Zeal for God's House

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you so much, Melissa.

And uh thank you all for being here.

It does me uh a great blessing to be here myself and an extra privilege to get to bring God's word this morning.

It is an exciting text, as Melissa just mentioned, where Jesus takes a whip in hand and cleanses the temple, or as they say down south, went and cleaned house.

This morning I want us to turn in our Bibles to John chapter 2.

John 2 · chapter mention

And as we're turning there, I want you to use your sanctified imagination.

Instead of just thinking about what's written there in the text, put it into our vernacular.

Just imagine here this morning that we're sitting here, and let's say halfway through this message, the door bursts open over here, and Jesus comes walking in.

And he's intense.

He looks really angry.

His face is red, his nostrils are flared, his fists are clenched, and he's got these wild eyes.

Then he runs over here to uh the bass guitar and he yanks out the cable and he starts swinging it over his head and he starts screaming, get out of my father's house! And in case that wasn't motivation enough, he starts overturning these tables of communion.

I mean, we would probably clear the room before the security team could call crime stoppers.

And if you think about how crazy that may seem, it sounds more like a scene from the Hulk, right, than Jesus, gentle and lowly.

We do get a glimpse in this text of a side of Jesus Christ that makes us realize that he's not safe.

That Jesus Christ is not someone we can put inside a small box and we can keep him tame.

He's not safe, but as C.S.

Lewis so famously said, he's not safe, but he is good.

This story is not quite as far-fetched as we may think because that's exactly what Jesus did in John chapter 2.

John 2 · chapter mention

What possibly could have stoked Jesus to such a temperature that he would be moved to break decorum in such a profound way?

During Passover week, the sacred feast of the Jews, where he would go onto the temple grounds, into the temple courtyard, and literally run people out of the temple with a whip.

What could possibly have forced Jesus to do such a thing?

Let's read again the text, just to familiarize ourselves with it just a little bit more in verses 13 through 16, because I don't want you to miss a single word of this passage.

Verse 13.

This was an annual feast, a weeklong feast, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

That's where the feast was held.

In the temple, he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons for a sacrifice, right?

And the money changers sitting there.

And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and oxen, and he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.

And he told those who sold the pigeons, take these things away, do not make my father's house a house of trade.

What a dramatic scene.

Every Jewish man was required, according to Deuteronomy chapter 16 and verse 16, to annually uh attend the feast of Passover.

Deuteronomy 16 · chapter mention

And so the city of Jerusalem would have been filled with hundreds of thousands of people, some would estimate upwards of a million, mostly men, because they're required of Jewish law to be there.

But according to one Jewish historian named Josephus, there were also an average of 250,000 animals sacrificed that week in the temple.

So hundreds of thousands of men and plus women who lived there and children, and at least 250,000 animals in Jerusalem.

You can only imagine what that temple courtyard must have sounded like.

Can you imagine the cacophony of bleating lambs and lowing oxen and cooing pigeons and crowds of people and vendors and priests and worshippers praying and shouting and talking and bartering?

But I'll tell you what it sounded like to the priests and temple authorities.

It sounded like this cha-ching, cha-ching.

Makes you think of Disney World around this time of year.

The boys just went to Disney World, right?

Where parents are on a pilgrimage, the annual pilgrimage, you know, to Orlando, where they're then held captive within the confines of Disney World and they're forced to buy$15 hot dogs and$7 non-refund refillable lemonades.

Similarly, the religious leaders were running a rigged system, a closed system of profit and profiteering, profiting off of their religion and its devout adherents.

And there were two ways that the text insinuates they were doing this.

First was with the use of money changers.

So very conveniently, sometime before this point in time, the Jewish leaders had set this rule up that you had to use a Tyrian shekel, a specific type of coinage and currency, to give money to the temple, which a lot of these people that were coming from out of town were doing.

They were giving their tithes and offerings to the temple.

But they had to use the official currency of the temple, the Tyrian shekel, and thus they had to exchange their currency from other regions.

And of course, they had to exchange that at a high fee that would then go in the coffers of the temple.

So this was one way they were charging people, making money off of people with a man-made rule.

The second way was they were selling animals for sacrifice.

It wasn't enough for you to come in from out of town and bring your own animal.

You couldn't buy an animal from some other part of the city.

You had to buy it from them.

Sounds like quite the prophet's scheme, right?

And of course they were selling these likely at a high rate as well.

Which Jesus says when this similar story is told in the other three Gospels, Jesus says, Don't make my father's house a house or a den of thieves.

So they weren't just running a system of sacrifice, they were profiting off of it in an unjust way.

They were turning God's house into a house of trade at best or thievery at worst.

And so the main idea of this passage is this that Jesus cleansed the temple of those who desecrated it.

That's the obvious meaning.

That's the obvious story here.

Jesus comes in and he cleans the house of those who were desecrating his father's house.

While this story seems simple enough from the outside, we're concerned this morning with more than taking this story, wrenching it out of context, the immediate context or the context of John's gospel or the entire biblical context, and then taking that story and then me preaching a sermon on how this relates to you and me.

There's a couple ways we could do this, and we could really do an injustice to the text.

I thought of, I think, four different ways that we could take this text and use it in ways that was not intended.

If we ignored the authorial intent.

That is, what does the author intend to communicate with this text?

Here's Sacred Mission.

We love to come to God's word and we love to say, God, you teach us from your word.

We're not interested in taking some interesting Bible passage, especially one as colorful as this, and then hijacking it and doing something with it John never intended.

I'm so thankful for the members of this church who come and they open their Bibles and they open their hearts to hear what God would have to say to us, not what I would have to say, by taking God's words and co-opting them for my own ends.

Here's four ways we could co-opt this.

We could say what the Jesus Seminar loves to say of a story like this, where they take this story and they use it as evidence that Jesus was a religious zealot.

They'll quote this text and they'll show, yeah, this is why Jesus got killed.

He didn't come on some divine mission.

He came and he angered the wrong people.

He poked the wrong bear, and by the end of the Gospel of John, we see that it gets Jesus killed.

The Jesus Seminar, if you're blissfully unaware of who they are, a very noisy group of liberal theologians that deny that Jesus was the Son of God.

They love a story like this because it fits into their narrative.

Or remember something even more popular you've probably heard before.

If you go to your local Christian bookstore and you take books on Christian manhood off the shelf, you're always going to find this story in there.

And you're always going to see it being advocated as, hey, Jesus was a tough guy from Nazareth.

Jesus was not a bearded woman.

Look how tough Jesus was.

This is how Christian men should be.

And they'll use this story completely absent of what the reason John used it to show you how you too can be a tough guy from wherever you're from.

Or perhaps we could take this as a good story of how we can we can grow in self-assertiveness.

Maybe I could preach the message, preach a message entitled It So Loud They Can't Ignore You.

Jesus went in that day and he refused to be ignored.

You shouldn't be ignored either.

If you're in your relationships and you feel unsafe, you need to make your voice heard.

If it even means you need to get violent, you need to do it, girlfriend.

I could preach that message.

Maybe not really.

It'd be hard to pull that one off.

Maybe another way that's even more relevant today that people are using it in this way.

We could preach this message and understand it is as a narrative of a critique of social injustice and power inequalities where Jesus stands up for the poor people and he exposes how the rich are exploiting the poor.

That was one article I read this very week, argued.

But the problem with all these approaches is they ignored the context.

They ignore the context of the Gospel of John, they ignore what this passage means in this larger storyline of Scripture.

We're not going to do that.

There's a couple ways we can figure out why John include this story in the Bible.

And that's in his gospel.

And that's a really relevant question because John already tells us in the last part of his book, in John chapter 20, there's so many stories that are worth telling about Jesus.

John 20 · chapter mention

So many things he did, so many things he said, that if all of them were written, the world couldn't contain the volumes written.

But then he says, But these things I have written so that you may believe.

I think I actually had this in the slides.

Let's look at that real quick.

John chapter 20, verse 31.

John 20:31

Now Jesus did many other things in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.

Why is that important?

Here's why it's important.

That means that the things that are written here are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John gives us the agenda for everything he has in his book.

So, number one, we know that this story is included because of what he says in chapter 20.

It's included so that we would come to trust in Christ as Messiah.

But there's even better reasons for that.

In the text itself, there are two verses, two clues that tell us exactly why he's including this really colorful story about Jesus.

And it may not be what we think.

Verse 17.

After John tells the narrative of Jesus clearing the house, verse 17 says, His disciples remembered that it was written in the Old Testament, zeal for your house will consume me.

John wants us to know that those who observed Jesus' clean house, clean the temple out, that they were remembering a connection between the Old Testament prophecy about who Messiah would be and what he would be like, and Jesus' actions in the temple.

This is from Psalm chapter 69 and verse 9, where the psalmist said, For zeal for your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you have fallen on me.

Psalms 69 · chapter mention

There you have paired with this zeal for God's house is this sin-bearing, sacrificial servant of God who bears the reproaches of God, who's willing to stand between sinners and God and absorb the sinner's wrath and absorb the wrath of God against sinners.

A powerful messianic text in Psalm 69, 9 is paired with this idea that Messiah would have a zeal that would consume him, a zeal for God's house.

So just from verse 17, we can conclude that John wants us to know that Jesus' rampage through the temple court was motivated by fervent devotion to the honor of his father.

Look also in verse 22.

In verse 22, John kind of concludes this text of ours by saying his disciples believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Don't mix those two.

They believe the scripture and what Jesus has spoken.

John is very intentionally holding these two things up.

Scripture means that which is written.

The Old Testament scriptures, right?

That which had been written hundreds of years before, and what Jesus now said.

So the scriptures and what Jesus did in verse 17, the scriptures and what Jesus said in verse 22, he's wanting us to connect the dots.

Jesus is now fulfilling another aspect of who Jesus would be as Messiah.

Isn't it powerful to think that this long-awaited figure of Messiah, the promised one, the anointed one that we've we long for, the one we need to come and save us from our sins, that this figure would not come on the scenes as a sterile individual.

Somber like you see in most paintings of Jesus.

You could scare him and he wouldn't scare because he's just so placid.

No, Jesus could get fired up.

But the way he got fired up was very different than how we usually get fired up.

Jesus never got fired up because people mistreated him.

We see him on the cross later, and they're spitting on him, and they're yelling at him, and they're using this occasion of him on the cross bearing our sins as an occasion to say, see, this man has dishonored God.

Now he's getting what he deserves.

If you really are the son of God, come off the cross.

And what does he say in return?

Father, forgive them.

They don't know what they're doing.

But the same one who couldn't get riled up when people were casting stuff in his teeth would get riled up when they would dishonor his father or when they would dishonor his bride, the church.

Jesus would get angry at the right things, which is so wonderful to know that Messiah would come, and he wasn't like a father or an older brother that couldn't ever get angry, would never move to your defense.

Jesus is someone who is consumed with a desire for the honor of God and the good of his bride.

He's worthy of praise, and Jesus fit the bill.

That's who Messiah was in prophecy, and that's who Jesus was in actuality.

Now that's an interesting story.

It served its purpose, and we can close our Bibles and go home, right?

But the fact is, if we zoom the cameras back, there's even more to this story than that.

That's the immediate meaning.

That's why John wrote it.

But if we zoom back and we see this same story in light of the larger storyline of scripture, it gets even more interesting, even more relevant to our lives, as we'll see very soon.

To see the larger picture of where this story fits in, we're gonna have to turn our Bibles to Malachi chapter 3.

Malachi 3 · chapter mention

Malachi chapter 3, so Malachi is the very last book of the Old Testament.

Malachi 3 · chapter mention

It was the very last prophecy, the last official word from God given to his people before Jesus would come again.

So this is pretty important.

This is the last thing Jesus, or rather the last thing God said to his people before he spoke in a final way through his own son.

We find in Malachi chapter 3, verses 1 through 4, this.

Malachi 3:1–4

And I'm gonna comment so we don't have to spend a lot of time going back and forth to the text.

I'm gonna kind of comment on the text as we read through it.

So just bear with me.

Malachi chapter 3, verse 1.

Malachi 3:1

Behold, I send my messenger.

This is God speaking, and he will prepare the way before me.

Pause right there.

Does that jog your memory at all?

That God would send a messenger who would prepare the way before himself.

John the Baptist, right?

We heard about this in this series in John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

John the Baptist was the forerunner of Messiah of Jesus.

In Isaiah chapter 40, the same thing is said.

Isaiah 40 · chapter mention

So let's keep going.

He's talking about John the Baptist there.

And verse 1 says, The Lord whom ye seek.

The Lord, this is Christ, the Messiah, whom you are longing for and seeking.

He will suddenly come to his temple.

That's huge.

He will come to his temple.

And the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight.

This is the Messiah as well.

Behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.

Not only is he the Lord whom you seek, he's a messenger of a covenant.

Do you remember what Jesus said at the end of his life when he was observing Passover with his apostles and he took the bread and the wine?

He says, Drink this wine.

This wine is the blood of the new covenant that I am sealing for you.

Jesus Christ came as Messiah to create a new covenant.

Here Malachi chapter 3 is talking about that very thing.

Malachi 3 · chapter mention

Behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.

But don't think that it's going to be all roses and cherries, right?

Behold, he is coming, but who can endure the day of his coming?

That is, who is going to survive the day of his coming?

Who can stand when he appears?

For he is like a refiner's fire and like a fuller's soap.

He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver.

He will purify the sons of Levi, the priests, think temple.

He will refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings and righteousness to the Lord.

Pause right there.

He's saying, Messiah is coming, but don't think that it's all going to be happy and all salvation.

He's going to come with violence.

He uses two types of imagery here to show the violence with which Messiah is going to come.

Because remember, Messiah is not just someone who loves his people and is going to bring salvation as the Lamb of God slain in their place.

He's going to come as God Himself, meeting out judgment on people who do not obey him and follow him.

There's the two sides of God, his justice and his mercy.

The imagery he uses here is, I just have to use the word violent.

He used the imagery of a refiner.

Do you know what a refiner does?

A refiner of silver?

He takes silver ore, mixed with a bunch of other impurities from the ground, and he puts it inside this cauldron and he heats it up to thousands of degrees until it all melts down.

It's a good thing that silver doesn't have feelings, right?

Can you imagine how close can you get to that refiner's fire without you yourself being melted?

And then the refiner and then the silversmith would cleanse off the dross off the top, and then he would repeat the process over and over again until he could see the reflection of his face in that molten silver.

And then you would have the other imagery of a fuller.

I didn't know what a fuller was, except maybe reading in context and looking it up on Google.

A fuller was an old profession, kind of like you would take your clothes to a laundromat today, except it was a little bit less uh less docile than a laundromat here, where there's some dude who's like, yeah, take your clothes over there to spot four, throw some coins in, and that's the fuller.

The fuller in this day was someone who you would take really soiled garments to, or you would take clothes that need whitened, and they would put them in a large vat, and they would pour some alkaline substance on it, very, very caustic to the skin, and they would put that in this, mix it with water, and they would stomp on the clothing, and they would beat it with rods, tread out the grime, mix it up, and then rinse it and repeat.

This is the imagery he uses.

That Christ is gonna come to his temple and he's gonna clean house.

He's gonna cause, he's gonna bring a molten, as it were, he's gonna bring the fire to his house, he's gonna bring the alkalinity to the house, and he's gonna beat and thresh out the grime.

This is the imagery he uses.

And so we have to ask the question: how does that relate to John chapter 2?

John 2 · chapter mention

John chapter 2 is but a momentary purging of the Jerusalem temple, which was but a foreshadowing of the future coming judgment that Christ himself will meet out upon all unrighteousness.

John 2 · chapter mention

It's just a foreshadowing.

And we see this actually in the other gospels too, where Jesus goes to the temple and he cleanses it, and then later he looks over Jerusalem, over this city that largely was rejecting him, that just hours from then would be calling out for his crucifixion.

And he would weep and he would say, Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you like a chicken gathers its little uh little chiclets, but you are rejected me.

From henceforth your house is left unto you desolate.

And then Jesus would speak a prophecy about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, that there would not be one stone of that precious temple in Jerusalem left upon another, which came to pass under the reign, uh under the general Titus who would come, and they would demolish the walls of Jerusalem, and they wouldn't leave a single stone left on another of the entire temple.

Here Jesus comes.

And him cleansing the temple was just a foreshadowing of what he's gonna do with all of creation one day.

And this is the bad news.

Because we ourselves, if we're honest, we can't just read if we're honest.

We can't read this story simply as a story about how those Jews then, those religious leaders then, were making Mockery of God's house.

We're contaminating God's temple.

We have to read this as our own story.

Because if we realize that it itself is in the context of a large larger story, and we realize that we ourselves have become desecrators of God's temple.

This is our story.

We have desecrated God's temple for selfish gain.

We have desecrated God's temple for selfish gain.

Now maybe you're sitting there thinking, that seems like a little bit of a stretch there, Tim.

I've never been to Jerusalem, never been to the Holy Land, maybe be kind of neat, but to say that I have somehow desecrated God's temple, and I live like 2,000 years after the fact, how are you really going to make this point?

We need to realize that again, we're taking a big step back here.

The Bible uses the terminology of temple often in relation to all of creation.

In Isaiah chapter 66, in verse 1, the writer says, Heaven is my throne.

Isaiah 66 · chapter mention

Well, God says this heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool.

He goes on to say, in relation to the temple, the heavens of heavens cannot contain me.

Where is the house then that you will build unto me, and where is the place of my rest?

In other words, you think you're going to build a temple for me to dwell in and box me in?

All of creation is my temple.

I dwell in the cosmos.

In fact, the cosmos can't even contain me.

Many other texts could be spoken of that, especially in the Psalms of David, that speak of creation in this cosmic language where God is dwelling there, reigning there, ruling there, his throne is there.

The praises of his people inhabit creation.

In other words, this temple language is the earth we live on and the universe we inhabit.

Others have said it this way: all of history is God's story.

History is his story, and all of creation is his stage.

And here's the catch.

The role that you and I have played in this story and on this stage, prior to coming to trust in Jesus, is to be among those who desecrate this cosmic temple of God.

We've rejected the purpose of our very existence, to know and love God above all, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

And you and I have actively instead twisted our lives into self-centered, self-gratifying, self-promoting, God forgetting, God neglecting, God dishonoring pursuits.

And then I don't even need to convince you that you've also failed to love your neighbor as yourself, as have I.

It is into God's sacred sanctuary of creation that He has created us and placed us for His glory and His pleasure, and we have come on the scene as fallen creatures and have shaken our fists in the face of God.

We have taken God's good gifts of money and sex and food and beauty and power and industry and religion, and we've distorted them in the grossest ways.

We've abused them.

We've worshipped them.

We've been ungrateful for them.

We've been slavishly addicted to them.

We've wielded them and influenced them for selfish gain.

We have loved them more than God.

We have loved them in the place of God.

Just like the money changers of old.

We have sought not the God of the temple.

We have sought to set ourselves up as gods in the temple of creation.

But this desecration of God's temple isn't just the work of irreligious.

It's so easy as Christians, isn't it, to think, preach it, brother.

You go out there, all those heathens out there, we're the good people of God in God's house this morning, praising Jesus.

You're not talking about me, you're talking about my neighbor who I couldn't get to come to church, right?

That's our temptation, right?

To think that the sermon is for the person that's not sitting next to you.

Man, I wish they could have been here.

No, this is our story.

And in fact, it's in the house of God, in the church, that we often see the greatest distortions of what God has designed for us.

This is not just the work of the irreligious.

And in fact, when we see the story of John chapter 2, it wasn't on some prairie that Jesus was cleansing the prairie, he was cleansing the temple where the most religious people, probably in the world, were at during one of the most religious festivals in all of history.

John 2 · chapter mention

Singer-songwriter Carolyn Cobb has noted, I think, in a very apt way, she asked a very probing question.

She says, We're quick to wag our fingers at the more egregious examples of false teachers who exploit the vulnerable by promising health and wealth, right?

Turning religion into a gain, a money system.

Send in your pledge, and then I'll send you a handkerchief I've sneezed on, and you'll get healed of whatever is ailing you.

We've all seen that, and it turns my stomach and it turns yours.

But she asked very probingly, but is there a more subtle, insidious, widespread culture of commercialism in today's church?

Have the mercenary ways that provoked Jesus' anger crept into our churches, into our hearts?

How might that happen, you may say?

I tell you, it's like swimming in the ocean.

Whenever I jump in the ocean and I feel the seaweed or whatever else, I'm very aware I'm in the ocean.

But the fish are in the ocean, it's often been argued you'd probably don't know they're in the ocean, right?

It's just it's the water they swim in or the air we breathe.

When a fish is out of water, it knows it's out of water, but it feels normal to us.

I really feel like so often we relate to God in a way that's so consumeristic and mercenary we don't even recognize it.

So often I myself catch myself relating to God like a cosmic vending machine.

I get up and I read my Bible and I pray and I ask God for blessing on my day.

And so often I do this hoping that God will do something in return.

Quid pro quo.

I mean, I certainly don't want my daughters to grow up and treat me that way, like a vending machine, where they grow up and they only come around when they need some money or need something, need something signed, need car insurance, whatever.

Otherwise, they don't really care about dad.

That would break my heart.

It would break yours, right?

If you're a parent.

But how often we treat God that way?

We're not really after him.

We just want to do enough for him that we obligate him to do stuff for us.

We do this for God often, do we not?

We praise him, we pray to him, we even give money to his cause, we go to church, but what we want is not him, but hoping what our righteous actions will entitle him to do for us.

We do these things in the name of God, but our eyes are not set on him.

They're set on what we really want.

We just want him, for the love of all things holy, just make my life a little easier.

If I pray, if I pray with my kids, if I read them a bedtime story, Lord, would you just be nice to me and make my life a little easier?

I just want physical health.

I was reading a book the other day that was talking about you need to beware whenever you say, I just this or that to God.

Often we say, Lord, I just need this or that, it's something that we're wanting to put in in front of God.

Lord, I just want physical health.

If you can just give me that, then I can live the Christian life like I should.

If you can just give me that, then I'll be the spouse I can be.

In other words, my disobedience, my bad attitude, my vicious words, my sins of omission and commission are completely justified until you just give me this or that.

I just need a job I enjoy.

I just want a spouse that will love me.

I just need a child, God.

Just that.

That's all I ask.

If you've given me a child, I just want another child.

That's all I ask.

If I've got two children, I just need that third child, God, that's all I ask.

And then your kids grow up, and God, I all I need is just keep my kids off of drugs.

Help them to turn away from the friends they've chosen.

Lord, that spouse you gave me so long ago, when that's all I needed, now I need you to change that spouse.

That's all I ask.

That job you gave me so long ago, when that's all I needed coming out of college, now I need you to save me from this job that's causing me so much stress.

In other words, the list is bottomless.

And it's ever-morphing according to our fickle felt needs.

When we're coming to the one, ironically, who's the only one who can satisfy our hearts, and who tells us time and time again, don't seek me so I can merely change your circumstances.

Seek me in your circumstances, and I'll be enough for you.

And if in my wisdom I change your circumstances, you can praise me.

And if in my wisdom I don't change your circumstances, you can praise me because I am enough.

Easier said than done.

But this is our gospel conviction that through Christ this is possible.

Our gospel conviction is that Christ was desecrated so that we would be cleansed.

We who have desecrated the temple of creation, Christ was desecrated so that we would be cleansed.

The second half of our text, verses 18 through 21, reads like this.

So the Jews said to him, What sign do you show us for doing these things?

Jesus answered them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

The Jews said, It's taken forty-six years to build Herod's temple, and will you raise it up again in three days?

John says, But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

Huge passage here.

The preceding verses were all about the story, and this is really in its interpretation and its theological significance.

The Jews, I mean, who just saw Jesus come on the scene, what could be more inappropriate than a Jewish man during the Feast of Tabernacle causing such a scene?

It looked to them like he was the desecrator.

How dare he enter into God's sacred temple and drive them out as if they were evil people?

And so they question him, John says.

On what basis do you do such a thing?

I mean, it looked like he was doing the work of a prophet.

And so they were smart enough to know if he was doing that with such authority, we need to see a sign, because maybe this guy is legit.

We need to see a sign from you to show us on what basis you would cause such a scene.

And Jesus says, I'll give you a sign.

Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

That sounded kind of absurd because Herod's temple there, which had been built after the second temple had been destroyed.

Herod's temple had taken 46 years.

Herod, sort of building a temple to keep the Jews happy, he built this pretty magnificent temple.

Took him 46 years to build it up, and Jesus says, Yeah, destroy the temple, and I'll build it up in three days.

And they're like, You're crazy.

But John says he was speaking about his own body.

In other words, Jesus' answer to this question about what is the base of your authority wasn't just to say, I'll give you a sign.

I already turned water into wine earlier in John chapter 2.

John 2 · chapter mention

Did you not talk to some of those eyewitnesses?

You see that leper over there?

You see that lame man sitting over there in the outskirts of the kirk?

Let me go over here.

I'll show you a sign.

No, he didn't give us any of those things.

He says, The sign I will give you is that when you kill me, I will come back to life in three days.

He would take the rest of his ministry, the very end of it, when he would raise from the dead after they killed him.

This is powerful because his answer to them isn't, I'm the son of God, and therefore I have authority over the temple.

I'm the son of God.

The temple there exists for me.

No, what he said was not, I have authority of the temple.

His answer is, I am the temple.

You destroy this body, I will raise it up in three days.

My incarnate body is the prototype of the meeting place of God with man.

The temple existed for one reason only, to for people to go to the temple and then to be in God's presence, to offer sacrifices through the priesthood under the blood, and to be appeased of God's holy wrath.

Christ says, My body is the meeting place of God with man.

I am the intermediary that comes between men.

I am the one in whom people enter and are reconciled to the Father.

I am the true sacrifice, I am the true offering, I am the high priest, I am everything this temple points to.

I am the guardian of God's honor.

This temple exists for me.

And if you want a sign of this, kill me as you will in the end.

And three days later, I will build myself again.

Do you not see in Jesus' answer here this morning hope for your own self?

That in Jesus' sign that he was the temple of God, you have Jesus already prophesying that he himself would be destroyed.

What for?

For your sins and for mine.

For the sins of those who have desecrated God's temple.

Jesus would then be destroyed in our place.

It would be Jesus who'd be profaned just like we've profaned creation.

It would be Jesus who'd be marred like we have marred God's, all that he has made.

It would be Jesus who would come to be destroyed block by block, brick by brick, because that was the judgment that awaits sinners.

That is what awaits those who will be refined like fire.

When he comes like a fooler with a baseball bat at the end of time and begins clubbing the grime out of creation and rinsing it and wringing it out until no impurities remain.

That happened to Jesus when his body was destroyed.

Later in John's Gospels, we're very familiar.

The temple of Christ's body would be desecrated.

Truly.

His visage, the face, was marred more than the visage of any man, the writer would say in prophecy.

He would be desecrated by Judas' kiss.

Desecrated by the slap of the temple guard when he responded to the high priest.

Desecrated by the spit and the fists of the 70-member council of the Sanhedrin court.

He would be desecrated by the purple robe of Roman mockery in Herod's court as they plaited it mockingly around his body.

He would be desecrated by the skin-filleting cat of nine tails in Pilate's Praetorium as they would fillet him from head to toe on both sides of his body, front and back.

He would be desecrated by the cross and the nails that were meant for criminals, not for a king.

He would be desecrated by my sins and your sins, just like we had desecrated God's honor.

But more importantly than all, he would be desecrated by the wrecking ball of God's holy justice as it came crashing into Christ's body and demolished him, just as he hung in the place of desecrators.

But our hope this morning, church, is that after three days, according to his prophecy, and according to Old Testament promises, the true temple of God, Jesus Christ, would emerge from a borrowed tomb, reconstructed, made without hands, a temple that'll never be destroyed again.

Our eternal meeting place with God, Jesus Christ, the true King and temple.

The one this morning we come through whom.

The one this morning we come in whose name.

We pray in his name, we worship in his name because he alone is where we meet with God.

He is the temple into whom we enter to be acceptable to God.

And Jesus is the one who through that blood and through that resurrection is now transforming even today desecrators into disciples.

That's my hope this morning of ceasing to be a desecrator, one degree of glory to another.

Hopefully next year I'll be a more sanctified man in twice as much as I was last year.

Not because I'm good, not because I'm strong, because I'm not.

I'm a desecrator.

But because Christ's blood is cleansing me and transforming me.

And so this is our gospel vision this morning, my brothers and sisters.

May the zeal, may zeal for God's house consume us.

That is the zeal of Jesus Christ.

May that be refashioned in our own image.

Would we become more like Jesus in his zeal for his house?

So that rather than desecrators who take what God has made, the beautiful things, the wonderful things, the gifts, and we turn them and twist them and misuse them, abuse them and worship them instead of God, more and more all along we take his gifts and we're grateful for them.

And we use them with moderation, and we use them for the good of others, and we use them to the praise and glory of the Giver.

And we prize God at all times above every gift he's ever given.

That's the vision.

That we would be consumed by zeal for God's honor in the house he has created.

Oh, that this place would be a place where God's honor is lifted up.

Where every time we open our mouths, we're not worrying about whether the person next to us is singing or not singing.

When we raise our hands, we're not thinking about it.

I wonder if someone's seeing me raise my hands and thinking I look like a fool.

I wonder if maybe someone thinks that I look more holy because I'm singing out loud.

When people stand in this pulpit and we're not worried about people's opinions, when the band stands up here and their eyes are just transfixed upon the crucified and risen Jesus, when you're there and you're not worried about whether your spouse hears a message, but you're just drinking in the word because it's what you need.

When we're responding to the word and our hearts are just broken and we're pouring ourselves upon God, that's what happens when God transforms his people bit by bit into zealous people who are consumed with a zeal for God's honor in his house.

One of our core visions here in values, this sacred mission, is affection for God and neighbor.

Affection for God and neighbor.

I read a book this past week that was called When the Church was a family.

And in it he talks about how individualistic our society is.

How we, how we're so, it's so foreign.

The world of Jesus was so foreign to us.

We're we're brothers and sisters, we're so tight-knit.

In our day and time, we sort of church hop, we look for the church that sort of fits our needs, and then maybe a year in or two, there's a little bit of conflict, a little bit of this or that.

Someone gets on our nerves and we bounce, we go to the next church, and he talks about, he cites a bunch of statistics.

It's a pandemic in America, Western Christianity, because we're so individualistic.

And he pleads with the readers that we ourselves would love the church.

What is another writer called Stop Dating the Church?

We would commit, that we would go through the thick and the thin, through the easy times and the hard times, when people are getting on our nerves, and when whenever we've been been the offender, and we would we would repent and we would forgive and we would embrace and we would love each other like Christ loves the church.

Affection for God and neighbor.

Oh, that this church over time would continually be growing and being stirred in a consuming zeal for God's house.

That our love for God's house in the abstract would become tangible on a weekly basis in the ways that we minister to each other, encourage each other, speak truth into each other's lives.

That that would happen right here in Mason, Ohio.

Sometimes I think we need to be reminded that zeal is good and that lukewarm is bad.

So that when we bow in our in our living rooms and in our kitchens, around our tables, and with our children at bedtime and with our neighbors when they tell us about something bad going on in their lives, we pray with them that our zeal would be evident to them, our zeal for God and for their spiritual good.

Zeal for speaking the name of Jesus to others, zeal for singing his praise, zeal for interceding for our brothers and sisters' good.

Zeal.

May the zeal for God's house that consumed Christ, my brothers and sisters, now consume us.