Greg Locke wants a missile. Pete Hegseth wants a miracle. The Temple Institute wants a genetically perfect cow. Tucker Carlson wants answers. The Dome of the Rock is still standing, the Iran war is providing excellent cover, and approximately zero American Christians have been told that the temple their pastors are fundraising to rebuild is the same building where the Antichrist sets up his throne.
In Tucker’s episode, titled “Israel’s true motives, potential false flags and oncoming global crisis,” he asked a question that deserves an answer we aren’t getting from anyone in Washington. He asked, “Could this be a religious war designed to rebuild the Third Temple on the ashes of Al Aqsa?”
The answer he gave was essentially yes, and he went further, calling the Third Temple “totally anathema to Christianity” and specifically targeting American evangelical leaders whose organizing religious purpose has apparently become lobbying for a blood-sacrifice complex in Jerusalem. “If you’re a Christian preacher calling for the rebuilding of the Third Temple,” Carlson said, “you kinda missed the whole point. That’s more than apostasy. That’s like not even knowing what the religion is about.”
My greatest frustration in the last several months has been watching Reformed and Protestant evangelical leaders who are in 100% agreement with that statement from Tucker, and others like it, watch him be pelted with rotten fruit for being an antisemitic god-hater, when that’s actually their theology, too. I think it’s incumbent on Christian leaders to speak up when they see someone skewered for good theology, to raise their finger like summoning a waitress, and to say, “Excuse me. He’s right, though.” But they are not, in fact, doing that. And that’s sad. In fact, two of those leaders whose theology absolutely concurs with Tucker’s claims - Douglas Wilson and Mark Driscoll - were busy at a conference this weekend, espousing Israeli war propaganda. If you want proof it’s the End Times, I’d use those two men as an example of the Great Apostasy. I’m only partly kidding.
Tucker is right to presume that this military action could be used to level the Dome of the Rock and rebuild the temple, and the subsequent blowback from the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Israel lobby is predictable, because he’s over the target. But before I explain why he’s right, we need to talk about the very real operational planning to make the temple’s rebuilding happen in a way that doesn’t look like what it is: intentional sabotage by Israel, likely staged as a false flag attack by Iran.
The “Accident” Being Prepared
One incontrovertible fact that Tucker revealed is that the desire to demolish the Dome of the Rock is not a conspiracy theory, a fever dream, or an antisemitic canard. It is a documented, multi-decade aspiration among Israeli religious and military figures, preserved on audio tape and confirmed over and over again for decades (and it’s amping up). For example, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who served as Chief Rabbi of the IDF during the 1967 Six-Day War and later became Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, was recorded at a military convention stating that Israel’s failure to destroy the Dome of the Rock at the moment of the Temple Mount’s capture in June 1967 was “a tragedy for generations.” On that tape, Goren said, “I myself would have gone up there and wiped it off the ground completely so that there was no trace that there was ever a Mosque of Omar there.”
General Uzi Narkis, head of the IDF’s Central Command and the man who oversaw the actual conquest of Jerusalem, confirmed in a news interview that Goren approached him personally in the immediate aftermath of the Temple Mount’s capture and proposed blowing up the Dome of the Rock on the spot.
Fast forward to 2026, and the political conditions that restrained Goren are systematically being dismantled as extremist factions in the Israeli government are taking over. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stood before thousands at a Jerusalem Day rally in May 2025 and declared the Israeli government’s intention to “expand Israel’s borders, bring about complete redemption, and rebuild the Temple here,” which he said from a stage where the crowd had just finished chanting “death to Arabs” while marching through the Old City. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has personally led hundreds of settlers in storming the Dome of the Rock compound, implemented policy changes designed to erode Islamic authority over the site piece by piece, and told Army Radio he would build a synagogue on the Temple Mount if he could.
The Israeli media reported that Ben-Gvir is now running what analysts describe as an organized three-stage plan to seize full control of the temple site, with the demolition of the Dome as its unspoken but inevitable conclusion. Extremist Israeli settler media circulates detailed blueprints for the rebuilt Temple alongside explicit calls for demolition, with official government cover that would have been politically fatal a decade ago and is now effectively normalized. Anyone calling Tucker conspiratorial for this is either lying or ignorant, and has no excuse to be because they’re not even hiding any of this (except in American media and possibly your Sunday School material).
The setup for an “accident” is not difficult to imagine when the Iran war is providing the kind of “kinetic background noise” (missiles flying overhead) that makes blame murky. A misdirected missile, a drone that wanders off target, a munitions depot with unfortunate geography, and suddenly the Dome is rubble, and Iran obviously catches the blame before anyone asks hard questions, and the Temple Mount will suddenly be cleared for construction. That’s their plan.
Regular I2I readers know the playbook because it has been run before. You likely recall the Lavon Affair, the USS Liberty, Operation Northwoods, and a half-dozen other documented cases in which Western-allied intelligence agencies manufactured false pretexts to achieve policy objectives they could not achieve through legitimate means. The question is never whether such operations by Israeli intelligence or the Israeli military are conceivable. The question is whether anyone seriously believes that the heirs of Rabbi Goren, the people who have spent 60 years calling the failure to blow up the Dome a “tragedy for generations,” would hesitate when circumstances finally aligned for them to pull the trigger and finally demolish it. That’s the plan, and if they see the opportunity present itself to destroy the dome, they’ll take it.
The Coalition of the Delusional
I’ve already mentioned in a previous article the comments by Defense War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the clip he played deserves to be watched by every American who voted for an America-first, anti-Forever War presidency. In a 2018 Fox News segment filmed at the Western Wall, Hegseth looked into the camera and said, “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.” In other words, the man who now controls the United States military described the demolition of one of the holiest sites in Islam and the construction of a Jewish sacrificial complex in its place as a miracle he anticipates and apparently endorses, at the Western Wall. The Dispensationalist pipeline from prophecy conferences to the national security apparatus is obvious, and its running things in Washington.
Tucker also played a clip of Tennessee pastor Greg Locke, who openly advocates destroying one House of Idols to build another. Locke’s direct quote was, “Get a great big missile and blow that wicked Dome of the Rock plum off the spot where it’s standing right now, so we can get that Third Temple rebuilt and usher in the coming of Jesus.” Locke is not some crank yelling into a phone booth. He commands a significant following across the charismatic Dispensationalist world, and his position is not a departure from the movement’s theology but its logical product (by the way, I asked Locked via phone last week if he’d join me for a conversation about this in Austin, and he agreed; I’ll get that arranged soon).
Meanwhile, the Israeli operational infrastructure for all of this is further along than most Americans realize, and the Temple Institute deserves more attention than it gets; in fact, you’ve likely never heard of it unless it’s been through I2I. Founded in 1987 with the explicit mission to “bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time,” the Institute has spent decades building out the ritual hardware for resumed animal sacrifice. A golden Menorah replica sits in a glass case near the Western Wall in full public view. The priestly garments, the golden vessels, and the musical instruments have all been manufactured to exacting biblical specification. A full-scale altar has been built and is stored in a secret location, ready to be deployed to the Temple Mount when the opportunity arises. A reconstituted Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish high court that slaughtered Christians, was formally re-established in 2004 and has been issuing rulings and positioning itself as the governing religious body for a future Temple order ever since. Young Jewish men are actively being recruited and trained as “kohanim,” the priestly class who would perform the sacrifices (because you don’t want the HR department rushing through personnel management trainees when the altar goes up). As I told you a couple of weeks ago, they’ve got a portable altar for IDF special forces to erect upon first entering, so they can get the sacrifices cooking at first opportunity.
And then there are the cattle I’ve mentioned previously. Numbers 19 specifies that ritual purification from corpse-contamination requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer, and without that purification, no kohen can serve in the Temple, which makes a qualified red heifer a logistical prerequisite for the whole project to come to fruition. The Temple Institute has been trying to produce one for over two decades. In September 2022, five red yearling heifers were flown to Israel from Texas, sourced by a Christian rancher and Dispensationalist named Byron Stinson, who spent years advertising in rancher magazines and offering $50,000 rewards to find suitable animals and eventually transported them to Israel as “pets” to get around livestock import restrictions.
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On July 1, 2025, a practice sacrifice ceremony was conducted on a remote Israeli hilltop using one of the disqualified animals, a dress rehearsal for the real thing. By August 2025, the Temple Institute announced that all five Texas heifers had been disqualified because too many of their hairs turned out to be the wrong color. The search continues with full steam, the Institute’s words, and they’re now doing heifer genetic experiments in Israel, where atheist James Lindsay recently snapped selfies. The entire operation, with its evangelical ranchers and its $50,000 rewards and its clandestine livestock flights and its hilltop dress rehearsals, is an internationally funded Christian-and-Jewish collaborative project to restart Bronze Age blood sacrifice on the most contested thirty-seven acres on earth. And the vast sum of American evangelicals don’t understand that this is where the money goes when you write checks to Israel.
Bible 101: The Temple Is Who’s Inside It
Think of the Temple of God like Air Force One. What makes that 747 the seat of American executive power is not the blue paint scheme, the leather seats, or the communications array that costs more than most municipalities’ annual budgets. It is the occupant. Put a random millionaire on that plane, and you have an expensive charter flight. It’s the presence that makes the thing what it is, and when the presence leaves, the thing stops being what it was, regardless of how much gold is still on the furniture.
The First Temple was the dwelling place of the Shekinah, the manifest glory of God among His covenant people. When Solomon dedicated it, the cloud of God’s presence filled the house so completely that the priests physically could not stand to minister inside (1 Kings 8:10-11). Ropes were tied to their feet in case God’s glory struck them dead, and they needed to be retrieved from the Holy Place. That was the actual God of the universe taking up residence in a building made of cedar and stone, because His covenant people had built it for Him and consecrated it to His name.
Then, when Israel’s covenant faithfulness collapsed through generations of apostasy and idolatry, the prophet Ezekiel watched in a vision as that glory rose from between the cherubim, paused at the threshold of the Temple, moved deliberately to the east gate of the outer court, and then lifted off the city entirely and went east across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives (Ezekiel 10-11). Nebuchadnezzar’s army arrived and burned the Temple to the ground some months later, but that fire fell on a building that God had already vacated. The Babylonians destroyed stone and cedar. The Temple of God had already relocated permanently.
The Second Temple, rebuilt by Zerubbabel after the return from exile and expanded by Herod into one of the genuine architectural wonders of the ancient world, operated under a cloud that the rabbis themselves acknowledged. There was no ark, no Shekinah, no Urim and Thummim, and no prophetic voice. The Second Temple had the complete institutional apparatus and the missing content, a shell of extraordinary beauty that housed, in practice, the absence of the Thing (or Person) it was designed to contain.
Then God did something no one in the Second Temple period was prepared for. He walked into it. The eternal Son of God, clothed in the flesh of the virgin’s son, entered those courts, drove out the money-changers with a whip of cords, taught in the porticoes, healed in the precincts, and then told His disciples: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). They assumed He was talking about Herod’s building. He was talking about His own body, and John makes the identification explicit: “He was speaking about the temple of His body” (John 2:21).
Christ is the Temple. He is the singular, final purpose and zenith of God’s dwelling with humanity. Every function the Temple ever served, the mediation between God and man, the place of sacrifice, the dwelling of the Presence of God, the seat of intercession, the throne of atonement, Christ fulfills completely, finally, and without the possibility of supplement or replacement. The writer of Hebrews, who clearly anticipated that someone would eventually propose going back to the shadow after the substance had arrived, spends thirteen dense chapters establishing the point: the Levitical priesthood was a shadow and Christ is the reality it shadowed, the animal sacrifices were an annual reminder that sin had not yet been finally dealt with (Hebrews 10:3), and Christ’s single offering accomplished permanently what ten thousand animal carcasses across a thousand years of sacrificial practice never could (Hebrews 10:14).
The High Priest entered the Most Holy Place once a year, carrying blood that was not his own, walking through a veil that physically separated the people of God from the presence of God, and performing a ritual that he would have to perform again in twelve months because it had not solved anything permanently. At the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, that veil tore from top to bottom, not from the bottom up as a man climbing a ladder would do it, but from the top down, as God removing a barrier He no longer needed. The architectural exclusion of God’s people from God’s presence was permanently, physically, and visibly abolished. The Day of Atonement happened. It happened once. It accomplished everything. It will not be repeated.
The Temple of God now exists in two forms, both of which are the same Temple. Christ Himself is “the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), the one Mediator between God and man, the eternal High Priest who lives perpetually to make intercession and who needs no relief and no successor (Hebrews 7:25). His body, the Church, every blood-bought believer indwelt by the Holy Spirit, is also called the Temple: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” (1 Corinthians 6:19), “You are the temple of the living God” (2 Corinthians 6:16), and the corporate Church is “a holy temple in the Lord, a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:21-22). The presence of God is not dormant on earth, killing time in Brooklyn while waiting for a new building permit in Jerusalem. It is distributed across the whole body of Christ, present wherever the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments properly administered, and the Spirit of God moves in regenerating power among His people.
You can put together whatever gaudy, gold-plated, marble-columned structure you want on Mt. Moriah. You can weave the priestly garments, plate the furniture, set up the altar, light the Menorah, sacrifice the red heifer, sprinkle the ashes, reinstate the Sanhedrin, train the kohanim, and reinstall every piece of ritual furniture the Temple Institute has been manufacturing in Jerusalem for the past thirty years. God’s presence is not showing up to occupy a glorified synagogue dedicated to the memory of Rebbe Schneerson, wafting in the incense smoke of burnt animal offerings that Christ rendered permanently and irrevocably obsolete at Golgotha. What you will have built is an expensive, architecturally impressive monument to unbelief, and the biblical testimony about what moves into such monuments is not encouraging.
The Throne Room They’re Building
There is a final dimension to this that Christians who cheerfully write checks to Temple Mount organizations and pray for the red heifer project to succeed need to think about. Paul writes to the Thessalonians about the coming man of lawlessness, the figure the tradition has called the Antichrist, and he describes his defining act in these terms: “He takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4).
The Dispensationalist reading of this verse is that it proves that a Third Temple must be rebuilt because the Antichrist needs a place to sit. What they have done with this logic is precisely bass-ackwards. Paul is not providing a construction schedule for Christians to follow. He is identifying, in advance, the defining act of the most catastrophic deception in human history, and the location where that deception is performed is a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.
If the Third Temple is rebuilt, the Bible’s own prophetic testimony (as Dispensationalists read it) is that it will become the throne room of the Man of Sin. Dispensationalists who are funding the Temple Institute and lobbying their congressmen for policies that would facilitate the demolition of the Dome of the Rock are, by their own eschatological framework, not preparing the way for the Second Coming of Jesus. They are preparing the office space for the Antichrist. The irony should be obvious to you, because the same people who have spent decades producing prophecy-chart paperbacks about the dangers of the coming antichrist and his global religion are writing the checks that fund the construction of his headquarters. When Greg Locke hollers about getting a great big missile to blow the Dome off the Temple Mount so the Temple can be rebuilt and Jesus can come back, he is, if his own theology is coherent, calling for the swift construction of the building where the man of sin will sit and declare himself God. That’s nuts.
The Temple is already built. That’s the testimony of historic Christianity. It has been built since the morning of the third day, when the stone rolled away from an empty tomb in a garden outside Jerusalem, and the presence of God walked out of death in a resurrected body that will never see corruption. Every stone of that building is a redeemed human soul, fitted together by the Spirit into a habitation for the living God that no army can siege, no political negotiation can transfer, and no missile can demolish. The Third Temple project is not an unfulfilled biblical prophecy awaiting completion. It is a demand that God abandon His finished work and show up in a building made with human hands, as if the cross and the empty tomb and the fire of Pentecost had accomplished nothing.
What’s the Good News if it doesn’t mean that the Day of Atonement has already happened? What’s the gospel, if the sacrifice is not already over, and debts already paid? What exactly are we celebrating each Sunday if the bloodshed was not sufficient? The Temple of God is the heart of every Christian, occupied by the Holy Ghost, and nothing built on Mt. Moriah by men who reject the Son will change that by a single stone.
But what about the prophetic passages?
The Dispensationalist will ask, “What about Daniel 9, what about Ezekiel 40-48, what about the abomination of desolation, what about the man of sin taking his seat in the temple?” Dispensationalists have built an entire eschatological industry on the assumption that these passages demand a literal rebuilding of the structure in Jerusalem, and they are not entirely wrong to ask those questions. It’s good they’re asking, if they’re sincere, and I suspect some are. But they are wrong about what the passages mean, and the disagreement runs deeper than proof-texting, because it is ultimately about how to read the Bible.
The postmillennialist and amillennialist answer to these passages is substantially the same: the temple language in the prophets is either fulfilled spiritually in the Church, fulfilled historically in the events of 70 AD, or both simultaneously. Both of those views are older than those of John Darby or Greg Locke. But Ezekiel’s temple vision is not an architectural blueprint awaiting a contractor, but rather a symbolic portrayal of God’s restored presence among His people, fulfilled in the Church as the dwelling place of the Spirit. Daniel’s seventy weeks were completed in the first century. The abomination of desolation was Titus. The man of sin taking his seat in the temple was Nero, or the Roman imperial cult, or some combination of events that closed out the old covenant age with the destruction of Jerusalem. There is real exegetical weight behind this position, serious scholars hold it, and the fulfilled-in-history argument for passages like Daniel 9 is considerably stronger than the Scofield chart folks want to acknowledge.
Historic Premillennialism, which is what I hold, reads these passages differently without capitulating to the Dispensationalist demand for a rebuilt temple. The position acknowledges a future tribulation period, a future Antichrist figure, and a future literal return of Christ to reign on earth before the final judgment. What it does not require, and what the text does not actually demand, is a reinstated Levitical sacrificial system with a functioning priesthood slaughtering animals in a rebuilt Jerusalem temple. And frankly, it’s insane that some Christians want to contribute to this.
When Paul says the man of lawlessness takes his seat in the temple of God, the historic premillennialist reads that as a reference to the profaning of what is sacred, whether that is a rebuilt structure that apostate Judaism constructs in unbelief, a desecration of the Church itself, or a broad apocalyptic symbol for the ultimate act of blasphemy, God’s own domain claimed by the enemy of God. What it is not is a divine construction order. It sure as heck should not be a foreign policy position of the United States. So while I’m not saying the temple won’t be rebuilt, I’m not advocating we renovate the antichrist’s throne for him of assist the Israelis in sparking WWIII by doing something stupid.
The passages that describe temple activity in the End Times describe what the Antichrist does, not what Christians are supposed to build for him. Ezekiel’s temple vision, read through the New Testament’s own hermeneutic rather than through a Scofield footnote, points toward the consummation of God’s presence with His people, the new creation reality that Revelation 21 describes when John sees the New Jerusalem and is told there is no temple in it because the Lord God Almighty is its temple. The trajectory of Scripture is not toward a reinstatement of the types and shadows of Christ’s coming. Jesus has already come. Rather, the trajectory of Scripture is toward the full and unmediated presence of God with His people, which is exactly what the sacrificial system was always pointing at and exactly what Christ has already secured for us.
The dumbest part of all of this is the insistence of Dispensationalists to help God accomplish His apocalyptic ambitions. If God will return Abraham’s lineage to Israel, it doesn’t require buying them a bus ticket or giving them 3 billion dollars per year of American tax money to ethnically cleanse its current inhabitants. Even if I believed in a rebuilt temple, it doesn’t mean God needs us to rebuild it. I believe in the antichrist, but I’m not about to roll out the red carpet. I also believe in a coming worldwide Christian persecution, but I’m not helping them build the gallows or gulags.
Where are all the theology nerds?
For decades, many men who built their ministries on the finer points of eschatological distinctions have made sure you knew exactly where they stood on postmillennialism, amillennialism, Dispensationalism, or somewhere in between. It has been in their sermons, Sunday school curricula, conference lectures, books, and, approximately every Thanksgiving dinner, when a relative made the mistake of bringing it up. The theological foundation for this moment has been under construction throughout their careers. The exegetical case against a rebuilt sacrificial temple has been sitting fully loaded in the chamber for two thousand years, and they’ve spun the cylinder incessantly and had incredibly poor trigger discipline.
And yet the microphone is curiously unoccupied on this topic, and they’ve apparently disappeared. Tucker Carlson, a political commentator with no seminary training, is the one taking the incoming fire for saying what every covenant theologian in the country already believes and has believed his whole professional life. The silence from the men who have made eschatology their signature issue is not hard to explain. Being right about the Third Temple in 2026 comes with a specific set of consequences that being right about it at a Reformed conference in 2019 did not, and the men who have never missed a chance to insert their eschatological convictions into a context where nobody asked are finding that their convictions have a social ceiling.
This is the moment those convictions were built for. The world is watching the Temple Mount in real time, the question of what the Third Temple means is on the front page of every major publication, and the one thing the Church actually has to offer the conversation is the theological framework that these men have been professionally cultivating for decades. Silence now is not humility. It is a choice, and the people making it should grab some courage on the shelf and choose differently.
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