic chorus. • The Lord is not describing a hypothetical mood swing; history records that during the Roman siege of A.D. 70, people indeed envied those who had no children to starve or be slain. ‘Blessed are the barren women • Scripture normally calls childbearing a blessing (Genesis 1:28; Psalm 127:3-5; Luke 1:42). Here Jesus deliberately reverses that expectation. • What could make barrenness seem fortunate? Only a catastrophe so severe that to bring life into it would feel cruel. • His earlier Olivet words line up precisely: “Woe to those who are pregnant and to nursing mothers in those days!” (Luke 21:23). the wombs that never bore • The womb—ordained to nurture life—would, in the coming siege, have no safe place to deliver it. • Lamentations describes mothers whose “womb became cruel” under famine (Lamentations 4:10). Deuteronomy’s covenant warnings had spoken of the same horror (Deuteronomy 28:56-57). • By citing the womb, Jesus points to mothers’ deepest instinct. When even that instinct is turned upside down, the severity of judgment is unmistakable. and breasts that never nursed! • Nursing, a picture of comfort and provision, would give way to scarcity and heartbreak (Lamentations 2:11-12). • Mark’s parallel prophecy repeats the lament for nursing mothers (Mark 13:17), tying it to the “abomination of desolation.” • Historically, Josephus records starving mothers during the siege; prophetically, Jesus’ words also foreshadow the final tribulation, when turmoil again overturns the created order (Revelation 6:15-17). summary Luke 23:29 is a sobering announcement: Jerusalem’s impending judgment will be so dreadful that the normal blessings of motherhood will feel like liabilities. Inverting the usual beatitude language, Jesus amplifies the certainty and severity of the coming siege and, by extension, the ultimate day of the Lord. His warning calls every generation to repentance, alertness, and trust in the One who alone can shelter us when “the days are coming.” |
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