JOHN120 - Yeah, It’s Pretty Terrible, but What Are You Gonna Do?

John 2:13-17

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. For those of you who are new, this is where we just pick a book of the Bible and then we chip away at it a little bit every day until we're done. Right now we're chipping away at John. We've chipped our way all the way to John 2.13, which is what we're going to talk about today. But first, a completely relevant old man rant about things that I don't like and that I just don't think should be that way, but I get why they are that way. Thing number one, gambling ads on everything. Crap, am I ever sick of that? I know that probably a whole bunch of you are like, you know, gambling, that's just uh that's a fun part of life. It's it's gaming, everybody's having a good time. What's the problem? I I think it's a problem. I think it ruins sports. I think it's particularly hard on certain types of young men in our society who really are suckers for gambling. And you know, with gambling apps, you make it even easier. I don't like it. I understand why we have gambling ads on everything now. I understand why sports statistics include the spread and all the other dumb gambling stuff. I just I know how we got here. I understand that it's normal now, and the longer something is normal, the more we just accept it as maybe being passively good, but I'm not down. I don't think it's good. Here's something else I don't like. I don't like super long lines that I gotta stand in when I go to license my car. We bought an old truck to take trash to the dump. Then it takes half a day of your life to just get stupid plates on the stupid truck. It should not be. But I get there's like crime, you gotta license the cars and pays for roads and stuff. Like, I understand how we got here. It just seems weird that we want to kill half a day of human productivity every time you gotta put plates on a vehicle. I told you this is a bit of a rant. I'm not done. I don't like tracking the kids on the phones. I know I'm offending everyone because just everyone does it now. I don't like it. The honest part of people atrophies when the accountability is brought about in the form of electronic surveillance. We know this to be true. I get why everybody does it. If you have, it's just one toggle on a phone. If you toggle it, then you know where your kid is. And what if something bad happened? Well, I don't know. Something bad always could I don't I don't like tracking the kids. I think it's better not to track the kids. God bless you if you like tracking your kids. I get it. I understand how we got there. I just don't like it. I saw another thing I don't like recently. They're making some guy in Belgium invented a mask that you wear over your face and it still kind of looks like you, but it's all screwy and weird and twisted up, and it makes it so flock cameras can't uh they can't do facial recognition on you. So all you have to do to not be tracked everywhere you go is just simply wear a mask that makes your face look screwed up, but still kind of recognizable by humans as you. I get how we got here. I just don't want to live like this. I don't like it. I don't want it to become normal because when things become normal, that means everybody's like, ah, yeah, well, it's just kind of how it is. And then it becomes default good. And then if you question it or you fight back against it, all of a sudden you're the conspiracy weirdo, you're the bad guy. Okay, why am I talking about all of this? There's a thing that had become normal that maybe people found distasteful in the first century. Maybe they didn't like it, but it became normal for kind of understandable logistical reasons. And it's just how things were when you went to the temple to Jerusalem in general for Passover. You know, there's just a lot of money changing hands, and there was a lot of people around and a few grifters mixed in there, and it was just a pretty ugly experience to go and be a part of a pretty beautiful thing, but it's just the cost of doing business if you want to be faithful to God. You had to go and contend with Jerusalem at Passover season. And I'm guessing that a whole lot of people in the first century looked at that and they're like, yeah, it's it's a bummer. I'm, you know, it kind of feels a little bit bastardized, a little bit cheapened, but you know, you know, just logistics being what they are. It's just this is, I guess, just how it has to be. Okay, maybe that's how it has to be. But, well, if you could relate to any of my, I get this is how it has to be, but I don't like it, so that I list it off, then maybe you can put yourself in the shoes of people in the original audience who were like, this isn't how Passover should be, but we get it. What are you gonna do, right? You're gonna challenge the way things are at the temple? You're gonna look like a weirdo. You're gonna look like a complete outlier. Well, how were things at the temple? And it's described here in John chapter 2, starting in verse 13, which I would like to read to you at this time. When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem in the temple courts. He found men selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords and drove them all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle. He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables to those who sold doves. He said, Get these out of here. How dare you turn my father's house into a market? His disciples remembered that it is written, zeal for your house will consume me. Wow. Well, Jesus just kind of became the champion of all the people who were like, This feels gross and it isn't how Passover ought to be, but what are you gonna do? I get it, it's just normal. He jumped right in the middle of that runaway social acceptance train where things that aren't good and we know they aren't good don't get checked because nobody has the courage to check it. And normal is kind of I mean, it's a huge part of how we formulate ethics at certain points in history. Certainly, we're no better than these people in that regard. Well, dang, Jesus looks mean here, but also you kind of like it, don't you? It does feel cheapened, it does feel gross what they were doing at the temple. And it kind of feels awesome that Jesus went in there and just nuked it. But also, isn't it crazy that just a second ago, he's like, no, no, it's not the time, mom. I don't want to draw attention to myself. My time has not yet come. I don't know that I necessarily want to do this miracle. Okay, I'll do the miracle. I'm big time paraphrase, is mine there. But just a minute ago, in the very previous anecdote, it's like, no, we're gonna kind of lay low here. But then in this one, he goes right to the temple. This is where the people work to kill him eventually, and he's like, Look at me! Not really look at me, but he certainly is drawing a lot of attention to himself here, and I would assume it's a lot of negative attention in the accounts in the other gospels, and we'll talk about how these line up another day. It prompts people to want to kill him. So it goes over that badly. But okay, were all these people just idiots and bad, and they didn't care about anything sacred? Or was this the the same kind of just slow degradation into a crappier version of how we live as what I was talking about a little bit earlier on? Again, I accept you may not agree with me on all of those things. Well, here's how I think we got there. If you go back through the entire Old Testament, you've got this ebb and flow. Yeah, that's right. I'm doing the little wave with my left hand through the air right now. You got this ebb and flow of times when the people feel the closeness of God, they're within living memory of the stupidity of their ancestors, and they're like, we got to follow God, we got to do this right, we got to do the sacrifices that God has established. We have to show care for the temple and all the people who work there. We got to fund that because this is the heartbeat of who we are as God's chosen people. Then at other times, they're like, we don't care about any of that stuff. In fact, we're gonna worship completely different gods. We're gonna marry neighboring women, we're gonna exchange dowries and enter into binding financial relationships with our neighbors, and then it's you know, kind of distasteful to say that how they do things with their religion is not good. And so we're just gonna kind of at least publicly pretend like all the things are equally true. We worship the God of Abraham, that's just kind of our thing. You guys take some of your babies and burn them on hot altars, that's kind of your thing for your God. We're all basically worshiping the same God and doing the they act like that, and of course, the wheels completely fall off because that's the fast track to normalizing really screwed up, stupid stuff through you know, social conventions and just this is just what's normal. And it it takes something crazy happening to disrupt that cycle, which is kind of what happens through the whole Old Testament. Things get really, really bad, and then there's a crazy, like cataclysmic level interruption to that bad that gets it back on track. So around well, in in 586 BC, the last of the tribes descended from Abraham and from Jacob, the last of them, Judah and Benjamin, are defeated. They have a little kingdom called the Kingdom of Judah. Jerusalem is their capital. They have a temple there built by Solomon where they do sacrifices and worship God, but they got stuff got bad. The Babylonians came to town. The Bible describes it as a just and righteous judgment from God using these godless people, the Babylonians, and Jerusalem gets destroyed. The temple is destroyed. God's presence leaves the temple, and the people become slaves. They become servants, they go into exile in Babylon. Well, a little bit later on, Persians come along and the Jewish people are allowed to go back home and start over with all the lessons they've learned. Rebuild the temple. It takes a while to get on track, takes a couple prophets yelling at them in the 520s and 15s, but they finally get it done in the mid-5s. They dedicate this new temple under the leadership of a descendant of David who would be king if they still had a king. And then they go through yet another series of ebbs and flows. Well, you know, let's marry, let's intermarry with our neighbors, let's get into binding financial agreements with them. Let's kind of, you know, morally equivocate on what we believe and what they believe, and things go to ruin again. Then in the mid-400s and the 440s BC, two guys, Ezra and Nehemiah, lead a series of reforms that the Jews it catches, it sticks this time. They don't go back to idolatry, they don't go back to the intermarrying practices. If anything, like they double and triple down on it so hard as to draw boundaries around Judaism such that they kind of stop positively affecting their neighbors. Then Jesus seems to give them the treatment like, hey, you're kind of missing the point of these reforms, more on that later. So part of what Nehemiah did in his reforms in the 440s BC is he put together provisions, long-term expectations and practices. Some of them were novel. Some of them he was drawing on stuff from back in the book of Leviticus, in the deep Old Testament when God was establishing things. But he has this comprehensive plan for how to make sure the temple stays open and it keeps working, and that this new, smaller, but you know, good enough temple that they built and dedicated in the 15s BC, he wants to make sure that it'll keep running into perpetuity long after he's dead and gone. So he puts these reforms in place. They're recorded at the end of the book of Nehemiah. And part of these reforms include financial provisions for the people who make the thing go, and a re-emphasis on what you would call the temple tax. And next time around, we're going to talk about how that temple tax ends up getting kind of twisted into something different. And there's some rules that get tagged on to it that go beyond the Bible and beyond Nehemiah's reforms, and how all of that adds up to this I see how we got there, but ick kind of situation that we're encountering in the temple with money changing. And then also we got to talk about the whole sacrifice and cattle and doves and livestock market that's going on in the temple next time around as well. Should be fun. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.