Luke chapter 19 as we actually begin looking at the last section of the gospel of Luke. In the late 19th and early 20th century there were millions of people from southern and eastern Europe that poured into the United States. Prior to the 1850s, most of the young American republic had a Protestant basis of thought and of culture, and that doesn't, of course, mean that they were regenerate. It doesn't mean that America was a Christian nation or anything, but at least their modes of thought generally rested on Christian foundations. And this mass of immigrants from more Catholic and secularist areas of Europe changed the culture of the United States significantly, particularly in the north. Much of the congregational Massachusetts became largely Irish Catholic. The formerly Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian New York kind of became an amalgam of Italian Catholic and Russian and German and Polish Jews. And many of those immigrants had been influenced by the secularism that had come from the French Enlightenment as they come into the United States. And it's inevitable that a growing country is going to experience the watering down of the particular heritage or culture that that company had experienced in its development. We saw that in the Roman Empire as we've gone through church history on Wednesday evenings, that that begins to happen to the Roman Empire as well, particularly in the fourth century. What God is doing, though, as he builds his nation, as he builds his kingdom, is actually quite the opposite of what we see in every earthly kingdom. Because his kingdom is not a political one, it's a spiritual one. And there's not a scattering, there's not a dilution of that heritage, but there's a unity of it, there's a building of that heritage. There are people from every tongue, tribe, language, and nation pouring into his kingdom, and their emigration into the kingdom of God, it doesn't come through a watering down of doctrinal distinctives or through the loss of biblical heritage. But it comes as God builds all these nations and all these languages into one pure nation and one pure language. Today, we're going to see Jesus open up not a country, but he's going to open up a temple. And he's going to begin to invite the nations in as he builds people from many tongues, tribes, languages, and nations into one people of God. The story of what we often refer to, usually refer to as the cleansing of the temple is the beginning of the last major section of Luke's gospel. Now, we'll wait till next week to introduce ourselves more thoroughly to that last section of Luke's gospel. We'll look at the significance of this last section of it next time, but today I simply want to look at two verses. Luke is different from the other three gospels that talk about the temple cleansing. His account of the temple cleansing is very brief. Doesn't have much to say about it at all, but it's the story of the cleansing of the temple. Just two verses today, Luke 19, 45 and 46. Listen to the reading of God's holy and infallible word. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying, it is written, my house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. This is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we ask that as we look at these two very simple verses in Luke's very abbreviated account of the cleansing of the temple, we ask that we might understand the significance of what's happening here and the part that you have us playing in it as well as we too welcome Jesus to his house. And it's in Christ's name we pray, amen. Well, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, and as we saw last time, the triumphal entry, the adoring crowds are greeting him. And as he arrives in Jerusalem, the first place he goes to is the temple. Now, it's not just any other person walking into any other building. We need to recognize what's happening as Jesus enters the temple. The temple is God with us. Jesus is God with us. This is God coming to his house. Will he be welcomed at the temple in the same way that he was welcomed as he descended the Mount of Olives? And we need to picture the scene once again as we did of the adoring crowds welcoming Jesus. We once again have to picture the scene as Jesus approaches the temple. Since he descended the Mount of Olives that's overlooking Jerusalem, this mountain, so dominating his view of the city would be the temple itself. It's going to be in the center of his vision. It is a magnificent structure. It dominates the architecture of the entire city. It is the masterpiece of Herod the Great's building program. It took over 10,000 builders decades to build. Josephus describes its doors as being 49 feet high, almost 25 feet wide. It's brilliant white marble. If that didn't impress you, then the gleaming gold would. The entry plaza was 150 feet high, 150 feet wide, and it's said that the plaza reflected the sun so brightly that if you looked at it with eyes unshielded, you'd be temporarily blinded. An altar for the burning of the sacrifices was 75 feet square and placed directly in front of the temple's brawn doors. I could spend the rest of the hour describing the thing, and I still wouldn't do it justice. It is absolutely magnificent. But as Jesus enters the temple courtyard, this is the court of the Gentiles, and that's important. This is the place where people would come, and if they've come from a long distance, they couldn't carry a sacrifice with them for days and days of traveling. It wouldn't be sufficient for sacrifice. It would smell as well by the time that they got there. They would need to purchase a sacrifice on site. And most of them also would need to exchange whatever local currency they were using for the more universal Roman currency. Where are you going to do that? Well, the Court of the Gentiles is a good place to do that. And as Jesus enters the court, does he find there a throng of humble temple worshipers who are singing praises to God and glorifying his name and preparing to give their sacrifices? No. As he enters into the court of Gentiles, he finds that the temple court has been turned into a flea market. And it's not just any flea market. This is a flea market that's run by racketeers. Yes, people needed to purchase sacrifices, but the religious leaders, many of the priests had teamed up with the thugs and extortioners to set up a scheme to exploit the needs of the travelers. It was all money-making paradigm. Let me read you a little section from Josephus' description of the high priest Ananias and the way that he ran things. This is just a little bit after the time of Jesus, but it gives you a sense of the corruption that we see in the priest of the temple. He writes this. As for the high priest Ananias, he increased in glory every day, and this to a great degree, and had obtained the favor and esteem of the citizens in a signal matter, for he was a great hoarder of money. He also had servants who were very wicked who joined themselves to the boldest sort of people and went to the threshing floors and took away the tithes that belonged to the priests by violence and didn't refrain from beating those who would not give him the tithes. So the other high priests acted in the like manner as did those servants without anyone being able to prohibit them so that some of the priests that are of old were supposed to be supported by these tithes died for lack of food. This is the priesthood. And as Jesus enters into the court of the Gentiles, there are thousands of people that are milling around. Remember, this is the Passover, and Jerusalem usually had a population somewhere around 200,000 to 300,000, but there are 10 times that many now in Jerusalem during the Passover. And all of that activity is centering around the temple. This is a cacophony of confusion. To give you a sense of how busy this is, Josephus, again, tells us that in the year that the temple was completed, there were over 250,000 lambs sacrificed at the Passover. How do you process that many within the space of a week? How do you even describe that? One historian attempts to describe it this way. Day after day, masses of victims were slaughtered there and burnt. And in spite of the thousands of priests, when one of the great festivals came around, the multitude of sacrifices was so great they could hardly cope with them. Jesus is not strolling into the temple and finds a few people dealing in the shadows. The smell, the noise, the crowd, the mechanical and the efficient process of moving people as fast as they possibly could through the sacrificial line. The coins clattering in the priest's bucket. Plenty of opportunity for a crooked priest to conjure up a pretty nice profit. The buying, the selling, tables are set up for a currency exchange and the rate of exchange is exorbitant to the point it would make a corner loan shark look like a charity. And for the average person, you just can't get around this. There's no way out of this racket. Now, the people knew that I have to have an acceptable sacrifice in order to sacrifice. But guess who tells you whether your sacrifice is acceptable or not? It's the priest. And if you didn't buy your sacrifice from the priest's buddy, then your sacrifice, well, sorry, your sacrifice just isn't acceptable. They had a deal going. You had to buy your sacrifice there at a ridiculous markup, or the priest would simply say, it's no good. I won't take it. Philip Reichen in his commentary comments this, instead of being priestly intermediaries to help men find worship and to be blessed by God, the priests had become middlemen, turning their priesthood into a commercial monopoly in order to make financial profit out of man's quest for God. What's happening is Jesus enters the temple. It's big business. It's a cacophony of greed and confusion, people shouting and deals are being made, angry consumers arguing with greedy merchants. The king has come to his temple only to find that it's been thoroughly corrupted and turned into a corrupt capitalist playground. So Jesus comes to clean house. Swiss reformer Heinrich Bollinger wrote that in ancient times it was the practice of kings, once they had been received by the people, which Jesus has been in the triumphal entry last week, it was their practice to then correct and restore the corruptions and the perversions of justice that had gone on, the negligence of the previous kings who came before them, just like King David did when he takes over from King Saul. And this is exactly what Jesus does as we see him cleanse the temple. And so in verse 45 we read that he entered the temple and he began to drive out those who sold. That's all Luke says about Jesus' actions. He's extremely brief in his description here. Matthew tells us Jesus gets physical. He goes over to the table of the money changers and it's hard to imagine this, but Jesus marches right up to the table of money changers and he flips them over. And then he grabs the seats of the crooks who are selling pigeons for sacrifice and he yanks them out from under them and overturns their chairs. John describes a whip of cords that he uses and he uses it as he drives them out of the temple. He picks up the cash box and he hurls all of the money out. You can hear the clanging of the coins, the astonished faces of the onlookers and maybe a handful of those onlookers who are diving into the dirt to get some of that money. Mark tells us that Jesus won't allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And presumably the merchants who are bringing in their wares. Luke makes it clear, at least Jesus drives out the people who were doing the selling. When you start to mess around with people's money, they really get upset because it really goes right to the heart. Jesus physically confronts these people. The meek and mild Jesus, who is often painted as a pansy by many, physically confronts these people. Now this is not a rationale for Christians to use violence to achieve their ends. This is not a rationale for believers to use physical force. We're not Jesus. And we don't know the hearts and minds of the people to whom we share, with whom we share the gospel. And remember who Jesus is. We're not Jesus. We're not God. Come to his temple. He has every right to do what he does here. Doesn't give us that right. But Luke doesn't say much more about what Jesus does when he confronts these money changers because he's interested in what he says. And we see it then in verse 46. Jesus first quotes from Isaiah 56, 7. And he says in verse 46, it is written, my house shall be a house of prayer. Now, why is that important? Why is he quoting Isaiah 56? Well, if we go back to Isaiah 56, we find there the prophet talking about doing justice and righteousness, keeping the Sabbath, holding fast to the covenant. Those who are obedient will one day be brought into God's holy mountain, will be made joyful in his house of prayer. And God says this, back in Isaiah 56, from which Jesus quotes, their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Now, you might remember how Jesus, just before this, he pronounces judgment upon Jerusalem. He pronounces the destruction of the city, and as a result as well, the temple. And he says that they'll be judged because you don't recognize the day of your visitation, the day of the Messiah visiting you. You don't recognize me as the Messiah. Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes to his temple, pure sacrifices are going to be offered. Sacrifices of prayer are going to be offered. And now Jesus comes to his temple, and does he find that? No, he finds just the opposite. It's a house of merchandise. It's a house of profiteering. It's not what Isaiah said it would be. And so he quotes a second quote, this time from Jeremiah 7, 11, but you have made it a den of robbers. Why Jeremiah? Well, if we go back to the time of Jeremiah, remember the Jewish people, the time of Jeremiah excelled at lawlessness, and injustice, and rebellion. They hated Jeremiah. They hated his message. They hated his person. They hated his work. Remember, they even tried to kill him. And yet, blissfully and ignorantly, they would do all of this. They would lie and cheat and steal and try to kill God's prophet. And on the Sabbath, they would happily just march into God's temple and offer sacrifices. They'd go through the motions of worship because, well, God loves us because we're his chosen people. The temple had become a den of thieves in the day of Jeremiah, and so in the day of Jesus. When God himself comes to visit his people in Jesus Christ, we find the very same thing. And the Jews looked at the temple not as a place of humility and worship and praise, but as a vehicle for economic growth. It's a sign of their national identity, our special status as a people of God. Don Carson put it this way. The temple was meant to be a house of prayer, but they made it a nationalist stronghold. The temple was not fulfilling its God-ordained role as a witness to the nations, but had become like the first temple, the premier symbol of a superstitious belief that God would protect and rally his people irrespective of their conformity to his will. Now all four gospels record the cleansing of the temple. Why? What are we supposed to learn from this? Are we supposed to learn from this just how awful the spiritual situation in Jerusalem had become? Well, we should learn that, yes. Are we supposed to learn? The only thing that we're concerned with here is how passionate Jesus could be about sincerity in our worship. Those are legitimate takeaways from this passage. When we read the Gospel of John, which John puts this at the beginning of Christ's ministry, but it's probably the same event. Remember, the Gospels aren't arranged according to a timeline or a chronology. They're arranged according to a theme or a theology. But when John tells this story, he includes the detail that Jesus does this, as Jesus does this, his disciples remembered what was written in Psalm 69, 9, zeal for your house has consumed me. The dwelling place of God with man is his temple. And there's no principle closer to the heart of God's covenant with man than I will dwell with you. So it is significant in that respect, Christ's zeal for that dwelling. But what else is going on? Well, you may recall, as Jesus comes to his temple, think about Matthew 12, when Jesus says about himself that something greater than the temple is here. You may recall in John 12 how Jesus, or John 2, Jesus says, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again. He doesn't argue the testimony of his accusers in Mark chapter 14 who said, we heard this man say, I'll destroy the temple that is made with hands, and in three days I'll build another not made with hands. Christ will build another temple. He'll build a temple not made with hands. The whole scene that is surrounding the temple here, Christ's cleansing of the temple, it's not just another attempt by a Jewish leader to reform worship practices. Now Jesus isn't merely cleansing the temple, he's beginning to replace the temple. And that's why this episode comes right after Christ's prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Because the temple would be gone, and this is the first blow. The temple of which Isaiah spoke, my house, that temple is initiated in Jesus Christ who is himself the presence of God. The temple is the picture of God with us, but Jesus is God with us. And the Jewish temple that Jesus is cleansing would become obsolete as soon as Jesus died on the cross. He's the last sacrifice that had to be made. There are no more sacrifices that need to be made because the perfect sacrifice has finally been offered. And then the temple curtain is torn in two. The Holy of Holies is exposed to the people. And after the resurrection, when Jesus ascends into heaven, he sends his spirit at Pentecost to be with us, God with us, the temple. What's Jesus doing? He's inaugurating a new temple. This is the temple that Isaiah prophesied, that would be a house of prayer, and it would be a house for all nations, Isaiah said. Wait a minute, the temple wasn't for all nations. The temple was for the Jewish people. But remember God's promise to Abraham back in Genesis 15, that in you all the nations will be blessed. Part of God's covenant of grace was not only to dwell with the Jewish people, but with the nations. They would be brought in to dwell with him as well. And now when Jesus cleanses the temple, where is he? He's in the court of the nations. He's in the court of the Gentiles. In Mark's account of the cleansing, he quotes Isaiah 56 more fully when he records Jesus saying, my house shall be called a house of prayer. That's where Luke stops. But Mark continues, Jesus also said a house of prayer for all the nations. For you and for me, even though we're sinners, that we could be invited into God's presence. And then we find the New Testament writers develop that. Remember Paul in 1 Corinthians 3, he writes to a group of Gentile Christians and he says, do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you? The you there is plural, by the way. The church is God's temple. His presence is not in the holy of holies, but it's among his people through his spirit. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul writes that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple. And in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit. In first Peter, we learned that we are like stones, living stones, living pieces of block that are being built into a spiritual house. Jesus is cleansing the temple and as he does so, he's inaugurating a new age in which the curtain will be open and the Gentiles will enter in and worship the Lord. And so it's no coincidence that when that temple curtain is torn in two, as the last sacrifice is made, as Jesus is crucified on the cross, as the temple is made obsolete, as the Holy of Holies is opened up to all people, it's significant that the very first person to describe Jesus as a son of God was not a Jew, wasn't a disciple. He was a Roman army officer, a Gentile. who had never known Jesus before. Yes, a Roman army official, a centurion, and Mark describes him as standing facing Jesus. This Gentile likely is the head of the execution squad. And we can't be certain that he becomes a Christian when he says that, but simply that he recognizes that Jesus is a son of God. It's a murderous Gentile who sees it. Well, the Jews didn't see it. Do you see it? As you come to God's temple today, how do you see Jesus? Maybe you're like the centurion and you've got plenty of sin on your hands. Maybe you're like the money changers in the temple, plenty of greed. And maybe you're like the priests, plenty of fraud. Maybe like the skeptics, there's plenty of arrogance. Only Jesus can cleanse you. Only Jesus can clean house in your heart. Left to yourself, there's only one place that sin can take you, and that's to destruction. But Jesus comes to clean the temple. His judgment on the temple is a picture of his final judgment when he will come and overthrow everything that defiles God's temple. What's the lesson here? The lesson here is leave the money changers table now. Leave it now. Leave your sin behind now. Go to Christ, the only one who can cleanse you and be saved so that when he comes again, he won't receive you in judgment, but will receive you in salvation. And maybe you've done that. You know Christ as your Lord and Savior. You have submitted to him as your King. Peter tells us that as the people of God, that we have become the royal priesthood. 1 Peter 2 and verse 9, we are priests. We are priests who serve in God's temple, the church. And so, as priests. Are we serving in the right way? As priests who serve in God's temple, as we look at this scene and those priests in that temple, what can we learn from it? Three things I think we can learn as we, as priests, serve in God's temple, as we welcome Jesus each and every week as we come to his house. Three things we can learn. One is this, let's offer to God sincere worship. As we approach the Lord's table today, representing the last sacrifice made, it's not a re-sacrifice of Christ, but it represents that to us. The Lamb of God sacrificed for our sins. Paul tells us that through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as we come, we have been raised up with him and we are seated in the heavenly places. John Calvin puts it this way, if we are lifted up to heaven with our eyes and minds to seek Christ there in the glory of his kingdom, we shall enjoy him at last in his wholeness. Understand, Christian, that when you come to worship, you are coming into the holy of holies. that it has been opened up for you. It has been opened up for all of those who trust in Christ alone for salvation. But just because God doesn't strike you dead in your sin, like he would a sinful high priest who tried to enter the holy of holies in the Old Testament, that doesn't mean God is any less holy, that he's any less concerned with our hearts. Let's cleanse our hearts and minds and worship him in humility as we come to his table. Second, second thing we learn from this is that we can take seriously what Jesus says when he quotes Isaiah 56-7. This is a house of prayer. We emphasize prayer, and we emphasize our prayer meeting, not just because the church is commanded to pray together. We are. And not just because prayer is powerful. It is. But we emphasize it because prayer is a theological necessity for the church. As the church is a kingdom of priests, and as we all serve as priests in the temple, we all continue to offer up sacrifices to God. In Psalm 142, David said, let my prayer be counted as incense before you. He says in Psalm 119, freewill offerings of praise to the Lord. The writer of Hebrews takes that, and he speaks of the priestly work of the New Testament believer, and he says, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God. Is this house a house of prayer? I think we do worship right. We follow the biblical prescription for how we ought to worship. But are we a house of prayer? Perhaps the most underappreciated and underutilized benefit of our redemption is the privilege of prayer, of being priests who can go into the Holy of Holies at any time. And we're busy people. We're restricted by the limitations of time. You work more hours than you can probably handle. We got a dozen irons in the fire and they're burning their way to your hand as quickly as possible and along the way you've got to deal with heartbreak and disappointment and temptation that just never leaves you alone but it's a false economy that calculates that the trade-off has to be prayer. We don't have time to pray, we think, but the truth is we don't have time not to. Let's learn to understand by experience what a sweet and restful and fruitful place the so-called prayer closet can be. It is the most important room in your house and probably the most underutilized. Go there often. And the nice thing is, of course, you can go to your prayer closet, if you will, while you're driving to work or while you're preparing dinner or while your haunting thoughts rob sleep from you. But remember also that the cleansing of Christ's temple, it's corporate, it's not individual. And if you spend time in personal prayer, then you will hunger for prayer with God's people. You will hunger for corporate prayer. Come to prayer meeting as often as you can. It's hard to do. I understand that. It's in the middle of a week. It's understandable when you can't come every week, but it's a different matter when you never come at all. Pray together with God's people because you are priests serving in his house. Okay, third, we should recognize that when Jesus stands in the court of the Gentiles and he inaugurates a new temple, one by which the nations are brought into the very presence of God, that he's giving us the rationale for the Great Commission. Jesus has opened the door for the nations, so now go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, baptizing them, bringing them into the temple, bringing them into the church, bringing them to Jesus. We are priests who are not just called to serve within the ancillary protection of these walls, but we are called to go, to go and bring in those nations for whom Jesus opened the way through his death on the cross. Sincere worship. the privilege of prayer, the Great Commission. As we welcome Jesus into his house each and every week, let us be priests who serve the Lord with these things, sincere worship, humility in prayer, and a determination to do what he's called us to do, bring the nations in to his place. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we ask that we We may not be as those that you drove out of the temple that day. You see the church, the temple as a means to get what we want, that see you as our ATM machine that we just tell you what we want and you give it to us. but that we're here to serve, to honor, to glorify you, recognize who you are. We pray that you would continue to work in us, that we may indeed offer you our sincere worship, our prayers, that we may reach out and bring the nations in through Christ our Lord. Amen.