Fill this House with Glory

Limitations are an interesting concept.  Interesting because they are the defining factor of the human experience.  There are only so many hours in a day, only so many dollars in our paychecks and only so much energy that we can exert in using one to acquire the other.  Athletes prove that while those who are uncommonly gifted and extraordinarily disciplined can do great feats that even they are limited.  A person can only jump so high or lift a certain amount of weight.  A mile can be run in only a certain amount of time and as we have seen at the NFL combine that a football prospect can only run the 40 yard dash in 4.2 seconds.

We are by definition limited.  And this is what I like about the Messianic prophecies of the Second Temple.  They literally only have a 586 year period that they could have been fulfilled.  That period of time being from the completion of the Temple in 516 B.C. until the destruction of the Temple by Rome in 70 A.D.

So as we look  back on history and examine these prophecies they too are within the context of limitations.  There could only be a certain number of people who could even be considered as fulfilling these Words.

The first prophecy that we will examine in this series is Haggai 2:6-9.  These are verses that come in the greater conversation of where God is comparing the Old Temple (Solomon's Temple) with the New Temple that had just been built.  And the people were saying that the Old Temple was much greater in appearance than the new.  So we see in these verses a couple of phrases that I want to highlight:

"I will shake all the nations and they will come with the wealth of all nations an I will fill this house with glory."
-Haggai 2:7 (NASB)

The above verse is quoted in the New American Standard.  If it is quoted in the King James it would read:

"I will shake all the nations and the Desire of Nations shall come and I will fill this house with glory."
-Haggai 2:7 (KJV)

The word translated in the NASB for "wealth" is actually "desire" and the translators have chosen wealth because God promises in the next verse to bring silver and gold into the Temple so the translators believe that in this case the "desire" of the nations is wealth because that is what the worldly pagan nations covet after.  I would make a case that either the word "wealth" or "Desire" (capital "D" intended) are legitimate possible translations because I think context could dictate either.

The case for it referring to "Desire" are in a couple of following phrases.  Those phrases are in verse 7, "I will fill this House with glory" and in verse 9 "the latter glory of this House shall be greater than the former."  Now if you consider that the second Temple only stood for 500 years and you have studied the second Temple you will find that while Herod did make renovations to this Temple and adorned it with gold, it at best only matched the "glory" of the Temple of Solomon if you were using "glory" as a way of describing the brightness of gold on its walls (though it is actually more likely that it did not match the "glory" of the display and grandeur that was Solomon's Temple).

A definite fulfillment of this prophecy comes in a more Biblical approach to the word "glory".  A study of the word "glory" will show that it was the "glory" of the Lord that appeared in a cloud, in many verses to the people of Israel in the Book of Exodus.  This cloud appeared in the Tabernacle of Meeting in Leviticus and Numbers and this same glory was said to have departed from Israel when the Ark of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines in 1 Samuel.  This glory appeared as a cloud that was so thick in 1 Kings that the priests when dedicating Solomon's Temple could not stand.  And was one of the main themes of the book of Ezekiel as he had a revelation of the glory of the Lord only to see it depart from the Temple of Solomon.

So when we read that "the glory of the latter house shall be greater than the former" that makes for a very definite word.  Definite because the second Temple of Israel did not have the Ark of the Covenant.  After the Babylonians destroyed the first Temple they took all of the holy items of the Temple and transported then to Babylon and those items were eventually returned when Cyrus the Persian ordered the Temple to be re-built but the Ark is never mentioned among those vessels that were returned (see Ezra 1:5-11).

Moreover the historian Tacitus records that when the Roman General Pompey entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple in 63 BC that he saw that "the place stood empty with not similitude of gods within, and that the shrine had nothing to reveal" (Tacitus Histories 5.9.1) and the Jew historian Josephus when describing the nuances of the second Temple declares about the Holy of Holies that within it "there was nothing at all" (Wars of the Jews Book 5 verse 219).

Furthermore the Talmud states that "after the Ark was taken away a stone remained there from the time of the early prophets" and it is on that stone that Jewish tradition is that during the Day of Atonement the high priest would sprinkle the sacrificial blood at the place where the Ark used to rest (Talmud Yoma 5.2).

So it can be established that the Ark disappeared when the Temple was destroyed and that it never was seen again.  What is fascinating about this is that there isn't a testimony like that of when it was taken by the Philistines and they all got hemorrhoids which were so bad that it caused them to sent it back (1 Samuel 15).  I believe the reason for this is that in Ezekiel we see God lifting His manifest Presence (the Glory) from the Temple (where the Ark was resting) and that because of this removal of His Presence, the Ark ceased to be the physical spot where the Holy Spirit dwelt on the earth but rather just returned to being a golden box.  Because this gold covered box itself was not what was powerful but that the glory of God inhabited it, it was then of no effect to the Babylonians when they took it and as such was never seen from again.  This event was witnessed in part by Ezekiel and prophesied by Jeremiah in Jeremiah 3:16b which reads:

"people will no longer say 'The Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.' And it will not come to mind, nor will they remember it, nor will they miss it, nor will it be made again."

To then acknowledge that the Ark never dwelt in the Second Temple then means to look at the verse which states "the glory of the latter house shall be greater than the former" in a new light with very narrow lenses for "what" or better put "Who" could have fulfilled it.

For the Second Temple to have a greater glory than the First would mean it would have to surpass the manifestation of God's Presence that was greater than the thick cloud that fell on the priests as the dedication of Solomon's Temple.  How did it do this?  The Second Temple was the very Temple that Jesus walked, talked and taught it.  The Second Temple had within its confines the very Incarnation of Eternally Begotten Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, walking in its midst.  A glory so great that the world has spent the past 2,000 years reflecting on the time when God became a man and dwelt among us and when He did He spent some of His time in the Second Temple.

So as the famous Christmas hymn states "Come Desire of Nations, bind in one the hearts of all mankind," we in that same vein ask that You would bind us together oh God, bind us to You oh Desire of Nations as we stand in awe of the One who's glory eclipsed everything else that history has witnessed.  Amen.