1 Two visits to the Temple John 2: 12-16 Matthew 21:10-17 We can forget our purpose as a church: I. When we substitute the world s view of success for God s view of success. II. When we reverse God s priorities. III. When we exclude the very ones that should be included. IV. When we expect the Government to be the conscience of our nation John 2: 13-16 (NIV) When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father s house into a market! Matthew 21: 10-17 (kjv) 10. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this? 11. And the multitude said, This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. 12. And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves. 13. And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. 14. And the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple and he healed them. 15. And when the chief priest and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosannah to the Son of David, they were sore displeased. 16. And said unto Him, Hearest thou what these say? and Jesus saith unto them, Yea, have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise? 17. And he left them, and went out of the city into Bethany and He lodged there. We are looking at 2 passages of Scripture today that teach us the same lessons. The first passage is just the introductory to the message. The first scene in John 2 took place after Jesus first miracle in Galilee. It was early spring, Passover time. Jesus traveled with His disciples to Jerusalem from Capernaum. When they arrived there, they went to the Temple. Picture it that magnificent structure sat on the highest point of the city. It soared some 15 stories above the Kidron Valley floor. But when Jesus arrived, what caught His attention was the huge area of about 15 football fields known as the Outer Court. It had become almost a shopping mall. Pens of goats, sheep, doves, and other sacrificial animals were everywhere. Moneychangers were operating the tables. Now do understand that these merchants were providing a needed service. Faithful Jews were expected to offer financial gifts and sacrifices at the temple. So, these pilgrims who came from afar found it more convenient to buy their animals in Jerusalem rather than transport them across the country. Also, temple offerings were to be made in local Jewish currency, so someone needed to exchange foreign coins and Roman money for what was needed. But there were at least 2 problems here:
2 The business operations didn t have to be in the Temple compound itself. Imagine going to pray and worship and having to fight your way around cattle pens and over the messes on the floor. Another problem was greed as the moneychangers were charging very high fees. The animal sellers had marked up their prices. The whole system was filled with corruption. So, Jesus stepped into the middle of this, took a piece of rope and made a whip, drove out the animals and turned over the money tables. Jesus was angry at the corruption of the House of God. I do wonder how many other people walked into the temple that day, went about their business, and never even noticed the corruption and depravity. Evil has that affect. The more we are exposed to it, the less we notice it. Evil desensitizes us. We are basically walking that road in America today. Some of you who are older, what used to shock us is no so normal that we sometimes aren t even aware of its presence. During the days of the Passover, every Jewish homemaker thoroughly cleaned her house both physically and spiritually. A symbolic part of that cleaning was the removal of all leaven or yeast from the home. That may seem silly or trivial but it portrayed a very serious matter God wanted the lives of His people clean. So, think about it in relation to this passage by the time Jesus arrives in town nearly every house in Jerusalem was clean and spotless, except for one The House of God. The whip is really a symbol of God s love that demands a cleansing of sin. Now turn to Matt. 21 and let s fast forward 3 years. 3 Years later is when Jesus comes back to visit this temple in Matthew 21 beginning with verse 10. When I look at this passage, I am reminded of a Bible school student in Chicago who was given the assignment to dress up as if he were homeless. He was to take to the streets to see how he would be treated by people on the streets. He was acting as if he was a man down on his luck and he was to go out and ask for handouts for food, clothing, and somewhere to sleep. Well, this Bible school student was eager for the assignment, thinking that he would find a great deal of compassion on the streets of Chicago. However, by the end of the first day, he had been turned down on every hand. When nightfall came, he went to a famous church that had the following inscription on the outside wall, We will take in the stranger. I have seen that sign on the outside of that church. Well, he decided to go in and he fell asleep in one of the stairwells of the church. He was asleep in the warmth of that church when at 2:30 in the morning, he felt a kick and someone said, Get out of here, bum! And as he was on his way out, he looked up and again saw that sign that said, We will take in the stranger. I am afraid today that too often that is the way it is. We gather in churches all over America and sing hymns and hear the Word of God and are inspired by its message, but too often, we leave our house of worship only to turn our back on the stranger and those who need our ministry. We say that we are here to minister to anybody, but too often that is only a good advertisement because we don t always put it into practice. In the book of Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament, the Lord promised that He would come suddenly to His temple. And the first thing Jesus did when He went to His city of Jerusalem was to go to the temple. We saw this in John s gospel. And according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the first thing He did the last time he presented Himself to Jerusalem was to go suddenly to His temple. And when He got there, He found that the church, the temple, had forgotten its purpose for being there.
3 I want us to see that God s people, the people of faith, can indeed forget our purpose. In Verse 10 it says, and when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved. That word moved could be translated shaken. It is an interesting word in the Greek New Testament (seismos) for it gives us our word seismic which means shakes or quakes of the earth. So, when Jesus came to Jerusalem, there was that type of reaction. It was like a quake that shook the entire city when Jesus came. Now at the end of Verse 10 the people were asking, Who is this? And the Galilean crowds the peasants, the fishermen, and the little children were able to answer. In Verse 11, This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. So, it was the mob on the streets who knew who He was, not the religious leaders. The common folk knew who He was Jesus. They knew what He was the Prophet. They knew where He came from Nazareth of Galilee. This astounds me. The religious leaders in the temple could have received the One for whom it had all been erected! The one for whom the Priests had sacrificed throughout the centuries! The one about whom the Rabbis had taught in the temple court, YET, when Jesus came, they failed to recognize Him! Now, we must ask the hard question to really understand this scripture. Here it is. If Jesus were to come to this Church today, is there any possibility at all that we would fail to recognize Him when He came? Would our agenda be the same as His agenda? Would our concerns be the same as His concerns? Would the kind of people that we think are His people be the kind of people that we would receive? Why is it that some of the people we think will be the greatest in God s kingdom will be the least? And those we think are the least will be received as the greatest? It is because too often we have let the world s idea of success creep into the Church of God. Do you want to be great in God s eyes? Jesus said that if we want to be great we must be the servant of all. We are not to be concerned about rank and visibility. It is not about precedence or prominence or power because it is then that we become the least like Jesus. So you see I. THE CHURCH SOMETIMES SUBSTITUTES THE WORLD S VIEW OF SUCCESS FOR GOD S VIEW OF SUCCESS. The world s view is power and control. God s view is servanthood and humility. When the church adopts the world s view of success, the church forgets God s purpose. Jesus taught us this over and over. We are to humble ourselves. 1. He said it to the mother of James and John. 2. He said it in Luke 14 at a dinner. 3. He said it again in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. 4. He said it in the upper room the night before the cross. Jesus said, I am among you as He who serves. Jesus humbled himself to wash the feet of his disciples. Let me illustrate this.
4 It was 6:00 AM in the Tagg Mahall Hall Hotel in Bombay, India. A handsome, young American evangelist was sitting there in the hallway, half-asleep as he had to catch a plane to make a speaking engagement far away. That man was Billy Graham. He had already achieved world-wide fame. He was on his first extended tour of the Far East and India. In a cluster on one side of the lobby were three British missionaries and an Indian. They came up to Billy Graham and said, We left our home two days ago riding on an old train. We were coming to your crusade, but the train broke down and we missed it. They said, We serve a church called The House of Peace. that has an older ladies Sunday School class. They gave 100 rupees (which equals about $2.00 in American money) to support your crusade. Would you give us a message to take back to them? There in that lobby with a sleepy hotel clerk and those four people, tears welled up in the eyes of Billy Graham and he turned to II Thessalonians 3:1 and he preached a message to those three missionaries and that Indian lady. Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you. The hotel desk clerk came and stood there along with the bell boys and he preached them a message and then at the end he bowed his head and weeping, he said, Make me worthy, God, to preach the Gospel to such saints as these. If you asked me to explain Billy Graham s greatness, I would say that in my opinion, it wouldn t be when he preached to 105,000 people in Brazil, not when he filled the Los Angeles Coliseum with the largest crowd that was ever there, not the times he filled Soldier s Field in Chicago or Madison Square Garden in New York or even when the satellite sent his message all over the world. I believe the measure of a man s greatness is what he does when nobody knows. To me, true greatness is when a tired and sleepy Billy Graham preached that sermon at 6:00 AM to that little group of people. He didn t publicize it so everyone would know what he did we only know about it because of the testimony of 1 of those British Missionaries. Most every preacher I know would welcome the opportunity to preach to a great crowd but how many would have done what Billy Graham did in Bombay, India? The church today needs to come back to an understanding of how God views greatness. And this is found in servant- hood. II. THE CHURCH ALSO CAN FORGET GOD S PURPOSE WHEN WE REVERSE GOD S PRIORITIES. You see, in our scripture today, they had placed in the center of the temple what belonged on the edges. And they had placed on the edges what belonged in the center. This is the story behind the money changers in the temple. When Jesus came, He found those who were buying and selling there and He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. You see that at the end of Verse 12. It says, And he overthrew the tables of the money changers and the seats of them that sold doves. To understand this passage, you have to know what was going on. In that day, when the Hebrew people came to the temple to pay the annual temple tax, they had to go to the money changers where he would exchange his Jewish coins for the coins of the Phoenician city of Tyre. The reason they did this is because the coins of that Phoenician city were more exact in their weight and more sterling in quality than the Hebrew coins. They wanted to be sure the temple tax was paid exactly right.
5 There was a difficulty, because on the coins of Tyre there was an image of the Pagan God, Heroclese. And because of the commandment, Thou shalt make no graven image, they had to melt those coins down to pieces of metal. And so this big trade was going on. But you see, that had taken over the entire process and it had actually become the major achievement when one came to the temple. Rather than to pray and worship and listen to the instructions of the Rabbis who were teaching the Word of God, there in the very center of the temple s attention was this changing of money in order to pay the temple tax. Now as I explained earlier they were supposed to pay the annual tax but they had put in the center what belonged on the edges. They had reversed God s priorities. They had made most important that which was least important. What about us today? I am afraid that far too often in so many churches the building, the budget, and the by-laws take precedence over the Bible. Those kinds of things get more of our attention in the Church today than God ever intended for them to. We must remember that everything that belongs to the meeting and the going and the coming of God s people whether it be the instruments, type of music we listen to, the furniture, the budget, the by-laws, the order of service everything we use is secondary to the chief purpose and reason we are here. That reason is to proclaim the resurrected Christ and His power to change lives! And that is done through God s Word. The church must today be very careful to keep itself from becoming like this temple that we have read about in this scripture. We do not come to church to simply preserve an institution, we are not in church to just create a few moments of aesthetic beauty, we are not in church to just hear well formed sermons or to listen to a choir or an ensemble or a soloist perform some musical numbers! We have a central purpose and that purpose is that people s lives might be rescued and made whole by the Lord Jesus Christ! I think that was the message of our Lord when He turned over those tables in the temple that day! Folks, we have a great job to do. If you were to line up all the unchurched people in the world forming one line that line would reach around the world some thirty times. If you were to drive your car by these people lined up around the globe and briefly look into each of their faces, it would take you at least ten hours every day for four and one half years. When you reach the end of the line, it would have grown by 20,000 miles. If we are going to get busy for God, we must start seeing those many people with hope. The unchurched population of the world grows by 130,000 every day. By the time we leave this church this morning and come back tonight, the unsaved population will increase some 30,000 people. 80% of our churches are declining. By the year 2020, unless we get busy, the world will be less than 5% Christian. When Jesus saw the multitudes, the Bible says that He was moved with compassion. That word moved means he was touched at the very center of His being. God is looking for a church filled with people who will be like that. When we see a lost city and a lost world, our hearts will be broken and touched and we ll have a burden for souls. You know, it doesn t take much commitment to be a member of an average Baptist Church. It takes more commitment to be involved in many of the clubs in our city. Most of them require that you pay your dues and attend the meetings. How many of God s people come to church without a tithe in their hand, and yet the church struggles with cutting ministries or not being able to do other things we feel God has placed on our hearts to do.
6 Truth be known there are some who are critical about things at church but they are not paying the salaries or the bills anyway. Statistics show that 25% of the people support roughly 75% of the budget. We have gotten so comfortable with our air conditioning and heating, cushioned pews, and carpet, but the problem with the modern church is that the tears have dried up. We don t weep for lost people anymore that is too undignified. When we see more weeping, we will see more reaping. Many today will weep more over a gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo than we do for lost souls. When vast national meetings of major religious denominations gather together and put in the center of the agenda to debate whether God has a right hand, or Liberal Denominations ordain homosexuals to preach, it makes me say, No wonder America is where it is today! We, too often in the churches of this nation, have defied the secular, made primary what is secondary, and forgotten that our purpose is to make central what our Lord Jesus Christ made central. Our Lord emphasized when He cleansed the temple, when He turned over the tables of the money changers, to place in the center what belongs in the center, to make our priority what is His priority. I wish I could have lived back when God s people would have brush arbor meetings outside. I know that some of you have experienced that. O yes, it may have been hot or cold. Yes, it may have had sawdust floors. Yes, it lasted more than three or four nights. Some of them went for two weeks or more. But you know what happened? People got right with God and people got saved. III. THE CHURCH FORGETS ITS PURPOSE TODAY WHEN IT BEGINS TO EXCLUDE THE VERY ONES THAT OUGHT TO BE INCLUDED. There is no debate that one of the main messages of Jesus in what He did here in the temple was to do with what was happening in the temple. They were trying to exclude those who should have been included in the House of God. As our Lord cleansed the temple, the very place where it was, was in the court of the Gentiles. It was the one place in all of the earth where the Gentile who wanted to become a convert of the living God could come and stand and listen to the teachings of the Rabbis. But what happened? In the generations of Annis and Caiphas when a person came from afar, they were met in the temple with the bleeding of animals, the haggling and hassling of the exchange for money, the stench of dung. In the midst of all that, there was no possibility that they could have been instructed by the Word of the Living God. They had the experience of an Ethiopian in Acts chapter 8 who had gone to hear a word about the living God and left disappointed because he had been turned away. When our Lord came with his cord of whips, turned over the tables, and ran out the money changers, He was making a great visual statement that the church must always be careful to include anyone who comes with a heart seeking God. And I believe when a church decides to turn its back on any people, whether it be people of different color and ethnic backgrounds, the poor, the rich, the educated, the uneducated, that God will turn His back on that kind of church. That kind of church becomes nothing more than a sacred society for snubbing sinners or a country club with a steeple on top.
7 Jesus here in Matthew 21:13 quoted to them from Isaiah 56 when He said, My house shall be called the House of Prayer. In Isaiah the text adds for my people. Jesus went on to quote from Jeremiah 7 but ye have made it a den of thieves. They were excluding those who needed Jesus and it is easy to do that today. Something interesting was done at Princeton Seminary some time ago. Forty ministerial students were asked by their professor to walk to a nearby building and to dictate an impromptu talk on a tape recorder. They were told to talk about the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan. But what the students did not know was that they were going to be tested as they walked to the building. The professors had planted an actor who would groan and slump to the ground when the student approached. Well, 75% of the seminary students, 29 out of 40, walked right on by that person. Some of those literally stepped over the slumped body as they hurried along to go and talk about the Good Samaritan. What hypocrisy, and yet how often we are guilty of doing the same thing. Our churches should be open to all people. It s like the little black boy who walked three miles barefoot in the snow to get to D. L. Moody s church. Someone asked him about that and pointed out to the little boy that he passed several churches on his way. The little black boy said, Yes, I know, but they love little back boys at Moody s church. Last of all, let me say that IV. A CHURCH CAN FORGET ITS PURPOSE WHEN WE THINK THE GOVERNMENT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR BEING THE CONSCIENCE OF OUR NATION INSTEAD OF THE CHURCH. Too often, we are blaming the government and its leaders for the downfall of our nation and they are partly to blame. But we have gotten where we are today over a period of the past 50 years since the early 1960 s and the problem is the church has, for the most part, been silent on the issues. We have let our nation sink lower and lower until we are about to drown as a God-fearing nation, if we haven t already. History clearly shows that nations who honored and revered the Word of God, that God has prospered them and blessed them. Those nations that have turned against God have experienced tyranny and enslavement and defeat. Teenage suicide is at an all time high, and three-fourths of our high school graduates have experienced alcohol and sex. Most of the movies out of Hollywood encourage all those things. We took prayer and the Bible out of our educational system and have had to put police officers in. Men and women who gave their educational years training to be educators, and have given years to the public school sector even though underpaid, are now saying, No more, we can t even teach because the students can t be disciplined. Some blame our nation s problems on a sluggish economy or our nations debt. I m for a balanced budget. They need to quit spending away our children s future. Socialism would only create more of that. But listen, would we really be better off even if the finances of our nation were in order? I think not, because we certainly wouldn t turn back to God then if we won t now.
8 No, our primary problems ARE NOT economic and political. They are moral and spiritual. We have in America a shortage not of money or power but of virtue. A government that is the envy of the world has become an object of contempt in the minds of its own citizens. The Supreme Court has come a long way since it was first formed a long way DOWN, that is. Above their heads sit the Ten Commandments and they still pass laws that allow one and a half million babies to be killed each year. Let me show you the blindness of lost men. On one hand, those who promote abortion killing little babies before they are born, on the other hand, don t even want parents to spank those who are already born. Under-protecting before birth, overprotecting after birth. Don t touch this child, but it is OK to kill this one. What a ridiculous philosophy! These are things happening in this country today in the open that forty years ago would not have happened even in the dark. Teen suicide has increased by 300% since 1950. Teen pregnancy has increased 621% since 1940. Teen homicide has increased 232% since 1950. The outrageous and the bizarre are now the regular fare on the news and in the papers. We must ask where the church has been in all this. God has already promised, If my people who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and heal their land. God has given us the answer. It is not found in the White House, but rather in God s house. It is found, not in protest but in prayer. We as God s church, God s people, are to be the conscience of our nation. You say, But preacher, they won t listen. That is OK. I believe that we will not be judged by whether or not they listen but rather by whether or not we speak, by whether or not we do our part to help change it. We have been guilty of the sin of silence too long. I just believe there are enough of God s people in American to make a difference if we will stand united together speaking on the issues of our day in light of God s Word. OK, what can God do today in light of our scripture? He can restore purpose when the church forgets its purpose. That is what Jesus did. For one shining golden hour, our Lord turned the temple into what it was meant to be. Look at Verse 14. And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the son of David; they (These are the religious leaders.) were sore displeased. Or they were very unhappy. So, there for one hour, Jesus turned the house of God into what it ought to be. People were being healed and the children, arm-in-arm, were shouting, HOSANNA, HOSANNA, TO THE SON OF DAVID! Get the picture here. Jesus is there. Doves are flying around where He loosed the. Tables are turned over and money hungry men and women are crawling on the floor, picking up the coins that were rolling on the floor, but the true believers are there worshipping Jesus in the center of the temple.
9 This temple ultimately lost its opportunity. Jesus said within a week of what we studied today, Not one stone will be left on top of the other. And by AD 70, that came to pass as Titus Vespucian, the Roman general, fulfilled that promise made by Jesus as this temple was destroyed. As we come to our time of decision, we need to apply this personally. In the Old Testament, God had a temple for His people, it was a pile of stones. But in the New Testament, He has a people for His temple. God said of every believer in I Corinthians 6: You are the temple of the Holy Spirit. So when God comes today to cleanse His temple, it is not that He comes in and out of a physical building. It means that He comes to us, personally, to our hearts. To turn over some tables, possibly. To clean out the perimeter. To make our heart a heart and life that is totally devoted to one purpose and that is to glorify God through our lives. How is it with you today? Are there some places in your life that God needs to do some cleaning? If your temple pure today? What about our churches today? Is there any possibility that if Jesus came and sat in one of our services that we would fail to recognize Him when He came? Is God the first priority in your life or are you putting secondary things in the place that God deserves? Are you still looking at your money as being yours and not recognizing it as being all God s? Are you supporting God s work with your financial support to the church? Too often, God has been pushed aside. Won t you today decide that God will be first in all you do?