Does The Temple Really Have To Be Rebuilt?

It would be helpful to be familiar with the posting on this blog about Bible prophecy, "The End Of The World As We Know It".

The general feeling among those who are expecting the fulfillment of biblical prophecies of the "Last Days" in our time is that the Jewish Temple must be rebuilt before the beginning of the Tribulation Period. The Tribulation Period will last for seven years and will include the time that the Antichrist will effectively reign over the world and the tribulation sent by God on the world.

The Book of Daniel, which is a very important prophetic book, twice mentions an "Abomination of Desolation" which is a defilement of the Temple in the Last Days, which will be committed by the great leader of the time, who we commonly refer to as the Antichrist.

According to the prophecies the Antichrist will cause the Jews' sacrifices to cease. The place where sacrifices had to take place was the Temple and for the sacrifices to cease that means, at some point, they must have begun. These sacrifices have not taken place since the time of the Romans.

In the New Testament the Second Book of Thessalonians, Chapter 2 Verse 4, states that the Antichrist will go into the Temple and proclaim himself as God.

All of this is taken to mean that the Temple must be rebuilt, for the Tribulation Period and Apocalypse to take place, since it does not exist now. There is a movement in Israel to rebuild the Temple that has all of the correct religious utensils ready.

The Temple was originally built by King Solomon, son of King David, and this First Temple is also referred to as Solomon's Temple. David had purchased a hill, Mount Moriah, in his capital city of Jerusalem, to build a Temple in commemoration of where a plague had been halted. 

But it was David's son, Solomon, who was to build the Holy Temple because David had been a warrior and had shed so much blood. The Temple was to replace an earlier worship center, known as Shiloh, which had been destroyed in a raid.

Solomon's Temple, atop Mount Moriah, served as the focal point of the Jewish religion for about four hundred years, until it was destroyed in the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians which began in 587 B.C. The Jewish people, minus the "Ten Lost Tribes" which had earlier been taken away by the conquering Assyrians and scattered around the Assyrian Empire, were taken away to captivity in Babylon. Babylon had earlier risen up against and conquered Assyria, displacing it as the great power of the day.

Within a few decades Babylon was conquered by Persia. The Persians allowed the Jews to return to their homeland, and rebuild their Temple, if they wanted to. But the Jews had not been slaves in Babylon, unlike their earlier bondage in Egypt they shared in the prosperity of the city and many were doing quite well. It is almost certain that the majority of Jews in Babylon chose to stay, and not to return to Israel.

But this actually made Israel more devout because the most religious people were the ones that returned. The Second Temple was rebuilt, although it was definitely not as elaborate as the First Temple had been. It was at the same site as the First Temple, atop Mount Moriah.

Centuries later Israel was ruled by the Romans. The governor of Judea was Herod the Great. He dismantled the Second Temple in order to rebuild it on a magnificent scale. This was the Temple at the time of Jesus. Herod's Temple probably exceeded Solomon's original Temple in magnificence. 

Herod had brought in massive stones and built a great retaining wall around Mount Moriah. The remaining space was then filled in. This formed what we refer to today as the Temple Mount. It was not entirely filled in. There is a "basement" of the Temple Mount, in the southeast corner of the Mount, that used to be called Solomon's Stables and has now been converted into a mosque. At the southern end of the Temple Mount there were several stairways to the top, which used to be known as the Hulda Gates. There is a tunnel inside the Western Wall.

However Herod's magnificent Temple would be destroyed not long after it was completed, when the Jews rebelled against Roman rule. The Temple was razed and all that remained was the Temple Mount. Moslems later built the two mosques on the Temple Mount.

The Temple has never been rebuilt, since it's destruction by the Romans, although many who expect the biblical prophecies of the Last Days to be fulfilled believe that it must be rebuilt in time for the Antichrist, as described above.

Herod built the Temple Mount around Mount Moriah so the original site of the Temple is where the Dome of the Rock now stands. This mosque is so-named because it stands over what is called the "Foundation Stone". Long before King David bought the site to build the Temple, this stone is believed to be where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

We know that the first half of the Antichrist's seven-year reign will be a time of great peace and prosperity. But Moslems consider the Temple Mount ( Noble Sanctuary ) as their third holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. The Foundation Stone, within the Dome of the Rock, is considered to be from where Muhammad ascended to Heaven.

The Temple Mount is such a sacred site, to Jews, Moslems and, Christians, that Israel wisely allowed a Jordanian organization called the Waqf to administer the site after it recaptured the Old City of Jerusalem, in the 1967 Six-Day War, in order to keep the peace.

The idea that Moslems might acquiesce to allowing the Dome of the Rock to be razed so that the Jews can rebuild their Temple on it's original site is utterly unimaginable. At least one in five people is a Moslem. If anything should happen to the Dome of the Rock, and the Jewish Temple should be rebuilt on it's original site in it's place, close to two billion Moslems are going to be extremely upset and the world most definitely would not be living in peace and prosperity.

But let's take a closer look whether the Temple actually needs to be rebuilt on it's original site for the biblical prophecies of the Antichrist in the Last Days to be fulfilled.

The general feeling is that the Temple must be rebuilt on it's original site, no other location will do. But the Bible gives instructions for building the Temple. The First Temple, Solomon's Temple, was built according to these instructions. But the Second Temple, rebuilt after the Jews' return from exile in Babylon, is known to have been nowhere near as elaborate as the First Temple, and therefore not built exactly according to the instructions. Herod built the spacious Temple Mount for his rebuilding of the Temple, which certainly was not in the original plan.

As it stands now the Temple Mount effectively serves as an open-air Temple, including the Jewish area at the Western Wall. The Temple Mount itself is globally considered as an ancient treasure. Would it even be worth it to tear much of it up just to put a modern structure on it? It might end up greatly diminishing the whole thing.

There are references to the Antichrist and the Temple, in the "Last Days" as described above. Jesus, in the Gospels while Herod's Temple was still standing, foretells correctly that the Temple will be so completely destroyed that "not one stone will remain upon another", but there is no prophecy of the Temple being rebuilt after being destroyed.

What about the reference to the Antichrist entering the Temple and proclaiming himself to be God, in the Second Book of Thessalonians Chapter 2 Verse 4, after Herod's Temple had been destroyed?

Let's carefully consider the word "Temple". When the New Testament was being written Christianity was an illegal and underground religion. The Jewish religion was authorized under Roman law but Christians lost that legality when they separated from Judaism. A "church" in those days referred not to a building but to clandestine meetings of believers in private homes. This is where a fish got started as a symbol of Christianity, since some of the Apostles had been fishermen, it was a clandestine symbol for a meeting of believers.

When this prophecy of the Antichrist in the "Temple" was written Christians were in hiding. They were not building church buildings, certainly not the great cathedrals and basilicas that would come later. There was only one word in use for a great religious building and that word was "temple".

The Antichrist might declare himself to be God at the Temple Mount. But it could also mean any great cathedral or basilica.

Remember that in "The End Of The World As We Know It", on this blog, we saw how St. John, author of the Book of Revelation, was an ancient man without the slightest understanding of modern technology. God showed him visions of things taking place in the distant future, and he described them to the best of his ability. 

St. John's description of bizarre giant flying "locusts", in Chapter 9, is just as perfect of a description of modern helicopters as the equally bizarre "lions", later in the chapter, are of battle tanks. All that we have to do is apply the same principle to the prophecy of the Antichrist in the "Temple".