Loving Father, angry Son?

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!"

His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me."

Then the Jews demanded of him, "What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?"

Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days."

The Jews replied, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?" But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken (John 2:13-22).

A lot of people don’t like the Old Testament. Have you ever noticed how many Bibles are for sale that are New Testaments only, or New Testaments with just the Psalms? There are quite a few reasons why people don’t like reading the Old Testament: too much history, too many names that are hard to pronounce. But I think the main reason that people don’t like to read the Old Testament is that they have the idea that God, in the Old Testament, is a stern judge who is constantly punishing sinful people through plagues, drought, foreign oppression or outright death. Who wants to read about an angry God like that, when in the New Testament you have Jesus, the sweet, loving, gentle Son of God who forgives every sin and comforts us in the bad times? For many, the Old Testament is scary while the New Testament is reassuring. Jesus just isn’t like His Old Testament Father.

Of course, this is a terrible misunderstanding of both the Old and the New Testament, as it is a misunderstanding of who God the Father and God the Son are. The New Testament does not replace the Old Testament, it fulfills it. God the Son does not offer us mercy because He is different than His Father—Jesus offers us forgiveness because that is what His Father sent Him here to do. God did not change, somehow, during the 400 years between the ending of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New—God said plainly in Malachi 3:6, I the LORD do not change.

The God of the Old Testament is shown to get angry, but it is always anger tempered by mercy. When Adam and Eve cursed themselves and all humanity with sin by going against God, God told them, dust you are and to dust you will return (Genesis 3:19). Now a death sentence doesn’t sound like a statement of mercy, but consider the words of Paul in Romans 6:7--anyone who has died has been freed from sin. If God had allowed Adam and Eve to live forever as they were, they would have lived eternally as sinners. Can you imagine the amount of hurts you could be responsible for if you lived to be a thousand years old? There are teenagers who commit suicide because they can’t stand any more emotional pain after only living a decade and a half--can you imagine the amount of pain you could suffer at the hands of others over a period of two thousand years? When you think about it, God was acting in mercy when He put a limit on how long we can live under the curse of sin.

Do you need more proof that the God of the Old Testament is a God of love? As soon as Adam and Eve rebelled against Him and cursed themselves with sin, God promised to rescue mankind from sin by sending a Savior—God said to Satan, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel (Genesis 3:15). In this prediction, God told Satan that a descendant of Eve would oppose every follower of the devil’s, and even though Satan would cause that descendant great pain, He would triumph over the devil and crush him. This promise, directed towards Satan, was spoken in front of Adam and Eve to reassure them that even though they had been tricked into being the devil’s pawns, he would not have the final say over them or their children.

The God of the Old Testament forgave sins. Returning to Malachi, we hear God say, "I the LORD do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed. Ever since the time of your forefathers you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you," says the LORD Almighty. That, my friends, is an offer of grace. That is a call to repent and be forgiven. The God of the Old Testament does indeed hate sin and punishes it—but He is also a God of mercy who seeks our repentance and offers us grace.

What about Jesus? Did He turn His back on the Old Testament in order to give us a different relationship with God? In Matthew 5:17-18 Jesus says, Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Is Jesus different from His Father? In John 14:10-11 we hear Jesus say, Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Jesus makes it clear that He is not changing God’s attitude towards sin or His approach towards sinners. People who think that Jesus is a warm and fuzzy Savior who could never punish an unrepentant sinner have not read their New Testament very carefully.

In today’s Gospel lesson, we see Jesus enter the first courtyard of the Temple complex and find it full of penned animals, caged birds, and merchants who exchanged foreign currency for a percentage. All Jews received forgiveness by bringing sacrifices to the Temple, but those who traveled a long distance had a hard time bringing a sacrifice on the road with them; as a convenience, sellers of animals and money changers paid the Temple a percentage to set up in the outer court, which every pilgrim would pass through. This outraged the Son of God. Although God is everywhere, the Temple was set aside as the place where God’s people would be reminded of His influence upon their lives. The atmosphere of the Temple should provoke thoughts of regret over sin and thankfulness that God permitted forgiveness by means of sacrifice; what Jesus found, however, was a place where the prospect of forgiveness had been reduced to something that could be purchased for the right price.

We are shown a side of Jesus that we don’t often see—He grabs some ropes used to tether the animals and makes a whip, then uses that whip to drive out the merchants and their wares! He kicks over the exchange tables, scattering coin to the ground. Amazingly, no one organizes a defense—Jesus, alone, drives every greedy man from the courtyard—the burning of the Son of God’s holy anger removes any inclination to fight back. Jesus states His case bluntly: How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!

We are not used to seeing a violent Jesus. But Jesus is His Father’s Son, and His Father flooded the entire earth because of rampant sin, sparing only eight people in the ark. God does not tolerate the unholiness of sin, and although Jesus wants to rescue us from that sin, He will not accept us if we refuse to give it up. It is Jesus who will judge mankind on the Last Day; it is Jesus who will say to the unrepentant, Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41).

Jesus and his Father are one—one in hatred of sin, one in the desire to free us from the curse of sin. When the Temple officials confronted Jesus over His actions, they demanded a miraculous sign to prove His authority. In response Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." John adds, the temple he had spoken of was his body. A temple is a physical place where God dwells among His people. For hundreds of years, the Temple in Jerusalem had been God’s visible dwelling place; now however, Jesus reveals that His own body has become God’s temple. All the power and majesty of the deity was and is found in the fleshly body of the Son of Man who was also the Son of God. Jesus came to replace the Temple of Jerusalem. Jesus came to be the final sacrifice for all sins, which would make the Temple and its sacrifices unnecessary. And Jesus knew that this new Temple would be torn down; when He said, Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days, He was speaking of His death on the bloodied cross come Good Friday, and His resurrection from the dead on Easter morning.

Jesus’ crucifixion was the ultimate act of God’s love for us. An eternity of God’s anger is what we were due for being sinners, but Jesus endured all that anger in our place on the cross. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we need not fear God’s anger--as long as we repent of our sinning and ask Jesus to be our moral compass through life. And because Jesus rose from the dead glorified, His human body is no longer limited by the laws of space and time. Jesus says, where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them (Matthew 18:20). Just think—Jesus is the living Temple of God, the place where we can find forgiveness and a new lease on life. This Temple comes to us, whenever we gather in His name! We don’t have to go and find our Lord—He comes to us with His gifts of mercy and love.

It is important to remember that God hates sin but loves those who are under the curse of sin. If we don’t understand how much God hates sin, we don’t understand why Jesus had to suffer so much for us. If we don’t understand how much God loves us, we don’t understand why Jesus was willing to suffer so much for us. God the Father and God the Son, together with God the Holy Spirit, are united in purpose—to free us from sin, before sin and its willing prisoners are condemned for all eternity.