Acts 28:26

Acts 28:26. Saying, Go unto this people, and say. Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive. The stern prediction originally occurs in a sublime passage (Isaiah 6), which relates how, under circumstances of extraordinary solemnity, the Divine commission to be a prophet of the Lord to Israel was entrusted to Isaiah. Then he is told that he must preach to the chosen people, who, however, will refuse to listen to him. He hears that his divinely-inspired words will, far from converting, only blind their eyes and harden their hearts, and in the end the doom of judicial blindness will be their punishment. The terrible prediction was first fulfilled to the letter in the prophet's own days. After his time, calamity following on calamity, years of ruin and captivity, all failed to touch the hearts of the stubborn and rebellious people. It therefore received another and final fulfilment in the impenitence of the people, and in their determined rejection of the love and mercy of then-Messiah.

The story of the eighteen Christian centuries, which relates the strange destiny of the Jews since the last fall of Jerusalem and its temple, tells the nations of the world how the prophecy of the Holy Ghost has been carried out.