Jesus Cleanses the Temple - John 2:12-25 (03.01.2026)

Good morning. Please remain standing for the reading of God's Word.

When I'm finished reading, I will say this is the Word of the Lord,

and you can respond by saying thanks be to God.

Our scripture passage for today comes from the book of John,

John 2:13–25

chapter 2, verse 13 through 25.

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

In the temple, He found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons 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.

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.

His disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for your house will consume me.

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 then said, It has taken forty-six years to build this temple,

and you will raise it up in three days?

But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he

had said this, and they believed in the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover's feast, Many believed in his name

when they saw the signs that he was doing.

But Jesus, on his part, did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all

people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what

was in man. This is the word of the Lord.

Good morning. Go ahead and be turning in your Bibles to John chapter 2 if you're

John 2 · chapter mention

not opened up to there yet. And if you don't have a Bible today,

that's okay. We're going to have our passage on the screen.

So this is an incredible story. There's more happening here.

Just like last week, there's more happening here than we might first recognize

when we initially read it.

It's a jarring story, right? Last week,

we were reading about Christ's overflowing joy and grace as he saves a wedding

from disaster and he turns the waters of purification,

the old covenant waters of purification into the new covenant wine of joy.

And in that story, he's working quietly behind the scenes and he is answering prayer.

And now in this next, the very next story, Jesus is kicking tables over and

he's creating a scene and causing people embarrassment.

And it's like, what, which one is Jesus? What's going on here?

What is it that John is doing by putting these two stories together?

And he's being very, very intentional.

Is John trying to say that Jesus is inconsistent or double-minded?

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. The same Jesus who is spilling over with joy

and grace at the wedding in Cana is spilling over with indignation in the temple in Jerusalem. him.

John wants us to see the whole Christ.

We talked a lot last week about seeing Jesus rightly, seeing him for who he

is, and seeing him as the kind of man that would be invited to weddings,

the kind of person that would be invited to eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners.

People wanted to be around him. He was anointed with the oil of gladness beyond

all of his companions. Jesus was the happiest person who ever walked the planet.

And we unpacked that last week.

But he is a more complex person than that.

And so this week, I mean, immediately after reading that, we have this other picture.

But I want us to see that this is the same person.

That both of these things, the motivation behind both of these things is the same.

It's coming out of the same source. If you've been a Christian for very long,

you know that sometimes Jesus is quietly working behind the scenes to work a

miracle in your life because you've prayed.

And other times he's turning tables over. He's causing chaos.

But both are for our good.

Both are for our good. Whether he is turning things upside down.

Or whether he's just answering a prayer and working a miracle and doing the

very thing that we want him to do.

It's coming from the same fountain because Jesus is not inconsistent or double-minded.

And I want to show you that today.

Pray for me. One more. Pray with me and pray for me. I need all the prayers I can get.

Let's pray. Lord, would you help me? Would you help me?

And Lord, would you help us to hear what you have to say?

God, your word is so powerful, so relevant for our lives, and there's nothing

more important that we could do than what we're doing right now,

sitting with our attention on your son.

So give us eyes to see. Please give us eyes to see Him.

Not as we have created Him to be, but as He is truly.

Pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.

So, the first thing that we need to do is understand the situation.

So that's our first point. We want to understand what's going on here.

Verses 13 and 14 say, The Passover of the Jews was at hand. And Jesus went up

to Jerusalem in the temple.

He found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers sitting there.

So first of all, the backdrop of what's happening here is Passover.

The occasion is Passover. Passover was a celebration of God setting his people

free, redeeming his people from slavery and bondage in Egypt.

So Passover is this amazing story where God brings judgment on Pharaoh and on Egypt.

And at the same time, he provides a covering for Israel in the form of a lamb

that each family in Israel had to sacrifice a lamb,

kill a lamb, put the blood on the doorpost.

And that blood on the doorpost signaled.

They were not to be touched, that God's wrath would pass over them.

They would not be judged when God brought judgment on the Egyptians.

That's Passover. That's the backdrop.

And as we know now, because we know Christ, that this was all pointing to Jesus.

Passover was all pointing to the one final sacrifice, the perfect lamb.

What John has already said, John the Baptist has declared, the Lamb of God who

takes away the sins of the world has come.

And so here he is, Jesus, the Lamb of God who's going to take away the sins

of the world, is walking into Jerusalem at Passover and he moves through the crowds.

There are something like 2 million worshipers who have come into the city from

all over the world to observe Passover.

So the busiest day of the year for the city, the busiest day of the year for

the temple, that's the setting.

Jesus walks into the temple.

And let's consider for just a moment what that is. What is the temple?

The temple was the center of gravity for the life of Israel.

It was the literal dwelling place of God among his people.

And so it was called the house of God. You may have caught that in the passage.

Zeal for your house will consume me.

The temple was the only place that you could go to offer sacrifices in order

to receive forgiveness for your sins.

This meant the temple represented everything sacred to God's people.

It was the place of access. That's another way of looking at it.

This was the place to get access to God, to go, to receive forgiveness,

to worship, to pray to access God.

It was the focal point of their relationship with their covenant God.

And so what you should have seen in the temple is worship.

You should have seen people coming into the outer courts with their offering.

You should have seen them reverently bowing down. You should have seen them in fervent prayer.

That's what you should have seen. But Jesus steps into the temple,

and it says that this is happening in the temple.

And in the temple, he finds not worship, not prayer, not reverence, but business going on.

There's the bleeding of lambs.

There's pigeons being sold. There's money changers. There's a buzz in a crowd, right?

And things are just kind of happening, right? Things are happening.

People are exchanging currency. People are getting pigeons. People are getting there.

And I'm assuming there's a lot of efficiency in this. Two million people have

come. You've got to figure a lot of things out, right?

I don't think that what Jesus is angry about here is,

is that they are exchanging currencies.

There are many different currencies in this time, and they had to have one currency

that they accepted at the temple. I don't think that that was the issue.

I don't think that the issue is that they were purchasing a sacrifice.

I mean, people are traveling for very long distances. It only made sense that

those kinds of things needed to happen.

I think the issue is that they're happening in the household of God.

What does he say? He's get these things out of here, right?

I think that what's happened is the religious leaders had lost sight of what they were doing.

I think they had completely lost their reverence for God.

I think they had begun to get a little too pragmatic.

You can almost imagine the conversation. Well, it only makes sense that we set

it up here because this is where everybody's going to be coming anyways. We have the space.

We might as well use it.

We're just meeting needs for people. You can almost imagine a similar conversation

happening in the church today.

And it happens all the time. The church in America in particular, we're so pragmatic.

Well, what would work? And if it works, let's do it, right?

But God has a particular way that he wants us to approach him.

He has a particular way that he wants to be worshiped.

And so we can take a lesson from this.

We can take a warning from this that it's so easy to get caught up in the pragmatism

of what works, what would be easier, what would meet a need,

and forget to put first what God has prescribed.

So that's the situation. That's what Jesus sees, and that's what sets this whole

thing off. Point number two.

Let's look at how he responds to what he sees. Point number two is Christ's

passion for God's glory cleanses the temple.

Look at verses 15 through 17. 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 and 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.

His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me.

I just want to remind us again, as I said last week, as I said at the beginning

of this, that we are coming to this gospel, any gospel.

The goal is to see Jesus.

That's the goal of John's gospel. He wants us to see Jesus.

He wants us to see him, not as we have imagined him to be, but as he truly is.

That is the goal of every story, of every passage that we're going to work through

as we go through the gospel of John.

And that's what's happening here.

Just as we considered his joy last week, so we must consider his righteous anger this week.

Verse 15 says that when he sees all this stuff taking place,

he sits down and he handcrafts a whip.

And then he takes that whip and with unmistakable authority,

he drives everyone out of the temple.

Kind of makes us feel a little uncomfortable. Like, what?

I mean, is that okay? Can Jesus do that?

It surprises us. We expect the miracles. We expect the healings.

We expect the sermons. But this, this is righteous anger.

And I just want to be so clear. Jesus had every right to do what he did.

What he did was exactly the right thing to do.

Just to help us wrap our minds around the idea of righteous anger.

If, let's say, let's say I catch someone breaking into a window in my house

in the middle of the night while my wife and my kids are sleeping in their beds, in their rooms.

I had better be filled with righteous anger in that moment.

If I love my wife, if I love my children, then it demands that I have righteous

anger in that moment to deal with what threatens them.

Of course, 99% of our anger is not righteous anger, right?

Usually we get angry because one of our kids is going too slow,

you know, or somebody had the audacity to pull out in front of us.

Don't they know that I have somewhere to be?

You know, that's what most of our anger is like.

But we can imagine that there are instances when anger is the right response

to something because we love.

And that's what happens here. Jesus never once experienced sinful anger.

When he felt anger, it came from the same source as his overflowing joy.

What was that source? What was the source of his anger and his joy?

I believe it was his passion for the glory of God.

A key verse in this passage is verse 17.

His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me.

That's a quote from Psalm 69.

Zeal consumed Jesus. Zeal for God's house. Let's think about that word zeal for just a minute.

It's a biblical word. We don't often use that word today. It means passion.

It means enthusiasm or fervor. We probably most commonly would use the word

passion, but it means the same thing.

And that verse is key. They remembered this descriptor of the Messiah,

this prophecy about the Messiah from back in Psalm 69.

Zeal, zeal for your house will consume me.

This, I believe this event is a peek into what makes Jesus tick.

What I mean is what we are passionate about determines what we give ourselves to.

It determines what we worship.

It determines what we sacrifice for.

And it was passion, literally consuming zeal that motivated Jesus to do what he did in this story.

But not just this story.

And that's the point I want to make.

This is what moved him, what drove him, what motivated him to do everything he did.

What did his zeal ultimately lead him to? But the cross.

Where he was ultimately consumed. And I would argue, and as I argued last week,

that Jesus is the exact same today, save the fact that he is risen and glorified.

He is the exact same today as he is in this story.

He is still motivated by the same thing, his love, his passion for the glory of God.

And so whether it meant performing a sign or preaching a sermon,

teaching his disciples something or cleansing the temple, he's motivated by

his passion for the glory of God.

He prized the glory and honor of God above all things, above his own reputation

with the religious elite, above his own comfort, above even his own life.

It fueled every day of his mission.

How do we know that's what's going on here? Look at verses 16 and 17.

He says, do not make my father's house a house of trade.

And of course, his disciples remembered, zeal for your house will consume me.

He's concerned with his father's house. It's zeal for his father's house that's

driving this. What's the point of the Father's house?

God's glory on display. That is the point of the Father's house.

Let me just read you a few instances where we see this in scripture.

Exodus 40, 34 and 35 both say, the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

The tabernacle is what preceded the temple.

1 Kings 8, 10 through 11 says, the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.

1 Kings 9.3 says, I have consecrated this house, putting my name there forever.

Psalm 26.8 says, O Lord, I love the habitation of your house and the place where your glory dwells.

The tabernacle and later the temple in Jerusalem were always ultimately about

God's glory. And Jesus is spilling over with passion for God's glory as he enters

into the outer courts and sees what he sees.

And instead of worshipers consumed in an awe of the glory of God,

he sees activity, a flurry of activity.

Something else, something big in terms of redemptive history is also happening in this scene.

And I need to explain that a little bit more. And that brings us to the third point.

Christ's passion for God's glory provides a new temple.

Look at verses 18 through 22. We'll read those in just a second.

But I've got to give you some background here, some Bible background.

God had made the temple the place where his name and his glory were centrally

located among his covenant people.

But when you read the Old Testament, his people gradually drifted away from him.

They eventually adopted the customs and worship of the surrounding nations.

And eventually God disciplines his people by allowing them to be conquered.

I mean, this is after like so many warnings and warnings and warnings.

He eventually allows them to be disciplined by being conquered and taken into exile.

While they're in exile, the Lord raises up prophets to call his people back

to himself, to explain what God is saying and what God's doing.

And one such prophet is the prophet Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 10, Ezekiel's taken

in the spirit to Jerusalem, to the temple, where God shows him the idolatry

and wicked practices that are being done by the religious leaders.

Ezekiel then sees something that is devastating for Israel. More devastating

even than being taken into exile.

He sees the glory of God leave the temple. The judgment.

And it leaves God's people with a question.

Is all hope lost? I mean, if the glory of God has left the temple, what are we left with?

Will God's promises of redemption be fulfilled? And if God's glory has departed

from the temple, where has it gone? When will it return?

Now, let's fast forward 600 years to the Gospel of John. The first temple that

was built by Solomon and filled with the glory of God has been destroyed,

and later a second temple was built by King Herod, this temple.

And even though sacrifices and temple worship resumed, even rabbinic tradition

acknowledged that the glory of God was conspicuously absent.

Remember, at the beginning of the Gospel of John,

John 1, 14, you can look at it. It says, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And we have seen his glory, three things there.

The word, that's the revelation of God.

Dwelt, that's the word tabernacled among us.

And we've seen his glory. Three big ideas in that introduction to this gospel.

The word, word, Jesus is the revelation of God, tabernacled.

He is the tabernacle of God.

We've seen his glory. He is the glory of God incarnate.

So it gives us some perspective now on what's happening at a deeper level when

Jesus comes into the temple and cleanses it of the religious activities that

had distracted people from actually worshiping God.

On the one hand, the glory of God that had departed 600 years earlier has returned

to the temple in the person of Jesus.

And no one has the eyes to see that it's him, that it's the glory of God incarnate

until later looking back.

But Jesus is showing by his actions that God has no plans to restore things as they once were.

His return to the temple is not to return things to the way they once were.

He is standing in the temple with fire in his eyes and a whip in his hand.

Glory of God has returned to the temple for judgment. That's one of the things happening here.

Look at verses 18 through 22, and I'll show you what I mean.

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 then said, it has taken 46 years to build this temple,

and will you raise it up in three days?

But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When, therefore,

he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this.

When Jesus says, destroy this temple, it is a statement with multiple meanings.

One meaning of destroy this temple is a declaration of judgment upon Herod's

temple there in Jerusalem.

You have to remember that when this gospel is written, there has already been a siege of Jerusalem.

In 70 AD, Roman armies came and took Jerusalem, destroyed the city,

and raised the temple. It's rubble.

As first century believers are reading this gospel, it's rubble.

So when Jesus says, destroy this temple, there's multiple layers of meaning here.

And one of those layers of meaning is judgment.

It's coming down because his own people rejected him, because his own people crucified him.

Jesus Christ, whom God appointed as the judge of the world, brought that temple down in 70 AD.

But also, but also, when Jesus refers to his own body as the temple,

he is saying, there is a new temple that is replacing the old.

Glory is not returning to the temple as it did in Solomon's day.

The glory has come in a person.

Instead of a structure in Jerusalem representing the presence of God with his

people, Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God with us.

Jesus is the new temple.

Whereas once the temple was the center point of worship for God's people,

now Jesus Christ is the center point of worship.

Once the temple was where one had to go to offer sacrifices and receive forgiveness

of sins, but in a short time from this.

These religious leaders would do just as Jesus prophetically declared,

destroy this temple, and they would destroy his body.

And three days later, he would be raised from the dead. His death was the final sacrifice for sins.

And because of that, this temple is obsolete.

We no longer go to a temple to offer sacrifices for forgiveness.

We go to Jesus, our final sacrifice, sufficient for all time.

And through him, we receive forgiveness of sins. Do you see that Jesus is the new temple?

He is the point of access to God.

He is the focal point of our worship.

Is the place we go to receive forgiveness. He is God's glory incarnate.

Final point, Christ's passion for God's glory confronts our lack of passion.

Verses 23 through 25 says, Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast,

many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing,

but Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them because he knew all people

and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.

This starts to get at, what do we take from this sermon?

If all you do is think, huh, it's really interesting stuff about Jesus,

then you're completely missing it.

This story is meant to confront us in a significant way.

It's meant to do more than just teach us some things that make us go, hmm.

When we look at the perfect son of man, burning with passion over the glory

of God, it should be a wake-up call for us.

We should ask ourselves why we don't burn with the same passion.

These last verses in this chapter tell us that a lot of people saw Jesus' miracles,

the signs that he performed while he was in Jerusalem, and they believed.

People in Jerusalem believed in his name. In other words, they were intellectually

convinced that he was the Messiah, but they weren't changed.

We'll see in the next chapter.

Person must be born again. This is a setup for what's coming next.

There has to be a significant change at the core of our being.

It didn't happen just because they intellectually were convinced that he was the Messiah.

Jesus knew what was in them. He didn't entrust himself to them.

We know the rest of the story, the same people in a short time would be the

ones calling for his crucifixion.

As convinced as they were that he was the Messiah, they weren't actually Christians.

It's one thing to be intellectually convinced that the Bible's true.

It is one thing to be intellectually convinced that Jesus is the Son of God

and that he came to earth and that he died on the cross for sins and that he

was raised on the third day.

Satan believes all of those things.

Another thing to be consumed with passion over these things.

How do you know if you're really a Christian or if you've just been convinced

intellectually of the facts about Christianity?

What makes you tick?

What motivates your life? What drives you? What do you want in life?

Ask you very pointedly, are you passionate about the things of God?

Or do you just come to church and hear the song sung and the word preached and

shrug your shoulders and go, hmm?

Or do you burn with passion at the thought of Christ dying in your place?

Do you burn with passion at the thought of other people coming to know that truth?

Do you yearn to see the nations worshiping him?

Do you long to see the church purified

and shining in Christ's glory as a testimony to the watching world?

Let me just lovingly say to you, this isn't optional.

The word commands us to be passionate about the things of God.

Romans 12, 11 says, do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit.

In Revelation 3, many of you are familiar with it, Jesus rebukes the church

in Laodicea. It's the letters to the churches.

And in Laodicea, they're neither hot nor cold, they're lukewarm,

and Jesus says that he's going to spew them out of his mouth.

They're not rebuked for believing the wrong things or even for doing the wrong things.

They're believing and practicing according to the scriptures,

but they've lost their passion.

You know what Jesus says? He doesn't look at them and say, well,

you know, you can't really control how you feel.

He says, those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.

How do we do that? How do we do that?

How can we make ourselves burned with passion, again, if we've lost that?

How do we not be like the crowds who saw the miracles and were intellectually

convinced, and they were not changed?

Is my answer from this text. We need to go to the new temple,

Jesus Christ, and we need to worship.

We need to look with awe at the glory of God on display in Jesus.

There's one more way of seeing what he is doing.

Another meaning of what he is doing here in 1 Corinthians 6,

19, Paul tells us that we are temples.

Do you not know that you are a temple of the Holy Spirit who is within you? We are temples.

And so there's this other way of looking at this entire scene in which Jesus

comes to cleanse the temple of all of its false worship and idolatry and sin

and wickedness and to take up residence in it.

And so, friends, look at the glory of Jesus Christ standing in the temple in all His holiness.

We might not be zealous for God's glory, but He is.

We might defile these temples of the Holy Spirit, but He cleanses us with His blood.

We might allow idols into our lives, but Jesus comes to drive them out.

We might shrug our shoulders when God's holiness is dishonored, but Jesus defends it.

What I see in this scene is a picture of the temple cleared out of everything

that defiled it, and only the perfect and holy Son of God standing there.

Jesus has defended the holiness of God.

He's filled the temple. It reminds me of this passage. Well,

we're almost finished. It reminds me of this passage in Ezekiel 36.

The Holy Spirit, through the prophet Ezekiel, is describing the salvation that's

coming in Jesus. And here's what he says.

Thus says the Lord God, it is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act,

but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came,

and I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, and the nations will know

that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness

and from all your idols. I will cleanse you.

I will give you a new heart and a new spirit. I will put within you a new spirit

and will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and

be careful to obey my rules. Here is the question.

How can he both vindicate his holiness, his perfections?

How can he vindicate his holiness and cleanse a people who are clearly rebellious

and sinners against him?

And the answer, there's only one answer. The answer is the cross.

At the cross, all of God's holy, righteous anger was poured out.

Rightly so, righteous anger was poured out on our sin and at the cross.

He provided mercy. He provided forgiveness. And all who turn to Him and trust in Him.

Be forgiven because He has both vindicated the holiness of His name and made

a way to put His Spirit within us.

He can give us a new heart. Because of the cross, He can put within us a heart

that is passionate for His glory as He is. Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, You have done it all.

You have done it all you

have cleansed these temples and

filled them with your perfect holiness thank you help us now to love your glory

to reflect your glory to the watching world in jesus name we pray amen.