10/15/06 Not Without Cost
We are going to move into the second half of John chapter 2 this morning,
and with this move we also enter a dramatic change in Jesus’ life.
What we have recorded for us at the end of chapter one and the first half of chapter two
is a tiny window of transition early in Jesus’ public ministry.
In that section
we see Jesus when only a handful of people even knew of His existence.
It was very likely just a few weeks at most,
a time when He privately sought out and introduced Himself
to at least half of the men who would eventually make up His inner core of disciples.
But the event we looked at last week,
the miracle of turning that water into wine at the feast at Cana,
rapidly altered everything forever.
We saw last week
that, when Jesus performed that miracle,
He did so primarily for the six men who were with Him.
He wanted them to know
that He was far more than just a carpenter,
far more than just a prophet.
But the report of what He’d done spread rapidly
and with it Jesus was catapulted onto center stage,
first in the rural communities in the north of Israel,
and then very quickly in the nation as a whole.
In John 2:12 John tells us that immediately following the wedding
...He went down to Capernaum, He and His mother, and His brothers, and His disciples; and there they stayed a few days.
Capernaum was a little less that 20 miles away from Cana,
one of the larger cities in the region.
It had a synagogue,
it also had a Roman garrison and a Roman tax collection office.
It was located on the Sea of Galilee,
just a few miles from Bethsaida,
the home town of Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Philip.
It was also the place where Jesus chose to set up His home base for the years ahead.
He and His mother and several of his brothers
had a house in the city.
Having officially begun His public presentation of Himself to Israel,
it is likely that,
upon His return to Capernaum,
He immediately began His public teaching
and probably His miraculous healings as well.
But we need to keep in mind
that life in the first century was in many respects
radically different from anything we know today.
Nearly all travel was on foot,
or for the more fortunate, by horse, donkey, or camel.
There was, of course, no radio,
no TV,
no internet,
no telephone,
no rapid communications system of any kind.
News spread only from person to person.
And even though Jesus’ actions and teachings in and around Capernaum
most certainly caused a significant stir in those who witnessed them,
at this point He was still utterly unknown to anyone outside of that immediate area.
John tells us that just a few days following His return to Capernaum
Jesus made His first public trip to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was to Israel
what Anchorage is to Alaska.
In fact it was far more than that.
It was the largest city,
and it was also the center of both political and religious power in the nation.
It was where the Temple was located,
the only Temple,
the only place where the priests could perform the duties outlined by Moses,
the only place where sacrifices could be offered according to Jewish law.
It was where the High Priest lived,
where the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of the nation, met.
It was quite simply the political, cultural, religious, and social heart of the nation.
John tells us that the Passover feast was at hand
and Jesus went to Jerusalem.
Now, I don’t want us to get buried in unnecessary historical trivia,
but there are some things we need to know
if we are going to correctly understand the events we have recorded for us John’s Gospel.
And one of them is the significance of the Passover.
Many of you will remember
that Jesus attended not one but two Passover feasts in Jerusalem
during His three or four year public ministry.
The first is this one,
and it served as platform upon which He made His national presentation of Himself to Israel.
The second Passover He attended in Jerusalem
culminated in His being nailed to wooden cross.
That was no coincidence.
He didn’t just happen to be crucified
during the Passover feast.
That specific time and place
was predetermined by God Himself
from the very beginning.
It was rooted in the nature of the feast itself,
where it came from
and why it was imbedded in the history of the nation.
You see, the very first Passover feast that the Jews ever celebrated
took place not in Jerusalem,
not even in Israel,
but in the land of Egypt more than 1400 years earlier.
At that time
all of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah
were living in forced slavery in the land of Egypt.
In God’s plan
He brought Moses onto the scene
and through a series of devastating plagues poured out on Egypt
ultimately freed the Israelites from their slavery
and then led them back into the land of Israel.
The final plague was by far the most terrifying and devastating of all.
In a single night
God put to death the first born in every family in Egypt,
both man and beast.
But in preparation for that night
God gave Moses specific instructions for the Israelites.
He said that each family was to take a lamb,
kill it,
dip a bunch of hyssop into the lamb’s blood,
and then place the blood on the two door posts and the lintel
of the house in which they lived.
Then they were to roast the lamb without breaking a bone in it’s body,
and then eat it in it’s entirety.
And in Exodus 12:13 God made this promise to the Israelites.
“The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live; and when I see the blood I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”
He then went on to tell the people
that every year from then on
they were to celebrate this event,
this “Passover”
in memory of what God had done for them.
They didn’t know it at the time, of course,
but the entire celebration
was carefully designed by God
as a vivid picture of what God would one day accomplish
not just for Israel,
but for the entire human race through Christ.
It was no coincidence that the Spirit of God led John the Baptist
to use those five words to identify Christ at their first public meeting.
Behold the lamb of God.
You see, we are all in slavery.
With most of us it is not physical slavery,
but it’s just as real,
just as devastating.
It’s the slavery of our spirits,
the slavery of our souls,
slavery to fear,
slavery to futility,
slavery to our sin addictions,
slavery to a life without God,
slavery to a life without fulfillment
and a death without hope.
And our own spirit-rebellion against God
has earned each of us the sentence of death,
not just physical death,
but the endless death of an eternity separated from our Creator.
But through the blood of the lamb of God,
through His death for us,
we too are delivered from death and freed from our slavery.
And did you notice how God instructed the Israelites to apply the blood?
It was to be placed on each side of the door
and then at the beam at the top.
The blood was to be placed
in the form of a cross,
picturing a form of execution
that would not even exist for more than a century.
It was this annual Passover Feast
that Jesus went to celebrate in Jerusalem
in this 2nd chapter of John.
It was the feast that He knew
was carefully designed to picture the culmination of His own life,
the feast whose true meaning
He Himself would at last fulfill in just a few years.
But Jesus would use His first public Passover
for a different purpose.
He would use it as His platform
on which He would introduce Himself to the nation as a whole
and offer Himself to Israel as the Messiah
promised by God,
the Messiah Israel had been expecting since the time of Moses.
Now, with that as background,
let’s see where John goes with this.
JOH 2:13-22 And the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers seated. And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the moneychangers, and overturned their tables; and to those who were selling the doves He said, "Take these things away; stop making My Father's house a house of merchandise." His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for Thy house will consume me." The Jews therefore answered and said to Him, "What sign do You show to us, seeing that You do these things?" Jesus answered and said to them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews therefore said, "It took forty-six years to build this temple, and will You raise it up in three days?" But He was speaking of the temple of His body. When therefore He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He said this; and they believed the Scripture, and the word which Jesus had spoken.
And for this to make sense,
there is one other passage I need to read,
three verses from the last book of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi.
These words appear near the end of the message given by God to Israel
through the last true prophet to address the nation
prior to Jesus’ appearance on the scene.
And listen to what he says.
MAL 3:1-3 “...And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming," says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap. He will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, so that they may present to the Lord offerings in righteousness.”
Jesus knew exactly what He was doing in that Temple that day,
and He knew why.
He was the One that the nation had been waiting for,
He was the Messiah of Israel.
And when He entered Jerusalem on that Passover,
He did so to publicly present His credentials.
And His credentials didn’t just stop with His actions in the Temple.
John goes on to tell us
that at the same time He performed many other miraculous signs.
Most certainly these signs included
but may not have been limited to
numerous visible, public healings.
MAT 11:5 the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.
And so He stood before the nation
proclaiming with both His words and His actions
that the hope of the nation was at last here.
But hoping for a Messiah
and actually receiving and submitting to Him when He arrives
are two very different things.
And we understand that, don’t we?
I understood it all too clearly 40 years ago.
At 19 years old
I didn’t have a clue as to where to go with my life.
My greatest goals were all negative in nature.
They were things I knew I didn’t want to do.
At the top of that list
was avoiding the draft.
Viet Nam just didn’t seem like the type of place I wanted to be.
But when my Savior charged into my life
and started upsetting my not so neatly ordered life
my first response was the same as Israel’s
when He charged into their world and started upsetting tables.
It was obvious to those who held power in Israel
that this Messiah was not going to do things the way they’d been done before.
There was a whole lot of money being made by those people
who were exchanging the “defiled” Roman currency
for the “sanctified” temple currency.
And those priest-approved sacrifices
could only be purchased with the temple money.
It was a great money-making system,
and anyone who dabbled with that system
simply would not be tolerated.
And then there were all those who currently held the positions of power in the nation,
those who had schemed and bribed their way into the inner circles,
and they certainly weren’t about to step aside and turn control over to some unknown country carpenter
unless there was something in it for them.
It was obvious to everyone there that day
that Jesus was claiming for Himself the authority to upset more than just tables,
He was there to upset lives,
lots of lives,
and they were having none of it.
And with me 40 years ago,
even though I knew whatever was going on inside me
was absolutely real,
even though I knew this had every indication of being the real God
intervening in my life at a very real level,
and even though I knew He was offering me His leadership in my life,
I simply didn’t like the offer He was making.
To His credit,
He was as honest and straightforward with me
as He was with those money changers in the temple that day.
They certainly knew what He was demanding.
"Take these things away; stop making My Father's house a house of merchandise."
And I knew just as clearly what He was asking from me.
“Larry, will you be a preacher?”
The problem, of course,
was that there were some things about this Savior’s entrance into my life
that I simply hadn’t anticipated,
things like submission...and trust.
I desperately wanted direction and purpose in my life,
I just didn’t want that direction.
It’s easy for us to look back on the Nation of Israel
and wonder how they could have been so stupid,
so blind.
Here was a man whose powers for good seemed to have no limits,
a man who could cure the suffering and deformities of a lifetime in an instant
with nothing more than a word or a touch.
Here was a man who understood life absolutely,
a man who did only good,
a man who could calm the turmoil in life as no one else had ever done.
And yet, when He offered Himself to Israel
as the fulfillment of God’s promised Messiah
they wanted nothing to do with Him
because they knew the price He was asking
for what He was offering
was a price they simply were not willing to pay.
In just a few verses
we’ll hear Him explain why in His own words.
JOH 3:19 “And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil.”
But when we are honest with ourselves,
I think maybe we don’t dare be all that critical
because each of us have fought the same battles in our own lives.
Do we really want a Savior?
Well, yes, of course...but...
But what I really want is a Savior
who will fix stuff for me
while causing as little disruption and disturbance as possible.
And I certainly don’t want a Savior
who thinks He has the right
to start mucking about with the foundation of my life.
And I certainly don’t want One
whose presence with me
at times increases my discomfort or my pain.
What we think we want
is a Savior who will fix things
without having to fix us.
And of course no such Savior exists.
In the not too distance future
there will be a man
who will make that offer to the world,
a man who will promise to fix everything for us
if we simply trust him and give him absolute power to do so.
He’ll promise to fix everything
without fiddling with our personal lives at all.
He’ll promise each of us personal peace and affluence,
the right to choose any life-style we prefer
and the means we need for achieving it.
And for a few brief months
he’ll even seem to deliver what he promised.
Scripture calls him the Anti-Christ.
But of course it’s all an illusion,
all smoke and mirrors,
just like all Savior-alternatives in our lives.
And we’ve all had our share of them, haven’t we?
Savior alternatives -
things that promise to fix what hurts
without really fixing us.
Just one more drink,
just one more pill,
or maybe just one more passion-driven relationship.
A new house,
a new car,
a new pair of shoes...now I feel good,
now everything is going to be OK.
Jesus charged into the heart of Israel,
into the Temple in Jerusalem
and offered the nation what they believed they’d been waiting for.
He offered them the promised Messiah -
a Savior.
But rather than attacking the hated Roman soldiers,
He started attacking the corruption within their own lives.
And that simply wasn’t an option.
You see, He came to offer them
not political freedom from Rome,
but the true freedom of spirit they so desperately needed,
the freedom they could only know
when they found victory over their own inner corruption.
And in the end they decided the price was too great.
Things were really just fine the way they were, thank you.
And things really haven’t changed all that much since then.
The offer He makes to each one of us is very much the same.
There are times when His entrance into our lives
looks and feels just like His entrance into the Temple
looked and felt to those who were there.
He clearly comes with authority
asking us for our submission and trust.
And our first response
will be the same as those money changers.
Just as they grabbed onto their little golden treasures,
so we will see Him reaching for whatever it is
that we are clinging to for hope,
and for security,
and for purpose,
and we’ll try very much to hang onto it at all costs.
And if that happens,
when that happens in your own life
I hope and pray that you will do
what those in the Temple refused to do.
Look closely at the One you’re so afraid of.
Look at your God.
And then ask yourself why is He doing what He’s doing?
Is it because He takes some twisted pleasure in causing you needless pain,
or could it be because He’s telling you the truth,
because He loves you with an everlasting love,
and what He does He does because He longs for you to be truly free?