Then I said, ‘Until when, Lord? ’ And he replied: Until cities lie in ruins without inhabitants, houses are without people, the land is ruined and desolate,
Your land is desolate, your cities burned down; foreigners devour your fields right in front of you – a desolation, like a place demolished by foreigners.
For the palace will be deserted, the busy city abandoned. The hill and the watchtower will become barren places for ever, the joy of wild donkeys, and a pasture for flocks,
A lion has gone up from his thicket; a destroyer of nations has set out. He has left his lair to make your land a waste. Your cities will be reduced to uninhabited ruins.
For this is what the Lord says concerning the house of the king of Judah: ‘You are like Gilead to me, or the summit of Lebanon, but I will certainly turn you into a wilderness, uninhabited cities.
‘This is what the Lord of Armies, the God of Israel, says: You have seen all the disaster I brought against Jerusalem and all Judah’s cities. Look, they are a ruin today without an inhabitant in them
Wherever you live the cities will be in ruins and the high places will be desolate, so that your altars will lie in ruins and be desecrated, your idols smashed and obliterated, your shrines cut down, and what you have made wiped out.
Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to the speaker, ‘How long will the events of this vision last #– #the regular sacrifice, the rebellion that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary and of the army to be trampled? ’
In that day one will take up a taunt against you and lament mournfully, saying, ‘We are totally ruined! He measures out the allotted land of my people. How he removes it from me! He allots our fields to traitors.’
But I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw a sword to chase after you. So your land will become desolate, and your cities will become ruins.
Just as the Lord was glad to cause you to prosper and to multiply you, so he will also be glad to cause you to perish and to destroy you. You will be ripped out of the land you are entering to possess.