By Steven Thompson
A Comment on the Sabbath School Lesson for December 15–21, 2001
Why would the God of Israel destroy his people’s temples? What sort of God would repeatedly demolish the temple built for him by his people, and desecrate its site? Here’s the record: After Israel’s entry into Canaan, the tabernacle was permanently set up in Shiloh by Joshua (Josh. 18:1). It was violently destroyed and burned, with the surrounding town, about 150 years later. Although the destruction is not recorded in the Old Testament, Jeremiah alluded to it when he spoke the following words on Yahweh’s behalf: "go now to my place which was in Shiloh…and see what I did to it" (Jer. 7:12). According to Jeremiah, then, Yahweh owned responsibility for the destruction of his own temple. That was the first time.
Yahweh destroyed a house and altar built for him a second time about six hundred years later, in Bethel, between 640 and 609 B.C.E. (2 Kings 23:15). This was admittedly not a house of worship that met with his approval, because it was built after the northern ten tribes withdrew and set up an alternate temple to keep Israelites from traveling south to worship at the temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 12:25–31).
The prophet Amos, in vision, saw the Lord standing by the altar in Bethel, issuing the order for the sanctuary’s destruction "from pillar-tops to door thresholds" (Amos 9:1). In other words, a top-to-bottom, total destruction. The resulting collapse would shake the very ground. In verse two, the Lord orders the slaughter of everyone in and around the sanctuary, possibly evoking memories of Samson’s final act of bringing down the sanctuary of the Philistine god Dagon in Gaza, killing the revelers inside (1 Sam. 16:23–31). The un-Israelite nature of the sanctuaries in Bethel and Gaza is made clear by the implied presence of worshipers within the buildings, something prohibited in Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem, where worshipers remained outside.
The third destruction occurred when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem. In the words of the introductory verse to the book of Daniel, "The Lord let…some of the vessels of the house of God fall into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar" (Dan. 1:2). What a way for Yahweh to treat his own house! His apparent betrayal shocked the Hebrews. How could the Lord actually empower the Babylonians to invade, defile, and burgle his own house? A few years later, in 586 B.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar’s bodyguard returned to finish off the task, burning the temple (2 Kings 25:8–10). At least Yahweh was decent enough to give prior warning. Micah predicted a century before it happened that Mount Zion would be "plowed like a field" and the temple mountain would become "a forested hilltop" (Mic. 3:12).
By the time the fire and smoke cleared, the Hebrew nation and the dynasty of King David had vanished forever, replaced by what became the Jewish nation and the Judaism familiar to readers of the Gospels. Jews did what their Hebrew forefathers had done—they built a temple, the grandest of all, an elaborate project already forty-six years underway when Jesus attempted to cleanse it (John 2:14–20). Forty years later, for the fourth time, God yet again allowed his people’s temple to be destroyed.
According to Amos, what was Yahweh’s "emotional" state when he issued the order for the temple’s destruction in Amos 9:1? How did Yahweh turn "emotions" into actions?
What was Amos communicating by attributing to Yahweh an "emotional" state?
How can one apply the message of Amos 9 to the present, since our God seems less emotional, and his Christian followers have no temples for him to destroy?
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