“God Spoke all These Words” Mount Olive Lutheran Church Season Of Lent Sunday Sermon March 3rd 2024 – John 2:13–25 & Exodus 20:1–17

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday March 3rd 2024: Season of Lent / John 2:13–25 & Exodus 20:1–17 “God Spoke all These Words”

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple He found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And He poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And He told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make My Father’s house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for Your house will consume Me.”

So the Jews said to Him, “What sign do You show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking about the temple of His body. When therefore He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs that He was doing. But Jesus on His part did not entrust Himself to them, because He knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for He Himself knew what was in man.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends. The hippie-dippy Jesus that is often presented to the world by perhaps well-meaning yet addle minded types, the “Jesus” that’s all about intimate relationships, who touts love is love and would never call anyone on anything, the buddy Jesus, the life coach Jesus, the perpetually soft Jesus who comes across as spineless and week to many men is not the Jesus we find when we actually take the time to read Scripture. That distortion of Jesus that sidesteps Scripture is a fabrication and a false Jesus. You are not called to pick up your cross and follow that phony “Jesus.”[1] Today we hear of the true Jesus who while forgiving and kind with repentant sinner who desire to be forgiven for their sins[2] is also the one who makes a whip of cords, and drives the sellers of sheep and oxen and pigeons out of the temple, along with their sheep and oxen and pigeons. Today we hear about Jesus pouring out the coins of the money-changers as He overturned their table, the one who says, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s House a house of trade.” This is no push over Jesus, no demurring shrinking violet of a Christ.

Now in our Old Testament Reading we heard the giving of the Ten Commandments and I’ll ask you, did you catch the very first bit of the reading [?] the part where Moses recounts, “And God spoke all these words, saying, ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’…” and “God spoke all these words,” dear ones these are not words mitigated through someone else, these are not words spoken by a go-between. The LORD Himself came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain. And the LORD called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up:[3] Moses with His own two ears heard the voice of God give the Ten Commandments and it was the people who stood by, who out of fear pleaded that the LORD not speak directly to them. They said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of Him may be before you, that you may not sin.” [So Scripture tells us that] the people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.[4] 

Jesus, God in the flesh, Jesus the Son of God, the Christ, drew near to Jerusalem and walked into the temple and saw the sellers of the sheep and the oxen and the pigeons for sacrifice and the money changers exchanging Roman coins for temple coins and He witnessed a people breaking the Ten Commandments: people who thought themselves wise but who were fools when it came to the Law of God. Remember what the Epistle of Saint James teaches, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For He who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the Law.”[5] The “For He who said” part that Saint James mentions there is not Moses, it’s the LORD, The LORD spoke the Ten Commandants just as much as He spoke into creation the universe and everything in it. 

Remember your catechism, in the section on How Christians Should Be Taught to Confess their sins you are asked a question: What sins should we confess? [And the answer from the catechism is what?] “Before God we should plead guilty of all sins, even those we are not aware of, as we do in the Lord’s Prayer,”[6] “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” So we plead guilty of breaking the whole of the Law of God. Now I often bring this up while teaching the Ten Commandments because each Commandment comes with a gift and blessing, so when we break one of them we break the First Commandment prohibiting other gods because we are saying we know better than God regarding His gifts and the giving of them. We make ourselves into a god over and above the LORD. Here let me explain: For example the eighth commandment “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour,” this Commandment comes with the gift of a good reputation so the one who tells lies about his neighbour betrays him, slanders him, and by so doing hurt his reputation. This is not done with fists or weapons but with the tongue which Saint James teaches is a restless evil full of deadly poison,[7] so with the mouth we fail to defend the reputation given to our neighbour by the LORD and in so doing say that we know better what our neighbour reputation should be than the LORD who gave it to him in the first place as a gift, and thereby we break the First Commandment putting our desires over and above the will of the LORD making ourselves into a god of our own. You can find this to be true with each of the Commandments at their heart the breaking of them is also a breaking of the First Commandment. So when you really dig into the Ten Commandments and start to see your place in them you will start to see them as a serious matter indeed. The World may find them foolish but they are the wisdom of God. When the World fights against them as restrictive they fight against God. When Satan and your flesh and the World and Sin itself tempts you to dial back how seriously you should take the Ten Commandments, or how seriously you should take this one or that one within the Ten Commandments, be careful you are being set up at the edge of a trap.     

Likewise do not mistake God forgiving sins to mean that He Himself doesn’t take the Ten Commandments seriously anymore. God takes the Law seriously, it is His Law. He took it so serious that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity voluntarily came to live a life lived under that same Law, so that He could face and defeat every temptation to sin and present Himself blameless before His heavenly Father in death. Had the LORD not taken the Ten Commandments seriously He would not have suffered “the flaming darts of the evil one;”[8] He would not have suffered the Devil’s viscous temptations into sin. Had Christ Jesus not taken the Ten Commandments seriously He would not have taken on flesh only to have men beat Him and whip Him and nail Him to the cross, He would not have accepted the thorns of mockery upon His sinless brow or the spit and humiliation of the men He came to save. Men who put themselves above Him thinking themselves superior; who took His name in vain; who charged the LORD of the Sabbath with breaking the Sabbath; who refused to acknowledge His authority; who have no regard for His physical welfare and plotted and executed His death; who robbed Him of His dignity along with every stitch of clothing off His back and all that He had; who spoke falsehoods about Him in an attempt to ruin His reputation; who coveted the love of the people toward Him and the authority and honour given to Him from His heavenly Father. Men who did all of these things in a way that on the surface, to some, only appeared right yet was wantonly treacherous. Jesus walked into all of this knowing that this was the response He would receive, that men would break practically every Commandment toward Him while He at the same time was called to keep every commandment toward the ones who had become His enemies. Jesus was doing unto them what they ought to have been doing unto Him by the very law they professed to follow.[9] The Scribes, and the Pharisees and the Chief Priests along with the Sadducees and the Elders of the People did not follow the Ten Commandments toward Jesus. The breakers of the Commandments do not take the Commandments as seriously as the one who rightly strives to keep them. And where they believed themselves to be in the right, in Christ Jesus, we have come to see how they were self deluded, that they had in fact sold themselves a lie about the nature of the Law of God and failed to see God with their own two eyes when He drew near to them in His incarnation, and failed to hear the voice of the LORD when Jesus, who is God, spoke to them that same Law with His own two lips.       

When Jesus cleared the temple of the sellers of sheep and oxen and pigeons and the money changers the response of those who had allowed and promoted this sin against the LORD was not one of repentance. They didn’t turn from their ways and return to the LORD their God for mercy, grace and love, no instead they doubled down insisting that they were not at fault, that they knew best and that this Jesus should die for confronting them. They didn’t take why He was calling them out seriously; they only took the threat to their perceived authority seriously. Their sin regarding the temple and the sacrifices instituted by God there was that they were not following what was laid out for them by the LORD, they had grown lazy and in their laziness had despised what God had instituted seeking ways to make it all easy, they made pragmatism their idol and wouldn’t embrace the personal sacrifice required of them. They no longer encouraged people to bring their own sacrifice for an offering from their own animals but made a way to sidestep this and in the convenience they produced they also produced an opportunity for profit off of the ignorant or lazy people who bought the animals exchanging their Roman coins for temple coins. On the surface this only appeared right but it was dishonest and the LORD knew it. Yes, He Himself knew what was in man, and He, Jesus, knew what was in these men.    

How seriously do you take the Law of God? How seriously do you take the Ten Commandments? Do you only take them seriously when they are broken against you and not when you break them against others? Do you often review them and contemplate them? Do you take the time to think about how well you are doing with each of them? Do they show up in your prayers when you come to the LORD for forgiveness? Do they come to mind at the altar rail when you kneel to receive forgiveness for them from Jesus in His meal? Ah, Maybe you’re a real stickler when it come to the Ten Commandments and you’re the type who keeps a running tally on just how well you’re keeping them?

What does Saint Paul in our Epistle say to us today? Quoting from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah[10] Paul says, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord,”[11] keeping Christ Jesus in mind then, and His life and passion, His death and burial: Do not boast in how well you keep the Ten Commandments boast in how well Jesus kept them and boast in how well He graciously gifts this righteousness to you (this righteousness of His which He won at the cross of His crucifixion, for your sake, to cover your unrighteousness). If you’re going to boast in something boast in that. What does the writer of the Book of Hebrews say: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.”[12] So place your hope, and your boasting, in the one who resisted beyond the point of shedding of blood all the way through to death and the final point of the Roman spear proving His death. Many would think it foolish to die for people they’ve never met, for people who won’t always appreciate the sacrifice, who won’t even acknowledge the gift that it provides but then again what does Saint Paul teach “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”[13] From time to time the World finds this one of the LORD’s Ten Commandments foolish or that one of the LORD’s Ten Commandments foolish but their thinking this does not change the wisdom that the Commandments contain. From time to time this man or that woman may think that Jesus was a fool to die at the cross but that doesn’t change the wisdom of His sacrifice there for you and me.

So “we preach Christ crucified a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles … Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”[14] We do so remembering that the one who spoke the Ten Commandments to Moses, who Moses heard with His own two ears is the same one who at the cross of His crucifixion, when all was accomplished, with His dying breath said, “It is finished,”[15] meaning one man—this Jesus who we preach—lived a life without sin in your place, one man followed those Ten Commandments without sin, and came across the finishing line dragging your sin with Him, prying them out of your fingers, out of your heart, out of your lips to cast them away as far as the east is from the west.[16]  The same LORD who spoke the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai to Moses and the Children of Israel in the Old Testament stood risen from the dead with His disciple in the upper room that first Easter Sunday and said to them “Peace be with you.”[17]  Dear ones this is the very best news. If you have no peace with following the Ten Commandment, with this one or that one, set that aside and remember those words spoken by Jesus to His disciple and recorded for you and your sake, “Peace be with you,” He says. Dear ones you are now called to follow these Ten Commandments in peace for in Christ your victory over sin has been won. Amen.    

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Matthew 16:24-25
[2] John 21:1-19
[3] Exodus 19:20
[4] Exodus 20:19–21
[5] James 2:10–11
[6] Confession, Luther’s Small Catechism, Concordia Publishing House 2017, Page 25. The answer continues, “… but before the pastor we should confess only those sins which we know and feel in our hearts.”
[7] James 3:8
[8] Ephesians 6:16
[9] Luke 6:31; Matthew 7:1
[10] Jeremiah 9:23–24
[11] 1 Corinthians 1:31
[12] Hebrews 12:4
[13] 1 Corinthians 1:25
[14] 1 Corinthians 1:23-24
[15] John 19:30
[16] Psalms 103:12
[17] John 20:21

Photo Credit: Main Photo "The Merchants Chased from the Temple" (Les vendeurs chassés du Temple) by James Tissot from brooklynmuseum.