When the seventh month came and the Israelites had settled in their towns, the people assembled as one man in Jerusalem (Ezra 3:1).

This was about twenty years before the time of Haggai the prophet who encouraged Zerubbabel to build the temple. These “Israelites” mentioned above were the first returnees from the Babylonian captivity. Perhaps, they first went to their own towns to see their own houses and fields, but as the seventh month approached, they all came to gather in Jerusalem. According to the Law of Moses, they were to celebrate the feast of trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the feast of tabernacles in the seventh month. While they were still in Babylon, to celebrate such festivals in Jerusalem was only a dream. You can imagine the kind of excitement and joy they had that time.

Despite their fear of the peoples around them, they built the altar on its foundation and sacrificed burnt offerings on it to the Lord, both the morning and evening sacrifices (v.3).

The phrase, “on its foundation,” means “on its appointed place”—the certain designated place. Where was it? There is an interesting story in the Bible as to how this place came to be designated for such a purpose. It was the place where the angel of the Lord stood with a drawn sword in his hand to destroy Jerusalem when David sinned by taking a census in Israel.

David looked up and saw the angel of the Lord standing between heaven and earth, with a drawn sword in his hand extended over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders, clothed in sackcloth, fell facedown (1 Chr 21:16).

Note the expression “between heaven and earth.” This disaster was brought from this particular place. And this must be the place from which all kinds of other disasters are brought to humanity as well. What happened to Israel at the time of David’s sin can be applied to what had happened to our human world at the time of Adam’s sin. If so, we want to know if there is any solution to it: how can we stop the disasters? God told David to go up and build an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite (v. 18). He did so, and God accepted his sacrifice with fire from heaven. Then, the disaster stopped! Needless to say, this was the designated place where the Israelites built the altar after the Babylonian captivity.

There is another interesting story that is connected with this place—the story of Abraham sacrificing his own son Isaac.

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about (Gen 22:2)."

Here, too, Abraham built an altar and gave a sacrifice to God so that the whole world would come to be blessed. Isaac in this tory is the type of Christ, the only Son, who died for the sins of the world.

Then Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David. It was on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the place provided by David (2 Chr 3:1).

Now we know that the mountain of Moriah was exactly the same place as the place where David built his altar. Then, what had happened as a result of the altar David built was the type of what happened to the whole world through Christ. Christ came and built an altar for us right between heaven and earth, and gave himself as a sacrifice. It was to stop all disasters that came as a result of sin. He became the foundation upon which the temple was built so that God’s teaching would flow from it to the whole world establishing his kingdom, a new world with full of blessings and no disasters.