Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And do you remember yesterday, 24 hours ago, when I got all worked up about temple cleansings and ranted like a crazy person about abominations and things being consecrated and a need to purge the film of evil that is left behind when evil people misuse the house of God? I mean, I was really got into it. I was having fun. I'm not sorry. I think I'm going to be the same way today. Because we got more temple cleansing to talk about. In John chapter 2, there is a light temple cleansing, like a little spring cleaning just on the outer court of the Gentiles. It's just at the very beginning of what Jesus is doing. There's a lot more reform that needs to happen here. There's so much more for him to do. But it certainly is reminiscent of great temple cleansings of the past. Yesterday we likened it to mom's spring cleaning time of year, and she would wait until the long, dark winter was over, and we were all stuffed up in there with our typhus and our dysentery and our scarlet fever and our rheumatoid consumption and all the other diseases used to get back then when I was a kid all winter long. Finally, the weather would break, the season would change, she'd throw open the windows and she'd be like, We're cleaning every last bit of this place. We're gonna reconsecrate it as a home that is fit for a family. Well, that same rhythm keeps appearing throughout the Old Testament. There's a whole lot of long, dark winters where things turn real ugly and the temple needs to be cleaned up, and inevitably people come along who do the cleaning up. Let's start with Good King Hezekiah. This is maybe the best example. Second Chronicles, I mean it's a lot. I can't really read all of this to you. It's chapters 29 through 31. You should probably just go read the whole thing altogether. Hezekiah was 25 years old when he became king and he reigned in Jerusalem 29 years. His mother's name was Abijah, daughter of Zechariah. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done. In the first month of the first year of his reign, he opened the doors of the temple of the Lord and repaired them. See, he threw open the windows like it's spring cleaning time. I'm the 25-year-old king now, and I might not know everything I ought to do around here, but I know this. The temple's important, and we're going to fix this place up. And then what you get is a detailed account of how he, I mean, first and foremost, just reopened the temple. They had been shut before by King Ahaz. And Ahaz took stuff out of the temple. He wasn't using it for anything. And then when he finally was like, Well, that's a really nice building, maybe we could use it for like pagan stuff. And he built altars again and around the temple. It was really, really gross. Hezekiah rebels against his dad and is like, no, we're going to use the temple the right way. And so he specifically says, this kind of sums it up here in verse 5. He says, Listen to me, Levites, consecrate yourselves now and consecrate the temple of the Lord, the God of your fathers. Remove all defilement from the sanctuary. Our fathers were unfaithful. They did evil in the eyes of the Lord our God and forsook him. They turned their faces away from the Lord's dwelling place and turned their backs on him. And then the punchline is like, but now I intend to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel, so that his fierce anger will turn away from us. Then he exhorts everybody else to do the same. And he gets all the unclean stuff out of the temple, and he re-purifies all the things that got filthified. He dumps it all in a valley somewhere else, all the bad stuff. He takes two plus weeks to cleanse every last bit. And then he gets rolling with the sacrifices again and declares a national holiday. We're going to celebrate that we're doing this thing. We're doing this right with God again. And then a few more kings go by. We're still in 2 Chronicles. We're right at the end now of the southern kingdom before the wheels fall off and they get conquered by Babylon. And there's another king named Josiah. How quickly things fall apart. After Hezekiah, it wasn't long, and bad kings came along. And it only takes really one to turn it into an awful winter season that will require another spring cleaning. But along comes Josiah and he does the right thing. He was eight years old when he became king and he reigned in Jerusalem 31 years. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and walked in the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left. I'm reading these first lines about each of these kings to show you that the Bible full-throatedly endorses these guys as being good and doing the right stuff. And what's one of the right things they did that is celebrated? Well, they threw open the windows and they cleansed the temple of the ick that had happened before. Now Josiah is the king who uh during his reign, the book of the law is rediscovered. And Josiah's like, what are we doing? We're not even close to any of the stuff that God laid out and that we're supposed to do. And so it's pretty crazy that this wasn't immediately obvious to everyone, but he's like, all right, well, we can't worship Baal in here. Get all of that out of here. We can't worship Asherah. Get rid of all of that. We got to get rid of all of these other pagan worship utensils and tools. All of that stuff's gone. We're going to put them in a big pile. We're burning all of that junk. We're going to get rid of all the priests who supported that. They're gone. They're fired. We're going to destroy all of the high places that overlook our people, where all of the worship of these pagan deities and whatnot occur. And we're going to destroy this pagan altar that's been built by a previous king. And we're going to focus on resuming the life of the temple. Awesome. Throw open the windows, purge the thing, clean it up. But this isn't all. Other kings of the south, the kingdom of Judah, did the same kind of thing. There was a spring cleaning under Joash. That's recorded in 2 Kings chapter 12. We're not going to get into a ton of it, but basically he fixed the temple that was just broken and neglected. And he put back together the proper rhythms of worship the way God had ordained it. There's an earlier king who did a pretty good cleansing of things. It wasn't so much specifically the temple, but the temple was purified from idolatry. This is Asa, who is a good king. He got rid of the cult prostitutes who were lingering around the temple and lingering around the people. And I guess this is just that you go to the Kidron Valley when you want to burn a bunch of weird pagan shrine stuff and artifacts. And so Asa was another dude who was like, We're doing spring cleaning and all the stuff. We're going to haul it to the dump. Load up the back of the work truck. We're hauling it to the metaphorical dump, which is Kidron Valley. Burn it all. There's just generations of pagan idolatrous garbage apparently just burned at the bottom of this valley. There was also a priest who took matters into his own hands in 2 Kings 11 and 12 and did a little temple spring cleaning as well. And then I told you about the one that Nehemiah did in the 440s BC during the Persian era of the Old Testament. We talked about that yesterday. So my point is this there is a lot of precedence for the idea that sometimes you're just in a long winter of the people and the temple gets cheapened and stuff goes sideways, and then somebody needs to come along and straighten things out. This was a time-honored tradition at this point. And I kind of have to applaud the religious leadership, even if you know the motives weren't perfect, for at least pausing here to see what kind of temple purger this was, not like perjury, but person who purges it. I've got one more really big rebellion that I need to tell you about. Some of you are like, oh, what about that one? You're actually picturing it already. But it's going to take a minute. So we're going to take one more day on spring cleanings and temple cleansings and all of this. We're not messing around here historically, by the way. This is important because every single person in the crowd who saw this happen or who'd heard the story of what Jesus did here, every single one of them was picturing one of these reformers. But these temple cleansings, they all have a little different flavor. They all have a little different emphasis. And I think for us to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience, we kind of have to have all of these dramatic temple cleansings in view as we read this, especially the most recent and most prominent one that people would have had in mind. So we'll do a quick run through that one next time around, and uh then we'll be on to the question of these religious leaders pestering Jesus about whether or not he has enough authority to be doing things like this. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.