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 want to 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.

The Kingdom of God as Jesus’ Primary Mission

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

It's a kingdom of new creation, meaning that if you're saved, you're not only going to be resurrected and given new life in Christ, you're going to be new people, new people of grace who are going to be saved.

New people 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 going to be a kingdom like no other kingdom of this planet. It's not going to 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 going to be like that. It's going to 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 going to be a kingdom where guilt and shame and regret will all be eliminated forever. It's going to be a kingdom where Jesus is going to perfectly purify his people. And at the root of all of that, underneath every single part of that, it's going to be a kingdom that's going to exist, both it and its members, for the glory of God.

It's going to 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 going to examine that passage together.

Jesus Cleanses the Temple in John 2

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 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 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.

Six Reasons Jesus Was Angry at the Temple System

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.

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 being condemned.

They're 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 the command, 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 animal's safety, they risked the travel, they risked the cost and 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 going to be poured out onto that animal and you were going to receive grace, you were going to receive the same, you were going to receive the innocence that that animal had and that animal was going to 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 percent 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 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 2 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 is 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 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 and he was the one who took over 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 to his spiritual prowess. So the time of John 2 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 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 want to be in relationship with God then drastic measures need to be taken before a person could walk into the temple extreme preparations need 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 worshipped he cares how he is worshipped.

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.