[Machine transcription]
And Jesus made a whip of cords and drove them out of the temple.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Whenever we speak of the sinlessness of Jesus, there’s always a couple of incidences that
are brought up to question the point.
If Jesus was truly sinless, then why did he run away from his parents when he was 12 years
old in the temple?
and if Jesus was sinless, what was He doing with a whip of cords, whipping people and driving
them and the animals out of the temple? Not only once, but twice. Here in John at the
beginning of His ministry and later at the end of His ministry on Monday of Holy Week.
Wasn’t Jesus angry then? Didn’t He sin? We’ve got to ask the question, why was He so upset?
why was Jesus so angry? And we’re going to go back to the Old Testament lessons to pick
up the point.
We sang in our gradual Psalm 19. Verse 1 of Psalm 19 says this, the heavens declare the
glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. This is one of the beautiful
places in the Bible where we come to understand what the theologians would later call the
natural knowledge of God. Remember, there’s two ways that we know about God. We know about
God through nature and we know about God through Scripture. Through nature, when we
look outside of us and also when we look inside of us, we know that there is a God. We can
see, by the way, that the world is an orderly place, that everything fits together perfectly,
That there’s a design and an intent behind everything in creation.
And we know from that that God must have made it.
And we know more.
We know that not only can we see that things are good, but that the world also has a moral
quality to it, a moral character to it.
And this is confirmed by our own conscience.
Our own conscience tells us that there’s a good and a bad, a holy and an unholy, a right
and a wicked. So we know that not only is God good, sorry, not only is God big to create,
but also that God is good. And our conscience tells us one more thing. Our conscience shows
us that we have not lived according to that particular order of the universe, the order
that God has set up. Our conscience testifies against us that we are guilty.
I heard someone say this, and they said, it’s not really fair that the Lord will judge us
on the last day according to the Ten Commandments, because what if you didn’t know the Ten Commandments?
How is it fair to judge someone according to the commandments that they didn’t know?
And I heard someone offer this example, that the Lord will say, okay, well, if you don’t
want to be judged by the Ten Commandments, here’s the deal.
you. Every time you ever criticized someone, or you were judgmental about someone else,
let’s just use that standard to judge you. And people are begging for the Ten Commandments
instead. I mean, even according to our own standard, this is what Paul says in the beginning
of Romans, even according to our own standard, we find that we are guilty of breaking the
law of God, even if we don’t know the Ten Commandments. We know that there is a law
all, and that we are guilty of breaking it, and that if God is good, that means He must
be mad.
Those are the three things that we know about God according to nature.
That He’s big, that He’s good, and that He’s mad.
Every religion basically teaches that about God.
That He created, put things in order, and that we’ve lived out of order, and we’re guilty.
Now, that gives us a problem, right? I mean, if God is mad at us, what are we going to
do? If God is upset at us for being out of order, out of the created order and out of
His moral order, what are we going to do about it? Now, you can invent a religion to try
to appease God, like Adam and Eve with their fig leaves in the garden, and like every other
religion invented by humanity, you can try to come up with a way to appease the wrath
of God, but it just doesn’t work. It falls short. You can’t do it.
Now what does God do about it? That takes us to our Old Testament lesson. We’re going
to spend a lot of time, well, not a lot, but we’re going to spend some time on Wednesday
talking about the Ten Commandments, but just a brief thing now. Consider how the Lord came
to His people, enslaved in Egypt, and He rescued them with these ten mighty acts, the ten plagues.
He just walloped the Pharaoh and all of the Egyptians. He brought them out of slavery.
he brought them into the wilderness, he led them across the Red Sea, and he brings them
to Mount Sinai, a mountain that’s on fire, and the Lord talks to them from the mountain.
It’s the only time in all the books of Moses that the Lord talks directly to the people,
at least that I can find. From the shouting voice that they heard, it was like thunder
and trumpets, from the fire on top of Mount Sinai, the Lord says, you shall have no other
gods. You shall not misuse my name. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
Honor your father and your mother. You shall not murder. You shall not commit
adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not lie. You shall not covet. The Lord
booms out the law and it turns out that this idea that God was big and good and
mad is true. In fact, the law confirms it and makes it even more emphatic that the impression
that we had from nature was not even, didn’t even capture the fullness of it. That God
is in fact full of wrath for sinners. That God is, here’s the problem, that God is dangerous
for us. And so the people, remember what happened in Exodus? The people heard the
Ten Commandments and they backed away terrified, shaking from the mountains and
they said to Moses, don’t let God talk to us anymore. Don’t let God say anything
else. You go up and talk to the Lord for us. We can’t handle it. And you know what
the Lord said about that? This is always a surprise to me. The Lord says the
Some people were right.
They were right in their trembling.
They were right to be afraid.
They were right to back away
from the mountain.
Because my presence, my holiness,
is not safe for sinners.
No one we read in Exodus 32.
No one, now think about this.
No one can look at the face of God
and live. That’s not a problem with God’s face. The problem is with your eyes and mine.
The problem is not God’s holiness. The problem is our sin. And because of our sin, because
of our breaking the commandments, because of our dying, because of our failure to keep
God’s law, because of that, God’s presence is dangerous to us. This should be helpful
when⦠because we live in a culture and we live in a city that is⦠wants to be spiritual
but not religious, right? I’m spiritual but not religious. You hear that all the time,
which means I want to be in the presence of God without God saying anything to me.
I want a God who’s very, very quiet but always available. That’s what that means.
but to be in the presence of God is not safe. Our God is a consuming fire. Now this is the
problem that we started with, that God is good, big, and mad, but it’s even amplified
when it comes to the holiness of God. And now the question is, what can we do about
it? And the answer is nothing. All we can do is what the children of Israel did at the
mount⦠at the bottom of the mountain, and that is to run from God. That’s the only
right thing to do when God’s holiness shows up, is just to run for it. That’s your only
chance. If it’s up to us, it’s all over. But it’s not all up to us. God might be able to
do something about it. God, and here’s the answer to the problem that we’re looking for,
God might be able to establish a way so that He can be with us and not destroy us. And
And that’s what happens in Exodus 21 and 22 and 23, and all the way to the end of Exodus
and all the way through Leviticus and halfway through Numbers, the Lord invites Moses up
on Mount Sinai, and He gives him a vision, and He says, now I want you to go about this
building project. I want you to build something, the tabernacle, and I want to have a fence
around it so that no one approaches unaware, unprepared, and I want you to have a tent that
has a holy place and a holy of holies, and I want there to be a showbread and the candelabras
and the incense, and I want there to be a bronze laver for washing, and I want there
to be an altar for sacrifice, and I want there to be in the middle of it the holy of holies,
that is the Ark of the Covenant with the Ten Commandments, and you know the whole thing.
The whole thing. I want there to be priests, and I want them to wear these certain clothes,
and I want them to wash their hands in this certain way, and I want them to approach in
all these things. We’ve all read it before and we’ve gone through it and we’ve gotten
lost in the minutia of it. The cubits and the rods and the staffs and all the measurements
and everything else like this and we think, what’s going on here? But this is what’s
going on. The Lord was establishing a way to dwell in the midst of His people without
destroying them. He was giving them a welding mask so that the glory wouldn’t destroy
their eyes. He was hiding his own holiness so that it wouldn’t be a consuming fire.
And he was saying there is now a way for God to dwell with his people and for his people
to dwell with God. And it has to do with the temple and the tabernacle and what happens
there, the sacrifice and the blood. That’s the only way. The only way to approach the
presence of God is through the blood. So the temple was established. Moses built the tabernacle.
It was a cloth, I mean, well, it was a leather tabernacle there.
It wasn’t that big.
The tabernacle would have fit inside this room probably twice.
It was not that large of a thing.
But it was there and the people had that where the Lord’s glory could dwell in their midst
to not destroy them but rather to bless them.
And that tabernacle traveled with the people through the wilderness into the Holy Land
until finally King David moved it to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, and David, after he built a home for himself, says it’s not right for the
Lord to be in a tent. I’m going to make a temple for him. That’s the difference between
tabernacle and temple. The tabernacle was the temporary structure that was like a tent,
and the temple is made out of stone, a permanent building. The Lord says, no, I don’t want
you to make a temple for me. Your son will do it. So Solomon constructed the temple in
Jerusalem in about the year 960 or so, he dedicated the temple. And that temple stood
until it was destroyed in 586, 587. It was built when they came back by, remember, Zerubbabel
who rebuilt the temple? And it was nothing like the glory that it had in Solomon’s day.
In fact, the people who were there before, who remembered Solomon’s temple, came and
beheld Zerubbabel’s temple and they were weeping because the temple was so small and
humble compared to what it was. But that was the temple that was hanging around until Herod
the Great decided he would build it up 40 years, 42 years before our text. And Herod
goes about renovating the temple to make it one of the most glorious buildings to ever
exist in the history of the world. Herod’s temple in Jerusalem was bigger than any of
the Roman buildings in Rome. It was more glorious than any of the other temples of
the ancient world. It was this massive, huge thing with huge stones and huge pillars gilded
with gold. It was there to proclaim the glory of, well, probably Herod and maybe of God.
But that was the temple that Jesus was in. It was a beautiful building. It was equipped
with all sorts of churches and places for teaching and all this sort of stuff. But what
had they done? They had taken the building that was to preach the sacrifice and preach
the blood, and they had turned it into a market. They had, you know, the Pharisees had said
that you can’t bring in your pagan money that has the image of Caesar on it. That would
be worshiping a false god, so you’ve got to change your money here so that you have temple
money instead of the pagan Caesar money. And they said, if you want to, you don’t even
have to bring your animals to sacrifice with you from your house in Galilee or from wherever.
You just show up here and you give us a little money and we’ll provide the ram or the sheep
for you to sacrifice. It was like a sacrifice vending machine, you know. You just show up
and give them your money and they give you a ram or a pigeon or something like that,
and then you can offer the sacrifice without having any trouble, you know, all the trouble
of bringing a goat all the way from Bethany or whatever. You could just buy it there in
the temple. They had undone the preaching of the temple, and this is the point, because
to undo the preaching of the temple is to undo the preaching of the gospel, to undo the preaching
of the blood, to undo the preaching of the sacrifice. Every time an Israelite was to
bring a goat or a ram or a pigeon and offer it on the altar there, they could see that
that goat or that lamb, which didn’t do anything wrong, was suffering in their place.
And that doctrine, what the theologians call the substitutionary atonement, is what was
constantly being preached in the temple, that the Lord accepts the death of another in
my place.” And that’s what makes Jesus so angry. That’s what drives Him to make a whip
of cords and to drive the people out. That’s what has Him so upset because the gospel,
that the free forgiveness of sins, and that the way that we can dwell with God has been
silenced by all of this money changing and all this rigmarole that they had brought to
the temple. It’s got to go. Because this temple, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how
glorious it is. It doesn’t matter how huge it is. It doesn’t matter how big the rocks
are. It doesn’t matter how much gold is on all of the stones. None of that matters if
the gospel is not preached. That’s the only thing that matters, the forgiveness of sins.
And God’s solution to this problem, that His holiness is dangerous to us. Because there
is a solution to this. There is a way that the Lord can dwell with us and not destroy
us. There is a way that the Lord can call us into His presence without demolishing us
and the way is through the sacrifice. And all the sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed
to the ultimate sacrifice, which was Jesus on the cross.
The Jews said to Jesus as He was driving them all out, they said, give us a sign. They always
want signs. Give us a sign to show that you can do this sort of thing. And Jesus says,
here’s the sign. Tear the temple down and I’ll build it up in three days.” And we
see at last the punchline of the Old Testament. We see the punchline of
everything that Moses was commanding and building. We see the punchline of all of
the preaching of the prophets. That all of it was pointing to Jesus. The
sacrifice to take away sins. The sacrifice that would win God’s pleasure. The death
that would make God smile at you and that would reveal His glory.
So one day, you and I will stand in the glory of God,
we’ll stand in the face of God, that face that Moses said that no one can see and
live, one day we will stand in that face and
we, you, will live.
Not because you’re holy or perfect, but because Jesus is crucified, died,
buried, raised on the third day and you have His blood, that blood of that
sacrifice, you have that blood cleansing you, declaring you to be His, winning for
you, now think of it, winning for you the smile of God. One day you’re gonna see
the face of God, and on His face will not be a frown, but a smile, because of the death
of Jesus. That preaching of the gospel that was lost in the temple, it’s here in the body
and the blood, which makes us fit eternally to be in the presence of God. May God the
Holy Spirit grant us this faith and this confidence in the name of Jesus. Amen. And the peace
of God which passes all understanding, guard your heart and your mind through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.
