Page 125 - Satan in the Sanctuary

/ Will Fill This House with Glory 121

The Moslems have never had troubles comparable to
the Jews at the Temple site, but it was not entirely peaceful
either.
The Crusades, those worldwide holy wars, brought the
professing Christians of Europe against the populous Syrian
and Egyptian Moslems in many a bloody battle on the
temple site during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries.
The dome bore a golden cross for nearly a century, creat-
ing a Christian symbol on a Moslem dome superimposed
on a Roman temple built on a Jewish site.
And that was not nearly the end of it.
The Crusaders thought the Dome was Solomon's Temple
originally and named it Templum Domini. Continuing a
Roman tradition, they garrisoned the tough Knights Tem-
plar in the Aksa Mosque to guarantee the passage of de-
vout European Christians who made pilgrimages to the
holy site.
We can imagine the devotion of those hearty believers
who journeyed from far-off Scandinavia, England, France,
and Spain in those medieval days, to pray in what they
thought of as the very building graced by Jesus Christ.
But the knights eventually lost the Temple grounds to the
Moslems, who certainly had a shorter supply line, and from
that time—the fourteenth century—the Temple site had
remained in non-Jewish, non-Christian hands until 1967.
The Turks, in their various wars with the Arabs, some-
times captured the ground, but always had to relinquish it.
The Dome survived and, with various improvements and
remodelings, is essentially the same today.
At the time of the First World War, Palestine became a
British mandate, and Prime Minister Balfour, in response
to the Zionist movement, declared that the Jews should be
permitted to return to Palestine as their homeland.