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The True Fulfillment of Prophecy, part 5

The prophets speak often of the restoration of the House of Israel. They were speaking of the ten “lost” Israelite tribes that made up the northern kingdom. They were not referring to the two tribes of the southern kingdom, which were never “lost.”

The southern kingdom was conquered by Babylon in 604 B.C. and later, because King Zedekiah revolted, Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in 586 B.C. The Judahites (“Jews”) were exiled for just 70 years, and they remained in captivity until the Edict of Cyrus allowed them to return under Zerubbabel in 534 B.C. (604 to 534 = 70 years).

During this time, they did not lose their identity. Yet neither did they truly become a free people. They were allowed to rebuild the temple and the city and form their own government under a license from the king as part of the kingdom of Persia.

Two Types of Yoke

The main change in 534 was that they were upgraded from an iron yoke under Babylon (Deuteronomy 28:48) to a wooden yoke under Persia that was lighter. This wooden yoke reverted back to an iron yoke in 70 A.D., when the people again refused to submit to the divine judgment by revolting against Rome.

During the days of Jeremiah leading up to the captivity, God told Jeremiah to walk around the city with a wooden yoke on his shoulders (Jeremiah 27:2), telling the people to submit to Nebuchadnezzar’s “yoke” and avoid a greater catastrophe. Jeremiah 27:11 says,

¹¹ “But the nation which will bring its neck under the yoke of Babylon and serve him, I will let remain on its land,” declares the Lord, “and they will till it and dwell in it.”

The law spoke only of “an iron yoke” (Deuteronomy 28:48) in terms of conquest and exile, but the prophets later spoke of a lesser captivity—one where the people were conquered but allowed to remain on their land while serving out their sentence for breaking God’s covenant. This was carried out in all of the captivities in the book of Judges, but it was not until the time of Jeremiah that these captivities were actually identified as wooden-yoke captivities.

Jeremiah preached repentance, hoping to avoid captivity altogether. But finally, when they persisted in their lawlessness and rejection of God’s rule, Judah and Jerusalem were sentenced in the divine court to a Babylonian captivity. The stated reason for this divine sentence was that they had turned the temple into “a den of robbers” (Jeremiah 7:11)—that is, a hideout for thieves who had usurped power over the nation in total disregard for God’s right to rule.

The Divine Sentence on Jerusalem

God then sentenced the city, declaring that He would abandon the temple even as He had previously abandoned the tabernacle in Shiloh, the town in Ephraim. Recall how the glory had departed from Shiloh in 1 Samuel 4:21, 22, along with the fact that God’s glory never again returned to Shiloh. Jeremiah 7:12-15 says,

¹² But go now to My place which was in Shiloh, where I made My name dwell at the first, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people Israel… ¹⁴ therefore, I will do to the house which is called by My name, in which you trust, and to the place [Jerusalem] which I gave to you and your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. ¹⁵ I will cast you [Judah] out of My sight, as I have cast out all your brothers, all the offspring of Ephraim.

So we find in subsequent history that the glory of God never returned to that location—not even when the second temple was built in Jerusalem, as described in the book of Haggai. Why? One would think that, because the people were obedient to the word of God commanding them to rebuild a temple on that location, the glory would certainly return there.

The problem is that God had already put that location under a divine curse. Jeremiah 26:6 says,

⁶ then I will make this house like Shiloh, and this city I will make a curse to all the nations of the earth.

The underlying reason for this curse is given in Jeremiah 11:2-4,

² Hear the words of this covenant, and speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem; ³ and say to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Cursed is the man who does not heed the words of this covenant, ⁴ which I commanded your forefathers in the day that I brought them out of land of Egypt….

In the time of Moses, the people took an oath to obey God’s covenant. If they obeyed, they would be blessed (Deuteronomy 28:2); if not, they would be cursed (Deuteronomy 28:15), and their genealogy could not save them. The curse of the law struck Shiloh in the days of Eli; it struck Jerusalem in the days of Jeremiah.

After years of warning, the city passed the point of no return, and God’s curse was pronounced officially. God then told the prophet in Jeremiah 7:16,

¹⁶ As for you, do not pray for this people, and do not lift up cry or prayer for them, and do not intercede with Me; for I do not hear you.

What, then, became of the command in Psalm 122:6, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem”? Is this a contradiction? What about us today? Shall we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, or shall we obey the command of God given to Jeremiah?

The answer lies in the fact that there are two cities of Jerusalem. In the Hebrew, Ierushalayim has the dual ending, ayim,” which means “two Jerusalems.” In my view, God’s command to the prophet marked the moment when believers ought to accept the divine judgment upon the earthly Jerusalem and pray for the peace and prosperity of the heavenly city. In other words, the earthly city became certified as “the bloody city” (Ezekiel 24:6), essentially stripping it of its name, leaving the promise of God to be fulfilled in the heavenly Jerusalem alone.

When we look in the book of Revelation, we see that the early city was again condemned along with Sodom and Egypt (Revelation 11:8), while the heavenly city fulfilled the prophecies given to Jerusalem (Revelation 21:2). The “bride” of Christ is not the earthly city with its children of the flesh, but the heavenly city. Paul shows us, too, that Abraham had two wives and that Hagar represented prophetically the earthly Jerusalem with its children of the flesh, while Sarah represented prophetically the heavenly Jerusalem with its children of the promise (Galatians 4:22-30).

The point is that God’s command to Jeremiah did not contradict Psalm 122:6. The application merely shifted from one Jerusalem to the other.

The Glory of God

The Most Holy Place in the second temple remained in the dark, having only a stone slab to mark the place where the ark of the covenant should have been.

The great Jewish-Christian scholar, Alfred Edersheim, discusses this in his well-known work: The Temple: Its Ministry and Services in chapter 16 entitled, “The Day of Atonement.” Edersheim writes:

“…in the Holy of Holies there was no Ark, but only a stone, called the ‘foundation stone,’ on which the high priest set down the censer.”

That “foundation stone” itself was a prophetic type of Christ in the third (spiritual) temple built with “living stones” (1 Peter 3:5). Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3:11,

¹¹ For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

Jeremiah was the prophet who heard the verdict in the divine court putting the curse on Jerusalem. His contemporary, Ezekiel, was the prophet who saw God’s presence removed from the temple (Ezekiel 10:4, 18; 11:23). Ezekiel saw God’s glory go as far as the Mount of Olives, but no further. To trace the glory beyond that point, one must go to the New Testament. Christ is the glory of God, and He ascended to heaven from the Mount of Olives (Acts 1:9-12).

Ten days after His ascension, on the day of Pentecost (the Old Testament Feast of Weeks), the glory returned—not to the temple in Jerusalem, but to the disciples assembled in the upper room (Acts 2:1-3). Hence, the third temple, made of living stones, was blessed and glorified according to God’s promise.

The point is that the third temple is the final fulfillment of the earlier prophetic types. It is not a future temple build (again) with dead stones and golden ornaments. It is the true temple made with living stones, which God has seen fit to inhabit with His glory. That glory came (in part) through the feast of Pentecost, but this glorification did not make believers immortal and incorruptible—otherwise, Paul would not have spoken of it as a future event in 1 Corinthians 15:53. That final glorification can come only through the fulfillment of the feast of Tabernacles, following the resurrection of the dead overcomers two weeks earlier on the feast of Trumpets. This will take place after the church has been sifted to separate the overcomers from the carnal believers in past generations.