Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Did you guys do spring cleaning? I mean, a lot of you who are listening to this, you don't really have spring. You just have rainy season and dry season because you live in the south, or some of you listen in like Phoenix, Arizona, and you have hot season and well, you got hot season. But where I live, we've got all the seasons. And growing up, my mom on you know one day every spring, maybe it was March or early April, there'd be a day that's kind of when the weather broke and things would smell different. The ground would thaw. There's probably a name for the smell that comes from the spring thaw ground, but it would just smell different. And I'd usually notice it at night. I'd walk out in a parking lot, would be kind of steaming, and I'm like, whoa, winter's about over. Crazy. The air feels different. It smells different. And without a doubt, the next day, mom would have all the windows in the house flung all the way open, and she would take apart everything. She'd usually rearrange the furniture in the living room, try a new configuration. Anything that could be run through the wash would be run through the wash. She would you mop down floors and clean, and we would all help, of course, as well. And she had a name for this, and the name was Spring Cleaning. Do you do that? Is that still a thing? Is that the name of it? I miss it. I miss spring cleaning day. I mean, we always dreaded it because it was so much work. I don't want to do all this stuff. But also, I kind of loved it. And I kind of missed that rhythm. Like I don't know. Our house stays pretty clean. Camilla does the lovely job. I'd like to think I'm somewhat helpful in that regard as well. The kids are great. So maybe it's a bygone era kind of thing, but it was part of the rhythm for us of hey, you know, stuff, it adds up through the long dark winter. Things that shouldn't be there get neglected for a time, and the season it just isn't right to fix all of this yet. But then when it was right, wow, everything is going to go through the wash, everything is going to go through the ringer, and we're going to get it right because it's finally clean in time. Likewise, throughout the Old Testament period and the intertestamental period, the whole era of the temples, we see a bunch of moments where it's kind of a long winter. Stuff is crappy and dumb and dark and bleak. And the right people and the right conditions aren't there to clean things up around the temple where God lives with his people. But then the seasons change. Something thaws. And it's clean in time. It's time to throw open the windows. It's time to fix things. It's time to do reforms. And there's plenty of stuff in the Bible that even just talks about hey, you just this needs to happen from time to time. Ezekiel famously talks about this rhythm. I should have marked all of these because then you wouldn't have had to listen to me turn pages, but I don't I think I can find it. My Bible has those little tabs in the side, so I can find things a little bit quicker. I'm stalling. Here it is. He said, This is God talking, Son of Man, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet. This is where I will live among the Israelites forever. The house of Israel will never again defile my holy name, neither they nor their kings, by their prostitution and the lifeless idols of their kings at their high places. Dang, and it goes on, there's a lot more language here, but the idea is take care of the temple. Throw open the windows when the season is right and the long dark winter is over. Clean things up around here. The temple isn't just another building, it's special, it's important. That's Ezekiel 43:7. If you want to go read the larger context, uh it's uh very vivid language. God is speaking very, very candidly about his expectations. Here's one right at the end of Zechariah, just one of the sneaky great books of the Old Testament that for whatever reason doesn't come up that much and people don't appreciate it nearly enough, but it's just fantastic. So much imagery, so much stuff in the New Testament comes from Zechariah, and you just don't notice. This is, is it literally the last verse? It is. Zechariah 14, 21. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the Lord Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord Almighty. Sounds real mean, maybe even kind of racist, but in the larger context of Zechariah, the point that is being made is all of the idolatry and all of the abominations and all of the stuff that from time to time has clumped up in the long, dark winter periods of the history of Israel and have befouled the temple. All that stuff is gonna get pushed out. And not just the temple will be holy, but everything will be holy and set apart for God. Again, there's that principle of cleanse the temple, keep this thing right. Man, time is flying. Gotta hit the gas pedal. Whitman Malachi 3.3. This is like two pages over from Zechariah. You know, if you don't have the Bible drills down, it's just right there. Uh, I'm just gonna read it to you. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He will purify the Levites, these are the people who assist with all the the life of the temple, and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in the days gone by, as in former years. So there again, Malachi, he's like the last prophet of the Old Testament. He's the defeated prophet, the one who's like, I we tried everything, and we need we need God. God's gonna have to fix it. We cannot fix the stuff that plagues us. Well, here is part of Malachi's vision is uh you know, a refining. That's the imagery that he's drawing on here from God. What happens in refining? Will you burn off all the garbage stuff to make the silver pure, to make the gold pure, to make the offerings? That's the metaphor here, pure. So you got all this stuff in the Old Testament that talks about the idea of hey, you gotta cleanse the temple from time to time. It will go dark. There will be long periods of metaphorical winter, but then things will change and you gotta throw open the windows and get stuff tidied up. Nehemiah 13. We covered this one a whole bunch in the season on Nehemiah. Uh, long story short, Nehemiah has rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and he's trying to get this thing to where it needs to be. He's really effectively cleansing and preserving the temple after years of neglect. And there's been these enemies who were there posing as friends who linger around, you know, like kind of the suitors in the Odyssey were just there like jackals. Well, some of these people who've been a total thorn in the side of God's people have had the doors of the temple thrown open to them by the priests. One of the priests takes a storeroom and quits using it as provisions to keep the temple running, and instead puts an enemy of the people, someone who's a liar and an opportunistic exploitative villain. He lets him live in the temple complex. What are you doing? Before this, Elieasheb the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. He was closely associated with Tobiah, and he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles and also the tithes of grain, new wine and oil prescribed for the Levites, singers, and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests. This idiot high priest kicked out all of the stuff that people worked their butts off to, you know, they built a room to hold all of this stuff so the temple wouldn't run out and it could continue doing the stuff of God. And the the high priest threw all that stuff out and moved in an enemy. Well, uh, Nehemiah is not impressed. But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem. Well, of course, you weren't in Jerusalem. It wouldn't have gone on if you'd been in Jerusalem. He's back in Susa hanging out with his Persian king buddy. For in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon and Persia, I had returned to the king. Some time later I asked his permission and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah's household goods out of the room. I gave orders to purify the rooms, and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God with the grain offerings and the incense. I love that. It wasn't enough for Nehemiah to be like, get that guy out of here and move the things back in. He's like, No, that guy is so disgusting and represents such a vile defilement of this sacred holy place, our father's house, that we not only obviously have to kick this guy to the curb and throw his stuff out like a deadbeat renter who set up a meth lab in our house. We also have to go through and scrub every last thing and boil it all to get the filth of what he left behind off of the house of God so that it can be properly reconsecrated for its actual use, which is the things of God. My goodness, I did not get anywhere near covering all the stuff in the long history of temple purges. Should we do another day? You want more of the stories? Am I getting too worked up? Do I sound mad? Is it scary when I when I take on a tone that sounds like Nehemiah? Funny thing is, I didn't earn it. Nehemiah earned it. He's put his neck on the line, he's walking halfway across the known world time and again. People are trying to kill him. He's building a wall with a sword in one hand and a trowel on the other. Like this guy earned the right. I'm a podcaster in my shed. That's that's me, but it's kind of fun to cosplay as Nehemiah sometimes when we talk and yell and get all worked up like it's my right to be this mad or I own it the way Nehemiah did. I don't know. I'm having a good time. Yeah, uh, all right. In the interim here, I've made my decision. We're doing another day on temple cleansings. It's entirely relevant to what we're looking at back over here in John chapter two, and it's entirely relevant to the question of why didn't Jesus get arrested? Well, I think it's because there was precedent for spring cleaning needing to happen from time to time. You got to throw open the windows, you got to get all the riffraff out of there, you gotta wash every single surface and rededicate, reconsecrate the home as a place of clean, happy, pleasant, fresh smelling family living. Or in this case, you got to reconsecrate the temple as a place dedicated to God and not to stupid stuff. Yeah, more temple cleansings next time around. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.