My article from this week's edition of the Rockford Squire:
When we consider the now-cliché
question, “What would Jesus do?” turning over tables and chasing people with a
whip isn’t probably the first thing that comes to mind for most people. However, that’s exactly what we see Jesus
doing in the event recorded in John chapter 2.
If you are familiar with this event, you have probably heard it
described as Jesus condemning the greed, dishonesty, or corruption associated
with the market that had been set up in the outer court of the temple to
provide a convenient way to purchase sacrificial animals or exchange Roman
coins for temple coins.
All of those sins most likely are
occurring, but they are only a symptom of the true problem. The likely owners of these establishments in
the temple courts are the Pharisees, who were known for their enthusiasm at
making and keeping rules. In the Old
Testament, God had given somewhere around 600 laws to the people of Israel
regarding their religious, civil, and moral life. As an attempt at safeguarding against
disobeying God’s law, these Pharisees had expanded the list to over 10,000 rules
to be kept regarding every facet of life.
The trouble is that in doing so,
they had reversed the direction of religious life. The structure of the Old Testament
sacrificial system was not to be a transaction with God, as if murder could be
paid back by burning a bull or an act of adultery could be satisfied by slaying
a lamb. That would be no different than
any indigenous religion invented by human minds, rather than a prediction of
the crucified sacrifice of Jesus for sin.
Likewise, the point of the food and purity laws was not that meats like pork
or shrimp were in themselves an offense against God, but that just as He is
separate and distinct from every humanly invented deity, His people were
likewise to be distinct from the nations that surrounded them.
This self-righteousness of the
Pharisees was the root concern, and the cause of the dishonest trade in the
temple, because self-righteousness ultimately creates a demand for loopholes,
and eventually the obsessive keeping of man-made laws yields loopholes so wide
that the Ten Commandments themselves are neglected in favor of keeping the
obsessive details of Pharisaical law.
This is the unrighteous self-righteousness that Jesus cleanses from the
temple when He clears the outer courts of this market, and what He speaks of
when He later tells the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures because you think
by them you will earn eternal life, but it is they that testify about Me.”
