The Temple

The rebuilding of the Jewish Temple at Jerusalem is a central theme in biblical prophecy. Thomas Germine says of it,

[The] Roman emperor Vespasian ... was the sixth in the line of Caesars which began with Augustus. Under his reign [in 70 AD], Jerusalem was sacked by the Roman legions under the command of his son and successor Titus, who wantonly destroyed the great Temple of Jerusalem which had been rebuilt by the Jews after their return from exile in Babylon. The razing of the Temple fulfilled the prophecy uttered by Christ just days before his death, when he sat on the Mount of Olives and pointed over to the adjoining promontory of Mount Moriah, saying:
There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
After making this startling prediction, Jesus went on to speak of the Last Things and to caution His disciples that His return would be preceded by the appearance of a False Christ and a False Prophet — those whom John the Divine later depicted as the two Beasts. It was as if Our Savior had intentionally prefaced His Apocalyptic warnings with the prophecy of the Temple so that the contemporaneous fulfillment of the latter would give cause for belief in the former.

— Apokalypso, "The End of Time" series, "The Glory of the Olive Tree"

But as Germine points out, the powerful imagery of the destruction and resurrection of the Temple goes back even further, to Solomon's Temple:

In the Scriptures, the destruction of Solomon's Temple furnishes a metaphor for the dissociation of human Consciousness caused by the Fall of Adam, and the rebuilding of the Temple comes to symbolize the great historical task of cleansing and reintegrating the collective Mind of Man, so that it may again become the Sanctuary of the supernal Light. Quite appropriately, therefore, the great Apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel and Zechariah use the chronology of the Second Temple as a sort of temporal grid onto which they project the events of the end-Time.


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