Desiring To Know Truth

I recently crossed paths with an old question that I have not thought about in some time after it was recently presented by one of my classmates. This question challenges people on the subject of whether or not God would be pleased with us choosing to sell things inside the church building, when we have such a clear example of Jesus and His righteous anger displayed during the temple cleansing when he had discovered that the Jews had turned His temple into a marketplace. While I do believe that questions such as these can be prompted by a very surface level understanding of scripture, I am not saying that it is unacceptable to consider such a question. However, I believe that it might be unacceptable or just simply unwise to formulate an opinion about such a question when one has not properly sought to understand the truth of God’s Word in a deep and meaningful way, which is what many of us have chosen to do in the past, including myself.

Answering this question specifically is not my goal, but more so I want to encourage you to reject complacency when it comes to searching for truth so that you may be able to accurately handle the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15).

The temple cleansing and the righteous anger that motivated Jesus’ actions in the second chapter of John is something that I have sought to understand for a few years now. However, I settled for an answer that was indeed prompted by a very surface level understanding of the passage. I accepted the fact that Jesus’ anger was righteous because I knew that sin was not an option, but until now I had sought no further insight on the matter. I did not understand how personal this was for Jesus. The issue was not simply that this was a place where these types of things should not be done. One issue was that the temple was a beacon of God’s presence and that, through their actions, the Jews were turning the temple into a beacon for something else. Another issue is that, as evidenced in Old Testament passages such as Isaiah 56:7 and 1 Kings 8:41-43, the temple was a place where God desired all people and all nations to be able to come and worship Him. The significance of this reason became even more evident after Andreas J. Köstenberger explained in Encountering John,that the Jews had set their marketplace in the court of the gentiles, the only place available for those who were not Jewish to come and worship God.

Regardless of whether or not we feel that it is acceptable to sell things inside the church building, we can know these things for sure. God desires that we do nothing that would hinder our own or anyone else’s worship to Him. Also, God desires that all would come to know Him, so we should desire to be beacons for God’s presence and seek to make Him known in any way that we can, above all other things.

In closing, I believe that another thought becomes relevant when we realize in Johns prologue that God’s presence has now been revealed through the person of Jesus Christ and then again when He speaks of himself as a temple after the temple cleansing in chapter 2. Jesus of course was the perfect temple in which the glory of God was perfectly revealed, but 1 Corinthians 6:19 also speaks of our bodies, as followers of Christ, as temples of the Holy Spirit and through us God is also revealing Himself to the rest of the world. With that being said, I think it would be wise for us to be on guard in making sure that our temples remain a beacon for God and that they do not become a place in which our worship to God is hindered.