Nehemiah 13:23-30 “In those days I also saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. (24) And half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and could not speak the language of Judah, but spoke according to the language of one or the other people. (25) So I contended with them and cursed them, struck some of them and pulled out their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, "You shall not give your daughters as wives to their sons, nor take their daughters for your sons or yourselves. (26) Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? Yet among many nations there was no king like him, who was beloved of his God; and God made him king over all Israel. Nevertheless pagan women caused even him to sin. (27) Should we then hear of your doing all this great evil, transgressing against our God by marrying pagan women?" (28) And one of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was a son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite; therefore I drove him from me. (29) Remember them, O my God, because they have defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites. (30) Thus I cleansed them of everything pagan. I also assigned duties to the priests and the Levites, each to his service.”
This brings us to a very important point that needs to be mentioned. We have already established that the reason the Lord destroyed the First Temple was because of Judah's worship of foreign gods, and we said that the Lord would not allow the Jews to build a Second Temple until those practices had been completely eradicated from their midst. And so to that end, it is important to note that after the seventy-year exile of the Jews, scripture teaches us that the Jewish leadership became zealous for the Law of Moses once again, and would no longer allow the Jews to embrace the worship of foreign gods. The above-quoted passage of scripture is one account of the zealousness displayed by the Jewish leadership after their return from exile. It is interesting to note in this passage that Nehemiah specifically cites the example of King Solomon's leading the Jewish nation down the destructive path of pagan worship. The last generation of Jews who worshipped foreign gods had been done away with during the seventy-year exile, thus ending that practice among the Jewish nation. The Jews' zealousness for the Law of Moses and shunning of foreign gods, eventually became so extreme that the Jews considered it unlawful for a Jewish man to keep company with citizens of another nation (Acts 10:28). That zealousness for God was not transitory, for hundreds of years later the apostle Paul testified of the Jews that he bore them witness that they had a zeal for God (Romans 10:2). And so we see that because the Jews had completely reformed, the Lord thus allowed them to build the Second Temple.
Malachi 3:1 “Behold, I send My messenger, And he will prepare the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, Will suddenly come to His temple, Even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, He is coming," Says the Lord of hosts.”
This brings us to another important point that needs to be discussed, i.e. why the Lord needed the Second Temple to be built. We have seen that the Lord allowed the Jews to build the Second Temple because the reason for the First Temple's destruction had been done away with (i.e. the Jews no longer worshiped foreign gods), but that doesn't answer the question of why the Lord deemed it necessary for the Second Temple to be built. The reason God needed the Second Temple to be in place, was to accommodate the first coming of the Messiah. In the above-quoted passage of scripture, we have an account of the prophet Malachi prophesying to the Jews in approximately the year 420 BC[1]. In this prophecy, Malachi told the Jews that the Lord, whom they were seeking, would suddenly come to His temple. And so Malachi’s prophecy was fulfilled when Jesus the Messiah finally appeared in the temple to begin His ministry. This prophecy is just one of many that linked the coming Messiah to the temple. Another example was when Jesus used a whip of chords to drive the money changers out of the temple; the scripture teaches us that His disciples remembered that it was written “Zeal for Your house has eaten me up” (John 2:13-17). And so we see that the Second Temple needed to be in place for the first coming of the Messiah to be fulfilled. That is the reason why God destroyed the Second Temple soon after Jesus the Messiah was raised from the dead; because the primary purpose for the Second Temple had been fulfilled. As an aside, in approximately the year 573 BC the Lord gave Ezekiel the prophet a vision, in which He showed Ezekiel the design of a Temple that the Jews were instructed to build (Ezekiel 43:10-12)[2]. And so we would have assumed that the Second Temple which was eventually built 53 years later would have been built according to the design given to Ezekiel. That is not the case however; for historical records reveal to us that the design of the Second Temple did not match the design given to the prophet Ezekiel[3]. This implies that the design shown to Ezekiel pertains to the Third Temple that has yet to be built. It is also interesting to note that Ezekiel mentions nothing about the Ark of the Covenant in his design, thus implying that the Ark will not be present in the construction of the Third Temple either.
Michael E.B. Maher
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