Hellenism Destroyed the Temple Once—It's Happening Again

A man who called himself God Manifest walked into God's temple in Jerusalem and sacrificed a pig on the altar of God. Then he put a statue of Zeus where the presence of God was supposed to dwell. And if that wasn't enough, the priesthood that was supposed to be passed down through lineage started to be bought with a price. This is the backstory that Jesus comes into the world to fix and ultimately it's the reason he's going to destroy the temple and decimate it to the ground. The worst part is the corruption of then is still affecting us even today. This is part two of a two-part series that I'm doing on Hellenism. And if you missed the first part, I'm gonna give you a link. You can go back and watch it now before you get into this one. But by the time of the second century BC, now this is the time between Malachi in the Old Testament and Matthew in the New Testament. This is the period I'm going to discuss. And let me just pull over for a moment. Most Christians, probably including you, have never heard this before. I know I didn't learn this till not long ago to really understand the backdrop that Jesus was born into. Hellenism by the second century BC

dominated the entire Western world. And the Greek language that came with it was so deep into the Jewish world that Greek-speaking Jews began translating the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. We call that translation, this may be familiar to you, the Septuagint. Now here's the irony. The very language that Alexander the Great used as a weapon, God turned it around as a delivery system. Beginning in the mid-third century, the scriptures went out in the common tongue of the whole known world. And with that came the prophecies of Jesus, the prophecies of the Messiah, the birth of Jesus, the life of Jesus, the death of the Messiah, and the resurrection of the Messiah were all etched into the public records centuries before Jesus was ever born. The empire meant the Greek language for conquest. God turned it around and meant it for a witness. What the enemy intends for evil, God always turns around and uses for good. Now I want you to hold on to that for a moment because we're gonna see this play out toward the end. I want to introduce you to a man named Antiochus Epiphanes. His original name was Antiochus the Fourth, but he was a very humble man, if you can imagine, so he changed his name to Epiphanes, which means, brace yourself, God manifest on earth.

You can imagine the humility he possessed. And he comes on the scene and he starts to do things that are contrary to the people of God and the word of God. The book of 1 Maccabees records this moment. This is an apocryphal book in the intertestamental period of time. Here's what happens. A group of Jews decide to go to Antiochus and they essentially say, hey, why don't we come to terms? We're gonna try to work together with the Greeks. Our refusal to blend in has brought us nothing but trouble and so let's make an agreement. And so basically, he gives them permission to live like Gentiles. He even builds a Greek-style stadium in Jerusalem. Some even undergo surgery to reverse their own circumcision so they can run naked in the games without shame. They even abandoned the covenant at this time. And then Antiochus issues a decree that every nation under the empire or in the empire has to abandon its own customs and become one people. If you're interested, this is in 1 Maccabees 1, 41-43. Many Israelites, believe it or not, obey. They start offering sacrifices to idols. They stop keeping the Sabbath. And then the unthinkable happens. In 167 BC, Antiochus desecrates the second temple. He sacrifices a pig on the altar of God and then, if that's not enough,

he erects a statue of Zeus, one of the false gods, in the holy place of God where the presence of God is, there is a false god. It is the abomination of desolation in the flesh, if you will. Now, I want you to ask yourself this question. When a nation has been told for 300 years that their god is just one dish on a buffet and that a man calling himself God Manifest puts a pig on the altar, what do you think happens to the people desperate for rescue? Well, here's what they do. They start looking everywhere for a savior, someone to bail them out, a messiah, if you will. The scholar N.T. Wright points out, and this is startling to think about, he points out, It's out that there were 10 to 12 messiahs, so-called messiahs, that rose up and claimed to be working for God and of God, get this, 100 years before Jesus is coming and 100 years after. So within 200 years, 12 men rise up. We know some of them even in the Bible. Judas the Galilean, who's referenced in Acts, was a man who led a revolt around the time of Jesus' birth. He had about a hundred or hundreds of followers, if you will, who were hunted down after that, crucified and killed.

So every messiah, so-called messiah, that rises up, you're gonna see the same pattern. They rise up, they get a following, they die, and the movement ends. About a century later, after Jesus, a man by the name of Simeon ben Koseba, or Bar-Kopa, you may have heard of him, he rises up and he convinces some of the leading rabbis to even follow him. They even proclaim, this is, at last, our messiah. He was, of course, hunted down and killed as well. During the Jewish war, a grandson by the name of Menahem, who was the grandson of Judas the Galilean, led another group of dagger men. We call them the Sikyari or the Sikyri. And their movement ended in mass suicide on the cliffs of Masada as the Romans closed in. And this was at the end of the war, 70 AD, they had already decimated the temple, and this put an end to it. Now, here's Wright's point with sharing all of these insights, and it's devastating. In every single case, the death of the leader means the death of the movement. If you kill the so-called messiah, then the dream dies with him and the people, which is exactly what makes the resurrection of Jesus Christ the hinge point of all of history. Because one tomb, one time, broke the pattern. They killed our messiah, and three days later,

he rises up and the movement, somebody help me here, amen, the movement doesn't die, it explodes, it expands. Now, before we get to the empty tomb, I wanna look inside the temple walls, because this is where it gets real personal, and it's what I believe causes the total destruction of the decimation of the temple and the entire system of Judaism and the Jewish practice back then. Corruption trickles into the priesthood with the appointment of a man named Jason. Now, Jason, remember that name, is the first illegal priest appointed by Antiochus. Antiochus Epiphanes accepted money for the position in order to repay the Romans this enormous tribute, thus outing Onesius III, who, as crazy as this is, is Jason's own brother. And Jason, at that point, is unqualified to hold the office he bought, why? Because he's not of what is called the Zadokoan or Zadokean lineage. He's not of the lineage of Eleazar, the son of Aaron back in Moses' day. The priesthood back then was given through the family. Now the priesthood is bought with a price. This was the line God appointed himself, and Jason is not in it. His position, though, is short-lived. In 171 BC, another non-Zadokean priest bought the office for more money than the previous man.

This change, according to commentator Leiby, it's an interesting comment he has, this change marked the downfall of the Zadokean priesthood or office of high priest. No one can conclusively demonstrate that after that event, they were a member of the Zadokean line to become a priest. So at that point, when Jason takes over, that's when the corruption trickles in. Now I want you to sit with the scale of the collapse for a moment. Because Israel, up to this point, had 43 high priests, watch this, from Aaron to Onias, who was the last qualified priest. Over the course of almost 1,400 years, 1,388 years to be exact. So think about this, from 1560 BC to 172 BC, almost 1,400 years, 43 high priests. But over the next 240 years, that's it, 240, 42 to be exact, 38 high priests occupied that position. It went from being an inherited position to a purchased one. Rampant greed, if you can imagine, and corruption were trickling into the first century temple until no priest had a right to occupy the office, even until the day Jesus comes. Let's now feel the weight of this. This means, and I can't say this any more plainly, and this is the punchline, Caiaphas,

the high priest of Israel, who is going to sentence Jesus and hand him over to death, doesn't have the right theologically, genealogically, practically, to own the position that puts Jesus and punishes him to the cross. An illegitimate priest condemns Jesus, the only truly legitimate high priest the world has ever known, to die on a cross for crimes he didn't commit. And if that wasn't enough, the final straw was broken when Jonathan, one of the sons of Matthathias the Maccabean, back in the war of the Maccabeans against the Greeks, declared himself to be high priest. A lot of people don't know this. His family were descendants of Aaron's, obviously, so they were priests, but they were not of the Zadokean family line. So neither did he, who started the Maccabean revolt with his family, neither did he have right to chair the position he took. A group of faithful priests use money and corruption as motivation for power. So this motivates and moves a bunch of priests in the temple to uproot and go live in the desert. Now, all this will make sense, because the Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, was populated by a group of former priests called the Essenes. We know them as the Essenes, and I want you to understand this.

The Essenes departed Israel, by and large, because of the corruption in the temple. They didn't leave because they stopped believing in God. They left because the house of God had been hollowed out with corruption and sin and greed and money and power, and they said, we're not gonna watch this happen anymore. Ultimately, the corruption of the priesthood led to the destruction of the temple, both times that it happened. Rabbi Johanan Torta, in the second century, actually attributed the fall of the first temple, which was Solomon's temple, to the Babylonians because of one sin, idolatry. Tempted to worship other things, the people of God lost their love for the God who saved them. But then the second temple, according to him, rebuilt under Zerubbabel and Ezra and Nehemiah, the temple Jesus comes into the world to, was decimated, get this, in 70 AD, by the Romans because of one sin. A lot of sins, but one main sin. Internal strife, corruption within. You could say it this way. A lack of love for one another led to their own demise. Now, let's stand back and look at these two diagnoses side by side. One temple lost its love for God. The other lost its love for people. And interestingly enough, Jesus sums the entire law of God,

all 613 commandments of the Torah, into two commands. Love the Lord your God and love others as yourself. Matthew 22, if you're familiar with this reference. Two failures that destroyed both temples are the exact same commands Jesus said the entire Bible hangs on. That's not a coincidence. That's the diagnosis of a culture and the cure for it in one single sentence. So here's the uncomfortable question that turns this entire study home. If the buffet back then of temptation hollowed out the people of God 2,000 years ago with four things, athletics, education, information, and entertainment, and we are far more saturated today than they ever were, what makes you and I think it isn't doing the same thing to us right now? Because the reality is, it is. We just renamed it with other titles. I wanna return to the four doors I mentioned in the last video, the four hallmarks of Hellenism. And I want you to look at these doors as mirrors into your life. Let's take the first one, education. We have kids today, you and I, who were taught the universe began by colliding planets and that humanity climbed up from the animal kingdom in classrooms they attend.

And intelligent, educated people have bought into it without blinking an eye. Biblical accounts get filed under, those are children's stories, until born-again believers sit by quietly doubting the flood, doubting the fall, doubting that Adam and Eve were real people, doubting the resurrection themselves. Now you may not say, I'm doubting this publicly, but by not speaking up actively, you're in a sense allowing it to happen. It's the same door, new library. Number two, what about athletics? America's favorite pastime is football. And for plenty of us, we worship teams without knowing it. The team gets the worship that only God should get. Travel ball, high school sports, college seasons, NFL athletes, we follow more than we follow people in the Bible. And for some families, again, I'm not trying to throw shade at you. I'm trying to lift you up, not break you down. Athletics don't supplement life. They actually rule your life. Same door, different stadium. What about information or the media? A partisan agenda-driven media has so hijacked the news that we could barely tell the truth anymore. And our news station is right, obviously, and everybody else's news station is wrong.

Have you ever thought everybody on every side thinks the same thing? Of course, I'm right and everybody else is wrong. And we don't even know how to tell the truth from a lie anymore. We don't even know how to search on AI or chat GPT or Google and know if it's true. I remember one time I was showing my boys something and they looked at the screen and they said, "'Dad, that's not real, that's AI.'" I was like, wow. They are coming from a position of suspicion, not trust. Same outpost, different news feed. What about the final one, entertainment or the theater back in the day? Do you remember a time when PG-13 actually meant something? Not anymore. Nighttime television, endless scrolling with language and sexual content we are exposed to on a daily basis. Every single night that we swipe and flip and scroll through our phones passively, individually, by ourselves, in the dark, isolated and alone. You see, that's how Satan wins. If he can get a man or a woman isolated, alone from relationship and community, he wins. And that's the exact same thing the Greek theater taught. Same door, different screen.

Friends, you and I are not fighting Hellenism. We are living in it today. We just call it something different, Hollywood, and everything that happens in association with it. We just call it something different. And nobody's asking you to bow down to Zeus anymore. They're just asking you to accept the new plate of food. Just add this to the repertoire of things you're influenced by, one degree at a time, one addition at a time. There's a song years ago, I love this song, it's by Casting Crowns, and it's called Slow Fade. You probably know it already, but the whole point of that song is that no one crumbles in a single day. The distance from your mind to your hands is shorter than you think. Why? Because it's a slow fade. A thought invades, a choice gets made, a price gets paid, and one ordinary morning, you and I wake up and we realize we are standing in a place we swore we would never stand. And you realize, how did I get this far from God? Listen, you listen, you linger, and then you start laughing. And then you start mocking God, just like the psalmist says, blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers.

You don't sit in the seat of scoffers overnight, it's a slow fade. So let me ask you as we close, has it been a slow fade for you? How did you even get here? How did you wind up here? At one time, you were fired up for the things of God. You loved the word of God, you prayed fervently. What happened? Was there a time you can remember where you were always obeying the voice of God? You'd find yourself wanting to go worship and sinning in the presence of God or basking in the word of God. Does God feel distant from you now? If that's you, I want you to hear this. The fade is slow, but so is the way back, one degree at a time in the other direction. If that's you, I want you to hear this. The fade away from God is slow, but the return to God is not. If you have wandered from the Lord and you feel like God is distant and you're worshiping other idols and things of the world, if you're consumed with everything but God and his word and longing for his presence, the way back is quick. It's through repentance. So let me just challenge you. If you're far from God, would you come back home today

and let's do it right now through repentance and confession of sin? I hope you enjoyed this video. Do me a favor and like it if you were blessed by it. Encourage someone to watch it. Send it to a friend who maybe has never heard about this history lesson. And if you haven't subscribed to the channel, go ahead and do that right now. Until next time, get into the word until the word gets into you.