Hey everybody I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast and we have just taken a grand journey through the Old Testament and

Extrabiblical ancient texts looking at the story of the Hebrew Israel, Jewish people and their temple, a building that they had good reason to believe God dwelt with them in.

But that temple story has got a whole bunch of chapters going back to the

tabernacle a tent where God dwelt with them to Solomon's Grand First Temple

completed somewhere in the 900s BC to the destruction of that temple under Nebuchaneseer in the 500s

BC to the rebuilding of a much more modest temple under the Persians and Cyrus the

Great later on in the 500s B.C. all the way up to political turmoil that lands the Jewish people with

Herod the Great in charge and his building of the grand temple complex that is the thing that

was in place when Jesus and his disciples go to Jerusalem

on the fateful trip that would see him executed on a cross. I think we are going to

round out that story with our conversation today, so I've gone on long enough here with the intro

Let's have Jeff play some music and then we'll finish it up So as you can see the story of the temple has no analogy, probably in your life or my life.

There is no building that means what that building means to the original audience in the book of

Matthew. The story starts all the way back just as

they're walking out the door from Egypt, supernatural things happen to confirm

this building. It's an expression of the grandeur of the unified monarchy and the blessing of God under Solomon.

It gets destroyed by the Babylonians. It gets rebuilt under the authority of the Persians.

Alexander the Great shows up the Egyptians under the Talimids control Jerusalem in the temple for a given time

then the solucids from Syria end up controlling it for a time

then the Jewish people rise up and throw them off under the Maccabees and they create their own thing for a time.

Then Pompeii and the Romans show up and Caesar controls it for a time.

Then the Roman Republic breaks and the new Roman Empire

...