Good and Angry
John 2:12-25
Main Idea: If Jesus is Lord, we must love what He loves, hate what He hates, and trust in His way.
I. The Symbol (2:12-17)
John 2:12-17: After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
“The temple courts were to be a place where the Scriptures were read, where sacrifices were offered, and where people came to pray… The one thing that would have been impossible at the temple was the one thing it had been made for: the reverent worship of God.”
~ Richard Phillips, John (Reformed Expository Commentary)
II. The Substance (2:18-22)
John 2:18-22: So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
1 Corinthians 3:16: Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
2 Corinthians 6:16: What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God.
“God kept his promises through the death and resurrection of Jesus, who is the new and better Passover Lamb accomplishing a new and better exodus, after a more devastating destruction of the temple and a more impressive rebuilding of it on the third day, in his resurrection.”
~Jim Hamilton, ESV Expository Commentary
III. The Savior (2:23-25)
John 2:23-25: Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.
John 6:64-66: But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
Luke 14:26: If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
"My faith rests not in what I am, or shall be, or feel, or know, but in what Christ is, in what he has done, and in what he is doing for me."
~ Charles Spurgeon, Morning by Morning
Jeremiah 20:9: If I say, 'I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,' there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.
1 Corinthians 9:16: Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!
“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason, my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen”
~ Martin Luther, The Diet of Worms (1521)
