(John 2:20)
�Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?�
This is the first week-end of February in Northern Illinois. This �global warming� is killing me. There are several inches of snow already on the ground. Well enough snow that my grandson made a large snow man yesterday. Now, more snow is falling. There is a �winter storm watch� out for our area.
I, for one, ain�t going to go out and watch it! I am huddled under a blanket, with a winter coat and �stocking� cap on my head as I sit at this word processor. I could turn up the heat; but I�ve seen the bills!
Really, it�s not all that bad. I am somewhat bundled, with a sweater and hat, so I don�t have to turn the heat too high. But, it really is snowing outside. Quite a bit! I was at the door watching the grandkids play in the snow. They were having a ball. As a matter of fact, one of those balls, snowballs, hit me. The three year old laughed.
Then, what to my wondering ears should appear? We began to get peals of thunder! Thunder! In February! In the middle of a snow storm! Most of my sixty one years have been spent in this general area; I do not recall ever hearing thunder in the midst of a snow storm. Something just seems not quite right.
Then there is the matter of my grandson. As I was helping him get ready for Sunday School he asked me to help him zip up his winter coat. He handed me the zipper. Well, not the entire zipper; he only handed me the part that slides up and down. It was disassociated from the zipper assembly.
New coat needed. His dad went and got him a new coat as soon as church was over for the morning.
The thing that struck me was that little Elijah really believed that fat old grandpa could fix the zipper on that coat. His view of reality was that grandpa can fix anything. Wow! Is he ever wrong! Some people cannot set their VCR�s. I have to call an electrician to plug it in!
The problem is that Elijah�s perception of reality, that grandpa is able to fix anything at all, is not the reality of reality.
This is exactly the problem of the religious leaders as they responded to Jesus in our text verse. Their understanding of the reality of His words was not correct. They heard His words. They cleared this through the understanding of their natural ears and they went in the wrong direction.
This was a case of religious error. �Then said the Jews��
The error of these religious leaders lay not in their grasp of the facts. They were completely right in their recitation of the facts of the Temple. They might even been excused as to their error. They had been asking Jesus why He had the right to cleanse the Temple.
The problem was that they had unbelieving hearts and misunderstood the reasoning of Jesus in the giving of His authority to cleanse the Temple as He had done.
Even after John the Baptist had witnessed of Him, even after all the miracles which Jesus had performed, these religious leaders failed to understand that they were in the very presence of their long awaited Messiah.
It is the same way today among men. Very few actually understand that Jesus went to the Cross of Calvary in order to present an atonement for sin. They see Him as a teacher. They see Him as a moral force in the world. They see Him as a man of peace. They do not see Him as He is; He is the One Who gives peace with God.
People often see Jesus as One Who taught the way to God. Untrue. Jesus never taught the way to God. John 14:6 records Jesus as saying that He is the Way to God. We follow His example of how to live the Christian life. That is, after all, the meaning of the word �Christian.� It means to act as did He.
We fail quite often in this endeavor. Rather than searching for sinners to call to repentance in love, we often go out of our way to antagonize the sinner because he fails to live up to our cultural ideals. Foolish! We act as though we preach a �works salvation.�
There are no works which can provide an entrance into Heaven. There is no use simply following the example of Jesus. Even this can never save. What actually saves a soul is the applied sacrifice of Jesus. He died in time so that we might live in eternity. We accept, as a free gift, His offered salvation.
Anything else is a work of man. It is useless in the spiritual realms.
The mistake of these religious leaders may have been an unacceptable hermeneutic. That, hermeneutic, is just one of those �churchy� words. It means simply an understanding of what the Bible has to say.
These religious leaders understood the Old Testament. Well, they understood most of it. They knew all about the idea of the sacrificial system. They understood that the sinner was offered purification through the death of one not guilty of sin. They even understood the concept of the coming Messiah. But, they could not understand the truth of Isaiah 53:6. �All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.�
Neither did they see the truth of the verse immediately preceding. �But he was wounded for our trespasses, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.� (Isaiah 53:5)
Look back yet one further verse. �Surely he hath bore our grief�s, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.� (Isaiah 53:4)
We could go back another verse. �He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.� (Isaiah 53:3)
But, these religious men, devoted to the study of the Scripture, could not go back and read of the suffering Savior. It was just not something that they were prepared to comprehend.
It is a sad thing when we allow our conception of what God ought to have said, in our opinion, to override the Truth of what He has said! We need to yield to the message of the Bible rather than attempting to make the Bible say what we want. God never honors those who misuse His Words of Love to brow beat another.
The truth was missed, also, because of the unwavering hostility of these religious leaders for the Person of Jesus Christ. We have these same sorts of persons in our day as well.
I just read a story in the local newspaper by a sports writer. It seems a few weeks ago an ESPN reporter had used the phrase �F� Jesus� at a comedy (?) roast. The reporter�s story was that it was so wrong for the Christians to be upset over this. After all, he reasoned, she was just making a joke.
Making a joke?
Have you ever wondered why it is �politically incorrect� to make ethnic jokes? Simple. It is making those of that ethnicity as though they are beneath the speaker. And, of course, it is wrong. It is also wrong to make disparaging remarks about most religions of the world. Same reasoning.
But, for some unknown reason it is �open season� on attacking Christians and Christianity. Well, maybe it is not some �unknown� reason. Sin separates from God. God is on a higher plane than is humanity. Humanity hates God. The fact is that there are only two beings in all the universe which can accept worship: God and Satan.
Since the world, bound by the burden of sin since the fall of Adam, worships Satan in whatever form he has taken in the countless false religious systems of the world, natural man will hate God and the things of God.
These religious leaders hated God so much that they eventually had Jesus put to death. The world still tries to put Him to death by disallowing His message of love and hope to be spread into the world. Do you know that there are secular groups, even in this nation, which will threaten religious organizations if those organizations dare to speak of governmental issues?
These organizations seek to stifle the legitimate preaching of the churches under the guise of the separation of church and state. In doing so they are actually elevating the state above the church. There is, in their minds, no real separation because the state is allowed to dictate, again in their minds, what the church is able to preach.
Folks, we need to understand, this may be, as the song says, �Our Father�s World.� But, right now the forces of evil are in control. We need to continue the work of the Great Commission and allow God to change the world one soul at a time.
The religious leaders believed that Jesus was talking about a physical structure. As such they understood a reasonable erection of the structure of stone and brick. ��Forty and six years was this temple in building��
This morning I was talking with my three year old grandson. He is a big fan of �Spider Man,� the cartoon character. Eli said, �Grandpa, I can shoot webs. Can you make webs? I had to admit that I couldn�t �shoot webs.� Eli asked why. I said, �I�m just too old. But, you are just the right age to shoot webs.�
What did I mean? I meant, of course, that at three years old Eli has the imagination to be anything he wants to be in his play time. As we get older we tend to lose that wonderful ability to suspend reality in our minds and pretend that we are whatever it is we want to be. We begin to live, at least we should as we mature, more in reality.
That was a problem with these religious leaders. They thought that they were dealing in reality when, in fact, they were not. They had mistaken time as ultimate reality. It isn�t.
We, our concepts of time and physicality, are illusions in a sense. Now, I am not saying these are not real. They are. They are concrete because God has created them. To deny such was one of the errors of the Gnostic.
But, the fact does remain that we, and all about us, are creations of the Higher Order. God, a Being of Spirit and Eternity, made us to exist. We are His creation. To ignore this fact is to cast a shadow across our understanding of all other facts.
There have been times when I�ve looked out the window and seen a dense fog covering the ground. Fog, we know, is just a cloud that is at ground level. The clouds above us look so substantial that we might imagine that we could walk across them. When we see those clouds close up, like in a fog or flying through them in an airplane, we see that our perception was mistaken because of our distance from the object.
Sin, like the distance between us on the ground and the clouds in the sky, has so altered our perception of God, as a race of men, that we often fail to understand the things of God. When Jesus spoke to these men of the Temple of His body, they could not understand. They saw only the temple made with hands and understood not the Temple wherein the fulness of the Godhead dwelt. �For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.� (Colossians 2:9)
The religious leaders had asked by what authority Jesus had cleansed the Temple. He answered that the authority was His because He was the One to Whom that Temple had been dedicated. Jesus asserted His deity. Jesus also prophesied of His Own coming sacrifice as the remedy for the sin nature. While people came to the Temple, at this time, to interact with God, the time was coming when this Temple would not be needed as the worship and fellowship with God would be centered in Himself.
Having asked for, and received, the answer as to under what authority Jesus had cleansed the Temple, the religious leaders completely misunderstood His answer. They simply saw the fog of time and missed the cloud of eternity.
Partly, this was true because they measured treasure as riches. They saw the great edifice of this Temple and imagined that this was important. It had taken decades to build this building. Now the building was all they could see as a worship center.
Jesus could have asked them, had He so desired, just where they had worshiped before this Temple had been built. Surely some of these men could remember back that far. In effect, He did ask that question. He put forth the truth that He was the true Temple in which worship ought to be, really must be, centered.
These religious rulers seemed more interested in structure of stone than in the Lord of Glory. They saw the building as more important than the Builder. They saw a structure that would be destroyed, in just a few more decades, and lost for time, as more important than the Lord of Glory Who was God from Eternity unto Eternity. He Who transcended time was counted as unimportant in their minds while a temporary stone building was the shrine to which they bowed.
This is because they were masquerading trowels as reward. A trowel, to the uninformed, is used in doing work with cement. When my father was building the home I lived in as a youth, he built the basement and foundation out of cinder block. He fastened these cement blocks together with concrete. He used a trowel to spread the concrete so that these blocks would be securely fastened together.
Brick, and stone, buildings are built in this manner as well.
The religious leaders saw the building, the Temple, so fashioned, as a monument to their religious affiliations. They saw this Temple was a place to meet with their understanding of God. In effect, in not in plan, they came to view the Temple as the only true place of worship since the Temple was seen as the place where God was residing.
God resides in the hearts and lives of those who have been regenerated by faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross of Calvary. Even our ultimate reward does not reside in this earth. It is to the earth that our efforts are directed as we fulfill the Great Commission which Jesus gave to us. But, our rewards are many. We have fellowship with God, and brothers and sisters in the faith, in this life. We have an eternal home in the bliss of Heaven. We have an eternal fellowship with the Lord in Heaven.
We have been given blessings without number. These blessings are not based on the structures of time; they are based on the Sure Words of the God of Eternity.
Not understanding what Jesus had said, the religious leaders felt they could argue against His prophecy. They gave a radical excuse for so doing. ��and wilt thou rear it up in three days?�
The primary excuse for their misunderstanding of His words was that they doubted His Word.
First, the religious leaders didn�t believe that He could have the Temple rebuilt in three days should it be torn down. Foolish people. God can do anything He desires. By simply speaking the word, the earthly Temple could be rebuilt in an instant. The Words of God are that powerful.
Remember the incident where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead? In verse 43 of the eleventh chapter of John, Jesus is recorded as saying, ��Lazarus, come forth.� Jesus said this in a grave yard. Lazarus had been dead for several days; the people said that decomposition had already set in on the body. ��Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.� (John 11:39) Yet, at a word from Jesus Lazarus came out of the tomb.
I believe that Jesus said, �Lazarus, come forth� for a very simple reason. Had Jesus just said, �Come forth,� the entire grave yard would have yielded up her bounty. So powerful are the Words of God that none can resist their directed power. No person. No element. No spiritual foe. None can resist the power of the Words of God.
This Bible is also the Words of God. It is sheer foolishness to believe that the inspired record of God was lost until some men began to �reconstruct the ancient text� back in the nineteenth century. It is sheer unbelief to argue that the Words of God were ever allowed to be withheld from the churches which He founded, or the Christians of those churches. It is near blasphemy to argue that His Words were so powerless as to be defeated by the pen of the pious or the shifting sands of time.
May we never be guilty of disbelieving His Words!
These religious leaders also doubted His words because they doubted Him. They didn�t believe that He was the promised Messiah.
Worse yet, in my estimation, are the religious leaders of our day who claim to revere Him as Lord and Savior and yet doubt His Words in His Book of Revelation to the World, the preserved Scripture. They are sowing seeds of doubt in the very Book of Life which is God�s message to humanity.
These religious leaders also dismissed His worth. They didn�t count Him as important as He, in reality, is. They saw Him as a simple itinerant preacher. They saw Him as a threat to their monopoly on the religious scene. They saw Him as a threat to the political status quo.
But, they never saw Him as the Lord of Glory. They never saw Him as the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. They never saw Him as the Righteous Judge. They never saw Him as the Promise revealed in the Scripture.
How many of us see Him as all these things, and more. Yet, although we use the term, we never actually treat Him as Lord. If He is Lord, He is our leader. His pronouncements are binding upon us. Yet, the Great Commission, given to all who would call upon His Name, is forgotten except as a part of a catechism.
The Great Commission is not a doctrine. It is a command. We need to spread the Good News that Jesus Christ died in time so that others could live in eternity. Culture can be important. Living a moral life is very important. Looking into the Words of Life in the Book of Life is a duty of all Christians. But spreading the message of Hope and Salvation into the world is essential.
None of those other things have any meaning until a soul has been regenerated by the Blood of the Lamb.
There was a symbol in ancient Greece. It was the victor�s symbol. It was the wreath of triumph given to the winner in athletic contests. A similar wreath was used to denote the victor�s of battle in the Roman wars.
These religious leaders were guilty if discarding His wreath of victory. They denied that Jesus was the Lord of Glory. They denied that Jesus had died for the sins of the world. They denied that He had defeated death in His resurrection that first Easter morning.
Jesus has won the victory over sin and death. To all who accept Him as Savior He promises full pardon from their sin. He assures them of eternal salvation because of His Own sacrifice. And, as God, He promises an eternal life of bliss in a mansion in Heaven.
What about those who have not accepted Him as Savior? They have none of these. They remain lost in their sins and trespasses. They are without hope in the eternal realm.
What about you? Have you accepted Jesus as your own Savior? He calls you today. He understands your sin and shortcoming. He stands with His Hand outstretched, calling you to His full salvation.
Accept Him now.