36. Tricky Temple: Jesus and John's Gospel Part 5

G'day, Dave here.

Welcome to stories of a faithful God for kids.

I want you to imagine going to a local shopping centre with a grown up.

Maybe they're your dad or mum or grandparent or carer.

You're walking along, looking at the stuff in the windows, when suddenly the grownup you're

with shouts.

They yell out, hey, what are they doing here?

Theyre looking at some face painters and craftmakers and a petting zoo whove set up for

the school holidays.

In fact, theyre there every school holidays.

Everyone stops and stares at you and your grownup.

Youre feeling so embarrassed.

But thats nothing compared to what happens

next.

The grownup youre with suddenly runs forward.

They grab the craft table and tip it over.

Glitter goes everywhere.

The glue's spreading on the ground.

Then they pick up the face paints and throw

them up against the wall.

They open the gate to the petting zoo.

The lambs freak out and start running all over the shopping centre.

The rabbits bounce off to find some grass.

The pony rears up on its back legs, gallops

into a pram, throws the baby onto its back.

The baby's giggling.

The pony bolts for the exit.

The alpacas are so scared that they're pooping

everywhere and everyone's screaming.

Later on, the police, who by now have crash

tackled your grown up and locked them away with a goat that had attacked three officers,

ask you, why do you think they did it? And you're like, I have no idea.

I am so embarrassed.

Can I please just go home and crawl into bed

and, well, hopefully no grownups around you ever do anything like that.

But in the part of the Bible that we're going to look at today, it feels a little bit like

that's what Jesus does.

I know.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.

What on earth's going on?

This is going to need some investigation.

So get ready for our next episode of stories

of a faithful God for kids.

In our last episode, Jesus showed just a tiny

bit of how great he is.

He showed his glory when he turned the water

into wine at a wedding in a town called Cana.

After that, Jesus, his mum and his disciples

go back to a town called Capernaum.

It's on the edge of Lake Galilee.

They only stay there for a few days, though.

It's almost time for the most important

festival of the year, the Passover, the celebration of when God has rescued his people

from Egypt.

If you've listened to our last series on

Exodus, you should know all about the Passover.

Jesus wants to celebrate the Passover in the city where God's temple is Jerusalem.

So he walks down to Jerusalem.

It's about 135 kilometres away, or about 85

miles.

That's a long way to walk.

But Jesus wants to get to the temple.

The temple is like God's home on earth.

Obviously, God's far too big to fit in a building, but it's a reminder that God is with

his people.

If they want to pray or learn about God, or

ask God to forgive them for their sin, or sing God's praises, then they can come to the

temple to do it.

And that's where Jesus wants to be.

When he gets there, though, what he sees makes him really, really mad.

He doesn't see people praying, he doesn't hear people singing God's praises.

What he sees is people selling animals.

What he hears is this.

Can you imagine trying to pray with all that going on?

The people selling the animals would say they're helping God's work.

The temple is where you go to sacrifice animals to God.

So they're just providing the animals for people to buy.

But that's nuts.

The temple is absolutely not the place to be

selling those animals.

It stops people from doing what they're meant

to be doing there.

Jesus also sees money changes.

In Australia and America, we use dollars and cents, but they're different dollars and

cents.

There are australian dollars and american

dollars.

And if you go from one country to another, you

need to have your money changed from one to the other.

In Jesus day, most of the money is roman money.

The Romans Arent Jews.

Theyve conquered the area and they get to

decide what money gets used.

Some people have said, though, when you get to

the temple, you cant use roman money.

You have to use this other type of money,

which you have to come and buy from us.

And again, theyre doing it in the temple.

They're filling up the space that's meant to be used for people coming to honor God.

This is a disaster.

And Jesus is really, really angry.

He gets some cords and ties them together to make a whip for moving animals along.

Listen to what happens in John, chapter two, verse 15.

Jesus made a whip out of cords.

Then he forced all these men with the sheep

and cattle to leave the temple.

Whoa.

Imagine walking on the path up to the temple and all of a sudden all these sheep and cattle

come charging towards you.

Get out of the way.

Jesus isn't done, though.

The passage also says he turned over the

tables and scattered the money of the men who were exchanging it.

Imagine that.

There's money flying everywhere.

The animals are charging out the gates, tables are scattered.

Jesus turns on the people who are selling pigeons, and he says to them in verse 16, take

these things out of here.

Don't make my father's house a place for

buying and selling.

Has Jesus gone crazy?

Is he just being mean or silly? No. Jesus has every right to be angry.

The temple is meant to be a place for God his father, and for people to come and learn about

him and honour him and pray to him.

What does it say about God if people are using

his temple to stop people from praying and instead are using it to make money?

It doesn't make God seem very great, does it? And jesus wants people to know how great God

is.

He wants God's temple to be a place where

people can discover how great God is.

Jesus disciples are watching all this, and it

makes them think of something they remember.

Some words that are written in the Old

Testament.

In a psalm, verse 17 says this.

When this happened, the followers remembered what was written in the scriptures.

My strong love for your temple completely controls me.

Those words were written by King David.

If you had a picture in your mind of a king,

what would he be wearing? Fancy clothes?

A crown, maybe holding a fancy stick? Well, there was a time when King David knew

he'd sinned.

He knew he needed God's forgiveness, and he

knew it wouldn't be right to go up to God's house and ask for forgiveness, looking like he

thinks he's the most amazing guy around, looking like God should be really happy to see

him.

So he took off all his splendid clothes and

put on rough, itchy sackcloth, and people laughed at him.

They thought he was a joke.

They thought, what kind of a king would go to

the temple like this? And the answer is, a king who knows that the

greatest king is God.

A king who doesn't try and hide that he's

sinned or that God's more important than him.

You see, how you treat God's temple is how you

treat God, because David loved God.

He loved God's temple.

And if that's true for David, how much more for Jesus?

Who's God? The son.

Now, if someone starts doing the sorts of things Jesus has done, people are going to

start asking questions like, what makes you think you're allowed to do this?

So in verse 18, the Jews say to Jesus, show us a miracle for a sign.

Prove that you have the right to do these things.

Jesus doesn't do a miracle then and there.

He hates doing miracles.

Just because people want to see something fancy, they're not really interested in

finding out who he is so he doesn't put on a show for them.

But he does talk about something that's going to happen, something amazing, something

spectacular.

He says in verse 19, destroy this temple and I

will build it again in three days.

Umm.

Say what now? The Jews say in verse 20, men worked for 46

years to build this temple.

Do you really believe you can build it again

in three days? It feels like Jesus just walked up to the

fastest runner in the world, a guy named Usain Bolt, who ran 100 metres in 9.58 seconds and

said, yeah, I can actually do it in half a second.

It's taken 46 years to build the temple, but Jesus has just said, destroy this temple and

I'll build it again in three days.

John tells us, though, that Jesus is not

talking about the building they're standing in.

The temple they're standing in represents God's home on earth.

It's like a picture of God's home.

But now there's an even better place to find

God than this building.

Can you guess where it is?

It's in Jesus.

John tells us in verse 21 that the temple

Jesus meant was his body.

Just like we've been seeing all along through

John, Jesus is God the son.

He's God in the flesh.

We don't need a temple anymore because we have Jesus.

And the people there are going to destroy his body.

Not at this Passover festival, but at another Passover in a couple of years time.

They're gonna nail him to a cross to kill him and he will die.

But on the third day, he'll come back to life and that will be the sign to show he has

authority over the temple, because it'll show he has the power of life and death.

Only one person has that power, God.

So of course, when God the Son comes to his

father's temple, of course he's allowed to drive out evil people from his own father's

house.

His disciples or followers, they don't really

understand what Jesus is saying, but they will.

John tells us in verse 22, after Jesus was raised from death, his followers remembered

that Jesus had said this.

Then they believe the scriptures and the words

Jesus said.

When Jesus is raised to life, then it'll all

make sense.

Thankfully, we don't have to wait two years to

know about that.

We already know that Jesus came back from the

dead.

We can already look and think about the signs

that show jesus really is God the son.

He really does have authority over the temple.

In fact, he has authority over the whole world.

You know, the people who were selling things in the temple, they didn't really care about

God.

They didn't care about people knowing God.

That's why they didn't care about the temple.

And it's also why they didn't care about Jesus

when he arrived.

How we treat Jesus shows what we think about

goddess.

Because Jesus is God the son.

We need to honor Jesus as God the son.

Listen to him, learn from him, let him teach

us and lead us about what's really important and what isn't.

Back in Jerusalem, lots of people are starting to believe in Jesus.

John tells us Jesus was in Jerusalem for the Passover feast.

Many people believed in him because they saw the miracles he did.

But Jesus did not believe in them because he knew them all.

He did not need anyone to tell him about people.

Jesus knew what was in a person's mind.

You see, Jesus is super clever.

He understands people really well.

He knows that just because people are saying

the right words, that doesn't mean they actually always believe or understand those

words.

And it's really good that Jesus knows that

because he's about to meet a person who has really good words.

But that's a story for next time.