Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And recently I had a couple of friends come up from out of town to ride the Mickelson Trail here in the Black Hills. We have this amazing rails to trails bike path that runs right from the very top of our mountain range, like the 12 o'clock position of our mountain range, all the way down to like the six or seven o'clock position in our mountain range. And on this trail, which is more than 100 miles long, you get a really good sense of the Black Hills and even one of the big mega construction projects. It gets you kind of close to the Crazy Horse Monument. And they were commenting on the Crazy Horse Monument, which has been under construction. Ooh, what are we at now? 45, 50, 60 years. It's been going forever. Mount Rushmore fits in the armpit of the sculpture of Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse is a Sioux Indian leader, and he's got like a in this sculpture, he's got like a war bonnet on, he's riding a horse and he's pointing forward. It is huge. And they're not taking any government funding. And I've watched it take shape over the course of my whole life. Now, my friends were kind of ribbing it a little bit, and they're like, never gonna get done. It's taken forever. And that's a fair point, but also it's just not the kind of project you can do fast, especially if you want to keep it independent and not take taxpayer dollars. There aren't very many of those mega projects anymore that take more than a lifetime. I guess you got the Sagrada Familia in Spain, that huge uh cathedral that's going up right now. But in general, in our day and age, when we think of a big project, we picture something that's gonna take a few years and has a published budget, and then it's over and everything gets tidied up, and a little bit of landscaping gets thrown over the top. It looks like it's been there forever, and it's just done and great. Well, there was a mega project that was going on in the first century during Jesus' time, and it had been going on for a long time before Jesus, and it was gonna go on for a long time after Jesus was there in a physical sense, and that project was Herod's Temple. Now, I bring up Herod's Temple and the size of the project because it is in view here in John chapter 2. There's a scene that takes place in the middle of this, well, currently functioning but still under construction, pardon our dust, gigantic temple project that's going on. And that is the purging of the temple. Jesus goes down to Jerusalem for Passover. He sees that a whole bunch of people in the courts of the temple are selling livestock and doing money vending and money changing, money vending. I'd like to be a part of that business. And so he goes and he flips over the tables and he drives them all out with the whip. And then the Jewish people, a bunch of them, are like, Well, what the heck? Give us a sign to show us you have the authority to do this. And Jesus famously says, Destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days. And as we've been discussing for the last couple of days, many who were there immediately their thoughts leapt to, you know, the complex they were standing in right then. The physical temple. Probably if they wanted to imagine something other than that, the sound of clanking hammers and chisels and nails and workmen tugging on ropes all at once with a big kind of thing in the background just immediately would take them to the sensory place of being like, man, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the everything would make me think of the physical temple. And so understandably, they were very put out by this and confused by it. And they took it very literally and replied very literally, saying, It has taken 46 years to build this temple, and you're gonna raise it in three days? Of course, then the text goes on to say, but the temple he had spoken of was his body, and after he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he'd said, then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. Why did everybody care about the temple so much, though? Why did they immediately get defensive? Okay, well, we've talked about how God lives there, or at least he did once. Maybe he did at this time in the same way that he did deep in the Old Testament in the first temple, Solomon's temple, but there's not nearly as much evidence in the Bible to suggest that that was the case. But, you know, so on the one hand, there's the legacy of the temple, like the whole history of the Jewish people is tied up in this building, the good old days of the kingdoms, and then everything since 516 BC when Zerubbabel led the reconstruction of the temple. And then 80 years later, or whatever, Nehemiah came along and led the securing of the temple and the building of the walls. I mean, it's just an epic, important era. And the temple had been nice. You know, it had its problems, it needed a purging here or there in the meantime, but it had been great for a long time. And then along came Herod the Great, a character people didn't quite know what to do with. He seems like kind of a frenemy to the Jewish people. He's always throwing money at the Jews, but he's also a non-Jewish, quote-unquote, ethnic ruler, an ethnarch, that's what they call, an ethnic king that the Romans would deploy to occupied places. Like, oh, here's somebody with, you know, your bloodline who uh can kind of represent your interests and sort of rule a little bit in harmony with their Roman overlords. Well, a lot of other places that got an ethnarch king got one who was actually from that place. The Jews did not get this luxury. They got a king from a neighboring people group, at times rival people group. So Herod always had this complex: this I gotta keep Rome happy, but also I gotta prove my Jewish chops to my Jewish subjects to keep them happy and to have them fawn over me. Herod was a guy who liked to be fawned over. And then there is no bigger project that Herod undertook to please his people and glorify himself than the expansion of the temple. This was a ludicrously huge expansion, and it had been the defining thing in the area for uh a lifetime plus by the time we get to John chapter two, in the same way that every time I've driven by that crazy horse monument outside Custer, South Dakota, up there in the Black Hills, since I was a baby. You know, it's been under construction all that time. It's just a reality of where I live, as Crazy Horse is getting worked on. In the same way, that's just in the backdrop of my reality here. So, even more so, the constant banging and clanging and working on the project of Herod's expansion of the Second Temple was the constant reality that was going on. In fact, it was surely one of the three big economic, unusual, arrhythmic economic drivers of commerce in Jerusalem. I mean, one, you had the Roman occupation. Well, they go off duty, they eat things and consume things, they participate in the economy. Two, you would have had the festival seasons. You know, where I live, that would be like the Sturgis motorcycle thing happening three times a year. Three giant festival seasons happened, and Jerusalem would swell every time. And it was really good for the economy there, no doubt when that happened. But then the third big, unique, unusual economic driver was this mega project that was going on right in the middle of everything. It was inescapable. Everybody knew there was quite the hubbub about it. And it was, let me tell you, it was ambitious. I mentioned the other day that when this thing was done, it doubled an acreage. It ended up being about 35 acres. I went and did a little more research on the dimensions. It looks like we're talking about walls 1,600 feet by 1,000 feet. We're talking about things that you measure in meaningful fractions of a mile just for each leg of the wall surrounding all of this stuff. Now, Herod became king, depending on how you count it, uh, a couple decades before Jesus. There it's complicated. There's some political turnover in terms of the classification of Judea and Galilee, exactly what kind of occupied state it is. But Herod's the man there for a real long time. And around 20-ish BC, he got it in his head that he was going to take a whole bunch of money and he was going to make the, he was going to huge the temple. Herod, in the 18th year of his reign, undertook a very great work, unquote, according to Josephus in his antiquities. And Josephus goes on to say that Herod wanted to make it, you know, he entones kind of a monument to himself. He wanted to make it much larger and more impressive than Solomon's temple from way back around a little after 1000 BC, which is the one that everybody looked back on as being the glory days. Well, Herod says, no more. The glory days shall be now, and they shall bear my name. So he wants to prove that he's a real Jewish king, that he's a benefactor of the people. He wants to show that we can build things on a Roman imperial scale, like they have at the Forum back in Rome, right here in old Jerusalem. And according to Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, he pulled together an army of workmen, 10,000 skilled workmen. Now, ancient authors always tend to go with even numbers for things. Was it exactly 10,000? I don't know. Maybe the guy was like, I want 10,000 skilled workmen. You know, the president comes along and says, I want 80,000 new people to help collect taxes and crack down on the taxpaying citizenry. Is that the actual number? I don't know. Let's ballpark it and say that Josephus is right and he hired 10,000 skilled workmen, brought in a thousand wagons for transporting stone, which is an insane addition to the traffic there in town. And this I thought was really interesting. I didn't know it until I was preparing for this conversation. He also specifically hired a thousand priest builders. There's a guy who runs ads during Denver Nuggets games who's like, I'm the only attorney who's an attorney and also a medical doctor. So I know more things. I think it's kind of a silly gimmick. Maybe he's a great guy. I have no idea, but it's kind of one of those weird mishmashes where you're like, okay, I guess you could get both of those jobs. I guess. Well, that's kind of the deal here. Priest and uh builder, like those are your combined tasks. I mean, priest was a pretty rigorous, pretty dedicated thing back then. But apparently a thousand of these guys were hired because Herod was trying to respect the sensibilities of the people he was trying to impress, and he didn't want he wanted to honor the rules of the more holy parts of the temple, and you have to have priests of a certain rank in order to go in there. So he just hired priest craftsmen to go in and do it. Clever solution. So initially, we get this pretty quick rebuild. It only takes uh a relatively short amount of time, maybe a couple of years, to rebuild the sanctuary area, the middle most, the heartbeat of the whole temple complex. And so some people look at that and they're like, Well, the whole thing was done then after two years. Well, yes, but also no, because the entire compound was the larger project. So phase A, fix up the sanctuary, that happened relatively quickly, 18 months, according to Josephus. Phase B is more like crazy horse. We're talking about a generational, multiple lifetimes. You will joke as a 20-year-old, like, oh, this thing probably won't even be done before I die. I'll probably never even see it finished. And then you get to be real old and you're about to die, and you're like, I guess that wasn't a joke. It's it's not done. All right, and we're gonna do a hard break right there because I got other stuff that I want to talk about in terms of the temple. The temple's really important. I can't overstate the importance of us understanding how much this project had dominated everything, sucked all the air out of the room for ages and would for decades to come after the time of Jesus. And so we're gonna take one more day to try to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience and feel what they felt about this great project and what it meant. We'll pick up where we left off. Manana, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.