Tisha B'Av: Does God Want The Temple Rebuilt?

Tisha B’Av (the 9th of Av) arrives like a long, low note of mourning held across the centuries. On this one day, both Temples fell. The fire that consumed the House of God still smolders in the memory of Israel, and every year His people fast, sit low to the ground, dim the lights, and read the Lamentations of Jeremiah, weeping for a Home they have never seen. 

We from the nations watch them mourn and quietly wonder how we are meant to relate to this day. For many of us, this is the day we struggle most to wrap our minds around. We were never taught to mourn a building. We were taught that the Temple's destruction was God’s way of showing humanity that God is not confined to any building.

Traditional Christianity says that buildings don’t matter, because God can be anywhere. It says that God destroyed Jerusalem for the sins of the Jews, and that His choosing of one literal, physical, geographical place is no longer relevant. Much of it goes further still, insisting that a third Temple will be built only for the Anti-Christ. And so most Christians look at the smoking ruins of Tisha B’Av and see it as progress. I confess that not many years ago I also stood in the camp of the indifferent. I knew almost nothing about the Temple, assumed we weren’t missing much without it, and certainly wasn’t expecting God to be behind its rebuilding.

Then I began going up. 

On the Temple Mount, praying where prayer has ascended for three thousand years, I felt the Presence of God in a way I had felt nowhere else on earth. I tasted a little taste of what was, and of what will be, and of what, astonishingly, is still there today. Those moments drove me back to the Scriptures, and what I found there shocked me. The Bible is not indifferent to this place. Heaven is not neutral about this particular mountain.

Hear the word of the LORD through Zechariah: “Thus says the LORD of hosts: ‘I am zealous for Zion with great zeal; with great fervor I am zealous for her.’” Let that settle for a moment. The Spirit could have chosen a word that means land in general or people in general. He chose Zion, a specific geographical location. Almighty God, who fills heaven and earth, declares Himself greatly and fervently zealous for a particular piece of real estate.

The Maker of galaxies has an address on His heart. And if we do not yet feel that zeal ourselves, the honest response is not to explain it away but to press into His heart and pray: Lord, make me zealous for what You are zealous for.

When Solomon dedicated the first House, he asked God to come and dwell in the place prepared for Him, and to hear every prayer spoken before Him there. And God appeared to him by night and answered: “I have heard your prayer, and have chosen this place for Myself as a house of sacrifice . . . Now My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to prayer made in this place.” Millions of us have quoted verse fourteen of this chapter, “if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray,” without ever reading on to verse fifteen, where God anchors this whole promise to prayer made in a specific place.

 Solomon even dared to ask that the foreigner who came and prayed there would be heard from heaven, and God said yes. When heaven is shut, and the land is broken, it is toward this place that the humbled and the praying ones must turn, and from this place that forgiveness and healing flow. The Temple was never merely architecture. It was the meeting point of heaven and earth, the hinge on which mercy swung.

And the promise reaches beyond Israel to embrace us all. Isaiah saw the sons of the foreigner joining themselves to the LORD, loving His name, keeping His Sabbath, holding fast His covenant: “Even them I will bring to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in My house of prayer . . . for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” The promise of an international prayer house in God’s capital city is yet to be. A House yet stands on the horizon of history, and there is a place there with your name on it.

If we wonder how the Messiah feels about His Father’s House, we need only watch Him walk through its courts. He braided a whip of cords, drove out the merchants and the money changers, overturned their tables, and cried, “Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up.” He would not allow so much as a vessel of wares to be carried through its courts, and He taught them, saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’?” 

Read that scene carefully. Many assume the overturned tables prove that Yeshua had something against the Temple, but the truth is exactly the opposite. He cleansed it because He claimed it. You do not drive thieves out of a house you have abandoned; you drive them out of a house you love. The Temple was not repulsive to Yeshua. Zeal for it consumed Him.

After Yeshua’s resurrection, He spent forty days teaching about the Kingdom. His disciples, understanding its tangible reality, asked Him plainly, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” Yeshua’s answer, in essence drawing in what Paul later unveils in Romans 11, was this: first, go bring in the fullness of the Gentiles. The restoration is not canceled; it is sequenced. 

There will be a new heaven and a new earth, just as you became a new creation when Yeshua came into your heart. God is returning to Jerusalem. The fullness of the nations will come in, and His House will be a house of prayer for all peoples. That is why God is greatly and fervently zealous for this place. That is why zeal for God’s House consumed the Messiah. And that is why you and I should be greatly and fervently zealous for the rebuilding of God’s House: the house of prayer for all nations.

And perhaps this is the deepest reason to mourn today: we do not know what we are missing.

When Solomon finished his prayer, fire came down from heaven, and the glory of the LORD filled the House, so that the priests could not even stand to minister. We have all felt God’s presence in worship, in prayer, in moments of the miraculous, and we treasure those tastes. But the visible Glory–the cloud descending, the fire falling, the Presence of God resting openly in the midst of the earth–that is what departed, and that is what the world has been living without. If we truly understood what was lost, we would weep with Jerusalem today. And if we truly understood what is promised, we would labor with her for its return.

So may this day of mourning become for us a day of vision. May God give us a revelation of His heart for Zion, and may it knit us to our Jewish brothers and sisters, who already understand what it means for God’s Presence to rest in Zion and what that will mean for the whole world. May the tears of Tisha B’Av water the seeds of restoration. May God bless us with a zeal that fires us up to actively bring His Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven. 

May the House of Prayer for All Nations be rebuilt speedily and in our days. Amen!