It was winter

Five hundred years of failure of the Jewish people to follow God’s Torah resulted in the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE. Nearly a hundred years passed before the Temple was rebuilt. But there was a difference. The Ark had been lost. And God’s presence was not there as it was in Solomon’s day. They had a Temple, priests rebuilt furnishings, but no presence.

But John tells us that on that cold day in Jerusalem during the festival of Hanukkah God’s presence returned.

Yeshua was walking in the Temple! Roughly a thousand years after God’s glory settled on the Temple, God’s Son was in the Temple. There was no weight of God’s glory forcing men to the ground. But the words Yeshua uttered while surrounded by his critics would start in motion God’s plan for the salvation of man.