Day 279 (John 2-4) - Year 8

Tara-Leigh Cobble (0:01)

Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara-Leigh Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap.

Welcome back to the action-packed book of John. This guy is the George Lucas of Gospel writers. He's got a story to tell, and he wants you to catch how exciting it is. So even though we're reading through the Bible chronologically, John kind of throws us off. He has no intention of telling the story in order. That's not his goal.

Luke seems to be the one who makes the most effort at chronology, but even he throws us off sometimes. Try not to get frustrated. Just grab some popcorn and kick your feet up because it's truly the greatest story of all time. A long time ago, in a Galilee far, far away, Jesus performs the miracle that is recognized as his very first public miracle, turning water into wine. By this time, it's clear his mother knows what he's capable of. So when a problem arises, she asks him for help. His response seems harsh in English, but in Aramaic, the language he speaks, it isn't disrespectful at all. Woman is a common way of addressing a female, and what does this have to do with me is actually more along the lines of, you and I don't need to get involved with this. Jesus is very measured and intentional about when and where he displays his power and in front of whom. His primary concern seems to be keeping with the father's timeline for revealing his identity as the Messiah.

Mary persists though, and Jesus saves the wedding party. By the way, this miracle accounts for roughly 600 to 900 bottles worth of wine. It was no small feat. Then John jumps right to the last week of Jesus' life with no regard for our reading plan. Then we encounter the famous scene of Jesus cleansing the temple. Some scholars believe this moment happened at the end of Jesus' ministry and that John is less interested in keeping a chronological timeline, so he's inserted that story here.

Others believe Jesus cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning of his earthly ministry and once at the end. Regardless of how many times it happened, here's what John tells us about it. Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Passover, a big holiday celebration for the Jews. Everyone is in town actually, and so are the people who come to make money off all the tourists.

It's a standard practice to sell animals outside the temple. It provides an actual service to the travelers who are either too poor to own animals themselves or who don't want to haul their animals all over the country on their holiday road trip to Jerusalem. I wouldn't want to ride through the desert with a sheep in the back of my Camry either. So the problem isn't necessarily that there are people selling these animals. It seems to be that A, they're selling them inside the temple complex instead of outside of it, disrupting what's supposed to be peaceful, and B, they're almost certainly price gouging the tourists, being greedy in the very place that most represents God's generosity, the place where a holy God came to dwell in the midst of sinful people. So Jesus sits down and does something I never learned about in Sunday School. He makes a whip. He doesn't just use a whip, he makes a whip. He drives them out of the temple with his whip. He is very angry. We're always trying to remind you to look for God in scripture, what he loves, what he hates, what motivates him to do what he does. So this is a very telling passage. He hates what's happening. And since we hate things that oppose what we love, that shows us that he loves the place where God in his holiness comes to dwell with mankind. And in the very next paragraph, he compares his body to that place. In as much as the temple is the place where God came to dwell with mankind, Jesus himself is the place where God came to dwell with mankind. And they had no respect for either. All of this is happening just a few days before he goes to the cross. So today he's using a whip, but soon they'll be using the whip. And both whips show us that they don't get it. They've missed the truth.

In Chapter 3, Jesus has a nighttime visitor named Nicodemus. He's a Pharisee. Remember the guys JTB referred to as snakes? But after watching Jesus for a while, something in Nicodemus is starting to shift. Jesus tells him that shift is God the Spirit blowing like wind across his life. The Spirit is moving Nicodemus and waking him to life. Jesus says the Spirit is the one who gives a new birth, a new life. And this new life is the only way to be a part of God's kingdom. Essentially, we are born dead, and only through believing in him do we gain life in the kingdom. Everyone who believes in him won't die and will have eternal kingdom life. But those who don't believe in him are condemned already. They love the darkness and hate the light. This statement is challenging because lots of people seem neutral to the light. To each their own, they say, live your own truth. But if we're born dead, then even what looks like neutrality is still death.