It Was Never About a Building

by John Wiertzema

There is a question that sits near the center of almost every popular conversation about Scripture’s most contested texts, and it usually arrives in one of two forms. Will a third temple be rebuilt in Jerusalem? And will the man of lawlessness walk into it?

I am not going to argue you out of a position on that question. That is worth saying plainly at the start, because arguing positions is what nearly everyone does with it, and the argument has hardened into camps the way these arguments do. There is something quieter to do, and I think more useful. Over the course of this temple series we have been building a way of reading: tracking one image across the whole of Scripture and watching what it does. You have the key in your hand now.

I do hold a position on the third temple, and I have written it down. I would be glad for you to arrive at it. But a conclusion you land on before you have traveled to it tends to stay someone else’s — held lightly, and defended afterward by hunting for verses that agree. So let me walk up to the handful of texts this question stands on and read them with you, key in hand, and let you watch what happens.

Because here is what I have come to believe about the third-temple teaching. It is not wrong the way a wrong answer on a math test is wrong: a sound method arriving at a slipped digit. It is wrong the way a reader is wrong who picks up a novel at chapter forty holding a picture the author retired in chapter twelve. The problem was never the sincerity, and it was never the seriousness about Scripture. The problem is that the picture stopped moving and the text did not.

The Teaching, Fairly Stated

First, the position itself. It deserves to be stated fairly, because it is held by sincere people who love the Bible and take its hardest pages seriously.

The teaching runs like this. Several prophetic texts speak of a temple. Daniel speaks of sacrifices brought to a halt and an abomination that desolates. Paul tells the Thessalonians that the man of lawlessness “takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.” John, in Revelation 11, is handed a measuring rod and told to measure the temple of God. Since the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 and these events have not visibly happened, the reasoning goes, a temple must stand again: rebuilt in Jerusalem, its sacrifices resumed, so that the lawless one can enter it, halt the offerings, and enthrone himself where he does not belong.

You can see why the reading commends itself. It takes the words at face value. It refuses to dissolve hard texts into vapor. If the choice were between this reading and a reading that shrugs the texts off as antique poetry, I would take this reading every time.

But those are not the only two choices. There is a third: read the texts with the picture Scripture itself has been building, and watch the question change underneath you.

The Key, Briefly

You may remember, from our walk through the temple’s movement, what that picture is. The dwelling of God does not sit still in Scripture. It begins in a garden, travels in a tent, rests at Shiloh, settles into Solomon’s stone — and then it keeps going: into Christ, who spoke of “the temple of his body,” and from Christ into his people. The order there is the whole point: the dwelling came to rest in Christ first, and it reaches his people only because his Spirit carries it out of him and into them. They are the temple in him, never apart from him. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” By the time the last book of the Bible opens, that is where the dwelling is. Not poetry. Location. The people of God are the temple of God, the last standing thing Scripture establishes about the dwelling before Revelation begins.

That is the key. Now watch what it does to each of these texts.

Daniel: The Abomination Is an Army

Start with Daniel 9:27, the passage that supplies the “halted sacrifices” and the “abomination of desolation,” the twin pillars of the rebuilt-temple expectation. The common picture is liturgical: a restored altar, a ritual interrupted, a desecrating act performed inside a sanctuary.

But Daniel’s own imagery points somewhere else. The abomination comes “on the wing” — the Hebrew is kanaph — and that wing-image is not invented on the spot. It reaches back to Isaiah 8, where Assyria’s invasion of the land is pictured as a great bird whose outstretched wings overshadow the whole breadth of Immanuel’s land. The wing is an army in flight over a country. The picture Daniel reaches for, in other words, is not a man performing a ceremony in a building. It is an invasion: a devastating military overspreading of the land and an assault on its people. I have walked through this at length in Settling the Rapture Debate; the short version is that the abomination that desolates is a war brought against a people, not a rite performed in a room.

Notice what just happened. The text everyone reads as requiring a building turns out, in its own imagery, to be about an attack on people. Hold that. It is going to keep happening.

Paul: The Seat and the Temple

Then there is 2 Thessalonians 2, the lawless one who “takes his seat in the temple of God.” We spent real time inside this verse earlier in the series, so here I will only compress it: “takes his seat” cannot be woodenly literal (there were no chairs in the sanctuary; the priests stood, and no throne was in it), and once the verb is granted to be figurative (an assertion of authority), there is no honest way to demand that “the temple of God” in the same breath must be masonry. Read with Paul’s own settled usage, the usage he spent his ministry teaching, the verse describes a usurper installing himself over the people of God, claiming a place among them that belongs to God alone.

One text might be a coincidence. Two begins to look like a pattern: wherever the popular reading sees a building, the text, read forward, sees the people.

The Tent at the Holy Mountain

The most striking witness of all sits at the very end of Daniel 11, the long chapter that tracks the willful king: the figure who “exalts himself above every god,” the figure Paul is widely recognized to be drawing on when he writes to the Thessalonians. The chapter’s final verse says this of him:

“And he shall plant the tents of his palace between the seas and the glorious holy mountain; yet he shall come to his end, and none shall help him.” (Daniel 11:45)

Read quickly, it sounds like troop logistics: a king pitching camp. And the verses just before it are indeed military: campaigns south, tidings from the east, armies in motion. But slow down on two details, because they will not stay quiet.

The first is the word. “Tents” here is the Hebrew ‘ohel. And ‘ohel is not a word that stays in the barracks. It is the word of the tent of meeting, the wilderness dwelling of God. It is the word Scripture uses for habitation: the ‘ohel of David where his throne was set, the ‘ohel of the daughter of Zion, which is Jerusalem herself. Isaiah reaches for exactly this word when he promises that Zion will be “an immovable tent, whose stakes will never be plucked up”: Zion as ‘ohel, and plainly not meaning fabric and cord, but the people of God secure in their God. And when the ancient Greek translators rendered Daniel 11:45, they chose skēnē: the tabernacle word, the dwelling word. Remember that word. You are about to meet it again.

The second detail is the location. He plants this dwelling “between the seas and the glorious holy mountain”: at Zion, at the mountain of God. Of all the ground on earth, the willful king sets his ‘ohel at the one place that has meant, since the tabernacle first stood, the dwelling of God with His people.

Now ask the question the whole chapter has been preparing. What has this figure actually been doing since he entered the narrative? Verse 44 says he goes out “with great fury to destroy and devote many to destruction”: a rage far past what conquest requires; land-takers do not rage like that. And across Daniel’s visions this same figure is the one who “made war with the holy ones” (chapter 7), who “grew great, even to the host” (chapter 8), whose work is summed up as “shattering the power of the holy people” (chapter 12). His campaign has never really been about territory. It is about a people — God’s people — from beginning to end.

So when, at the climax of that campaign, he plants a dwelling — an ‘ohel, a skēnē — at God’s holy mountain, I do not think we are reading about where an army parks. We are reading about a claim. A counterfeit dwelling, planted on the true dwelling’s ground. He is not building himself a palace so much as declaring that what belongs to God — the dwelling, the people — is now his. The verse is the willful king’s whole career in a single image: he claims what was never his to claim, and the very next clause pronounces the verdict on it. Yet he shall come to his end, and none shall help him.

Revelation Says It Out Loud

If that reading of Daniel seems like it asks too much of one verse, Revelation removes the doubt, because Revelation makes the same move and then, remarkably, explains itself.

You may remember, from our walk through the movement, that the people-as-temple does not wait politely outside Revelation’s door. It walks in early. In the third chapter, the risen Christ tells the churches: “The one who conquers, I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God. Never shall he go out of it.” A pillar in the temple — a person. The believer, built permanently into the dwelling of God. That is the true temple, standing in Revelation’s own opening chapters.

Now come to chapter 13, where the beast (John’s portrait of the same usurping figure) opens his mouth. And listen to what he attacks:

“It opened its mouth to utter blasphemies against God, blaspheming his name and his dwelling — that is, those who dwell in heaven.” (Revelation 13:6)

His dwelling — the word is skēnē, the same word the Greek translators placed at Daniel 11:45 — that is, those who dwell in heaven. Do you see what the text just did? It used the dwelling word of God’s skēnē, and then it turned and told you, in so many words, what that dwelling is. Those who dwell. People. Revelation glosses its own term. The dwelling the usurper rages against is not a structure. Scripture says so, plainly, in the very sentence.

Set the two side by side and the picture is complete. In chapter 3, the dwelling: believers built in as pillars, never to go out. In chapter 13, the war: the usurper blaspheming that same dwelling. The true temple, and the assault on it. Daniel showed you the claim: the counterfeit ‘ohel planted at the holy mountain. Revelation shows you the rage behind it, and names its target. And in neither book is the target a building.

The Temple That Gets Measured

Which brings us, finally, to Revelation 11, the text I pointed at during our walk through the temple’s movement and deliberately left closed, because the series had not yet earned the reading. It has now.

John is handed “a reed like a measuring rod” and told: “Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there.” Here, more than anywhere, the rebuilt-temple expectation plants its flag: a temple measured must be a temple standing.

But look at what John is actually told to measure. Not the temple alone — the temple, the altar, and those who worship there. Try to picture the third item performed literally. You can lay a rod against a wall. You can lay it against an altar. You cannot lay a measuring stick against a congregation; worshippers are not measured in cubits. The command itself tells you the measuring is not architecture-work. And the instrument agrees: the reed is “like a rod,” and the rod in Scripture’s vocabulary is the instrument of judgment and rule, not of the building trade. What John is given is an act of divine assessment (a marking-out of what belongs to God), and the object of it is the worshippers. The people. I have worked through this text carefully in Settling the Rapture Debate, and there is more there if you want the full case. But the essential move is visible on the verse’s own surface: even here, at the text most often read as blueprint evidence, the object under the rod is the people of God.

Three books. One pattern. Daniel’s abomination: an assault on a people. Paul’s temple: the people. Daniel’s planted ‘ohel: a claim on the people. Revelation’s blasphemed skēnē: “those who dwell.” Revelation’s measured temple: the worshippers. Read with the key, every text in the third-temple file turns out to be about the same thing — and it is never the masonry.

It Was Never About a Building

I am not telling you no structure will ever stand on that contested hill. Buildings rise and fall, and men build what they build; Scripture does not need my supervision on the point. What I am saying is that the texts this expectation is built on are not about that. Read in their own imagery, with the picture Scripture itself spent a whole canon building, they describe something far weightier than construction: a usurper whose war is against the dwelling of God. And the dwelling of God, by the time these texts are pointing forward, is His people. That is what the willful king claims at the holy mountain. That is what the beast blasphemes. That is what the rod marks out. The lawless one’s ambition was never real estate. It is the seizure of what God calls mine. And Scripture’s whole answer, from Daniel 11’s last verse onward, is that the claim fails. He shall come to his end, and none shall help him.

And notice, finally, what happened to the question itself. We did not defeat the third-temple position in a debate. We read the texts with the movement in hand, and the question quietly changed shape — from will there be a building? to what is the usurper actually after? — and the second question is the one the texts were answering all along. That is what the method does. It does not hand you a new position to defend. It hands the texts back to you, saying what they were saying before the old picture froze.

This is the last piece of the temple’s story I set out to walk with you, and it ends where the whole series has been pointing. The dwelling of God moved — garden, tent, stone, Christ, His people — and every voice in Scripture that speaks of the end speaks of that dwelling: its Lord, its enemies, its security, its future. Learn to follow the movement, and these most contested pages stop being a battlefield of positions. They start to read like the rest of Scripture.

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