Israel had been given nearly 40 years to decide whether or not to accept their Messiah since John the Baptist first appeared on the scene. However, by the end of the book of Acts the tally was nearly in. Though many Jews had received the Gospel message, many more had not and practically all of the nation’s leadership had rejected it. It was time for the Lord to take the next step in God's Redemptive Plan with respect to the nation of Israel.

It was mentioned earlier how the Roman procurator Felix had cruelly put down a Jewish revolt with many deaths. Actually, that uprising was the result of an ongoing dispute between the Jewish and Greek citizens of Caesarea over the political control of that seaport city. There had already been many insults hurled back and forth with street fights and arrests before the matter was finally taken before a Caesar’s tribunal for final decision. When the Greeks won the case and the city government was awarded to them, it took only one last insult to spark a Jewish rebellion against Rome. As is usually the case, the ostensible pretext for war was all out of proportion compared with the magnitude of the disasters that resulted.

The Jews in Caesarea had a synagogue adjoining a plot of ground owned by a Greek of that city; a site they had frequently endeavored to purchase with offers far exceeding its true value. The Greek owner not only spurned their offers but defiantly proceeded to build workshops on the property so as to leave only a narrow and extremely awkward passage into the Synagogue. On a day following a Jewish attempt to curtail his operations, the Jews came to the synagogue to find that a Greek mischief-maker had placed beside the entrance a pot, turned bottom upwards, upon which he was sacrificing birds. This was intended as a mockery of (Leviticus 14.1-4), and the Jews were incensed. A riot ensued, then when the Jews appealed to the Roman governor Florus, he sided with the Greeks. Innocent Jewish leaders were arrested, then Florus blatantly marched against the Temple in Jerusalem to steal its treasures. And so from such a trivial dispute, a major rebellion was spawned in the summer of AD 66.

The fighting escalated, first with a massacre of the Jews living in Caesarea, then with a similar massacre of the Roman garrison located in Jerusalem. The news of the slaughter at Caesarea infuriated the whole nation, and Jews were soon sacking several Syrian villages. This caused a Syrian Roman general by the name of Cestius to enter the region of Galilee and move toward Caesarea, destroying cities as he went. Advancing along the coastline of Israel to Joppa, he also destroyed that city then thrust his force of 23,000 troops against Jerusalem itself. All of this had happened within a few months of the initial uprising in Caesarea.

Cestius began a siege of Jerusalem in the fall of AD 67. The Jews were forced to retreat into the city remaining there for the next six months. Then Cestius inexplicably ordered a full withdrawal! The historian Josephus explains the unexpected action in this way.

"It then happened that Cestius was not conscious either how the besieged despaired of success, nor how courageous the people were for him; and so he recalled his soldiers from the place, and by despairing of any expectation of taking it, without having received any disgrace, he retired from the city, without any reason in the world."

The Christians in the city, apparently seeing this untold event as a fulfillment of Jesus’ earlier prediction in (Luke 21.20-24), successfully fled the city and settled in the area of Perea across the Jordan River.

Tragically, the reprieve for Jerusalem was only momentary for when Caesar Nero heard of Cestius’ strange retreat he sent Vespasian, one of Rome’s ablest generals, to restore order. However, before the problems in Israel could be resolved, Nero died. Vespasian was moved to remain in Rome where he became the next emperor, and sent his son Titus to defeat Jerusalem. Titus came with an army of 80,000 Roman troops, plus thousands of battering rams and siege engines. This second siege against the city began in February of AD 70 and ended in the fall of that same year. The Roman devastation of Jerusalem was complete as they smashed into the city, burned the Temple, leveled the walls, and killed over a million Jews who were huddled inside its walls.

As if such grand destruction were still insufficient to requite this national disaster, a small group of about 1000 Jewish zealots refused to surrender. They retreated to a fortress sanctuary called Masada near the Dead Sea, where the saga of Masada has come down to us as the final death knell of Israel. This small band of men, women, and children held off a Roman army of about 15,000 soldiers for a period of a year in the Judean wilderness before committing suicide just as their mountain high garrison was about to be overrun. The final curtain on Biblical Israel was closed in AD 73.

Thus the nation of Israel as described in the New Testament ceased to exist, allowing us to summarize certain key events and dates during this period by the following calendar.

REDEMPTIVE PLAN