Things Revealed

On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts.

And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written: "'My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations'? But you have made it 'a den of robbers.'"

The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.

Mark 11:15-18

The whole crowd was amazed at Jesus’ teaching because it shattered their understanding. In a moment, what they had known and seen and done was revealed as wrong. Maybe even ridiculous. Until Jesus shook their reality with his display of righteous anger, the crowd had accepted the practices that he found so offensive. They had been brought up in a system and culture that had been captured by the world for so long, they weren’t even aware of the great divide between the Kingdom of God and the way of the world. Worse, for them, the two had become virtually one and the same.

Things are not much different today.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trade and business. Commerce makes the world go round, whether in cyberspace or Samaria. But there are things that are holy and things that are not, and the Lord has ordained that the holy things not be treated with irreverence or contempt.

Look at Belshazzar, the Babylonian King. He held a great banquet for all his friends and decided to break out the good China. Only the good China was the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple in Jerusalem. It was while they drank from the sacred cups and celebrated their good fortune that “fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall.” Daniel was called to explain these things and told the King that by praising gold and silver instead of the God of all things, he set himself up against the Lord of heaven. By treating as common that which was holy, Belshazzar sealed his fate. Daniel then translated the writing on the wall and told the king that he had been weighed in the balance, had been found wanting and that his days were now numbered. Severely numbered, as it turned out. He was slain that night.

Most of us are confident that we would never set ourselves up against the Lord of heaven. At least not knowingly. But something very similar happens all the time. The market place that’s out there has a way of creeping into the temple, into the church and into our own understanding of scripture and of what is or is not acceptable. In our culture, almost everything is acceptable. In fact, tolerance is the god of our times and one of the reasons Christians are so reviled. By taking a biblical stand on almost any issue, we are seen as intolerant and closed minded—heretics of the new world order.

Yet that same tolerance for just about anything infects our own thinking. We’ve all seen how easy (and seemingly reasonable) it is to use proven marketing strategies to grow churches, sell books and worship music, evangelize and advertise. But it's like a Trojan horse. Once we accept the world's way of doing business and apply it to Kingdom matters, lots of other ideas, paradigms and philosophies enter in and become just as acceptable. Just as tolerable. As a result, growth and influence often trump love and intimacy. In the end, believers and unbelievers can become a kind of funhouse mirror image of each other, the one worshipping tolerance but having none for people of faith, the other worshipping the God of love but having none for the lost or even for each other.

Like those who ran the temple of old, we rob the lost of opportunities to hear the gospel when we judge them unreceptive or beyond hope; and when we withhold love out of frustration with their stand against what we value, we rob them of the power of the gospel. If we don’t guard our hearts, we can end up like Belshazzar, setting ourselves up against the Lord’s call to the lost and celebrating our works instead of his worthiness. Or we can end up like the money changers in the temple, exchanging God’s currency for man’s. Love for power. Godliness for worldliness. Then, as now, it’s the righteous anger of the Lord that shows us how much we have unknowingly embraced the world’s way of doing things.

Realizing how worldly we’ve become and just how broke we are in God's economy can elicit two diametrically opposed responses. The chief priests and the teachers of the law had one: they wanted to kill the messenger. Many still want to kill the messenger. The Psalmist has the other; he wants to kill the worldly ways within him:

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Psalm 139:23-24

How we respond depends on our hearts since "no one can serve two masters."

Either way, search me is a killer invitation.