Bobby Schuller - Temple Sermon
Wow, this is an amazing time. Good morning, everybody. It's such a joy again to be with you here this Sunday morning. Coming to you from Jerusalem. We are here at the southern steps of the Temple Mount. So, in Jerusalem, of course, a fifth of the city is made up by just this one platform right here, where the temple and the court of the Gentiles and Solomon's porch and all of those famous things all happened right here. And so, today, my sermon, I want to talk a little bit about Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers. Just to the left of me here is the entrance to the temple, the main place where people would have entered.
To my right is what's today called the City of David. It's the smaller, original city of Jerusalem that King David sort of established as the capital of Israel, of Judah, and down at the bottom, actually they recently discovered it. It's the original Pool of Siloam that functioned as a mikvah. So, if you are a Jew and you came here to Jerusalem during Passover, you would go to that mikvah. You would wash yourself, and then you would take this long ascension of stairs. You would sing the Ascension Psalms, and you would prepare your heart and your mind to go into the temple, and then this would be this amazing place where you're like, "Wow, I'm about to enter into God's house and into God's company in God's court".
And this is also, though, the place where the money changers were. And everybody wanted to see the money changers knocked out. Before we get to that, the temple is a symbol of God's love and grace for us. You know, God wants to be with you. Throughout all of the Old and the New Testament, you constantly see God desperately wanting to be with his people, and sometimes his people are with God, and other times they sin and they fall away. Maybe even this morning or this evening, wherever you're watching, you can feel that way sometimes. You're like, "God does not want to be with me. God is ashamed of me". Or "God, you know, doesn't want to spend time with me".
But the temple is God desperately wanting to be with his people. So, the temple in Jesus's day was called The House. I don't think they ever call it the temple. Maybe they do, but they call it God's House. I love that image, that it's the place where you gather to be with God, God your Father. It's interesting, we see, actually, the first connection to the temple at the very beginning of the Bible. In Genesis chapter 1, God creates the Garden of Eden in seven days. There's seven speeches that God gives. And then, later on, when the temple and the tabernacle are established, God also, the temple priests give seven speeches over seven days as they establish both the tabernacle and the temple.
In the garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve are called to work and to keep the garden on God's behalf, later on, the priests are also called to work and keep the temple, and then you also see that the design of the temple, the inside of the temple is full of gold and rich flowers and all sorts of imagery that is a reflection of what the garden of Eden would've been like. So, we think of the garden of Eden as the way the world should be. As Adam and Eve, walking and talking and being with God, and in a way where they're naked, right, and the idea of being naked is like totally vulnerable and with God.
So, in the same way, the temple becomes like a little garden that's supposed to be where, in a world of chaos and sin and people harming each other, you can sort of get away from it and be with God and be made right with God. And the temple is also where you could make a sacrifice to make an atonement for your sin, so that if you've really hurt someone or really made a mistake, you can be reconnected with God. So, the temple, again, is just a symbol that God is so gracious, so loving, and he wants to be with you today. Maybe you're not religious. You're not a Christian at all. You're at home watching on television, like, but that's not how God is.
In fact, God hates it when people do things like that. In fact, the Jews believe in the Ten Commandments. Some say that the worst of the Ten Commandments is taking God's name in vain, and that's exactly what that is. When people pretend to be from God, but they hurt you, they're actually driving people away from God. So, God, you don't need anyone except Jesus Christ to connect with God. He made the way where you can spend time with God today. Okay. So, this is the Temple Mount, and this is where Jesus comes on the triumphal entry, Jesus rides on the donkey into Jerusalem. He goes to the Golden Gate and then he comes here. This is called the Huldah Gate.
This is where Jesus said, "Hold my beer, I'm gonna kick over these tables, and I'm gonna set things right". We'll get to that, but this is a setup because the money changers were the thing between people and God in many ways. So, Jesus's story of riding the donkey is actually a hyperlink to another famous Jewish story of when Solomon becomes king. When you read 1 Kings, you see this dramatic story of King David, the one who, you know, creates this nation. He unites the 12 tribes of Israel. He makes Jerusalem the capital, and now he's old. He's 70, which in the ancient days, like, extremely old. He's on his deathbed, and he has 19 sons, and usually in those days, it would be the oldest of the 19 sons, the three eldest have probably died.
And so now, the oldest living son is a son named Adoniah. The Bible says Adoniah is really good looking. You get the sense that he might be pretty charismatic. I heard one guy say, but he also might have been a little bit dumb. We don't really know, but he was like the popular guy, and he's the oldest. So, according to custom, if nobody is named Adoniah should be the one who becomes king, but early on, David had said, I don't want Adoniah to be king. I want Solomon to be king. And so, when David's on his deathbed, just over here in the city of David, Adoniah decides, "I'm gonna try and take the throne and not allow Solomon to become king".
So, he gathers all of his brothers, except for Solomon, and he gets just one priest, and he gets some of the officials, and he makes a sacrifice, a big, grand sacrifice and throws this party, and they start shouting, "Adoniah, long live the King Adoniah," even though David is still alive. And the prophet Nathan and Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, go to King David and they say, "My Lord, have you not heard. Didn't you say that King Solomon would be the king after you"? And he says, "As surely as I live, Solomon will be the king". And so he said, "Take my mule, my donkey, and put Solomon on him, and take him down here to the Kidron Valley, where the Gihon Spring is. There anoint him to be king, and then have him ascend Zion, ascend this hill, and there put him on the throne".
And so, they do exactly that. Bathsheba and the priests, the prophet Nathan, go down and they anoint Solomon as king and he's on King David's mule, which is like our version of Air Force One. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but the King's mule is a huge symbol, and it's a way of saying this is the king's pick, and as Solomon comes up the hill, there's a whole parade of people that are with him, saying, "Long live King Solomon. Long live King Solomon".
And he sits on David's throne, and King David praises the Lord that the one he chose, Solomon, became king, and they're like kind of a funny story. At the same time, well Adoniah, the guy that tried to take the throne, they're celebrating. They've all had a few glasses of wine. They'd have a huge feast. They're laughing it up, having a great time. They think the story's over, and a guy named Jonathan comes into the party and he says, "My Lord Adoniah, have you not heard? King Solomon was placed on David's mule and was anointed king at the spring and now sits on his throne". And it says that all the officials and all the people who are with Adoniah quietly dispersed.
So, they went from shouting, "Long live King Adoniah" to quietly dispersing. Like, we weren't really there, you know? And Adoniah freaks out, and he runs up to the temple, and he grabs the horn, because there's this thing in the law that says if somebody accidentally murders someone and they grab the horns, they're safe until they take their hands off the horn. So, Solomon comes up and he talks to Adoniah and he says, "I won't kill you. I won't harm you as long as you do what's right". And Solomon becomes king.
So, oftentimes when we see Jesus ascending this hill from the Mount of Olives over there through the Kidron Valley through the Golden Gate on Palm Sunday, we think of the prophecy from Zechariah, and we should, but another hyperlink is this other story, not just the messianic part of Jesus, but the Kingship of Jesus, that he is called to be the Prince of Peace and the King of our lives. And so, with the King comes authority. Authority to set things right in your life and in my life. And so when Jesus comes down through this valley on his donkey and he goes into Golden Gate, he comes down here, probably from behind, and these money lenders, he kicks over their table and he drives them out.
Now, what was the big deal with the money lenders? You know, during Passover so many Jews would come from all over to come here to celebrate this great holiday, but you're only allowed to take kosher money into the temple. So, like, if you pull out a dollar bill from your pocket, you'll see that on there, there's all sorts of images of animals or of people. Well, in Judaism, you're not allowed to do that. So you have to exchange whatever currency you have for shekels that don't have any, you know, and pagan imagery on it or anything. And that's fine, right? It's okay to exchange money, but what was happening was the money changers were taking, you know, giving you a huge haircut and making a huge profit from that.
And so all of these people who have these big heart, and they just want to be with God, and they want to celebrate with his people and they want to sing the songs and they wanna make sacrifices. They come here and if they forget to, you know, get the right money, they get this massive haircut when they exchange, and Jesus comes and, of course, our guide, he said earlier that everybody wanted to do this, but then finally, this famous rabbi, Jesus, comes and he actually does, you know, what everybody else wanted to do. He comes in, he kicks over these tables, and he sets things right. And so, you see that when he does that, he says, "My Father's house".
So again, there's that word. That is the word they use for the temple, is "My Father's house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers". He chases everyone out. Nobody stops him, of course, because everybody knows that, you know, this thing was wrong, and in a King-like way, he sets free the temple from these robbers. And then instantly, he just begins to heal people. There's just this outpouring of the Spirit, and people are coming to him, and there's this amazing Passover Miracle, where Jesus heals people, and I just have to say, even just standing here, it's in a way just overwhelming seeing some of these stones here.
These are all the same stones where those money changers would have been, where Jesus would've walked through, where millions of Jews every year would have come and made sacrifice. This is the place, and these are the doors, even though they're blocked. This is the place people would have come to be with God. But you know, you don't need a temple anymore to be with God. The temple was a beautiful thing and a place in Jerusalem that people would go to, but Christ has made the way in our lives that Peter tells us we have become living stones, that the Holy Spirit dwells in you and me. We think all the time about how amazing it would have been to go into the Holy of Holies and to go into that place, but you know, you're a Holy of Holies now.
The Holy Spirit dwells within you. The power to heal, the power to forgive, and to speak God's Word and to do great things for God, it's inside of you. And so often, we have religious experts who say, oh no, God can't use you. Or we have religious frauds like these people who take money or harm you, and God can't use you. And I just want to tell you, God just wants to be with you directly. He just wants to spend time with you. And he wants to be with you now. So make Christ King.
In that same way that sometimes like Adoniah, you know, tried to take the throne, maybe other things have tried to take the throne in your life, make Jesus the throne in your life. You'll never regret it, and then also remember that sometimes when we invite Jesus into our life as a king, there may be some things in our heart that he has to set right. I imagine that cleansing the temple as he did probably, you know, looked in a way, a little bit violent. It probably was a mess. Things were spilling everywhere.
Probably money was lost and property was broken, and I think this is sort of what happens in life sometimes when we go through a transformation. Sometimes, maybe you've recently come to faith or you can sense that God is doing something great in your life. Sometimes when that happens, things get messier before they get cleaner. You start digging up old memories, old sins, mistakes that you made. You start to feel a lot of shame. Maybe you're experiencing a lot of stress as you're going through transformation, but I want you to just trust those things to the Lord and believe that sometimes things get messier in God's kingdom before they get cleaner.
You know, the way that God fixes the house isn't always decent and in order as we like to say. It's sometimes it's a bit of a mess. More than anything, the temple was a symbol that God loves you, that God wants to be with you, that he wants to spend time with you, and that somehow, people just, I don't know why, people sometimes just want to get in the way of that, or people want to capitalize on that. Don't let that happen, and don't worry about it. Just go to God directly, and if he does some things in your life and maybe speaks to your heart about some things that will be hard to deal with, just trust him with it and watch how that often will precede healing. You know, all of us need healing in some way.
A lot of us have been broken and wounded. A lot of us need physical healing. And so often in the Bible there's, you know, there's words about forgiveness and restoration that have to happen before the healing. Sometimes we forgive others or receive forgiveness from God, but that happens before we receive healing from God. And so, I wanted to invite Hannah, actually, to close out this sermon and to pray for you. You know, I could pray for you as well, but we do ministry together, and Hannah has, I think, just a real anointing for prayer. So, I wanna invite Hannah to come and pray with me as we finish this message and pray that God would help you and bring healing to your life. Hannah, would you come?
Hannah: Thank you, Bobby. The Bible says that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and I am a living testimony that God still does miracles today like he did in the Bible times. I would add 14 years of stomach issues and autoimmune things that the Lord completely healed me of. We had people we pray for. We had cancer shrink and didn't need chemo anymore. People that we've prayed for who joy returned to their life, who were originally on different types of anti-depressants. So, as pray for you right now, I want you to release your faith and listen to the words that I'm praying. These are for you. God wants to heal you, actually, in this moment, right now. So, would you join me in prayer?
Jesus, you are the same yesterday, today, and forever. So, healing is part of your ministry today, just as it was when you healed those in this temple. Thank you, Lord. You promised us healing. You went to the whipping post for our healing. We know you came to give us life and life to the full. Only Satan wants us sick and tormented. You use the word "sozo" for salvation, which means full physical, mental, and spiritual healing. So, our physical and mental healing are part of our salvation. So, we take you at your word right now. In the name of Jesus Christ, heal the one listening right now. Thank you that because you have just heard us, we now have what we have asked. Thank you that the one who has heard this prayer is now healed. I asked the healed one would act their faith after this prayer and do what they could not do before in the name of Jesus Christ. Thank you. Thank you, Lord, for your healing salvation. Hallelujah. Thank you, Lord. In the name of Jesus, we pray, amen.