The Temple: From Eden to Eternity with Dr. Randall Price

Okay, all right.

I'm going to start over.

I'm Terry Camerazelle here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

We love to learn about our Creator God and believe that the Bible, when read properly, rules out the possibility of millions

or especially billions of years.

We used to meet for 10 years at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California.

Then, and online, our goal is to rally the remnants so we can defend our faith.

You can see a list of our upcoming speakers by visiting tinyurl .com forward

slash CF Santee.

That's C for Creation, F for Fellowship, and Santee is spelled S -A -N -T -E -E.

Tonight, we are happy to have with us Dr. Randall Price, founder of the ministry Word of the

Bible.

Dr. Price is a biblical archaeologist, leading scholar on biblical prophecy, and global

keynote speaker.

Our Creation followers might recognize him as one of the experts in the recent Ark in the Darkness movie, but

Dr. Price is also a prolific author on the temple.

That's just what we are excited to have him come speak to us about.

If you're watching on Facebook or if you're in the Zoom and you have questions during his presentation, please put them into the

chat and comments so that we can ask during the live Q &A at the end.

With that, I'm happy to turn it over to you, Dr. Price.

Thank you, Terri.

I'm glad to be with everyone this evening.

I know this is a fellowship that focuses on creation, and I do speak on

those topics as well, but when we talk about the subject of the temple, we're actually beginning with

what we call protology, the first things, and tying that in with eschatology, the last things,

because God had the original creation, but he also has a new creation, and the subject of the temple

spans all of that and is very essential to all of that, because in God's plan and program,

we'll find that the temple is kind of at the center of all that he is doing.

So, I'm going to switch to a PowerPoint and run through a little bit of everything related to the

temple, kind of past, present, and future, and let me

get this where we can all see it.

All right, I hope that's full screen now,

and is everything okay for y 'all?

Looks good, thank you.

Okay, I have something on mine that says meeting is being recorded.

Leave meeting.

Okay, I'm just going to click that.

Everything's good?

I do see your tempo from Eden to eternity.

We're good to go.

Okay, good.

All right, so as I was.

Saying, when we talk about creation, starting at the very beginning, we're talking about

the Garden of Eden, God putting man on earth, putting him in a particular situation, and

we know God's presence was there, but sometimes we just bypass that and don't think deeply enough about

what was going on.

And so, for us, this is going to relate to the temple's past purpose.

Let me go back to that.

So, what are we doing as we talk about the very beginning of things?

As we look at the scriptures, we talk about a heavenly temple.

The heavenly temple, you'll see it as we come to the psalmist.

He talks about the Lord in his holy temple.

The Lord's throne is in heaven, and this was written by King David, but there wasn't a temple standing in the time of

King David.

That only happened in the time of Solomon.

Then we have passages from the book of Revelation that mention a loud voice coming from the temple from the

throne, but obviously the setting of this is heaven.

As you can see this also in Revelation 11, 19, the temple of God which is in heaven was

opened, and the Ark of his covenant appeared in his temple.

Dr. Price, can I interrupt you for.

One minute?

I think you have it on presenter view rather than slideshow, but do you

prefer it like this?

Can you see all of it?

I can see the whole, just somebody in the comments mentioned that it's in presenter

view.

I'm okay with it.

I can certainly change that.

Let me escape this and go to...

It would be slideshow.

Yeah, from current slide.

From current slide right there.

There you go.

Yeah, thank you very much.

I'll put those texts back up.

All we're simply saying here is that there was a temple in heaven from the very beginning.

This is God's throne.

This is God's presence, and you'll notice it has features in it that are similar to features received

later in earth on the earthly temple.

When we get to that, we'll find out why, but as we go to the Garden of Eden, the

layout, and this is the best an artist can do with what we have in the

text, but it tells us God's presence was in the garden.

It talks about a tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

It talks about cherubim stationed at the east of Eden to prevent man from coming back

into the garden once he was exiled from the garden after the fall.

So, these are just features that are there.

There's an assumption that there was a mountain of the Lord, but at any rate, God's presence was

in the western part of the garden because when they are thrown out of God's presence, they go

east, and the return to God would be west, but they're not permitted to do that.

So, this is the kind of picture we see.

You see in Genesis 3 -24, it says he drove the man out, and at the

east of the Garden of Eden, he stationed cherubim with a flaming sword, which turned every which direction

to guard the way of the tree of life, so that man in a fallen state could not return

and regain immortality in the garden.

Now, thinking about all that, and just to think about it in a real

sense, how do we get back?

How does man get back to God?

How does he get to the plan that unfolds in Scripture?

We come to Abraham, and it says the Lord appeared to him.

So, this was a manifestation to Abraham, just as had happened to

Adam.

Adam and his wife, later Chava, Eve, had God's presence.

It tells us they walked in the garden in the cool of the day, and the presence of God was there, and they heard his

footsteps, and he called for them.

So, this was what we call a theophany.

If you understand, that's the second person of the trinity.

It'll be a Christophany, but God came down with two angels.

We know the story from Genesis 18, and the picture there goes on

with Sodom and Gomorrah, but Abraham is left standing before the Lord.

So, we know that the Lord was there in the physical form.

We see something similar when Abraham now is being told by God to offer

his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.

In Mount Moriah, the text goes on to talk about that they named that

place Adonai Uriah, or the Lord's Seas, or as a

kind of a play on words, it will be provided, because the same root for see and provide is

there.

So, the picture is that where he was to offer Isaac,

God substituted a ram, and so this is the first substitutionary atonement in the Bible.

The ram takes the place of Isaac.

It forecasts the work he's going to do on Mount Moriah, which is the place, of course, where the temple

would stand, and also in the same vicinity where the crucifixion took place.

All of this is part of talking about future experiences.

So, it's tying things together and moving things forward.

All of this deals with a covenant.

It's the covenant that helps us understand how God works throughout history.

He made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, and that's repeated in 15 and 17 and 22, and

on it goes with all of Abraham's descendants, so that when he chose

him, he chose his descendants in him, and he said, in you, all the nations of the earth will be

blessed.

So, the picture of what God was going to do through the Jewish people, through

Israel as a nation, would be to bless all the other nations of the world, and

out of this Abrahamic covenant, which involved a land and a seed and a blessing, came three

other covenants, a land covenant, which kind of made it necessary that

Israel have a land and be in that land in order for these promises to be fulfilled, and

then a Davidic covenant, which was a covenant based on the seed

promise, and that was the one that would indicate Messiah would come from a

particular family, a lineage, and then finally there was a blessing, but this is the spiritual

covenant called the new covenant, and that's the one that will be affected with national Israel in the

future.

Those who believed in Jesus as their Messiah entered into

that new covenant when that happened, whether the Jew or Gentile, so that's what

we—the church is now under the new covenant.

It participates in the new covenant, but remember, the new covenant, as part of this whole covenant system made with Israel,

was designed to be ultimately fulfilled by them.

So, the temple is going to be a strategic part of this, both past, present, and future, and

we'll see how this unfolds.

When we're talking about restoring God's presence to this people and carrying

that whole promise forward, we come to Mount Sinai.

In Mount Sinai, we heard this statement when Moses and the children of Israel camped at the foot of Mount Sinai.

He said, let them make for me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst.

And the word sanctuary, I'll show you here the Hebrew word, mishkan,

it comes from the verb shekan, which means to dwell.

So, he literally says, make for me a dwelling place that I may dwell in your midst, because God's

desire was to dwell with his people.

He couldn't do it as a holy God and midst of unholy people, but with this structure

that was a meeting place, he could bring his presence, in a sense,

ritually shielded from man and his unholy

contamination.

And through the ritual and through the various things that recognized

sin and how to approach God in a proper way, that his presence would dwell with man.

And that's what happened throughout the Old Testament period.

It's the same word is used in the New Testament.

When we speak of John 1 .14, it says, the word became flesh and dwelt among

us.

And this is the word shkina in Hebrew or shekina or shekina, some

people put it that way.

The Greek term, skinao or skene is simply a transliteration

of that Hebrew word.

So, when you see that, what is being said is that when the second person

of the Godhead, who would be the Messiah, came to earth and

took a human form, it was like God in his glory dwelling within the

tabernacle.

It was a way he could meet with us.

It actually tells us that this is God in the flesh.

This is what we're talking about.

So, you can see how all this ties in with temple terminology.

So, when Moses is receiving commandments from God, the one he received was

about building the tabernacle.

And God said, this is going to be according to the pattern which I showed you,

both with the structure of the tabernacle and all the furniture that goes in it.

You shall construct it according to what was shown you on the mountain.

The term pattern that's used there, some text will say pattern, some will

say type, some will say example, some will say many things, or design,

something like that.

The word tavmit in Hebrew refers to something that could be a model or a blueprint.

Moses was actually shown the heavenly temple.

He saw something in that vision.

And God said, make a copy on earth, the things that are in heaven.

Why is that?

Because God was bringing his presence to earth, localizing it, and he simply reproduced a little bit of

heaven on earth as the place of his throne.

He had a heavenly throne, in a sense, he had an earthly throne.

When you come to the Ark of the Covenant, this structure, you'll see how this fits together.

So, when we look at this, going back to our picture of the Garden of Eden, you had these essential

elements.

And when we come to the tabernacle and its layout, you'll see those same elements reproduced.

So, you have the presence of God in the west, you have preventing people from entering

into that presence, or the cherubim.

They're on the outer curtains on the eastern side, on the inner curtain separating the holy place from the

holy of holies, and they're on the Ark of the Covenant itself.

And then you have the lampstand, which is like a stylized tree of life,

and the table of showbread, which is like, shall we say, in this case,

the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

These are things that represent the original creation, but now have been

restored in a ritual way, so that as people enter God's presence, they enter according to

this prescription.

So, in a sense, what we're saying is, God created a place where he can dwell with us in

our fallen state.

And so, the way away from God is to the east, the entrance to God is to the west, just as

it was in the Garden of Eden.

We come to the Ark of the Covenant, this is where God's glory came and dwelt.

That's what he said, I will meet with you there.

And so, from the time of the original tabernacle, the glory of God appeared as a

pillar of fire at night or a cloud by day, stayed with Israel, and when we come to the first temple, it entered into

that structure and could be seen with Israel all through that period of the

united monarchy, and then later what we call the divided monarchy, those periods.

So, this was the kind of idea, I will speak to you from the mercy seat, the Kippurit,

that's the term for it.

So, our term, Yom Kippur, when the high priests would go in once a year for a few minutes

into the holy of holies, carrying the blood on Yom Kippur, the day of

atonement, that's when this kind of thing happened, when Israel as a

nation had their sins passed over one more year.

Now, if we look at the temple through time, going back, we have the construction of a first temple, and I'll go ahead

and circle this because this is where we're headed right now, construction of a first temple under

Solomon, and then we had the construction after a 70 -year period

of exile of a second temple.

So, let's look at some of that.

That's very important.

It says, God chose Zion, this is Jerusalem.

He said, he's desired it for his habitation.

This is my resting place forever.

Here I will dwell for I have desired it.

So, God, just as he had a chosen people, he also had a chosen place.

That's the land of Israel, but within that chosen place, he had a central sanctuary, a place where his presence

would dwell, where all the tribes of were to come and representative appear before him.

And when he created the first temple, he's going to say, wherever you are on the

face of the earth, you turn toward this place and pray, I will hear from heaven because God's presence was there.

Edwin Smith wrote an older book.

He said, unlike other cities, a lot of my screen is

obscured by things that I can't seem to make go away too well.

I've got all our pictures on the side here.

I'm not sure how to make those.

Would you like help just reading the start of that?

Well, I just moved it out of the way.

So, I moved it down to the bottom.

So, it says, like other cities of antiquity, which have been the admiration of the world on account of their greatness, splendor, or

wisdom, Jerusalem has ever been identified as that particular place in the whole world, which may be said

to have formed the connecting isthmus betwixt this sin -polluted earth and the throne of the eternal

majesty on high.

In other words, it was considered a meeting place.

It was a place where God was going to bring his presence.

But now moving, putting that there, I can't get to

my corner.

Let's see.

Well, let's work in that way.

All right.

So, here is something of what the first temple may have looked like.

As you can see from the text in 1 Kings 8, it says, if you pray toward this place,

because you're praying to God and God has localized his presence, not his entire presence,

obviously, because when Solomon prayed, he said, heaven and highest heaven cannot continue, much less this temple, which

I built.

But nevertheless, his presence was with his people.

So, that temple, archaeologically, we have evidences of what this temple would have

looked like in nearby places.

Remember, it was King Hiram of Tyre, Lebanon, up in that area, that came and helped

build the temple.

If you go to that area today, this is in Syria.

We have the Ein Dara temple, and you see cherubim at the entrance to the temple.

We have models of temples that were found at a place called Kirbat Keyefa, just near the

Valley of Elah, from the time of Saul, King David period.

We have walls now discovered in Jerusalem from the time of King Solomon.

And here is a reservoir from the first temple period, you know, used by

pilgrims coming to the temple.

And I show you some of this because all of this stuff is at the present -day Temple Mount.

There are people who, and I've done a whole presentation on this, you can find at my website.

But where was the temple located?

It was located exactly where we know it has always been.

That's the testimony of history and archaeology.

There are some disparate voices today trying to say that the temple was somewhere else, another part

of the city.

Simply not correct.

So, that's why I'm showing you a little of this evidence.

Because of Israel's sin, basically following other gods

alongside or in place of the God of Israel, God said, I made a covenant with you.

This was the Mosaic covenant.

And it had terms, it had conditions.

And because of that, when Israel did not obey, God had told them what he would do in a

progressive way.

He would bring ultimately, finally, some destruction.

And he did that at the place that represented his fellowship or presence with his people.

So, the first temple was destroyed.

And then we have an interim time when the Jews returned from exile

after 70 years and came to Judah.

Daniel will be talking about a sanctuary that will be built.

This is during the period we call the Maccabean period.

Just before that, it's actually in the Syrian Greek period.

A man named Antiochus IV of Epiphanes, when the temple was built by

the exiles who returned to Judah, he came in because Israel was never again

independent as it had been before.

It was under now Greek rule.

And he had a priest offer pigs, which are unclean animals, on the

altar.

He put a huge statue of Zeus Olympius, the Greek god, outside the temple.

This was what Daniel referred to at that time as abomination that makes desolate.

When this was, there was a revolt that happened, temple was cleansed again.

The term for rededicating the temple is Hanukkah.

So, this is the whole story behind Hanukkah, which is not necessarily in our

Bibles.

It's in between the Testaments, but Jesus and John 10 celebrate the feast of dedication,

it says.

And that's the same term as Hanukkah, the same time of year.

Herod the Great, Roman, following the Greek rule came Roman rule.

Herod the Great wanted to placate the Jews and press the Romans.

He built the temple twice the size that it was before, built a very

expansive courtyard around it.

You can see from this picture that the temple is there kind of to the left -hand side of your screen.

But as you look, you see this large esplanade, you see all these walls and columns.

This is all part of the Roman world, what they were used to, these type of

stoas.

And so, all this was part of that work.

If you look at the front of the screen, you see some stairs coming down.

All that area has been excavated by Israel, and also to the right of the screen as well.

They can't excavate on the Temple Mount, but they can excavate at the foot of the Temple Mount, only since

1967.

That's been ongoing.

So, if we look right beneath this staircase, there's an arch called Robinson's

Arch.

You can see at this point, the top of that corner, see the corner up

there, just above that arch.

So, Josephus, a first -century historian who wrote about these things,

talks about the priest standing here at this corner, blowing a trumpet to

sound the beginning of the Shabbat, that is the Sabbath day.

And then, when it ended, the same thing.

It was the way that people knew to stop work and go home.

The stone that was up there was pushed down, and right at the foot of that, archaeologists found it.

Now, I'm pointing here to it, but there's a piece missing.

The piece that's missing is this piece that was cut out and taken to the museum.

It has on it the words, to the place of trumpeting.

So, we know it was put there to tell the priest, particularly the priest in training, where to stand

and where to blow those trumpets.

When we look at this staircase, it's just around the corner.

This is all of Israel entered through this.

When we talk about Jesus entering the temple, this is the place he would have entered through these double gates.

He was not a priest.

He's not from the tribe of Levi, so he couldn't enter through the other gates, which are only given to the priest or a part of the royal

family, which that Robertson's arch was part of.

So, this is the public interest.

When we talk about the beautiful gate and the healing of a

man in the book of Acts, Acts chapter one, when Peter and John go to pray, they're going through this gate, and the man is sitting

right at that gate.

Inside those gates, very beautiful construction.

That's why it's called the beautiful gate.

In fact, if you look the staircase just to the right of it, you see sort of a building.

The staircase continues on the other side of that building, but that is the mikveh.

This is the place of ritual immersion.

We would call it baptism.

They had to immerse themselves to be ritually pure to go into the temple.

When the day of Pentecost happened, all the baptisms that took place, 3 ,000, 5 ,000, adding to the

church, they went into that building there for that ritual cleansing.

So, here's what that looks like today.

It's excavated.

The staircase is here, and there's the remains of the building with

a lot of those mikveh or these ritual immersion pools in between.

So, again, we have evidence of where these things are mentioned in scripture.

When Jesus was on earth and overlooked this at one point, he says in the gospel of Matthew,

Behold, your house is being left to you desolate.

I say to you from now on, you shall not see me until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

The idea here is that, again, because of the national rejection of Jesus as

Messiah, they then came under the terms of the covenant and rejected

God.

As a result, they were going to find their house desolate or be destroyed.

This is also mentioned in Luke when it says, These days are going to come upon you,

and they will love you to the ground and your children within you, and not leave one stone upon another, because you did

not recognize the time of your visitation.

I didn't point this out, but when the first temple was destroyed, it was on the ninth of the Hebrew

month of Av, which is our August -September.

When the second temple was destroyed, it was exactly on the same day.

It was an indication to the nation of Israel that this was a divine discipline.

God was doing it exactly at the same time.

Of course, they record their recognition of that.

We look today at some of the evidence of that.

These stones were pushed down from above.

The wall nearly to the right of your screen is the Western Wall or the Kotel or what we call the

Wailing Wall.

There are shops on the left -hand side, but you can see when the stones were pushed down, it buckled the street.

This is the main street that Jesus, the disciples, and others would have walked upon.

The excavator of this was a man named Ronnie Reich.

He only finished it around 1998 for the 3000th anniversary of the

city of Jerusalem.

They left these stones right where they were rather than trying to reconstruct something because they wanted to give testimony to the

fact this destruction happened just as history said.

It also indicated the fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy because he said it would happen and it did

happen.

Now we go to the temple through time and we're moving from the past

to the present day.

There is no longer a temple on the Temple Mount.

There is a spiritual temple and those who belong to the body of Christ are

part of that spiritual temple because the presence of God is with them.

Individually, our bodies are called the Temple of God because the Holy Spirit dwells in us.

This same language is used, but the temple, in a sense, was taken

away or it no longer exists in that sense.

Instead, we have since 691 AD

a Muslim structure known as the Dome of the Rock and we'll talk a bit about that.

So, let's look at some of this present situation and it's a very problematic one.

That's why we have the issues we face today.

Before 1967, as Islam took over, they built a part of their city

and things wrought almost against this wall.

It was only a narrow corridor where Jews could come and wail, as they would call it, at this wall.

In 1967, on June 7th, all that changed with the Six -Day War as Israel was attacked

simultaneously by eight different nations.

It responded and it from Jordan, who in 1948 had occupied

all of what we call today the West Bank.

That's all Judea and Samaria, including half of Jerusalem.

Just as Egypt had occupied the area we today call Gaza

and Syria had occupied the Golan Heights.

All of these were occupied by other nations.

It's always strange.

We never hear anybody else called occupiers.

They just call the Israelis occupiers, but they were simply re -occupiers because it was their land in

the first place, going back to antiquity.

In 1967, that changed.

They regained this territory.

The Jordanian authorities surrendered.

The chief of the Israel Defense Forces, Shlomo Goran, sounded the shofar.

In 19 years, they were separated from this part of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall and all of this.

The soldiers that were serving at this time, when they were born, there was no access to this.

For the first time in their young lives, they were able to come and actually come to this place

where Jews prayed from a distance now, since the very beginning.

So, Shlomo Goran sounded the shofar.

He said, we're announcing the beginning of the Messianic Age, because he felt if Israel has returned, and for the first time in history, in

the last 2000 years, regained this territory, that something monumental must be happening.

I met with him, actually shortly before his death, and went through some of these things with him.

He explained how they came to the Temple Mount, they had Army Corps of Engineers measuring things, they were going to do

many things.

He even wanted to remove the Dome of the Rock.

Politically, it was not possible.

There was great protest.

He couldn't get his way.

He did some other interesting things before his death, but this was the intention of

Israeli authorities, at least of religious authorities, but the world was not ready.

So, the Temple Mount, from that point, became the most volatile 36 acres on earth,

and we have seen now a contest of holy sites.

What was where the place of the Temple was, now there's a Muslim Dome of the Rock.

Even though the wailing wall, or western wall, of the Temple Mount was called Al -Buraq wall,

because the Muslims claimed that Muhammad had rode his celestial steed Al

-Buraq, and tethered into this wall in his night journey to this place,

which all, of course, is a reinterpretation, because he died five years

before any Muslims came to Jerusalem.

In his night vision, he went to the far mosque, which in that day was in a place called

Medina.

He was in Mecca, but it's been reinterpreted, of course, for political reasons to be

Jerusalem.

So, they built a mosque later in the year 711, called the Al -Aqsa mosque.

The whole place is called Al -Aqsa, meaning the far mosque, and so this is where we

are in terms of interpretation of history.

If you look at this aerial view, you can see because of this, even though this came under the

sovereignty of the state of Israel, Jews relegated themselves to the western wall below,

and the Muslims continued to worship up on the top, where

the original Jewish temple was.

There are other reasons for all of this, but basically this is the status quo for today.

But if you notice, when the Muslims come up here for prayer, which is only once a year in Ramadan,

they pray toward Mecca, which is the opposite direction.

The Dome of the Rock is, of course, in the west.

They pray toward the east, which is toward Mecca, and turn their backsides to what is considered the

holiest place in Judaism, and maybe the third holiest place in Islam, but they don't

give it the same reverence at all.

Because of political situations, and because the Muslims had control of

this area called Al -Aqsa, or the Temple Mount, they decided to change the status quo by building a

new mosque on the site.

This was something that was not supposed to be allowed.

You can see them moving all these archaeological layers without any inspection, and they

threw the debris out.

We estimate about 20 ,000 tons of archaeological rich debris was just moved out,

so they could build this within what was called Solomon's Stables, a new mosque called the

Almawadi Mosque, and that's what exists today.

The pushback in all this started as early as 1987 with groups who wanted to see the

temple rebuilt.

We have Temple Mount Faithful who marched to the site wearing sackcloth like they were mourning over the temple,

carrying a model of the temple.

They built cornerstones for the new temple.

The sign behind me says,

Mikdash Hashlishi.

It's the third temple, stones of the ebony for the third temple, the Beit

Mikdash Hashlishi, the third temple.

There was another organization called the Temple Institute.

If you've gone to Israel, you may have visited this.

They've been working since 1987 to build all of the type of implements and

utensils required by Jewish law to have a functioning temple,

and to also begin training a priesthood to do the work when that day arrives.

Sanhedrin was reconvened in October of 2004.

This was the body, of course, that existed in the time of Jesus just because they were

priests related to the temple, and the temple was destroyed.

Their job ended, but now it's been reconvened in view of future rebuilding.

So, their goals are to locate at the original temple and find a descendant of King David, which by

the way is very interesting because on a genetic basis, we know people who were related to the house of

Hillel, related to the house of David.

Those descendants were known even though temple records were left.

There's a whole huge database of the descendants of King David, and they actually

meet on a regular basis once a year for a kind of a conference.

Then, of course, to ultimately erect a temple, an altar on the Temple Mount to renew sacrificial

system.

You can see headlines like this, the temple vessels are ready for the rebuilding of Jerusalem's third temple.

These are the kind of images you often see conceptualizing what that day would be like,

but of course, we're talking about a World War III happening, at least over this kind of thing.

In July of 2022, right at the end of COVID, Jews did something they hadn't done.

Just as the Muslims changed the status quo, Israel decided it was changed.

We've not been able to go up on the Temple Mount and pray.

It's our capital city.

This is our holiest place.

It's under Israeli sovereignty, but we have not gone there.

They decided to do that, and so that has been renewed.

As that's been done, it has caused, of course, conflict with the Palestinians

who now usurped charge of this place after the Jordanians lost it.

When we come to something like October 7th, and the massacre that happened there, and the war

that's going on right now, the day after that, you heard Ismail Hanea,

who's the head of Gaza, say, we have achieved a victory in the battle for Jerusalem, the defense of

Jerusalem.

Jerusalem's the axis of the conflict, and he went on elsewhere to say, because of Jewish prayer here,

because of Jews' desire to rebuild the temple, this is why the war is taking place.

It's a religious war.

If you look at the Palestinians, this is Hamas, one of the

organizations among the Palestinians, but the one who's in charge of their government, they have right at the center of

their logo, the Dome of the Rock, and then cross swords indicating that symbol of

Jihad, the way this will be the battle for this.

Another thing they mentioned, and this headline, it says, Hamas reveals the hidden reason for

the October 7th attacks on Israel.

It's the red heifer.

The red heifer is something that has to be raised and then

burned, and it's ashes used for the purification of those who will rebuild the temple and officiate within it.

So, they got these red heifers from Texas.

They have five of them right now sitting in Shiloh or Shiloh, and the hope is to

have this red heifer ceremony on the Mount of Olives, and then from that, have the means to

begin the process of rebuilding the temple.

That, of course, is frightening to the Palestinians because they feel they would

lose control, and that's part of the things behind this conflict.

Monadis, one of the codifiers of the Mishnah, which is

kind of put together, the oral law,

it's supposedly behind the written law, which is in the Bible.

He said, nine red heifers were prepared from the time that this command was given up until the destruction of the

second temple.

Verses prepared by Moses, the second by Ezra, and seven more prepared from Ezra until the destruction of the temple,

and the tenth, the king Messiah will prepare, may he be speedily revealed.

So, in other words, there haven't, there's been nine.

The one now that they want to see done, they believe will enter us into the Messianic

era.

So, this combines present politics with prophecy.

Just this week, and before this as well, I think back in May, Ben

-Gavir, who is the minister, national security minister, has

been going to the Temple Mount, praying for the hostages, things like this.

It's the first time an official of Israel has actually gone to the Temple Mount for prayer, and it moves

things into a different realm.

He says, and he said this Al -Aqsa belongs only to Israel.

You can see Muslims saying Al -Aqsa is only for them.

So, this conflict is now present, has been on for a while, will continue.

Some of those fighting in the IDF today are among advocates for rebuilding the temple, and they wear these patches

on their military uniforms, saying we are fighting so we can rebuild the holy temple.

So, that moves us into the temple's future plan, and on the way to eternity.

If we look at, at least as I see it, a literal unfolding

of the 70th week of Daniel, which is a period of seven years,

which I won't go into all the details on, but if you look at this kind of timeline, indicates the

next thing that is coming upon this world is a time of tribulation, the appearance

of the Antichrist.

At the midpoint of the seven years, that is three and a half years into it, the Antichrist will

desecrate the temple.

Jesus said that in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 15,

also in Mark, chapter 13, and verse 15.

So, and Paul will go on and talk about it too.

I think I have this coming up, so I'll mention it, but the temple obviously would have already been rebuilt by this

midpoint.

So, we could see some preparations for it being made today.

At some point, that will be successful.

It tells us in 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2, that he, that is this man of sin or the Antichrist,

takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God, just as

Satan always wanted to be like the Most High, as he comes and,

shall we say, empowers or gives his authority to this individual on earth.

In a real sense, this is Satan working through a man as he never has before, to try to achieve

his ideal on earth.

He's been in control of the earth.

He's the god of this age.

He's the prince in power of the air.

The whole world lies in the lap of the evil one, which is why his

humanistic and global agenda seems to be moving forward so well.

But all of this is still under the control of God who is in heaven, and Satan

knows enough of scripture to know that there is an end to him.

It's all been predicted, but he's trying to slow things down.

He can't attack God directly, but he attacks God's people on earth, trying to thwart this plan.

This is part of how that will happen with the temple at the center of it.

Zechariah tells us at the end of this period, God will gather all the nations to Jerusalem.

They're going to come against Jerusalem, do battle.

It tells us that he will in that day, and this is the very next verse, it says the Lord will go forth and fight

against those nations as he fights on a day of battle.

And in that day, his feet will stay on the Mount of Olives, which is in the front of Jerusalem on the east.

And so if you've never been to Israel and been on the Mount of Olives, you know you're facing the temple mount.

This is where the conflict with Antichrist will be.

This will be the final battle.

We call it the Battle of Armageddon.

And this moves us to the Lord coming into Jerusalem

to see the national repentance of the Jewish people, where

Isaiah 66, as a nation is born in a day, where Romans chapter 11,

verses 25 to 27 says, so all Israel will be saved.

That is all the Jewish people lived at that time.

It says, he says, he will pour out on the house of David and the habitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of

grace and supplication.

They will look on me whom they have pierced, and they will mourn for him.

So this is a time of national repentance.

And again, it's there right in view of the temple mount.

Now, what happens after this is the Isaiah chapter 2, verses 2

through 4 talks about the mountain of the house of the Lord.

That is the temple mount will be established as the chief of the mountains.

So there'll be a final temple built, and it says all the nations

will stream to it.

That's because now there's been a judgment of the nations and the believing nations along with believing

Israel will join them in this time when the Lord will set up his throne or his kingdom on earth.

You know, you may or may not have heard of this or even accept this, but I, again, looking at the

text literally, and it tells us that he will rain upon this earth, and it tells the rain upon the earth, and

it tells us that God's will will be done on earth as is in heaven.

So I take the idea of a thousand year rain of Christ on

earth quite literally.

And with that in mind, we have a temple for the world that will be built.

And that Ezekiel 39 tells us that he's going to set his glory among the nations.

He'll bring them back.

They'll know that he is the Lord when he's sanctified in their midst.

This is part of what happens in a battle called the battle of Gog and Magog, which

happens earlier, I think, in my opinion, before the tribulation.

But it also tells us in Ezekiel 37 that he's going to put his temple again

on earth.

And we have these nine chapters of Ezekiel, chapter 40 through 48, dealing with the

description and the directions for this earthly temple.

Now, some will say, well, why does it have to be literal?

Well, if you look here, I just laid it out for you.

Ezekiel is laid out where the first part of it, chapters 1 through

32, deal with the destruction of the first temple.

And the nation is disciplined and rejected.

The temple is ruined, and the nations are judged.

We come to chapter 33 through 48, and we see that the prophetic section of this

is moving from retribution to restoration.

The nation is restored.

This is where we have the valley of dry bones and all the things that happen there.

The nations are judged, and there's divine deliverance.

And then we see the idea of restoration and this temple that will stand.

Well, some will say, well, couldn't this simply be symbolic?

When we look at the language in Ezekiel, it says, well, I was by the river Kibar, because Ezekiel

was taken with the exiles to Babylon.

So, his whole vision is not in Jerusalem.

It's in Babylon.

And so, it says, the heavens are open.

That's all visions of God.

So, if he's not even in Jerusalem, and it's all visionary, why is this literal and not symbolic?

Well, let me just compare Ezekiel's visions and scripture concerning the temple with previous ones.

When Moses saw it, we mentioned in Exodus 25, he saw a literal

structure and built a literal structure, which was the tabernacle.

So, filled in history.

David in 1 Chronicles, it tells us he also had a vision, and he wrote it down.

And as a result, he gave it to Solomon, and they built the first temple.

That was literally fulfilled in history.

So, Ezekiel, same turn, same idea, has a vision.

He's told to write it down.

And then Israel is told that if they repent, and this is chapter 43 of

Ezekiel, it says, then let them make it or do it, build it.

So, they're supposed to build it, and that's literally fulfilled.

So, it fits very much with the text of the scripture.

If you look at the details, you have immense details.

Every single entrance and dimensions, everything is given

in explicit detail.

And those who have looked at this said, you know, these chapters describe the general layout of a

visionary temple.

Yes, but the chapters are difficult to read without some attempt to draw what Ezekiel describes.

The detailed measures invite the reader to sketch out this temple plan, which in fact is what Christian Jewish

exegetes have done throughout the ages.

If it can literally be drawn, it can literally be built, then it must be literal.

And that's exactly what happens.

Here's a model someone has built exactly based on the scriptures.

Nothing added, just what the text tells us.

So, we believe this will be a literal structure in the future.

And this is the place to which in this future age, all will give attention because

now the glory of God will return to this place.

And this is where the rule of Messiah will be from Jerusalem.

And there's topographical changes that are given.

There's many other types of things.

All these things seem quite literal with dimensions and actual places

that are given.

And then it says the glory of God returns.

It tells us that Ezekiel 43, led me to the gate, the gate facing toward the east, and behold, the glory of God of

Israel is coming from the way of the east.

Remember, that's the direction.

And if you were looking at Ezekiel, you'd see that earlier in chapters 9 through 11,

the glory departed as God was about to destroy the temple.

It tells us that his glory departed from within the temple at the Ark of the Covenant, went

to the outer part of the holy place, then to the gate facing

toward east, and then it disappeared.

It went over the Mount of Olives.

As you look at these directions of the return of the glory of God, it goes

exactly opposite.

It comes from that direction in the east and moves west until it again fills

the temple.

So, it's again, this is a restoration.

God is returning.

This all is part of fulfilling his little promise.

If it left literally in the past, it's coming back to be fulfilled literally in the future.

And then, of course, we have the final climax of all this is the New Jerusalem.

I want to explain about that because Revelation says, I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from

God.

And when we look at what John says in Revelation about it, he says, I saw no temple in it for the

Lord God and the Lamb are its temple.

So, it does have a temple, but its temple doesn't require a structure

as such because we're looking at those who are within that structure,

God himself.

But when we think what this is, it's going to be on earth, comes down out of heaven

from God to earth.

And I think what we look at, we see the dimensions of this cube structure.

It's actually the heavenly temple.

The holy of holies detached from that and coming down to earth.

So, that we, with the promise given in John chapter 14,

Jesus said, if I go away, I'll come again and I'll receive you to myself that where I am there you may be also.

He goes on to talk about in my father's house are many dwelling places.

If it were not so, I would have told you.

I go to prepare a place for you.

And so, the New Jerusalem is that place, but it's wherever he is, we will be.

And it tells us that he is going to be in his heavenly environment.

So, in my opinion, that's the final structure that we

have this temple, whatever it may be, in the ultimate

sense, dwelling with God forever in that form.

So, that kind of is going to end things.

I'll wrap it up this way.

Back in the second century AD, after the destruction of the second temple,

there was a rabbi named Akiba and some of his disciples were walking with him on the

temple mount.

And they saw a jackal jump out of some of the ruins.

And they remembered a statement in the book of Jeremiah that said, I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals.

And so, in typical expression, believing this, they tore

their garments to show their extreme mourning over this

fact that it happened, that destruction happened.

But Rabbi Akiba, he started laughing.

And they were, you know, what's going on?

He said, Rabbi, why are you laughing?

And he made this statement.

He said, if we have seen the prophecies of the temple's destruction come to pass, how much more should

we see the promises of its restoration fulfilled?

And what he was trying to say was that if literally God did this in the past and he's

promised to renew it and restore it in the future, then if this happened, the other

has to happen as well.

It's the same thing for us.

If Christ came and he said, I'm coming again, we know because he came literally and fulfilled

the prophecies, then he'll come again, just as he promised a second time.

We can take that to the bank.

We have great confidence in it.

So, that's what's being said here.

Let me just make this statement before we begin to take some questions.

I have a ministry called World of the Bible Ministry.

We bring the world of the Bible to the word of the church because our Bible is

content, but the world of the Bible is the context.

We want to be able to put those things together, and that involves all kinds of things.

But we take tours to the Holy Land.

We've done 115 of these, and I'll be back there in September and then with a tour group again

in April.

I have books on the temple.

I've written The Rose Guide to the Temple.

If you see that, that's mine.

We've done a virtual tour of the temple.

I have a book called The Temple and Bible Prophecy.

I have another book called Jerusalem and Prophecy, which lays out everything there.

And then a book you should try to get because it really answers a lot of the questions, but going on right now,

I'm actually the general editor.

I got 22 scholars together to answer questions about what should we think about Israel.

And one of the chapters in there on the temple, I also wrote.

So, those are kind of things that are available that I think would help.

So, with that, let me just say there's also the Evangelical Study Bible.

I was on the committee that produced this.

It is young earth creation.

Okay.

So, Dr. Marcus Ross was part of that in Genesis.

It also has a messianic focus.

I did over 100 of the archaeological study notes in that.

So, this is available through Zondervan.

It was produced by Harper Collins.

It's New King James version.

So, if you have a chance to look at this new study Bible, I think you'll enjoy that.

Well, that's all I have in terms of the PowerPoint.

Well, that was amazing.

All right.

I'm going to quick ask you about your tours.

Now, are you going there?

Are you taking a tour group there.

This September?

No.

I'm actually on the board of an organization called the Friends of Israel.

And so, with the Friends of Israel, our board is going over to see how some of our missionaries are doing.

They're also going to try to look at some of the relief works and things that we were doing

there.

And so, it's more of a fact -finding.

Okay.

In April, we're hoping by April, of course, things will be back to normal and we'll be able to

have a nice tour like we normally do.

So, that's our hope.

That's exciting.

Me and Diane were going to go to Israel in March,

but it got canceled.

So, now we're going to South Africa in September.

So, I was just wondering if you were going in September.

So, I would like to get over there before the

rapture anyway.

It's certainly possible to go to Israel.

El Al Airlines has the best schedule, but maybe a couple of airlines flying.

There's some areas that are compromised in the north.

Otherwise, there are small tour groups going on right now all over the place.

And people should go, I think, and give some encouragement to the Jewish people.

They've suffered probably one of the greatest attacks, not only physically

with 1 ,200 people killed in one day, but also psychologically, because within the very land they

sought to have as a refuge after the Holocaust, they had been attacked.

And things as bad as the Holocaust has happened to them again.

So, it's demoralized them.

They are struggling with this.

There's more people being killed as the war goes on.

They're getting nothing but terrible criticism, anti -Semitic

statements of these made really across the whole world.

And they suffer from that too, because people do not really understand the issues and the facts.

Behind them.

It's more...

The replacement theology.

People, we have stopped extending invitations to people to speak for us

that adhere to the replacement theology.

So, I'm going to turn this over to Terry.

All right.

Hi.

So, we do have some questions from our audience.

So, I'm going to go ahead and ask you some of those.

Robin has a few.

So, we're going to start with one of hers.

The temple picture that you showed that has the cherubim, was that in Syria?

And was that a Jewish temple?

No, that was a Syrian temple.

It was...

There's actually several up there.

The Ein Dara one, there's the Tell Tayanat temple.

All these have features that are very similar to what Solomon's temple would have looked like.

The Ein Dara temple I showed you is probably the closest in time.

So, they're about...

When you're trying...

Because we have architectural features given in the Bible, but we have no...

We had no examples till these temples were discovered back in the 1930s and following.

So, you're seeing similar things because they were built by similar people.

Okay.

Solomon used the expertise and the

architectural...

Oh, yeah.

That makes sense.

I was just trying to figure out how pagans could build a temple.

Like that Solomon did.

Okay.

When we go back, that's why I was going back to the Garden of Eden, because we have this layout of the presence of

God and then entrance to God.

And so, it follows a kind of a tripartite arrangement where

you have an entrance that is less holy.

Then a holy place where only priests can go.

And then a holy place where only the high priest can go.

And this kind of layout, because it was laid out at the very beginning of the creation,

seems to have followed through as God revealed it on Mount Sinai.

And then we see it in other structures too.

I mean, it's very interesting things.

You do these comparisons.

They're almost the same all the way through.

It has to do also with the idea that at Babel, when there was a dispersion,

there was a certain knowledge base that had been brought across with those who were on the ark.

And that kind of got dispersed.

That's why you see things like pyramids or other structures built in very diverse places, but

they follow the same kind of pattern.

Oh, that makes sense.

Yeah.

The general knowledge that was shared, and then as the dispersal happened, took place

elsewhere.

And temples are part of that.

Thank you.

And you also showed a temple reservoir.

And so, she was asking, where is the first temple reservoir?

Oh, that one is actually, you can't get into it.

If you, when I showed you that big picture of the

western wall with the Robinson's Arch, it's kind of centered over between that

and part of where the upper city was.

It was discovered in excavations they were doing just in the last, I'd say, maybe

five or six years.

Okay.

And because it's deep, but there's no way to secure it for people to enter it safely.

It's just, there's no access.

But it's not under the temple mount where you would think that the reservoir would be.

It's, well, on the, okay, so let me explain.

On the temple mount, we know of 37 reservoirs like that.

They existed, we know about them from the 19th century, when certain archaeologists were able

to go there.

And it was under the Ottoman Empire, and there were certain agreements made, and they could do certain things, and they explored, and they

identified these.

Since then, there's been nobody able to do any kind of archaeological penetration on the

temple mount.

So, all these things were done in the 1860s and 70s, and then nothing in the 20th

century.

So, we know these existed, and we know where they are.

If you go to the temple mount today, the Muslims have wells.

If you go there, you'll see these little kind of raised, like, look like cisterns, and they have

green kind of metal doors on them.

And those go down, and what were these reservoirs in the past, and full of water,

they use.

So, you often can even see people sometimes spraying water all on

the 36 -acre platform, that water comes from down below from those.

Oh, that's interesting.

And there are probably more.

There's some that, and all these existed on the temple mount.

We know from Conrad Schick and others who did these

excavations, again in the 19th century, that beneath the Dome of the Rock themselves, there are actually

reservoirs right in front of them and below them.

So, the temple had to have massive amounts of water to deal with the sacrificial system,

to deal with other things that were there.

That reservoir I showed you was for pilgrims who came to the temple mount, I mean,

by the tens of thousands, and they needed a water source.

So, all that was there.

In that aerial picture I showed you, I probably didn't notice, it was kind of a triangular,

a triangular square building at the bottom.

That's a huge reservoir as well.

Oh.

And just like that area I showed you where, called the Day of Pentecost, they went in and

were baptized.

That kind of stuff is all in that area on the southern side of the temple mount.

So, we know there's massive amounts of these things that.

Exist.

Thank you.

Okay, next is, do you think that the Ark was in the second temple?

Robin says that she's heard other people talk about that the Ark was never in that temple.

That's correct.

The Ark,.

I've written two books on the Ark of the Covenant, and you can find them, go to Amazon, just

look up my name, and you'll see one was called In Search of Temple Treasures, another one's called Searching

for the Ark of the Covenant.

And I weigh out the historical arguments about this, but we know as a fact

that the Ark was in the

first temple probably about 38 years before it was destroyed.

Tells us 2 Chronicles chapter 35 in verse 3, King Josiah, when

he was renovating the temple, making improvements.

They cleared out idols and things.

His grandfather Manasseh had put a

statue of a false god in the Holy of Holies, so the Ark of the Covenant had been taken out

before all that.

And so Josiah says, put it back in the temple which Solomon built.

So, we have that.

We also know that Hezekiah unwisely showed the treasures of the

temple to Babylon emissaries, and Isaiah told him one day they're going to come and take these things

away from here.

So, we believe that what happened was before the destruction of the first temple, when they saw

they were surrounded by enemies, 605 BC, that's when Daniel and others were taken captive.

589 BC, it's another siege.

Then 586 BC, the final destruction.

But they had all this time to prepare, so the priest would have taken the Ark of the Covenant and moved

it somewhere to safeguard it, because this is the Holy Ark.

All we have from that now is Jewish tradition.

A tractate in the Mishnah called Shekelim talks about the Ark

being hidden beneath the Temple Mount, and it tells us that one of the priests was separating

the wood that was used for sacrifice.

There was moldy wood and there was good job to separate it, and that he, when

he was suffering, it saw that the flagstones and the floor beneath him were different,

and he went to tell his fellow companions what he had found.

It said he was struck dead at mid -sentence, lest he betray the hiding place of the Ark.

And so, based on Jewish tradition, the Ark is hidden beneath the Temple Mount.

Those who want to build the Temple today say, we think we know where this is, and when we can get to it,

we will, and we'll bring the Ark out, and it'll be in the next temple.

But Josephus, the first century historian, tells us that the Ark was not there.

It says that the priest, the high priest, would go in on the Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,

and it says he would pour the blood right on the barren stone within the Holy of Holies, where the

Ark had previously sat.

That's an odd thing to do.

Why did he do that?

Well, because by law, he had to do that.

He's supposed to put on the mercy seat of the Ark, but what do you do if there's no Ark?

And so, Shlomo Gorin, he told me the very day I took that picture with him and had an interview, he said

they did that because the Ark was hiding beneath, and in continuity with the Ark that was

underground, they poured the blood there, because that was the closest thing to the mercy seat

itself.

He said, how else could they do Yom Kippur if they didn't have the Ark?

So, you have to think about it.

Maybe he's right, but it was lost to history, not brought out

after that.

So, the second temple just didn't have it, but there was always the understanding

that it existed and one day could be recovered.

So, that's all we know.

We know, and there's different theories as to where the Ark might be, but

with the Bible giving such attention to the Ark of the Covenant in the past, if it was

destroyed or stolen or something like this, you'd have some comment on it.

We know that over 4 ,500 of

the temple vessels were taken to Babylon, and it mentions, you can see it Ezra chapter 1.

You know, in Daniel chapter 5, they're offering, Beltshazzar has this kind of

party, and he brings some of the temple vessels out.

They were put in the temple of Shinar, and he brings them out to kind of mock the God of Israel, and that's when the handwriting on the wall

says your kingdom is fallen.

As the Jews are, under Cyrus, allowed to go back to the land, Ezra 1 says they took the

vessels with them, and it actually gives us an inventory, kind of in general sense, but

he mentions there's 4 ,500 of them that went back, but the Ark of the Covenant is not mentioned.

So, obviously, it wasn't taken or it would have been brought back.

So, these are the clues we have, and we do our best to try to put the pieces together.

Thank you.

Yeah, that does.

That does make sense.

So, there's a couple of questions that kind of dovetail on things that you mentioned in that

answer.

So, one of them is about the destruction of the temple

in 586, and what Ezekiel was witnessing about the Shekinah glory

leaving the temple a few years before that.

Jim would like to.

Know your understanding about that situation.

Well, as I was saying, I mean, Ezekiel 9 through 11 shows a progression

of the departure of the Shekinah from the first temple, and sort of in

preparation for it being no longer a holy structure.

God's presence has departed, and so now it can be destroyed as any building can.

That's part of divine discipline.

But as you look at Ezekiel chapter 43, what's interesting is the directions of the

return of God's glory into this rebuilt temple follow exactly the same path, but

in reverse order.

So, it's simply saying, whereas on the one hand there was divine discipline, now there is divine

restoration, and what was removed is now returned, and so it's simply

showing that picture.

I was saying this is literal because obviously if it happened literally the first time, by the way, if

Ezekiel saw a vision of the destruction of Jerusalem, and he wasn't even in Jerusalem, he was in Babylon

when that happened, and we know it happened historically and literally, then his vision in Babylon of the

future restoration of it should also be historic and literal.

It's just hard to argue otherwise, and so when I look at this, all the

things that attend to that are also literal.

God is going to restore his people and the land, he's going to restore the nation, he's going to restore

the worship features of that, and his presence is part of that.

So, that's the way I understand it if we look at those texts.

Okay, and then also you refer to the ark having a part of

Yom Kippur.

So, in the new earth, do you think that we will be going to Jerusalem for Yom

Kippur or any of the feasts?

In the millennial kingdom, which is the time in which Ezekiel's temple will stand.

Yes, because, and not here's the thing, not I wouldn't say all the feasts, there

were certain feasts that were had a fulfillment with the first coming of the messiah, and there

are feasts that will have a fulfillment with the second coming of the messiah.

And so, the one that is mentioned in Zechariah chapter 14

is the feast of tabernacles or what we call Sukkot.

So, it says at that time that the nation, certain nations that had gone, they had

representatives, these are believing nations, but they are part of nations

that attacked Jerusalem in the past.

And so, now these believers, because they're a part of that, need to show their allegiance and their

agreement with messiah as the king of all the earth and

the lord in Jerusalem by going up at the feast of tabernacles, which is the time the nations were to go

as well.

So, this is kind of a solidarity thing, just like, you know, if

nations who are involved in the holocaust, if we're going to accept them, how do we

know, I mean, there's such a stigma connected with it, they need to show that they're in agreement

with others.

So, that's the only one mentioned, but it does mention in Ezekiel that an altar is constructed,

it exists there, and a table of showbread.

So, if these things are there, they're part of a ritual system that it implies.

The sabbath will be there, but the sabbath is not a feast, it's simply one of the

instructions of God for the nation of Israel.

And what relation the nation, however, the nations is unclear, it's

clear that they will be the head and not the tail.

It tells us in Isaiah 2, the nations will come to Jerusalem, and the word of the

lord will go forth from Jerusalem.

So, there's a sense in which the nations who did not know the spiritual

things that God revealed to Israel will have that.

Education through Israel.

Yeah.

So, there's some chatter going on, several people are wondering about

sacrifices during the millennium.

Why would they be reinstituted since Christ as the Lamb of.

God has already made the ultimate sacrifice for us?

If you'll allow me to share my screen again, actually.

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay, let me do that.

Now, where's my presentation?

It's back here.

Maybe I shut it down.

Let me go back to it real quick.

All right.

I anticipated, I might be asked that, so I actually have a little bit of the PowerPoints on that.

Jan Markell has talked about that.

Yes.

And is that in the Bible, and I've just missed it?

No, it's there.

So, let me see.

I've got to share my screen, and I don't see how to share.

A screen again.

There should be a green button.

I don't see it.

Let's see.

Up, down.

Move your.

Mouse up and down.

Yeah, I am.

I'm not getting it.

You're not seeing anything on the screen right.

Now?

Not right now, no.

All right.

There should be a green button that says share.

It might be at it's probably at the bottom of your screen.

Over here.

Do you see a little Zoom square,.

A little blue Zoom square?

Now, I see it.

Okay, so share screen.

Okay, I put share screen, but I don't see my, there it is right there.

Now, are you seeing it?

Yes.

Okay, so let me now go to.

You can do a presenter view.

That'll help you.

Away from current slide.

Okay.

So, it's right here.

So, when we talk about the sacrifices in this

future temple, it's not just the book of Ezekiel that talks about it.

Oh, that talks about it in detail, but we see it in, we have these prophecies of the restoration

of the temple, but these are prophecies of renewed sacrificial system.

You see it in Isaiah.

You see it in Jeremiah.

You see it in Zechariah.

You see it in Malachi as well.

So, if you're looking at these particular passages, you'll see what it says about that,

and it just assumes it.

Now, to go back, what is the sacrificial system all about?

Back to the Garden of Eden.

Okay.

When men, until mankind sinned,

they brought about the fall, and the animal creation

suffered in that.

Oh, the animal creation didn't participate in the sin, but they participate in the

effects or the consequences of the sin, and because of that, God can substitute a sinless

animal for a sinful human.

That's exactly what he did, and it says in Genesis 3, 2, and 1, God made garments

of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them, and we see this, and this is the first time they recognize

that what the cost of sin is, that they have to be clothed, and the

skin has to come.

Animal just didn't give its skin.

It has to be taken.

It has to be killed, so they see the wages of sin is death, but it's not their death.

It's an innocent animal, and so this is how God taught from the beginning

what was necessary to come to him.

In Genesis 3, 15, we have the picture of what we call the proto -evangelium, the first proclamation of the

gospel, in which he says the seed of the woman will be in conflict with the seed of the serpent, and it

talks about how the serpent is going to bruise his heel,

and he will crush his head, and so now it goes right to a

masculine pronoun.

We believe this is spelled out later in Scripture as well.

This is a picture or prediction of the coming of the Messiah, laying out that the

substitute would be this one, and I think when you come to Genesis 4, in verse 1,

it talks about Eve.

She gives birth to Cain, and she calls his name Cain, which means acquire.

She says, I have acquired a man, and then it says in the Hebrew text, even the Lord.

It doesn't say with the help of the Lord, as some of her translations say, it just says et adonai, you

know, and so I think she believed that God had made this promise

of a salvation and a return to the

restoration of the world, and she thought, you know, as we all would, let's have

it sooner rather than later, but Cain was a disappointment.

Nothing changed with Cain, so she had a second son named Abel.

Now, it doesn't mean anything in English, but in Hebrew it's hevel, and that's the word for vanity.

That's the word used in Ecclesiastes for the condition of the fallen world, vanity of vanities, all is

vanity, and I think she's seen that the curse will go on, and that's why she named

it that, but the promise is still there, that it's projected to the future,

and I think when Abraham says in Genesis 15, 6, believe in the Lord and reckon him for

righteousness, what did he believe?

He believed what prior revelation was given to him.

This is progressive revelation, it's true, but he had a basis.

He believed in what God had said, that he was going to send a substitute.

He was going to bring salvation through this promised one who would one day

reverse the curse and bring about a new creation, and so that's when

he believes.

Otherwise, we simply say that salvation in the Old Testament is very different than salvation in the New Testament.

We have to believe in Jesus for salvation.

Well, we look back on what he did.

Abraham looked forward to what he was going to do.

It's still salvation by grace through faith, and the object of faith is always the same.

So this is tied in with this early passages in Genesis, and we look why millennial sacrifices.

Well, in the past, through the sacrificialism, they looked toward Christ's death, his

substitution, and in the future they will look back on Christ's sacrifice.

Very interesting, we talk about the Lord's Supper.

It tells us as often as you drink this cup or eat this bread, you proclaim the Lord's

death till he comes.

Well, what happens when he comes?

Well, there's going to be a whole generation who now sees

the risen Christ in their midst, but has no real connection with this.

They have to go back and realize this themselves.

So this is what some consider a moral view.

The other view is, and I hold this one, that Ezekiel

says it's that these sacrifices are for the atonement of Israel, and probably

in some sense for the atonement of the nations too for anyone who's going to come.

So it's like this.

The whole picture of salvation is a picture of Christ substituting himself for us.

And in the Old Testament, they offered an animal.

They put their hands on it.

Their sins were commuted to the animal.

It took its place.

They recognized this animal is dying for me.

In the New Testament, the same thing happened.

I mean, even the Lord Jesus probably brought sacrifices when he went up to the temple three times a

year through his early age.

When he ate the Passover with his disciples, that was part of that too.

That animal had been offered in the temple, and it was part of that sacrifice.

So all of that was part of something God commanded and had to be done.

When we come to the future temple, okay, Israel and

all the people living in this millennial age are immortal bodies.

They still are sinners.

They're not in resurrection bodies.

They're in physical bodies.

They walked from the administration of the time of Antichrist into the administration of

Christ, and so they're still the same people.

And it tells us during this period there's going to be a revolt or a ban among their descendants.

So this is all simply impossible.

So we have to have some kind, and on top of all of that,

God's presence is now located again on earth, just as it was in the time of the first temple.

So the approach to God has to be mediated again to people in mortal bodies, if they're going to be

part of his kingdom of priests.

Now people still say, well, but I don't understand how that works.

If Jesus Christ saved us past, present, future, then why would we need something

like that?

But it tells us in 1 John 1, 9, we have to confess our sins,

okay?

Now we're forgiven by the Lord past, present, future, and

that is sealed in heaven.

I think that's sure.

But on earth, our fellowship with one another and with God in a, and

shall we say a horizontal thing, can be cut off because of sin.

We have to restore that.

So it tells us that when we do this, the blood of Jesus' Son cleanses us of all sin.

That's 1 John 1, 7.

Well, cleanses present tense.

So there's still some sense in which the blood of Christ, though it was offered

forever for us, still has a very present and practical application.

Now I think that's what's happened in the future.

You have people living on earth in mortal bodies, sinful bodies, with

God not in heaven, but on earth.

And the approach to God is a very physical one.

And he has the same, his temple exists on earth, but we have this kind of

sacrificial system imposed again.

I simply see that in the text.

I don't see a problem with that.

Paul was saved.

He is offering a sacrifice for men under a vow.

There's no condemnation to Paul doing that.

He did that in keeping with what he understood was the right thing to do.

He didn't see any digression, nothing going back.

He saw that as part of his responsibility, as part of what God had commanded the nation of Israel.

He didn't command that to the Gentile nations, he commanded to the nation of Israel.

So I just see God's institution of the temple, past, present, future,

pretty much remaining the same.

There's no present sacrificial system because there's no temple.

And we have a spiritual relationship to God in heaven, tells us that we go with our prayers

straight to the throne in heaven, but God is in heaven, not on earth.

But one day he's coming back to earth and things will, I think, require this.

So that's the way I understand it.

And I don't see a conflict with anything else in scripture.

So is that a little clear?

As one person said...

Yeah, that made a lot...

I'm sorry, go ahead.

They simply said we can hardly spiritualize the sacrifices and then literalize the temple.

You're going to be consistent and a temple is built and it says they're going to be doing sacrifices in that rebuilt temple,

then to be.

Consistent, we have to have it all the same.

That makes a lot of sense.

We should end the.

Live stream and the recording.

Yeah, so we do have one more question, but I don't want to keep you longer than

we need to.

So I want to be mindful of that.

Would you mind answering one more question on the live and then we'll go ahead and wrap things up.

So Bill had asked about, I believe it was Bill, who would like to know...

Oh, it was Brad, I'm sorry.

He says that he read an interesting and very detailed description of Herod's temple with the location of

Solomon's temple within, written by the Rittmeyers.

Do you have an opinion about the Rittmeyer book?

Yeah, Lean's actually a friend of mine and

he and Kathleen have done some great work on this.

The chief book on this is called, well, I can't think of it all of a sudden.

Anyway, there's a big thick book he's done on this.

He was an architect on the archaeological project

for 15 years or so under Benjamin Mazar after 1967 when they did the whole

work of beginning excavations.

And so his expertise as an architect is doing

architectural renderings from the archaeological evidence to show what something looked like.

So from this, he's done the work to try to put together all the details of where things were

located in the temple, what it looked like, where things stood, sizes, all of that.

And his work is first rate.

Most people will.

Certainly agree.

Okay, perfect.

So as we're signing off our live stream and recording, if you could go ahead and just remind

people about your ministry and how they can find your resources.

The ministry is called World of the Bible Ministries.

The website is worldofthebible .com.

Worldofthebible .com.

And you'll find information on our tours there.

You'll find a lot of free resources.

We also have a YouTube channel with a lot of various videos and materials there.

So just encourage you to go to those sites.

Okay, perfect.

And once again, we are Creation.

Fellowship Santee.

And you can email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com to get on our

mailing list so that we can send you invitations to our upcoming speakers.

Next Thursday, we're glad to welcome back our fan favorite, Dr. Jason Lyle of the Biblical

Science Institute.

He's recently made a new discovery that really challenges the Big Bang Theory.

So we're excited to hear about that next week.

So join us.

All right, with that, we're going to go ahead and turn off the recording.