The gate that was sealed until the return of Jesus has strangely opened up from the inside.
So what happens now?
It’s the golden gate of Jerusalem walled shut in 1541.
And believers saw that ceiling as Ezekiel’s prophecy coming true.
Ezekiel wrote that the gate would only open for a prince.
And Christians believe that prince is Jesus.
Could this be the sign of something enormous?
Let’s find out what it might mean for humanity’s final chance to be with Jesus.
I’m Ambrose Wild and before we’re done, we’ll read the one verse in Ezekiel that actually describes this gate being opened and what it says happens the moment after.
Here’s what happened.
On Friday the 22nd of February, 2019, a Muslim cleric named Sheikh Abdul Azim Salab walked up to a set of doors on the Temple Mount and opened them.
Behind those doors was the hall built into the back of the Golden Gate, the vaulted room Muslims call Babal Rahma, the gate of mercy.
Israeli authorities had locked that hall in 2003, saying the group running it had ties to Hamas.
And in 2017, an Israeli court upheld the closure.
Salhab headed the religious endowments authority, the Jordanianrun body that looks after the Muslim holy sites in East Jerusalem.
And that Friday, for the first time in 16 years, worshippers prayed inside.
On the Monday before, the authorities had shut the gate to the hall and kept hundreds of worshippers out, and police arrested 60 people before the Friday prayers even started.
So, yes, the gate opened up from the inside, but the two great arches on the outside, the ones facing east, stayed exactly as they’ve been for nearly five centuries, packed with stone.
So why does a locked hall in Jerusalem send believers straight to the Bible?
It comes down to a vision.
In the book of Ezekiel, the prophet is led through a temple of the future.
And in chapter 44, he’s brought to the outer gate on the east side.
In the words of the King James Bible, it was shut.
Then the Lord tells him, “This gate shall be shut.
It shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it because the Lord, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it.”
And the very next verse leaves a single exception.
It is for the prince.
The prince he shall sit in it to eat bread before the Lord.
That’s Ezekiel 44:es 1:3.
God came in through this gate.
So no ordinary man gets to use it again.
Only the prince may come in by it.
And for Christians, there’s only one person that prince could be.
That’s the reason this gate matters to so many people at once.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all see something waiting here.
In Jewish tradition, the Messiah is expected to come in through this gate from the Mount of Olives.
In Christian belief, Jesus himself rode down that hill into Jerusalem, and he’s promised to return.
And in Muslim tradition, the ground in front of this wall is tied to the last day and the resurrection of the dead.
So, three faiths end up looking east at the same stone gateway, which is what makes the ceiling in 1541 so striking.
The man who ordered it was the Ottoman Sultan Sullean the Magnificent, a Muslim ruler rebuilding the walls of a city his empire had taken over.
Many believers look at what he did and see a Muslim sultan carrying out a Hebrew prophet’s words to the letter.
Whether he meant to or not, the gate was shut and it has stayed shut.
But that’s the version everyone has heard and it leaves out a lot.
For Christians, the closed gate became a picture of their whole faith.
They believe Jesus is the only way between people and God.
And here was a door that only the prince could use.
They also believe that when Jesus comes back, this sealed gate will be opened and that it will mark the moment God keeps every promise he’s made.
Hold on to that idea of the gate opening for one person.
By the end, it’s going to look very different.
Start with the wall itself.
The old city of Jerusalem has eight main gates, and the Golden Gate is the only one in the eastern wall that leads straight onto the Temple Mount, facing the Mount of Olives across the Kidron Valley.
It’s often called the oldest of them.
Some historians date the building you see today to around the year 520 in the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian.
Others think it went up later in the late 600s or early 700s.
The work of Byzantine builders hired by the Umayad caiffs.
Nobody can settle it with a shovel either because the Islamic WAC that oversees the Temple Mount doesn’t allow archaeological digging there.
So the oldest gate in the wall doesn’t have a confirmed birthday.
It does have a lot of names.
In Hebrew, it’s Shaharamim, the gate of mercy.
A Jewish traveler named Ishori Hapachi wrote in the 1300s that ordinary people in his day called it the gates of mercy plural and it does have two doorways side by side.
It sits closer than any other gate to the place where the Jewish temple once stood.
And tradition says the gate on this spot was built and rebuilt again and again from the days of King Hezekiah through Zerubbabel and the Hasmonian kings to the great rebuilding of Herod.
The gate you see is believed to stand on top of an older one.
And that older one may have a name too, the Mishna.
The early collection of Jewish law describes the eastern gate of the second temple and calls it the Shushan gate.
It was kept for the high priest and the men who served with him and through it they went out for the most solemn rituals of the year like the burning of the red hepher and the sending out of the scapegoat on Yam Kapour.
The Mishna describes a raised causeway leading out from that gate for those rituals.
One of the rabbis, Rabbi Eleaza, argued that it wasn’t solid at all, but a bridge of marble pillars laid with cedar boards.
The medieval scholar Myimmonades wrote that someone coming in through the east gate walked on level ground and then climbed 12 steps up to the court of the women, each step about half a cubit high.
The historian Josephus writing in the first century also mentions a gate on the east side of the inner sacred court up in its far northeastern corner.
So the idea of a special eastern gate into God’s house is much older than the stones you can see.
And the stones inside may be older still.
In the 1970s, a Dutch archaeologist named Lean Ripmier studied the inside of the Golden Gate and concluded that two huge single stone gate posts in there belong to something far older than Justinian, a structure from the first temple period, possibly the Shashan gate itself.
If he’s right, the stones Ezekiel’s world knew may still be standing inside the sealed building.
And there’s something below it as well.
In 1969, a man named James Fleming was exploring the walls of Jerusalem the day after a heavy rain.
He was walking in front of the Golden Gate when the ground opened under him.
As he later wrote in Biblical Archaeology Review, “Down he went into a hole 8 ft deep.
He dropped into a mass grave, and there on the wall in front of him, he saw a row of wedge-shaped stones, the top of an arch sitting right under the left doorway of the Golden Gate.
So, there’s another gate underneath this one.
Fleming believed it belonged to an earlier gateway built into an older city wall with today’s wall resting on top of it.
He only ever saw the top of that arch.
The rest of it is still buried in the dark.
Up above, the Ottomans found their own uses for the place.
They burned bricks inside the gates vaulted hall, and those bricks went into repairs all over the Haram Sharif, the Muslim name for the Temple Mount.
A small mosque grew up beside the gate.
And in the 1800s, the Sultan had it torn down, and the sealed gate itself became a watchtowwer looking out over the Kidron Valley.
So, a gate that was supposed to be waiting for the Messiah spent part of its life as a brick works and a lookout post.
Now, look at what the builders made.
Every other gate on that wall sits flush with the stone around it, but the Golden Gate’s eastern face juts out about 2 m, so it stands proud of the wall.
On the outside are two great doorways, each almost 4 m wide, under round arches with carved bands split by a column.
Those are the openings that are sealed.
Inside, the gate house runs about 24 m by 17.
A wide stairway comes down into it from the temple mount into a vated hall split by four columns into two aisles.
One aisle leads to the southern doorway, Babal Rama, and the other to the northern one, Babal Ta, the gate of repentance.
The main hall is about 20 m long and 10 wide, and it was roofed with six shallow domes, two of which were later changed.
Two more details stand out.
Inside the hall looks surprisingly like the double holder gate on the southern wall of the temple mount.
And the gate doesn’t line up with the holy of holies.
So the builders weren’t simply aiming it at the heart of the temple.
But here’s what the usual story gets wrong.
This gate wasn’t sealed once and left alone.
It has been shut and opened again and again.
You’ll often hear that Muslims first closed it in the year 810, but most scholars think that date is off.
And a Christian writer named Rabanis Mauus may have seen it closed around 830.
What is solid is this.
Late in 1098 or early in 1099, the Fatimid rulers of Jerusalem walled up the outer doors to defend the city against the crusaders who were marching on it.
The crusaders took the city anyway and it’s been suggested they opened the gate again in 1102.
The Arab geographer Al Idrisy wrote in the 1100s that the crusaders called it the porter ora turned it into a church and opened it just twice a year on Palm Sunday and on the feast of the exaltation of the cross.
That second feast has its own story at this gate.
In the year 629 or 630, the Byzantine emperor Heracleus brought back the relic Christians believed was the true cross which the Persians had carried off from Jerusalem.
He came in through the eastern gate barefoot as a pilgrim.
A medieval collection of saint stories called the golden legend adds a miracle.
When Heracleus first rode up in his royal robes, the stones of the gate came down and locked into a solid wall, and an angel told him the king of heaven had come through here riding a donkey with no pomp at all.
The emperor got down, took off his robes, and the gate let him in.
That return of the relic is the event Christians remember at the feast of the exaltation of the cross, the same feast the crusaders picked as one of their two days for opening this gate.
Then in 1187, the Sultan Saladin took Jerusalem back and walled the gate up again.
In 1541, Sulaman did it one more time, and that’s the seal that has lasted.
Historians think his main reason was defense.
A gate opening straight onto the Temple Mount is a weak spot in any wall.
But there’s another explanation you’ll hear everywhere.
In Jewish belief, the Messiah will come through this gate.
So the Sultan, the story goes, sealed it to keep him out and planted a Muslim cemetery right in front of it because a priest of Israel or Elijah coming before the Messiah wasn’t supposed to walk through a graveyard.
Here’s the strange part.
That story doesn’t come from Islamic sources.
The researchers behind the Medan Project, an online archive of holy sites, trace it to British travel writing from the 1800s and early 1900s.
The Muslims who buried their dead outside this wall had their own reasons, and we’ll get to them.
And the gate has been in danger more than once.
During the Six-Day War in 1967, a group of Jewish soldiers wanted to break the Golden Gate open.
It would have been a huge symbol of victory, but an Orthodox Jewish leader stood against it, insisting the gate should stay closed until the Messiah arrives.
50 years before that in 1917, the story goes that the Muslim authorities planned to tear the gate down entirely to break the power of the prophecy and that on the very day they meant to do it, the city fell to the British.
What the record does show about that day is just as striking.
The Turks surrendered Jerusalem on the 9th of December 1917.
Two days later, General Edmund Allenbeby rode up to the Jaffa gate, got down off his horse, and walked into the city on foot as a sign of respect for a holy city.
So, like Heracleus in the old legend, the man taking the city chose to walk in.
So, the question keeps coming back.
What does this gate have to do with the end of days?
Part of the answer sits in the book of Acts.
In chapter 2, at Pentecost, Peter quotes the prophet Joel, words about the last days that Christians usually tie to the second coming.
Some Bible teachers see the Golden Gate the same way, as a kind of foretaste, a small preview in stone of the eastern gate they expect in a temple of the future.
But to be fair, plenty of scholars point out that Ezekiel was describing a gate of the temple in a vision, not a gate in Jerusalem’s city wall.
There’s also a Jewish tradition that the Shechina, the presence of God, came in through the eastern gate and will return through it when the Messiah comes.
Pay attention to that idea of God’s presence leaving and coming back because Ezekiel lays it out step by step.
In chapter 11, Ezekiel watches the glory of the Lord rise up out of Jerusalem and settle on the hill to the east.
It went up from the midst of the city and stood upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city.
That hill is Olivet.
Then in chapter 43, it comes home the same way.
The glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east.
And his voice was like a noise of many waters.
And the earth shined with his glory.
And the glory of the Lord came into the house by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward the east.
It leaves to the east.
It comes back from the east.
And only after that in chapter 44 is the gate shut.
So the order matters here.
In Ezekiel, the gate is closed after God has already come home.
The prophet Zechariah points to that same hillside.
His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east.
And the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west.
And there shall be a very great valley, and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.
Stand on that hill today and look west and the first thing in front of you across the valley is the sealed golden gate.
That’s why so many believers expect Christ to come back down that slope and straight through those blocked arches.
Now back to those Muslim graves.
In Islamic tradition, this gate is Babal Rahma and the eastern wall is tied to the last day and the resurrection.
One of the early companions of the prophet Muhammad, Ubada ibn al-Samit, linked this wall to a verse in the Quran about a wall that will be raised between two groups of people with a gate set into it.
The scholar Iban Cathier later disagreed and said it wasn’t the same wall.
But belief like that seems to be why Muslims began burying their dead right below the eastern wall, as close as they could get to the gate of mercy.
Jews prayed here, too.
During the crusader period, Jews came to this gate to pray for mercy, possibly because they were barred from praying near the Western Wall.
Christians brought their own stories.
Old writings outside the Bible say that Mary’s parents, Yookim and Anne, met at this gate.
Medieval painters love that scene, and the golden gate became a symbol of Mary’s own conception.
Some people also say this is the beautiful gate from Acts chapter 3 where a man lame from his mother’s womb was laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called beautiful.
That idea may come from a slip between two languages.
The Latin word ora means golden and the Greek word horas means beautiful and some think the two got mixed up along the way.
And then there’s Palm Sunday.
Christian tradition says Jesus rode through this gate on a donkey when he came down from the hill to the east.
The gospels never actually name a gate and the building standing there now went up centuries after Jesus.
But if he came in from the east that day, he came through whatever gate stood on this line back then.
Maybe the very arch Fleming saw in that grave.
In 1968, the writer Solomon Steckle wrote that the crusaders Palm Sunday processions came over from Bethany and entered the temple area through the Golden Gate, retracing that same road.
The symbol never stopped working on people.
Medieval Italian artists painted Mary, her mother Anne, and the Christ child together in a type of image called the Matza.
Three generations in one frame.
And Pope John Paul II used the idea of a gate and a threshold in his book crossing the threshold of hope.
For him, the gate was something you were invited to walk through.
There’s a reason it all points east.
Christians have long linked the dawn in the east with the resurrection on Easter morning and with the direction Christ is expected to come back from.
That’s why so many old churches were built facing east.
So the congregation prays toward the sunrise and other cities hang their hopes on a gate too.
In Vnius, Lithuania, there’s the gate of dawn where an icon of our lady is honored by both Catholic and Orthodox believers.
But Jerusalem’s eastern gate is the one that faces the hill where Christians believe the Lord will stand.
So here’s the verse I promised you.
It’s in Ezekiel 46, two chapters after the gate is shut.
Now when the prince shall prepare a voluntary burnt offering or peace offerings voluntarily unto the Lord, one shall then open him the gate that lookth toward the east, then he shall go forth.
And after his going forth, one shall shut the gate.
Notice what that says.
The gate in Ezekiel’s vision does open.
Someone opens it for the prince.
He comes through and then it’s shut behind him.
It isn’t a gate that opens up for everyone on the last day.
It opens for one person and then it closes again.
That changes how you look at the news from 2019.
Doors have been opened at this gate before.
The crusaders opened it.
An emperor walked through it barefoot.
And worshippers opened its inner hall after 16 years.
None of those was the prince.
What believers have been waiting for all along is the one person it’s kept for.
Tonight, the two arches still face Olivet, packed with stone, with the graves on the slope below and an older arch buried under the left doorway.
Whoever is inside the walls, the outer doors are still shut the way Ezekiel saw them, waiting for the prince.
I’m Ambrose Wild.
And if this one gave you a new way to look at an old gate, stay with the channel because more videos like this one tracing the Bible’s promises to the places you can still stand today are on the I
