Oct 8, 2014

Another Temple in Jerusalem?

Just an update on the continuing struggle of the Orthodox Jews (who openly reject Jesus as Messiah) and the many evangelical Christian organizations that support them (even though they openly reject Jesus as Messiah!) to build a third temple on the "Temple Mount" in Jerusalem.  One is coming soon, but who will build it?  Messiah, Jesus Christ?  Or the "seed of the serpent", the Antichrist?

News out of the Middle East makes it seem impossible that Jewish religious rites will ever again be performed on the Temple Mount. Yet the Bible explains events that will unfold at the site.

Past: A model of Jerusalem and the Temple, located in the Israel Museum, shows what the city looked like during the time of Christ.
Source: Thinkstock

Twenty-three. That is the number of times armies have surrounded the city of Jerusalem throughout history. Egyptians, Assyrians, Romans, Muslims, and Christian Crusaders have all had their turn.

Fifty-two. This is how many additional occasions the city has been attacked. It has been utterly destroyed twice.

Forty-four. That is how many times Jerusalem has been captured and recaptured.

Yet surpassing all these numbers combined, which come from Eric H. Cline’s Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel, are the differing opinions on how to bring actual and lasting peace to the City of Peace.

Today, tensions between Israelis and Palestinians largely center on the Gaza Strip, which is just over twice the size of Washington, D.C., and is governed by the terrorist organization Hamas. For years, the global community has favored a two-state solution, with the idea of having two official nations—one Israeli, the other Palestinian—peacefully exist side by side. Often this answer includes the contested city of Jerusalem being under international supervision.

Yet repeated failures to implement this have left many disillusioned. For example, in the wake of the most recent Israeli response to Hamas firing rockets into the Jewish state, The Washington Post published an article titled “Beneath the Conflict in Gaza Lies the Death of the Two-State Solution.”

The publication cited a Pew research poll that showed a growing segment of Middle Easterners believe that Israel and an independent Palestine could never peacefully co-exist. In Egypt, the number of people who believe this jumped from 40 to 48 percent over last year. Tunisia rose 14 points to 71 percent during the same time. Among Israelis, it went from 38 to 45 percent, and in the Palestinian territories it rose from 61 to 63 percent.

The Post article stated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “signaled clearly…that the two-state solution was off the table. In a speech discussing the current Operation Protective Edge [the military campaign to stop rocket fire from Hamas], he made this stark pronouncement: ‘I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.’”

Read the rest of this article at - http://realtruth.org/articles/140917-005.html