Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And we're on a little mini arc here trying to understand why Jesus was so angry and why he was righteously angry and justified in being angry about what was going on in the temple at Jerusalem. And we figured out that the ugly stuff that was happening here is almost surely, I mean, almost certainly, happening in the court of the Gentiles. And I think that has a lot to do with why Jesus is so upset. Stuff means stuff. Theology, bad theology in this case, is being communicated by the way the temple is being run, and Jesus is having none of it. We made pretty good progress on this stuff yesterday, and then I just hit paused. And so we're just going to keep going right where we left off, right after my close personal friend, Jeff Foote, plays some music. All right, here we go. Adding this massive court of the Gentiles reframes the whole thing. I mean, the percentages, the numbers alone tell a story. What is the story? Well, this temple, and maybe even the god who supposedly lives here, is a little more interested in outsiders than it used to be. Interesting that it was kind of built by an outsider or that the expansion was carried out by an outsider. If you really stop and think about it, it's kind of weirdly welcoming. It's also kind of weirdly, maybe even accidentally, in fulfillment of the vision of the whole Old Testament. Remember, the promise that God made to Abraham wasn't just to be a blessing to the Jews. All the nations were supposed to be blessed through Abraham and his descendants. The whole Old Testament screams, this is the God of everything, and he is for everyone. And that is the arc of redemptive history that you're going to see through the whole Old Testament and into the New Testament and through all of history since. Herod the Great? What? Herod the Great somehow did something with whatever set of weird mixed motives that I couldn't possibly sort through. Herod the Great somehow did something that made the temple more communicate that? Huh. Why didn't they just build it that way in the first place then? I don't know. The fullness of time? Maybe this is just exactly the moment where God ordained this is when this larger court needs to be built. Well, where would be the only place in the temple complex that I just described that would be big enough to have a livestock market? You couldn't put it in the Holy of Holies or in the temple itself. You couldn't really put it in the court of the priests, you couldn't put it in the court of the Jews, you couldn't put it in the court of the women. The only place on the compound that could accommodate this is the court of the Gentiles. So the one place that screams hospitality and welcoming to outsiders in fulfillment of what God said to Abraham all the way back in the beginning in Genesis is cluttered up with all of this stupid stuff. And it smells like turd and it looks cheap and bastardized and gross. That's what you see as an outsider coming to look at this place. Now, over the years, for just as long as I can remember in kind of the Bible discussion scholarship ether, I have heard that there was some sort of ruling that Caiaphas, the high priest, the guy who was in charge of the life of the temple during the time of Jesus, I had heard that he made some sort of ruling or policy change where he had moved the livestock market and the money changing from outside the temple complex. Some people think it used to be on the Mount of Olives, down into the temple complex. And this was a very recent change carried out by Caiaphas. I've heard it so much that I guess I just assumed it was documented. But in preparation for our conversation today, I went and looked and I didn't find anything. I think it it's possible that there's some source out there that just, you know, I just didn't find. But usually I got tricks and I can find that kind of stuff if it exists. So maybe you know that this is an actual fact and that Caiaphas really had recently introduced some sort of new policy here, so that this was kind of fresh, and Jesus then would have been responding to this fresh change. But again, uh I can't find it. I think what is more defensible historically is to just look at the footprint of the thing. Before Herod's changes, roughly 15-ish years before Jesus was born, there wasn't room for a livestock market. Maybe there was room for money changing, but probably not even that. There wasn't room for that in the temple area. So it would have had to have been somewhere else. Maybe there's documentation that puts it on the Mount of Olives or something like that across the valley. That would be nice because it would have made all the noise and the poop smells and the chaos and everything. It would have made all of that a faraway separate thought. It would have kind of kept the temple separate and holy. But after Herod made these changes, well, now all of a sudden there is room for this. So presumably the changes that Jesus finds rightly offensive here all happened within somewhere between a couple of years before Jesus cleanses the temple, right here, maybe as far back as like 35 or 40 or 45 years. Either way, in the grand scheme of temple history, this was a novelty. This was a relatively new change that was in place. And like we talked about a few days ago, you know, it's the kind of thing where at first it changes and some people grumble and mumble, and maybe there's a little protest, but eventually everybody's like, well, what are you gonna do? This is just the new normal, and then they accept it and they move on, until in this case, Jesus comes along and is like, you know, it should not be this way. Now, there's no evidence that anything changed after this, but there's strong evidence that this practice no longer persisted after 70 AD, because well, this entire temple complex got wrecked in 70 AD, and none of this none of this was happening after that. So it was pretty short-lived, no matter how you slice it. It is also kind of telling about where the headspace was of the religious leadership at the time, that they threw all of the animals and the poop and the livestock and the money changing in the court of the Gentiles. Well, like we don't care if you're here, we're indifferent to that. Also, remember the coins that are being swapped freely in the court of the Gentiles have got idolatry all over them. They've got Roman gods and Greek gods and local gods and Tyrian gods and ancient gods all over, slathered all over every one of these coins. There is idolatry, or at least what the Jews at the time considered to be idolatry. So, okay, well, are they being frauds and hypocrites? Yeah, we've talked about that. But further, what does this say to about the court of the Gentiles? Well, Herod might have built it, but the Jews do not acknowledge this as part of the temple in an actual meaningful way. If they did take it seriously, they wouldn't be allowing these images in there that they're so concerned with. We have hard extra-biblical historical data to say that any image that got within a country mile of the temple complex, even on adjacent buildings, if it depicted something that was a man claiming to be a god or an emperor or something, they would melt down over that, but not apparently, I guess, if it's on a coin. So, what does this communicate to outsiders? It communicates your thing, you know, Herod might call it temple or part of the temple, but we don't treat it that way, at least when it's convenient for us. It really is kind of a big giant middle finger to outsiders here when you really start to peel back the layers of meaning and consider what was being communicated with these policies and with what an outsider would be greeted with when they came to this great temple they'd heard about in Jerusalem, where the one true God of all was supposedly being worshipped. Well, he was being worshiped. It was just a cheapened worship of God, cheapened by things like this. And I'm not out on some kind of theological limb here making a statement like that, like I, Matt Whitman, went to college once, and I read a couple of books and a tweet one time, and I decided that they were worshiping God wrong. No, Jesus, the guy for whom the religion is named, is saying, you're doing it wrong, because he turned over their tables and made a whip and whipped them with stuff, which requires a lot of forethought, by the way. More on that later. Now, this cleansing of the temple is one of the anecdotes that gets recorded in all four Gospels. We'll talk about how those line up more down the road, I assume. But we get a little bit from each of the four gospels about why Jesus is so upset. In John, there's a whole lot of emphasis on this is my father's house, and Jesus has great zeal for that house. That's clearly part of the equation. But in Mark, we get another hint about what's going on because Mark gives us a quote from Jesus that's a reference back to some Old Testament stuff. Over in Mark 11:17, it says this Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers. That's a nod to Isaiah 56, 7, which is one of the really important passages in the Old Testament on that theme that we keep talking about, that this is supposed to be for everybody. These I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. And then he's also referencing Jeremiah 7:11, which says, Has this house which bears my name become a den of robbers to you? It's a reference to the morally decrepit attitude toward God and the temple toward the very, very end of the southern kingdom of Judah before they were judged by God using the Babylonians. So in Mark, we get more of a sense of what Jesus is upset about. We have to read between the lines a little bit more in John, but Mark just overtly spells it out. Well, there it is again. This place is, if it's working right, the temple is something that is a beacon to all nations, for people to understand that this is the God of all things, not another cheap local, regional, made-up, wood carved, ethnic god. This is the God, the maker of all things, the I am, being, essence, power, omni everything, and he's for you, outsider. He's for you, traveler. When the temple is going right, the temple is communicating that to everyone. It's God's vision of the kingdom. When the temple is going wrong, see Jeremiah 7 11. This is an exploitation, this is a control mechanism, this is an exercise in missing the point. It happened in late stage southern kingdom of Judah, and it's happening again here in late stage southern province of Judea, and like I mentioned a minute ago, just forty years after this temple cleansing from Jesus, the whole temple's going to be taken apart brick by brick, and the greatest calamity ever in the history of the Jewish people since 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar took apart the last temple. I think Jesus is in part mad because he is here to not just bring the gospel to the Jews, but you know, to the Gentiles. He's initiating this new moment, this new epoch and redemptive history when in the fullness of time the whole thing goes global. And the temple, his father's house, is being co-opted by the religious leaders. And the very way the temple is working, the temple is pushing the rock in the opposite direction that Jesus is pushing the rock. The temple and everything it communicates are hiding the keys of the kingdom from the people and from the world. And Jesus is here to unlock that stuff, to show the glory of God to people and to invite people into the new family of faith. Yeah, he's mad because the temple is supposed to be something that helps point people to God. And instead, at least in part, it's pointing in the exact opposite direction. Hey, I still think you should go check out Mount Rushmore. It really is lovely. Just when you go, try to imagine the way it used to be and try to imagine the contrast in the framing between the two. Also, when you come to Rapid City to do that, make sure to get Armadillo's ice cream because it's delicious, and my friend knows what he's doing down there. That this episode not brought to you by Armadillo's ice cream. Okay, that is good for now. We're gonna look at Jesus actually making a whip and the nuts and bolts of the scene and the aftermath of it next time around. Um Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.