Take These Things Away

...He said, "Take these things away; stop making My Father's house a place of business." (John 2:16)

Why did Jesus say this the way that He did? After all, He also stated very plainly that this was His Father's house, so why was He even bothering to ask people to take their stuff out of the house?

Again, I am looking at this in order to perceive the real significance of this event in order to understand how it applies to my own life and church. What I am noticing here is that God is not going to cleanse His sanctuary without the cooperation of those who constitute that sanctuary. Remember, the church/temple/sanctuary is not really a place or building but is made up of living stones, (1 Peter 2:5) people with open hearts who are allowing God to cleanse them so that He can fully dwell in them collectively. (2 Cor. 6:16) From this perspective it is easier to see how these words can take on much more meaning.

This ties back into the issue of authority and its proper exercise. Just because Jesus is asserting that He has authority to cleanse the temple does not mean that He is going to do it without my involvement. God is not going to cleanse my heart of sin, selfishness and false sources of life (false gods) unless He receives my permission and cooperation. Otherwise the result of this kind of activity would be a condition in my heart that would preclude me from really being able to love God genuinely. Love can only exist in a heart that is free to not love, otherwise it cannot be true love. Freedom of choice and love are inextricably fused together.

I believe that is part of what I am seeing in these words here. Jesus is explaining that He is not going to forcibly and personally remove the obstructions preventing God's presence in my life, the temple of my heart. I may encounter times of intense passion on the part of God that will make my problems unavoidably clear to me, but I still have a choice as to whether I am going to throw out the things that distort my picture of God or whether I am going to cling to them.

Another thing I just noticed about this phrase; Jesus was not trying to force people out of the temple but was insisting that their stuff, their merchandise and their counterfeit activities be removed. After all, the temple's original purpose was to be a place where people could come to meet with God, so it wouldn't make any sense to run the people out of the temple courts – that is, unless they refused to remove the things they had brought in that were not appropriate to be there, things that misrepresented the God of that temple. Then if they refused to be parted from their false ideas, false activities and false affections, then it would only be appropriate for them to leave with the things that they valued the most. Because there is no room in the temple of the heart for false ideas about God linked with false gods who promote those ideas and the true presence of God. These simply cannot coexist together.

What was happening in this temple situation was a vivid illustration of what is happening in each one of our own hearts. There is a great deal of business activity going on in our spiritual life that has no place being there. Our ideas about God demanding payment before we can receive forgiveness, our exploitation of the weak, the poor, the ignorant, the fearful are all things that misrepresent God and have no legitimate place in the sanctuary of our heart and mind. Our beliefs in a God who gets mad, who threatens violence and who seems arbitrary at times, all of these and much more are perversions of the real truth about our Father in heaven that bring filth and stench and noise into the temple of our hearts.

Even if all of the facts and symbols that we are using may be things that are religious and were originally designated by God as means of expressing something about Himself, if we have distorted those things into something they were never originally intended for then we have filled the temple with counterfeit ideas and activities that need to all be removed.

But Jesus is here asking me to remove these things. You see, I am the one that ultimately holds the authority in my own house. And as long as I insist that this temple is my house and not God's house, then I will be very reluctant to remove the counterfeit things that are corrupting my temple. These are going to be things that are very familiar to me, that bring me enrichment at the expense of others or that distort the truths of God. But if I refuse to acknowledge the authority of Jesus in this place and refuse to agree to let go of the things that blind me to the real truths about God and how He feels about me and relates to me, then there is going to be a serious problem.

What we have here is a situation of competing claims of authority. Jesus is claiming in essence that He has authority to order the removal of everything that distorts our concepts and feelings about His Father from the house that He says belongs to His Father. On the other side, there are people and false gods asserting that Jesus does not really have legitimate authority to challenge our picture of God, to require that false ideas, misrepresentations and religious distortions must leave. Instead of welcoming the new light that is presenting itself and admitting that our ideas are faulty and sinful, we may choose to argue and debate and quibble and resist the passionate love that is impossible to ignore.

The Jews then said to Him, "What sign do You show us as your authority for doing these things?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." (John 2:18-19)

This now begins to unravel some of the mystery of why Jesus answered this question the way that He did. The Jews believed that as keepers of the truth about God that they were the ones who should be considered as the authorities to be recognized on the temple grounds. On the other hand, Jesus was asserting that as the true Son of the owner of this temple that He had more legitimate authority than they and that, in fact, they had come to be seen by God as embezzlers and usurpers of the rightful authority of God in the minds of His people. So what was happening here was that there were two competing claims of authority, but only one of them could be right.

The Jewish leaders were living in fear of losing influence and control over the minds of the common people. They were afraid of losing strategic advantages that they had been carving out for themselves in their various schemes of personal enrichment at the expense of religious worshipers. They were in fear of being exposed as frauds and opportunists and they were scrambling to keep up the appearances of religious piety and social control that they had worked for so many years to construct in the minds of the public.

What this turned into was a confrontation about who owned this temple and therefore who had legitimate rights to be recognized as the established authority here. The very same confrontation takes place in our own hearts on a regular basis.

I am very familiar with the suggestions of false gods that constantly assert their ideas to me on a regular basis. Many of them sound very religious and feel quite legitimate, but their claims of authority in my heart must be challenged by One who is greater than my heart. (1 John 3:20) But ultimately it is up to my own power of choice as to whether I am going to acknowledge and embrace Jesus' new claims of authority over what is true and what is not true about the beliefs that fill the libraries of my mind and heart. This is not just a one time event but is something that must be repeated again and again. As I find new lies about God exposed by the increasing light of His presence and self-revelation, I am challenged repeatedly to “take these things away”.

I do not want my heart, my sanctuary that is designed for God to dwell in, to continue to be a place of business. I do not want my life to reflect the lies about God that have corrupted me for so many years. I want Jesus to come in and keep exposing the false ideas about Him and about reality and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness. I choose to give Him full authority, because He has demonstrated the basis of His authority by raising up His own temple in glory and triumphant love after I helped to destroy it.

What I have recently been learning is that the true message of the cross is very different than what I have been taught in the past. The real message that the cross reveals is that there is absolutely nothing that I can possibly do that can ever be so horrible or disgusting or revolting or painful that might cause God to stop loving me or even can lessen His passion for me in the slightest degree. I am coming to perceive, even though still dimly, that God's love and forgiveness and heart towards me is unconditionally permanent and passionate. If I am ever lost for eternity, it will never be in the slightest way God's fault for not doing everything possible to change my mind about His love for me.

This is the basis upon which Jesus claims to have authority in my heart and life. He will never force me to give up my claims of authority, but He will expose the false nature of those claims and give me repeated opportunities to lay them aside and allow Him to take up residence on the throne of my heart. As I surrender to His love and become captured by His passion and beauty, I will become more eager to continue to surrender even more fully and to fall into that love that is beyond comprehension.