Morning. We’re going to do a little bit of uh work in God’s word this morning together from that passage that Christian just read and then uh we’re going to pray together and uh continue our worship of God. And uh his word is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword. So, let’s just see how it uh works its way into our lives this morning. So, we’re continuing in our study of the Gospel of John. And uh this uh this morning, the action moves south. Last week we encountered Jesus at a wedding in his home territory in the northern region of Galilee. And after the wedding we read that Jesus went to Capernium fishing village on the north side of the Sea of Galilee. He hung out there for a while with his family and his brothers and his disciples. As the Jewish Passover approached, Jesus joined the throngs of people from all over the world. Jewish people who would journey to Jerusalem for the annual Passover celebration. And if we think of Edmonton like that great capital city of uh of Jerusalem, then Jesus’ home territory of Nazareth or in Galilee would be the approximate equivalent distance to a community like Aabaska, north of Edmonton. Can anything good come from Aabaska? Anyone here from Aabaska? I hope not. That distance between Edmonton and Aabaska that almost entirely circumscribes the geographical boundaries of Jesus’ life on earth. Jesus was no world traveler. He never saw Athens. He never saw Rome. He never saw Alexandria. Any of the great cities where the emperors ruled and social and political and cultural action took place in the world. Bulk of Jesus’ time was spent in the rural north, a backwoods region of a backwoods country. But the interesting thing that makes the gospel of John unique from Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that John’s focus is on the time that Jesus spent in the south in the capital city of Jerusalem. That’s where most of the action in the Gospel of John took takes place. So if you like southern gospel, then John is really the it’s the book for you. Now, the Passover celebration we’re looking at this morning, it’s the first of three annual Passovers that John’s going to write about. And the passage we’re looking at, it stays with us. It’s very vivid. It’s very violent. And last week, we saw Jesus do a very polite, somewhat unobtrusive, semi-public, miraculous sign when he changed these six jars of water into high quality wine. This morning, Jesus does something not so polite. It’s entirely public display, making a whip and overturning tables and messing up merchandise and driving animals out of the temple area. So last week he was Lord of the wine. This week he’s Lord of the whip. But these two backtoback stories, they’re not so unrelated as they may seem. Because if we have any experience of God working in our lives, we know that sometimes he’ll come and he’ll fill our wine glass. He’ll bring extraordinary comfort and joy and abundance and goodness and peace. Other times, God’s going to come in and turn over tables in our lives and he’ll shake things up and he’ll move things around and he’ll rearrange the furniture in us as if he owns the place. We like the full wine glass. We’re not crazy about the whip. But to know and worship the real God, not some God that we just make up. We need to expect and accept both kinds of ministries that God brings into our lives. We’re going to qualify, we should probably qualify that whip part a little bit. Our passage says, “In the temple courts, he found men selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords and drove them from the temple area.” Now, commentators on this passage notice that there were no sticks or weapons ever allowed in the temple area of Jerusalem. So, most likely when it says that Jesus made a cord uh or a whip of cords, it would have been constructed of the material at hand and probably the rushes that were used for the bedding of the animals. So, don’t think rawhide whip that Jesus is cracking here. Think instead probably of something as innocuous as plant stems. In our passage, it doesn’t describe Jesus hammering away at people and uh cracking the bullhip and ripping clothes and raising welts on people’s backs, but he’s rather using a bunched up wound together length of grasses directing the animals out of the area. So, there’s nothing in our passage that says that anyone got hurt or anyone was physically threatened, which makes this actually even more miraculous when you think about it. Because why do a bunch of people in the temple area respond by obeying his call to get out? They move out alongside their animals. They pick up their bird cages of doves and they leave and they grab the money scattered on the ground and they don’t resist. Why do they allow one man, Jesus, to do this to their whole operation? That’s the very interesting question about this passage. They’re astonished, I think, as much by the fact that they let this happen to themselves as they are by the one who did it. So, their question to Jesus, actually, it says they demanded of him, what miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this? At the same time, maybe they’re asking themselves, why does this guy have so much authority over us? Why did we instinctively feel it? Why did we leave? Why did we obey? And Jesus replied to them saying in effect, “Because this is my house. This is my father’s house. And in my house, I can do as I please.” So, if someone ever comes to stay with you for the weekend and it’s Saturday morning and you’re trying to get an extra hour of sleep and uh and you hear noises and things being shuffled around uh somewhere in the house, you stumble blurry down the hallway and you find that your guest has rearranged all your furniture and moved your TV into another room and taken some pictures off the wall and put others up and thrown out some of your books and you say, “Hold on. What do you think you’re doing?” because a guest really doesn’t have any authority or right to do that. But the owner, of course, has the authority to do all of that. We we like the Lord of the wine. We like when God comes and he ministers to us and he comforts us and he brings abundance and and he does do those things for us. Probably far more often than we realize, God is out in front of our lives, out in front of our week arranging things so that we don’t stumble and fall. But we also need to learn the the Lord of the whip who casts things out and rearranges the furniture and straightens out the priorities in our lives. And when we bow before Jesus as both savior and lord of our life, we’re really we’re turning the house keys over to him. He doesn’t have to explain anything to us if he doesn’t choose to. That day in Jerusalem, Jesus acted first without explanation. He didn’t discuss it and talk it over with the people before he assumed authority. The explanation came later. And that’s what we really sign up for when we acknowledge Jesus as our Lord. He acts and we respond whether we receive an explanation from him or not. And there’s no explanation given to Adam and Eve as to why one particular fruit in the garden was not to be eaten. And if you read the book of Job, this poor Job, no explanation is given to him when so many things are being subtracted from his life, his wealth, his children, his health. Even when God shows up and converses with Job at the end of the book, there’s still no explanation given. God just confronts Job with his sovereignty and his otherness. And Job realizes that the God he worships is beyond anyone from whom you could ever demand an explanation. God’s under no obligation at all to explain anything to us as to how he’s working in our lives. He might be adding to our lives with the full wine glass or subtracting from our lives health and wealth and even family members. All we can do is just trust him and obey. Not turn away from him, but somehow run to him and crawl up into the lap of the one that we’ll will never fully understand, but we know who loves us in a deeper way than anyone else is ever going to love us. So that’s how these two stories in John 2 about the wedding and the temple are related. There’s authority in each one of them. And our task is to submit to God’s authority however it’s being expressed in our lives. But let’s get into the heart of the passage. Jesus does provide an explanation for what he does in the temple. Verse 16, we read, “As Jesus was clearing out the temple area, he said to the people with the doves, “Get these out of here. How dare you turn my father’s house into a market? And we’re given a little editorial side note in verse 17 says, “His disciples later remembered that it is written and there’s a quote from Psalm 69:9, zeal for your house will consume me.” So in other words, after the fact, after the smoke had cleared, it was all over. Sometime later, the disciples of Jesus were able to connect the dots between Jesus and his Old Testament forebear, King David, who wrote that psalm, a righteous sufferer, but just alive with passion for God and for God’s glory. When confronted by the demands of the crowd to account for what he’s done, Jesus says, “Destroy this temple and I’ll raise it again in three days.” And what an odd thing to say in response to them asking, “Why did you do all this?” He says, “Destroy this temple. I’ll raise it in three days.” How is that any kind of answer at all to the question the Jews were asking? Jesus’ answer really his focuses his discussion then on the meaning of the temple. What’s a temple? What do you think a temple is? I think it’s a place where heaven and earth are somehow meant to intersect. It’s a crossroads between people and the divine. It’s a place where that gap can be bridged. And all ancient people believed that there was some ultimate transcendent mystery, some transcendent power that lay beyond the borders of the world. And they understood that the gap needed to be bridged between themselves and the transcendent. A gap bridged by such things as priests and sacrifices and incantations and prayers. So all throughout the ancient world, in every culture, there were temples. There were places where the presence of the divine could be accessed. And that gap between people and the divine could be bridged. Because in our modern western world, many people don’t believe at all in the need for temples anymore. I mean, things like Masonic lodges or early 20th century buildings like this one or synagogues or shrines. They’re just old spooky places that are relics of the past. And to them, there’s no divine presence. There’s no gap that needs to be bridged. In the aftermath of the enlightenment 250 years ago, everything that the ancients considered divine mysteries, it’s assumed that uh they’re all just products of natural causes and that’ll be proved in the end. Everything can be seen through and explained. What might appear to be supernatural be shown to be completely natural in time. In 1867, about 40 years before our church was built, the British poet Matthew Arnold wrote a poem entitled Dover Beach as a kind of eulogy to times gone by, especially the times of religion and the times of faith. And he wrote, “The sea of faith was once too at the full, and rounder shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled, but now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night wind, down the vast edges dreer, and naked shingles of the world.” So he compares the world of faith to a receding tide, moving away, withdrawing from the shores of the earth. And I’m sure it felt very much like uh like that for the poet at the time. He wrote that eight years after uh Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species had been published and and that further opened up the possibility of a world that had no creator, a world without God. The sea of faith was withdrawing from the shores of the earth. Now, those lines from Dover Beach were referenced uh recently in a podcast by a journalist and author named Douglas Murray. And Murray, he’s an agnostic. He describes himself as a Christian atheist. And he was talking about how a number of his highly intelligent friends have converted to Christianity in recent years. So referring to the poem, he said the interesting thing about the sea of faith is that there’s no reason why it can’t come back in. The sea doesn’t only withdraw. You know, that’s the whole point of the tides. You can find that discussion in Justin Brierley’s book called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, where he makes the bold proposition that atheism is a waning spent force in the West. And that long withdrawing sea of faith, it’s beginning to reach its farthest limit, and we may yet see the tide of faith rushing back in even in our lifetime. Justin Brierly notices the oddly recent phenomenon of public intellectuals becoming far less reluctant to talk openly about their wrestling with or they’re even coming to faith in Christ. Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson and historian Tom Holland and Paul Kings North and many others. Brierly has sat with and interviewed many of them. Even a notoriously outspoken atheist like Richard Dawkins has recently described himself as a cultural Christian, acknowledging the great cultural currency that Christianity has deposited in the world. I’m not sure he would have said that 20 years ago. Last month, January 7th, uh on the most popular podcast in the world, the Joe Rogan Experience, this has an audience of over 33 million listeners. It brought in its first biblical scholar and Christian apologist as the guest. Wesley Huff is a pretty unassuming guy, a 33-year-old Canadian PhD student. His expertise is in the field of early Christian manuscripts, ancient languages, scribal transmission, hardly the stuff of popular podcasts. But Joe Rogan brands himself as a truth seeker and he gave this young, winsome, respectable, thoroughly Canadian, endlessly polite Christian scholar the opportunity to present the gospel in a forum that probably represents possibly the single widest broadcast of the gospel message in all of history on that one podcast. Wes Huff himself says it was all a bit overwhelming. In his personal testimony, part of his personal testimony is how at age 11, he was suddenly paralyzed from the waist down, but then he was miraculously healed four weeks later. He says that that was the craziest month of his life, but last month was his second craziest. He had he’s got he had a modest YouTube following of about 1,200 people and it surged to 450,000 people. Hundreds of people reached out to him afterward to say that since hearing him on Joe Rogan, they’ve picked up a Bible, they’ve started going to church, they’ve professed faith. And Wes Huff says that he has to offset the impostor syndrome that he feels by reminding himself that only God could orchestrate this unexpected connection. He says, “I felt more reliant on on the spirit’s leading than I have for a long time.” And toward the end of the pod podcast, Wes Huff asked Joe Rogan, what do you think of Jesus? And the reply, well, it certainly seems like there’s a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed. So the question is, what does that mean? Does it mean he was the son of God? doesn’t mean he was just some completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity and this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever. Later, Huff said of Rogan, he said, “He’s not a Christian. He doesn’t profess to be a Christian, but I could tell he was mulling things over much in the way as Jesus’ disciples in Mark chapter 8 when Jesus asked them, “Who do you say I am?” If the tide of faith has really reached its farthest point away from the western world and atheism doesn’t have nearly the currency it had even 20 years ago, if the tide is beginning to come back in, then people are going to be looking for a temple, not a physical one, but some kind of connection between themselves and whatever transcendent being is beyond themselves. You know, in our passage, it’s not specified that the people who were exchanging currency and selling animals were doing anything particularly corrupt or unethical. If you were coming to the Passover from far away from Spain or Italy or Egypt, you wouldn’t travel with the approved animal that you need to sacrifice. But you couldn’t observe the Passover without that sacrifice. So, you’d need to buy an animal locally when you arrived in Jerusalem. And similarly, every year Jewish men over 20 were required to pay a half shekele temple tax. Matthew 17, Jesus himself paid that tax. There was a requirement that it be paid in a standard coinage. And so people who had various currencies from all over the empire, they would need to exchange currency and the money changers would take a bit of a fee for the service. In our passage, it’s not wholesale corruption or greed that Jesus is confronting. But the fact that those transactions are happening in the temple at all, he says, “Get these out of here. How dare you turn my father’s house into a market. It’s a prophetic command to return the temple to its intended use. It’s to be a place of worship and prayer and instruction and sacrifice.” So commentators on this passage invariably make the point that the animals and the money changers, the only place they could have been within the temple precincts would have been in the court of the Gentiles, which is sort of the peripheral area, the peripheral ring of the temple precinct. This is where non-Jewish people, this is where seekers could seek some kind of connection with the one true God. They couldn’t go any further in. They weren’t allowed. These were people who were on the outside looking in. Pagans maybe, maybe they had some faith, maybe they had no faith, maybe their lives were a mess, but they were drawn to the temple. And they wondered, “Could there be a place for me here?” And the people selling animals and changing coins, they weren’t concerned about allowing Gentiles a quiet place to address God and a quiet place to pray. And they’re just Gentiles. They can put up with the noise of animals and the haggling over prices and the clinking of coins and the smell of manure. It’d be like us trying to worship here in our building with a bunch of lambs bleeding and coins clinking in the back of the sanctuary. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke recount Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. Jesus says, “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.” Quoting from the Old Testament, Isaiah 56:7, “And the clearing out of the temple grounds is a picture. It’s a picture of justice really of making a place for those in whose lives the tide of faith is starting to come back in.” Jesus describes his role as an intermediary between seekers and God. He answers the question the Jews put to him. They say, “What sh what sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” Jesus answers, “Destroy this temple and I’ll raise it again in three days.” And they replied, “They,” this is incredible for them to process. They said, “It’s taken 46 years to build this temple. You’re going to raise it in 3 days.” Then we have this explanatory side comment again. But the temple he had spoken of was his body. And after he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. So what Jesus spoke in kind of a veiled manner that day one day would be revealed fully that he is the temple. In Jesus’ time, the temple that King Herod had been renovating and adding on in Jerusalem for over four decades. And that that project would continue for another 35 years. This magnificent structure project would finally be completed in AD63 about 30 years after Jesus was crucified. But only 7 years after its completion in AD.70, historian Tom Holland describes how the Jewish people had rebelled against their Roman overlords and the Roman army came in and laid siege to the holdout city of Jerusalem. That siege lasted three months. Sometimes Jewish fighters would bravely venture out from Jerusalem to take on the mighty Romans and they’d be captured and they’d be crucified in all kinds of grotesque poses uh within sight of the people who were manning the walls. And early in the siege, a Roman battering ram was able to penetrate the outer wall of the city of Jerusalem. Inside were two more walls. The last one guarded the temple, the building, the one building in the world that the Jews regarded as God’s sanctuary. Holland writes, “To strangers who were approaching Jerusalem, the temple appeared like a mountain covered in snow, for all the stretches of it that were plated with gold were a dazzling white.” The second wall inside the city was eventually breached, leaved only the wall of the temple precinct itself. And the Roman general, the Titus, he sent an emissary up to the wall to talk some sense into these rebels and convinced them of the vastly superior strength of the Roman army at their door. But someone uh uh threw a brick at the emissary and and knocked them out and to General Titus to abuse a friend of Caesar was to abuse Caesar himself. And that was the last straw. He hadn’t wanted to damage this great cultural artifact of the Jerusalem temple. But he felt he had no choice other than to storm it. Walls of the temple were very thick, impervious to even the largest battering ram. So he ordered the gates of the temple to be torched and they were plated with gold and silver. But as that as the silver and gold melted, it allowed the wood underneath to catch fire and the outer court burst into flames and a blazing piece of wood was thrown into the small opening into the inner court and it too became an uncontrollable inferno. And the place the Jews considered the holiest place on earth is done for. It was finished for good. The temple complex was then stripped by the Romans of all of its treasures. The temple itself was sent crashing down into ruin. No temple in Jerusalem has arisen since. And there’s no need for one because on the day he cleansed the temple of its marketplace, Jesus declared himself to be the temple. He said, “Destroy this temple. I’ll raise it again in three days.” And only after his resurrection from the dead was it fully revealed that he is the intermediary. He is the bridge between heaven and earth. He’s the one who spans the gap between sinful people like us and our holy God. The founders of other religions, they only built temples. Jesus says he is the temple that makes all other temples obsolete. We have no access to the one true God, to the divine, apart from the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross for our sins. He’s our temple. He’s the one who’d be destroyed, raised in three days. the temple in Jerusalem. You couldn’t just go in to be in the presence of God. There had to be a punishment. There had to be a judgment. There had to be the sacrifice of a lamb. But once you did that, there was a way to joy and a way to at least have your conscience temporarily cleansed. Of course, you had to reenact that every year, year after year on the Passover, an ongoing preview of what would come to an uh to a complete end with Jesus. But now he calls all of us in just as he opened the way to the seekers in the court of the Gentiles. He calls us to come and seek him and find him and acknowledge him as our savior and our lord. When we put our faith and trust alone in Jesus for salvation when the tide of faith comes back in for all of us and we can go inside the temple without fear to the very place where God resides and God just receives us as his own. So for now there are some signs in the western world that more and more of our friends and our neighbors and our family members may be joining us in seeking the temple that is Jesus Christ. The tide of faith may be coming in once again. Western world it’s one once was highly Christianized. Maybe that’s that tide is is h is coming back in to to bring a new sense of Christ’s presence to our world. So may the great temple that is Jesus encourage us to just stand quietly in the place of prayer on behalf of all those who are seeking him. GK Chesterton noted Christianity has died many times and risen again for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. So I just some things that we can pray for people not just for ourselves but for other people. One would be to acknowledge God’s authority in your life as both Lord of the wine and Lord of the whip and say, “God, I I need both. I want to submit to both. Even if it’s really hard, uh I want to submit to both of those things.” And you maybe you want to pray that the tide of faith that you you know was there once in uh people you love and people you care for and friends and family members that that tide of faith will come back in in the hearts of those you care about. And finally, thank Jesus for being your temple, the place where heaven and earth intersect. So, this is just some private time between you and God for a few minutes. I’ll close us off in a couple minutes, but just take some time to pray some of those things and anything else that God’s spoken to you from his word.