The Commands of Christ
Sermon # 29
Matthew 21:12-17
Jesus began his ministry at the Passover just as he now ended at a Passover. He is
just about to cleanse the Temple just as had done on one other occasion three years
earlier recorded in John 2:14-16, “And He found in the temple
those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money-changers doing business. (15) When
He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the
oxen, and poured out the changers’ money and overturned the tables. (16) And He said
to those who sold doves, "Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house
a house of merchandise!"
Now we read in Matthew 21:12-17 how he cleansed the Temple once again and his
reasons for doing so.
“Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. (13) And He said to them, "It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’" (14) Then the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them. (15) But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the children crying out in the temple and saying, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" they were indignant (16) and said to Him, "Do You hear what these are saying?" And Jesus said to them, "Yes. Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have perfected praise’?" (17) Then He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, and He lodged there.”
As we continue our study of
Christ’s Commands the next command we want to examine is found in the 21:13 here
Jesus says, "It is written, ‘My house shall be
called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’" The command
is found in the phrase “you
have made” (polieite) the command seems to center on what
this people have made God’s house into.
In verse thirteen Jesus says that they have
made the temple into a “den of thieves.” I think some times we have gotten the wrong idea
here.
What is it that has
aroused the anger of the Lord? There are of course several possibilities; First, some have
maintained that Jesus was angry because commerce, that there is buying and selling of
anything being done in God’s house. Some use this verse as a defense of denial of
allowing anything, at any time to be sold in the church. Yet the provision of animals for
sacrifice was in it’s self vital for worship as it existed at that time.
Secondly, some maintain it is not that commerce
was being done in the Temple that is the problem but that the people are being
“ripped off” in the process. According to Old Testament law, any animal
approved by the priests could be offered for sacrifice in the Temple. But the chief
priests made certain that animals not bought in one of their franchises would be judged
unacceptable. The business enterprises in the outer court came to be known as the “Bazaar of Annas”
whose chief priest and associates oversaw the Temple franchises. Merchants would buy the
right to sell sacrificial animals, wine, oil or salt, or exchanging money into the proper
currency used in the Temple. According to historian Alfred Edersheim, a person would have
to pay as much as ten times what an animal normally cost. And when their foreign currency
was exchanged they were charged a twenty-five percent fee.
Third, one other possibility is that if we stop to
Fourth, and
finally there is one more possibility that I want us to consider that could have made
Jesus angry at this situation. We tend to thing in terms of a modern church and that all
these things were being conducted in some version of the foyer. That all these things were
being done in some sort of entry way into the
temple proper but this is not the case. All this buying and selling was being done in what
was called the outer court but it had another name, the “court of the Gentiles.”
It was the only area in the Temple into which a Gentile believer could go to worship. Can
you imagine trying to worship in such a place. Let me share with you how Kent Hughes
describes the scene as he imagines it, “The noise of this court of the Gentiles was
terrific. Merchants shouted from their stalls to the customers, noisy, haggling, pushy
pilgrims jostled one another for position. The incredible din was heightened by the
constant bawling of livestock, The aroma of the livestock, accentuated by the enclosure,
made it like a county fair and the Stock Exchange all rolled into one.” [
R. Kent Hughes. Mark: Jesus, Servant and
Savior. Vol II ( Westchester, Illnois: Crossway Books, 1989) p. 87]
In the end it would have to be said that this
was a desecration of the Court of the Gentiles and as such was a massive national sin
against God and the lost people of the world.
So which of these possibilities is what Jesus was
saying about making his house into a “den of thieves.” I don’t know, but I
think that it is something that could cause us to take notice and cause us to think about
what we do and how we treat God’s house.
Jesus calls for his house to once again be a “house
of prayer.” In saying this Jesus is
appealing to the Old Testament, this is a quote of Isaiah 56:7. Jesus said that which
should be the distinguishing feature of the Lord’s house is prayer. The Temple was to
be a place of place of worship and prayer, a place were God’s people could draw close
to him in worship. As he in one sense closes down one place of worship he illustrates what
the new place of worship, the church is to be like. The distinguishing feature of this
place is that it is to be a place of prayer and worship. Jesus never said, “My house shall be a
called a place of preaching.”
Nor did he say, “My
house shall be called a house of music or singing.” Obviously those things are good and a part of our
worship experience but the Lord said, “My house shall be called a place of prayer.” And I don’t think that he meant by this that
prayer was to be a perfunctory thing that we do at the beginning and end of a service.
If you examine the birth of the church in the book of acts you quickly see the vital connection between the church and prayer. In Acts chapter four when the apostles were unjustly arrested, imprisioned, and threatened, they did not lodge a protest; they did not look for some political leverage instead they prayed. The early church had this instinct; when in trouble, pray. When intimidated, pray. When challenged, pray. When persecuted, pray. Acts 4:31 records, “And when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.”
The
Bible translator J.B. Phillips, after completing his work on the translation of Acts wrote
in his 1955 preface, “It is impossible to spend several months in
close study of the remarkable short… without being profoundly stirred and to be
honest, disturbed. The reader is stirred because he is seeing Christianity, the real
thing, in action for the first time in human history. The newborn church, as vulnerable as
any human child, having neither money, influence nor power in the ordinary sense, is
setting forth joyfully and courageously to win the pagan world for God through
Christ…. Yet we cannot help feeling disturbed as well as moved, for this surely is
the Church as it was meant to be. It is vigorous and flexible, for these are the days
before it ever became fat and short of breath through prosperity, or muscle bound by over
organization. These men did not make ‘acts of faith’ they believed; they did not
‘say their prayers,’ they really prayed. They did not hold conferences on
psychoso-matic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and
naïve by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit they were open on the God-ward side
in a way that is almost unknown today.”
I want to share story of the power of prayer which
Jim Cymbala, pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, relates in his book, “Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire.” It’s lengthy but I think it is worth
it. He writes, “Our oldest daughter, Chrissy, had been a model
child growing up. But around the age of sixteen she started to stray…. Chrissy not
only drew away from us, but also away from God. In time, she even left our home. There
were many nights when we had no idea where she was. As the situation grew more serious, I
tried everything. I begged, I pleaded, I scolded, I argued…. nothing worked. …
Then one November, I was alone in Florida when I received a call from a minister whom I
had persuaded Chrissy to talk to. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I love you and your wife
but the truth of the matter is, Chrissy’s going to have to do what Chrissy’s
going to do. You really don’t have much choice, now that she’s eighteen.
She’s determined. You’re going have to accept whatever she decides. I hung up
the phone. Something very deep within me began to cry out. ‘Never! I will never
accept Chrissy being way from you, Lord!” I knew that if she continued on the present
path, there would be nothing but destruction awaiting her. …. There came a divine
showdown. God strongly impressed on me to stop crying, screaming or talking to anyone else
about Chrissy. I was to converse with no but God. …. I was just to believe and
obey… I began to pray with an intensity
and growing faith as never before. Whatever the bad news I would receive about Chrissy, I
kept interceding…. Carol and I endured the Christmas season with real sadness…
February came. One cold Tuesday night during the prayer meeting, I talked from Acts 4
about the church boldly calling on God in the face of persecution. We entered into a time
of prayer… and an usher handed me a note. A young woman whom I felt to be spiritually
sensitive had written, ‘Pastor Cymbala, I feel impressed that we should stop the
meeting and all pray for your daughter. I hesitated. Was it right to change the flow of
the service… yet something in the note seemed to ring true. In a few minutes I picked
up the microphone and told the congregation what had just happened. ‘The truth of the
matter,’ I said, ‘is that my daughter is very far from God these days. She
thinks up is down, and down is up; dark is light and light is dark. But I know God can
break through to her, and so I am going to ask Pastor Boekstaff to lead us in praying for
Chrissy. Let’s all join hands across the sanctuary.
….To describe what happened in the next few
minutes, I can only employ a metaphor: the church became a labor room. The sounds of women
giving birth is not pleasant, but the results are wonderful… There arose a groaning
… a sense of determination, as if to say, ‘Satan, you will not have this girl.
Take your hands off her - she is coming back. I was overwhelmed. The force of that vast
throng calling on God almost literally knocked me over.
When I got home that evening… I told my wife,
‘It’s over!’ ‘What over,’ she wondered. ‘Its over with
Chrissy.’
…. Thirty-two hours later on Thursday morning,
as I was shaving, Carol suddenly burst through the door, her eyes wide. ‘Go
downstairs!” she blurted. ‘Chrissy’s here.’ ‘Chrissy’s
here.’ ‘Yes! Go down!’ ‘But Carol – I –‘ Just go
down,’ she urged. ‘Its you that she want to see.’ … I headed down the
stairs my heart pounding. … I saw my daughter on the kitchen floor, rocking on her
hands and knees sobbing…. She grabbed my pants leg and began to pour her anguish.
‘Daddy – Daddy – I’ve sinned against God. I’ve sinned against
myself. I’ve sinned against you and Mommy. Please forgive me.’
… She suddenly drew back. ‘Daddy,’ she
said with a start, ‘who was praying for me? Who was praying for me?’ ….
‘What do you mean Chrissy?’ ‘On Tuesday night, Daddy who was praying for
me?’ … ‘In the middle of he night, God woke and showed me I was headed for
the abyss. There was no bottom to it – it scared me to death. I was so frightened. I
realized how hard I had been, how wrong, how rebellious. But at the same time, it was like
God wrapped his arms around me and held me tight. He kept me from sliding any further as
he said, ‘I love you!’ ‘Daddy, tell me the truth – who was praying for
me Tuesday night.’ I looked into her bloodshot eyes, and once again I recognized the
daughter we had rised.
[Jim Cymbala. Fresh Wind,
Fresh Fire. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997) pp. 60-64]
God’s house is to be called a house of
prayer. To be a house of Prayer, we must be
people of prayer and to be people of prayer we must
1. Pray in
accordance with God’s will.
We must be desire God’s will in our lives
more than our own will. Jesus provides the supreme example in his
prayer in Gethsemane where he boldly
states, “Not my will, but your will be done.”
2. Pray
confidently.
When
Christian’s pray in Jesus’ name we can
3. Pray with a
Forgiving Spirit.
We have animosity with others it will hinder
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