The Ways of God
Commentary
At the beginning of his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, John Milton articulates a part of his task in writing as to “justify the ways of God to men.”1 That may be an ongoing task for us. Fallen humanity is like a perpetual adolescent, always questioning and challenging (and disobeying) the parent. And so there is a continual need for the ways of God to be explained and justified to human beings.
Our three selected passages this week give us a fascinating glimpse of the scope of the ways of God. The breadth of his repertoire is surely on display, as we move from the giving to the Ten Commandments to Paul’s discourse on wisdom and foolishness to John’s account of the cleansing of the temple. In every case, we see the ways of God. But, taken together, we observe that his ways are marvelous in their variety.
In the Exodus passage, we are reminded first of God’s saving activity: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” And that deliverance is followed by the giving of the law. The law represents God’s covenant relationship with his people, and it also articulates his will for human life and civilization.
In the epistle passage, we see again the saving activity of God. This time, however, it is not the methods and deeds by which the Israelites were set free from bondage in Egypt; this time, it is the cross. And Paul frames the cross in the context of wisdom and foolishness, acknowledging the difference between what human beings are impressed or put off by, on the one hand, and how God operates, on the other.
Finally, in the gospel lection, we may see yet another saving activity of God. Jesus’ cleaning of the temple, as we note below, is a merciful intervention into sin: better to clean what is filthy, after all, than to destroy it. And then, in the wake of that activity, the ultimate saving activity of God is presaged, as we are given reason to anticipate the cross and the empty tomb.
Exodus 20:1-17
This passage of scriptureis rather like the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution: there is broad recognition, but only vague familiarity. Everyone has heard of the Ten Commandments, just as they have heard of the foundational documents of our nation. Yet when pressed, we discover an alarming lack of real knowledge of the actual contents.
Unless you are serving a church where an emphasis continues to be placed on memorization, chances are that most of the individuals in your congregation would not be able to recite the Ten Commandments. And, even if they came up with ten, the likelihood is that some other commandments would have found their way onto the list (e.g., love your neighbor as yourself). Earlier generations made a priority of rote memorization so that folks just grew up knowing this sort of fundamental material, but that’s not so broadly the case anymore.
Accordingly, we may find that some introductions are in order. Perhaps we might personify the Ten Commandments as a sort of celebrity that everyone has heard of, but most of us do not know well. And if I were going to introduce a 2021 American congregation to the Ten Commandments, I would include the following elements.
First, set the stage. The Ten Commandments may appear as a stand-alone item in a children’s Sunday School classroom, but they were not originally given in a vacuum. The commandments are given at a time, at a place, and to a people. The children of Israel are a recently freed nation of former slaves. Their deliverer is leading them through the wilderness, guiding and providing in the desert, en route to the land promised to their ancestors. And along the way — though not necessarily on the way — they have an appointment to meet their God at the holy mountain. And at that place, he appears in awesome glory, and gives to them his law. The visible centerpiece of that law are the tablets containing these commandments. And those tablets, in turn, are kept in a sacred box known as the Ark of the Covenant, which helps us to understand the relational quality and purpose of these commandments.
Second, chronology is theology. We noted above that God is giving his law to the slaves he has recently freed from their bondage, which had been in the land of Egypt. The order of events is significant, inasmuch as law follows rather than precedes salvation. Many times we make such a distinction between “law” and “gospel” that we lose sight of the overarching theme of grace. God’s sovereign actions on our behalf always come first. So it is that the people of Israel were “saved” before God gave them his law.
Finally, form is content. Any introduction to the Ten Commandments must include some attention being paid to how those commandments are presented to us. Many have observed a seeming hierarchy in their order, with the first four commandments being “vertical” (that is, pertaining to God and the things of God), while the latter six are more “horizontal” (that is, involving other human beings). As a corresponding observation about the hierarchy, it is arguable from the rest of the Old Testament law that breaking any of the first seven commandments was a capital offense, while the next two commandments incur lesser penalties, and the final commandment has no corresponding penalty in the rest of the Old Testament law.
The prevalence of that death penalty is a bothersome thing to many a modern reader. For myself, I look at it as the law’s version of a price tag. This is the Lord’s way of showing his people how valuable some things are. And we would do well to note which things in his law are given that highest price tag, for many of them are no longer highly valued in our world today.
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
Paul’s relationship to the Corinthians is a fascinating one, and instructive to us at many levels. Between 1 and 2 Corinthians, we have 29 chapters of correspondence between the apostle and the people of that church, which makes up fully ten percent of the entire New Testament. And we may understand this week’s selected passage within the larger context of that relationship.
The compelling issue, it seems to me, is the balancing act between meeting people where they’re at and changing where they are at.
On the one hand, later in 1 Corinthians, Paul is explicit about his deliberate effort to meet people where they're at for the sake of the gospel. “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. And to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the Law, as under the Law, though not being myself under the Law, that I might win those who are under the Law; to those who are without law, as without law, though not being without the law of God but under the law of Christ, that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:10-22 NASB). And we see that winsome approach at work in the Acts accounts of Paul’s preaching and evangelism in various settings.
In 2 Corinthians, meanwhile, we observe Paul wrestling with the congregation in their admiration for people that he sarcastically refers to as “super-apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:5 NIV). Paul himself does not regard as most important the metrics by which the super-apostles boast and by which the Corinthians seem to be impressed. Yet he takes a two-can-play-at-that-game approach, demonstrating his superiority over those super-apostles. He wins even by their metrics, yet the whole time that he is exalting himself in those terms, he confesses that he is talking like a fool (e.g., 2 Corinthians 11:17). He is meeting the people where they're at, but he is also chiding them for where they're at.
And then, in our selected passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul explores the themes of wisdom and foolishness. Wisdom is an exceedingly important category for the people in Paul's audience. The Greeks in general prided themselves on wisdom, and the elites in the Corinthian congregation would have been especially inclined to cater to conventional standards and understanding of human wisdom.
In the face of that, Paul endeavors to redefine wisdom and foolishness for the people in that congregation, for the Christians in that culture. The gospel — and, specifically, the centerpiece of the gospel, which is the cross of Christ — is readily dismissed as foolishness. And that must have been something of a social burden for the Christians in Corinth. No one, after all, wants to be associated with something that those around us scoff at. No one wants to be tied to something that others regard as stupid or ridiculous. Yet this was the plight facing Paul’s audience, for the message of Christ crucified was “foolishness to the Greeks.”
So it is that Paul encourages the Corinthian Christians to a broader view.
In the 1972 movie The Poseidon Adventure, we follow the experiences of a group of passengers on a cruise ship that is capsized by a tidal wave. Initially, of course, the ship contains hundreds of passengers, as well as crew members. Many are killed by the initial catastrophe. But those who survive the overwhelming wave now find themselves alive on a ship that is upside down in the water. And the question becomes: How do we get out of here alive?
The answer to that question is not unanimous. Some of the passengers are convinced that their best course of action is to stay where they are. Others seek to move to a certain part of the ship. Still others make their way to yet another part of the ship.
In the moments of disagreement, there is profound tension, for the stakes are so high. This is a matter of life or death. And as you head to the right, you can’t help but be unsettled by that big group that is choosing instead to head to the left.
So it is that Paul endeavors to reassure the band of Christians in Corinth, who are no doubt a small minority — numerically, theologically, and philosophically — in their community. He wants them to know that, even though everyone around them is pointing one way, they should go the other way. Even though everyone around them says, “Nonsense!”, it is God’s nonsense. And God’s nonsense is higher, better, stronger, and truer than the very best that human beings have to offer.
John 2:13-22
John’s placement of this familiar event is different than what we are accustomed to in the synoptic Gospels. But then, of course, John’s whole organization is quite different, and he does not spend as much time on Jesus’ Galilean ministry, but focuses instead on significant events in Jerusalem. And the so-called ‘cleansing of the temple’ is, to be sure, a significant event in Jerusalem.
In the 2006 movie The Nativity Story, we observe Joseph and Mary making the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. On the way, they pass through Jerusalem. When it is visible on the horizon, Joseph says, with wonder in his voice, “Jerusalem, the Holy City!” But when they arrive in Jerusalem it proves to be a disappointment, for it does not feel holy, at all. First, they experience an attempted robbery, which is not attested in scripture. Then they pass through the cacophony of the commerce within the temple precincts, which also does not feel holy. Joseph anticipates his son’s indignation a generation later, lamenting, “This is meant to be a holy place.”
Whether Joseph was so prescient or not, we don’t know. But all four gospels tell us of Jesus’ indignation at what he finds going on in the temple. Scholars offer varying insights into what Jesus may have found especially offensive and what corruption was perhaps behind the scenes with the on-site salespersons and money-changers. It may be to our advantage, however, that the details of the offenses remain vague. The point, after all, is not so much what the people were doing wrong as how Jesus responded to that wrongdoing.
We recall that the Lord showed Ezekiel the detestable things taking place in the temple circa 592 BC (Ezekiel 8). That temple was destroyed by the Babylonians less than a decade later. Meanwhile, the temple where Jesus turned over the tables and drove out the money-changers was destroyed by the Romans just one generation later.
Of course, in that larger context, we may recognize this seemingly angry and violent act by Jesus as an exercise of grace. To cleanse, after all, is not to destroy. And if only the temple of Ezekiel’s day had been cleansed — or the temple of Jesus’ day had stayed cleansed — perhaps the fate would have been different.
In our day, of course, the temple in Jerusalem is no longer an issue. What was destroyed by the Romans almost two-thousand years ago has not been rebuilt since. But we may still take seriously — and take personally — the episode recorded here in John 2.
The scene at the temple, you see, reminds us to ask ourselves the question, “How are things supposed to be?” The underlying premise of this event, after all, is that Jesus did not find things in the temple as they were supposed to be. And whether the site in question is the Jerusalem temple, or your church, or my family, or an individual’s heart and life, the poignant and profound question remains the same: How is this supposed to be? When the Lord comes here, is he pleased or displeased by what he sees? Is he honored or offended by what he finds?
Finally, this episode in Jerusalem anticipates two others that will follow — the crucifixion and the resurrection.
The disciples’ remembrance of the line from Psalm 69 — “zeal for your house will consume me” — has an ominous quality to it. And we know from Mark that, immediately following this event, “the chief priests and the scribes... began seeking how to destroy Him” (Mark 11:18 NASB). And so, in terms of the unfolding antagonism of the Jerusalem leaders toward Jesus, this event in the temple was highly provocative, perhaps even a watershed.
On the other hand, Jesus’ dramatic challenge to his opponents — “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” — looks beyond the cross to the empty tomb. His words were not understood at the moment, of course. Indeed, it’s clear from the response of the Jews that they had misunderstood him. But he was at this moment promising his own resurrection, and then, “after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this.”
Application
We noted above the variety of the ways of God that are revealed in our selected passages for this week. Let us marvel at his variety and versatility! Zeus had his thunderbolts and Cupid his arrows, but the God of the Bible is no one-trick-pony. We rejoice in the wisdom and providence by which he does just the right thing at just the right time.
In Exodus, salvation looked like power — miracles and plagues that beat down the stubborn Pharaoh and the land of Israel’s bondage. The cross, on the other hand, salvation looked like weakness — a shameful, public execution, in which the Son of God might be mistaken for either a criminal or a victim. Yet those of us “who are being saved (recognize that) it is the power of God.”
In the commandments and the cleaning, we are reminded of the poet, who prayed, “Make and keep me pure within.”2 These are the sanctifying purposes of God in the cleansing he does and the commandments he gives. It would be a severely limited salvation, to be sure, if all he could or would do was forgive our sins; if he was unwilling or unable to clean out the sinfulness and to guide us into righteousness.
Of course, the ways of God are seldom recognized by the world. Pharaoh did not take them seriously until it was quite too late for him and for his people. The people who were part of the temple establishment in Jerusalem were angered by the unrecognized ways of God in their midst. And the people who surrounded the Christians of ancient Corinth, likewise, were dismissive of God’s way and the message about it.
Through it all, though, the Lord patiently and providently works in our world. Whether by power or by sacrifice, whether with gentleness or severity, he works to save, to deliver, to cleanse, and to set free. And whether it is plagues or pillars, wisdom or foolishness, tablets or stone or turned-over tables, it is always love and it is always grace. Thanks be to God for “the ways of God to men!”
Alternative Application(s)
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 — “Some Things Never Change”
When I was a young man in the ministry, I remember an occasion when I urged the folks in a small group I was leading to reach out to friends and neighbors in order to invite them to church. My suggestion was followed by an awkward silence. I looked around, searching the group with my eyes for an explanation. Then someone said what it turns out the others were thinking: “Everyone I know already goes to church somewhere.”
That was decades ago, and it’s a different story now for most of our people and most of our churches. In my present context, it’s hard to imagine being in a group of people where anyone would say that everyone they know goes to church. I would not want to paint with a carelessly broad brush as though we have gone from a wholly Christian American to a wholly pagan America. But the prevailing winds of our culture have certainly shifted in the course of the past generation or two.
One result of that shift is that we find ourselves today in a context that more closely resembles the context of Paul’s Corinthian audience. We, too, are surrounded more and more by people who find the gospel to be a stumbling block and foolishness. We, too, proclaim a message that is dismissed as nonsense and an offense.
If we are old enough to have known a quite different cultural context, then we may still be reeling from the surprise and disbelief. If we are young enough not to know anything very different from this, we may be insensitive to the dramatic change that has occurred. But, in either case, we are in a position to feel solidarity with the Christians of ancient Corinth.
Perhaps at some level human society is just a macro version of junior high school. There is some select group within the school that is made up of the “cool” kids, the “popular” kids, and their attitudes and values set the pace for everyone else. So too, perhaps, with society at large. And in both first-century Corinth and twenty-first-century America, the “cool” kids have grown dismissive of — perhaps even antagonistic toward — Christ, his cross, and his word.
What Paul writes in our epistle reading, therefore, is a kind of comfort to us, for we are assured that there is nothing new under the sun. Skepticism is not a recent invention. Condescension toward the gospel message is not a new phenomenon. No, for in the very beginning, the church faced an uphill battle with what we might call the elites and public intellectuals of that day.
The mistake that we must avoid is to try to contort the gospel so that the skeptics and antagonists will approve of it. Paul famously sought to meet people where they were at (see 1 Corinthians 9:19-22), to be sure, but he would not change the gospel in order to gain anyone’s approval (see Galatians 1:8-10). He was reconciled to the fact that the message of Christ’s cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Yet there is a third group — one that featured both some Jews and some Gentiles — and that third group experienced that gospel message differently. “To us who are being saved it is the power of God,” he said, and “to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
The gospel doesn’t change. Antagonism to the gospel does not change. But people are changed — they are changed by the gospel. Paul was a living testament to that, and he had seen flesh-and-blood evidence of it all around the Mediterranean world.
So it is that we are called to go out into our world with the message of Christ. It is increasingly a world that will treat our Lord and his message with scorn. But that is not a reason either to suppress the message or to alter it. For we preach it with the confidence that it is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
1 https://www.dartmouth.edu/milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml
2 Charles Wesley, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” UMH #479
Our three selected passages this week give us a fascinating glimpse of the scope of the ways of God. The breadth of his repertoire is surely on display, as we move from the giving to the Ten Commandments to Paul’s discourse on wisdom and foolishness to John’s account of the cleansing of the temple. In every case, we see the ways of God. But, taken together, we observe that his ways are marvelous in their variety.
In the Exodus passage, we are reminded first of God’s saving activity: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” And that deliverance is followed by the giving of the law. The law represents God’s covenant relationship with his people, and it also articulates his will for human life and civilization.
In the epistle passage, we see again the saving activity of God. This time, however, it is not the methods and deeds by which the Israelites were set free from bondage in Egypt; this time, it is the cross. And Paul frames the cross in the context of wisdom and foolishness, acknowledging the difference between what human beings are impressed or put off by, on the one hand, and how God operates, on the other.
Finally, in the gospel lection, we may see yet another saving activity of God. Jesus’ cleaning of the temple, as we note below, is a merciful intervention into sin: better to clean what is filthy, after all, than to destroy it. And then, in the wake of that activity, the ultimate saving activity of God is presaged, as we are given reason to anticipate the cross and the empty tomb.
Exodus 20:1-17
This passage of scriptureis rather like the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution: there is broad recognition, but only vague familiarity. Everyone has heard of the Ten Commandments, just as they have heard of the foundational documents of our nation. Yet when pressed, we discover an alarming lack of real knowledge of the actual contents.
Unless you are serving a church where an emphasis continues to be placed on memorization, chances are that most of the individuals in your congregation would not be able to recite the Ten Commandments. And, even if they came up with ten, the likelihood is that some other commandments would have found their way onto the list (e.g., love your neighbor as yourself). Earlier generations made a priority of rote memorization so that folks just grew up knowing this sort of fundamental material, but that’s not so broadly the case anymore.
Accordingly, we may find that some introductions are in order. Perhaps we might personify the Ten Commandments as a sort of celebrity that everyone has heard of, but most of us do not know well. And if I were going to introduce a 2021 American congregation to the Ten Commandments, I would include the following elements.
First, set the stage. The Ten Commandments may appear as a stand-alone item in a children’s Sunday School classroom, but they were not originally given in a vacuum. The commandments are given at a time, at a place, and to a people. The children of Israel are a recently freed nation of former slaves. Their deliverer is leading them through the wilderness, guiding and providing in the desert, en route to the land promised to their ancestors. And along the way — though not necessarily on the way — they have an appointment to meet their God at the holy mountain. And at that place, he appears in awesome glory, and gives to them his law. The visible centerpiece of that law are the tablets containing these commandments. And those tablets, in turn, are kept in a sacred box known as the Ark of the Covenant, which helps us to understand the relational quality and purpose of these commandments.
Second, chronology is theology. We noted above that God is giving his law to the slaves he has recently freed from their bondage, which had been in the land of Egypt. The order of events is significant, inasmuch as law follows rather than precedes salvation. Many times we make such a distinction between “law” and “gospel” that we lose sight of the overarching theme of grace. God’s sovereign actions on our behalf always come first. So it is that the people of Israel were “saved” before God gave them his law.
Finally, form is content. Any introduction to the Ten Commandments must include some attention being paid to how those commandments are presented to us. Many have observed a seeming hierarchy in their order, with the first four commandments being “vertical” (that is, pertaining to God and the things of God), while the latter six are more “horizontal” (that is, involving other human beings). As a corresponding observation about the hierarchy, it is arguable from the rest of the Old Testament law that breaking any of the first seven commandments was a capital offense, while the next two commandments incur lesser penalties, and the final commandment has no corresponding penalty in the rest of the Old Testament law.
The prevalence of that death penalty is a bothersome thing to many a modern reader. For myself, I look at it as the law’s version of a price tag. This is the Lord’s way of showing his people how valuable some things are. And we would do well to note which things in his law are given that highest price tag, for many of them are no longer highly valued in our world today.
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
Paul’s relationship to the Corinthians is a fascinating one, and instructive to us at many levels. Between 1 and 2 Corinthians, we have 29 chapters of correspondence between the apostle and the people of that church, which makes up fully ten percent of the entire New Testament. And we may understand this week’s selected passage within the larger context of that relationship.
The compelling issue, it seems to me, is the balancing act between meeting people where they’re at and changing where they are at.
On the one hand, later in 1 Corinthians, Paul is explicit about his deliberate effort to meet people where they're at for the sake of the gospel. “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. And to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the Law, as under the Law, though not being myself under the Law, that I might win those who are under the Law; to those who are without law, as without law, though not being without the law of God but under the law of Christ, that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:10-22 NASB). And we see that winsome approach at work in the Acts accounts of Paul’s preaching and evangelism in various settings.
In 2 Corinthians, meanwhile, we observe Paul wrestling with the congregation in their admiration for people that he sarcastically refers to as “super-apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:5 NIV). Paul himself does not regard as most important the metrics by which the super-apostles boast and by which the Corinthians seem to be impressed. Yet he takes a two-can-play-at-that-game approach, demonstrating his superiority over those super-apostles. He wins even by their metrics, yet the whole time that he is exalting himself in those terms, he confesses that he is talking like a fool (e.g., 2 Corinthians 11:17). He is meeting the people where they're at, but he is also chiding them for where they're at.
And then, in our selected passage from 1 Corinthians, Paul explores the themes of wisdom and foolishness. Wisdom is an exceedingly important category for the people in Paul's audience. The Greeks in general prided themselves on wisdom, and the elites in the Corinthian congregation would have been especially inclined to cater to conventional standards and understanding of human wisdom.
In the face of that, Paul endeavors to redefine wisdom and foolishness for the people in that congregation, for the Christians in that culture. The gospel — and, specifically, the centerpiece of the gospel, which is the cross of Christ — is readily dismissed as foolishness. And that must have been something of a social burden for the Christians in Corinth. No one, after all, wants to be associated with something that those around us scoff at. No one wants to be tied to something that others regard as stupid or ridiculous. Yet this was the plight facing Paul’s audience, for the message of Christ crucified was “foolishness to the Greeks.”
So it is that Paul encourages the Corinthian Christians to a broader view.
In the 1972 movie The Poseidon Adventure, we follow the experiences of a group of passengers on a cruise ship that is capsized by a tidal wave. Initially, of course, the ship contains hundreds of passengers, as well as crew members. Many are killed by the initial catastrophe. But those who survive the overwhelming wave now find themselves alive on a ship that is upside down in the water. And the question becomes: How do we get out of here alive?
The answer to that question is not unanimous. Some of the passengers are convinced that their best course of action is to stay where they are. Others seek to move to a certain part of the ship. Still others make their way to yet another part of the ship.
In the moments of disagreement, there is profound tension, for the stakes are so high. This is a matter of life or death. And as you head to the right, you can’t help but be unsettled by that big group that is choosing instead to head to the left.
So it is that Paul endeavors to reassure the band of Christians in Corinth, who are no doubt a small minority — numerically, theologically, and philosophically — in their community. He wants them to know that, even though everyone around them is pointing one way, they should go the other way. Even though everyone around them says, “Nonsense!”, it is God’s nonsense. And God’s nonsense is higher, better, stronger, and truer than the very best that human beings have to offer.
John 2:13-22
John’s placement of this familiar event is different than what we are accustomed to in the synoptic Gospels. But then, of course, John’s whole organization is quite different, and he does not spend as much time on Jesus’ Galilean ministry, but focuses instead on significant events in Jerusalem. And the so-called ‘cleansing of the temple’ is, to be sure, a significant event in Jerusalem.
In the 2006 movie The Nativity Story, we observe Joseph and Mary making the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. On the way, they pass through Jerusalem. When it is visible on the horizon, Joseph says, with wonder in his voice, “Jerusalem, the Holy City!” But when they arrive in Jerusalem it proves to be a disappointment, for it does not feel holy, at all. First, they experience an attempted robbery, which is not attested in scripture. Then they pass through the cacophony of the commerce within the temple precincts, which also does not feel holy. Joseph anticipates his son’s indignation a generation later, lamenting, “This is meant to be a holy place.”
Whether Joseph was so prescient or not, we don’t know. But all four gospels tell us of Jesus’ indignation at what he finds going on in the temple. Scholars offer varying insights into what Jesus may have found especially offensive and what corruption was perhaps behind the scenes with the on-site salespersons and money-changers. It may be to our advantage, however, that the details of the offenses remain vague. The point, after all, is not so much what the people were doing wrong as how Jesus responded to that wrongdoing.
We recall that the Lord showed Ezekiel the detestable things taking place in the temple circa 592 BC (Ezekiel 8). That temple was destroyed by the Babylonians less than a decade later. Meanwhile, the temple where Jesus turned over the tables and drove out the money-changers was destroyed by the Romans just one generation later.
Of course, in that larger context, we may recognize this seemingly angry and violent act by Jesus as an exercise of grace. To cleanse, after all, is not to destroy. And if only the temple of Ezekiel’s day had been cleansed — or the temple of Jesus’ day had stayed cleansed — perhaps the fate would have been different.
In our day, of course, the temple in Jerusalem is no longer an issue. What was destroyed by the Romans almost two-thousand years ago has not been rebuilt since. But we may still take seriously — and take personally — the episode recorded here in John 2.
The scene at the temple, you see, reminds us to ask ourselves the question, “How are things supposed to be?” The underlying premise of this event, after all, is that Jesus did not find things in the temple as they were supposed to be. And whether the site in question is the Jerusalem temple, or your church, or my family, or an individual’s heart and life, the poignant and profound question remains the same: How is this supposed to be? When the Lord comes here, is he pleased or displeased by what he sees? Is he honored or offended by what he finds?
Finally, this episode in Jerusalem anticipates two others that will follow — the crucifixion and the resurrection.
The disciples’ remembrance of the line from Psalm 69 — “zeal for your house will consume me” — has an ominous quality to it. And we know from Mark that, immediately following this event, “the chief priests and the scribes... began seeking how to destroy Him” (Mark 11:18 NASB). And so, in terms of the unfolding antagonism of the Jerusalem leaders toward Jesus, this event in the temple was highly provocative, perhaps even a watershed.
On the other hand, Jesus’ dramatic challenge to his opponents — “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” — looks beyond the cross to the empty tomb. His words were not understood at the moment, of course. Indeed, it’s clear from the response of the Jews that they had misunderstood him. But he was at this moment promising his own resurrection, and then, “after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this.”
Application
We noted above the variety of the ways of God that are revealed in our selected passages for this week. Let us marvel at his variety and versatility! Zeus had his thunderbolts and Cupid his arrows, but the God of the Bible is no one-trick-pony. We rejoice in the wisdom and providence by which he does just the right thing at just the right time.
In Exodus, salvation looked like power — miracles and plagues that beat down the stubborn Pharaoh and the land of Israel’s bondage. The cross, on the other hand, salvation looked like weakness — a shameful, public execution, in which the Son of God might be mistaken for either a criminal or a victim. Yet those of us “who are being saved (recognize that) it is the power of God.”
In the commandments and the cleaning, we are reminded of the poet, who prayed, “Make and keep me pure within.”2 These are the sanctifying purposes of God in the cleansing he does and the commandments he gives. It would be a severely limited salvation, to be sure, if all he could or would do was forgive our sins; if he was unwilling or unable to clean out the sinfulness and to guide us into righteousness.
Of course, the ways of God are seldom recognized by the world. Pharaoh did not take them seriously until it was quite too late for him and for his people. The people who were part of the temple establishment in Jerusalem were angered by the unrecognized ways of God in their midst. And the people who surrounded the Christians of ancient Corinth, likewise, were dismissive of God’s way and the message about it.
Through it all, though, the Lord patiently and providently works in our world. Whether by power or by sacrifice, whether with gentleness or severity, he works to save, to deliver, to cleanse, and to set free. And whether it is plagues or pillars, wisdom or foolishness, tablets or stone or turned-over tables, it is always love and it is always grace. Thanks be to God for “the ways of God to men!”
Alternative Application(s)
1 Corinthians 1:18-25 — “Some Things Never Change”
When I was a young man in the ministry, I remember an occasion when I urged the folks in a small group I was leading to reach out to friends and neighbors in order to invite them to church. My suggestion was followed by an awkward silence. I looked around, searching the group with my eyes for an explanation. Then someone said what it turns out the others were thinking: “Everyone I know already goes to church somewhere.”
That was decades ago, and it’s a different story now for most of our people and most of our churches. In my present context, it’s hard to imagine being in a group of people where anyone would say that everyone they know goes to church. I would not want to paint with a carelessly broad brush as though we have gone from a wholly Christian American to a wholly pagan America. But the prevailing winds of our culture have certainly shifted in the course of the past generation or two.
One result of that shift is that we find ourselves today in a context that more closely resembles the context of Paul’s Corinthian audience. We, too, are surrounded more and more by people who find the gospel to be a stumbling block and foolishness. We, too, proclaim a message that is dismissed as nonsense and an offense.
If we are old enough to have known a quite different cultural context, then we may still be reeling from the surprise and disbelief. If we are young enough not to know anything very different from this, we may be insensitive to the dramatic change that has occurred. But, in either case, we are in a position to feel solidarity with the Christians of ancient Corinth.
Perhaps at some level human society is just a macro version of junior high school. There is some select group within the school that is made up of the “cool” kids, the “popular” kids, and their attitudes and values set the pace for everyone else. So too, perhaps, with society at large. And in both first-century Corinth and twenty-first-century America, the “cool” kids have grown dismissive of — perhaps even antagonistic toward — Christ, his cross, and his word.
What Paul writes in our epistle reading, therefore, is a kind of comfort to us, for we are assured that there is nothing new under the sun. Skepticism is not a recent invention. Condescension toward the gospel message is not a new phenomenon. No, for in the very beginning, the church faced an uphill battle with what we might call the elites and public intellectuals of that day.
The mistake that we must avoid is to try to contort the gospel so that the skeptics and antagonists will approve of it. Paul famously sought to meet people where they were at (see 1 Corinthians 9:19-22), to be sure, but he would not change the gospel in order to gain anyone’s approval (see Galatians 1:8-10). He was reconciled to the fact that the message of Christ’s cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Yet there is a third group — one that featured both some Jews and some Gentiles — and that third group experienced that gospel message differently. “To us who are being saved it is the power of God,” he said, and “to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
The gospel doesn’t change. Antagonism to the gospel does not change. But people are changed — they are changed by the gospel. Paul was a living testament to that, and he had seen flesh-and-blood evidence of it all around the Mediterranean world.
So it is that we are called to go out into our world with the message of Christ. It is increasingly a world that will treat our Lord and his message with scorn. But that is not a reason either to suppress the message or to alter it. For we preach it with the confidence that it is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
1 https://www.dartmouth.edu/milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml
2 Charles Wesley, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” UMH #479
