John 2:14 Commentary and Bible Study

This was astonishing, though maybe it had been going on for some years. The temple, or at least the court of the Gentiles, the great open-air first court, had been turned into a kind of farmyard, and commerce had taken over. The amount of animals that were sacrificed during the week of the Passover was enormous so there was money to be made and a great number of people were selling animals. It is suggested that by this time the chief priests and the temple priests had turned it into a wholly commercial occasion. The custom of people bringing their own animals and the firstlings of the flock and so on had given way to most of these animals being sold to them at Jerusalem. Now, to some extent, it was necessary that people would be buying animals for sacrifice. That was necessary because some of them had travelled tremendous distances, and they couldn’t bring their animals so far, but that they were being sold and commerce was being conducted in the temple precinct, was abominable. The money changers were there because animals had to be paid for, and the annual tribute had to be paid in Jewish money. The people aged twenty and over were supposed to bring their temple tribute – their annual tax for the maintenance of the temple. But that could only be paid in Jewish coinage, and they didn’t have it, and of course the commissions were sky high. We can only assume that the chief priests and the temple police had allowed this, and afforded the most prominent positions to the wealthiest of the traders. You can imagine the stench, the clamour, and the noise, and this is what confronted Christ.But this was his Father’s house, and he was the eternal Son of God, and so in his purity and in his majesty he came to the temple and he purged it. The temple worship and proceedings were very closely regulated by the rules of the Old Testament, and all these had been thrown aside, and God’s house of peace, and glory, and awe, and reverence, had been turned into uproar, and commotion, and profiteering. At the second cleansing of the temple, Christ went so far as to say that they had made it a ‘den of thieves’.