Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas
Bro. Ken — Wednesday evening service, August 19, 2026 2 Thessalonians 2 · Daniel · Mark 13:14
► Watch this lesson on video (34:38)
Bro. Ken brought the lesson this Wednesday evening. What follows is his lesson written up from the recording — his order, his words, and the places where he offered a thing as his own reading are marked as his.
What the Lesson Was About
Bro. Ken spent the evening on two Greek words that both come into English as temple, and on what happens to a very common view of the last days once those two words are told apart.
The first word is hieron. Ken described it as the neuter noun standing behind the whole temple complex — mortar and stone: the sanctuary, the holy place, the holy of holies, the outbuildings, the court of the women, the court of the Gentiles, the court of the men. It is neuter, he pointed out, precisely because it is not a person. It is masonry.
The second word is naos — the inner sanctuary, the dwelling place itself.
Ken walked the hieron passages first, so the sense of the word would be beyond dispute. In Mark 11:11, “And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.” In 1 Corinthians 9:13, “Do ye not know that they which minister about holy things live of the things of the temple? and they which wait at the altar are partakers with the altar?” In Matthew 21:12, “And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.” And in Matthew 24:1–2, where the disciples came to shew him the buildings of the temple, and he answered, “See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”
Every one of those is stone. Nobody argues about it.
Then he turned to John chapter 2, where both words stand within three verses of each other. Jesus found the money changers in the hieron and drove them out of it. But when the Jews demanded a sign, “Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” That word is naos. “Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body.”
Ken’s point was that the Lord did not misspeak and the Jews did not misunderstand. They knew He meant what He said about rising in three days — that is why they set a watch on the stone. They simply accused Him of something else.
From there he took the same word into the Christian. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are” (1 Corinthians 3:16–17). And again, “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). Naos. The inner sanctuary. “This thing right here that I walk around in,” as Ken put it, “is the temple of God.”
Where He Was Going With It
With those two words settled, Ken turned to 2 Thessalonians 2 and to the verse that most of the argument hangs on: “Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4).
The common reading, he said, is that a temple of mortar and stone has to be rebuilt in Jerusalem before the man of sin can take his seat in it. But the word in that verse is naos, not hieron — the same word the Lord used of His own body. And the verse does not say he shews the world that he is God; it says he sheweth himself that he is God. Ken tied that to Daniel 8:25, “he shall magnify himself in his heart.” It is a self-exaltation, inward, not a public proclamation from a platform.
His conclusion, plainly stated: no rebuilt temple is required before the man of sin is revealed, and anyone waiting for one as his signal is going to miss him altogether.
The “It” in Mark 13:14
The part of the evening Ken most wanted the church to carry home was one word in Mark 13:14 — “But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not . . .”
Not he. It.
Ken’s argument was simple. The Lord does not misspeak. A man is a he; a woman is a she. If the abomination were the man of sin standing in person, the Lord would not have called him an it. And Ken noted that the reading holds up across the modern translations as well as the King James.
He read that alongside Daniel 11:31 — “And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate” — and Daniel 12:11, “And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.”
Notice, he said, who does the acting. Arms. Forces. They pollute; they take away; they place. The man of sin does not set himself up as the abomination. Something is set up. And it stands where it ought not for a thousand two hundred and ninety days — which no man stands still for.
He carried it into Revelation 13:14–15, where those who dwell on the earth are told “that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live,” and where the killing falls on those who will not worship the image. Ken took the word for image in its plainest sense — a likeness, a statue — and connected it to the three Hebrew children in the furnace, who were not condemned for refusing a man but for refusing an image.
His own view, offered as a view and not as certainty: a statue will be raised on the temple mount, and given how the ground lies there — the eastern gate, the beautiful gate below it, the Dome of the Rock — there is nowhere else for it to go but over the holy place.
Daniel 9:27
Ken closed by challenging the standard reading of Daniel 9:27 — “And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate . . .”
Three observations:
First, the verse says covenant, not treaty. And only one Person ever confirmed the covenant. Ken took the “he” of that verse to be Christ, not the antichrist.
Second, the sacrifice is caused to cease, and Ken pressed on the finality of that word. Antiochus Epiphanes interrupted the offerings; he did not end them, since the offerings resumed after the temple was cleansed — which is what Hanukkah remembers. Only one death ended sacrifice permanently.
Third, the verse reads “for the overspreading of abominations,” which is a different phrase from Daniel’s “abomination that maketh desolate.” Ken gave the sense of the word as an edge, an extremity, a wing, a corner, a spreading out — and suggested it points to the placing of a cornerstone, the beginning of the thing rather than the thing itself.
He ended looking past all of it, to the feast of tabernacles kept in Jerusalem and to the temple of Ezekiel, which he takes as literal and as the third temple — Solomon’s first, the second (Zerubbabel’s, as Herod rebuilt it), and then Ezekiel’s.
“Y’all think about that. It’s about to happen.”
Scripture Used
Mark 11:11 · 1 Corinthians 9:13 · Matthew 21:12–13 · Matthew 24:1–3 · John 2:13–21 · Matthew 26:1–3, 57, 69–71 · 1 Corinthians 3:16–17 · 1 Corinthians 6:16–19 · 2 Thessalonians 2:1–4 · Daniel 8:25 · Daniel 11:31 · Daniel 12:11 · Daniel 9:27 · Mark 13:14 · Revelation 13:14–15 (all KJV)
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