Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out all the people buying and selling animals for sacrifice. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. He said to them, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves!”
You might remember that the Gospel of John has Jesus clearing the temple at the beginning of His ministry. Here Matthew records Jesus doing it at the end of His ministry. Some people see this as a contradiction. It's not.
There are a couple of possible reasons this event was recorded at two different times. First, John was not very much concerned with chronological correctness -he was more focused on the meaning of Jesus actions than he was when Jesus did them. Second, Jesus very well may have cleared the temple twice. In fact, I believe He did. In a sense, Jesus earthly ministry was bookended by clearing the temple. We should probably think about why.
Before we dig into this, let me say that I don't believe that what Jesus did in the temple has a direct implication for local churches -although there are certainly principles we can glean. The temple was the center of Judaism; it was established by God and intended by God to be His dwelling place until after the New Covenant was fully established -at which time we (Believers) became His temple and dwelling place.
The abuse that was going on was more than just people making a profit in God's house. You probably recall that Jews were required under the Old Covenant to make animal sacrifices at the temple. There were, of course, requirements for the animals -God didn't want old or lame or diseased animals to be sacrificed; He wanted the sacrifices to be the best people had to offer. These were to be animals without blemish. Accordingly, when people brought a lamb or a dove to sacrifice, a priest would inspect it to make certain it was unblemished. Part of what was going on at the temple was that people would bring their sacrifice and the priest would find it objectionable and insist that a lamb (or dove) must be purchased from the temple. But, the sacrifice at the temple could not be purchased with with standard currency because that was Roman and, therefore, unclean. People had to exchange their Roman currency for official Temple currency -at a very high exchange rate. Often, the temple officials would then turn around and sell the animal they had just declared to be unfit to someone else as unblemished and worthy to be sacrificed. And although the people knew that what was going on was unfair, they had to participate because under the terms of the Old Covenant, sins could only be forgiven by the sacrifice of these animals at the temple.
It's easy to see why Jesus was angry. What He intended to be holy and sacred was being exploited for profit. You can see why this doesn't translate directly to modern churches. Under the New Covenant, we are not required to make sacrifices in this way at our local church building and the church building is not actually God's dwelling place anyway, we are. So, although some churches have small businesses going on -bookstores, coffeeshops, etc., it is not the same kind of thievery that was occurring at the temple. Nevertheless, I think there is a major principle here we should consider carefully.
We should consider that God does not like us to take spiritual things that He intended to be holy and sacred and exploit them. This isn't about money - it is about a disrespect and disregard for the sacred. We are violating this principle whenever we take something God has declared sacred and treat it as common.
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