Cleansing the Temple

Luke 19:45-46

“And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, “It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”

The Gospels all have their own point to make about Jesus’ life. They aren’t making up details, but instead choosing which ones to highlight in their portrait of Jesus.

This passage in Luke has a very tight narrative of how Jesus cleanses the temple, describing Jesus’ actions in a single sentence then having the references to Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11. In Matthew, He is flipping over tables and chairs (21:12), in Mark, He is not allowing people to carry anything (11:16), and John includes the detail that he put a whip together (John 2:15)!

However, they all agree that Jesus drives the people out of the temple. This is not usually how we picture Jesus. After all, isn’t He all about love? How does shoving people out of the Temple (with a whip!) exemplify this?

Well, Jesus isn’t shoving people out of the temple because He doesn’t like what they are wearing. He isn’t doing this because He has a dislike of any of them personally. It is because these people were perverting the purpose of the temple. They had so filled the place with animals for sale, that the ability to pray had been squeezed out.

How does something like that get started? It was probably slowly. I imagine that it started just as a guy with a four or five sacrifices for sale as an emergency back up for families that suddenly had a sacrifice get injured on the way. It’s very practical, but the drift starts immediately into disobedience.

Jesus takes worship ferociously serious. It can be easy to think that we can improve upon it or make it better, but we can’t. That is like taking someone’s pizza order and then changing all the toppings. We give what God has called for, a place for prayer and adoration for every nation tribe and tongue.