The Jerusalem Temple According to Dall-E

Dall-E 2 is the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) for image generation. You describe in a sentence what you want, and Dall-E will create an image for you. 

Here are some fun examples:

"An astronaut riding a horse in photorealistic style":

"Llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, shot from below, tilted frame, 35°, Dutch angle, extreme long shot, high detail, dramatic backlighting, epic, digital art":

"Spiderman reading the Bible, comic style":

"A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension, digital art":

Impressive technology from the brightest minds in artificial intelligence.

I enrolled in Dall-E's private beta a few weeks ago and recently gained access. With access to Dall-E, I thought it'd be fun to do some Biblical images, see what fantastic scenes this AI would put together. 

I've seen some beautiful paintings of Jerusalem and the Temple by Alex Levin; might Dall-E do something comparable? I tried out some text prompts and some image prompts. Here's what Dall-E created for me:

Whoa - fascinating, isn't it? I really like those first three.

Some observations.

First, Dall-E seems to think the Temple is always on fire. 😬☠ 

I figure there are two potential explanations for that. First, there are many art depictions of the Romans destroying the Temple, and those often include the Temple aflame. With Dall-E trained on images from the web, it assumes the Temple should look like it's on fire.

Another possible explanation is that even for art depictions of the Temple where it's not being destroyed, there usually still is fire and smoke: on the altar in the courtyard. 

The AI doesn't understand what needs to be on fire, so it just haphazardly puts fire and smoke around the image.

But a pleasant side-effect of all this fire is, it looks like the fire of God's spirit. Some friends commented on these:

"This one doesn’t scream fire to me. It almost reminds me of an artist's rendering of the Holy Spirit around the temple."

"This one is rather beautiful. More like God's glory surrounding the Temple."

"This one reminds me of the pillar of fire in the wilderness"

"At first glance, I totally thought that was just a depiction of the temple filled with the Shekina"

Another observation: Dall-E seems to think that the Temple utilized Greek architecture, even though the Temple predates Greek architecture by several hundred years. I am thinking of those free-standing columns that show up in some of the images that scream "Greek" to me:

For frame of reference, the real Temple looked something more like this:

Which, to be fair, may have had decorative or even supporting columns, but not likely the free-standing columns we know from ancient Greece, e.g. the Athenian temple:

My explanation here is again the training set of images. 

Dall-E was fed millions of images from around the web to teach it what things look like. The web is populated firstly and primarily by Western culture, especially folks from the UK and US. Greek architecture is big in the West, and thus it shows up in the pseudo-mind of our AI Dall-E.

Fun stuff!

Ascending the Temple Mount: A Firsthand Account

Rumors.

That’s the given reason for dozens of stabbings in Israel over the last month. Palestinians stabbing Jews over rumors.

What rumors, you ask?

Why, the rumors that Israel is changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, of course!

What’s the status quo on the Temple Mount?

Read for yourself. Below is a firsthand account from a Messianic woman who visited the Temple Mount just days ago as part of the HaYovel group.

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“We spent the day yesterday in the old city of Jerusalem. In the last few days, we’ve had speakers each evening and have learned so much about Jerusalem and the Temple Mount that I felt like I knew Jerusalem much better this time as we came into the city. One of our speakers was named Ezra and he was one of the soldiers who fought in 1948 for the survival of Israel in its earliest days of statehood. He experienced an incredible number of miracles and God saved his life on a number of occasions. A couple of his stories had us all literally on the edges of our seats, eyes wide, just waiting to hear how he made it out of the situation.

“Our Jerusalem has been waiting for us for 2000 years!”

His words and his face showed so much love and passion for the Land as a whole and for Jerusalem specifically. They had tried to liberate Jerusalem in that war and it touched me deeply to hear him recount how he had told his commander how they needed to focus on Jerusalem because... “our Jerusalem has been waiting for us for 2000 years!” He said that as the soldiers gathered together to fight the Jordanians for Jerusalem, they were all excited...“We were on wings of excitement! Everyone looked so different, so bright. I thought the Maccabees must have looked the same before they went to liberate Jerusalem.”

They weren’t able to keep the city and they lost it to Jordanian control until 1967. Ezra told us that he lived those in-between years “with one eye on Jerusalem.” And then as he told us about the miracle of finally liberating Jerusalem in 67, he quoted the words of Psalm 118 – “I shall not die, but live and proclaim the works of the Lord!”

I wish I could repeat the whole evening for you word for word. It was amazing.

Back to yesterday morning: I helped in the kitchen, getting breakfast ready and serving it, and then ran to gather my things and to get on the bus. This time, because of the security situation, once we reached Jerusalem, we didn’t walk down the Mount of Olives like we have done many times in the past; we just drove down it, across the Kidron Valley, and then up to the Old City. We entered through the Dung Gate and then stood in line waiting to be able to go up to our first stop - the Temple Mount.

The Temple Mount and the Status Quo

The Temple Mount has been a big deal lately in Israel and the world – it’s been in the discussions of the Israeli government, it’s been all over the media, and the Palestinians have been rioting because their religious leaders have been claiming that Israel is going to allow Jewish people and others (anyone other than Muslims) to pray on the Temple Mount. They also have been claiming that Israel has no historical connection to the Mount, that it’s always been Muslim and that Jewish people going up on it defiles it. You always hear government leaders of the world speak of needing to “maintain the status quo” on the Temple Mount.

A little modern history lesson – in 1967, Israel recaptured the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanians who had held it since the Israeli War for Independence in 1948. The Temple Mount came into Jewish hands for the first time since the Romans destroyed the Temple back in 70 AD. Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister at the time, (in what I consider to be a misplaced and irresponsible attempt of a “good neighbor”, “gesture of peace”) gave the Temple Mount back into the control of the Jordanian religious leaders, the “Waqf”. The Muslims saw it as a sign of Israeli weakness. Since then, until today, the Jordanians have religious control and the Israelis have police/security control. It makes for a very tense and volatile combination.

Tour groups, and especially Jewish groups of people, who go up on the Temple Mount are often harassed by the Palestinians.

No one is allowed to wear any kind of religious symbol like a cross or a Star of David on clothing or jewelry. You’re not allowed to bring a Bible or prayer book onto the Mount. If you’re not dressed according to their modesty standards, (which can change from day to day) they will make you buy a shawl to cover up. Women call or scream things like “Allah huAkbar!” (meaning “god is great”), over and over at the groups, and usually the Muslim religious “guards” will come and harass the groups. (The guards don’t actually have any authority.) They watch to see if anyone is praying so that they can have them arrested, they try to get them to leave, they block their way and try to intimidate or anger them so the Jewish people or tourists react and then get escorted from the Mount. Lately the screaming ladies have been blocked from coming up on the Mount during the morning “visiting hours” so things have become a bit more peaceful. Because of all this, we didn’t know what it would be like as we visited the Temple Mount. The last couple times the HaYovel groups had tried to go up, their times on the Mount were very short.

Our group split into 2 different groups and were led by tour guides. I was in group #1 and our guide’s name was Oren. We entered the platform and moved around the Mount in a clockwise direction and stopped a few different times and learned about the Mount and about the 2nd Temple.

A couple of fascinating facts that we learned...

• In the 1870s, a sign/plaque was found in a house in an archeological dig right next to the Temple Mount that said basically, “No gentiles past this point.” It would have been posted on the wall that separated the Court of the Gentiles from the rest of the Temple area in the days of Yeshua (Jesus).
• There were several gates in the walls surrounding the Temple showing a heart of hospitality and welcome...a way of saying, “Please come as much as you can!”
• The building called the Dome of the Rock was built in 691 AD and only after it was built did the Muslims attach a tradition to it.

Then, at our 4th stop, a handful of Waqf guys (Waqf is the Jordanian religious authority) came over and spoke to our guide in Hebrew and Arabic, telling him that he couldn’t be there, that we all had to leave. They kept interrupting him when he tried to speak. One man in our group knows Arabic and he told us later that the guards were confused about who we were. They thought we were a Jewish group and wouldn’t believe the tour guide when he told them we were a Christian tour group. When asked to speak in English, one of the Waqf guards answered that he didn’t speak English.

The next several minutes were a bit chaotic. The guards were yelling, an Israeli policeman came over and Oren was talking to him, trying to explain. We all slowly moved forward along the path. The Waqf guards would stand in front and talk loudly and try to make us stop, and then someone in the front of the group would start moving (usually our friend, Mr. Pauls) and we would all just keep walking forward – around and past the Waqf guards.

Eventually Oren left the Israeli policeman to work it all out and just went back to giving us our tour – speaking loudly over all the noise. One of the young ladies in our group, Erica, had helped him focus by asking questions; raising her hand and calling loudly...”Excuse me? I have a question. Could you tell us ...” I was proud of her. : )

Another of our ladies, Teresa, approached one of the Waqf guards, asking if he wanted to see her passport, and trying to visit with him. At one point, he stepped closer and explained quietly that he didn’t have a problem with us being there, but that they didn’t want our tour guide there and that he was telling us lies. He said, “He’s telling you this is the Temple Mount and it’s not! It’s the Al Aksa.” (The Arabic/Muslim name for the Temple Mount) Teresa thought to herself, “You say our tour guide is the one who is lying? You just said a few minutes ago that you didn’t speak English!”

After several minutes, the Israeli security guard reaffirmed our right to be there on our tour and we continued walking. The Waqf guards and a handful of others continued to walk alongside of us, watching Oren closely, and sometimes taking pictures of us. Toward the end, a group of Muslim ladies shouted at us, but they kept their backs turned so they couldn’t be identified. We ended up being able to walk around the entire perimeter of the Mount and were able to conclude our whole tour so we were very thankful.

I experienced a strange mix of feelings while there. I was so blessed and thankful that we serve a God who can hear our prayers that are spoken only in the heart. I was praying a lot while I was there, and the Waqf guards had no idea. I was grateful for the opportunity to be up on the Mount at all. Many times people are turned away. I was also angry – that even the most simple and basic religious rights, such as prayer, are not allowed in a place so precious to those who believe the Bible. I can pray silently inside, but I shouldn't need to in that place. Yeshua loved the Temple. It made me wonder what He would have done if He had been there with us. I prayed about my feelings...I want to always stand for Truth, for what’s right, and not back down...but in a kind and honoring way, not nasty or bitter. I was proud of our tour guide and the others who held their ground and didn’t let the intimidation push them back. The rest of us, our “group 2”, experienced more opposition than we did (I’ll hopefully share the videos when I get my photos put together) and yet everyone kept their cool and didn’t give the Waqf the satisfaction of getting a reaction.

I also felt a quiet joy, a bit of satisfaction in the fact that I had an Israeli flag patch on my backpack that the Israeli security hadn’t noticed when we went through security, so I was able to take it with me up on the Mount. (Israelis have been arrested for waving the Israeli flag on the Temple Mount.) The colors blended in with the rest of my backpack so it wasn’t obvious at all and no one saw it except our Israeli friend, Doron, who was with us (who had arranged the opportunity to buy the backpack a few years ago). But other people seeing it wasn’t important to me. I was just glad that I could take an Israeli flag up on the Temple Mount.

Once we had left the Temple Mount area, we gathered in the street. Our tour guide told us, “Many many thanks for coming to this ancient holy site. Thank you for being brave, for not listening to the Waqf, for keeping on going. Thank you for joining us and supporting me, my people and country.”

We went straight from there to the Kotel (the Western Wall) and had a time to pray. The Jewish people welcome and allow anyone who wants to, to come and pray at the Wall – no matter their religion, their nationality, etc. It was a quiet morning at the Wall and our time there was sweet. I was able to quiet my heart and have a time of praise and thanks, and prayer and petition. I was struck by the extreme differences I had experienced. In a matter of a couple hours I

“The Jewish people welcome and allow anyone who wants to, to come and pray at the Wall – no matter their religion, their nationality.”

felt exclusion and welcome, harassment and acceptance, shouting and intimidation and peace and quiet. I was filled with gratitude for the Jewish people who have allowed the world to come to their most special place (since the Temple Mount is, for the most part, off limits to them right now) without any kind of censoring. There’s respect, honor, and hospitable welcome. I’m challenged to remain generous with what God has given me, by their example.

In case you hadn’t guessed, : ) I’m not at all politically correct about the Temple Mount. I fully support the right of the Jewish people and everyone else to be able to pray on the Mount. I greatly look forward to the day...I pray for the day, when prophecy is fulfilled and the next Temple is built and that mountain becomes, once again, “a house of prayer for all nations”. (Isaiah 56:7)

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Thanks to Ardelle Brody, an acquaintance of mine, who relayed this story from a friend, Megan, who visited the Temple Mount just 4 days ago.

Sadly, the status quo on the Temple Mount is unlikely to change. The Israeli Prime Minister has pledged to uphold the status quo. It will take bold leaders who are unafraid of world opinion to do otherwise.

Beit HaMikdash, sacrifice, and Messiah: Meditations on 1 John 2

My children, I am writing you these things so that you won’t sin. But if anyone does sin, we have Yeshua the Messiah, the Tzaddik, who pleads our cause with the Father.

Writing these things so you don’t sin. John is encouraging the believers to keep following the Lord. Reading later in this passage, some of the community he was writing to was in apostasy, denying God’s Messiah but clinging to God – perhaps converts to Judaism.

Everyone who denies the Son is also without the Father, but the person who acknowledges the Son has the Father as well.

John calls this a form of apostasy in which such people have neither God nor Messiah. It’s a brash view, but one that may actually line up with the rest of the Scriptures and biblical history. For example, if ancient Israel rejected one of God’s prophets, say Jeremiah, were they not also opposing God? How much more, then, for God’s messianic son?

This warning against sin, apostasy in particular, may be one of the reasons for his letter.

Also, he is the kapparah for our sins — and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.

The kapparah, a Hebrew term for sacrifice, is used here by the translator – David H. Stern, a Jewish luminary of the Messianic world – to highlight the link between Messiah’s death and the sacrificial system of Judaism.

Quite fitting to read this today, at the beginning of the 10 days of awe leading up to Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.

Messiah’s death is the sacrifice for sin. The was also the understanding of numerous authors of the New Testament, I’m thinking in particular those of the gospels (“in Yeshua’s name is repentance leading to the forgiveness of sins…”) and again in Acts.

It aligns with the messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53 – shared in numerous circles of Judaism – in which the suffering servant’s death will bear the sins of humanity:

After this ordeal, he will see satisfaction.
“By his knowing [pain and sacrifice],
my righteous servant makes many righteous;
it is for their sins that he suffers.
Therefore I will assign him a share with the great,
he will divide the spoil with the mighty,
for having exposed himself to death
and being counted among the sinners,
while actually bearing the sin of many
and interceding for the offenders.”

Messiah’s death-as-sacrifice-for-sins, has been abused to create anti-Jewish ideas inside Christianity, seeing Messiah replacing the Biblical sacrificial system. Indeed, many interpret the book of Hebrews as pushing this very idea.

Is it possible to interpret Messiah’s death as something besides replacing Judaism’s sacrificial system? I feel we as Messianic believers need a clear answer to this. Is Messiah’s death a once-and-for-all sacrifice? Or is it for the 2000 year absence of the sacrifices? Is Messiah’s death a replacement for or an addition to the sacrifices? Does Messiah’s death atone for the sins covered by the Levitical sacrifices, or ones not covered by that system? These questions the Messianic movement needs clear answers to.

More interesting still is the timing of Messiah’s death. His death occurred roughly 35 years before the destruction of the Temple – and with it, Judaism’s sacrificial system. Nearly 2000 years later, this same Temple and sacrifice system have never been reinstituted.

This has 2 interesting effects today.

First, it strengthens the argument for Messiah’s death as atonement. Acting in lieu of sacrifices and unable to consider Yeshua, Judaism has had to reinvent its own theology about atonement, reworking itself as a Temple-less exile religion. (This is well-known by Christians, so much so that the Jewish Q&A site Mi Yodea has several canned answers for this often-posed challenge to Judaism.)

And while Judaism certainly has answers to the question of atonement-without-sacrifices, these are later inventions and not authentic to ancient Judaism. Such uncertainty and scrambling for an answer points to the rightness of a more certain and divine answer: Messiah’s death is the atonement for sin, done at just the right time in history, for a purpose that, in its fruition, has seen billions of non-Jews embrace the Tenakh as their own Scriptures, the God of Israel as their own God.

I do wonder whether this Temple-destruction event is what Messiah had in mind when he said,

“Jerusalem, see your house is left to you desolate. You will not see me again until you say, baruch haba b’shem Adonai.”

In this verse, “your house” may refer to the Temple, and desolation to the coming destruction of Jerusalem, finally occurring some 35 years after these words were spoken.

The second effect it has had is, once again, to strengthen the idea of Christianity replacing Judaism, creating the ill-effects of anti-Jewish theology in the Christian world. It does this by saying the Temple and Jerusalem (and thereby all Israel and Judaism) are now left desolate and ignored, while Messiah is glorified in the nations. Jews and Israel and Jerusalem don’t matter – or rather, aren’t exalted any longer – now that the multi-national Messiah has arrived.

One can see quite easily how we have arrived at the status quo, where Christianity is very much separate from Judaism, where Christianity has at times been a vehicle of anti-semitism, and where Jews consider Christianity completely foreign and idolatrous.

This is indeed one area where Messianic believers are called in service to God: to repair this damage. We have a great deal of work ahead.

In the next verse, John urges his audience to obey God’s commandments. We’ll look at that in the next post.

The historical, verifiable, melancholy miracle that is Tisha B’Av

Tl;dr: Tisha B’Av – the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av – has an amazing, horrific history behind it, and it occurs today. It simultaneously gives evidence of God and makes us question Him.

We often think of miracles as positive events, like a miraculous healing, or a resurrection; something good for humans.

But miracles are more broadly – and in my opinion, more accurately – described as any divine intervention in the natural world, whether positive (healings, etc.) or negative (judgment).

The Bible gives us examples of both:

• God acts through Elijah to resurrect a dead girl – positive.
• God sends a string of plagues and death on the hard-hearted Egyptians – negative.
• God proves himself by sending fire from heaven, and all of idolatrous Israel sees it and repents – positive.
• God sends the Babylonians after the nation of Judah after their repeated rebellion – negative.
• God works through Yeshua the Messiah to restore vision to a blind man – positive.

Tisha B'Av – the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av – which began last night and continues through tonight (August 5, 2014), is an instance of a negative miracle. At least 15 negative events have afflicted Israel and the Jewish people on or around the 9th of Av.

And intriguingly, many of these negative events are verifiable. We can actually look at the events that have occurred on Tisha B’Av, and verify them through secular history and scholarship.

If these negative events have all occurred on this date, I believe it is a kind of miracle; God intervened in the natural world and caused the great negative events – many of them negative miracles in themselves – to coincide on this date, making it a verifiable miracle.

Verifiable, because most of the events can be verified to happen on this date.

Miraculous, because  such great tragedies occurring all on the same date in history, repeated in multiple generations, is either the most amazing string of horrific coincidences, or an act of divine intervention. I believe Judaism is right in choosing the latter.

Despite the verifiable, negative miracle that is Tisha B’Av, it’s largely discarded by Messianics here in the US; very few of even the Messianic leaders here in my corner of the world mention Tisha B’Av, let alone observe the traditional fast.

In this post, I wanted to look again at Tisha B’Av and suggest that Messianics and Hebrew Roots Christians ought to remember this day with mourning, in unison with the Jewish people. Tisha B’Av leaves me with some puzzling questions, too, which I’ll pose at the conclusion of this post.

But first, here’s the list of events that have occurred on, or around, Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, in chronological order:

Key:
Orange = traditional, unverifiable
Purple = Biblical
Blue = historical, verifiable

• Israel worshiped the golden calf on their way to the land of Israel on the 9th of Av, around 1446 BC.
• 10 of the 12 spies sent into the land of Israel return with a bad report, preventing that generation from entering.
• The Babylonians destroyed the first Temple in Jerusalem, 7th of Av through 10th of Av, 587 BC (2 Kings 25, Jeremiah 52)
• The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem, 9th of Av, 70 AD
• 100,000 Jews killed in Bar Kokhba's revolt, 9th of Av, 132 AD
• Roman commander Turnus Rufus destroyed Jerusalem and plowed the site of the Temple, 9th of Av 133 AD
• The First Crusade began, killing 10,000 Jews in the first month, 9th of Av through 24th of Av (July 31st through August 15), 1096 AD
• Jews expelled from England, 9th of Av (July 18th) 1290 AD
• Jews expelled from France, 9th of Av (July 21st) 1306 AD
• Jews expelled from Spain, 9th of Av 1492 AD
• Germany entered World War I, 9th of Av 1914 AD
• Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler received approval for the Holocaust, 9th of Av 1941 AD
• Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Nazi concentration camps, 9th of Av 1942 AD
• The Jewish community in Buenos Aires was bombed, 10th of Av, 1994.
• Jewish expulsion from Gaza and the subsequent destruction of Gush Katif, 10th of Av, 2005.

Notice that the last 11 events or so are known to be historical; verified as occurring on or around the 9th of Av. The Bible actually records the date of the destruction of the First Temple. The 2nd Temple’s destruction is known to historically occur in 70AD, but I can’t find secular histories verifying the 9th of Av traditional dating.

Several of these events directly impact Messianics.

For example, Linda Davidson’s Pilgrimage: From the Ganges to Graceland reports that Jewish followers of Jesus, even though they did not support Bar Kokhba’s rebellion, were barred from Jerusalem along with the rest of the Jewish people, being allowed to visit Jerusalem only on Tisha B’Av.

As I did my research for these dates, I noticed that many of them fall around Tisha B’Av. For example, the first temple was besieged on the 7th of Av according to 2nd Chronicles 25, while Jeremiah reports the same events occurring through the 10th of Av. The First Crusade officially began on the 24th of Av. And of course, things like the Jewish expulsion from Gaza occurred on the 10th of Av.

Still others, such as the Jewish expulsion from England, are certain to have happened during the 9th of Av. I just wonder if Jewish reckoning tries very hard to align the events on the 9th, when in fact they take place around that date.

Why the 9th of Av, why Jews, why judgment?

One of the top search results on Google for the 9th of Av is a Christian web page claiming “God has cursed Judaism and the Jews” and that the 9th of Av is evidence that “God is done with the Jews” and has since moved onto non-Jews via Jesus.

Of course, that is an easily-rebuffed argument, since these events happened prior Jesus, and God still wasn’t “done” with the Jews. (Not to mention, the Christian bible makes no claim about God being “done with the Jews”, and in fact, makes claims to the contrary.)

Traditional Jewish speculation claims this day is cursed by God, having forever been cursed since that first instance with the 12 spies and the bad/false report of the land of Israel.

I happened to have as guests two holy brothers in Messiah this week, Israeli musician Micha’el Ben David, and Messianic Jewish teacher Andrew Gabriel Roth. I asked them both this same question: why the 9th of Av?

Ben David suggested that because God works in cycles, he has brought judgment on Israel during that particular date, beginning, perhaps, with the 12 spies and the false report.

Roth concurred with the traditional Jewish view that the day is cursed by God.

Conclusion

Whatever the case, fine Kineti readers, we are left with a verifiable reality that tragic events – some of the very worst events in human history, including the Holocaust – began on the 9th of Av.

If anything, the 9th of Av is evidence of God at work – miracles.

Going deeper, it’s evidence that God’s vehicle of work in the earth is Israel and the Jewish people.

Going deeper still, I question why God would bring judgment to Jewish people at these times, when Jewish people committed no great sin at those times in history. For what great sin of the Jewish people did the Holocaust begin on the 9th of Av? (Or was it the sin of humanity, and God’s people were suffering vicariously?)

Was it merely God’s signature in history, hinting he’s still there despite the evil going on? Or was it really judgment against Jews for something? I cannot imagine the latter.

Or, perhaps these great evils were necessary to bring about a greater good; destruction leads to creation; the Holocaust creating the conditions for the recreation of the State of Israel in 1948?

I don’t have those answers. I’d love to hear your thoughts, fine Kineti readers – why are these great evils perpetrated on the 9th of Av? And why are the Jewish people almost always on the receiving end?

Chanukah, and the most contested real estate on Earth

The Washington Post hosted an interesting article today on the history of the Temple Mount. Excellent infographic to boot, showing its history from Chanukah renovation to its current Islamic domination:

Hat tip: Ritmeyer Archaeological Design

Does the Temple have significance for Yeshua’s disciples?

• Yeshua called the Temple “my Father’s house”
• Yeshua was zealous for the Temple
• Yeshua appeared at the Temple during Chanukah, the Feast of Dedicating the Temple
• Yeshua died for the Temple
• Yeshua called the Temple a “house of prayer for all nations”
• The early followers of Yeshua, including Paul, sacrificed at this Temple
• It appears from the Scriptures that a 3rd Temple will be built, God’s presence will return to that Temple, and God’s people will appear at the Temple.

In Israel last year, I was impressed by the Jewish devotion to the restoration of the Temple. I snapped this photo of a mural on a Chabad synagogue within eyeshot of the old Temple:

Learning about the Messiah will help bring about the 3rd Temple, according to this Chabad Orthodox Jewish mural in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The subject of the Temple, I’ve found, is touchy among Christians and even some Messianics; like you have to walk on eggshells whenever its mentioned.

Some well-meaning people feel that a Temple with a resumed sacrificial system will somehow cancel the atoning work of Yeshua on the cross.

And yet, any person that honors Chanukah – a remembrance of the cleansing and rededication of the Temple – must hold a special place for the Temple in their hearts.

And, if we are true to our roots as an Israel-centric faith, our Hebrew Roots, and the Jewish root of our Messiah faith, the Temple ought to not only be a place of great significance for us, whether Jew or gentile, but furthermore its current state should cause us consternation and we should pine for its rebuilding.

More on that in the next post.