Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we are on a little three-day arc talking about great purges of the temple in the Bible and in not the Bible. And it's it seems pretty hardlined, but I'm having a delightful time adding all of this up. One of the things I like doing with this program, because you know, it's not sermons, it's not church, and not anybody's pastor, like we're just working through the Bible together as peers here chipping away at this. It means I don't always have to get to a punchline at the end of the episodes. You know, there's not that pressure to be like, well, I only have 40 minutes and at the end, like I got to give you something to take with you every time to kind of like work on in your own life. That stuff is important. I think the Bible does that really well on its own. I mean, the story teaches as hard as any, you know, as the overt smoking gun lines that challenge us is just being immersed in the story pushes us. I think it, you know, for those of you who are Christians like me, I know there's a lot of you here who are not. Love the fact that you're here, love the fact that you have curiosity about uh this whole thing and this whole story. But for those of you who are Christians, like me, I think one of the things that really helps us understand God is just seeing his superintendence of history and how he works in all these different moments and what it all means and what he says it means, oftentimes himself. And, you know, a lot of times you can just really let the story teach, and this format lends itself to it. So I love these little arcs because when else in my life have I ever been like, I'm gonna assemble a list of all the great temple purges inside and outside the Bible. Never, I've never done that. You give me an excuse to do that, and it's really fun. So we have covered a whole bunch of them. So far in our overview of temple purges, we've looked at three passages: Ezekiel 43, Zechariah 14, Malachi 3, all of which talk about the principle of a refreshment, a throwing open the windows, a spring cleaning of the temples. Then we looked at one of the most famous temple purges ever, which is the one Nehemiah does at the end of the of the end of that book in Nehemiah 13, it's recorded. And that's kind of the one, it's right at the end of the Old Testament. That's the 440s BC. Everything in Jesus' time is still sort of coasting on those reforms that Nehemiah brought about. Well, kind of. I mean, there's one big, obvious, notable blip in the middle, which is the one we're going to talk about here in a minute today, which is, you know, at the time of Jesus the most recent temple purge. But to finish out the recap, then we went and looked at a bunch of the temple spring cleanings that happened in the southern kingdom of Judah over the course of 400-ish years or so, where different kings would come along after a bunch of wicked kings and be like, what are we doing? We got to change stuff. And they clean up the temple. So all of that would be in view for the original audience here in John 2. Not just the religious leaders who were getting after Jesus and they're like, Yeah, what miraculous sign can you do to show us and prove your authority to do all of this? Not just them, but also all the bystanders, all the witnesses, all the hostile witnesses who were there who were mad and scooping up their coins and trying to round up their sprinting frantic livestock, all of the people who secretly really liked what Jesus had just done, all of the ones who were on the fence and were like, that seemed bad, but also needed. Everybody there had at least some notion of previous temple cleansings, temple purges. And I would submit to you that whichever temple purge a given person was picturing or liked the most would kind of correspond to how that individual would eventually end up responding to Jesus. Because all of these temple purges kind of mean something different. At any rate, today we got to talk about the one that happened about 160 years before Jesus' birth, just shy of 200 years before this incident that's happening. And that is the temple purge that is recorded in the extra-biblical inter-testamental books of Maccabees. There's several of them, as well as the extra-biblical historian Josephus. We learn a whole lot about this particular era and this particular temple purge. The Jewish people found themselves in the 160s BC under the control of a Greek overlord who was descended from one of the generals of Alexander the Great 160, 170 years earlier. And this empire, the Seleucid Empire, was a pretty it was foul. And their king, a man named Antiochus Epiphanes IV, was quite the agitator, and he had a particular problem with the Jewish people, and he liked to make an example out of their temple. So he did horrible things, unspeakable things in the temple, and it provoked the Jewish people into open rebellion. Wildly, the Maccabees family led this rebellion and they, using guerrilla warfare, they won some key early battles against the Seleucids, the Greeks, and regained control of the temple, at which point they immediately did an Old Testament style spring cleaning, throw open the windows, we got to get all the filth out of here. They tore down all of the altars to pagan Greek gods, they removed all of the items that the Greeks had put in there, and then they ran into a problem. There's an ancient altar in that second temple that was used to sacrifice things to God, but it had been used to sacrifice pigs and stuff to pagan deities and probably to Antiochus Epiphanes himself. And so the Maccabees were like, what are we actually supposed to do with this? It's special, it's old, but it's filthified. So they took it apart piece by piece, and we're like, maybe we could put it back together after it's been cleansed or something, but ultimately they just build a new altar from uncut stones and they consecrate that and they start doing the sacrificial system again at that point. So this cleanse. Oh, and by the way, later on, the miracle of that that Hanukkah commemorates is kind of associated with this little period of temple cleansing. That's kind of where this story of rebellion and purifying the temple lives in modern consciousness. It's associated with the holiday of Hanukkah. All of that happened, by the way, at like Thanksgiving time 164 BC. Is that right? 164, 162. Dang it, I used to know this off the top of my head. I don't remember now. I think it's 164. It's something like that. So at the time of Jesus in John chapter 2, we're talking about something that happened like 190 to 200 years before this conversation in John chapter 2. Okay, what were we doing then? Uh that's about the time Andrew Jackson was president. We were starting to push west across the Mississippi River. Um, we had rebuilt after the War of 1812, and it was kind of like now the United States had officialized its separation from Great Britain, who had kind of looked at our Revolutionary War as like sort of a little inconvenience, so that we'll just come back and remedy later. Well, now after the War of 1812, it's clear now we're not going to remedy that. And now we're building like kind of like national banks and a whole financial infrastructure because whoa, we're going to be our own country. Okay, so I'm just threw all of that out to be like, hey, that's what 200 years ago looks like to you and I as we have this conversation, the end of the Napoleonic age. Okay. So it was a long time since this last purge had occurred, and that's long enough for people to kind of yearn for another one. And now along comes Jesus. And well, the last time we had an independent kingdom is when somebody came along and purged the temple, threw open the windows, did a much needed spring cleaning after a long, long winter. Are you here in the spirit of the Maccabees, Jesus? There were miracles associated with their stuff. Do you have any miracles, Jesus? Is there a miraculous sign you could show us to prove your authority to do all this? Maybe they're feeling this out to get a sense of, like, well, are you like Jehoiada the priest? Are you like one of the kings of ancient times who cleaned things out? Are you like Nehemiah, the super uh aggressive guy who comes along and does all this with political and physical force? Are you like the Maccabees, the open rebellion type? We know the religious leaders were very interested in in questions like, well, who exactly are you? And surely these are the things that they would have had in their mind as they were trying to make sense of what Jesus had just done. A miraculous sign would put to bed a lot of those questions and give them a lot of clarity. Jesus does not offer them the miraculous sign that they want, more on that later on. But also think about all the people who are picking up coins and collecting their animals, and also think about all the people who were too afraid to go into the comment section and be like, I'm actually with Jesus. That needed to be done a long time ago. This is sacrilege. This is what the pagans do. This is ridiculous. They didn't want the social consequences of going right out and getting in the chat and saying that in front of everybody, but there were a lot of people who were standing there watching what Jesus were doing and they were like, dang, I wish I had the courage to do that. I completely approve of this action. What are they thinking? Who are they picturing? Probably every single person there is picturing at least one of these spring cleaning events or one of these spring cleaners who threw open the windows and got rid of all the filth from years past. Which one in their minds they likened Jesus to and idealized probably corresponded very closely to what each member of the crowd eventually did with Jesus in their own mind and in their own heart. Okay, I had fun temple purging with you the last couple of days. Now we'll move forward next time around into this question of authority and what happens every time the religious leaders come at Jesus and demand a sign or question his authority and why they do it. See if we can get a little more insight into that. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.