REACT: Jesus Cleanses the Temple| Easter Devotional Day Two By Steve Adler for Faith Wire
And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”
And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,
“‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?”
And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there.
Matthew 21:12-17
REACT
On Monday Jesus reached the temple, and the excitement picked up right where it left off the day before. Entering the temple courts, he saw the money-changers; people were profiting from the exchange of currencies to pay temple taxes and purchase animals for sacrifice. Angered, Jesus drove out these “robbers” — and he wasn’t polite about it! Imagine the commotion as Jesus turned over tables and benches. Coins hit the ground, people and animals scattered; the temple court was cleared of the profiteers who misused and defamed it. A new king had arrived, and as he cleansed the temple, Jesus’s actions remind us of two other Davidic kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, who each during his reign repaired the temple to restore proper worship of God before observing Passover (2 Chron 29-30; 34-35).
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