John 2:13-22 (The War On False Religion)

I think it's important for us to begin our time today by asking just a couple of questions.

For starters, why did Jesus come? Why was he born?

And why did he die? And perhaps the easiest answer to that question might be that he came to save sinners, and he came because he loves us so much, and that he wanted to die to forgive us of our sins, or maybe he came in order to make the world a better place and to end it of its evil.

And I just wanna say that those are wonderful things. Those are good things, but those aren't the primary reasons why

Jesus came. Those things, again, are wonderful and they're glorious, but they are consequences of why he came.

They're not the primary and the ultimate reason for why he came. That, as we learned last week, was to set up the kingdom of God.

Jesus's primary reason that he came to this earth was to set up the kingdom.

You see, Jesus came to this enemy -occupied territory that was firmly in the grasp of the serpentine emperor in order to launch this holy invasion that was gonna reclaim planet

Earth and crush the serpent's head and free the people of God and to bring God's heavenly rule back to this rebellious planet.

Last week, we saw that Jesus actually unveiled this kingdom at a wedding, and he taught us several different things about what this kingdom was gonna look like.

It's gonna be a resurrection kingdom that's gonna demonstrate to us that all of those who are dead in their sin are gonna be raised to life in Christ.

It's a kingdom of new creation, meaning that if you're saved, you're not only gonna be resurrected and given new life in Christ, you're gonna be new people, new people of grace who are joyfully obedient to God and have their lives fit for the

Father's kingdom. But it's even better than that. It also is gonna be a kingdom like no other kingdom of this planet.

It's not gonna be a kingdom like we live in today where the rich and the poor are more divided than ever, the weak and the strong or the left and the right, and everyone seemingly seems like they're just more and more and more divided.

It's not gonna be like that. It's gonna be a kingdom where every single member experiences the most beautiful intimacy with their king, even better, as we said last week, than a bride on her wedding day.

It's gonna be a kingdom where guilt and shame and regret will all be eliminated forever. It's gonna be a kingdom where Jesus is gonna perfectly purify his people.

And at the root of all of that, underneath every single part of that, it's gonna be a kingdom that's going to exist, both it and its members, for the glory of God.

It's gonna be a kingdom that exists for the glory of God alone. And that is the kingdom that Jesus announced to us last week, and that is the kingdom that Jesus is going to be bringing this week.

And he begins that work of bringing the kingdom by going to war with false worship.

You see, when Jesus plans to bring the kingdom, his first target, the first beachhead that he's going to attack is false worship.

And he does that in John 2, 13 through 22. And if you'll turn there with me, we're gonna examine that passage together.

John begins this way, chapter two, verse 13. The Passover of the

Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And he found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves and the money changers seated at their tables.

And he made a scourge of cords, and he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables, and to those who were selling the doves, he said, take these things away and stop making my father's house into a place of business.

His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me.

Then the Jews then said to him, what sign do you show us as your authority for doing these things?

Jesus answered them, destroy this temple, and in three days,

I will raise it up. Then the Jews said, it took 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?

But he was speaking of the temple of his body. So that when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believe the scriptures and the words to which

Jesus had spoken. Now, I find it fascinating how different this passage is from the passage that we dealt with last week.

Last week, we saw quiet, private, small town Jesus at a wedding doing a miracle to rescue his people from their shame.

This week, we see angry public Jesus at a Jewish temple flipping tables out of zeal for true and proper worship.

And on the surface, these two images could not look any more different, but underneath them, both of these pictures communicate the exact same

Lord. You see, Jesus is both the lion and the lamb.

He is both the savior and Lord. And in Jesus, we see every single characteristic of God made perfectly manifest.

Jesus says in another passage, if you have seen me, then you have seen the Father. That means that if you've seen

Jesus loving sinners, then you've seen the heart of God. If you've seen Jesus having compassion and mercy on the broken, then you have seen the heart of the

Father. And it also means that when you see Jesus angry and frustrated over adulterated worship, and he's flipping tables in the crowd, and he's hitting the courts, and he's making a whip, and driving out the idolaters from God's house, if you've seen that, then you have also seen

God's heart for true and proper worship. You see, the same

Father who furiously loves his people is also furious over our sin. The same

God who pours out love upon his elect children of grace is the same God who is storing up wrath for all of those who defile him.

And listen, we see some of the most beautiful portraits of God in the

Bible, his patience, and his mercy, and his grace, and all of those things are real. But if we do not stop and take notice of the full picture, then we'll miss some of the beautiful attributes of God that we're often prone to overlook.

For instance, to have a true view of God, we must not only know the attributes that we like, like the love of God, or the grace of God, and the mercy of God, we must also look at the attributes that we are in our flesh are not prone to like, like his anger, and his perfect, righteous, holiness, and justice.

We have to look at the entire picture of who God is, because if we don't, then we'll have the wrong

God. We'll not only have the wrong view of God, we'll have the wrong God. For instance,

I don't treat my wife like she's a seven foot tall

Icelandic hockey player with a European accent. I might have a million facts about her correct, but if my orientation towards my wife is that's her, which it's most certainly not, but if my orientation towards her is that is who my wife is, every time

I look at my wife, every time I think about my wife, I'm thinking about another woman, because that woman is not my wife.

And every time we view God as the God of love only, and grace only, and mercy only, again, those traits are true, but if we only view him in that light, and we don't view him in the fullest picture of who he is, then we're thinking about a different God, a

God that is an idol, and a God that has no power whatsoever to save.

Now today, I bring all of this up because the text is gonna portray a picture of Jesus that is not popular today.

We're gonna see a picture of Jesus who like his father gets angry. And while many people in today's church hold to an effeminate, meek and mild, feathered hair

Jesus, who loves you just the way you are, and who cheers for you, and who accepts you, and who's never gonna flip any tables in your life, while that is the common picture that people believe when they think of Jesus, it's just not biblical.

Again, we saw Jesus last week rescuing a family from shame, and this week we see him angrily flipping over tables, and both of those are

Christ, which means our view of Jesus must be big enough to incorporate both.

Now, today's sermon is gonna be a little bit different than normal, because there's so much in this passage.

I could preach 10 ,000 sermons out of this one text. And I've done my very best to boil everything down into what is exactly important, and what you need to know from this, but I'm gonna tell you, it's not gonna be a typical sermon.

My last week's sermon was six neat points in a tight little outline.

This week is gonna be a running commentary on the text. We're gonna work through this text point by point by point, and I don't really have nice, tight, pithy points, but we have one major theme that is gonna cover this entire sermon, and it's this,

Jesus goes to war with false religion. See, Jesus is coming to set up a kingdom, and to set up his kingdom, he has to dismantle false religion.

And he hates false religion enough to get angry at it, to flip tables for it, to make a whip because of it, to chase people out of the temple in light of it, and he hates it enough to challenge the religious establishment of Israel that was abusing people and hurting people, and he takes it on directly so ferociously that they end up killing him, but all of that is a part of the glorious plan of God, and we will see that in today's message.

So turn with me once more as we pray. We're gonna read verse 13 and 16 one more time.

We're gonna pray, and then we're going to dive in. Father, I pray that you would open up our minds today to be able to see the beauty of this text.

I pray that you would give us a deeper and richer view of Christ, and that we would see him in the totality of who he is, that we would worship him in the totality of who he is.

Lord, I pray that when we see Jesus getting angry over false religion and impure worship, that,

Lord, it would cause our hearts to adore him. That it would not be an attribute that we cringe at, but it would be an attribute that we worship him more ardently for.

Lord, soften our hearts to who Jesus is. Let us see him for who he is, and let us not have a phantom

Jesus in our minds that is all grace and never wrath, that is all patience and never fury.

Lord, let us have a biblical view of Christ. It's in your name we pray, amen.

Verse 13 says it again. The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

And he found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves and the money changers seated at their tables, and he made a scourge of whips, and he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen, and he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

And to those who were selling the doves, he said, take these things away. Stop making my father's house a place of business.

God in the flesh had come back to his house, and he was angry.

Now, I want you to understand this. This event, it says, was happening at the Passover, which was one of the happiest times of the

Jewish year. You would have had millions of elated pilgrims streaming to Jerusalem from all over the

Roman Empire as the city swelled with joyful worshipers. And it seems like that the only person who is angry about this is

God. That's a striking feature. What's going on?

What John tells us, it's what Jesus found in the temple that infuriated him so badly.

Well, what did he find? He found money changers, he found animal merchants, and he found religious leaders.

And you may be wondering, why is that such a big deal? Why is Jesus so angry over that?

Because on the surface, it seems like that would be a reasonable service. Because if you think about it, the temple is where you sacrifice animals.

So having animals nearby would actually make sense, right? I mean, think about the money changers.

The temple at that time had a very specific currency. It was a very pure currency, and it didn't contain any of the idolatrous images from all over the

Roman Empire, because you wouldn't wanna allow idolatrous images into the temple. So they had a money -changing table to provide pilgrims with the service so that they could come from all over the

Roman Empire, from all over the world, wherever they had all of these different currencies, and they could exchange them before they walked into the temple, and they could have the pure temple currency so that they could pay their tithes, pay their taxes, and not carry into the temple images of idols.

And that, on the surface, I think that sounds reasonable. It sounds like a very necessary service.

The same is true for the animal merchants. Again, especially during Passover, you had to bring an animal to sacrifice, and that animal needed to be a spotless lamb, according to Exodus, and that spotless lamb would need to be brought to the temple so that you could sacrifice it, not only for your sins, but for the sins of your family.

And you would think that people would probably want to bring their own animals, but there was a great problem with doing that because Jerusalem was on a mountaintop, and over the years, the city had been built up with stone walls and stone staircases and gates and various entrances, which made it more difficult for humans to walk up, much less animals.

And if you risked it, it would be easy for your lamb or for your ox to fall, for it to break a leg, for it to become maimed, and then it would have no longer been accepted as a sacrifice because it had needed to be a spotless animal, a perfect animal, an animal that did not have any broken bones.

See, the law required a perfect sacrifice because only a perfect sacrifice would atone for your sins.

That means no impure, imperfect, diseased, leg -broken, spotted, deformed, or maimed animals would do.

And if you consider that most people were actually coming from long distances, many from all over the Roman Empire, it would have been a tremendous hassle to transport an animal at that distance, and it would have been incredibly expensive.

Animals needed watering, they needed food, they needed bathroom breaks, so they were not only expensive, but they also slowed down the pace of travel so considerably that they were an utter hassle to bring with you, not to mention that they could get sick on the way or they could die of exhaustion or get injured or hurt, which again would have meant that you would have gotten all the way to the temple and you could not sacrifice them, which would have been frustrating to say the least.

So it became the custom that travelers and pilgrims would not only take their, or they wouldn't take their animals with them anymore.

Instead, they would buy them at the merchants who were selling those animals at the temple. And one other benefit to that was that they were already inspected.

You see, when you brought an animal yourself, you risked that maybe you missed a spot on it or maybe its earlobe was a little too long on one side, whatever it was, and that your animal was gonna be rejected.

At least if you bought this animal at the temple, the Pharisees had already inspected it and they've already given you a peace of mind that it was gonna be accepted.

So it sounds like with all of that data, that this was actually a really good thing, that this was a good capitalist solution to the problem.

Now, I believe there's six reasons why Jesus was angry about this.

And I believe that we need to pull back the veneer of this pragmatic solution that seems like it was a good thing, but underneath it was a lot of darkness and a lot of evil and a system that was actually abusing the people of God.

And I think that there were six reasons why Jesus was righteously and rightly angry against this system.

So let's start with the first one. The first problem was location.

Jesus didn't just condemn the practice in general, he condemned the location. Again, Jesus is not angry that people are coming up with creative solutions to problems.

He's not angry that entrepreneurs are coming together to try to solve problems. He's angry that it's happening in his temple.

He's not upset at innovation. He's upset that innovation is being brought into the one place on earth where God and man are supposed to dwell in purity.

Now, if you wanna understand this objection more, there's a wonderful documentary out there because we can't cover this in full.

We're only gonna be able to skim the surface of this point for just a second, but there's a documentary out there called

Spirit and Truth, and I would highly recommend you checking it out. It's on Vimeo and it's on other places.

I highly recommend this because the documentary is gonna uncover really the heart behind what

Jesus is angry about, the heart behind pure and impure worship, and I commend that to you.

But suffice it to say right now, the reason Jesus is angry is because this is being done on holy ground.

If you remember Moses in the Old Testament, he took off his sandals when he was in the presence of God because he's on holy ground, which means that there's a distinction between holy ground and secular ground so that you can't just bring the things of the world into the place of God.

See, Jesus was looking at the temple as this utterly sacred place, this place that was set apart from the world so that you don't bring the things of the world into the temple.

It was special and it was sacred, and this practice was actually blatantly disrespectful.

To fill the outer courtyard of the temple with money -changing merchants and comers was a blatant sign of disrespect to God.

It was a low view of his holy presence and it was evidence that their hearts had been given over to idolatry.

Again, Jesus does not condemn a marketplace. He condemns a church that's masquerading as one.

That's the first point. It was location. The second point is an important point because the

Jews should have known better. The Jews had the scriptures, they had the word of God, and they knew how

God felt about worship. Yet time and time again, all throughout the Old Testament, we see it's the

Jews who are blatantly rejecting God's commands. Again, God not only meticulously describes how he wants to be worshiped in his book, in the

Bible, he also provides vivid examples of what happens when he's not. And those examples are striking and they're all over the place, but we're only gonna cover two.

The first is the golden calf. If you remember from the Exodus narrative, one of the striking features about this is that it's all about worship.

And it's not that the Israelites just wanted to worship a false God. The really striking feature of this narrative is that they were trying to worship the one true

God. They were trying to make an image of Yahweh. They weren't trying to make an idol.

They weren't trying to worship a false God. They were trying to worship the right

God in all the wrong ways. They were trying to solve the problem.

How do you worship this God that none of us can see? How do you worship this

God when our leader has abandoned us, Moses? So what do they do? They take their gold, they turn it into Aaron, they throw it into the fire and out pops a calf, is what

Aaron says. And he doesn't say, here's your idol. He says,

Israel, here is your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. They were trying to worship

God, but they were worshiping him wrongly, and God cares about that.

God not only cares that he is worshiped, he cares how he is worshiped.

And you see the great irony of that is that while they were down there making this golden calf,

Moses was up on the mountain receiving it. He was receiving the command, you shall not make, you shall not cast me in any image.

And yet here they are casting God in the image of a cow, and God doesn't take kindly to it at all.

He visits them with decisive and expedient judgment because he cares how he is worshiped.

God is holy, which means that he wants us to treat him that way.

He wants us to approach him with awe and humility and reverent fear, not with flippancy and creativity and innovation.

He never ever gave us permission to be innovative with worship. That's the first example.

The second example, I think is even more clear, and that's the example of Nadab and Abihu. If you don't know who they are, they were

Aaron's first two sons who also became priests in the temple, and their job was to perfectly and obediently execute

God's desires in the temple. They were not given permission to be innovative.

They were not given a license for creativity. They were told to simply follow the instructions to honor the

Lord and to serve God on behalf of the people, but like many people today, they decided to go against the

Lord's commands and they decided to add in innovation. In Leviticus 10, it tells us that they brought strange fire, which just means fire that was brought in in a strange and unauthorized way.

It was innovative, but it wasn't the way that God wanted it, and they brought that fire into the sanctuary of God, and without grace, forgiveness, or mercy from heaven, they were consumed by the fire of God.

Now, the point in Leviticus 10 and the golden calf and other such examples throughout scripture is not that God just gets easily angry or that he blows things out of proportion or that people do their best and God was just in a bad mood or that he's grumpy or anything else.

The point is that God is unimaginably holy and that he deeply cares about how he is worshiped.

Now, let's come back to John 2. When Jesus, God in the flesh, came to this temple and he beheld all of the strange practices that were going on that his father never prescribed to happen inside of the temple, he was understandably outraged.

The same God who rained fire down from heaven on Nadab and Abihu is the same

God, second person of the Trinity who shows up to the temple and he is outraged that they had turned the house of God into a marketplace bazaar.

Instead of the quiet murmurings of prayer and worship and devotion to God, what

Jesus heard was the loud throng of merchants, the clanging of money, the bellowing of cows and sheep, and this infuriated the

Lord our Christ. John tells us he made a scourge of cords.

He made a whip and he drove them out of the temple with the sheep, with the oxen, and he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

Jesus was angry that these people had brought innovation into the house of God when they were given no biblical warrant for doing so.

And just like God was angry at the people of old, Jesus was angry at his wayward people here in John chapter two.

That's the second reason. The third reason is the extreme greed of the

Pharisees. This is what Jesus was angry about, the third reason, that the Pharisees were greedy lovers of money and they were making an exorbitant amount of money on the system of convenience and they were abusing the people of God.

For instance, the merchants, they were making money off the animals that were sold for several different ways.

First, they were the ones who owned the fields where the animals were raised, so they were making a profit even when the animals were sold.

The second way that they were making money is they were charging a booth fee to the merchants.

So the merchants would go to the Pharisees to buy the animal and then they would take the animal to the temple grounds and set up their animal booth and then they would be charged an exorbitant rate from the

Pharisees just to rent the space. So the Pharisees are making money both ways so that if you were to walk into the temple like Jesus did on this day and you were to see the outer courtyard filled with hundreds if not thousands of these booths that are filled with animals that are being sold and the changing of currency, then what you would understand about that moment is that the

Pharisees were making rent off of every single one of those booths that were there and the rate was an exorbitant rate.

So that meant that the price of the animals was gonna skyrocket, leaving weary travelers with overpriced animals as their only option.

Now, you might think, well, why don't they just bring their own animals?

If the price of the animals has skyrocketed and someone couldn't afford it, why don't they just revert back to bringing their animals?

Well, some of the poorest people actually began doing this and they did. They risked the animals' safety, they risked the travel, they risked the cost that it would take in order to get their animals to the temple and some of them would even carry their animals up the mountain just to make sure that their animal didn't fall and they would exhaust themselves trying to get their animals up to the top of the hill only to be met with the awful news that your animal is not accepted and often with very little reason given.

You see, the Pharisees were the ones who would have to approve the animals for worship so the ones that you brought in were not the ones that you bought from them and because that wasn't lucrative for them, they would reject your animal outright and send you right back to the line where you would have to buy their animals and make them more money.

It's recorded that animals were rejected for almost no reason because the

Pharisees wanted everyone buying their animals. It was socialism.

The Pharisees controlled both the means of the animal production, they controlled the distribution of the animals and they were the ones that were left with all the money while everyone else starved and if you think about it this way, the most critical element of the

Passover was sacrificing an animal. Your family were bringing an animal to the

Lord to sacrifice and your sins were gonna be poured out onto that animal and you were gonna receive grace, you were gonna receive the same, you were gonna receive the innocence that that animal had and that animal was gonna receive your guilt so what the

Pharisees were doing was forcing you to buy their overpriced animals or forcing you not to participate and if you didn't participate, that meant that you didn't receive forgiveness that day, that your guilt wasn't poured out on the animal and you didn't receive that animal's forgiveness and you were cut off from God.

You were unjustly excommunicated from the presence of God and is there any wonder that Jesus was angry at that?

The same is true for the money changers. The Pharisees made money on their booth rental as we've already talked about but they charged this exorbitant rate for the change of currency from 10 to 20 % profit just on the change of coin.

You see, the entire system was theft by the threat of religion.

Is it any wonder Jesus is angry? Not only these wicked men defiled the temple grounds with their pagan practices and dishonored the

Lord and his temple with their innovation but they were taking advantage of God's people and they were dangling God over their people's heads and threatening to withhold a relationship with him if they didn't comply to their demands and contribute to their religious

Ponzi scheme. They were robbing God's people that God himself loved and they were making themselves rich in the process.

Is it any wonder in another event in Luke 16, Jesus said, or that Luke says, the

Pharisees were lovers of money and they were listening to all of the things and they were scoffing at Jesus and Jesus said to them, you are those who justify yourself in the sight of men but God knows your hearts for that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.

Jesus is saying there and he's saying here in John two that the Pharisees had become detestable to God.

They were perverting worship. They were perverting the location of worship.

They were perverting the truth of worship and through their greed, they were perverting the people's ability to worship.

All of these things Jesus was rightly frustrated and furious about.

But if you've ever watched a late night infomercial, you'll know the phrase, but wait, there's more because there is the fourth reason that Jesus was so angry.

It's because all of this was happening in the court of the Gentiles. Maybe this point doesn't seem that significant right away and maybe it's not even immediately clear why that matters but I want us to take a moment to peel back the layers of why it matters where it was happening.

You see, the first point we said was that Jesus was angry about the location. Well, this is part of it.

It was happening in the court of the Gentiles. So for a moment, I want us to understand the history of the temple and the layout of the temple just so that we can understand why this is such a big deal and why

Jesus is so angry about it. See, at the time, this was not the first temple, this was the third temple that had ever existed.

First temple was built by Solomon and God allowed it to be burned to the ground by the Babylonians because of the

Jewish people's penchant for impure worship. The second temple was built after the first temple was destroyed by the exile, after they returned from the land of Babylon back to Israel during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah and it too was desecrated by the

Syrians by a man named Antiochus Epiphanes who sacrificed a pig right in the middle of the temple which was again a sign of God's judgment on his idolatrous people.

It seems, biblically speaking, that God would rather allow his temple to be defiled and burned to the ground than to allow his people to go on worshiping him improperly.

And that's what happened in both of these cases. The people devolved into idolatry and God destroyed the temple.

Now tuck that point away for a moment, we'll come back to that. Again, this is the third temple and temple construction began around 14

BC by Herod the Great. He was a non -Jewish puppet king. He was installed by Rome and he ruled the nation with an iron fist.

He's the same Herod who was king during Jesus's birth and he's the one who tried to assassinate

Jesus as a child because he was threatened that another king had been born and had it not been for God warning

Joseph in a dream and sending the young family down to Egypt, then Jesus would have been killed.

This is the Herod we're talking about who built the temple with his stained hands of blood.

Now, Herod took the remains of the second temple that was left and for political reasons and for reasons of pride, he began building and erecting one of the greatest structures in all of the ancient world.

It was in fact a temple not to the Lord God, but a temple dedicated to the glory of Herod and his architectural prowess.

So at the time of John II, the temple had been under construction for 46 years.

It would actually not be completed until AD 63 and it had become a wonder in the ancient world.

All throughout the empire, it was known that the temple was the crown jewel of Jerusalem and it was one of the most impressive, if not the most impressive buildings in all of antiquity.

Caesar's palace did not even look as incredible and as glorious as the temple in Jerusalem and people began getting a sense of pride, national identity over this building.

And if you think about it, it was a tremendous source of tourism. People from all over the world were coming to look at the

Jerusalem temple and it could have been one of the greatest opportunities for reaching the nations with the good news about God that had ever happened in the

Jewish history. They had every opportunity when the world came to behold their beautiful building, to teach them about the one true

God, but this rarely, if ever happened. We'll get back to that in a moment.

The structure of the temple also indicates to us that this temple was a missionary temple.

Not only was the world streaming to it because of its impressiveness, the entire structure of the temple was dedicated to missionary work.

And it was not only a place where Jewish people were supposed to worship, it was intentionally designed with the worship of the nations in mind.

For instance, at the very heart of the temple is where God's presence dwelt in its fullest capacity so that no man could walk in except for once per year and with extreme preparation processes.

And from the very center of the temple emanated the presence of God in this room called the Holy of Holies. And that was the hotspot of God's glory on earth.

It was the furthest in, it was the deepest room because God was intentionally protecting his people from the power of his holiness.

The second room, which was one layer removed from that where God's presence was present, but not as fully present as in the

Holy of Holies, that's called the Holy Place. And the second room is where the Jewish priests could enter, but they had to enter daily through preparations and purifications.

And if they did not, then they would fall over dead. The point of these two rooms is that God is ferociously holy and that our sin is utterly serious.

And if men wanna be in relationship with God, then drastic measures need to be taken

Before a person could walk into the temple, extreme preparations needed to be taken so that their sin did not offend the holiness of God.

Now, the temple was more than just a building with these two rooms, that was the temple proper, but there was also a temple complex that was consisted of three different courtyards.

So outside of the temple was the court, the first courtyard was called the Courtyard of the Israelites. It was two layers removed from the presence of God and it was where the

Israelite men were to come and were to offer their worship and their prayers and to present their sacrifices on behalf of their family.

They could walk right up to the door of the temple, but they could not go in. They had to hand their sacrifice off to the priest who would then serve that sacrifice on behalf of the family.

And they needed to be ceremonially clean before they could even enter inside of this courtyard.

God's presence was so thick that if they were not clean, according to the law, then they could not approach and they could not come to God in a flippant way because God cares, not only that he is worshiped, he cares how he is worshiped.

Outside of that courtyard is the Courtyard of Women. That was three layers removed from the holy of holies, the violent presence of God.

And that's where the women and the children gathered, in fact, to pray for the safety of their husbands as they served their

God on behalf of the family, the wives and the mothers and the girls would pray for their husbands and fathers to return.

You see, the husband or the father represented his family in a unique way.

He was the family head. He would take the sacrifice in for the family, just like the priest would take the sacrifice in for the nation.

So the man represented his family in a special way. And he did gain greater access to the temple than his wife and his children, but he also exposed him to greater danger than his wife and his children.

And in that day, the women would be huddled, would not be huddled together in anger because they didn't get to go in.

They would be praying for their husbands and for their fathers that they would return safely and that they would courageously serve the

Lord. That's the court of the women. The final courtyard, the third courtyard was the courtyard of the

Gentiles. And it was the outermost courtyard. That meant that anyone who wanted to go in the courtyard of women had to go through the courtyard of the

Gentiles. Anyone who wanted to go into the courtyard of the men had to go through the courtyard of the Gentiles. Any priest who wanted to serve inside of the temple and even the high priest on the high holy day,

When he went into the Holy of Holies, everyone had to go through the court of the Gentiles.

Now if you don't know what Gentiles mean, what that word means, it just, it means someone who wasn't

Jewish. It was a made up word that the Jews made up to describe you are not like us.

There were Jews and then there were Gentiles. There were Jews and there were non -Jews according to the Jewish way of thinking.

And this courtyard was established to be a house of prayer.

It was a place of worship for the nations. It was a place where the people of the world could come and at a safe distance they could learn who

God is and what he was like and they could evaluate this God and hopefully the goal would be that they would turn to this

God in faith. Now the expectation that they would have had as they came up to this temple is that they would have been welcomed by the people of Israel.

That the Jews who had to walk through their courtyard anyway would stop and talk to them and would minister to them and would showcase the love of God to them.

If this God is so good and so great and so holy then shouldn't their followers also be that way?

So the expectation would be that they would be welcomed by God's people but that never happened. And the second expectation would be that if this

God is so loving and he's so good and he's so great then he would not permanently keep the

Gentiles separated from him. He would not create a permanent boundary that they could never cross and that they could never go any further.

The point is, and there were rumors that the Old Testament was a record of Gentile inclusion.

There's evidence all over the place that Gentiles can move from the place of Gentiles to becoming part of the people of God.

We look at people like Ruth and Rahab and Hagar and Caleb and the mixed multitude that came out of Egypt and a host of other people and we see that by grace through faith in God alone that even in the

Old Testament a Gentile could move from being a Gentile to becoming a person of the people of God.

Ruth is a great example of this as you read the book Ruth moves from being a hated

Moabite to a beloved daughter. So at the very least you would think that people who came to this temple and who learned to love

God and worship him would have a path to be able to get to know him deeper.

But again this almost never happened. And it wasn't because of God and it wasn't because his word was not true in the

Old Testament that he wanted to reach the nations with the gospel. It wasn't because of God.

It wasn't because of his word. It was because of the racism of his people. See at the time of Jesus Gentiles were not welcomed.

They were treated like untouchables. They were treated like outsiders. And instead of Israel welcoming them into the presence of God or trying to teach them or anything like that they pushed them away.

The Jews became so impressed with themselves and so impressed by their unique status with God and their religion and their temple and all of the benefits that they thought that they had by being

God's chosen people they actually became arrogant narcissistic and quintessential racist and they would look down their nose on anyone that they considered to be inferior to them and an outsider to them and the

Gentiles were certainly inferior to the Jews in their mind. And it's even reported that at the time of Jesus there was a sign that was hanging up in the middle of the temple courtyard warning

Gentiles that if they stepped in any area that was unauthorized for them then they would be killed on the spot.

No questions asked. They would be murdered. See the

Jews were so worried that a Gentile would come in and defile their temple. They were willing to commit one of the great commandments thou shalt not murder.

How blind do you have to be? I mean how do you get this far off track where you hate someone so much that you that you basically tell them don't step one square inch outside of your little area or else we'll kill you.

And I believe the way that they got there is because they love their building more than they love the nations.

On this day Jesus walked up to a temple that checked the biblical boxes.

They had a court of the Gentiles. Okay great. Check that off the list. But it wasn't a faithful temple and it wasn't a welcoming temple and it wasn't a missional temple.

Here you have an awful scene. And if the sign wasn't bad enough to send the

Gentiles running away. Here you have a courtyard that's filled full of animals defecating on the streets.

Money tables pressing you up against the sides of the walls and you would have had no room to kneel and no room to to worship.

The place that was given to you for quiet prayer money changing would have been utterly distracting.

You'd have had no place to stand because of the merchant booths that were obstructing the view of God's temple. And over and over and over you would have looked around and you would have been unwelcomed by people who wouldn't even look you in the face.

And the overwhelming message that you would have gotten is that you are not wanted.

This God doesn't love you. He doesn't want you and neither does people. And you would have left feeling utterly rejected.

And is there any wonder that Jesus was angry at this disgusting practice?

And so he confronts the Pharisees with their sin. And instead of responding with humility and repentance to the rebuke of Christ, Pharisees were angry and they were gnashing their teeth at him in godless fury.

And in that moment, they showcased the awful and sad reality that God could walk right up to them and look at them face to face and they could not even recognize him.

And this leads to the fifth and final reason. I know we said there's six. I'm going to stop with this one.

The fifth and final reason that Jesus is angry is because the temple was utterly empty.

At this point, the temple was nothing more than a religious relic. It was a nice building people came to visit, but it no longer housed the powerful presence of God.

See, the temple used to have power when it was built in Exodus or when it was built when the tabernacle was built in Exodus or when the temple itself was built in the book of Kings.

We see the earth shaking and the fire from heaven falling and the mountains rumbling and we see

God's power is palpable. And in those moments,

God had made an agreement with sinful humans that he would graciously share his presence to them in ways that weren't dangerous for them if they would obey the law and if they would sacrifice for their sins and offerings.

And essentially what you have here is that the people are going to do their best to love God and when they fail, that God is going to offer them grace because living in God's presence is costly, but yet the people don't hold up their end.

They don't obey the law. They don't sacrifice the way that they're supposed to and they have hatred in their heart for other people.

So God leaves due to their penchant for idolatry. The Lord left his temple and no one seemed to notice day in and day out.

They kept up with their religious show, unaware that God had totally abandoned them. And you may be like, where does it say that God left his temple?

It says it in Ezekiel 10. Before the temple was burned to the ground, the first temple before it was burned to the ground by the

Babylonians, God had had enough with the spiritual apathy of their nation, with the idolatry, with the wickedness and the rebellion, and it all had reached unfathomable proportions.

So God packs up his presence, he leaves his temple and he leaves it a hollow shell of its former glory.

And there's no biblical evidence that his presence ever returned. When they built the second temple, it says that the old men weeped because they had seen the former temple and his former glory.

And they knew that this one was different because God's presence didn't come back. Just like we learned last week about the empty stone water pots,

I believe that Jesus is even foreshadowing there the emptiness of the Jewish religion and the emptiness of that temple.

You see, it's the presence of God that made the people special, that made the temple special.

It wasn't the building itself, wasn't the decorations, it was him. And when he left, they traded relationship with the living

God for a well -decorated building that they clung to in their sickening idolatry.

You may be asking yourself, how do you know that God's presence didn't return? Well, the Old Testament does not tell us that, but I will tell you that God's presence eventually did return and we see it in John chapter 2.

That's the theological point that John is making. After centuries of the temple being thoroughly empty,

God's presence not dwelling inside the Holy of Holies, after centuries of that,

God does return to his temple. He returns when Jesus walked up to the temple, flipped over the tables, made a whip and chased the idolaters out.

That is when God's presence returned to the temple and they rejected him.

After hundreds of years, you would think that they would have welcomed

God's presence back and they're ready to kill him. They were so blind, they could not even recognize that God was in their midst.

Now, those five reasons that we've just given, I don't want to give you those reasons just to paint the picture that the

Jews are bad people and that they're uniquely making

Jesus angry. I want you and I to understand that we do these same things today. That American Christianity is no different than the

Jewish people of the ancient world and we have to take responsibility for how we have made Jesus angry as well.

For instance, the Jews turned the temple into a place, into a marketplace where they were introducing highly innovative things into the worship of God.

What have we done in the American church? We introduced marketing, innovation, psychology, anthropology, lights, fog machines, you name it.

And what we've done is we've added innovation and we watered down the gospel and I believe that Jesus is angry at that.

He's still angry at that today. Building idolatry. It's not just large churches, it's also little small churches that are so in love with their buildings that they don't love people anymore.

And if you touch a chair that aunt Susie dedicated, then, then you're going to get in trouble with, with the building committee.

It's idolatry. Jesus is still angry at that.

It's empty religion. These Jews didn't seem to notice that the temple behind them was empty.

Like many of us today who settled for the sort of empty religious performance that's devoid of relationship and this devoid of the love of God and the, and the wrath of God and the justice of God and the mercy of God.

And we create for us this, this little soothing sort of religion that leaves us just as lost as these

Israelites. And Jesus is angry at that. When we make our relationship with God about our performance,

Jesus is angry at that. That's religion. Church greed.

Think about it. These people built an elaborate system to extract the wealth and the resources from people.

I've seen so many churches do this with bigger buildings, better services, larger budgets.

Send me a thousand dollars and you'll get a miracle. But what have they done for the poor?

What are those churches done for the widow and the orphan? Or what have those churches done to actually reach the nation with the true gospel of Jesus Christ?

I believe Jesus is angry at that. We live in a day when racism and sexism is still a thing.

I think Jesus is angry at that. We live in a day that there's a lack of zeal.

Jesus in this passage is known for his zeal. It's a zeal for God's house will consume him.

And we see this beautiful picture that Jesus is displaying that he has a righteous zeal for the house of God.

And yet we live in a day that could not be more characterized as spiritual apathy. There's few better descriptions for the modern, modern church than that.

We live in a day when it's easier to mow our yard than to go to church because we just don't want it.

We live in a day when we yawn at God, when we prioritize everything in our life except our relationship with God.

And we have a total lack of zeal, a total apathy, a consumer -driven mentality.

And I think that Jesus is still angry at that. You see, the question

I think that we need to ask ourselves is not, oh, look at the

Jews. I wonder how they were this idolatrous. It's what tables does Jesus want to flip in my life?

What areas in my life do I have that are causing me spiritual pride? If Jesus visited today, what area of my life would be offensive to him?

The question is, what are those tables? What areas of my life are spiritually apathetic?

What areas of my life are spiritually impure? What areas of my life do I need to give over to Jesus? Because if he saw them, he'd be angry at them, and he is, and he does see.

So before we continue with this message, I don't want us to look at it like it's a museum exhibit where we're standing safely behind a pane of glass and the lion can't reach out and rip us apart.

I want us to see that the same things that we do today are the same things that they were doing back then, and it angers the

Lord. The question is not, does our lives as they are in our sin and idolatry anger the

Lord? They do. The question is, how are we going to respond? See the

Jews responded in anger, and they even questioned and challenged

Jesus. They said to him, what sign are you going to show us as your sign of authority for doing these things?

After centuries and centuries of God's presence being devoid of the temple,

Jesus shows up and they not only say, who are you, but they say, what, who do you think you are? You better show me some credentials,

Jesus, for doing these things. See at the time, this was a capital offense.

Jesus doing this could have got him murdered and the Jews want to sign.

The Jews want him to prove that he's either God or the Messiah or both. But either way, if he doesn't prove this, they're going to kill him.

And I love how Jesus responds with such wisdom when he says, destroy this temple in three days,

I will raise it up again. Do you see what's happening here? Jesus, they've asked him for a sign and he gives them an answer that would dramatically unfold in three of the most unexpected ways that would totally prove that he was the

Messiah, that would totally prove that they were idolaters. The first is he exposes them for who they really are.

He says, you tear down this temple and I will rebuild it in three days. He's saying, you, you tear it down and I'll rebuild it into something full and lasting.

You tear it down and I'll make it into something better. You tear it down and I'll replace it.

And they were totally unwilling to do it. And because they were unwilling to take him up on his sign that he offered them,

Jesus walked away free, but he exposed them by doing it.

He showcased who they really were. They were people who loved their temple more than God. They loved their wealth more than the people and they were the purest form of idolaters.

That's the first thing that we see that Jesus does through saying this phrase.

He says, you destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. That's the sign. They're unwilling to do it.

Second way that this unfolds when he says, you destroy this temple and in three days

I will raise it up, is that they actually were the ones who destroyed this temple. Forty years after this passage, remember

I said that the temple wasn't finished until 8063. Well, in 8070, the

Lord dispatched the Roman armies upon the city of Jerusalem and burned their temple to the ground, never to be rebuilt again.

In John 2, the Israelites were standing right in front of their covenant God and he tells them, you destroy the temple.

Forty years later, that's exactly what happened. Out of their pride and out of their idolatry, their temple was destroyed.

Because of their sinful, idolatrous love of the temple, their temple was taken away from them.

That's the second reason or the second way that this passage is applied, but that's not the primary reason.

The primary reason or the primary meaning behind what

Jesus is saying here, destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.

Well, if you want to understand that, you need to understand what Jesus means by this. Because primarily there's two secondary meanings about the actual temple that's going on here, the physical temple that's standing behind him.

But the word this shows us the primary meaning, destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.

And John gives us the clue to understand what Jesus is actually getting at in verse 21 and 22 when he says, but he was speaking to the temple of his body so that when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this and they believe the scripture and the word to which

Jesus had spoken. So Jesus not only saying, here's the sign, you destroy the temple and I'll raise it up and they're unwilling to do it and he's not only, he's not only prophesying that in 40 years they were going to actually destroy the temple, which they do.

The primary temple to which Jesus was talking about was the temple of his body. See on this day,

Jesus shows up to a temple that needs to be destroyed or false worship was happening that no longer house, the presence of God that was no longer a place of worship that had turned this holy sacred place into a place of business that was cutting people off from God and abusing people.

And God was not only so angry that he was going to destroy it. He was going to thoroughly replace it because Jesus wasn't talking about just the temple.

He was talking about his body. Not only is Jesus going to allow the Roman armies to destroy this physical temple, he's going to allow the unfaithful

Jews two years from this moment to take his body and to kill him in two years from now,

Jesus is going to come back to the temple and he's going to cleanse it again. And on that day, the authorities are going to descend upon him, arrest him and kill him.

And all of that was a part of the plan of God. Two thousand years ago, Jesus came to his empty temple and he signed its condemnation order.

And he didn't leave his people without hope. From the cross and in his resurrection, he replaced that old building with the true living temple of God.

Now, this means and this is incredibly important. Because of what

Jesus Christ has done. We no longer need to go to a temple in order to know

God. We can know God through Jesus Christ. He replaced it. He condemned it, he destroyed it and he replaced it.

That means that we no longer need a human mediator like a priest in order to represent us in a temple.

We have Christ who represents us perfectly before the Father. He has replaced the entire sacrificial system and the temple.

This means unlike that old temple that could be defiled, you and I can never be defiled because of what

Jesus Christ has done. If you are saved, then you have been made perfectly and eternally clean.

There's no more shame, no more guilt, no more impurities and no more possibility that you could ever be defiled again.

This means that you and I no longer need to go to a building where God dwells. God now dwells in you and he has sanctified you and he has made you sacred and holy ground, which means that he has made you a temple.

It makes you and I a place where God's presence dwells, where the nations and anyone who is far from God can come and get to know

God because God is in you. He's transformed you and everywhere that you go now, it is holy ground.

So if you're in Christ, you've been made a temple of the Holy God and that's not a light thing.

That's something that we ought to steward. With sacred passion. See, the

Jerusalem temple was replaced because of the Israelites penchant for false worship.

Now that God has taken a precedence in you, how are you going to live your life? Are you going to steward your life well?

Are you going to live in awe and wonder of God? Are you going to do what the

Pharisees did and expose yourself to God's wrath? That's what

I want my Christian brothers and sisters to be thinking about. How am

I going to live now that God lives in me? If you're not a

Christian, it's not difficult to become one. All you need to do is turn to Jesus Christ.

Confess your sins to him. Repent like the Pharisees didn't do. Humble yourself and cry out to Jesus as Lord.

Ask him to forgive you. Ask him to save you. Ask him to come into you and make you new.

Cry out to Jesus and he will rescue you. And he will come and he will make his presence known inside of you.

And he will transform you. And I pray that you would do it before it's too late.

2 ,000 years ago, Jesus came to a temple that was thoroughly couched in false worship.

And he made war on that old institution. And he replaced that old institution.

And now because of what Christ has done, he comes and he lives inside of his people. A nation of people who have been made into walking, talking temples.

What an amazing God. Let us pray. Lord, thank you for what you have done.

Thank you for what you continue to do in our lives. And Lord, I pray that we would steward our lives well for those of us who are in Christ.

That we would live cognizant of the fact that you live in us.

That we would restrain or refrain from sin. Not because we want you to love us.

But we would refrain from sin because our lives have been made sacred and whole. And we want to please you.

We know because of what you've done on the cross that we cannot be separated from God. But that doesn't lead us to a life of flippancy.

That doesn't lead us to a life of sin so that grace may abound. Your grace in your life changes us.

It makes us want to obey you. It makes us want to love you. And God, I pray that for your people here today.

And Lord, I pray that if there's anybody listening to this message and they want to turn from their sins and they want to find the hope that we have in Christ, Lord, I pray that they would turn to you.

That they would have the courage to do that. And that Lord, that they would even have the courage to reach out to someone at the

Shepherd's Church or at another church and find out what it means to turn to Jesus and be a

Christian. What it means to grow as a Christian. What it means to grow up into maturity as a

Christian. Lord, I pray these things. And I ask them in your strong, in your firm, in your powerful, in your glorious name.