“For the days will come on you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you, and surround you, and keep you in on every side, and will dash you to the ground, and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone on another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
And there could be only one result. The same thing that had happened in the days of Jeremiah would happen again. Because they had missed their day of salvation, days of judgment would come on them. Jerusalem would be destroyed. The holy stones would lie scattered at the end of every street (Lamentations 4:1). In Jeremiah's day it had been brought about because of their support for a false son of David, one of the rejected house, of whom God had warned that no son of that house would inherit the throne of David, so that it was rather to be given to One miraculously born (Isaiah 7:13-14; see also Isaiah 39:6-7). Here it was because of the rejection of that One Who had been miraculously born, Whose death would seal their fate unless they repented. The vivid description fits well with the descriptions of the siege of Nebuchadnezzar (compare Psalms 137:7-8; Jeremiah 6:6; Lamentations 1:15; Lamentations 2:8-9; Lamentations 2:17; Lamentations 4:1; Ezekiel 4:2; Ezekiel 26:8), as well as its repetition by Titus in 70 AD. (See also 2 Samuel 17:13; Isaiah 29:3; Isaiah 37:33; Hosea 13:16; Nahum 3:10). Sadly it was a description of all sieges where resistance was offered. There would be nothing unusual about it, only its severity and its cause.
And all this would come on them, the consequence of their own rash folly, because they had not recognised that the time of their visitation had come (compare Jeremiah 10:15; Jeremiah 51:18), that the acceptable year of the Lord was here (Luke 4:19), a time that would then be followed by the day of vengeance (Isaiah 61:1-2).