Temple Mount Trouble
Tensions over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount have been rapidly building in the past several weeks. What started out as a minor disagreement over access to religious sites in the Old City, has now reached the point of becoming a major conflict between the Arabs and Jews.
The bloodshed started with the attempted assassination of Jewish activist, Yehuda Glick, 48, who led efforts to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount. Glick was shot multiple times by Palestinian, Moataz Hijazi. He was quickly declared a martyr after he was killed by Israeli police. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said that he died, “While defending his people’s rights and the holiness of sanctuaries (Temple Mount).”
Despite the fact that all the acts of murder have been committed by Palestinians, Israel is seen as primarily responsible for maintaining the peace. After one outbreak of violence, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry came over to lecture Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the need for Israel to take action to restore calm.
The conflict reached a demonic level of madness with a brazen assault on a Jerusalem synagogue. In that attack, four rabbis were brutally murdered as they prayed, and one policeman lost his life. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas condemned the synagogue attack, but his statement also urged Israel to “halt its provocations.”
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to understand what Palestinians see as a provocation. Their concerns over the Temple Mount appear more like the raging rants of paranoid mad men. Last week, they accused Israel of allowing Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount to become “contaminated.” In another message they said the Al-Aqsa mosque was in danger of being destroyed by “extremist settlers.” The Palestinians also fear that Israel plans to declare sovereignty over the Temple Mount.
The Temple Mount area is currently under Islamic control. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel seized control of East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. As a gesture of goodwill, Israeli General Moshe Dyan decided to allow the Islamic Waqf trust, to continue running the site.
For a long time the mindset of most Israelis has been that the Temple Mount is off limits to them. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef had even set forth a prohibition on Jews entering the Temple Mount based on the idea that the Temple area was “ritually impure as a result of contact with the dead (for which there is no possibility of purification in our time.”)
In recent years, many Jews are starting to question the restrictions placed on them to access the Temple Mount. The problem with the impurity of the Temple Mount can be dealt with by using biblical remedies (like the Ashes of the Red Heifer). There is no remedy in getting the Arabs to share access to the Temple area.
All efforts at appeasement have been futile. The Palestine Liberation Organization is so rabidly opposed to Jewish access to the mount, they have gone to the ridiculous length of declaring that the Jews have no historical connection to the Temple Mount, and it is “null and void” to use the term.
Another factor that is changing the Israeli view about the Temple Mount is the realization that the Al-Aqsa Mosque may not be outside of the sanctified area. Chief Rabbi Ramat Gan, one of the leading rabbis of the religious Zionist movement, recently said, “They say we want the Al-Aqsa (Mosque). Who wants the Al-Aqsa? It’s outside of the Temple Mount. It’s very possible that it will remain even when the Temple is rebuilt!”
Satan will most likely do everything in his power to hinder the Jews from rebuilding the Temple. He has been using the Palestinians as a proxy to oppose Jewish interests on the mount. His fate is directly tied to this plot of land. Once the go ahead is given for the building of the Tribulation Temple, a countdown clock to his doom will be set into motion.
End-time prophecy tells us that the Tribulation will start with the Antichrist signing a peace agreement between Israel and her Arab neighbors, one that will validate rights for Jews to worship at a rebuilt Temple. Unless the devil can come up with some delaying tactic, we may be very near to the Tribulation hour.
“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate” (Daniel 9:27).
--Todd
End-Times Leadership
Study of powerful leaders throughout history has always fascinated me. The fact that such study intrigues others, too, is demonstrated, I think, by the obsession with Adolf Hitler my cable TV system seems to harbor. It’s all Hitler, all the time--or so it seems.
I can’t seem to pull myself away from the presentations, despite the fact that I have “viewed” these same documentaries multitudinous times–and me totally blind since 1993! Perhaps that is one reason they still fascinate. Most of the documentary film of the rise of Hitler and his diabolical regime, up to and including World War II, replays in my mind’s eye almost like I was physically seeing it all again.
So, you see, I’ve been “fascinated” with this most terrible tyrant, literally, for numerous decades.
However, it isn’t just the grisly history of der Führer that piques my interest. It is leadership throughout history, from the times of Nimrod and the building of the Tower of Babel, to Nebuchadnezzar, to Alexander the Great, to Julius Caesar and all of the beastly Roman emperors, to the more modern era of Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Tojo, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, Vladimir Putin, et al, that draw my interest.
My fascination is not with the horrors of war. These are heart wrenching and not in any way intellectually stimulating or edifying–at least not for me. The intrigue that enthralls comes from the fact that these human beings are allowed power over the people. This power is given to them by the people themselves, through acquiescence.
But, it is the fact that the Lord of Heaven allows that they attain such power that continues to truly spellbind me, I think.
Allowing the millions upon millions of people enslaved and murdered by these seem incomprehensible to reconcile with the great character of the one and only God I know and love through the Lord Jesus Christ–His Son—who made my own soul’s reconciliation possible. The question that most of us who name the name of Christ have when considering the evil of this world is: Why does God allow such to take place?
How can the Lord of Heaven seemingly sit by and watch while these atrocities–this genocide—take place throughout the eons of history? We sometimes forget when thinking on such things that our God has provided leaders of the sort that are people after His own heart, as the Bible puts it. David comes to mind, as do some of the “good” kings of Israel and Judah during the alternating times of good versus bad kings throughout certain periods of the history of those Northern and Southern kingdoms of the Jewish people.
Other great leaders of the world’s nations, who were not necessarily people after God’s own heart, have ruled the people under their authority with benevolence. Such societies and cultures have thrived, most often, under such rulers.
Certainly, in these modern days when nuclear weapons could end civilization with the press of a few buttons, God’s staying hand on the leadership of the nations of planet earth is all the more important to recognize. To place the blame on the Almighty is to place blame wrongly. He has kept us from destroying ourselves, despite our best efforts to do so, restraining evil that comes from our own sin-blackened hearts.
There is coming a time, and I believe very soon, when that restraining influence will remove–according to 2 Thessalonians, chapter 2. We can see indications that our collective rebellion has already caused the Lord to somewhat take his Mighty Hand of restraint off this world. We can see it through the more than obvious confused thinking that this end-times era has wrought among the leaderships of the nations on a global basis.
In my view, our own nation demonstrably manifests this restraint being removed. There are many instances of the apparent reprobate (upside-down) thinking I could mention. I will mention only the fact–to reiterate for the hundredth time—the US president and his secretary of state moving heaven and earth to placate the blood-vowed enemies of America and Israel whom they call the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan.” At the same time, this administration moves ever farther away from Israel, our staunchest and most trustworthy ally on the planet.
Sin-insanity has infected the highest echelons of US and other earthly governments. Leaders can’t seem to find their way to their cocktail parties, much less to the table of common sense, while they interact diplomatically in these strange times, which are almost certainly near the very end of the age. So, why has the Lord allowed such leaders in such high places–those who are showing themselves in most cases to be the very minions of Satan? I believe that at least part of the answer resides within what God has told us as follows:
For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory, Even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? (Romans 9:17-24).
Terry.
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