Preparing For The Coming Messiah

“And it shall come to pass in that day that the L-rd will thresh …And you will be gathered one by one, O you children of Israel. So it shall be in that day: the great trumpet will be blown; they will come …and shall worship the L-rd in the holy mount at Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 27:12-13)

At the turn of the 20th century, G-d began to stir the Jewish people to return to the former Land of Israel, the land of their ancestors. Immigration began to increase from all the countries to which they were scattered. The hearts of even atheistic Jews were turned toward Jerusalem. G-d’s stated purpose in the above scripture is to gather them to Jerusalem to worship Him in the Holy Mount, i.e. the Temple Mount––thus, to build a Third Temple there since the Second Temple had been destroyed in 70 CE. The construction of the Third Temple of G-d in Jerusalem is the final sign that announces the imminent arrival of the Messiah. 

In the same way, just before the construction of the Second Temple, G-d began returning the Jews from their exile in Babylon, calling them to the task of rebuilding Jerusalem and the Temple of G-d in preparation for the arrival of the Messiah’s first appearance. He even used a pagan king, Cyrus, to initiate His plan.

“Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: ‘All the kingdoms of the earth the L-rd G-d of heaven has given me. And He has commanded me to build Him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is among you of all His people? … let him go up to Jerusalem which is in Judah, and build the house of the L-rd G-d of Israel (He is G-d), which is in Jerusalem.’” (Ezra 2:1-2)

The enemy (Satan) has always tried to stop the Jews from returning to Israel. At first, he enslaved them in Egypt for 400 years. When G-d released them, their first task was to build the Tabernacle in the desert in which He himself would dwell. Then he stirred up fear and persecution against those returning from Babylon to discourage them from carrying out their purpose. Then, he motivated evil men to persecute the dispersed Jews in Russia and Europe, culminating in Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jewish people. 

In failing to prevent the return of the Jewish people to Israel, the enemy continues to use these same tactics on Jews still living in other lands in ‘galut’, and has added new strategies to prevent the construction of the Third Temple by those who have returned.

These new tactics include:

• Influencing Arabs to create a pseudo history of the Mideast. They seek to convince the world that there never was a Temple on the Temple Mount and that the land belongs to Arabs who lived in the land prior to the re-establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

• Causing Arab Muslims to destroy archeological evidence of Israel’s former presence on the Temple Mount.

• Stirring Arabs to physically and verbally attack Jews who attempt to visit the Temple Mount. 

• Swaying opponents of Israel to conspire with UNESCO to declare that the Temple Mount is a “Muslim” site. 

Despite the enemy’s exploitation of Arabs, Muslims, and others to resist the Jewish people, it would seem that the mere existence of the State of Israel would create a supernatural strength in Israelis to overcome all opposition. Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz examines this natural assumption in an Internet Blog.

“A pillar of Jewish life is a commitment to the unity of the Jewish people worldwide. Many assume the State of Israel creates that unity — that support for Israel is, or should be, the thing that unites all Jewish people.” 

Yet, the most destructive and successful tactic of the enemy has been to cause sharp divisions between the Jewish people themselves, between the religious and non-religious and between Jews living in the Land and those who contentedly live in other lands. If Satan can keep the people divided, it could prevent the construction of a Third Temple. To clarify this dilemma, a look at the past is necessary.

During the Second Temple Era, during the Roman conquest, there was great political turmoil in Israel in an ongoing power struggle among the different groups of Jews: 

• The Pharisees – rabbis who led the people and wanted to retain the status quo to keep their leadership positions
• The Sadducees – the wealthy, who ‘purchased’ the position of High Priest and sought to ingratiate the Romans
• The Zealots – those who wanted to fight Rome
• The Sicarii – those who were entirely against all forms of government 

While we know that the First Temple was destroyed due to idol worship and gross sins, the Jewish Sages attribute the destruction of the Second Temple to “the baseless hatred that prevailed among the Jews”. They believed that if the Jews had been united, they would have been able to withstand the Romans with G-d’s help. It was the fractured community of Jews, in essence, that resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple.

In more current history, the splintered Worldwide Jewish Community has a similar profile. G-d fearing Jews saw the new Zionist Movement in one of two ways. Some rejected the Zionists because most of its adherents were not religious. They placed great importance upon opposing anything worldly, thereby protecting their communities from secularization. Rabbi A. I. Kook did not respond that way, but sought to be involved in Zionism. He endeavored to create an atmosphere of holiness over the Zionist Movement, elevating it to a religious movement.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) was one of the most influential—and controversial—rabbis of the twentieth century. He was the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine and the founding theologian of religious Zionism. He spoke and wrote on the uniqueness of Israel and on the extraordinary Redemption that was taking place before his eyes. He believed that non-religious Jews would find G-d when they moved to Israel and in the end, would contribute to the revival of G-d's Word.

“Non-observant people of integrity,” he said, “do not come here to be free to lead a decadent and erring way of life, but because unconsciously, they long for the truth and Divine light found in the Torah….The secular world is one of impurities, but in its depths there is a spark of holiness that keeps it alive….” 

On the other hand, Kook harshly castigated those who “uprooted” the true faith and developed a new religion, i.e. Reform Judaism. He described them as “despoilers who have destroyed the vineyard of the L-rd and are causing many to abandon the G-d of Israel and His eternal Torah” including the way their synagogues were being constructed and what customs they followed.

“…they go from evil deed to evil deed… Many of them have been swallowed up without a trace by the non-Jewish world, and those who have not yet been lost are like an atrophied limb festering in the nation's body, devoid of Torah and the light of true Judaism.”

Rabbi Kook’s vastly different attitude towards Reform Jewry and that which he held towards secular Jews was due to his belief that the secular Jewish world did not want to take over the religious world, theologically speaking, but to live side by side with it. They were not presenting an alternative organized religion that sought to displace Orthodoxy, as did the Reform Movement. Kook believed there was no possibility of living side by side with them, but only to engage in a battle over which theology would lead the nation of Israel.

Rabbi Kook advocated that Reform Judaism sought to infiltrate the State of Israel from the United States to change the balance of power in Israel so that the religious world would not continue to be a place of commitment to G-d. The fact that the Reform Movement donated large sums of money to Jewish religious schools and other organizations in both Israel and the U.S. served to reinforce his indictment against them. 

These vastly disparate views keep the people of Israel divided and unable to move forward in their biblical mandate to build the Temple of G-d once back in the Land. Plus, in addition to the Reform and Orthodox branches of Judaism, there exists a hard-left Secular community that seeks Israel’s destruction, some knowingly and some in ignorance. 

Added to these divisions, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out that “the modern state of Israel is built on a vast panoply of ethnicities – Ashkenazi, Sefardi, Jews from Eastern, Central and Western Europe, Spain and Portugal, Arab lands, Russia and Ethiopia, America, South Africa, Australia and other places, some Hassidic, some Yeshiva-ish, others “Modern”, others “Traditional”, yet others secular and cultural.”

In order to unite all these varied factions, the national rights of the State of Israel to exist and thrive as a Jewish State must trump the individual rights of each group because the Jewish community, based solely on individual rights, will erode families, communities and eventually the Nation of Israel itself. The destruction of the Jewish identity of the State of Israel from within will serve Satan’s purpose to prevent the construction of the Third Temple. Nevertheless, G-d has overseen the return of the Jewish people to the Land, the re-establishment of the Nation of Israel, and the taking back of Jerusalem from enemy hands and He will accomplish the seemingly impossible task of unifying the Jewish people to build the Third Temple.

“As for you, son of man, take a stick for yourself and write on it: ‘For Judah and for the children of Israel, his companions.’ Then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel, his companions.’ … ‘Surely I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel, his companions; and I will join them with it, with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they will be one in My hand.’” (Ezekiel 37:16-19)

“For I have bent Judah, My bow, fitted the bow with Ephraim, and raised up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece, and made you like the sword of a mighty man.” (Zechariah 9:13)

G-d is watching over His Word to perform it (Jeremiah 1:12).

“I will return to Zion, and dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. Jerusalem shall be called the City of Truth, the Mountain of the L-rd of hosts, the Holy Mountain.” (Zechariah 8:3)

1 "Galut" is the condition of living anywhere in the world other than Israel.

2 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

3 Zionism was a movement for the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of the Jewish nation in what is now Israel. It was established as a political organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, and was later let by Chaim Weizmann and other secular Jews.

4 The Critical Difference Between the Reform Movement and Secular Jewry by Rabbi Baruch Efrati; Translated from Hebrew by Rochel Sylvetsky

5 Ephraim is described as Jews that are of a 'mixed' heritage (Genesis 46:20, Hosea 7:8)