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I vividly recall the first time I ever heard the Bible read to me. I was seven years old. I was in a dimly lit motel room with my mother, and we were both on our knees beside the motel bed, praying for God’s help. My mother took the Gideon Bible she found on the bedside table and read to me the account of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple from John 2. Something deep within me stirred when I heard about Jesus. Even now as I write these words, my whole being is filled with many emotions as I think about my mom, who recently went to be with the Lord.
The accounts of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple from the Gospels have always intrigued me, and for years I have read every commentary and scholarly work I can find on the subject. The best scholars agree that we do not know all the reasons that Jesus cleansed the temple, or, because of the way that John thematically organized his account, whether Jesus cleansed it once or did so twice (Matt. 21; Mark 11; Luke 19; John 2). Yet most agree that Jesus’ cleansing of the temple was a sign of His judgment and His authority. Moreover, a number of scholars believe that in demonstrating His judgment and authority, Jesus was also revealing His purpose in coming as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) and that He was demonstrating His love for the world, which the Apostle John makes clear in the very next scene: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (3:16).
Simply put, it seems that one of the reasons, if not the primary reason, that Jesus cleansed the temple is on account of His mission and purpose in coming to save the world, not only the Jews but the nations. In the fullness of time, the long-awaited Messiah came to seek and to save the lost. He came to His own people, but many of them rejected Him (1:11; 5:43). Throughout His earthly ministry, Christ affirmed that He and the Father are one and that His purpose is one with the Father’s (5:19; 10:25–30; 12:49). Jesus declared, “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (5:17). The Father sent the Son into the world to save sinners, and that was foundational to Jesus’ mission.
Jesus’ earthly ministry fulfilled the mission of God according to the sovereign purpose of God. For the Messiah did not come only to die but to live and to fulfill the righteous demands of the law of God so that His perfect life and sacrificial death would atone for the sins of God’s elect. Therefore, all of Jesus’ life and ministry, signs and wonders, prophecies and promises, and acts of mercy and judgment pertained to His mission as the Redeemer of those chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world.
In accordance with the mission of God, Jesus cleansed the temple by driving out those who were selling animals for sacrifice and the money changers. In Mark’s account of Jesus’ cleansing the temple, Jesus taught them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17; see Isa. 56:7; Zech. 14:20–21; Mal. 3:1–4). Pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem for Passover would need to exchange money and purchase animals for sacrifice. It was not feasible for worshipers to travel such distances with the required animals for sacrifice. (In AD 66, more than 255,000 lambs were sacrificed at Passover.) For centuries, such commerce had taken place down from the Temple Mount in the Kidron Valley at the bottom of the Mount of Olives. Yet these merchants had now set up shop in the temple, and in particular in the enormous thirty-five-acre outer court of the gentiles. Money-changers would often take advantage of pilgrims coming from other regions, charging exorbitant amounts (beyond the expected one-twenty-fourth of a shekel to account for the age and wear of coins whose face value became unintelligible). It was typical for pilgrims to exchange the Roman denarius for the Tyrian shekel, which was the temple currency in Jerusalem, used for the annual temple tax as well as the purchasing of animals for sacrifice. While Jesus was certainly condemning the money-changers and animal traders for their duplicity, opportunism, and thievery, the more fundamental problem was their very presence in the outer court of the gentiles, as Jesus declared, “My Father’s house is to be a house of prayer.” Being a house of prayer meant that the entirety of the temple, including the outer court of the gentiles, was a house of worship.
For expediency’s sake, however, and likely because of their disdain for the gentiles, the Sanhedrin had allowed the exchangers and traders to bring their noisy, messy, and smelly commerce into the place that was meant to be a place of worship and prayer for the nations. (They could not enter the temple proper for fear of Jewish prosecution and possible execution.) Interestingly, it is possible that some among the Sanhedrin (men such as Nicodemus, who may have agreed with Jesus’ act of driving out the exchangers and traders to make way for the pilgrim gentile worshipers) may have so strongly opposed this move from the Kidron Valley to the outer court of the gentiles that a major dispute occurred among the council in AD 30, a dispute so significant that historians made note of it. Nevertheless, we do not know the subject of the dispute, nor do we know when the change took place.
The need for a place at the temple for foreigners to worship the Lord was clearly in view in Solomon’s dedicatory prayer:
“When a foreigner, who is not of your people Israel, comes from a far country for your name’s sake (for they shall hear of your great name and your mighty hand, and of your outstretched arm), when he comes and prays toward this house, hear in heaven your dwelling place and do according to all for which the foreigner calls to you, in order that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and that they may know that this house that I have built is called by your name.” (1 Kings 8:41–43)
While many Jews despised the nations and did not want them anywhere near the temple, God so loved the world that whoever believes, Jew or gentile, would not perish but have everlasting life. The Jews crowded out the nations from the only place in the temple complex where they were permitted to worship Yahweh. What was meant to be a quiet and reverent place of worship was exchanged for a busy, noisy, and filthy place of commerce. The temple was the central place of worship for the people of Yahweh, and it was to be a place where the Abrahamic covenant would be in part fulfilled as the Lord, through Abraham, would bless all the families of the earth and make a nation ultimately for Himself and His glory from all the nations of the world. For that is the end for which God created the world.