Hello and thanks for listening today to Trinity Sermons.
Here at Trinity Church, Streetsville, we want to share encouraging sermons rooted in biblical
truth that guide us in our faith journey as we seek to gather to love Jesus, live like
Jesus and lead others to Jesus.
This is our fourth sermon from the series titled Playing with Fire and Reverend Rob
Hirkmans will be preaching about how Jesus challenged the way people of his day thought
of and used the temple and pointed them towards himself instead.
Now before we begin, don't forget to follow our podcast to stay up to date on all our
future sermons.
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Thanks for listening and God bless.
Good morning.
This is a reading from John chapter two, verses 13 to 22.
When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
In the temple courts, he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves and others sitting
at tables exchanging money.
So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple courts, 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.
Stop turning my father's house into a market.
His disciples remembered that it is written, zeal for your house will consume me.
The Jews then responded to him.
What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do this?
Jesus answered them, destroy this temple and I will raise it again in three days.
They replied, it has taken 46 years to build this temple and you are going to raise it
in three days.
But the temple he had spoken of was his body.
After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said.
Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
The word of the Lord.
You know those people, you know the people I'm talking about.
They're kind of offensive.
They're always opinionated.
They have their agendas, right?
And whenever you get into a conversation with these people, they're like, they're going
on and on and on about their own agendas.
They have all these ideas.
Their ideas are really controversial.
It's almost like they like to offend people.
It's almost like they want to pick a fight.
They want to get into a fight.
You know what these kind of people I'm talking about?
Does this remind you of anyone you know?
Anyone you know?
No.
Well, I'll tell you by now, it should be reminding all of us of Jesus.
That's right.
Because for four weeks now, we have been seeing how Jesus disturbed and offended again and
again and again his own Jewish contemporaries by challenging some of the things that they
held most near and dear to them.
And by doing this, we have been saying that Jesus was playing with fire.
And I need to say that Jesus didn't just do this kind of stuff like 2,000 years ago.
Jesus is still pushing people's buttons.
He is still prodding and poking us.
When you hear Jesus speak, all of us should have a little part of us that gets a bit nervous
today.
Because it has been said, yes, Jesus came to comfort the afflicted.
But Jesus also came to afflict the comfortable.
So let me catch you up where we've been, and I'll explain what I'm talking about.
Four weeks ago, three weeks ago, we started with this topic, how Jesus set fire to one
of the most sacred symbols in all of Judaism, which was the idea of the Holy Land itself.
I mean, talk about playing with fire.
This is a hot topic even today, the Holy Land.
But Jesus audaciously claimed that the true definition of home for God's people is not
some piece of real estate located in the Middle East.
It's not this little piece of geography.
No, home is truly found in a person.
And that person, according to Jesus, was him.
And so Jesus was actually constantly challenging people to release their hold on their possessions,
especially their most valued possession, which of course would have been the land, the land.
And say to people, he would say, find your most treasured possession in me.
Find your true home, your true land, the true place where you can live in me.
That was a hot, hot, spicy meatball.
Jesus threw at them.
That's hot stuff.
Secondly, though, he challenged people on another national symbol that people held near
and dear to them, and that was the Jewish scriptures, the Torah.
Right?
Jesus took the prophets, and he took the law, and he took the commandments, and he took
all of that.
And he didn't say, this isn't important.
He actually said he was more important than the law and the prophets and the commandments
of God.
He put himself above Moses.
He put himself above the prophets.
He put himself above the law itself.
That is pretty, pretty explosive stuff.
We didn't get to this then, but Jesus actually at one point says, hey, you know those scriptures
that you're reading?
And you're reading them so carefully because you think they lead you to eternal life.
He says, these are the very scriptures that testify about me.
They're pointing to me, and yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
So Jesus wasn't done, because last week when Simon was here, he talked about how Jesus
messed around with a very sacred symbol in Israel, which was the symbol of family.
It seemed like Jesus was disregarding the importance of blood relations.
I bet some of you would get your own blood boiling if you heard Jesus say stuff like
this.
Who is my mother and who are my brothers?
Well, whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and my sister and my
mother.
And he said that in a culture that said, you don't mess with family.
But guess what?
Jesus went and he messed with family.
He says, I'm going to redefine what family is, and I'm going to put myself right at the
middle of the new family that God is creating.
So you see, whether Jesus is relocating the Holy Land and saying, it's here, it's with
me, or whether he is reinterpreting the Torah and saying, I'm the one who understands this,
it's all about me, or whether he's redefining the family and he's saying family is found
around me, Jesus was just dishonoring and disrespecting these cherished symbols of Israel's
identity.
You might say, well, this is horrible.
I didn't come to church this morning to be confronted.
I didn't come to be disturbed.
I came to be consoled.
I came to be comforted.
I don't know.
I'm not sure I want to be part of a church that's always confronting people or challenging
people.
I want to be part of a more moderate church.
You might say, but I would say to you, actually, you don't want a more moderate church.
You want a more moderate Jesus because Jesus played with fire and there's no way around
it.
But here's the thing, Jesus knew that he was incendiary.
Jesus knew the things he was saying, we're going to ruffle people's feathers.
And so he says, I know, I know I'm rattling your cage.
I know I'm getting under your skin, but just hang in there, Jesus would say.
Hang in there.
Stay with me.
Wait and see where this is all going because blessed is the one who does not take offense
at me.
And I hope this morning you're not taking offense at Jesus for some of the stuff he
is saying because it is vitally important that we listen to it and accept the challenge.
Now as if that wasn't enough meddling for one person in one lifetime, Jesus is now going
to light another fire today.
And he's going to, we're going to look at, I would say even maybe one of the most provocative
and dangerous things he ever did.
And I hope you're ready for this.
This is time he's not messing with land.
He's not messing with scripture.
He's not messing with family.
This time Jesus is going to light a fire under Israel's most sacred symbol, which was the
temple itself, the temple, the temple.
You know, there is such a long history and a long story about God's people and their
temple.
We can't get into it this morning, but it is safe just to say that the temple occupied
and occupies a very central place in the faith of Judaism.
And if we were to turn back the clocks, we would see that the very first temple was built
under the reign of King Solomon.
Sometimes historians call the Solomon's temple or the first temple.
And we can read in the book of Kings that in the 480th year after the Israelites had
come out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, he began to build the temple
of the Lord.
And even though this temple Solomon was building was relatively speaking smaller than the one
that would eventually take its place, it was still ornate.
It was still amazing.
It was made of expensive woods and cedar and everything was overlaid with gold.
It was about the year 1000 BC when Solomon built this temple.
But then 500 years later, the Babylonians came in and destroyed it.
It was needless to say, utterly devastating.
Jesus however, lived in a different period of time.
Jesus lived in what we would call the second temple period because Israel, yes, made a
few attempts between the years 500 BC and Jesus's day to rebuild that temple.
But it really wasn't until King Herod came along.
And I've told you before, King Herod had this thing about building projects and he rebuilt
the temple into what we would now call the second temple, the second temple period of
time.
And this temple, I mean, it was glorious.
I don't know if it was Herod's ego that made him do it or if it was his desire to kind
of appease the Jewish people who he was ruling over and curry favor with them.
But this temple would have been one of the great wonders of the world in Jesus's day.
The construction began 20 years before Jesus was born and it took a total of 84 years before
the temple was fully complete.
So during Jesus's day, the temple was not even complete yet, although it already looked
just so magnificent.
For Jews, what was the temple about?
First of all, it was a place of pride.
This was where the kings of old were connected.
This is where Israel's history was found.
This was their identity.
This temple had been burned down and rebuilt and reclaimed and fought for.
It was a symbol of national pride.
Israel and the temple, they just went together.
Hard to imagine one without the other.
But not only was it a place of pride, it was a place of pilgrimage.
Every family in Israel, it was hoped in their lifetime would make a trip to the temple.
Some went many times to the temple for special events and for special celebrations.
And it wasn't just Jewish people who journeyed to the temple.
The temple was supposed to be a house of prayer for all people, for all nations, and all the
nations would stream to visit the temple.
It was a place of pilgrimage.
It was a place of pride, but it was also a place of pardon.
It was at the temple where sins were forgiven.
It was a place where you would go and you would purchase a goat or a bull or a lamb
or it didn't say cat here.
But I wonder, I wonder.
And anyways, you would take those things to the temple and you give it to the priest and
the priest would sacrifice it right in front of you.
Sounds horrible, sounds gory, but the blood of the sacrifice would flow over the altar.
It would pool around you and through that spilling of blood, you experience the forgiveness
of your sins again and again and again.
But most importantly, the temple was a place of God's presence.
The temple really was seen as God's earthly home.
It was where his glory, what the Old Testament calls the shekinah, the presence of God would
dwell in the temple.
The temple was thick with God.
Sometimes we call churches the house of God.
Hey, everybody, welcome to the house of the Lord.
But no, no, no, the temple was in like a whole nother category altogether.
In fact, we're told that when the first temple was constructed at one point, fire descended
from heaven and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.
And the priest couldn't even go in the temple because God's glory was just so explosive
and radiant in there.
It was truly understood as God's dwelling place on earth, his special home.
It was where you went to meet with God.
And even today, millions of people flock to Jerusalem on trips and tours to see this place,
including many Christians, right?
Because they see the temple as a place of pride, as a place of pilgrimage, of pardon,
and yes, even God's presence.
So some people believe that the temple is the real home of God.
They do.
Some people still believe that one day God's people are going to take back control of the
temple mount.
Some people still believe that God will once again take up residence in the temple at the
end of time.
And some people believe that rebuilding the temple, therefore, is one of the things that
we look for as a sign of the end times being upon us.
And some people, therefore, still believe that the temple occupies a critical place
in God's plan for the world.
Some people believe all of this, but I have to tell you, Jesus was not one of them.
Jesus was a critic of the temple.
And he believed that Israel's fixation with the temple was not going to lead to their
salvation.
It was ultimately going to lead to their destruction.
And anyone, you can imagine, who takes a position like that at a time like that was taking their
own lives in their hand.
They were playing with fire.
It all comes down to that story we were reading this morning.
It's a story that actually appears in every one of the gospels, so we know it's pretty
important for understanding what Jesus was up to.
Jesus goes down to Jerusalem, and when he gets there, he looks around, and he goes into
the temple, looks around, and he's not happy with what he sees.
He makes a whip out of cords.
He begins tossing tables this way and that, throwing chairs over, knocking over the money
changers, and he's causing a real, real ruckus.
He's driving people out of there.
He's letting the animals go.
Now it was almost like he was trashing the place.
You might say, Rob, watch your language.
Surely Jesus was not trashing the temple.
In fact, in my Bible, yes, in my Bible, it says Jesus cleansed the temple.
He was cleansing the temple.
Now this is important for every one of us who reads our Bible to figure out what Jesus
was doing in that moment.
Was he cleansing the temple?
Was he cleansing?
If you think he was cleansing the temple, then maybe your view of Jesus is like he is
mystically, right?
He's a nice guy who loved the temple and just wanted to clean it up.
He wanted to get the temple back to its former glory.
Let's get this commercialism out of here.
Get these guys out of here.
Let's get this temple back to the way that it should be.
Is that what he was doing?
Was he cleansing the temple, a symbolic cleansing?
If you think so, I want to challenge you to think again, because that is not what a lot
of scholars think Jesus was up to that day, saying, oh, guys, let's get out of here.
Let's clean this place up.
Jesus, rather than enacting the cleanup of the temple, many people think Jesus was enacting
the destruction of the temple.
In which case, Jesus is more like Conan the Destroyer than Mr. Clean, right?
When he turned over the tables and chairs, when he smashed the jars of money, when he
let the animals all go through the temple and he was throwing things around and chasing
people around, Jesus was not pretending to clean up the temple.
Jesus was pretending to knock down the temple.
It was a demonstration, all right, saying that people listen to me.
One day, all of this is going to come crashing down.
Now, I'm sure you can imagine a demonstration like that would get you in a lot of hot water.
He's playing with fire.
You don't get to say stuff like that about the temple and live to tell about it.
Let me prove my point, though.
Another day, when Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, oh, look,
Jesus, look, teacher, what wonderful stones.
Look how big they are.
And look at what beautiful, magnificent buildings.
And Jesus, in reply, did he say, oh, yes, praise God, may the temple once again be filled
with God's glory?
No.
Instead, Jesus says, do you see these great buildings?
Not one stone here is going to be left on another.
Everyone will be thrown down.
And Jesus said stuff like this throughout all the gospels.
It was like he had this sense that the temple was coming to an end, like it was going to
be destroyed.
He could picture the future.
It was going to be knocked off the map somehow.
In fact, Jesus would even go so far as to say things like, listen, I'm warning you, the
days are coming.
When enemies, yes, enemies will encircle this city and they will destroy this temple, not
one stone is going to be left on another.
He even went so far as to give people some real kind of personal warnings.
He'd be like, hey, when you see the soldiers arrive and they start camping outside the
city, when that day comes, it's about to be devastated.
The whole thing is going to be razed to the ground.
And if you're living in Judea at that time, here's my advice to you, run to the hills.
And if you happen to be in the city when that happens, just get out quickly and it's all
coming down.
It's all coming down.
Now, it was so interesting because at a time when everyone thought the temple had never
looked so good, Jesus says it's all going to burn, baby, burn.
Right?
He's playing with fire.
And he goes even further because you know what Jesus does when he challenges these symbols?
He always puts himself in place of the old symbol.
So for example, Jesus says, I'm the new land.
Jesus says, I'm the new Moses.
I'm the new interpreter of the law or I'm the new head of the family.
And that's exactly what Jesus does here with the temple too.
He says, I'm the new temple.
I'm the new temple, which explains what Jesus meant when he said this, destroy this temple
and I will raise it up again in three days.
What are you talking about?
Jesus took 46 years to build the temple and it's still not done.
And you're going to raise it in three days.
But the temple he was talking about was his body.
Jesus knew one temple was going down and another temple was coming on up and he was going to
be that new temple himself.
If you go to Jerusalem today, you will see these massive stones that make up the Western
wall of the temple.
They've been precisely cut and positioned.
They're magnificent, creating tremendous strong, strong walls.
With that in mind, it changes how you hear things like this when Jesus said, hey, have
you never read the scripture that the stone the builders rejected is going to become the
cornerstone?
You might not get it because we're living 2000 years later on the other side of the
world.
But in Jesus day, when someone came along and talked about a cornerstone, what he's
saying is I am the rejected stone, but I will become the new foundation for a new temple
that God is building.
Again, you got to hear these things the way they would have originally been heard.
I'll give you another example.
You go to the Western wall again.
There is one stone in the Western wall called the Western stone, and it is one of the largest
building blocks ever in the world.
It's somewhere between 300 and 500 tons heavy, they estimate.
With that in mind, listen to what Jesus says in Matthew 7.
You've all heard the parable of the wise and foolish builders.
One builds his house on the sand.
Another builds his house on the rock.
Well, Jesus says everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like
a wise man who built his house on a rock.
That is code.
It's not even code.
Anyone listening in Jesus' day would have known that there's a house on a rock.
He's talking about the temple.
I guarantee you that's what they thought.
So Jesus says this temple is going to come down.
It's going to crash and burn, but if you build your life on me, on my rock, the temple I
am building, that one will not fall.
This temple's days are numbered, but my temple will have no end.
Let's just keep going a little bit further here.
Remember the last supper.
Jesus gathers around the table with his disciples.
He takes the cup and he says, this is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for
many for the forgiveness of sins.
Wait a second, Jesus, blood?
Forgiveness of sins?
Wait, wait, wait.
That's the job of the temple, but Jesus says, no, no, not anymore.
You don't need to slaughter any bulls or you don't need to slaughter any goats or any sheep
or doves anymore, right?
I'm the new temple.
My body, my blood is the real sacrifice.
I am the real source of forgiveness.
I am the real temple.
Folks, this was real controversial.
He's essentially saying the temple is obsolete compared to his forgiving work.
Here's a bonus, a bonus for you.
Do you guys remember when Jesus was dying on the cross?
He's hanging, breathing his last breaths.
And as he dies, we are told that at the moment he died, the curtain in the temple ripped
from top to bottom.
Why are we told that?
Because what we're learning is that when Jesus died, the final sacrifice had now been made.
The old temple was done.
The new temple was here.
Jesus took his life in his hands.
I mean, he just came out and said it.
Nothing greater than the temple is here.
He's talking about himself.
So no, Jesus was not just cleaning up the temple that day in hopes that one day its
former glory would return.
He was showing people that one day it was all going to come crashing down and he was
going to take its place.
That my friends is what you call playing with fire.
But you know what?
He was right.
In the year AD 70, after another failed revolution by the Jewish people, Rome fought back.
Just as Jesus predicted, they encircled the city.
And just as he predicted, they starved them out.
They broke through the walls.
Thousands upon thousands of Jewish people died in those days and weeks.
They broke through the temple mount and they destroyed it.
And that great wonder of the world, that great place of pride and pilgrimage of pardon and
God's presence was burned to the ground.
And all the treasures were carted off and taken back to Rome.
It all came down.
Jesus was right.
When you visit Jerusalem today, there's actually not much to see left of the original temple
except that Western wall, which is now called the Wailing Wall, where Jewish people still
go to this day and they pray and they remember the temple.
And some Jews, I read, even believe God's presence is somehow still residing in that
one remaining wall.
But the temple is gone.
It's a good reminder for us as a church not to put too much stock in earthly structures.
Many churches like Trinity have beautiful buildings, amazing locations that can become
a real source of pride for us too.
People still call their churches sometimes the house of the Lord, God's house, as if
God lived within four walls like these.
Guys given all that Jesus just taught us, this is a huge, huge mistake.
And actually nobody knows this story better than Trinity itself.
25 years ago, parishioners of this church sat out there on Queen Street and watched
this church burn to the ground.
Our temple, if you will, was destroyed.
Was that the end of Trinity?
No it was not because for Trinity, Jesus was the temple.
For Trinity, Jesus is the temple.
The presence of God did not live in those four walls.
God's presence lived in the hearts of the people of Trinity.
All that the temple was now finds its fulfillment in Jesus.
Jesus is our pride and joy.
Jesus is our pilgrimage.
He's the one we journey with through life.
Jesus is our source of pardon.
He's the one who forgives us once and for all through his own blood.
And Jesus is the dwelling place of God.
That means that God is with us today, not because the spirit of God happens to live
in this location on Queen Street, but because God's temple is comprised of God's people
and where we are gathered, God is in our midst.
The temples of old were just mere pointers.
They were pointing toward a greater temple that was yet to come.
And now that Jesus has come, those temples are gone forever.
And I say forever because if you turn to the last book of the Bible, to one of the last
pages of the Bible, you will see this beautiful vision of a new creation, a new heaven and
a new earth.
And yet there's one thing that is lacking in that vision of the future, and that is
there is no temple.
There's no temple.
And why is that?
Because the Lord Almighty and the lamb are the temple.
The temple is gone.
It's never coming back.
So if you're here today, you're looking for forgiveness.
I've got good news for you.
You don't need to go anywhere.
You don't need to go to any temple in any city anywhere.
And if you're here today and you're looking to find the presence of God, you do not need
to take a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or any other place.
The only journey any of us needs to take is the journey of faith toward Jesus.
And the only pilgrimage any of us needs to make is the movement of our heart toward God.
That is how you go to the temple.
You move toward God and you journey with Jesus.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Thanks so much for listening today.
It is our hope that you enjoyed this message and were inspired by Rob's sermon.
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And don't forget to come back next week for our final sermon in this series.
Today's sermon was taken from the January 28th, 2024 service at Trinity Church, Streetsville
in Mississauga, Ontario.