Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Person of Christ from John 2:13–25
“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’
His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ Then the Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ The Jews replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ But the temple he had spoken of was his body.
After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man.”
So reads the Word of God. Let us bow in prayer.
Lord God, the more we study the character, the wisdom, the words, the deeds of your dear Son, the more we understand that these are the words of life. These are the words of God. They shame us and expose us. They also nurture us and correct us and lead us in paths of righteousness. Forgive us, Lord God, when by a superficial familiarity we skate over passages without understanding them.
Grant, Lord God, that by carefully reading tonight and thinking about these things together and listening intently to what they say, above all by the power of the Spirit of God illumining our minds and hearts, we might hide these things in our minds and hearts and learn not to sin against you. We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.
It’s very difficult for most of us in the Western world to appreciate how important temples were in the ancient world. This importance was almost as mighty in paganism as in Judaism. So much so that throughout the Roman Empire, desecration of a temple, any temple, was a capital offense. It’s hard for us to imagine that in this day of spray painting buildings and writing graffiti and general disrespect for the sacred, but that’s the way it was.
By such laws, the Roman Empire was not necessarily trying to be wonderfully pious. In part, it was trying to hold itself together. The Romans sometimes engaged in god swaps. When they conquered some new territory, they would insist that this new conquered territory would accept some of the gods in the Roman pantheon, and they would adopt some of the gods in this conquered territory and bring them back to Rome.
The reason being, in their minds, that the people most likely to rebel and cause the Roman army trouble are those who associate kinship, land, and religion all together. If they could break up any of that, there was less opportunity for rebellion. So the way they broke up one element, at least, the god angle, was to engage in a god swap. If some of the gods of these conquered people were now Roman gods, and some of the gods of these people were now in Rome being honored by the Romans, then there was less of this threefold cord that could incite rebellion.
Partly because of this, partly because of eminent superstition, it was common enough in the ancient world to actually execute someone for desecration of a temple. The Jews who inherited Old Testament revelation had far stronger reasons for revering the temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem. This was the temple, Zion was the hill, Jerusalem was the city, where God had chosen to make himself known from the time of King David on.
From their point of view, it was not only their sacred history. This was the place where God himself came down every year on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and when the high priest went into the Most Holy Place, carrying the blood of animals, and made atonement for the sins of the people, they expected God to come down. Whether in manifest glory or simply something accepted by faith, they expected this to be the meeting place with God.
Muslims today speak of Mecca as the high point, and every respectable Muslim is supposed to make a valiant effort to get to Mecca at least once, but Mecca has nothing like the compelling power with contemporary Muslims that Jerusalem had with Jews. Not only should Jews try to get up to Jerusalem, but this was the place that was the focus of all of their religion.
It’s hard for us to understand this today, partly because we don’t think of temples in the same way, and partly for us today the Jews gather in synagogues. They don’t have a temple. They don’t have a sacrificial system. They don’t have a high priestly service anymore. So contemporary Judaism is streets away from the Judaism of the first century.
But for those Jews, it brought to mind the exodus, Moses and the Law, the tabernacle, all the specific commands of how the temple should be built, David in Jerusalem, the glory of Solomon. It reminded them of the division of the Davidic Empire after Solomon’s death, the destruction of the temple, the people going off into exile, then the return of a few thousand strong and the building again of a second empire that was no empire at all; a second temple that was just a shadow of the former glory.
Still, this was the place where God chose to meet his people. Every day, there was a morning sacrifice and an evening sacrifice. Three times a year, there were the great festivals to which thousands and thousands of Jews went up from all around the world. Thus, the temple had come to represent for the Jews far more than any church building could mean for us today. This building just doesn’t rate in our thinking the way that building rated in theirs. This place was unique. So there is no warning when he does it a second time.
Third, a straightforward reading of both John and the Synoptics shows that in both accounts, the report is tied to that period of Jesus’ history. In other words, in the Evangelists’ handling of the account, there is no hint of a merely topical arrangement. Now sometimes there are topical arrangements. Sometimes the chronology is not as set forth in the Gospels, because authors sometimes do arrange things topically.
For example, if you read Matthew 8–9, you get a whole lot of miracle stories, one after the other. If you compare them with Mark, you find that they’re not in the same order. The reason is because Matthew puts things topically sometimes. People do that. Luke puts a lot of sayings topically. I like reading biographies. Antonia Fraser wrote a wonderful biography of Cromwell called Cromwell, Our Chief of Men. In that biography, you follow Cromwell’s life until the protectorate when he becomes chief honcho.
Once he is the Lord Protector, there are five chapters where, instead of following things chronologically, Antonia Fraser discusses things topically. Authors still do that today. It doesn’t mean he’s sort of miscued at a certain point. Likewise, the gospel writers often arrange things topically, but when you read the accounts here in John 2 and the corresponding passages in the Synoptic Gospels, it sounds as if they are arranging things in sequence, and I see no reason for denying that.
Moreover, the theological reasons, in the fourth place, that some scholars advance to justify the view that John moved the story are simply unconvincing. For example, if John had it in the same order as the Synoptics, it would be found in John 13, but we are told, “John moved this account to make room for the story of the foot washing.” To make room for? You mean they didn’t have enough room on the manuscript?
If you had put it in just before or just after the foot washing, then scholars would have had a lot of fun explaining how the things were properly linked together. John could have done it if he had wanted to. In the fifth place, most important of all, all of the material in John 1–5 is without any parallel in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew, Mark, and Luke start with Jesus in the North in ministry in Galilee.
John 1–5 starts by placing Jesus in the South. There is a short period of his ministry in the South before he begins his ministry in Galilee. In other words, the two accounts complement each other. But to think at this point that right in the middle of this block of material from the South there is suddenly a story brought in from somewhere else is asking me to believe a little more than I am able to swallow.
There’s one more thing, and perhaps it’s the most important of all. Only John’s account provides background to something in the trial of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Let me explain. It is only in John’s account that you get these remarkable words, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” You don’t find that in the account of the cleansing of the temple in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. You find it only in John.
At Jesus’ trial in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there are some renegades who come forward trying to get Jesus in trouble, saying, “Hey, we heard that this man said he would destroy this temple.” That was, in principle, a capital charge: desecration of the temple. But where had they heard that? If they had heard it just that week, they probably would have at least gotten their stories lined up, but Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree in saying, “But they couldn’t get their stories lined up right, so that charge was set aside as well.”
If, on the other hand, they heard Jesus say something like that two or three years earlier and couldn’t quite remember exactly how it went so that the witnesses were all mucked up, then it makes sense. But in that case, you have to accept John’s account that this cleansing of the temple really did take place two or three years earlier. Thus, far from being opposed to each other, John complements Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Now that is the technical part of tonight’s conversation. Now we’ll get on with understanding the text.
1. The temple must be cleansed.
Verses 13–17. From this, there are two important lessons John wants us to learn.
A. The worship of God must not be devoured by forms.
It is important to recognize that, at one level, the moneychangers and the people who had cattle were doing a service. Jews came from all over the empire. You didn’t expect a Jew who was coming up to the Passover to bring his sheep with him as he crossed the Mediterranean, did you?
Moreover, every male Jew over the age of 20 was expected to offer a half shekel of silver per year in support of the temple, but the temple wanted only one kind of currency. Then, as now, there were different currencies in different nations, and you had to convert the currency when you got into the particular nation. In Jerusalem, they wanted what was called Tyrian silver because it was the purest, so you had to convert whatever money you had to that currency.
So these people were providing a service. After all, they sold animals so that people from afar could have their animals to offer in sacrifice without having to bring them all the way from Spain or Italy or someplace, and to convert the money was part of a decent service for those who had money from Asia Minor or Greece.
Originally, these people had set up shop across the valley on the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives. Then there had been a place for them in a lower part of the temple complex right out of the way, but as their business expanded and they wanted a little higher profile, they had moved into the court of the Gentiles, and now the business had so taken over that worship anywhere there wasn’t possible anymore.
The bawling of cattle and sheep droppings you had to walk through to get to the money changers and the money changers calculating their percentage. “Over here! Over here! Special deal over here!” You were supposed to worship in all of this? So the thing itself wasn’t wrong, but it had so taken over that in order to keep the forms right … the right silver, the right animals, the right kosher meat, the right kosher lambs … The forms had so taken over that any meaningful sense of worship was entirely gone.
In the Synoptic Gospels, at the second cleansing of the temple, Jesus says something like, “My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves.” They were in the Gentile court. The Jewish court or the court of women wasn’t contaminated; it was the Gentile court. So instead of the temple being a place for all nations, they had made it a den of thieves. In fact, the word can be rendered a den of guerrillas, a nationalist stronghold. They could still serve all of the Jews, but the Gentiles were just squeezed out. It wasn’t a place of worship at all.
Here the charge is just a little different. Verse 15: “He made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle, scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’ ” In other words, they had gotten the formal details right, but they forgot that God is to be worshiped.
There are a lot of passages like that in the Old Testament. Hosea 6:6: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.” Elsewhere in the Prophets, God can actually say, “Your sacrifices and burnt offerings are a stench in my nostrils.” Indeed, John’s gospel is going to go on in chapter 4 to talk about a still larger vision.
The time is going to come, Jesus says, when neither at Jerusalem nor in Samaria will there be worship, but those who worship must worship the Father in spirit and truth. God’s worship is not going to be localized in a temple. Nevertheless, this has some important bearing on the Christian church. Think, for example, of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11 in the passage on the Lord’s Supper. In 1 Corinthians, from chapter 7 on, Paul is addressing one problem after another in the church.
Because there are factions in the church, he tips his hat in one direction after the other. He says, “Yes, it is good for a man not to touch a woman, but nevertheless, it’s also good for a man to be married. This is from God. Yes, it’s good for a person not to eat meat offered to idols, but on the other hand, we know that an idol is nothing, and there’s nothing wrong with eating meat offered to idols. It’s not contaminated in any way. Yes, it’s good, but …” It becomes part of his whole argument. “Yes, but … Yes, but …”
Even when he comes to tongues he says the same thing. “Yes, I acknowledge that I speak in tongues more than all of you, but in the church I’d rather speak five words in a known tongue than 10,000 words in an unknown tongue.” This “yes, but” part of his argument in Corinthians is because he’s bringing factions together, but when he comes to the Lord’s Table, the only place in the whole epistle, he says something different.
He says, “In what I’m now going to address, I have no praise for you …” There’s only but. There’s no yes. “… for your meetings do more harm than good.” What is it he’s addressing? The Lord’s Table. Can you imagine? The one ongoing Christian rite in the church, and Paul can’t find anything good to say about the way they’re conducting themselves.
In other words, it’s possible in our corporate worship so to pull down the condemnation of God himself that our meetings are doing more damage than good. That’s what the text says. Jesus treated the corporate worship of the temple that way in the first century. Paul warns about this in a particular church in Corinth, and we inevitably have to ask ourselves, “Where do we fall?”
Let me engage in a small excursus, if I may, about the nature of worship in the Bible before trying to see what this may say to us today. Under the old covenant, worship was inevitably tied up with the cultus, with the sacrificial system, with the offering of animals, with sheep and goats, with the temple clergy, with priests, and so on, but in the New Testament, under the new covenant, that all changes.
In the new covenant, when you look at worship language, it’s tied in another way. For example, Romans 12:1–2: “I beseech you, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice.” That’s sacrificial language, that you offer something as a living sacrifice. “Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, which is your spiritual worship.”
So what is worship in a passage like Romans 12:1–2? It’s not something you do on Sunday at 8:30 or 11:00 or whatever. It’s something you’re doing all the time. It’s removed from the cultic. It’s bound up with all of life. Then when you read something like Hebrews, it’s the same thing. We don’t come to the old temple; we stand in the presence of the living God, because Christ has gone in before us and offered his own blood on our behalf. He is our great High Priest, and now we are to offer ourselves up to him all the time.
In Hebrews 13, we’re to offer the sacrifice of praise, the gift of thanksgiving. In fact, in Romans 15, worship is tied to evangelism. Compare that with the way we use language today. In the Western world, we tend to think that worship is the first part of the service. All during the week we don’t worship. All during the week we do our thing. Then we come to church, and the first bit, when you have the minister of music up here … that’s worship. Then you get the pastor up here, and that’s not worship.
So not only have we restricted worship to the service; we’ve restricted it to one part of the service. Remarkable. Someone wrote a book a few years ago called Worship Is a Verb, and the burden of the book was when you worship, you have to be doing something. You can’t just sort of sit there passively like bumps on a log. You have to sing, or in the part where you’re singing or responding or joining in liturgy or joining all together, that’s worship.
I have a real problem with that. Worship is a transitive verb. It has a direct object, and the most important part about that direct object is who it is. We worship God. Under the terms of the new covenant, worship is not a cultic act. Worship is supposed to embrace all of life. It is being God-centered from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, in our family relationships, in our values, with our money … everything. That’s what worship is.
Of course, when we come together there is a sense in which we do worship corporately, but it’s not that we now start to do something, worship, that we haven’t been doing all week. We’re just doing something corporately that we should be doing all week. In other words, this is a time for corporate worship, corporate fellowship, corporate instruction, corporate proclamation of the Word, but it’s not something for worship as opposed to what we do all week long.
If we have that new covenant view of worship, it quickly becomes obvious that if we reduce our understanding of worship just to a scrappy bit of our lives and then argue whether or not this means proper worship must have organs or proper worship must have guitars or proper worship must have [you fill in the blank], we are missing the point terribly.
If we think we can come together in corporate worship when, in fact, we are nurturing all our bitternesses and we can’t talk to some people in the church and we’re sitting there steeped in lust or we know we just cheated with the IRS or we just yelled again and lost our cool with our children and we have no integrity in our family relationships, and on and on and on … But we’re here to worship. I think Jesus would say the same thing to us, wouldn’t he? “You have the forms right, and you’ve lost the heart.” There might be a few things he’d chase out of us too.
We can have the best singing groups in the world, but unless they’re a reflection of congregational individual worship now gathered together in corporate worship, they’re just show. Give it a miss. There are a lot of other singing groups around. But if it’s the overflow of lives expressed in gratitude to God, then, yes, we come together for worship corporately, for instruction, for mutual edification, for keeping short accounts with the living God. God is not interested in the forms; he’s interested in the reality.
B. God’s Anointed, God’s Christ, does not win popularity polls in a fallen world.
Verse 17: “His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ ” This is a quotation from Psalm 69:9. In the Old Testament context, the Davidic king is suffering. He is being betrayed by friends. He is made to suffer because those whom he trusts prove untrustworthy. Jesus fits into that mold himself.
The Old Testament figure likewise had such a zeal for the Lord that sometimes it cost him the allegiance and support of his friends. It consumed him and devoured him. From a biblical perspective, those Old Testament pictures of a suffering servant, of a suffering king, of someone who would come and be so devoted to the cause of God and the messianic mission on which he’d be sent that he would suffer, find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth.
“Zeal for your house will consume me.” It doesn’t mean “will consume me with zeal.” That misses the point. “Because I have the zeal, therefore I will be destroyed by it. I will be consumed by it. I will be burned up by it.” What you are getting, then, is some of the first inkling of something that becomes stronger and stronger and stronger in every gospel. Although the Jews expected a messianic king, they did not expect a messianic king who would also be a suffering servant. They just didn’t expect it.
The disciples remembered this word. Later on we’re told they didn’t really understand it until later, but they remembered this word: “Zeal for my house will consume me.” I will draw further lessons from that farther on. For now, it is enough to note the temple is cleansed by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, and from this we derive at least two important lessons. First, Jesus himself insists that reality is far more important than form. Second, Jesus himself does not win popularity polls in a fallen world. There are lessons to learn from that.
2. The temple must be destroyed and must be raised again.
Verses 18–21: “The Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ ” At one level, these Jews, temple authorities, had the right, indeed the obligation, to challenge the credentials of someone who would act like this. Of course. On the other hand, there were plenty of laws on the books to handle cheap hooligans.
If they thought Jesus was simply some cheap hooligan, they had ample legal and martial resources to handle him, but that’s not their question. It’s not as if you have some CTA inspector coming up to some punk who’s spray painting a bus, and the CTA inspector says, “What right do you have to do this?” That’s not what’s going on. You hit him over the head with a billy club and haul him off to court.
If that’s what they thought of Jesus, that he was simply some sort of punk, they had the resources to handle him. No, they had heard what he had said just previously. They already were witnessing some of his authority. This was a man with a moral integrity that you couldn’t just dismiss as some cheap hooligan. So inevitably, they have to raise the question.
The sad part, however, is that they cannot possibly hear the answer. They want to stand in judgment of him. We’ll see next week when we look at John 3 how in John’s gospel Jesus will not allow anyone to stand in judgment of him. He stands in judgment of everyone else. That’s part of the pattern. If he is who he says he is, then he’s not the sort of person who stands there and says, “Take me or leave me as you see fit” or “Take the parts that you like.”
If he is genuinely the Messiah from God, then finally he will stand in judgment of us. They are so blind they cannot see this dimension of things at all. They cannot see that if he is the kind of person he sets himself out to be, they don’t have the right to judge. They should be listening. It is, in any case, Jesus’ answer that is shocking. Verse 19: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” What does that mean? I think we must learn three things.
A. John tells us that the temple Jesus had spoken of was his body.
The Jews don’t understand this at first. They think he’s talking about this physical temple. “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple.” Indeed, at this point the reparations were still going on. “You’re going to raise it in three days?” John comments, “But the temple he had spoken of was his body.”
In other words, in the first place, Jesus himself is the ultimate meeting place between God and his people. That’s what the temple was. The temple was the meeting place, under the terms of the old covenant, where God met with his people. If Jesus now claims to be that temple, then he is claiming to be the ultimate meeting place between God and his people. It’s an astonishing claim.
Supposing some preacher got up today and said, “Everything you have ever heard about where to meet God … in the prayer closet, around the Lord’s Table, in the meeting of your people, or, if you’re a Jew, in the synagogue or the temple … forget all that. You meet with God simply because of me. If you know me, you know God.” A man who says such things either should be locked up in an insane asylum or he is to be worshiped.
That is on a par with the kinds of claims Jesus is making again and again and again in the Gospels, and it is part of a whole way of reading the Old Testament. In John’s gospel, Jesus is presented as the Lamb of God. Next week we’ll see he’s presented as the serpent who’s lifted up on a pole. In John 6, we’ll see he’s presented as the manna, the Bread of God. He’s presented as the Vine. He’s presented as the Passover. He’s presented as the true Sabbath.
Item after item is taken up from the Old Testament, and Jesus says, “That stuff was just pointing forward. It was pointing to me, and I’m here.” That’s what he’s saying all the time. Even in the Sermon on the Mount, in a passage that we sometimes overlook, that is his point. Do you remember Matthew, chapter 5, verses 17 and following? He says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Fulfill does not mean to do them, to perform them, nor does it mean to underline them, nor does it mean to tell you their true importance, nor does it mean to reinforce them. It means to fulfill them. “They’re prophecy, and I fulfill them.” In other words, Jesus sees even the Law and the Prophets as looking forward to him in certain ways, and much of the New Testament spends its time sorting that sort of thing out.
For example, in the epistle to the Hebrews, one of the arguments runs like this. There you have this entire priestly caste, the Levites, set up under the Old Testament law. Whenever you date Moses, it’s before David. Along comes David, centuries later, and he prophesies that there is a priest coming according to the order of Melchizedek.
The author says, “If a priest comes according to the order of Melchizedek, if God really says that, then he is, in principle, making the old priestly order obsolete. How can you have a priesthood that’s set up according to the order of Levi, which everybody is supposed to listen to and bow to, and now an announcement that there is going to be a new priesthood without saying something about the obsolescence of that old priesthood?”
So the author says, “If the old covenant Scriptures themselves announce, in principle, the obsolescence of the old covenant priesthood, how dare you still cling to it today when the priest in the order of Melchizedek has already arrived?” You find the same sort of argument in Hebrews, chapter 8, about the covenant.
For example, Jeremiah 31 announces that there will be a new covenant. God says, “In that day, I will make a new covenant. It will not be like the old covenant.” What does the author of Hebrews say? Hebrews 8:13: “In announcing this one ‘new,’ he has made the old one obsolete, and what is obsolete is fading and passing away.”
In other words, the New Testament writers are constantly at pains to show what there is in the Old Testament that announces the change of things that are coming when Messiah arrives. What Jesus does in inaugurating this whole school of interpretation, way of reading the Old Testament, which the New Testament writers reflect one after the other …
What Jesus is doing is saying, “If you read the Old Testament aright, if you understand how the parts fit together, if you see how the pieces cohere, what you will discover is that the pieces point again and again and again in one direction: to me.” In other words, Jesus presents himself again and again and again as the key that holds the whole Bible together. This is part of it here. Jesus himself is the ultimate meeting point between God and his people. There is no other temple, no other sacrifice that will do. This is it.
B. It is, in particular, Jesus’ death and resurrection that establish him as the ultimate meeting point between God and his people.
What Jesus says is, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” Not, “I am the temple.” He says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”
Already John 1:14, in the prologue, had used tabernacle language of Jesus. The Word became flesh and “tabernacled” for a while among us. He tented for a while among us. In that sense, already you have a preliminary announcement of these themes. Jesus himself is the tabernacle. Jesus himself is the temple. He’s the place where you really do meet with God.
Now the step is one further. Not only in his incarnation, in who he is as the God-man, is he this temple where you meet with God, but, in particular, you meet with God in this temple on account of its destruction and resurrection. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The temple was the place of sacrifice. Jesus’ body is the temple, but he is himself sacrificed.
That is why in the New Testament he’s sometimes presented as the priest, the one who offers the sacrifice, sometimes as the temple where you meet with God, and sometimes as the lamb who is sacrificed. All of the various strands coming together to point to this one person, Jesus. You can think of them in several ways. The models of the Old Testament all point in one direction. He is the temple. He is the lamb who is sacrificed at the temple. He is the new priest who offers the sacrifice.
Then you can put some of them together. He is the temple, yes, the meeting place with God and man, but this temple is destroyed, and that’s why he becomes the meeting place. He must be himself sacrificed. This is preparing for a whole string of themes in John’s gospel. We’ll see in a couple of weeks he’s the Bread of Life. He is destroyed. His death means our life.
In John, chapter 11, the priest, not knowing what he’s saying, says, “It’s better for this one man to die than for the whole nation to die.” John comments wryly, “He didn’t say this on his own. Being priest that year, he was actually uttering a prophecy. For Jesus did die, and not for this nation only but also for all the children of God who would come.”
In other words, the ultimate meeting place with God does not turn just on the incarnation but on Jesus’ death on our behalf, the destruction of his body, and his resurrection again to new life, or else the entire account makes no sense. That is why in all four gospels the plotline, the storyline, is heading toward the cross and the resurrection.
If you find some form of the gospel where Jesus is presented endlessly as a model, as a spiritual mentor, as a guru, as a teacher of fine ethical systems, but not finally as a temple who is destroyed and built again, it is simply not the biblical Jesus.
C. Jesus’ death and resurrection establish his authority.
Look at the logic between verse 18 and verse 19. “The Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’ ” Jesus is not changing the subject. He’s not saying, “I don’t like that topic, thank you,” like most politicians, and simply introducing his own. He is answering their subject exactly.
“What authority do you have to handle the temple structures that now exist with such wanton disregard for tradition and civil law?” Jesus says, in effect, “The ultimate authority vested in me is demonstrated beyond cavil in an empty tomb.” In other words, Jesus dares to rest some measure of his authority on the death and resurrection, witnessed by hundreds, that was still to take place. “Destroy this body, and I will raise it again.”
At the end of the day, it is important to remember constantly that the disclosure of God in Christ Jesus is not an abstract system of thought like Buddhism; it is something that takes place in history. There were witnesses, real people who wrote things down, who were willing to die for their witness. Biblical Christianity thus does not put itself forward as one possible opinion amongst many.
It puts itself forward as the disclosure of God in real history that was witnessed, and you cannot simply take it or leave it. You can run from it. You can deny it. You can slander it. You can advance reasons for disallowing it, but you cannot simply say, “It’s all very nice, and I’ll buy this part of the system and not that part of the system. I’ll choose this little bit, but not that little bit.” It won’t let you do that.
It is not an abstract system where you can afford to be eclectic. It is the disclosure of God himself in the God-man Jesus Christ, attested finally by resurrection from the dead, massively witnessed. When I was an undergraduate reading chemistry and mathematics at McGill University, I’d come from a Christian home, and I had parents who loved me and were praying for me, but I was trying to work through some intellectual things that I found difficult.
In those days, Christians were much more likely to be challenged by science than today, where they’re much more likely to be challenged by arts courses for reasons we needn’t go into now. As I was struggling with these things and unable to get them all together, unable to handle them all, the thing that stabilized my faith during that period was grounding I had had in the evidences for the resurrection.
You cannot escape the history of the resurrection. You cannot. If you come to that point, then you have to ascribe to Jesus certain authority in consequence of that fantastic event, and then a whole lot of things begin to follow. What do you do with someone who claims to be God and then comes back from the dead to prove it with witnesses?
So I spent time reviewing the evidence again. What evidence is there? When were the manuscripts written? Who was telling lies? Who was willing to die? That sort of approach to the authority of Jesus is authorized by Jesus himself. “What right do you have to do this?” “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”
3. As the temple of God, Jesus is misunderstood.
First by his disciples, and then in verses 23–25 by a lot of other people as well. Verse 22: “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.” In other words, at this point, not even the disciples understood what Jesus was on about.
That’s very important, for they too belonged to part of a culture that expected a messiah who would be powerful, who would turf out the Romans, who would raise the banner of Jewish history once again, restore the kingdom of David and Solomon, and rule powerfully. But a king who would also be a suffering servant? They just did not have categories for that.
That’s confirmed in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, when at Caesarea Philippi Jesus says, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter, speaking for the others, says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus says, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of John. Flesh and blood hasn’t revealed this to you. You got this from God himself.”
Then Jesus, finding them so grounded, starts talking about his passion, his impending death. Peter, thinking he scored once and he can score again, says, “On this point, Lord, quite frankly, you have it wrong. Messiahs don’t die; messiahs triumph. Anybody who can raise the dead, you can’t lose.” Jesus wheels on him and says, “Get behind me, Satan. You don’t understand the things of God.”
It’s possible to be so right in one area of theology and so wrong in another. On this point, even the disciples did not understand. The Devil himself didn’t understand. He had no interest in sending Jesus to the cross if he knew it was going to affect our atonement. It’s one of the reasons why Paul can say in his first epistle to the Corinthians, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men.”
While everybody thought God’s side was losing, while the disciples were in deep gloom and despair in the three days of the tomb, God had triumphed. Here they did not understand. They simply did not understand. Now there are a lot of entailments for us today from this fact. I will draw your attention to only one.
This means that, in some ways, the coming to faith of the disciples in the Gospels is never exactly like our coming to faith. Do you see that? Their coming to full Christian faith is always bound up with the need to wait until the cross and resurrection take place. Their coming to faith is always, in some measure, conditional. Yes, they know Jesus is the Messiah, but they don’t mean by Messiah, by Christ, exactly what we mean.
What we mean by this is already shaped by 2,000 years of Christian history. It’s shaped already by our full understanding that the Messiah is not only king but suffering servant. They didn’t see that. Thus, for them to come to full Christian faith took the passage of time until the great event of the cross and the resurrection had actually occurred, and then they believed, and the Gospels record that element in their coming to faith.
Then the Spirit comes upon them at Pentecost, and only at that point can you say that they are Christians in a full-orbed sense that we simply presuppose by that term today. That means we should not be reading the Gospels primarily to give us a kind of psychological profile on how you come to faith, because their coming to faith is always a bit different. The Gospels simply aren’t given for that reason.
You know the kind of Bible study I have in mind, the kind of thing that reads a gospel account and doesn’t look for what it says about Jesus, doesn’t look for what it says about God, doesn’t look for what it says about revelation, but somehow gives you a kind of psychological profile on what it means to be a disciple or what it means to come to faith.
There are some inferences to be drawn from those kinds of things, of course, but they’re secondary, because their coming to faith is always qualitatively different from our coming to faith. What the Gospels are given for primarily is to reveal Jesus. Our study of the Gospels should, in that sense, always be Christological, always focused on Christ … who he is, what he has done, why he says what he says. In that sense, it calls us to faith. It calls us to discipleship. But the disciples themselves at the time did not understand.
Finally, some misunderstand Jesus, the temple of God, because all they want is power religion. Notice how John ends this up. He could have put verses 23–25 anywhere, but he puts them right here, right after this account, before we’re introduced to Nicodemus. “While he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man.”
Here are people, then, who see his signs and believe (it actually says so), but Jesus does not treat their belief as true belief. There is belief and there is belief in John’s gospel. There is belief that Jesus views as enduring, persevering, and genuine, and there is belief that Jesus views as spurious and interested in superficial things. So here. Many people see his wonderful signs. They see what he’s doing. They believe in his name, but Jesus won’t entrust himself to them.
In the context, what John the Evangelist is saying is, “Look, these people were fascinated by Jesus’ power. They were fascinated by miracles. They were fascinated by the signs, but they too hadn’t understood that he had to be the temple who was destroyed. They hadn’t come to grips yet with the suffering servant.” That, of course, can be true for us too.
We can think of a kind of Jesus who fixes our marriages or stabilizes our children or gives us a social framework in which to cling to people in the fellowship of the church. Then we hear the words of Jesus in John 8:30–31. “If you hold to my words, then you are my disciples indeed.” There is a kind of discipleship that is persevering, and it follows Jesus. Not only Jesus as king and provider, but also Jesus as suffering servant, as the one who dies on our behalf and who calls us, too, to take up our cross and follow him.
It is important to remind ourselves that this is not the final biblical allusion to Jesus as the temple of God. The last allusion to the temple in the whole Bible is found in Revelation 21–22. In Revelation 21–22, John the Seer (in my view, the same John as the one who is writing this, John the Apostle) sees a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, and he describes it full of symbolic terms.
Then he starts ticking off what’s not there. You could preach a whole sermon on what’s not in heaven. He says there’s no temple there, for the Lord God and the Lamb are its temple. Isn’t that wonderful? In other words, there is no longer any point in a covenantal structure with some kind of mediation. The temple and the priesthood? No, no. You don’t have to approach God through all of these structures. Jesus himself is the temple, and now, in the new heaven and the new earth, he is himself the temple in unshielded glory. We know God personally.
All of our knowledge of God now is mediated. We don’t see Jesus face to face. We can’t yet, but he makes himself known to us by his Spirit. We feel these promptings within us that push us toward holiness and make us ashamed of sin. Firm belief comes and grasps us and makes us orientate our lives toward the future so that we too cry with the saints in every generation, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
Things we used to love we no longer quite love. We know something of the Spirit of God’s work within us, but we still don’t see God face to face. One day we will. There’s no temple in that place. There’s no longer any further question of mediation. The Lord God himself and the Lamb are the temple. So all of this is part of the progress of God’s plan of redemption to the last day.
It is within this framework that we must look at ourselves, our society, our church, our ministry. It’s not just that we are helping people for right now. We understand from what we have come. There is an old covenant structure of religion that has taught us all kinds of things about what God requires: sacrifice, a meeting point, holiness, a priesthood, death to pay for sin. Then climactically there has come Jesus himself, the temple of God, and already we have eternal life, given by grace, received by faith.
Ultimately, it is climaxed at the end of history in a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, in what is sometimes called the beatific vision; such an unblemished, untarnished, unshielded enjoyment of the transcendent glory of God that all of life, all of history, is resolved and fulfilled and consummated in the knowledge of God.
So when we are addressing the social evils of our day, we are not just addressing things piecemeal. We are seeing part of the ongoing struggle of sin and decay against the triumphing kingdom of God looked at now by us from the light of eternity, and our ministry is possible because Jesus is the temple of God.
O Lord God, have mercy upon us, we pray, and grant that our horizons may be full of him who is the temple of God, destroyed and risen again on our behalf. We long for the day when we shall see him face to face with no longer any shielding mediation, and with the church in every generation we too want to cry, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” Grant, Lord God, that we may turn to him again and again for forgiveness of our sin, for power and strength to cherish what is right and true and holy and good.
Grant that our desire may be to do good as well, as long as you give us strength, especially in the household of God, but as much as possible to all with whom we come in contact. Grant that the advance of the gospel may not be in tones of cheap triumphalism but under the banner of him who was destroyed and who rose again, that we might know you whom to know is life eternal. Have mercy on us, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
