Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And today I'm going to do the thing that I do from time to time when we look at passages that involve the bad guys from the New Testament. And they obviously end up on the wrong side of the Jesus thing for the most part, but sometimes they do stuff that's reasonable and they ask reasonable questions. And I think that we get one of those situations right here where you know nobody's totally freaking out or anything over a situation that you would expect them to freak out over. The situation is, of course, what we hear about in John 2, 12 through basically 17. And this is where Jesus makes a long trip with his buddies and he gets to Jerusalem for the Passover. He comes into the court of the Gentiles, presumably that's where this happened. And there's a whole bunch of people selling livestock. It's a big livestock bazaar. And they've got money changers everywhere. And Jesus is like, yeah, I've had enough of that. And with great intentionality, he takes his time to carefully braid together a whip. And then he drives everybody out of there and makes a great big mess. And he doesn't apologize for it or demonstrate any remorse or regret. And even his disciples, who were probably a little bit surprised with the way this was going down, I don't think they'd ever seen this side of him before. And on balance, they get to the end and the dust is still in the air, and they're like, yeah, well, zeal for his house will consume him. This is in keeping. This is what you're going to get from the Messiah. This is his father's house. Of course he's going to be mad about something like this. And then, this is where I'm sympathetic a little bit to, I guess, kind of the bad guys of the story. A bunch of people, a bunch of the quote, Jews come up, and they're like, Well, where do you get off, Buster? Who do you think you are? Where do you get the authority to do something like that? You better start answering questions right now, mister. So, on the one hand, it's a little presumptuous to question the Son of God. I mean, it's Jesus, but we have the luxury of hindsight. And these guys are only in the middle of chapter two in the Gospel of John. I mean, they probably don't, maybe they should know because of the Old Testament and John the Baptist and what happened to Cana. But okay, let's just give them the benefit of the doubt. They don't know, but still, you know, it clangs against our senses a little bit to have somebody throwing aggressive questions at Jesus. On the other hand, I think maybe we cut them a little slack here because nobody's demanding his arrest or execution, at least the way it's presented here in John, with this temple cleansing that, as best as we can tell, is arranged at the front end of Jesus' ministry when he's still a relatively unknown character. They're not freaking out. These Jews, whoever they are specifically, are like, eh, I could sort of see it, actually, but it's a reasonable question to just want to know who do you think you are? Like, what is this? On what grounds are you doing this? Who do you hold yourself out to be? And I think that's a pretty smart question. I think it's a pretty historically, culturally literate question, because a lot of people had come along. We know this from inside and outside of the Bible. A lot of people had come along recently and done big dramatic things and tried to raise up a following, and it caused problems with Roman governors, it caused problems for the more law-abiding capitulationist citizens of Judea and Galilee. There were a lot of wannabe messiahs who had come and gone very quickly, and Jesus is another one of these. Well, that's not going to be good because it always seems to end very badly when these wannabe messiahs come along. Indeed, we get that big rebellion in 70 AD. That isn't that's more of a victory for the zealots than a particular Messiah figure. But after 70 AD and the temple gets destroyed, you know, about a generation or so goes by, and the Jewish people in and around Judea throw another rebellion. And this time there is kind of a messianic character at the core, and it gets broken up and that guy gets killed, and that's that. But it, you know, if these Jewish leaders are asking the question, because they're like, look, we've had our hearts broken before by people making these big ovations, doing this public performance prophetic display kind of thing, and then they just turn out to be idiots or warmongers or cheap rebels. So who are you? What's the deal? Is this just another scam? I'm I'm tired of being hurt. Maybe that's where their question is coming from. Maybe, as I've speculated the last couple of days, they're thinking to themselves, well, what kind of a political asset are you? You're clearly a rogue agent. Are you for us or are you against us? I don't want to make it weird, so I'm not going to use specific examples, but think of rogue agents or rogue organizations or, you know, little um groups that crop up politically and they make a thing on Reddit or something, and they all get together and like, yeah, we're gonna go dress up and we're gonna go cause chaos at this thing. You notice how a lot of politicians are kind of slow to condemn those groups because they're like, eh, I don't like their methods, but that group could actually help move our thing forward. And I don't really have to get my hands dirty. But you notice the politically minded, that class, they kind of wait when that kind of uh unique character or group crops up. I sense that they're doing that, but the most charitable read that I could give to the religious leaders or the Jews, as the text says on this, is they know that long history we talked about over the last few days of temple cleansings. This is a temple cleansing. That idea is closely linked with the idea of the day of the Lord and renewal throughout the Old Testament. They were in the mood for renewal. I think the people had mostly lost the vision of what that messianic rule or renewal rather was gonna look like. But there was some latent memory of that, and maybe there's some little childhood glimmer of hope, some little pure of heart aspect of their religious sensibilities here that causes them to say, Man, we'd really like to rally to your side, but can you show us something? Now think about how you'd respond to this. Let's say somebody comes and does something crazy at some event. Maybe it's one that you think is not great or is devolved into something ugly, but somebody does something really, really aggressive like this. I mean, you'd kind of want to know where their credibility came from. Like what is this? What's driving it? Is this funded by some political party? Is this funded by some activist group? Do you what do you who do you imagine yourself to be? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to overthrow the government? Are you trying to become a celebrity or get a big following on social media? You would want to know, right? Okay. So they want to know. Then the Jews demanded of him, what miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this? I think it's interesting that they're like, hey, we will believe in you, and we'll go along with this. All you have to do is simply break the laws of time and space in front of our faces on command right now. Do it right now. Well, weirdly, they're actually talking to somebody who can do that. And weirdly, he says no. I remember coming across these passages when I was a kid, by the way. And I don't know, maybe you remember the first time you read through the Bible. If you did read it as a kid, maybe you're reading through it for the first time right now. Maybe you're only exposure to the Bible is what we're doing right now. I read the thing as a kid. I yeah, I understood some of it, I didn't understand other parts, but I very much thought in terms of Jesus is the hero and I want him to win. And even though I know he's gonna die, I kind of don't want him to. And maybe, maybe this time around, you know, he'll win. He'll defeat all the bad guys and they'll look like fools. You know, I thought about it like a Saturday morning cartoon kind of thing. And one of the motifs in the Saturday morning cartoon, remember, we talked about this back earlier in chapter two with the He-Man movie that came out a while back, which is very good, by the way. I do recommend it, and I do think you should probably go stream that because it's free now and it's really good. But you remember we were talking about the the motif that they kind of joked about in that He-Man movie is the the little boy's dream of I'm something special, but you all just don't see it yet. And then people gotta see it. Like, see, I was telling the truth. Look at this amazing thing. As a little boy who grew up on those kind of cartoons, I go and I read the Bible, I'm like, Jesus, just show them. Come on, do the thing. They'll all have to believe then. They'll all be like, whoa, I can't doubt that anymore, and you'll be the coolest kid. And all the bullies will have egg on their face, maybe they'll get pushed down in some mud or some poo will fall on them, and everybody will laugh at them and instead be excited about you. Do that, do the sign, do the thing, show them you can do it. Do it, do it, do it. And then Jesus doesn't do it every time he's confronted with that, and it's like, uh, come on. Instead, what Jesus gives them is this answer. Jesus answered them, destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days. Is that trolling? I mean, are you allowed to say Jesus was trolling a little bit? How did Jesus really expect them to take that? I don't know. We'll we'll unpack his answer more tomorrow. But to round out the question for today about these people and what they want to know from Jesus, uh, two things, I guess. One, who are they? Well, it's just the Jews. I'm sure this includes some people with political ties. I'm sure this probably includes some people with an axe to grind, some people who are connected to leadership or in leadership. I'm also sure this group includes prominent citizens who were there and being good, both from Judea and travelers, pilgrims like Jesus who were in town. And all of this is happening kind of in front of all of the local ethnic Jewish communities. So a lot of people are probably asking these questions for a lot of different reasons. And later on we find out that some of them believed. Verse 23, it says, Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. Okay. So eventually they saw stuff and they came to some sort of belief because they got their signs that they wanted, but Jesus didn't just give it to them. He gave them a difficult answer instead. In other words, they were asking for what they thought they needed, which is just do something, break the laws of time and space right here. Then, you know, whatever side you're on, we'll just suddenly be on that side. Why? Uh, because I saw something cool, because you're powerful, I guess. I don't know. But throughout this passage, that kind of spontaneous belief rooted in just show me a thing once is contrasted with the people, specifically the disciples, who understand the signs that Jesus is giving. They get that it means something. They're rooted in scripture and an understanding of the bigger picture of who Jesus is and what he's doing. And that is the idealized kind of faith and belief here in these two passages in John chapter 2, whereas kind of the cheap, whoa, look at that. That's neat. All right, I'm with you. Uh, the thing I saw most recently that was impressive is now what I think the most. That kind of faith, yeah, kind of gets shrugged at. And indeed, the last couple of verses or so of this chapter that we'll get to soon really are sort of a shrug at that kind of belief. So, in conclusion, this mixed group of Jewish people who saw what Jesus did and did not demand his arrest were rightly curious. Their curiosity was piqued. They wanted to know where this fits in the grand scheme of history, what kind of character is Jesus here? And they want to take the shortest route from point A to point B, which is you know, point A is I don't know exactly what's going on. And point B is now I know exactly how to feel, and I can confidently go out and say this kind of stuff to friends and family and on Facebook and Twitter and everything, and I I'll be locked in, I'll be on good, solid footing. They want the cheapest, fastest route. Do a sign right now, give us a thing. And Jesus gives them something much more robust that challenges them much more deeply, and that at the time most of them are not ready to accept. And I think we'll get a better sense of why he chose to play it that way as we move forward here toward the end of chapter two. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.