Each day of this week Jesus draws closer to the agony, and the glory, His Father has sent Him to.
Knowing there are only days left to your life what do you do with the remaining hours?
Jesus has spent two and half years pouring into his disciples preparing them for the time when he would no longer be with them.
He showed them how to live in victory and now he would show them the ultimate victory of life over death for eternity. This was why he came, to redeem man back from the sin committed in the Garden of Eden.
On this day when Jesus entered the temple area His fervor for the House of God erupted in a fiery anger at what He saw. The area was filled with money changers and merchants. The Passover celebration meant big business to them. What Jesus saw was a blasphemy of what the temple was meant to be.
When they arrived back to Jerusalem he went to the Temple and began to drive out the merchants and their customers, and knocked over the tables of the moneychangers and the stalls of those selling doves, and stopped everyone from bringing in loads of merchandise.
He told them, "It is written in the Scriptures, 'My Temple is to be a place of prayer for all nations,' but you have turned it into a den of robbers." Mark 11:15-17 TLB
Those who came to the temple to celebrate the Passover were robbed by these merchants when they were charged exorbitant prices for animals for the necessary sacrifices and when they were cheated on the exchange rate of their international currency for temple coins. How can a person worship with a pure heart after this kind of treatment at the “house of God?”
The holiness of the temple and the Passover celebration were defiled by the deceitful practices of the sellers. Jesus was desperate to bring purity, prayer, power and praise back to the house of God, even using violence to reestablish it.
God yearns for us to examine our personal temples and plant the seeds of purity, prayer, power and praise so that our temples may once again be a dwelling place for Him.
Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Ps. 51:10 NIV
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