A Dazzling Millennial Temple

https://www.thetrumpet.com/article/13129.11.0.0/religion/bible/a-dazzling-millennial-temple

The Prophet Ezekiel devoted nine chapters of his message to describing the millennial temple. To enhance our vision of a peaceful future under God’s rule, we must understand more about this special structure.

The temple described in Ezekiel chapters 40-48 will be built immediately after Jesus Christ returns. Preceding that massive construction project is an end-time Ezekiel-type messenger who declares the vision of this temple. People who heed him will better understand God’s plan to establish His government on Earth and to build a magnificent headquarters structure.

God says the millennial temple will be built in the exact place where the temples of Solomon and Zerubbabel once stood. Do we really know where those ancient temples were? The more we know about the Ezekiel temple, the more hope and faith we will have in a glorious future world ruled from Jerusalem.

Where the Temple Will NOT Be

Most Jews and Christians believe that the Temple Mount was part of the Zerubbabel temple. The Jews pray toward the Wailing Wall at that site. But is this really where the ancient temples were and where the millennial temple will be? Not if we believe the Bible.

“And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings [plural] of the temple. And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here ONE STONE upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:1-2). Here, Christ is discussing events to occur in the first century. Sure enough, the Romans completely wiped out every structure in Jerusalem during the A.D. 70 holocaust.

“The Greek word Jesus used in His prophetic context to describe the temple and its buildings was heiron,” Dr. Ernest Martin wrote in his book The Temples That Jerusalem Forgot. “That means the entire temple, including its exterior buildings and walls.”

Vincent’s New Testament Word Studies says this about heiron: “The word temple,heiron (literally, ‘sacred place’), signifies the whole compass of the sacred enclosure, with its porticoes, courts and other subordinate buildings, and should be carefully distinguished from the other word, naos, also rendered ‘temple,’ which means the temple itself—the ‘holy place’ and the ‘holy of holies.’” Every building associated with the temple was ruined!

The historian-priest Josephus recorded the destruction of Jerusalem in great detail: “[I]t was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by [the Romans] that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it [Jerusalem] had ever been inhabited .…” Josephus was the greatest historian of his time. If he had delivered an inaccurate account of this conquest, then his critics would have thoroughly discredited him. But that never happened.

“[I]t was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by [the Romans] that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it [Jerusalem] had ever been inhabited .…”
— Josephus”Where is this city that was believed to have God Himself inhabiting therein?” wrote the Jewish resistance leader Eleazar. “It is now demolished to the very foundations, and hath nothing left butTHAT MONUMENT of it preserved, I mean the camp of those that hath destroyed it, which camp dwells upon its ruins .…” After the battle, only a Roman camp within the city remained erect!

The Temple Mount was never leveled like a football field! “That facility known as the Haram [or what is called the Temple Mount] was officially reckoned as being beyond and outside the limits of Jewish Jerusalem,” Dr. Martin wrote in his book. “That’s where the Dome of the Rock is today. It was not reckoned as being part of the municipality of Jerusalem.”

Dr. Martin continued: “[I]f those rectangular walls of the Haram are those which surrounded the Temple Mount, as we are informed by all authorities today, why did Josephus and Titus leave out any mention about this magnificent Haram structure? That is, where the Dome of the Rock is, and the Wailing Wall. They spoke of the utter ruin and desolation of Jewish Jerusalem and the temple, not the survival of any buildings that Jewish authorities once controlled.”

Before the 16th century, Dr. Martin went on to write, not a single Jew on Earth paid the slightest respect to the western Wailing Wall. He believes the ancient temples were located on the Ophel, and I agree with that.