Today's text, John chapter two, verses 12 through 25. I am reading from the English standard version. And so we begin after this, meaning after the wedding feast at Cana, 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. Now, just so you know, You will frequently see that phrase going up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is on a hill compared to the other terrain, so it doesn't matter which direction you approach the city, you always go up to it. In the temple, Now let me clarify. I'll say it again in a moment. It doesn't mean in the holiest part of the temple. It actually means in the temple complex. He found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changer sitting there and making a whip of cords. He drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen and he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. In other words, he's wreaking chaos and havoc on the temple. 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 thy house shall consume me. Now we heard earlier in our older testament reading where that passages where they would have remembered that from Psalm 69 verse nine. Now notice verse 18. So the Jews said to him, what sign do you show us for doing these things? I want to pause here a moment. Because this statement, so the Jews said to him, this is another one of these early signals here in the very beginning that among all the other things that John's gospel is about teaching us, this is one of the most important. The shift, the change that is taking place on what it means to be a Jew. We might say that up to this point, being a Jew had at least a strong ethnic component to it apart from the ideological and theological connections. We were told back in chapter 1 verse 11, he came to his own, meaning the Jews as defined up to that point, but his own, meaning the Jews as defined up to that point, did not receive him. So, this is going to create a crisis. Because up to this point, a Jew was clearly defined, especially in a Roman dominated, pagan dominated culture as they were in. But now things are going to be changing and changing dramatically. And I'm making this point because you see the earliest followers of Jesus, all of these people that go with him to Capernaum, all the people at Capernaum that he's with, all the people he's going to be surrounded by at the Passover feast at the temple complex, they are all Jews. You might say, well, what's the big deal? What's the problem? The big deal, the problem, is Jesus the Christ. If you're a Jew, what are you going to do now that the Christ has come? Verse 19, Jesus answered them, destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. And the Jews, here we go again, this designation, said, it has taken 46 years to build this temple. 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. Now, when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, notice this, many believed in his name when they saw the signs i.e. the miracles 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. There ends the reading of God's infallible word. The question before us, is it the real or the imaginary? the real Jesus or the imaginary Jesus. Actor Cary Grant, for those who even remember who he was, I think most of us in this room do, he told a story once about how he was walking down a street, I don't know if it was London, New York, someplace like that, and all at once a man approaching him, his eyes fixed on Cary Grant with great excitement and he ran up to him and he said, wait a minute, wait a minute, I know who you are, don't tell me, you're Gregory Peck. No, no, no, wait a minute, he said, that's not right either. Well, obviously the man was confused and is in excitement and Cary Grant thought he'd help him out. And he said, well, it's Cary Grant. And the man said, no, no, no, that's not it either. I know, wait a minute, you're Kirk Douglas. The point is, here was Cary Grant, identify himself with his own name. But that man had somebody else in mind. In chapter 1, verse 10, we were told concerning Jesus, He was in the world, the kosmon, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him. Now, we need to understand, as I've pointed out before, that that verse is meant to set a contrast between how the pagan Gentile world of unbelievers reacted to the coming of the Messiah King Jesus versus the people of Israel who had by then called themselves the Jews. So there is that tendency that humans have not to recognize Christ our King. And the glimpse we get of Jesus in today's passage is one that goes even far beyond these mechanics that I'm talking about here because it challenges and even contradicts the image that many people have of Jesus Christ. Now, when I say image, I realize we're going into difficult territory. because the scriptures teach that we are to make no images of God. Christ was God in human flesh. This is a long theological dispute for 2,000 years of church history. Now, we in the Reformed tradition generally reject the idea of having pictures or images of Jesus, and for good reason. But however that may be, Unless you're going to live in denial, the fact is the Christian churches of other stripes, the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, some Anglicans, and even some evangelical Protestants have had pictures of what they call or who they consider to be Jesus. And I think the fact that the man was incarnate in human flesh, the people of his own time saw what he looked like. I don't think there's any blasphemy in wondering in our heads what he might have looked like. But when I talk about the image of Jesus, I'm not so much wanting to stray off into that discussion and that debate. Rather, I'm talking about the impressions that we have of him, what sort of person he was, the quality of his personality. And what I'm saying to you is that the true image, the real Jesus, often contradicts our imagination. You know, throughout history, people have had, at times, formed widely divergent images in all senses of the word, and even pictures of Jesus. And you can see that reflected, for better or worse, in the great art of the Western world. For example, you compare the images of Jesus as portrayed by someone like Leonardo da Vinci. with another artist, Rembrandt, and you see they're very different. And if you compare those with an even more modern artist, Salvador Dali, and his images of Jesus, and that's even more radically different. But based on what we are given in the pages of scripture, we often find that our own images, our own impressions of Jesus are quite different from what we find in God's word, God's infallible, inerrant word. I think that very often the passage that we have just read, it goes without any explanation as to the dynamics of what's really taking place here. I mean, for those who have heard this story before, we usually form some kind of image in our minds of Jesus coming into the temple and upon seeing all of the commerce taking place, he flies into a rage. How dare these merchants ply their trades in the house of God. But let's just step back for a moment. And look at this from a more biblical perspective. And let's just say, first of all, from what we know of the practices of the Jews in Jerusalem of that time, the farm animals, the money changing was not going on in the very heart of the temple complex, as I mentioned earlier. As a matter of fact, it was likely being done in the outer perimeter of the temple where the Gentiles were allowed to come and hear the teachings of the Bible. That was a part of some aspect of the mission of getting the true God's message out to the pagans, allowing them to come into that part of the complex. And I think part of Jesus' reaction was that no one could have congregated in that area because of all the cows and the sheep and the doves and the money changers. So tough luck, Gentiles. You're not getting in here, even though this is the place you're supposed to be allowed. But secondly, those farm animals were not brought there so the owners could just sell their livestock. Oxen and sheep and doves were used in the temple sacrifices and rituals during the Passover. Many of the people who came there traveled long distances over difficult terrain to get there. So it was easier for them if they could buy their sacrificial animals after they arrived instead of trying to haul them over long distances. But then thirdly, The money changers were also fulfilling a temple duty. Every male Jew who made the pilgrimage to the temple during the Passover was expected to pay a temple tax. And in order to do that, each pilgrim had to have a special coin that was used specifically for that purpose. And so the money changers, they set up their trade to accept and exchange foreign currency for the temple tax coin. And of course they imposed a surcharge for their services. And so pilgrims coming from divergent parts of the empire where other forms of money were being used, they could exchange it. So then if all that is the case, why would the Lord be so upset about it? Well, simply because it was all outward ritualism with no spiritual content. Those people were no more concerned for the real meaning and the purpose of the Passover than the Romans were. For the money changers, the livestock sellers, and the temple priest, it was all outward show and external conformity to some tradition. They cared nothing about God's commandments that the outer court of the temple be kept clear so that the Gentiles might approach and hear the truth. And they cared even less for the genuine spiritual condition of the pilgrims who came there. I think that is one reason that Jesus flew into rage and anger, but that's not all. In the cleansing of the temple, as it's called, Jesus is acting as the supreme high priest of God most high. He is purging the house of the Lord of the wickedness of men. Like his miracle, his sign at the wedding feast at Cana, this was another sign to those and for those who had eyes to see it. It was the sign that the end of the ages had come and the kingdom of God was dawning upon the earth. And once again, given that fact, if you are a Jew living at that time, especially if you are a priest, a Pharisee, a Sadducee, someone invested in the whole, what we know today as the oral Talmudic tradition, and now the Messiah has arrived, that which you thought was way into the future has now been brought into the present What are you going to do? Because if the old covenant age is coming, closing down, if it's the end of the ages, meaning the age that you have founded your life ministry on, if you're say a temple priest or a Pharisee, well, you've got some changes to deal with. And maybe you don't like that so much. Jesus himself, gives further testimony to the fact that the old covenant age was closing down. It was about to be shut down. If you look again at verse two, night, chapter two, 19, Jesus answered, destroy this temple. And in three days I will raise it up. So the Jewish religious authorities knew that what Jesus was doing was not just a random act of anger. They fully realized, a few of them at least, the symbolic meaning behind his actions. They knew that the prophets of old had foretold that when the end of the ages had come, that when God would make a new covenant with men, they knew that this was the sort of thing the Messiah would do. That is why they have quizzed him here about his authority to do this thing. The temple that the Jews refer to here, you know, it's taken 46 years. It's not the original temple built by Solomon. That temple had been destroyed long ago. Why? As a result of Israel's breaking covenant with God. But the Lord gave the prophet Ezekiel who warned the Jews back in that day that that would happen to them. He gave him two visions. One of them was a vision of the glory of the Lord rising up and departing the temple, but also a vision of the glory returning to the temple. But it would be a new temple, a new dwelling place for God's glory. And what we are seeing in John's gospel is nothing less than the fulfillment of that promise. The glory of the Lord did return to the temple because Jesus is the glory of his Father. But, you see in verse 19, Jesus spoke of destroying the temple. Now, of course, the comment is made in the text itself that it's the resurrection of his body that he's referring to, but there's also something else. This rehearsal, this chaotic rehearsal of these acts of overturning and disrupting, that also was a rehearsal of what would take place in that generation in the absolute destruction of the temple in AD 70. Now that the old covenant age was coming to a close and the new covenant age was dawning, the temple was no longer needed. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the true temple and residence of the glory of God. The two cannot occupy the same space. One had to go. The Jews thought they would get rid of Jesus, but it was their temple and their entire system that was annihilated by God Almighty. So, in all of this, we are given a picture of the real Jesus, not an imaginary one. And as we have done in a previous study, I think that we need to ask ourselves some questions. Previously, we asked ourselves four questions. Now, let's talk about two questions in particular that we must answer. And these get kind of personal. The first one is, do we know the real Jesus? Who is Jesus to us? You know, when somebody says the name Jesus, what images does that conjure in your mind? Do you picture him as the meek and mild mannered man from Galilee, a man of effeminate character who exudes nothing but love and compassion and tolerance to any and all indiscriminately? Or perhaps our image of Jesus is like that of what we see here in these verses, the strong, mighty son of God, who executes the wrath of God on rebels and apostates. But the fact is, many people see him exclusively as the man of love and compassion, the man who would tolerate any and everything from any and everybody. For them, Jesus is the man who never spoke a disparaging word, the man who is always ready to affirm others and build them up in self-confidence and self-esteem. Others, as I said, see him just the opposite. So how do we sort through these extremes? How do we, in fact, know the real Jesus? Well, the Bible is our only sure guide out of that dilemma and answering that question. And when we consider all that the Bible teaches us about the Lord, we find that he certainly was and is a man of infinite love and compassion. But at the same time, he was and is a man of infinite righteousness and holiness who will not tolerate sin. The same God who sent his son into the world in an act of mercy and love for his elect people to die for them a miserable death on a Roman cross is also the God who pours out his wrath on his and our enemies. And that is why we see the Lord Jesus in one place showing mercy and compassion as we will see in the story of the woman caught in adultery in a few more chapters. But then in another place we see him showing no mercy, taking no prisoners, driving out those who dare desecrate the temple of the Lord God. Is that the Jesus we know? But then there's another question. And the very posing of this question can make us quite uncomfortable. And we've asked it before in a previous study. Do we believe in Jesus for the right reasons? Now, as I said, that can be disturbing, both because it causes us to consider our own motivation in believing in Jesus, and because to some folks, any reason a person would claim to believe in Jesus, well, that ought to be a good enough reason for whatever reason. But we see that the word of God stands over and against the homespun, you know, cultural Christianity and preconceived notions of men. Look again at verse 23. Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name. All right, stop there. Many believed in his name when they saw the signs. the wonders, the miracles that he was doing. So here we're told that there were many people who saw Jesus doing signs and wonders and they believed in him as a result. Now, if that is all that the Word of God told us about this situation, well, then there would be no need to talk about and ask about right and wrong reasons for believing in Jesus. But the story doesn't end there, does it? Look at verse 24. but Jesus on his part did not trust them. He 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. Now that may not be as clear as it could be to some folks. So let's, let's listen to it from a slightly different translation. He did not trust himself to them because he knew them all. He did not need anyone to tell him about people because he knew what was in people's minds. So in other words, many people who saw Jesus do the miracles trusted him, but he did not trust them because he knew what was in their minds and hearts. We might say those people were following him because of the fireworks, the pyrotechnics. I mentioned a few weeks ago, the sad reality that many churches today, there's some folks, I don't know how many, but certainly some, who only believe in a Jesus that they trust for their self-esteem and their positive mental attitude and their health and their wealth. And then there are others who, like the people mentioned in John's gospel, well, they want the fireworks. They're following Jesus, perhaps like some of the folks down the road here, our Pentecostal friends. They're following Jesus because of the speaking in tongues and the so-called healings and the prophecies that are carried on in some of these churches today. And we don't see it so much anymore, and we may, I think, be thankful for it, but, you know, in previous years we've had the sensationalism of mass gatherings and, you know, football stadium crusades that are designed, crafted carefully, whether it be in a stadium or in a large church arena, to play upon people's emotions. The reality is that some people have never believed in him because they've never been told that they need to repent of their sins. I mean, the whole idea of Jesus being a savior, a deliverer, and a redeemer, and the entire notion of a righteous and holy God who is angry with sin and will punish his enemies is totally foreign to many people who call themselves Christians. And that's not just one pastor's opinion. The Word of God is open before you and if you can read, you can see plainly for yourself that there were people as recorded here in verses 23 and 24 in Jesus' day. People who followed him, who trusted him, believed him, and they did so for the wrong reasons. And he did not entrust himself to them because he knew their hearts. And just because Jesus does know our hearts, friends, he is looking for those who know him and love him for who he really is and not whom they make him out to be. He's looking for those who believe in the real Jesus, not the imaginary one. Now certainly for some of us, that may raise real doubts about our relationship to Christ. But let's hold on for a moment before we get too morbidly introspective about that. There is good news for us because the Lord promised that no one who comes to Him for the right reason will ever be turned away. And what is the right reason to believe in Him? the need for a savior and a redeemer who can take away our guilt and sin and the need for a Lord and King of our lives in whom we can trust to lead us into glorious victory, both in this life and in the life to come. And by his grace and mercy, may that be said of us and who we are. Let us pray.