JOHN123 - Herod Made Big Changes and the Temple Communicated Something Different after That

John 2:13-17

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I wanted to start by saying thank you to everyone who went and checked out that C.S. Lewis video from Belfast that I made with my daughter. I the what kind feedback. I really appreciate you taking a look. I hope it was everything that I promised. I mean, it's pretty cool, right? What they did with that C. S. Lewis Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe Park, and particularly what they did with Aslan. I think they did a great job of conveying that he isn't safe, but he is good. He's not a tame lion. And Aslan, of course, in those books is uh it's a picture of Christ. And we are seeing that same um, he's not safe, but he is good, playing out in the first two anecdotes of John chapter two. And I was mentioning yesterday that I think there's one more reason hanging out here why Jesus was so angry and why he chose to let the clause come out in this particular situation with the temple and with the livestock being sold there and the money changers and all of that. And here is how I want to get to it: the the temple, the location itself where this happened had undergone a lot of changes in terms of how business was done, but also in terms of the actual physical property and shape of the temple. And so it's kind of like this, timeline-wise, it's actually very similar. Mount Rushmore, I live real close to Mount Rushmore. My mom grew up here, my dad grew up on the other side of the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore, yeah, it's important to the whole country, but it's important to people who live in the area. And back in the day, Mount Rushmore, all the architecture around it, was very much a monument to simple citizen government. This kind of wooden A-frame, log buildings, everything smelled like cedar. It all kind of looked like an old man cabin, like a grandpa cabin where everything's shiny, lacquered up, and the wood is all aged and golden, and it just smells delicious. And it was great. It felt, it felt like it was kind of an homage to the stories you heard about the rough conditions that a guy like Abraham Lincoln grew up in. And I love the way the architecture back then minimized the guys on the rock. It's like, yeah, in other places they have kings, but in our country, we have people who are normal people called to serve, who set aside their own interests for a little while, and they take on the role of leadership, or at least, you know, that's what we used to aspire to. And then somewhere along the lines, somebody got the great idea to just bulldoze all that citizen government nonsense stuff and put up like this Greek-style marble and granite gray blase monument to these men. And it totally reframes the carving in the mountain from being something that is a monument to citizen government to being something that is a monument to these four men. Behold them. And I don't like it. I don't like the way it reframed that somebody rebuilt the complex and it reframes the whole thing in a way that changes the meaning. Likewise. Somebody came along a few years before the birth of Jesus and changed the all the surrounding stuff around the temple in a way that kind of changed the meaning. I would argue, mostly for the better. That's a bit of a controversial take because the guy who did this great big architecture overhaul on the temple just a few years before the birth of Jesus is also the guy who tried to kill Jesus when he was born. Herod the Great earned the title The Great, mostly because he was a builder. Now he was crazy, especially in his later years. He gave in to you know all sorts of egotistical whims, and this is an odd dude. Most of the great men of history are pretty weird when you pinch zoom in on their lives. And Herod is a great example of that. His family life was a mess. He was manic. I mean, it was very bizarre. But he built cool stuff, even if for the wrong reasons. Now, you might recall that the temple here in John chapter 2 that Jesus is going into, the temple of Jesus' time, is the second temple. The first temple was built a little after 1000 BC by Solomon, the third and final king of the United Kingdom of Israel. So you got Saul, you got David, you got Solomon. And God's fingerprints were all over the building of that temple. He made it clear, I'm going to dwell with you in this temple. Solomon spared no expense to build this gigantic thing. Then they did a huge dedication ceremony, and God physically showed up, not like showed up like Jesus taking on human flesh, but in fire and smoke, and he lived in the temple. There's tangible evidence, fearful evidence, that God was in there dwelling among his people. Well, then there's a civil war. The northern and southern kingdoms, you know, they split in two. The northern kingdom's an absolute joke. They don't put any good kings on their throne. The southern kingdom has like a 35-40% hit rate with okay to good-ish kings. The rest are awful. The northern kingdom falls to Assyria in 722. The southern kingdom falls to Babylon in 586. So that temple is up for about 400 years, the first temple, and then it gets wrecked by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. And the prophet Ezekiel describes the presence of God leaving the temple. This is a calamity and moving east somewhere. So there's all this ambiguity after that. Where is God? What are his plans? Does he still have plans to prosper us and not to harm us? Does he remember us? But the prophet Jeremiah says, yeah, uh, he does remember you. And 70 years, you know, you're going to see things coming back together. Sure enough, the Babylonians get defeated by the Persians, the first great Persian king, Cyrus the Great, tells the Jews, you can go back to Jerusalem and rebuild. So they go back and it's slow going, but they rebuild, as you know, and they make the second temple. It's not as good as the first temple. The old timers who kind of remember the first temple cry when they dedicate the foundation because it's so small. But the kids all think it's great and they all cheer when they dedicate the second temple. And eventually that second temple becomes a place where sacrifices are happening again. Nehemiah and Ezra put reforms in place that you and I have discussed in the 400s to really lock that in and make sure the temple is funded with the temple tax that we talked about a few days ago, that being part of the provision for the temple. But there's no real evidence that God's spirit lives in there. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. Jesus' anger here doesn't really hinge on whether or not God lives in the temple in some sort of manifestation like he used to. Either way, this place, this temple, Jesus' time was consecrated for God. And it's either tragic that it's his father's house and his father does not dwell in there in a meaningful way, or maybe God did dwell in there in that time. I I don't know. It looks different than what we see deep in the Old Testament in the first temple situation. Whatever the case. This temple is, you know, uh, it's great. It's a really good temple that's a holdover from the Iron Age, and it has been kind of eclipsed by some fancier temples to lesser gods around the ancient world. The temple of Artemis did a really good business up the coast in Ephesus. The Romans, by this point, had built some pretty cool temples, and there was pressure to maybe have this temple, since it's the one that's for the true god, look a little more impressive. Well, along comes Herod the Great, who isn't actually Jewish. He's from a closely neighboring cousin people group. He weasled in kind of the Roman political fallout after the assassination of Caesar. He and his dad were kind of in that mix, that little circle, and somehow they end up in charge of Judea and Galilee. What the heck? They're ruling on behalf of the Romans, but they're not even really Jewish. So Herod fixes up the temple. And I don't know, the negative way to attribute this to him would be like, well, he was, you know, in a dirty way, he was trying to curry favor with the people and draw attention to himself. I think that's probably a pretty accurate characterization. Like, I'm not really Jewish, but maybe this will make you all like me more. The, you know, the more positive way to frame it would be that um Herod, before his brain really broke later in life, had some sort of awareness of God and was really trying to do something that would honor God out of fear of God. Maybe both can be true. What we really know of Herod isn't particularly flattering later in life, but I'm not sure that all the people at that time, through most of Herod's reign, were as repulsed by him as we rightly are in retrospect, taking into account his entire reign. So Herod is a massive builder, super ambitious. He gets projects done very quickly, he leaves marks on the landscape. And at the temple, he does a massive expansion. Before Herod got his hands on it, the whole temple complex was about 17 acres, which is huge, just very impressive. The temple building itself was not nearly 17 acres, but you know, it was kind of the centerpiece of this whole temple complex. When Herod was done with it, and he did these, he fixed, he did all this very, very quickly. We're talking like a few years worth of building. When Herod was done with it, it was more than double. 36 acres is be is you know what the footprint was of Herod's whole expanded project. That is wild, especially when you think back to what happens in Ezra when we get the account back in the 520s BC of the foundation of the second temple being laid and people crying because it just wasn't that big or that impressive. Well, it's big and impressive now. Dang, Herod, I wouldn't have thought you'd be the guy who would do this, but okay, you did it. Things that happened. Okay, a general expansion to the temple proper itself, but also an improvement of all of the walls around that and the addition of a massive brand new court that encircled all the rest of the temple stuff. Working inside out. You've got like the Holy of Holies, nobody can go in there that's super sacred. Then you've got the court of like where the priests could go. At the beginning of the book of Luke, we are in that setting as Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, is in that kind of secondary uh court that only priests could go into and they could only do it at certain times. And then outside of that, you would have another court where Jewish men could go and perform acts of sacrifice and worship. And then outside of that, you had the court of the women, there both men and women could do worshipful things together. And then outside of that, Herod adds this gigantic new court of the Gentiles, a court for outsiders like you and me. And this shifts the balance of the whole stuff means stuff, right? I mean, how long have I been saying that phrase? That phrase right there, stuff means stuff is something I scrawled on a sheet of paper years ago when I was in seminary and we were talking about semiotics, the study of meaning. I was like, man, there's a simpler way to say this. Just stuff means stuff. Everything means something. Well, in the same way that reframing everything around Mount Rushmore changes the meaning of the monument from citizen government to celebrate these gods among us who served as our great presidents of the past. So adding this massive court of the Gentiles and throwing a little Roman fortress and governmental complex along the side of it too, but adding this massive court of the Gentiles reframes the whole thing. There's no way I'm getting through everything I want to get through today. So we're doing the pause and split routine here. I will be right back tomorrow, picking right up where I left off, because we got some juicy stuff coming up on this whole question about the temple and why Jesus was mad about it, why the claws came out here. All right, pausing now, picking it up tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.