How AD 63 to 70 Foreshadows the Great Tribulation
Nugget - 3
Most of my end times aha moments occurred during the years 2020 to 2024, as I discovered some of the key pieces of the end times puzzle and laid them out more or less in order. However, this is the most significant new discovery I have made in the year 2025 (so far).
In short, I have come to understand that the seven years prior to the destruction of the Second Temple (in AD 70) beautifully and precisely foreshadow the Great Tribulation (final seven years), which I believe runs from December 2020 to sometime in late summer to fall of 2028.
Let me explain.
In God’s Final Week, I made it quite plain that the forty years between the cross and the destruction of the Second Temple foreshadowed the entire 2,000-year Church Age.
After the cross, God gave Israel 40 full years to repent before bringing them swift destruction. So likewise, I believe that God has planned a set period of time, given after the cross, for all of mankind to repent and believe. And afterward, he will again bring swift and total destruction upon unbelieving humanity.
Would you believe me if I told you that the amount of time given to humanity was mathematically related to the amount of time given to the Jews?
Once again, God is using the nation of Israel to quietly prophesy to all of mankind.
And here we have once again the precise link to the sign of Jonah, spoken of so often by our Savior.
Israel was given 40 full years for repentance. I believe that mankind will be given 40 full Jubilee cycles.
– God’s Final Week
And yet there was more to the story. There was another level to the foreshadowing which I had not yet grasped.
This new level opened up for me when, as I was reading James B. Jordan’s recently published three-volume work Revelation Explained (highly recommend), I learned that the Second Temple was completed in AD 63. The date Jordan quoted may have been AD 64, but it was close enough to get me curious and I discovered that our histories give either 63 or 64 as the finish date. There is a bit of uncertainty, but to me it seems likely that 63 is the correct year, for reasons which will soon become more clear.
If you will remember, Herod the Great had begun a restoration and reconstruction effort at the Second Temple in around 20 BC. This effort continued up until AD 63 when it was at last completed, lasting for a total of 82 years.
Now, think with me here. By the time AD 63 came around, everything had changed. The gospel of Jesus Christ had turned the world upside down and while a faithful remnant of Jews had believed and birthed the early Church, the Jewish nation as a whole had largely rejected their Messiah. Even the Talmud itself testifies that during the 40 years leading up to the destruction of the Second Temple there were clear signs that God had departed from his people.
Interestingly, the Jewish rabbis took note of certain curious happenings during these 40 years immediately preceding AD 70. These occurrences all had to do with the Temple. It was noticed, for example, that the western candle of the menorah would no longer stay lit overnight. Additionally, on the Day of Atonement, the lot for the Lord would never come up in the right hand for these 40 years. This is the equivalent of tossing a coin on heads 40 times in a row, the odds of which are vanishingly small. Nor would the crimson-colored strap become white, as it had done before. These anomalies, pointing to God’s clear departure from Israel, are recorded in the Talmud (Yoma 39a and 39b).
– God’s Final Week
It is clear from these testimonies that God had departed from the same Jewish ceremonies which he’d once blessed. The reason is obvious. The Jews who refused to honor and worship his Son were no longer even worshiping the Father. Instead, they were worshiping their true father, as Christ told them; the devil. But notice also that believing Jews (and there were many of them) had already abandoned the scribes and Pharisees and were worshiping the true God through his newly formed Church. These were the remnant of the Jews.
This has got to be one of the obvious flaws with dispensationalism, if I have seen one. If you were ever to have met a dispensationalist in AD 69, they would have sworn to you up and down that God would never destroy the Temple of his chosen people. They would have protested loudly that the promises speaking of Israel inheriting the land forever must be fulfilled. And if you had pressed them, saying that presumably the years from AD 70 to AD 1948 should be included in “forever,” in the year AD 69 they would have ardently agreed with you. Yet, as we all know, they would have been horribly wrong when the Romans leveled the Temple Mount and destroyed Jerusalem the following year.
The fact is, the Second Temple, by the time it was finished in AD 63 was no longer even Yahweh’s Temple. Paul and the other New Testament writers make it plain that the new Temple of God is the Church, or the body of believers down through the ages (see 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 and 6:19, Ephesians 2:19-22, and 1 Peter 2:4-5). Interestingly, some of these passages even indicate that the true Temple of God is the human body itself.
What is clear, is that by AD 63 the Second Temple of Rabbinical Judaism was no longer used to worship God. Satan had subverted the worship of these Christ-denying pagans and so they were in fact enthralled to the dark lord himself. This was Satan’s temple. And it was completed in AD 63.
God allowed it to stand for seven short years. And then he razed it to the ground.
So, too, in these last days Satan’s final temple (erected through the abomination of desolation) will be allowed to stand for the seven years prophesied for it. But no longer.
Seek ye where the broken twig lies and the dead stick molds away, where the clouds float together and the stones rest by the hillside, for all these mark the grave of Hiram who has carried my Will with him to the tomb. This eternal quest is yours until ye have found your Builder, until the cup giveth up its secret, until the grave giveth up its ghosts. No more shall I speak until ye have found and raised my beloved Son, and have listened to the words of my Messenger and with Him as your guide have finished the temple which I shall then inhabit. Amen.
– Manly P. Hall (The Lost Keys of Freemasonry)