This House In Its Former Glory
Sermon
Coming Home
Advent/Christmas Sermons From The Book Of Haggai
In the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twent-first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the prophet Haggai, saying: Speak now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, and say, Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?
Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear.
For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts.
The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts. -- Haggai 2:1-9
One summer we took a long family vacation, traveling from Elkhart, Indiana, west to Grants Pass, Oregon, south to Los Angeles, and ending in Silver City, New Mexico, before heading back for the Midwest.
Three weeks and six thousand miles, and only three nights in motels. Otherwise we depended on the kindness of friends and relatives.
The trip started with cool weather. I wore sweatshirts in Oregon to the outdoor theater in Ashland.
By the time we hit L.A., with the World Cup in full swing, it was hot. We survived Disneyland. Then it got hotter.
By the time we began the drive to New Mexico it was baking: 126 degrees, even hotter than the 122 we encountered four years earlier on a similar trip. It's hard to describe just how hot hot can be. The air conditioning ran full blast in the car and we were still uncomfortable. When we stopped at a rest stop my movements were stiff and uncertain. I felt like I was walking through hot, dry sponges.
We spent the night with a good friend who lived near Florence, Arizona. Thank heavens for her air conditioning. The next morning we stopped to get a look at the Casa Grande ruins. We baked in the sun. There was no one nearby. The single building was said to be the site of what was once a thriving Native American settlement. Hard to believe it was still standing, but we were told the supporting beams had been dragged from hundreds of miles away, and they still provided support.
Ruins.
A couple days later we took a side trip from Silver City. It takes two and a half hours to drive around forty miles along State Road 15, said to be the worst road in New Mexico. That's how you get to the remote Gila Indian Cliff Dwellings of the Mogollon Indians. Tall firs jut out from the steep sides of sheer cliffs. Like pipe cleaners the fir and pine stand erect on the edge. Don't look down if you get giddy.
The caves themselves were nearly inaccessible to tourists until steps were cemented into the hillsides not long ago. Into these natural caves the Mogollon Indians carried mortar and stones to build walls, graineries, and fire pits. It's hard to draw your breath when you're a mile high in altitude. A lonely wind blew; a hawk played on the drafts.
This enterprise was not intended as a lonely outpost, but as a home for families, a dwelling for generations and generations.
People had lived here once upon a time. Seven hundred years ago they built.
The settlement lasted forty years. They left, never to return.
Did the soil grow infertile? Was the ecology disturbed? Were there social problems? No one knows. The wind blows through the pines; the birds soar on the updrafts.
Ruins.
I love ruins. I've stood next to Roman walls in London and near the great monument at Stonehenge.
I've walked among the remains of the California Missions along the Camino Real.
But ruins are deceiving. People don't live in ruins. They live in buildings. When you look at ruins it can be hard to imagine what the place was like when it was thriving. It was hard to picture a place filled with people when it was home.
You have to imagine the place crawling with kids, and people hollering or laughing, men and women arm in arm. But it's hard.
More likely you imagine giants walking among the stones. Not people like you and me.
This is part of what happened, I think, when the exiles walked among the ruins of the old Temple. It was not a place for the living. It daunted. Their homes were scattered all around it, and there it stood, taunting them. We were glory, it seemed to say. You, of a lesser generation, are nothing.
Like it says in the Bible, "There were giants in the earth in those days ... the same became mighty men who were of old, men of renown" (Genesis 6:4, KJV).
Yet the ones who built the Temple were people. Humans. It's dangerous to assume otherwise. I'm sure this is one of the reasons Jesus picked such ordinary people for apostles. He didn't want us to have an excuse when it came to following in his footsteps. The apostles and disciples achieved great things, stared into the face of death, and accepted martyrdom. But the stories in the Gospels make it clear they were just regular folks. It is God who is revealed in our weakness.
In what they imagined were the shadows of giants, those who had returned from exile wondered how they could possibly match the Temple's former glory. They got to work right away under the direction of Haggai and Zechariah, Zerubbabel and Joshua. They responded to the words of accusation. Now, perhaps as they began to lose heart, it was time for words of encouragement. God sent those words.
The oracle in this text is, like the previous one, well dated. October 17, in the year 520, barely a couple of weeks after God had declared that this was his people and he would be with them, God spoke again.
The Feast of Booths had already been celebrated. This annual harvest event was like family camp. People gathered outside the city and set up tents, roughing it for a few days. Kids loved it, I'm sure, and so did all the other outdoor types. The rest no doubt endured it, in good humor or not. It is important for us to be taken out of our regular routine, to be reminded we are sojourners, and not to get too comfortable.
The people had been pushed out of their comfort zone anyway, in responding to the prophecy and setting aside time to work on the Temple. Now, only three days from Yom Kippur, a time of introspection when the community confessed their sins, God speaks.
Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? -- Haggai 2:3
That doesn't sound encouraging, to be sure, but it is a statement of fact. There were those who probably had seen the Temple in its former glory -- but they must have been very old. The sharpest memories of the elderly are often those associated with their childhood and youth. These men and women could vividly recall the sights and sounds of the old Temple. And they could see that the new one did not measure up.
But as accurate as childhood memories can be, they are flawed. Not because they are incorrect. They are too correct. I'll try to explain.
My son Jacob is the youngest of three children. He used to accompany me as I dropped off first his older brother, and then his older sister, at the local kindergarten. Normally I'm fairly permissive, but I would not allow him to use the playground equipment because I wanted to save an experience for him to look forward to when he finally went there himself.
For him the holy grail was the elephant slide. Actually, it was a regular slide, but there were metal sidings on both sides that were painted to look like elephants. It looked so tall and magnificent. Jacob could hardly wait for his turn.
The day came at last and we walked together into the schoolyard. He ran through the playground for the elephant slide, then came to an abrupt stop. Turning to me with a puzzled expression, he asked, "Hey, who shortened the slide?"
No one had shortened the slide. Over the space of three years he'd grown, and his perspective had changed!
In the same way the survivors of the exile, who had been taken away as young children, remembered the Temple through the eyes of the very young. Everything looked bigger than real. No wonder the Temple looked like nothing in their sight!
Nothing measures up to the good old days, but they weren't as good as we imagined. People who talk about going back to the pre-Industrial Revolution forget how disease and drudgery drained individuals, who died early and often. They forget the high infant mortality rate, and the fact that most of us were servants or serfs and not the well off. They forget the Middle Ages were the thousand years without a bath, and that ignorance led people to kill cats as servants of the devil, so mice ran free, spreading the plague. People forget.
So God says, "Yet now take courage, all you people of the land ... Work, for I am with you."
The people are to have confidence in this statement because they have a God with a history. The reference to "the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt" reminds them that they are a people who are set apart. They should have been no people, but they are now God's people. When Moses asks for God's name, he tells him, "I am that I am," and he goes on to say that he is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. We know God, and people, because of the history we share. Names don't mean as much as action.
We as Christians were once no people, but God called us into existence as one people, God's people, drawn from every nation on the globe.
These things will come, God says, "Once again, in a little while."
It is the Lord of Hosts who says this, the captain of the army of the Lord. This figure appears to Joshua the night before the battle of Jericho. Not realizing he is standing in the presence of God, Joshua asks the figure whose side he is on. God identifies himself as the captain of the army of the Lord, and Joshua realizes the real question is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God's side.
Wait. "Michael shall arise!" we are assured by the prophet Daniel (Daniel 12:1).
This book, reflecting experiences from the exile through the mirror of the Selucid occupation that would come in the second century before Christ, spoke to a people horribly oppressed with the message: Wait. Soon and very soon we are going to see the king. God's army will appear and set the world on its ear. The last shall be first. These will be events of earthshaking significance. This won't be something that takes place in an obscure province on the edge of an empire. This will be immediately evident to all. Every nation shall know about it, and the center of the universe will be God's people. No one will be unaffected. "I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all the nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor" (Haggai 2:7).
That is the great encouragement. In the end our efforts need not be sufficient. God will make up the difference. He justifies us, thank heavens, because we always fall short.
"Once again, in a little while I will shake the heavens and the sea and the land." Our God is a God of power, an active God who promises to reorder everything. The treasure belongs to God, even if his sovereignty is not recognized by others. "The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of hosts." Don't forget it.
Overlooked sometimes is the fact that it will take the treasure of the nations to make the temple complete. The call to the nations went out even before the birth of Jesus, in the form of a star.
It would take a book to tell the whole story, but suffice it to say that those commentaries that date the birth of Jesus between 4 and 7 B.C. are wrong.
In 3 B.C. the decree went out requiring Mary and Joseph to register in Bethlehem. Herod the Great died mad between the Lunar Eclipse of January 9, 1 B.C., and the Passover which began on April 8 of that year.
And in between, on August 12, 3 B.C., the Magi watched Jupiter and Venus, the King and Queen of Heaven, seem to touch in the sky near the king star Regulus, in the constellation of Leo, which was associated with the tribe of Judah.
Twice more (February 17, 2 B.C., and May 8, 2 B.C.) this formation recurred. The Magi set out to seek the king. And a century later the martyr Ignatius wrote regarding this story, "Thence was destroyed all magic, and every bond vanished; evil's ignorance was abolished, the old kingdom perished, God being revealed as human to bring newness of Eternal Life."
God is calling us into one community. We are not complete unless all the nations are gathered together. Considering that the church remains the most segregated of social institutions, with the segregation enforced by all sides, it becomes clear this unity will take place only at the command and the timing of God. It is not something we seem to be able to accomplish on our own. But in order for the temple to be fully outfitted, in order for the church to be presented as the holy bride of Christ, we must be made whole in all our limbs, and can no longer remain separate peoples. It will take all our treasure to make this a holy place.
Outside there are revolutions and the empire is unsettled. Darius is setting the house in order. But here there is a great task to be done. It is a call to action, to rebuilding the community, in this instance through the temple. The temple we are called to build is the body of Christ, and it includes people of every ethnic, social, economic, and chronologic class.
But it is hard to remember that when you are building the temple and it doesn't measure up with your dreams.
I think back to my days in school. I have always had a way with words, but I can't draw a straight line. It was a source of constant frustration to me that I couldn't draw what I saw in my head. My drawings in school never measured up to my standards, but they were plenty good enough for my parents, who displayed them proudly. God is proud of our efforts, recognizing our limitations -- and our potential -- as well.
I call to mind this story every time I think things were better in the old days.
Once a local radio station in Los Angeles sponsored an essay contest. There were twelve first prizes offered to the general public. A trip for two to London, Frankfurt, or New York. I wanted to go to London very badly. Pen in hand, I wrote out what I thought was a super first draft. Setting it aside in order to gain objectivity, I returned to my efforts a week later, only to discover I couldn't find the draft.
Because the deadline was so near I waved my arms around in frustration, but finally settled down and wrote out a new draft. It wasn't very good, in my estimation, not compared to the first one, but it was all I had. I turned it in.
I won.
My wife and I had a marvelous trip to London, extending the trip so we could visit Scotland and other parts of England as well.
Months later I found that original first draft. The page had slipped under a heavy piece of furniture.
It was awful. It was nowhere near as good as my later effort. If I had submitted it, I'm not sure I'd have won.
"The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts."
Got that? Things just get better. Even when it seems like it is all falling apart, trust God, and wait. Michael shall arise!
Those ruins are a shadow. The real temple is being built.
And still stands.
The building raised by Haggai's contemporaries was the stage on which Jesus stood, while warning of a greater temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt in three days. And he shall reign forever and ever.
Take heart. God is on our side. He will give this place prosperity. Eternally. Thus says the Lord of Hosts.
Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear.
For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts.
The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts. -- Haggai 2:1-9
One summer we took a long family vacation, traveling from Elkhart, Indiana, west to Grants Pass, Oregon, south to Los Angeles, and ending in Silver City, New Mexico, before heading back for the Midwest.
Three weeks and six thousand miles, and only three nights in motels. Otherwise we depended on the kindness of friends and relatives.
The trip started with cool weather. I wore sweatshirts in Oregon to the outdoor theater in Ashland.
By the time we hit L.A., with the World Cup in full swing, it was hot. We survived Disneyland. Then it got hotter.
By the time we began the drive to New Mexico it was baking: 126 degrees, even hotter than the 122 we encountered four years earlier on a similar trip. It's hard to describe just how hot hot can be. The air conditioning ran full blast in the car and we were still uncomfortable. When we stopped at a rest stop my movements were stiff and uncertain. I felt like I was walking through hot, dry sponges.
We spent the night with a good friend who lived near Florence, Arizona. Thank heavens for her air conditioning. The next morning we stopped to get a look at the Casa Grande ruins. We baked in the sun. There was no one nearby. The single building was said to be the site of what was once a thriving Native American settlement. Hard to believe it was still standing, but we were told the supporting beams had been dragged from hundreds of miles away, and they still provided support.
Ruins.
A couple days later we took a side trip from Silver City. It takes two and a half hours to drive around forty miles along State Road 15, said to be the worst road in New Mexico. That's how you get to the remote Gila Indian Cliff Dwellings of the Mogollon Indians. Tall firs jut out from the steep sides of sheer cliffs. Like pipe cleaners the fir and pine stand erect on the edge. Don't look down if you get giddy.
The caves themselves were nearly inaccessible to tourists until steps were cemented into the hillsides not long ago. Into these natural caves the Mogollon Indians carried mortar and stones to build walls, graineries, and fire pits. It's hard to draw your breath when you're a mile high in altitude. A lonely wind blew; a hawk played on the drafts.
This enterprise was not intended as a lonely outpost, but as a home for families, a dwelling for generations and generations.
People had lived here once upon a time. Seven hundred years ago they built.
The settlement lasted forty years. They left, never to return.
Did the soil grow infertile? Was the ecology disturbed? Were there social problems? No one knows. The wind blows through the pines; the birds soar on the updrafts.
Ruins.
I love ruins. I've stood next to Roman walls in London and near the great monument at Stonehenge.
I've walked among the remains of the California Missions along the Camino Real.
But ruins are deceiving. People don't live in ruins. They live in buildings. When you look at ruins it can be hard to imagine what the place was like when it was thriving. It was hard to picture a place filled with people when it was home.
You have to imagine the place crawling with kids, and people hollering or laughing, men and women arm in arm. But it's hard.
More likely you imagine giants walking among the stones. Not people like you and me.
This is part of what happened, I think, when the exiles walked among the ruins of the old Temple. It was not a place for the living. It daunted. Their homes were scattered all around it, and there it stood, taunting them. We were glory, it seemed to say. You, of a lesser generation, are nothing.
Like it says in the Bible, "There were giants in the earth in those days ... the same became mighty men who were of old, men of renown" (Genesis 6:4, KJV).
Yet the ones who built the Temple were people. Humans. It's dangerous to assume otherwise. I'm sure this is one of the reasons Jesus picked such ordinary people for apostles. He didn't want us to have an excuse when it came to following in his footsteps. The apostles and disciples achieved great things, stared into the face of death, and accepted martyrdom. But the stories in the Gospels make it clear they were just regular folks. It is God who is revealed in our weakness.
In what they imagined were the shadows of giants, those who had returned from exile wondered how they could possibly match the Temple's former glory. They got to work right away under the direction of Haggai and Zechariah, Zerubbabel and Joshua. They responded to the words of accusation. Now, perhaps as they began to lose heart, it was time for words of encouragement. God sent those words.
The oracle in this text is, like the previous one, well dated. October 17, in the year 520, barely a couple of weeks after God had declared that this was his people and he would be with them, God spoke again.
The Feast of Booths had already been celebrated. This annual harvest event was like family camp. People gathered outside the city and set up tents, roughing it for a few days. Kids loved it, I'm sure, and so did all the other outdoor types. The rest no doubt endured it, in good humor or not. It is important for us to be taken out of our regular routine, to be reminded we are sojourners, and not to get too comfortable.
The people had been pushed out of their comfort zone anyway, in responding to the prophecy and setting aside time to work on the Temple. Now, only three days from Yom Kippur, a time of introspection when the community confessed their sins, God speaks.
Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? -- Haggai 2:3
That doesn't sound encouraging, to be sure, but it is a statement of fact. There were those who probably had seen the Temple in its former glory -- but they must have been very old. The sharpest memories of the elderly are often those associated with their childhood and youth. These men and women could vividly recall the sights and sounds of the old Temple. And they could see that the new one did not measure up.
But as accurate as childhood memories can be, they are flawed. Not because they are incorrect. They are too correct. I'll try to explain.
My son Jacob is the youngest of three children. He used to accompany me as I dropped off first his older brother, and then his older sister, at the local kindergarten. Normally I'm fairly permissive, but I would not allow him to use the playground equipment because I wanted to save an experience for him to look forward to when he finally went there himself.
For him the holy grail was the elephant slide. Actually, it was a regular slide, but there were metal sidings on both sides that were painted to look like elephants. It looked so tall and magnificent. Jacob could hardly wait for his turn.
The day came at last and we walked together into the schoolyard. He ran through the playground for the elephant slide, then came to an abrupt stop. Turning to me with a puzzled expression, he asked, "Hey, who shortened the slide?"
No one had shortened the slide. Over the space of three years he'd grown, and his perspective had changed!
In the same way the survivors of the exile, who had been taken away as young children, remembered the Temple through the eyes of the very young. Everything looked bigger than real. No wonder the Temple looked like nothing in their sight!
Nothing measures up to the good old days, but they weren't as good as we imagined. People who talk about going back to the pre-Industrial Revolution forget how disease and drudgery drained individuals, who died early and often. They forget the high infant mortality rate, and the fact that most of us were servants or serfs and not the well off. They forget the Middle Ages were the thousand years without a bath, and that ignorance led people to kill cats as servants of the devil, so mice ran free, spreading the plague. People forget.
So God says, "Yet now take courage, all you people of the land ... Work, for I am with you."
The people are to have confidence in this statement because they have a God with a history. The reference to "the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt" reminds them that they are a people who are set apart. They should have been no people, but they are now God's people. When Moses asks for God's name, he tells him, "I am that I am," and he goes on to say that he is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. We know God, and people, because of the history we share. Names don't mean as much as action.
We as Christians were once no people, but God called us into existence as one people, God's people, drawn from every nation on the globe.
These things will come, God says, "Once again, in a little while."
It is the Lord of Hosts who says this, the captain of the army of the Lord. This figure appears to Joshua the night before the battle of Jericho. Not realizing he is standing in the presence of God, Joshua asks the figure whose side he is on. God identifies himself as the captain of the army of the Lord, and Joshua realizes the real question is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God's side.
Wait. "Michael shall arise!" we are assured by the prophet Daniel (Daniel 12:1).
This book, reflecting experiences from the exile through the mirror of the Selucid occupation that would come in the second century before Christ, spoke to a people horribly oppressed with the message: Wait. Soon and very soon we are going to see the king. God's army will appear and set the world on its ear. The last shall be first. These will be events of earthshaking significance. This won't be something that takes place in an obscure province on the edge of an empire. This will be immediately evident to all. Every nation shall know about it, and the center of the universe will be God's people. No one will be unaffected. "I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all the nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor" (Haggai 2:7).
That is the great encouragement. In the end our efforts need not be sufficient. God will make up the difference. He justifies us, thank heavens, because we always fall short.
"Once again, in a little while I will shake the heavens and the sea and the land." Our God is a God of power, an active God who promises to reorder everything. The treasure belongs to God, even if his sovereignty is not recognized by others. "The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of hosts." Don't forget it.
Overlooked sometimes is the fact that it will take the treasure of the nations to make the temple complete. The call to the nations went out even before the birth of Jesus, in the form of a star.
It would take a book to tell the whole story, but suffice it to say that those commentaries that date the birth of Jesus between 4 and 7 B.C. are wrong.
In 3 B.C. the decree went out requiring Mary and Joseph to register in Bethlehem. Herod the Great died mad between the Lunar Eclipse of January 9, 1 B.C., and the Passover which began on April 8 of that year.
And in between, on August 12, 3 B.C., the Magi watched Jupiter and Venus, the King and Queen of Heaven, seem to touch in the sky near the king star Regulus, in the constellation of Leo, which was associated with the tribe of Judah.
Twice more (February 17, 2 B.C., and May 8, 2 B.C.) this formation recurred. The Magi set out to seek the king. And a century later the martyr Ignatius wrote regarding this story, "Thence was destroyed all magic, and every bond vanished; evil's ignorance was abolished, the old kingdom perished, God being revealed as human to bring newness of Eternal Life."
God is calling us into one community. We are not complete unless all the nations are gathered together. Considering that the church remains the most segregated of social institutions, with the segregation enforced by all sides, it becomes clear this unity will take place only at the command and the timing of God. It is not something we seem to be able to accomplish on our own. But in order for the temple to be fully outfitted, in order for the church to be presented as the holy bride of Christ, we must be made whole in all our limbs, and can no longer remain separate peoples. It will take all our treasure to make this a holy place.
Outside there are revolutions and the empire is unsettled. Darius is setting the house in order. But here there is a great task to be done. It is a call to action, to rebuilding the community, in this instance through the temple. The temple we are called to build is the body of Christ, and it includes people of every ethnic, social, economic, and chronologic class.
But it is hard to remember that when you are building the temple and it doesn't measure up with your dreams.
I think back to my days in school. I have always had a way with words, but I can't draw a straight line. It was a source of constant frustration to me that I couldn't draw what I saw in my head. My drawings in school never measured up to my standards, but they were plenty good enough for my parents, who displayed them proudly. God is proud of our efforts, recognizing our limitations -- and our potential -- as well.
I call to mind this story every time I think things were better in the old days.
Once a local radio station in Los Angeles sponsored an essay contest. There were twelve first prizes offered to the general public. A trip for two to London, Frankfurt, or New York. I wanted to go to London very badly. Pen in hand, I wrote out what I thought was a super first draft. Setting it aside in order to gain objectivity, I returned to my efforts a week later, only to discover I couldn't find the draft.
Because the deadline was so near I waved my arms around in frustration, but finally settled down and wrote out a new draft. It wasn't very good, in my estimation, not compared to the first one, but it was all I had. I turned it in.
I won.
My wife and I had a marvelous trip to London, extending the trip so we could visit Scotland and other parts of England as well.
Months later I found that original first draft. The page had slipped under a heavy piece of furniture.
It was awful. It was nowhere near as good as my later effort. If I had submitted it, I'm not sure I'd have won.
"The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts."
Got that? Things just get better. Even when it seems like it is all falling apart, trust God, and wait. Michael shall arise!
Those ruins are a shadow. The real temple is being built.
And still stands.
The building raised by Haggai's contemporaries was the stage on which Jesus stood, while warning of a greater temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt in three days. And he shall reign forever and ever.
Take heart. God is on our side. He will give this place prosperity. Eternally. Thus says the Lord of Hosts.
