Jesus Cleanses the Temple—Part 2
Matthew 21:14-22
Welcome back to the story of Jesus cleansing the temple. Last time, we all walked away with a renewed sense of the call of God on the life of each of us to reserve and preserve a holy time and a holy place to encounter and worship Him.
We saw that all thought and all work should be focused heavenward. We saw that worship is not to become a matter of commerce or of marketing, but of being in humble awe of Almighty God, making worship and prayer the pervasive atmosphere of our meeting in His name.
We are going to do thing in a completely different order today. We are going to hear the Word of the Lord first today. After that, we will enter into the music portion of our worship. As I have said before, all we do here is worship, not just the music time. So, we will begin our worship with the Word today. You will understand a little better as we progress.
Let’s pray.
Today, we are concluding our study of this story in Matthew. Matthew has left out some of the pertinent details that Mark and Luke include, like the vested interest in the graft that the sons of Annas, the high priest, had. Yet, in the next three verses, verses 14-16, Matthew gives us a picture in contrast between the greed of the one group and the innocence of another.
That other group consists of the blind, the lame, and the children. Now, those three classes of people are not usually considered regular people. They are not the ones our minds normally turn to when we hear about praising and worshiping God. They should; for it is in their innocence and in their humble circumstances that they are the ones most open to who Jesus is. And you see, that really is the point of all of this—who Jesus is, I mean.
I find it dramatic that Jesus switches so quickly from vengeful justice to healing mercy—all in the same place and in a matter of a moment. This shows us the very nature and character of God: while He is never tolerant of injustice, He is always simultaneously filled with mercy and compassion.
Our text tells us, “And the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple, and He healed them.” A moment ago, Jesus was purging the temple of what was improper, inappropriate, even sacrilegious. Now He engages in demonstrating what the house of God is supposed to be used for—as a house of prayer where the power and goodness of God are manifested.
One old commentator writes it this way: “The Church or chapel in which the spiritually blind and the lame are not healed has no Christ in it, and is not worthy of attendance.” What say we, then? Are we an assembly where these things take place? If so, then we shall continue on. If not, then either we get right with God or we abandon this gathering together that we do here and disperse into fellowships where they do. What say you?
In verse 15, Matthew tells us that the children were praising God, calling out and shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David!" The word used there is krazō. It is a verb that signifies “calling out with a loud voice filled with deep emotion.”
Think about that for a moment. How welcome would a bunch of children be here, shouting out praises to Jesus? How welcome would anyone be here, shouting out praises to Jesus when they felt moved by His Spirit to do so? When was the last time I heard even an, “Amen!” from someone here? I think we have become too stuffy and too filled with conventionality.
Know what I think? I think that we have become too much like the chief priests and the scribes who became indignant with all of that carrying on and became indignant about it. I think that we have lost that child-like innocence and comfortable awe of Jesus.
I purpose before you here today that we will either recover that, be less filled with our own sense of propriety and stuffy sense of ourselves, or we will abandon this venture and disperse. I cannot in good conscience allow any fellowship that I lead to slide into pride and prejudice and stiffness. I’ll either shake it up, or I will leave it in the hands of the devil where it belongs.
Strong words? You betcha! Wait until you read Jesus’ own words for a shriveled up, fruitless tree, though. You’ll see that what I am saying I am honor-bound to say if I am to be counted worthy as an undershepherd of His.
Before we get to that, I want to look at the reaction of the chief priests and the scribes. Did they join the children in worshiping Jesus? Absolutely not! Instead, they became “indignant”, as Matthew describes them. That word is very powerful in its description of their attitude.
In the original, the word for indignant means, “filled with anger and contempt”. The blind and the lame were filled with a sense of their own need of the grace and mercy of God, and they saw that need filled by Jesus Christ. The children, in their untainted perceptions and innocent love for God saw God is Jesus and gave Him their praises—praises that were His due.
Where were the men who were the leaders of the righteous? Where were the seeing, the walking, the adults? They were filled with the sense of their own importance-they had no time or inclination to worship Christ in spirit or in truth. In fact, the ravenous hearts of the chief priests and scribes were beside themselves that the orderly little program of their temple had gotten completely out of hand.
Now, I am not advocating chaos and complete disorder. That would not be honoring to God either. However, there is something in the sated and the satisfied that make us become stiff and stuffy and unyielding in the way we carry ourselves.
That is something I deeply admire and appreciate about my wife’s approach to worship—she abandons herself to it, to God, and to entering into adoring and worshiping Him. She is one who moves her feet, raises her hands, lifts her heart, gets on her knees, allows her sense of awe of Him to bring her to tears.
She is more like the blind, the lame, and the children—where are the chief priests and the scribes in this picture? I raise my hand and confess that I have allowed myself to become one of them.
Is this a comfortable message? No—not at all—least of all for me. As the man given the task of leading this fellowship, the responsibility of what our so-called worship has become falls to me. We need to get over ourselves. We need to swallow our pride, our sense of propriety, our sense of what we think is fitting and allow the Holy Spirit to be in control.
Otherwise, we are like the fig tree in the living parable that follows these verses. Jesus admonishes the spiritual leaders by saying (verse 16), “Have you never read, ’OUT OF THE MOUTH OF INFANTS AND NURSING BABIES YOU HAVE PREPARED PRAISE FOR YOURSELF’?”
Quoting from one of David’s psalms (Psalm 8), Jesus makes it clear that He is due this praise because He is God! If you read the first two verses of that Psalm, it is as clear as clear can be who the “Yourself” is that David is addressing. This is just one more text you Bible students can refer to when someone says that Jesus never called Himself God.
The reaction of these leaders? We don’t see it here, but Mark tells us “they began seeking how to destroy Him.” Jesus is no dummy. He leaves town for the night. He knows this “destroy Him” is going to happen soon enough—but it will be in His timing, and it will be in accordance with God’s divine will and plan.
Their plot to destroy Him will play right into the hands of the Almighty, and Jesus will conquer the power of sin for all who will believe. Do we believe? Will we live as if we believe? Or will we be like the fig tree, the symbol of those whose hearts have become like those of the chief priests and the scribes?
When we look at this story, which I am going to touch on only briefly, there is a lot of symbolism here. We don’t really need to get into that today. What I want to focus on is what significance it has for us in our lives. What does this text have to say to us?
We see Jesus, who is well aware that the fig tree will not have any figs on it yet because of the time of the season that it is, examining the tree as if looking for figs. Does that make any sense? It does if you realize that the fig tree is a symbol of Israel.
Didn’t God promise Israel that from him would come the Messiah, God’s Anointed One? Hadn’t He told them that they were to be the ones through whom all men were to come to know the one true God and learn how to worship and serve Him? Well, we just happened? What fruit did we see in the lives and hearts of those men to whom that trust had been given?
Were they bearing fruit? No—in fact, they were all showy, all full of outer accoutrements, but there was no fruit at all. Jesus was not punishing the fig tree for not having fruit at a time when it really wasn’t supposed to. He was using it as a living parable of His attitude toward the professors of godliness whose lives bore no fruit of it.
That is the message for us—always. Every human being was specifically created to bring honor and glory to God with their lives. Some will choose to submit their hearts and lives to Him as Savior and as Lord. Others will not. Some will be “klingons” to the kingdom, but not actually members of it.
The question then becomes: Where do you stand? Are you all show, or is there actual fruit in your life? Do you take and take and take, never really giving yourself completely to the control and direction of God, never really abandoning yourself to worshiping Him in spirit and in truth?
Who are you like—the chief priests and the scribes, or the blind, the lame and the children?
As we go to our music time, I ask you to allow this message to penetrate your heart. If you need to feel embarrassed by your attitude and position, if you need to be ashamed of yourself, then allow the Holy Spirit to convict you and bring you to repentance.
Feeling guilty when we are guilty is not wrong—we are guilty when we haven’t confessed our sin and repented. Once we have confessed and repented, though, we are no longer guilty. We are cleansed, renewed, and restored in our right standing with God and there is no condemnation against us because we have once again been washed in the Blood of the Lamb.
I plead with you today—allow the water of the Word to wash you today. Allow your mind to be washed clean of the worldly self-centeredness that prevents you of abandoning yourself to true worship. Allow your sense of your own importance to be diluted to the point of non-existence—if only for a moment—and enter into the pure, innocent devotion of a dearly beloved child to your Heavenly Father.
Let’s pray and worship with music.
