Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Josh.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: And I'm Gabriel.
[00:00:02] Speaker A: And today on reading the Gospel, we are studying the event, the second cleansing of the temple. This is found in the book of Matthew, chapter 21, verse twelve through 17.
In mark, chapter eleven, verses 15 through 19. And in Luke, chapter 19, verse 45 through 48. Today we'll be reading from the book of Mark, chapter 21, beginning in verse twelve.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple. And he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, it is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers. And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna, the son of David, they were indignant and they said to him, do you hear what these are saying? And Jesus said to them, yes. Have you never readdez out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes? You have prepared praise.
And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there.
So we are coming down to the end of Jesus ministry here. We're in the last week and he cleanses the temple. Is this the first time he's cleansed the temple?
[00:01:46] Speaker B: No. In fact, when he started his public ministry in Judea, very soon after his baptism and temptation, Jesus Christ, in a very visible way, enter into the temple and cleanse it exactly the same way. Somehow Jesus ministry of those three years of public ministry are bookended by took identical cleansing of the temple.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Yeah. And with this one, I wonder how long it took the money changers to set back up.
I wonder if they were gone for a day or an hour or a week, or how long it took for them to come back and set things up and start selling again.
Jesus is there to cleanse the temple, to make it a place where people don't have to come in and pay for salvation, where it's a gift that's given.
Here the focus is on house of prayer, a place of healing, a place where those who need communion with God can come, which it didn't seem to be.
The pharisees, the sadducees, the religious leaders, made this into a place of money making.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: It was a business of salvation.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: They even used a special coin, a special currency for the temple. So everyone coming from around the world, this was a large festival, a week long festival. Everyone had to change their money into the temple's currency.
And that was a big business.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: And if you've ever traveled internationally, you know, when you go to change money, they don't just change it one to one and give you what it's worth, whatever the value is worth. They take a little bit off the top, right, for themselves for the service of doing the work, which is to be expected. You have an employee sitting there, but here in the temple, they could charge whatever they want. You come in with $1, they could say, well, that's worth $0.01 in temple coins, and we're gonna take the rest for tax.
And so it was a huge money making business.
Jesus here is obviously upending that. He's disrupting it. I remember when that shipping container in the Suez Canal turned sideways and blocked the canal and all the shipping containers, like, I forget it. Was it billions a day that it was costing the world economy because the ships couldn't get through.
That's what I see happening here, is Jesus is disrupting this industry.
I can't imagine the religious leaders, the people who were making money were happy.
And we get a little glimpse in this, in Luke, chapter 19, where we hear this story again, the very last verse. Well, let me read verse 47, it says, and he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him. So at this point, we already know they're out to destroy him, it says, but they could not find anything they could do and why?
For all the people were hanging on his words.
So as we talked about in the triumphal entry event, the people of Israel seem to be on Jesus side even at this point. At the end of the week, they're going to turn. But right now, still, they're hanging on Jesus words. They're looking for him as the messiah. They're enthusiastic about what's going to happen.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Especially those for whom Jesus Christ made room in the temple for the blind and the lame, the outcast, low income people, those who have been considered unworthy to be children of the kingdom of God.
These people have been healed. Jesus Christ was teaching them daily because from among this we'll have later in acts chapter three and four, thousands upon thousands of those who joined the christian church. And I see the second cleansing, the current cleansing of the temple, as being very missionally oriented. Yeah, Jesus Christ tries to do what the people of Israel were supposed to do for centuries.
As we studied in the previous episode, they had no fruit.
And because of that, Jesus Christ in this week, has a glimpse of what could have happened through the power of goddess. If they remain faithful to the mission God entrusted them, the temple would be a house of prayer, a house of healing, would be a place for sinners who walk into the temple as sinners. But they leave the temple as saved, as transformed by the grace of God.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: I've seen this play out today so often in many churches. I've been at the.
They want a church that's ordered and respected and silent and good people come to church. They don't want people disrupting the worship service. They don't want people speaking out.
I think of this, you know what jumped out at me this time, and I've seen it before, and the children crying out in the temple.
Have you ever been to a church where members said, the kids are too loud, the kids are making a scene? We need to tell kids to be quiet multiple times.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Even I said it maybe a couple of times.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: I think that's probably the biggest complaint I hear from people, is we hear the children, they're making noise, and Jesus response is out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes. You have prepared praise.
We see this same thing happening today, where we are trying to put aside people who don't fit into societal norms. They can't sit quiet and be well dressed and well respected, and so we cast them out. But Jesus is saying, no, this is the place for them. This is the place, as you said, for the sinners to come while they're still sinning, when they don't fit in. And we need places of worship that can accept them in.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: We need a cleansing of our own temples, starting with a temple of the heart and also with the temples of worship.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: And so as Jesus cleanses this temple, we have a spiritual temple that Jesus wants to clean in us as well. So we can look at this at a different level, that how are we polluting our temple? What is the spiritual temple? What is the modern day temple here on this earth?
[00:09:36] Speaker B: We can start with a body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, and also we can go all the way to the body of Christ that is led by the Holy Spirit. And the spirit gives gifts to the body of Christ, which is like a living temple. Let's start at the individual level.
Jesus Christ, in a couple of conversations, talks about the cleansing of the fountain of life. That is the cleansing of the heart, because from the heart we bring all kind of unsanctified desires and thoughts, unclean thoughts, and something that is inappropriate or out of sync with the will of God. That doesn't reflect the holiness of God. So that has to be cleansed. And we should claim that promise from one John, chapter one, that when, when we confess our sins, God is faithful and just, not only to forgive, but to cleanse the fountain.
Because sometimes the fountain was poisoned and has to be cleansed.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
So we need to also surrender that because God's not going to cleanse it if we don't want it cleansed.
And so we need to examine ourselves and see what pollutants are we putting in.
What are we allowing to come into our lives that are defiling the temple.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: We should make a list of the dirty dozen, the top twelve pollutants, spiritual pollutants in our lives.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: And I guess this gets back to my soapbox.
If we try to take it out ourselves, we're not going to be happy. But going to God and saying, God, give me the want to want to quit, because I don't want to quit. God, change my desires, take these things out, because it's Jesus that's cleansing the temple and he will cleanse our body.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: If we take the cleansing process into our own hands, we might look like successful for a short while, but on the long term we become hypocrites, a kind of pharisees with a huge discrepancy between what we profess and what we deliver.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: I think of another analogy to this.
Most cleaning products say, try this in, you know, test in a place that's not important, that you can't see. Because sometimes a cleaning product does more damage than the dirt itself or the problem itself. And if we are not equipped, if we're not professional about it sometimes in trying to cleanse ourselves, we can do more damage than if we had just left it alone.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: And we should not try to cleanse other people because that is not our purpose in church. It is the Holy Spirit who will cleanse their fountain of life, their hearts, in the same way the Holy Spirit cleanses our hearts. So what we can do in the context of the church or in a small group or whatever format you used to meet like minded christians, we should grow together and allow the Holy Spirit to dwell among us and to work in us and later through us.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Yeah, let us pray.
Father God, we want to cleanse our temple. Your Holy Spirit is desiring to live within us. But Father, we can't do it. And so we surrender our lives to you.
We give you permission to change our desires to help us to live a holy life.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: But Father, we also ask that you help us to stop bringing pollutants in, that we make our lives, lives that are serious about caring for others, about lifting up, about focusing on Jesus, not about our own desires and our own wants.
And I pray, Father, that as we do this, you will fill us with that joy, undescribable joy, with the peace that passes all understanding.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: That we can experience the best life and that our life won't be worse because we've given something to you.
We ask these things in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.
