Dennis Tuuri

# Cleaned Transcript

The leprous house. The first inspection. Second inspection will happen two years after this at the third Passover of our Savior. This is the first cleansing of the temple. There’s a second and the house will be torn down. It doesn’t meet the criteria of having been cleansed of leprosy. Our Savior cleanses it. The leprosy comes back and then he will destroy it in AD 70. So we could call this incident the inspection and judgment of a leprous house.

But I want to look at the motivation for our Savior’s actions. I want to kind of focus in on the two things he says. I sort of read the text in a little funny way. I think there’s kind of a narrative structure of activity leading up to the first statement of our Savior. And after that there’s another—the second half of this text is the disciples remember based on what he said. The Jews talk, Jesus talks, the Jews talk and the disciples remember.

So Jesus presents himself two ways here with two specific pieces of speech. One, the climax of the action narrative and the other the instruction portion as men react to what he has done and said. Our brother Mike works for a company called Sherbeam. And what they do is they make these big huge devices, platforms that shoot a very high-powered electron beam, very focused at meat as it goes by this machine on a conveyor belt. And they make the meat safe for you.

When meat has gone through this process, E. coli, salmonella, whatever is in there originally will not live. What happens is that beam is powerful enough and it has to be very powerful to penetrate the cellular membrane of whatever’s in that meat. And having penetrated the cellular membrane, what it does then is the effect of this electron beam is to reconfigure, to mess up the DNA sequencing of the virus or the living organism.

So essentially it kills it by changing its DNA so it can’t replicate itself, but it has to punch through the cellular membrane. Well, the word of God is like many things in our culture—the word of God is this sharp two-edged sword that pierces to the innermost parts of our being. You know, no other book, no conversation with men can accomplish what the word of God driven by the Spirit will accomplish in your lives when we come together in the Lord’s day.

We go through this conveyor belt and God zaps us with this word and it penetrates to the interior of who we are and to some of us it kills us. It burns us up and to some of us it transforms our DNA so that we become super living organisms. We become better, transformed into the image of our Savior.

This incident, this cleansing of the temple occurs at Passover and Passover is a reminder of God’s judgment in the context of the world. And there are two kinds of people. Passover correlates to the firmament, the waters above the firmament, and the waters below—a heavenly people and an earthly people. And in Passover, God saves one group of people by judging and destroying another group of people.

So here we are in the context of the institutional church in Jerusalem at the great centerplace of the whole culture of that church and Jesus comes like a laser beam, you know, frying some and causing others to meditate on what he’s done and to be transformed by the power of his word and spirit.

So may God grant us the grace today to take the central message of this text that I’ve decided to focus on—zeal for the Father—and may he transform our lives. The mission of this text for us today is to try hard, to try hard, to try very hard to please our Father in heaven and our Father on earth. Our Father is on earth. So we’re to please our Father in heaven. The Lord Jesus Christ, his entire motivation is described here as zeal for his Father’s house.

It has consumed him. And we’ll see what that means in a little bit. But the point is his motivation is keen to us. And this is what we should take away from this text. A zeal not just for the Father’s house. Jesus had a zeal for the Father’s house because he had a zeal to please his heavenly Father. And that’s what we want to speak about.

Now, there’s a little context here by way of introduction to this. It’s significant that now that we’ve entered into the narrative portion of John’s gospel, the first event that happens—Jesus’s first miracle is a family situation. The second event that happens is this religious situation. So family and church occupy these two great opening narratives of the narrative portion of John’s gospel.

I read at verse 12 because that ties off the family portion as it were of the narrative structure by saying he hung around with his mother and his brothers and his disciples in Capernaum for a little bit and then he goes to Jerusalem.

So we have this movement from Galilee, from Cana where the first miracle takes place, and now we go down to Jerusalem in Judea and the Gospel of John will go back and forth, although most of the action will occur in Judea in the south, but those are the two poles of the action that goes on in John’s gospel.

And by way of what we’re looking at, we see immediately, of course, the opening sequence of these events describes the greatness of Jesus as compared to Moses. We talked about that in the prologue that there’s not radical discontinuity between Moses and Jesus. You know, Moses preached grace. God preached his name to Moses. Moses prayed for grace upon grace for the people of Israel in the Exodus experience that’s referred to in the prologue. But Jesus has come as the greater Moses. No comparison.

And he has come to bring fulfillment to all the Old Testament signs of who he would be and to replace them. So we saw John baptizes with water. Jesus baptizes with the Spirit. Wedding feast of Cana—we’ve got these purification jugs of water. That was good. God had ordained that things would be purified with water. But Jesus comes and changes the water into wine. Here we have the temple being pictured. Temple is a good thing. God commanded it. It is his Father’s house at this particular point in history. And yet Jesus clearly tells us with the instruction that they will destroy his temple and he’ll raise it up in three days that he is the greater Temple coming to fulfill what that temple pictured—God’s dwelling place amongst men—and to replace it.

So we have this movement from family to church and the implication that Jesus is coming to do what really nothing else could do—to bring cleansing, renewal and nothing short of recreation in the context of family life and marriage and also in the context of the religious structures and institutions of the day and of our day as well.

I mentioned these Old Testament pictures—we could look at this as a second cleansing of a house. We could probably say that we have Jesus creating marriage feast and joy in the family and now he addresses his Father’s house dwelling place. And in John 3, still in Jerusalem, he’ll talk to Nicodemus and say you have to be born again. So we have this picture of the recreation of the human race—renewed, purified, recreated marriages, renewed, purified, recreated house and then renewed, recreated, purified children, childbirth as well.

So Jesus comes to effect recreation across the whole plane of human existence.

Old Testament law was that if a house had leprosy, the priest would come and inspect it. They would try to clean it up and whatnot. After they do some stuff, then they come back later and if the leprosy was spreading on the walls of the house it’d be destroyed. And I think that the fact that there are two cleansings here should remind us of this ritual of the cleansing of the house because Jesus says that in this ritual of the cleansing of the house of Leviticus, you know, he comes and he’ll drive out demons, it’ll bring sanctification and if you let seven more worse come back in by refusing to fill the void with commitment to him then he’s going to destroy you. And so this is serious stuff for us.

If we don’t attend to these messages, you see, just because we’re in the walls of this church, we have no safety here. Unless we’re in Jesus, there’s no safety from the laser beam of his judgment as he comes to earth today to do his will, to sort things out. He can create and he can destroy. He can’t just leave things be. You see, he is motivated to examine us today and to transform us or to judge us and throw us out, to tear down the house, and he is motivated to evaluate churches individually as well.

We see that in Revelation 2 and 3. He comes to this house today. He evaluates us. He tells us some things that need to be changed. He tells us some things that are going on good. And he says, “The only way you can change anything is by partaking of me. I have all that you need to be transformed. You can’t do it of your own works.” So Jesus comes to us today and we can either, you know, in response to the preaching of the word heard in Jesus’s presence in the midst of us every Lord’s day mature and be transformed and be recreated or we can be judged and set aside.

Those are the only options.

So I keep saying that there are two cleansings and I need just to point out one reason for that. Some of you may be doubtful of that. Some commentators think these are just different versions of the same cleansing. But it seems to me for several reasons we should look at this as a different cleansing.

The synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke record the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Passion Week. So at the end of his ministry, the last year of his ministry, he goes to Passover. He cleanses the temple then. And that certainly occurs and they’re very clear about that—it’s in the sequence of events in terms of Passion Week. But John’s gospel places it at the beginning of his ministry, doesn’t it? We’re now at the very beginning. He just gathered his first few disciples. He does the very first miracle in Cana of Galilee. He goes to Passover. And John’s gospel makes this quite clear because in chapter 6, then again later in other chapters he’s going to go to another Passover.

There’s a sequence of three Passovers in the Gospel of John. So we’ve got three years being pictured. And while John has liberty—God has liberty to arrange events theologically instead of chronologically, to change the timing of events—he wouldn’t do it in such a way as to make us think that it’s a chronological account. And everything in this account so far indicates a chronological series of events.

If it had just been “once upon a time this” and “once upon a time that” and then “you know, this also happened once,” that would be something, but it doesn’t portray it that way. It portrays it as a chronological series of events.

Secondly, there’s internal evidence in the text itself because the Jews in response to Jesus saying “tear this down and I’ll raise it up in three days” say well, “this temple has been 46 years in the building.” We don’t know why that’s a particular detail is here, but one reason the detail is there is to convince us that this is a separate cleansing because we know the date of when Herod’s temple began to be built—it was 19 or 20 BC. And if we add those 46 years, we’re at 27 or 28 AD, at least 2 or 3 years, at least 2 years, probably three before the final Passion week of our Savior.

We know when that date was. So we have internal evidence that knocks down any argument that this is the same cleansing. Now it’s separate. And one of the reasons I want to make that point is because of this movement in Leviticus and this inspection procedure.

But there’s another reason for it too that I want to talk about when we get to the commercial aspects of this account. So in any event, we have two separate cleansings. This is the first one at the beginning of his ministry. There’ll be another one two Passovers down. So how many times did Jesus cleanse the temple? Twice. Two times. Two separate times.

And before we get to the actual outline, I also want to say that what I’m going to do with this text is I want to look at our Savior’s passion, his zeal here as the central motivating factor for the events that occur and as what we should be confronted with. We have a passionate Savior. We do not have some kind of gnostic passionless ethereal cerebral intellectual Savior who’s not passionate at the same time.

He’s certainly intellectual. He’s certainly cerebral, but he is certainly passionate in his life.

What do we see here in this opening account? The capstone gospel. I believe the four gospels were produced in this order. This is the capstone gospel that portrays Jesus as the Son of God. This capstone gospel begins with events that show passion—a passion for living, bringing wine to a wedding feast, enhancing joy, you know, so he’s got a passion for living that he produces passion for living in the context of his disciples. He wants us to rejoice. That’s what the Lord’s Table is all about—joy in what he has accomplished.

And here we see the other side of his passion. Here we see his passionate anger. It is a righteous anger and indignation he has against what’s going on in the temple. He loves his Father so much that he cannot wink at sin and particularly sin that is highly offensive in the face of God, whose special presence was told to be in the context of the temple environments.

He’s passionate about his Father and you know, on this particular day, Father’s Day has given us Father’s Day. I hope that by the end of this we have a passion for our Father in heaven. And I hope we also have an increased passion to please and walk in good relationship with our earthly fathers as well.

There’s a passion here that is good. It’s not bad. This word zeal frequently has a negative connotation, but not always. In 2 Corinthians 11:2, Paul says, “I am jealous over you with a godly jealousy.” Same word—with a godly passion. This is what I have for the church of Jesus Christ. So he has a godly passion. And we’re to have a godly passion for our Father in heaven and his institutions.

Another word for zeal then is passion. Zeal. My 8-year-old daughter asked me this morning, “What’s passion? What does zeal mean?” Well, it means being ardent, being passionate about something, getting worked up, desiring something strongly is to be passionate. Another phrase that might explain it to us is strong feelings and we shouldn’t be afraid of feelings and emotion.

We never want emotions to be the determining factor. We don’t want to feel everything instead of believing things. I feel this, I feel that. We want to believe things. But that belief, if it doesn’t produce the kind of feelings, passion and zeal pictured by these first two narrative accounts of our Savior—a passion for right living and a passion against wrong living and against those that would abuse the Father in heaven—if we don’t have that, we don’t really believe. I don’t know what we’re believing in, but it’s not the Jesus of the Scriptures.

Jesus is passionate, and he is specifically here focused. At the center of Jesus’s passion is his zeal for his Father and for his Father’s house. He is a son who avenges the honor of his Father’s house.

I want to read a quote from Merrill C. Tenney. There’s an article called “The Person of the Father” written, I think, in the mid-70s because, once again, here what we have—as we’ll have throughout this Gospel of John—is this tremendous emphasis upon Jesus as executing the Father. And you remember we said in the prologue that twice there the indication is that Jesus is always moving toward the Father. He desires relationship with the Father. The Father is open and communicative to the Son, and that is a model for our relationships.

Tenney speaking on this significance of the person of the Father in Jesus’s work writes this: “The consciousness of God as his Father is marked strongly in Christ. At the cleansing of the temple, which John describes early in his narrative, Jesus expresses his motivation by saying, ‘Make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise.’ He regarded the commercialization of the temple courts as an insult to his Father. It wasn’t abstract ideas that he was involved with. The first principle is truth. We have a truth-giver and the first principle here is truth—that we have a relationship with the Father.

Yet the cleansing of the temple tells us nothing else. It surely tells us that to put trust or confidence in external institutions and bodies and people and things that are going on can be idolatry if at the core of all that is not a passion and a zeal to please the heavenly Father who gives us these good gifts.”

So Tenney goes on to write: “Not only was he scandalized by the impropriety of making a business venture out of worship, but also he felt that the priesthood had dishonored one who was dear to him. Well, that’s absolutely correct. The priests had dishonored his Father and his Father was absolutely dear to him. He had a zeal for the Father, has a zeal for the Father. God for him was not simply an object of religious worship nor a philosophical absolute like Plato’s Demiurge or Aristotle’s Prime Mover, but a beloved person whose name and interest he should defend at all costs.

See, that’s what I want us to be like. We want to be like Jesus. We want to defend our Father in heaven’s honor at all costs. He was constantly aware of the Father’s love and trust and of an intimate partnership with him. God was profoundly involved in Jesus’s experience and the nature of that involvement became the pattern for the relation of his disciples to him. He was confident that the Father always listened to his petitions and answered them.

In the uncertain fluctuations of his fortunes, the Father’s presence was his ultimate destination and abiding hope. From the beginning of his ministry to the end, Jesus’s fellowship with the Father was the main spring of his activity and the stabilizing factor in his life. May it be so with us.

Let’s look at nine observations on this text then, dealing with the zeal for the Father.

Number one, the zeal for the Father led Jesus to observe the Father’s times. Now verse 13: “What happens now? The Passover of the Jews was at hand and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.”

Side comment about the Jews. We’ve been talking in our Wednesday night study about the church as Israel. Now we see the Jews mentioned repeatedly throughout the Gospel of John in a negative light. Early on, when God develops a people, he calls them Hebrew. Jerusalem and the Hebrews specifically—Abraham is the first Hebrew and Hebrew probably comes from one of Abraham’s ancestors named Eber, also means to cross over. But in any event, during that time of the Abrahamic Covenant and later the primary name for the people of God is Hebrews. Then Jacob comes along and he gets a new name Israel, and during that period of Covenant manifestation they become known as Israelites, primarily or predominantly. And then after, in the time of David and the expansion of the kingdom, and then after the restoration, what we have now is that God calls the people Jews.

Jews is short for Judah, one of the tribes that was to praise God, and David was from the tribe of Judah. So this kingly aspect is in this name of Jews. All these names are good—Hebrews, Israelites, Jews. But a new name is on its way. You see, the new name is Christians, and Christians is going to replace these three names.

You know, when we’re talking about this Monday night, George Schuman mentioned that, you know, Abraham is not an Israelite. He’s not a Jew. He was a Hebrew because he lived before that designation is given—it was before Israel’s name is changed to Israel. So there’s a progression here. And when the Gospel tells us “this is the Jews’ Passover,” it, you know, it’s God’s Passover. But he wants us to think in terms of this transition that’s happening, this replacement, fulfillment model of everything we’ve seen in the Gospel of John.

This Jew thing is going to go away and be put aside and now we’re going to be Christians. So the church is Israel now. The church are the true Jews now who praise God the Father. The church are the true Hebrews now. Okay. So here we have the Jewish Passover. Well, Jesus attends Passover.

You know, it’s certainly true that to hold to external traditions without the core principle, core truth of having relationship with God is idolatry. But it’s just as idolatrous to think that you love God and then do not observe times that he tells you to observe. If you have a true zeal for the Father in heaven, which our Savior had, it will be marked by a sincere attempt and desire to do the things that he wants you to do when he says to do them.

And that centers around here in this text the Passover, the worship of God. We should have a passion for the worship of God and specifically for the times that the Father has designated through his elders in the church that the church meets. We should be prompt. We should get here ready. We should have respect for the Father’s times. Our Savior did.

You know, the festivals and feasts are very important in this book. We’ll see as we go through it. All the Passovers of his ministry life are mentioned. Feast of Dedication is there. The Feast of Tabernacles. You know, there’s all kinds of feasts that are mentioned in this book. It’s not as if these things are wrong. Jesus is showing us what they’re all about. What they’re all about. And so we want to have a light zeal for our Father in heaven, leading us to observe the Father’s times.

And this time is a Passover time. And as I said, that indicates to us that there are two groups that are going to be shaken out in the context of this controversy—those are going to be judged and found wanting, not applying the blood of the Lamb, so to speak, upon their lintels of their heart. And those who do and who remember what’s going on.

We have the Jews who argue with Jesus, who don’t say, “Yeah, you’re right. We shouldn’t have been doing this.” They say, “What was your authority to come at us?” We have argumentation that goes on or we have the contemplation of the disciples who hear what he says, think about it and are trained enough in the Scriptures to remember what it really means and then interpret the events of his resurrection later based upon his word—his word spoken to them and the Scriptures.

Contemplation and meditation, interpretation of the events in our life based upon the word of God as opposed to argumentation and not wanting that word to disrupt our lives. So we should have a zeal for the Father which leads us to a timely attendance at the worship services of the church by way of implication.

Now, I think that in relationship to our application of this to our zeal for our fathers here on earth, the same thing is true. We should have a love for our fathers that observes the times that they set properly in the context of their bounds. You know, it’s been said that we have fathers on earth and that title father is one borrowed from our Father in heaven, and it’s borrowed so that the children of our congregation look to their parents and think about their Father in heaven when they look at their own father.

And to say that they’re going to observe the Father if you come to church on time but you’re late every time Dad tells you to be someplace at a particular time and means it—if you’re late to each of those occasions then you’re involved in hypocrisy, you see? And God says, “Have a zeal for your father on earth that really demonstrates to him, to your brothers and sisters and to the congregation, to the rest of the world, whether you truly love your Father in heaven who has given you your father on earth. Have a respect to the father’s time, the father’s activities.”

And fathers, of course, are to give direction to children in terms of times—not in an arbitrary fashion, but, you know, what goes on. And this father-son relationship between Jesus and the Father is not just the son loving the Father. It’s the Father having a tremendous love for the Son that continues to interact with him and move in the context of his life.

Okay.

Number two, zeal for the Father led Jesus to frequent and respect the Father’s appointed house. So now we have the place of worship as well. Jesus goes to the Father’s house which is the temple. And again, you want to come to church by way of application in a timely fashion. You want to come with a sense of commitment to the worship of God that is portrayed in how you dress when you come here. How you engage yourself in the singing of the songs. How you conduct yourself in preparation for hearing the word of God.

You know, if you know the text is going to be preached on, good thing to read it before you come. Good thing to get a good night’s sleep. Good thing to dress respectfully. If we’re coming to the place where Jesus calls us to on the Lord’s day, on Jesus’s day, to meet with him the way that they met with the Father in the context of the temple—now we’re decentralized. But we still believe that God calls to heaven and comes to earth in a special sense in convocative worship.

That how we approach these services should reflect that. You know, I want to have a congregation here that comes to church deeply desirous of worshiping God and not offending our heavenly Father in any way or manner.

David in Psalm 69:9, which is the Psalm that Jesus’s disciples remember when he gets angry—they say well, “we remember what the Scriptures said of him: zeal for his Father’s house will consume him”—well, that’s a quotation from Psalm 69:9. And in Psalm 69:9 it’s read that “the zeal of thy house has eaten me up and the reproaches of them who reproach thee have fallen on me.”

And as one commentator wrote, “the amount of the meaning of both of the clauses is that David’s anxiety about maintaining the worship of God was so intense that he cheerfully laid down his head to receive all the reproaches which wicked men threw against God and that he burned with such zeal that this single feeling swallowed up every other.”

David is the picture in the Old Testament in Psalm 69 of which Christ is the fulfillment. When it says that zeal for the Father’s house has eaten him up or consumed him or destroyed him, you know, we can read that and think, you know, it’s like a pastor who gets so busy that everything else in his life goes to pot. That is not the meaning of this text. The meaning of this text is that Jesus’s zeal for his Father’s house will lead him to take actions in terms of that house that bring about his undoing, his destruction, his death.

What we’re set up with here in the cleansing of the temple is the beginning salvo of our Savior. And this event is what will be brought back to him at the end of his life as the accusation by which he is sent to the cross. They’ll get people to say well, “he said this about the temple, he’s going to tear it down and then he’s going to raise up one without hands.” This is that event, you see.

So when we read that “the zeal for the Father’s house has consumed him,” it means you are so—by way of application—we are so committed to the purity of our worship, to forming it correctly, to preparing ourselves to meet with the Almighty God himself who descends to earth to meet with us, to shoot his high electron beam of his word into your hearts and either transform you or destroy you—that we are so intent on doing those things correctly that we’re willing to suffer the swings and arrows of abuse of people that don’t get it or that don’t like it.

It means we want to come respectfully and honorably in our clothing, even if God forbid people make fun of us in our clothing. It means we want to go to bed early on Saturday to get a good night’s sleep if we can to hear the preaching of the word, even if, you know, other teens may say well, you know, “it’s pretty stupid what’s the big deal” and sleep in. The sermon we want to, you know, have a desire to come to God and worship him with our songs and expose ourselves to the ridicule or embarrassment of other people saying “gee, you were kind of off key.” You know, we want to sing loud. We want to participate in the worship of God. We want to be respectful in how we approach it. We want to be attentive to the word.

We want to have this kind of passion and motivation for the Father in heaven that portrays itself in the context of what we do when we come to meet with him in Lord’s day worship.

So Jesus has a passion for the Father that manifests itself in terms of timing and in terms of places—Father’s places. You know, there was a time, maybe still is in some of our families here, when the father’s room—maybe he had a study in the house. Maybe the parents’ bedroom was sacred. This was a place where you just wouldn’t casually go into to look for what’s in there or you wouldn’t go in there and play ball in there or game or whatever it is, unless your parents invited you into their room or the Dad invited you into the study.

Now, the counterbalance of this is dads should be inviting their children into the study and wanting to spend time with them. But again, if we have a sense of that—if we have respect, if we have respect for God’s place and time here—and yet it doesn’t flow out in terms of our respect for father’s place of work and his environment in the context of our homes, well, then we’ve kind of missed the point.

I think God has given you a father in your home to train you in reverence for your Father in church. And probably a lot of us as fathers have blown it here big time. You know, we kind of been growing up in the 60s and 70s—everything’s loose, goosey, all the barriers are down, egalitarianism reigns—and we have not, we have failed to properly train our children for Lord’s day worship but not giving them a sense of a sacred environment in the context of Dad’s special place at home, whether it’s the bedroom, the office at work or the office at home, whatever it is. You see what I’m saying? We have failed to properly give our children a sense of reverence for their Father in heaven by not demanding a sense of reverence—not for you as a person, not for me as a person, but for our office that God has called us to manifest fatherhood in the context of the home.

So you know, we live in a tough situation here. Most of us were not raised in the context of the Reformed faith. Many of us did many things in our youth that we were ashamed of and were very unprofitable. God says that he visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children of the third and fourth generation of them that hate him, that he shows mercy to thousands that love him.

Well, what are you? You’re probably someone that came out of hatred and have come into love. And a lot of us, our parents, weren’t particularly enamored of God. So how long does it take to drive out those sinful patterns? Well, I think maybe we can infer from the text in Exodus, three or four generations, 50, 60, 70 years.

So children, it’s not that we want to be hypocritical, but we’re working out sin in the context of the parents of this congregation and we want you to be better than us. We want to turn the tide on these issues. We want to return a sense of reverence for our Father in heaven and a great desire and zeal for the worship of that Father. And we don’t do it very well. And you’re not going to do it as well as you should either.

But I think that we can infer from the other part of that is that after three or four generations things are changed. They’re cleansed. We want you to do a lot better than we did. We want your arrow to fly further than ours did. And we want you to go straighter than we did.

So this is an area what we probably, you know, as a culture certainly, we ignore—this idea of reverence.

Number three, zeal for the Father led Jesus to reformational holiness. Reformational holiness. As I said at the beginning of the talk, what we have here is reformation, right? I mean, he’s going to change things. He’s going to reform the temple practices. And the reformation occurs in the context of a desire not for power or dominion, first and foremost, but a desire of holiness. A love for the Father leads to actions of holiness that are reformational in their working themselves out.

In Zechariah 14:21, we read, “Yay, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord of hosts. And all they that sacrifice shall come and take of them and seethe therein. And in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite. And that word is sort of the same word as merchant or traitor. So there’ll be no more the Canaanite and merchant. Some translations read there shall be no more the Canaanite or merchant in the house of the Lord of hosts.

Now this is a specific prophecy of what we’re reading about in John chapter 2. And what it tells us very explicitly—if we couldn’t figure it out from the text in front of us—is that this is an act of holiness. Jesus is purifying the temple worship. He is creating an increased sense of holiness. And so holiness is what drives our Savior here, based on his love for the Father.

Again in Malachi 3:1-3 we have this same emphasis given to us. Malachi 3, beginning verse one: “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the Covenant whom ye delight in. Behold, he shall come, sayeth the Lord of hosts, but who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap, and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. And he shall purify the sons of Levi and purge them as gold and silver that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.”

Jesus Christ comes to purify, to create holiness in the context of the worship environment. He appears in the context of the temple. He does his work here to bring about holiness because of his great love for the Father. He has a sense of a need to see that holiness reflected.

Now we need to talk a little bit here about what’s going on—that he cleanses, what the particular place where this exchange, this merchandising is going on is in the court of the Gentiles. There were in Herod’s temple four courts in the exterior of the temple grounds. And the largest of these was the Court of the Gentiles. That meant unless you were a Jew—if you were a Gentile, a God-fearer—you could only go into that court. You couldn’t go any closer. You couldn’t go into the Court of the Jews or the Court of the Women or the Court of the Levites of course. So you were like on the exterior fringe of temple worship, but it was a big area because there were a lot of Gentile God-fearers.

Well, in this Court of the Gentiles, Caiaphas got the bright idea a while before this: let’s move the marketplaces which before were probably at the Sheep Gate or somewhere exterior to the temple environs. Let’s move into the Court of the Gentiles a lot closer and we can have real direct control over the exchange of animals, etc.

So an offer would—you know, a Jew would bring his animal up and he’d have to have the animal inspected because it had to have no blemish. And the inspection fee was so much and nearly always the guy would say, “Ah, not clear, not pure enough. You’ll have to buy one of ours.” And one of his costs you maybe 50 times what yours cost, you see. So you pay the inspection fee. Even if you get in the door, you pay an inspection fee. And even if you do, nearly always your animal will be not worthy and you’d have to buy one of theirs.

And what are you going to say? “I think it’s clean.” He’s the Levite, not you. So they did that and that was necessary. The Levites did have to look for blemishes.

The other thing they had to do was that at these—at Passover, they were to bring a half a shekel, the so-called head tax, the poll tax. And they wanted to make sure that this was legitimate money. And so they, you know, people were coming from all over the world. They’d have different currencies. And so, just like when Howard L. and I went to Poland, you know, they’re right there in the airport. They’ve got these places set up. You give us dollars, we give you zlotty—in the case of Poland. So so you have money changing going on.

Now, both of these activities are okay. In Deuteronomy, it says if you can’t get there, you can go ahead and put your stuff into money and then redeem it in Jerusalem. So the activity itself was not unlawful. What Jesus was objecting to was that this activity was going on in the context of the specific temple environment.

You know, so it’s that’s what Jesus was objecting to. Now the interesting thing is that when he comes two years later and cleanses the temple here, he just says, “You’ve turned my Father’s house into a house of merchandise.” Caiaphas, you were wrong in this. The other party was right. You shouldn’t have brought this into the temple. It belongs outside of the temple. Get it out of here.

Two years later, Jesus comes and now he says, “This has become a den of robbers.” And we’ll look more about that in a couple of minutes. But there seems to be a progression from just simple merchandising in the courtyard to now merchandising in a very wicked way—rejecting pure sacrifices, charging exorbitant rates for inspection fees, charging exorbitant rates for currency exchanges, etc. So it seems to be this movement which is significant.

But that’s what’s going on. We’ve got merchandising going on in the context of the worship of the temple specifically. And Jesus objects to that. He desires holiness in the context of worship. His love for his Father leads him to a love for his Father’s house and keeping it pure and clean in the context of worship.

Now I want to make an application of this and I think this is legitimate. We want to respect our earthly father’s wishes in terms of personal holiness. Right? I mean our fathers are given to us to help us to understand what holiness is and our zeal for our earthly father should reflect itself and is a zeal and a desire to manifest the sort of holiness that they’re training us in and training us up in the context of that—that’s what courtship’s all about.

Week from Wednesday, it’s in the announcements. We’ll have a discussion of courtship versus dating. The announcement says, “Come and slug it out. Let’s have some good dialogue. Let’s kick it around the corner a few times and see what the Scriptures say.” And I don’t want to, you know, the terminology is nothing. The concept is everything.

The concept of the relationship of young men and women and what I think of as courtship is that the fathers are involved and specifically the father of the girl is very involved and the father has a commitment and a responsibility in the context of courtship to promote personal holiness.

Merchandising itself is not a bad thing, but it’s bad at the wrong time during worship and at the wrong place in the temple court. Sex is a great thing, but it’s wrong and unholy at the wrong time and in the wrong place. The only place relation that kind of relationship should go on is in the context of marriage. Not in the context of courtship. Not in the context of being engaged or betrothed. It’s still fornication, referred to in the New Testament, to have sexual relations in the context of betrothal. You can’t do it. It’s wrong. It’s sinful. It’s unholy.

And it’s not because sex is unholy—just like merchandising, it’s great in its proper place and important—but it is absolutely wrong in the context of any other relationship of young men and women in our church. And it’s the father’s responsibility to clearly articulate to every child he has—boys and girls—at the proper times, a high requirement of them for personal holiness in this particular matter.

Great temptations in the context of our culture. And God has made you with desires. He gives you desires because he wants you married, most of you. And only if God hasn’t given you desires does he probably not want you married. Most of you, he wants marriage. And to get you there, he gives you strong hormonal desires. That’s great. And Dad’s place is to lay down the line and say, “We will not have improper touching, kissing, whatever it is going on.

Now, the definition of what’s right and wrong in that, I can’t give you. I know what my standard is. I don’t want kissing even. I think there’s a reason at the end of the marriage service you may now kiss the bride. I don’t know. To me, you know, it seems a lot more intimate—mouth-to-mouth kissing—than holding hands or doing other things that young men and women might do. Kissing is intimate. And if, believe me, well, you all know this. All the parents know this and the children find out about it real quick that kissing produces quite an emotional response.

So I’m not laying down any laws. But what the law I am laying down is your father communicates to you a sense of what holiness is in the context of relationships. You address