LittleLambofJesus said:
I am curious to know how others view that Court in Revelation 11:2.
The outer court in Revelation 11:2 refers to the outer court of a third Jewish temple which will be built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the coming tribulation of Revelation chapters 6-18 (Revelation 11:1-2, Matthew 24:15, Daniel 11:31,36, 2 Thessalonians 2:4). This temple will coexist with the church like the second Jewish temple did (Luke 24:53) and like the temple building in heaven does (Revelation 11:19). The third Jewish temple could be built by the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel after they clear the site by destroying the Muslim Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque.
Shortly after the ultra-Orthodox Jews complete the third temple, the Antichrist could attack and defeat them and a false Messiah leading them (Daniel 11:22). Then the Antichrist could "cut" a peace treaty with them and their false "Messiah" (Daniel 9:26, Daniel 11:23) permitting them to keep the temple and to continue to perform the daily Mosaic animal sacrifices in front of it for at least seven more years (Daniel 9:27a), so long as they give up the outer court of the temple (Revelation 11:2) to the Muslims so that the Muslims can rebuild the Al Aqsa Mosque on the southern end of the Temple Mount and resume worship there. The ultra-Orthodox Jews could grudgingly agree to this, if the only other option is for them to lose the temple entirely. They could then build a huge wall between the temple and the southern part of the Temple Mount, in order to keep the temple from being defiled.
But then, only some 3.5 years after making the seven-year peace treaty, the Antichrist will break the treaty, attack the temple, stop the daily Mosaic animal sacrifices, place the abomination of desolation (possibly a standing android image of the Antichrist) in the holy place of the temple (Daniel 9:27b, Daniel 11:31, Matthew 24:15), and then sit himself in the temple and proclaim himself God (2 Thessalonians 2:4, Daniel 11:36). Thus could begin the Antichrist's 42-month Luciferian (Satanic) worldwide reign of terror (Revelation 13:4-18).
Shortly after that reign, at the very end of the coming tribulation, the temple could be completely destroyed (Matthew 24:2), along with the entire city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:44). For the Antichrist and all the armies of the world will attack and pillage Jerusalem right before the second coming of Jesus Christ (Zechariah 14:2-5, Daniel 11:45), and at the second coming there will be tremendous earth changes which will occur in the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:4-5). These events could result in all the man-made structures in Jerusalem, including the temple, and the Western Wall (also called the Wailing Wall), being completely broken down so that not one stone will be left upon another (Luke 19:44).
Then the returned Jesus (Zechariah 14:4) will rebuild Jerusalem and make it the capital of the whole world (Zechariah 14:8-19, Micah 4:1-4) and he will build a fourth temple there (Zechariah 14:20-21, Zechariah 6:12-13). It will serve a similar function for the church during the coming millennium (Revelation 20:4-6) as the second temple served for the church in the first century (Luke 24:53) and as the temple building in heaven (Revelation 11:19) serves for those in heaven (cf. Revelation 7:15).
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Some people feel that if a third Jewish temple was ever going to be built, it would have been built already. But one reason that it hasn't been built yet is because the current, secular government of Israel has been very careful to protect the Muslim Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque ever since Israel took military control of the Temple Mount back in 1967. For the Israeli government knows that if the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel were to destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque (the third holiest sites in Islam, right after those in Mecca and Medina) in order to clear the Temple Mount for the building of a third Jewish temple, this could mean the end of the state of Israel, because Muslim armies and militias could in their total rage attack Israel en masse in an all-out jihad, invading Israel simultaneously from three directions, overwhelming its defenses and quickly overrunning its tiny territory, defeating it completely.
While the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are no doubt aware of this danger to Israel should the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque ever be destroyed, they believe that the third Jewish temple must nonetheless be built exactly where the first and second Jewish temples stood: right over the Rock of Sacrifice (the Rock of the Dome of the Rock) on which Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. And the ultra-Orthodox Jews could eventually be brought to the point where they will even desire to see the end of the current, secular state of Israel, believing that only in its demise will God make it possible for them to establish a new, perfectly ultra-Orthodox, theocratic state of Israel with its capital in the walled Old City of Jerusalem (which contains the Temple Mount), and to build on the Temple Mount a third Jewish temple before which they can restart the daily Mosaic animal sacrifices and perfectly keep every jot and tittle of the Mosaic law.
(This could point to another reason that the current, secular government of Israel doesn't want to let the ultra-Orthodox Jews build a third temple: out of fear that the secular authority of the Israeli government could subsequently get undermined. For once temple practices resumed and a priesthood came into power, a creep toward theocracy could ensue in Israel, where priests and rabbis would become powerful enough to replace the secular leaders in Israel. So the secular leaders could want to simply place a hold on any drift in that direction by forbidding the building of a third temple.)
The ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are currently very well-armed, for they're allowed by Israel to even have machine guns for self-defense against the Palestinians. If the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel start to get squeezed out of their settlements in Samaria and Judaea (also called the West Bank) and East Jerusalem, because of some "peace deal" handing the whole kit and caboodle over to a Palestinian "state", the ultra-Orthodox Jews in their rage could resort to violence, for they (rightly) see Samaria, Judaea and Jerusalem as being the historically most important and most holy parts of the land of Israel promised by God to the Jews since the time of Abraham.
A fear of the ultra-Orthodox Jews resorting to violence could be one of the reasons that the Israeli government refuses to effectively hinder Jewish settlement activity in Samaria, Judaea and East Jerusalem. It could also be one of the reasons that the U.S. government has been convinced by Israel to back off from requiring any such hindrance. But if pressure from the Arab masses for a Palestinian state becomes so extreme that it begins to threaten to overthrow U.S. hegemony over the Arab world, the U.S. could decide to force Israel to surrender all the Jewish settlements to a Palestinian state.
If the IDF then starts forcing the evacuation of all the settlements, this could so enrage the ultra-Orthodox Jews they could suddenly mass in their tens of thousands, all armed with machine guns, and led by three huge bulldozers they could march as a great army to the Old City of Jerusalem and go up onto the Temple Mount and completely destroy the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque. They could then begin to build a third Jewish temple and declare the walled Old City of Jerusalem to be the capital of a new, purely ultra-Orthodox state of Israel, where the Mosaic law will be the law, and where no non-kosher person or thing will be allowed within Old Jerusalem's "Holy walls".
Besides getting squeezed out of their settlements, something else that could help tip the scales so that the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel will become violent is the rising up of a false, miracle-working ultra-Orthodox Jewish "Messiah" in Israel. He could rise up and say something like:
"God says that now is the time for us to take back religious control of the Holy Temple Mount and rid it of all the vile abominations which the heathen have placed upon it. We are to sanctify it in the name of our God so that we might rebuild His Holy Temple there. Listen, my brethren, fear not the reaction of the heathen when we retake religious control of the Holy Temple Mount. For God Himself is with us. He will protect us perfectly. Have I not shown you His mighty Power working through Me? Fear not any men, but fear only our Mighty God, who now commands us to rebuild His Holy Temple at the place He determined from the time of our father Abraham.
"Our God gave us back the Temple Mount way back in 1967 C.E. But what have we done with it over all the time since then? Nothing! How can this be? How can we have allowed some merely-secular, so-called 'Israeli' government invented by sinful men to keep us, God's holy people, from even setting foot back on the Temple Mount? Let us rise up, my brethren! Let us all rise up, in the name of our God, and let us do mighty exploits to the Glory of His Holy Name!"
With such rhetoric, accompanied by his working of amazing miracles (cf. Matthew 24:24), a false ultra-Orthodox Jewish "Messiah" in Israel could whip up the ultra-Orthodox Jews there into a religious frenzy, so that they will all with great zeal, and without any fear, march in their tens of thousands upon the Temple Mount, and take total control of it, and then rejoice there and dance and sing holy hymns to God "for His great and mighty Victory".
Something else that could help tip the scales with regard to the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel becoming violent is the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant. It could be found, for example, buried under an ancient ruined fort in the desert east of Jerusalem. The Copper Scroll could contain the clues as to where the Ark's buried in the fort (e.g. "under the third step").
The Ark could have been located there already with ground-penetrating radar by some non-religious treasure hunters, but the secular Israeli government could be holding up a digging permit to retrieve the Ark because the government is afraid that the ultra-Orthodox Jews could see the discovery of the Ark as (in their words) "an unmistakable sign from God that now is the time for us to rebuild His Holy Temple". So the Israeli government has a strong motive to keep the location of the buried Ark top secret.
Fearing that some ultra-Orthodox Jews could nonetheless somehow discover the top secret location of the buried Ark, and go there in the dead of night and dig it up without a permit from, or any notification to, the Israeli government, the government could have placed armed guards and surveillance cameras to watch over the buried Ark's location day and night.
But if the buried Ark's location is found out by some ultra-Orthodox Jews, they could round up tens of thousands of their fellows, all armed with machine guns, and they could suddenly swarm the location, overwhelm any armed guards there, and hold off any subsequently-arrived IDF troops long enough to get the Ark out of the ground. Once it's out and the IDF troops actually see it, it's unlikely that they're going to try to stop the ultra-Orthodox Jews from parading it to the Temple Mount; they'll be in such awe.
Also, once the ultra-Orthodox Jews make it to the Temple Mount and begin destroying the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, it's unlikely that the IDF troops are going to open fire, whether with lead bullets or rubber bullets, on their fellow Jews, slaughtering or injuring hundreds or thousands of them. Also, increasing numbers of IDF officers are very religious, so they could even order their troops to stand down. And if some non-religious officers convince their troops to employ tear gas in an attempt to simply disperse the ultra-Orthodox Jews without harming them, this could be thwarted by the ultra-Orthodox Jews having brought along gas masks (which, ironically, could have been issued to them by the Israeli government itself, back when there was a fear that Saddam Hussein would send Scud missiles into Israel with chemical-weapons payloads).
So the Israeli government could be unable to prevent the complete destruction of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque at the hands of the ultra-Orthodox Jews. And so the Israeli government could be unable to prevent the subsequent, retaliatory destruction of the state of Israel at the hands of enraged Muslim armies and militias.
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When the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel succeed in building a third Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, it will be seen by God as a valid temple, just as the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem was seen by God as a valid temple, even at the time of Jesus Christ's first coming (Matthew 23:21) and even at the time of the early church (Luke 24:53, Acts 22:17), a temple building co-existing as the temple of God alongside the temple of Jesus' individual human body (John 2:21), and alongside the temple of every Christian's individual human body (1 Corinthians 6:19), and alongside the temple of the church as a whole (Ephesians 2:21), and alongside the temple building in heaven (Revelation 11:19).
For the ultra-Orthodox Jews will build a third Jewish temple, and will perform animal sacrifices in front of it, under the auspices of the Old Covenant Mosaic law, which in itself remains holy before God (Romans 7:12); that's why God still keeps an ark of the Old Covenant in his temple building in heaven (Revelation 11:19); and that's why the apostle Paul and other Christians could even be involved with the Mosaic temple practices without committing sin (Acts 21:20-26). This isn't to say that the Jesus Christ-rejecting motives of the ultra-Orthodox Jews will be holy before God, but that the Mosaic third temple in itself and Mosaic animal sacrifices in themselves will be holy before God because the Mosaic law in itself remains holy before God (Romans 7:12), even though its letter is no longer meant to be practiced by people (Romans 7:6) because the New Covenant has been inaugurated by Jesus and his once-for-all-time sacrifice on the Cross for all of our sins (Hebrews 10:1-23, Matthew 26:28, 2 Corinthians 3:6-18).
