We are looking at a rare glimpse of Jesus today – His anger over something He is passionate about. It pays for us to take note. If it can drive Him to behave in such a way, it must be something we need to take note of today.
The Temple was a good thing. God commanded the people of Israel to build this temple. It wasn’t their idea; it was God’s idea. God commanded Israel to worship in the temple and offer their sacrifices there. The people flocked to the Temple for major Feasts – we saw numerous psalms written about the joy of going to the Temple, the songs of ascent.
But the Temple was always a tool, nothing more. It was a tool for encountering the God of the Temple, a tool for finding forgiveness from God. The Temple was a tool for worship, a tool for praise, a tool for repentance, a place for prayer.
What makes a church a church is her Head, the Lord Himself. There are lots of things we can do in a church – worship, ministry, fellowship, and teaching – but all these doesn’t matter if God is not in it. Our relationship with God anchors all these. Without Him, the place is a clubhouse. Without Him, it would be just a marketplace.
We saw this in Mark 11. Lots of activities but no one is touched by God. People have been distracted. God is no longer central in the Temple. Religious activities have taken over the place of God.
Beware. Don’t let activities distracts us. Evaluate your day’s activities each day or your week’s activities each week. If we do not look at what we are doing, over time, we run the danger of missing our focus in life. We hold on to outward forms but lose its essence. That’s the problem with these people. Their focus has shifted.
(1) Get the Right Focus - God
We go to church, no longer because of God or because we want to commune with Him. For some, going to the Temple has become a business trip, a money-making opportunity. Especially at this time just before the Passover – they expect an influx of pilgrims arriving to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem. People will come to the Temple to offer sacrifices.
God is placed on the sidelines as the merchants sought their own profit and people focused more on the sacrifices and other preparation for the Passover. Anyway, it was a religious event.
If the merchants were interviewed that day, they might have said, “We’re providing an essential service to the people. How else are they going to get the required animal to sacrifice?”
They were right, in those times if you live a distance away from Jerusalem, you can’t be bringing your sheep through that distance, down the street of the city to the Temple. The animals and doves were sold for sacrificial purposes. “We’re here to help the people!” And of course, they charge exorbitant prices.
The money-changers would have said the same. “Everybody has to pay the temple tax, and people can exchange the common currency - Greek or Roman currency – for the half-shekel necessary to pay the temple tax. We help people with their currency problems." Again they were making big profits. That’s why it a “den of robbers”.
Everything looks and feels religious, especially in the weeks surrounding the Passover feast. There was nothing wrong with the glamour and joy of the festivities, but it was simply not what coming to the Temple was all about.
The priests, the merchants, and the people have been so used to having the Temple around, right in their city, but the God of the Temple had not truly entered their lives. They had substituted a personal relationship with God – for a cold institution and blind obedience to rituals. The Temple was built to point the people to God. As John Wesley would say, “They had the form of faith, but not the real stuff.”
(2) Get the Right Agenda - PRAYER
Jesus: “My house will be called a house of prayer.” The focus is God. The agenda is prayer. Communion with God is our main agenda. It’s not the rituals, it’s the relationship!
By allowing the courts of the Gentiles to become a noisy, smelly marketplace, they have obstructed what God has provided – for the Gentiles to have the chance to draw near to God. Jesus: It ought to be a house of prayer for all nations!
In the celebration and bustle, they had lost the meaning and purpose to which the event points to. Rather than bringing the people closer to God, the focus has now been drawn away from God to gratifying self.
Have we perhaps fallen into the same trap? We have to be careful not to exchange entertaining music for worship, or lots of activities for serving God. It is so easy for the Temple to get clogged up with the wrong baggage – religious activities. It is so easy for our life to be cluttered with religious activities, and having these activities takes the place of God in our life.
Whether we have entertaining music or lots of activities in the church are not the key concerns. Did you meet God? Have you spoken to Him? Did you hear Him today?
It must be a house of prayer. We have to commune with God. If no exchanges were made with God, you’ve not been to church.
Is that really too much to ask? No. That’s what makes the church so unique. It’s not a community centre or a clubhouse, and less so a marketplace.
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Prayer is the important feature that distinguishes a church. No where in the Bible did God ever describe His house as a house of preaching or a house of music and worship. Preaching and music are important and necessary, but they do not override prayer as the defining hallmark of God’s dwelling. We see that in the OT – the Tabernacle. Incense, representing the prayers of the people, is kept burning continuously. The high priests enter the Holy of Holies and intercede for Israel.
If you read the testimonies of house churches in China, prayer is the hallmark. Wherever the people gather, they pray. It’s in prayer that you get online with God. Preaching is good. Singing is good. But it is when you pray that you tap onto God.
Jim Cymbala: “I have seen God do more in people’s lives during ten minutes of real prayer than
in ten of my sermons.” ...Jim Cymbala, pastor of Brooklyn Tabernacle, in Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, p. 71.
Have you ever noticed that Jesus launched the Christian church, not while someone was preaching, but while people were praying? In the first 2 chapters of Acts, the disciples were doing nothing but waiting on God. The church was born when the people were praying.
In Acts 4, when the apostles were unjustly arrested and imprisoned, the Christians did not call for a protest or lodge a complaint with the authorities. Instead, they headed to a prayer meeting. The apostles had this instinct: When in trouble, pray. When intimidated, pray. When challenged, pray. When persecuted, pray.
What does that say about our churches today that God birthed the church in a prayer meeting, and prayer meetings today are almost extinct?
The British Bible translator J.B. Phillips, after completing his work on this section of Scripture, could not help reflecting on what he had observed. In the 1955 preface to his first edition of Acts, he wrote:
“It is impossible to spend several months in close study of the remarkable short book... 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 no 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 psychosomatic medicine, they simply healed the sick. But if they were uncomplicated and naive by modern standards, we have ruefully to admit that they were open on the God-ward side in a way that is almost unknown today.”
Open on the God-ward side... doesn’t that stir your spirit?
That one brief phrase sums up the secret of power in the early church, a secret that hasn’t changed one bit in 20 centuries.
In last week sermon, Rev Dr Chiu Wai Boon shared on Matt 6:6 “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
Our God is omniscience and omnipresent. Wherever we are, He hears our prayer. Why must we go into our room? It means that our hearts ought to be closed to the world and open to God. To seek His face we need to prepare ourselves. If we pray with cluttered hearts or in haste, we can easily lose Him in prayer. Let us not be praying and yet be thinking about many things at the same time. In such a clutter-ness, we cannot see God.
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Look at the reactions of the people:
11:18 “The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.”
There were two opposite reactions to Jesus’ actions – one group said, kill Him. The other group was amazed at His teaching.
Why were the priests so agitated? They are the boss of this marketplace. The merchants and moneychangers were most likely in the employ of Annas and the high priestly family, who grants permission for the use of the temple courts. They probably earn from this business enterprise.
The other people sensed that there was something special about Jesus. The rulers were so angry they didn’t even listen to Jesus’ message, but this verse tells us the people were amazed at His teaching. They heard what He said. They felt it.
It is possible for us to leave with this same two-edged response when we leave the church. Those who come focusing on self and seeking self-gratification will leave with nothing from the Lord and with their own frustrations and burdens intact. Those seeking God will leave with His lingering Word in their minds and a burden passion in their hearts.
It is so easy to allow the forces of life to give us the wrong focus and the wrong agenda.
So let us come, seek Him and pray!
