Today, Pastor Vogel had a sermon about Jesus driving out the moneychangers and animal sellers from the Temple. I had a few interesting thoughts marked *BLOG THIS* in parentheses and little star thingies. So here they are.

1. The Temple was a physical symbol of something better, something that was to come later. This got me thinking - if all the death associated with the Temple was pointing to the something better of the Messiah, and the Jews lost sight of that, what does that say about Christians today? Perhaps the in all the hullabaloo about Jesus rising from dead and the church being formed, we’ve done exactly the same thing. That is to say, it doesn’t end here. Our theology, our history, our church: all these things point to a future that doesn’t really involve theology, history, or this church we see here. It’s more the glorious now that will be, where the differences between Arminianism and Calvinism break down into a desire to just worship God, where the apex of history is Jesus, and where the church lives to party. Pretty cool place.
2. The Israelites went through the motions of worship, but it was vain, petty worship. It reminded me of the verse about clouds without rain. It looks good, but it’s the ultimate strawmen. And the thing is, they may have done it all with great motives, stealing worship from God. And of course, the road to hell is paved with great motives.
3. The gentle teacher became a wrathful prophet, priest, and king, driving those moneychangers out of the temple. We focus on the love of God a lot, but lamb is also a lion. And the worship we do, it doesn’t exclude fear and trembling.
4. Jesus (the one who would make the temple obsolete, cleaned it out before he died, leading the religious establishment to seek to kill him. I see two great ironies here. Jesus was greater than the temple, yet he stood in it, cleansed it. He was there, the thing that would eventually make the temple obsolete. But also, his very act of cleansing the temple made the leaders plot to kill hime. They plotted because they were afraid of their position - but the success of the plot, killing the Christ, made the very positions they sought to protect irrellevant.
5. Now we, the Church, are a temple that even the Roman armies can’t destroy. And that just about said it all.

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