Self-righteously Unrighteous

 

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.”