Revelation 11 Already Happened — And It Proves No Third Temple Is Coming

The third temple everyone is waiting for is never going to be built, not because of politics, but because the Bible says so. You and I have been taught to watch red heifers and headlines that count down the clock to the end of the world, but that teaching actually gets Revelation 11 exactly backward. Today, I'm gonna show you the stopwatch hidden inside of this chapter, one that has already ran out 19 centuries ago, down to the exact month. And my goal today is to eliminate any fear you have that the shoe will drop at any moment, so I need you to lock in. This should be a good one. Welcome back to Get Into the Word. My name is Robbie Gallaty. Before we dive into Revelation 11, I need to name the biggest obstacle that is standing between you and this chapter. And it's not Greek. It's not even history. It's a business concept called the sunk cost fallacy. Following through on something you've invested time in or energy in or effort into, even when letting go is clearly the better option, you would rather stay with it, even though it could be wrong. You've lived with it for years.

40 minutes into a movie, you know this, you realize the movie's not good. And what do you do? You finish it anyway. Halfway through a boring book that has lost you after chapter three, and you continue to push on. Why? Because you've come this far, you might as well finish what you started. The same thing happens, I find, with the book of Revelation. Many people have been taught one framework, like me, our entire lives. We've watched videos. We have tracked predictions. Maybe even taught classes at churches. We're invested. And releasing what we've always believed feels like losing something. So here's my encouragement for us as we continue on this journey through the book. I want you to set aside for a moment the futuristic lens you've always been taught just to read the chapter the way John's first audience would have read it. And here's how they would have read it, with the Old Testament in mind. We're looking for clues in Revelation that draw us back to the scriptures of the Old Testament, not forward to news headlines

as a way we've always been instructed to do. And the verse that hands us this clue immediately is Revelation 11, chapter one. Notice what it says. Then I was given a measuring reed, like a rod. Basically a ruler, an ancient ruler. Go and measure the temple of God and the altar and count those who worship there. But exclude the courtyard outside of the temple. Don't measure it because it is given to the nations and they will trample the holy city, here it is, for 42 months. Now right out the gate, John is pulling his readers backward to the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel 40 through 42. You can go read it for yourself, but here's the situation. A man with a measuring rod measures the temple. If I sound like a broken record, it's because I am. Just remember, the way you study apocalyptic literature is going back to the Old Testament, not forward to the internet. Let's settle that. But I want you to notice something that's easy to miss, and that is the angel tells John to measure the temple and the altar as if it's still standing. Not destroyed in the past, but still there. I want you to hold onto that. It's going to matter enormously before we're done with this teaching. But first, we have to deal with what we've been taught

that points to a rebuilt third temple somewhere in the future with a restored sacrificial system in the distant age ahead. I understand why that view is attractive, but here's my biggest obstacle to actually believing it, and it's not a political one. It's a theological one, and it stacks up witness after witness. Here's what Jesus says. Jesus said, you remember this? Destroy this temple, and I will raise it in three days. Jesus is the temple now. Hebrews, the book of Hebrews, says that the old covenant sacrificial system is obsolete, done. Paul said, we now are the temple of the living God. Peter said it this way. God is building a holy temple with believers, you and me, as living stones. So I want you to follow the logic to its conclusion, and that is if God sanctioned another temple with a sacrificial system of any kind, he would be declaring that the sacrifice of his son Jesus on the cross of Calvary was insufficient, that the. once and for all offering for our sins didn't actually accomplish it. And we need to do something else, like a future temple or a future sacrifice in the future. Friends, there's a word for that.

That's called heresy. But Robbie, what about the red heifers? What about the garments, the future furniture that's waiting to be put in the temple? Listen to me, and I've been here before. People have been trying to rebuild that temple for 2,000 years. Politically, if it were to be rebuilt, it would ignite a Middle Eastern massacre of people with Jews fighting those in Islam. I mean, it would be catastrophic. Theologically, though, it would insult the cross. I don't believe there ever will be another temple on Mount Moriah. And by the end of this video, I think you'll see Revelation 11 actually agrees with that because now we have to crack the code of what the 42 months actually means in the text. And to do that, I need to teach you how the Bible tells time. Where do we first learn about 3 1⁄2 years? Think about in the Old Testament. Put on your thinking cap. It comes from the book of Daniel. The prophet of Babylon, Daniel, is in captivity. He's writing a book to the people of God from bondage of captivity, trying to get back to the promised land. And Daniel tells us in Daniel 7, 25, these words. He says, God will speak words against the Most High,

or he will speak words against the Most High, and oppress the holy ones of the Most High. He will intend to change religious festivals and laws, and the holy ones, here it is, will be handed over to him for a time, times, and half a time. Now, it's kinda cryptic, but here's what he's saying. Time, times, and half a time. One plus two plus a half, so basically three and a half. Now, if we drop down to Daniel 8, verse 13, we get another clue. And Daniel 8, 13 asks the question straight out the gate. How long will the sanctuary be trampled? The house of God. And the answer is, right in the text, look at verse 14. For 2300 evenings and mornings, then the sanctuary will be restored. That's 1,150 days, or roughly, you guessed it, three and a half years. Now, can we check that against history? Does that ring true in the future? Absolutely. Josephus, the first century historian, records the actual attack of Antiochus Epiphanes on Jerusalem. And let me tell you about this humble man, as we have learned in a past video, who called himself Epiphanes, which means glorious manifestation of God. As I said, he's a humble man.

Antiochus, God manifest. In 167 BC, so roughly 163 years before, Jesus is born. He's expanding his Greek empire. He seizes Jerusalem. He erects a statue of Zeus inside the temple. He sacrifices pigs on the altar of God. And if that's not enough, he forces the Jewish people to eat pig, which is not kosher, if you can imagine. A priestly family by the name of the Maccabeans, the intertestamental period book, the Maccabeans, led by their father, Matthathias, and their son, Judas, rose up and fight back. They rose up and they fought back against this evil empire, and they retook the temple in 164 BC. Now, I want you to do the math. From desecration to restoration, three and a half years. Daniel's number wasn't a random figure. It became the signature timestamp of a season when God's people are trampled and then delivered. What I'm thinking John is doing in Revelation 11 is borrowing the exact language. I'm the only one who thinks this, by the way. I didn't come up with this myself. I learned this, but John is borrowing the language from Daniel in Revelation 11, which raises the question you and I are already asking. So is this literal or symbolic? Now, the answer is gonna sound strange

until I tell you about the weather in New Orleans, Louisiana, the place I grew up. I grew up in a city called Shellmat outside of New Orleans. And New Orleans is a city that sits below sea level. So storms would regularly flood the city. It's like an inverted bowl, if you can imagine that. I remember leaving work one day. I was leaving one afternoon from working down in the city, and I was driving with my windows down in my Ford Mustang, and then all of a sudden, a storm rolled in. You'd almost hear somebody say the same thing if you were living there, but we'd always would say, this is the kind of storm where the sky is falling. Now, I want you to imagine if you heard those words in another culture for the first time. Let's say they didn't know the vernacular or the colloquialisms of the time. They might look up into the sky, hearing the sky is falling, and panic. They'd be checking for cracks in the atmosphere, waiting for chunks of blue to come crashing down on Canal Street. We laugh at that because everyone inside our culture knows what that phrase means instantly. It comes from the old chicken little story, if you remember, where an acorn bonks on the head of the little chick, and she runs through the barnyard announcing that the world is ending. The phrase, you know this, doesn't describe the sky literally collapsing. It means somebody is treating a storm like an apocalypse. The words carry meaning beyond the literal definition, and everyone who grew up with this story knows exactly what the words mean. Now catch this. Could there be a more fitting phrase for this chapter? I don't think so, because the sky is falling, that phrase, is precisely what prophecy culture has trained you and I to feel every time we see a red heifer in the news. And that's exactly how three and a half years works in the Bible. It's a code phrase.

You ready for this? And here's the key to cracking it. Three and a half is half of seven. Seven, as we know from Gematria in the Jewish culture, is the number that means completion. It's the completion of a full and finished work of God. So half of seven is a broken seven, a season of trial that looks like it's headed for total destruction and then gets cut off before it can finish the job. And once you start to see this, watch this, you'll notice this is a pattern that runs through your entire Bible. In years and in days. For example, in years, Elijah prayed and the rain stopped for three and a half years. Daniel's visions run on time, times, and a half a time. In days, you notice this in the book of Jonah, where Jonah sat in the belly of the fish for three days, swallowed and tombed as good as dead, and then delivered. Some people think he actually did die and was raised back from the dead as a picture to Jesus's resurrection. But watch this. Jesus lay in the tomb three days and the grave could not hold him past that time. And right here in this very chapter of Revelation 11, we see it in verses nine through 11. Watch this. We'll go back to the text and we see it in nine through 11. We're going to see the same instance again. And some of the peoples, tribes, languages, and nations view their bodies, what, for three and a half days. And then the breath of God, after they're dead in the street, the breath of God enters them and they stand up. Do you see it? Whether the clock reads days or years, it's the same signature. The trial runs half of seven, then God interrupts. It's the same picture over and over, three, three and a half.

Death doesn't get a full week. Suffering doesn't get to finish its course. Now alongside this number is another number. It's the number 40, the Bible's number for testing. We see this all through the scripture. Forty days of Noah's flood, Moses's 40 years in the desert, 40 days on the mountain, 40 years of wandering, 40 days of spying out the land that God promised, 40 days of fasting for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. You get the point. So here's your prescription lens for revelation numbers, and I want you to write this down, make a note of this. Three and a half years, 42 months, and 1,260 days all mean the same thing. It's just like saying seven means completion and six means falling short, one less than seven. Three and a half is the Bible's code for tribulation with a time limit, a broken seven. Now some of you are saying, Robbie, you're getting allegorical or symbolic. No, listen to me. That's how the Hebraic culture viewed numbers because they didn't have a robust language like we do in English. very few words in Hebrew to choose from, so numbers did double duty. What God is saying here is this with the number three and a half. Suffering will come, but only for a season. It will not last forever, because God is gonna step in and cut it short. That alone should change how you read Revelation. But some of you, I can see this, you aren't sold yet. You're saying, I don't know if I agree with the symbolism. So let me show you something that should put chills

down all of our spine, and I remember when I first learned this, because this number also came true, literally to the month. Let's go back to Revelation chapter 11, verse two, and I want you to see the outer courtyard and what it is given to. Watch this. Exclude the outer courtyard outside the temple. Don't measure it, because it is given to the what? To the nations, and they will trample the holy city for 42 months. Now, the holy city is without question to every scholar, the city of Jerusalem. Now, I want you to open your history books for a moment in your mind. According to the first century historian Josephus, the Roman general Vespasian began his assault in March or April of 67 AD. Now, put a period, file that away for a moment. Together with his son Titus, who will finish the job, Rome goes through Judea, surrounded by Jerusalem, and then causes the city to fall by fire and destruction on September of 70 AD. This is all documented evidence. So I want you to count how long is March, 67 AD, to September, 70 AD. Ding, ding, ding, you got it. Exactly three and a half years. 42 months, 1,250 days.

The nation trampled the holy city for precisely the span John was told. And then the temple John was told to measure while it was still standing is obliterated. Just as Jesus promised, not one stone will be left on this temple, you won't need it again, you won't see it again. And catch what that does to the dating of this book. John measures a standing temple and predicts a 42-month trampling, which means Revelation was written before the fall of Jerusalem, not decades after it. By the way, if you're interested in a video on this entire topic, I talked about this in a video. I'll put a link to it if you're interested about Revelation, how to interpret it, the end times, and when was the book written. I think this is one of the most convincing arguments for an early date of the book of Revelation. Because it isn't an end times Dakota ring for charting the return of Christ. It's God's covenant critique of the nation that rejected his son Jesus delivered right on schedule like he promised in the past. And when the temple falls, watch this, the rest of the chapter does as well. Then an earthquake strikes in Revelation 11, verse 13, watch this, and at that moment, a tenth of the city fell and 7,000 people were killed in the earthquake, 7,000 people.

Now let's think again, have we heard about this number before in the Old Testament? Yes, it's a mirror of Elijah the prophet's day. When God decided to spare, brace yourself, 7,000 people who refused to worship idols. And here, 7,000, same number, are slain for it. Seven, the number of completeness, thousand, the number of the multitudes. And a tenth of the city fell, or better yet, a tithe, if you will, and a tithe was never a partial payment. It was a declaration that all of its belongings belong to God. Friends, the rest of the judgment comes with the final woe. Then the last trumpet sounds, you can see it here, there's a second woe right here, the seventh trumpet comes, and heaven doesn't mourn the temple, heaven what? Rejoices, because the old covenant was passing away, and now the new covenant is arising, or arriving. And here's the thing, we see that from Hebrews 8, verse 13. Christ is reigning, so what does a demolished temple in the first century mean to us today? Well, it actually means more than you think. I wanna give you two takeaways that you can take with you from this teaching. Number one is this, stop watching for a temple that God has already replaced. Every red heifer headline of rabbis in Texas, this is true, who are combing through every hair to find.

And if there's one discoloration in order to be thrown out, stop doing that. Because what it does is it heightens and spikes your anxiety, pointing you to a coming building that will never be built. God's answer to the temple was not to one day, don't miss this, construct a better building. It was to send his son, who is the temple of God. Jesus is the temple. He's the once and for all sacrifice. He is where forgiveness lives. He is where heaven meets earth. He is where the presence of God dwells. And by his spirit, you're gonna love this, you and I, the Bible says, are now living stones of the temple he's building. You don't need to wait for a construction of a building on Mount Moriah to begin. Construction started at the empty tomb, and you and I, somebody say amen, are a part of it. Secondly, remember what the number 42 months means. Because you'll need it. Tribulation is real, but it is rented. It has a lease that expires. Whatever season of trampling you and I are actually walking through right now, the diagnosis, the loss, the pressure for your faith is always the same. You are living in a broken seven. Your trial does not get a full week.

Why? Because God is sovereign. Somebody needs to hear this. Jonah got three days, then there was the shore. Jesus was in the tomb for three days, then there was the resurrection. Jerusalem's tramplers got 42 months, then the trumpet sounded. It came true to the exact month in AD 70. And the signature holds for every believer since then. Suffering comes for a season. And then we serve a God who steps in and interrupts that. The nations trample, the clock runs, and then heaven rejoices. Look at me. Somebody tells you the sky is falling. Don't be shaken by the headlines. Don't quit in the season. Don't throw in the towel. Don't give up. The God who kept a 42-month schedule down to the exact month is actually in charge of yours. If this video has helped you in some way to see something new in God's word, let me encourage you to hype the video or like the video or better yet, share it with someone who is into the end times and studying the book of Revelation. If you're interested in the video I have about the rapture end times of Revelation,

I'll put it for you here. And until next time, get into the word until the word gets into you.