OUR FATHER WHOSE TEMPLE SHALL BE CALLED A HOUSE OF PRAYER

After entering Jerusalem on a donkey colt, Jesus went into the temple of God and confronted the money changers and merchants who sold doves. Matthew chapter 21 vereses 12 - 13 records the event this way;

12 Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 And He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’ ”

The commerce that was being conducted in the temple was a speculative and opportunistic trade that took advantage of the sacrificial requirements of the temple to profit from the increased exchange rates between the public currency and the temple currency and to profit from the higher prices of sacrificial animals during the times when people flooded into Jerusalem for religious activities.

The Lord Jesus carried out a highly provocative cleansing of the temple where He drove out the money changers and animal sellers. As He did so, He quoted Isaiah chapter 56 verse 7 which (including verse 6 for context), reads this way;

6 And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to minister to him,

to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants,

all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant-

 

7 these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar;

for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.”

The Lord rebuked the temple administrators for turning the sacred temple away from its ordinal task which was to be an international nexus of prayer and turning it into a ˋden of thievesˋ where currency speculators and hawkers could take advantage of the inflated rates and prices right in the temple facility itself.

This activty defamed the holy temple of God to the foreigners who would come to seek God but would be accosted by rip-off artists inside the sacred spaces of the temple.

This action put the Lord Jesus in the cross hairs of the religious establishment and those who were profiting from the intrusion into the temple.

Have mercy O God.

8