41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
Jesus Cleanses the Temple
45 And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, 46 saying to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”
47 And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, 48 but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words. Luke 19: 41-48 ESV
Luke 19: 41-48 Time of your Visitation
He wept over it - This is a very strong sentiment for someone who is also God, seemingly so far removed from this, but a tear trickled down for Lazarus, and here Jesus mourns Jerusalem's unbelief. It is a strange reaction after the palm fronds, but this is a fickle crowd. It also shows the beauty of Christ's human nature, untouched by sin, blameless, yet He is still intimately associated with this people. This is very personal, crying over the souls of those who will reject you, and a model for us in dealing with the same. It is only by God's grace, provided for us through Christ, quickened in us by the Holy Spirit, that we come to see Him as Lord. The thought and refection of Jesus's walk towards Calvary, His silence before His accusers, His willingness to be our atonement, should be a bottomless reservoir of forgiveness, a well from which we always draw to give others drink.
8How could I give you up, O Ephraim? How could I surrender you, O Israel? How could I make you like Admah? How could I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart is turned within Me; My compassion is stirred! 9I will not execute the full fury of My anger; I will not turn back to destroy Ephraim. For I am God and not man—the Holy One among you—and I will not come in wrath.… Hosea 11: 8-9
Vs. 42 Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace - The Jews could know the time of their visitation based upon the prophecy of the 70 weeks of Daniel 9. When He started healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding the 5,000, those should have been huge signs to look into the possibility of Him being the Messiah. When He comes in riding the donkey that fulfills a prophecy as well, but He has to die in order to make peace, and they have to repent. None of these things are foreign to the Old Testament teachings. There is this huge breach between God and those made in His image, He is holy and we are not. We are so fallen as not see it, not to understand our state.
…28And the LORD heard the words you spoke to me, and He said to me, “I have heard the words that these people have spoken to you. They have done well in all that they have spoken. 29If only they had such a heart to fear Me and keep all My commandments always, so that it might be well with them and with their children forever. 30Go and tell them: ‘Return to your tents.’… Deuteronomy 5: 28-30
…12So I gave them up to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices. 13If only My people would listen to Me, if Israel would follow My ways, 14how soon I would subdue their enemies and turn My hand against their foes!… Psalm 81: 12-14
…17Thus says the LORD your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “I am the LORD your God, who teaches you for your benefit, who directs you in the way you should go. 18If only you had paid attention to My commandments, your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like waves of the sea. 19Your descendants would have been as countless as the sand, and your offspring as numerous as its grains; their name would never be cut off or eliminated from My presence.”… Isaiah 48: 17-19
…31Cast away from yourselves all the transgressions you have committed, and fashion for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die, O house of Israel? 32For I take no pleasure in anyone’s death, declares the Lord GOD. So repent and live! Ezekiel 18: 31-32
As testimony to the fact that the Jews should have known THIS DAY it is notable that over the centuries that have passed since Daniel's prophecy of the 70 Weeks, the Holy Spirit has used the truth of this incredible prophecy to save other Jews such as Leopold Cohn when went on to found a local mission to Jewish people which eventually gave rise to the .Chosen People Ministries (See Daniel 9:24-27 and Conversion of Leopold Cohn). Over 50 years later a man named Moishe Rosen left that ministry to form what eventually became Jews for Jesus. This one passage, Daniel 9:24-27, radically changed an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and led to the birthing of ministries that have touched literally thousands of Jewish and Gentile lives around the world! Here is a quote from the Chosen People ministry
It was during these years of rabbinic study that certain portions of Scripture leapt off the page to Rabbi Leopold, especially the passages in the book of Daniel that describe the timeline of Messiah’s coming. According to Daniel’s timeline, the Messiah should have already come two thousand years ago! Cohn asked himself, “Is it possible that the time which God had fixed for the appearance of our Messiah had passed away without the promise of our true and Living God being fulfilled?” Cohn was perplexed…if Daniel was correct, then the rabbis of the Talmud were wrong. Rabbi Cohn decided to dig deeper, but after much searching, he could find no satisfactory answers for his troubled soul. One rabbi in a distant town advised him to go to America where people knew more about the Messiah, so Cohn immediately made his preparations to leave for the United States. (ED: And as the saying goes, the rest of the story is history or better yet "His-story" for every new creation in Christ is God's Story of redemption. Won't heaven be a joy as we will likely hear of all the manifold ways God's Story played out in the lives of millions of souls bringing them to a saving knowledge of the Messiah! Glory!) - Precept Austin
But now they are hidden from your eyes - They had been given the truth through the word of God; the prophets and the law were with them for a long time. The people that rejected Him had seen the truth of God, knew many things from the OT about the Messiah, and many were actually studied spiritual leaders. They are the most negligent and gross in this, because like people trust doctors, scientists, and other academics, so the words of these leaders were also held in high esteem by their followers. The teaching of God never changes, and it has always been a call to repent, but these teachers thought they had nothing to repent of, which is the same as calling God a liar. This wall of pride, making light of things that God calls sin, is also helping to lead a whole nation into a very dark age. The judgment that comes will be God turning them over to the lie they want, a reprobate mind, adding iniquity upon iniquity, all which must be either atoned for by Christ or paid for by the reprobate in an eternal, never ending cycle of sin and judgment. When we see the truth, that God calls what I am doing, sin, then the first part of repentance is acknowledging God as right in this, then asking for forgiveness and strength to overcome.
Hidden (krupto - divine passive) from your eyes is the antithesis of Paul's prayer in Ephesians 1:18-19 "I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe." Note the key phrase "us who believe." Keep the context in mind. When is Jesus making this pronouncement? The irony is that He is making this judicial declaration at the very time the nation of Israel is seemingly receiving Him as their Messiah and their King! Of course as the story goes, we know the cries for coronation soon turned to cries for crucifixion. The fact is they not truly receive Jesus as Messiah and King, for He did not fulfill their expectations of a King who would conquer Rome. He conquered far greater enemies - sin, death satan! And so instead of the eyes of their heart being enlightened to true freedom found only in Christ, the eyes (of their heart/mind) were judicially blinded as God dropped a veil over their spiritual vision, which will only be fully removed when Messiah makes His "second (and absolute) triumphal entry" at His Second Coming (described in Zechariah 9:10), for then God promises (also through the prophet Zechariah wherein ironically we saw the prophetic promise of His First Triumphal entry in Zechariah 9:9) "I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me (THEIR EYES NOW SPIRITUALLY ENLIGHTENED) Whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn (NOTE THE IRONY - JESUS WEEPS AT HIS FIRST TRIUMPHAL ENTRY. ISRAEL WEEPS AT HIS SECOND AND TRUE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY!)." (Zechariah 12:10+). Until that time as Paul explains "just as it is written, "GOD GAVE THEM A SPIRIT OF STUPOR, EYES TO SEE NOT AND EARS TO HEAR NOT, DOWN TO THIS VERY DAY." And David says, "LET THEIR TABLE BECOME A SNARE AND A TRAP, AND A STUMBLING BLOCK AND A RETRIBUTION TO THEM.10 "LET THEIR EYES BE DARKENED TO SEE NOT, AND BEND THEIR BACKS FOREVER." (Romans 11:8-11+). - Precept Austin
V. 43 For the days will come upon you - The plural of day is used, which I think conveys the tragic reality of Jewish persecution throughout the ages. There is a siege coming soon though in seventy A.D., when Rome will take the city and destroy the temple. The Jews will suffer in holocaust in Russia, Poland, Germany and antisemitism is still strong in the Middle East to this day. The Messiah will end all of this, but in wanting only this, and not acknowledging the greater evil of their sin, they missed out on relief of the lesser as well. So remind yourself of this, Christ cried over them, yet so vile a thing is sin that He still punished their unbelief. Stop pretending that it is a small thing.
…7then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and I will banish from My presence this temple I have sanctified for My Name. Then Israel will become an object of scorn and ridicule among all peoples. 8And when this temple has become a heap of rubble, all who pass by it will be appalled and will hiss and say, ‘Why has the LORD done such a thing to this land and to this temple?’ 9And others will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshiping and serving them—because of this, the LORD has brought all this disaster upon them.’ ”… 1 Kings 9: 7-9
Drive out those who sold - Some have said this proves Jesus a sinner, that He made a whip and drove out the money changers. No, this is His house, and they were trespassers, making it into something it was not intended. For the record, outside the temple also belonged to Him as well, for He made the universe and everything in it, including you. There are places now where men and women break man's laws in order to keep God's mandate and repeat what He said.
…28“We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,” he said. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us responsible for this man’s blood.” 29But Peter and the other apostles replied, “We must obey God rather than men. 30The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging Him on a tree.… Acts 5: 28-30
…16But if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but glorify God that you bear that name. 17For it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who disobey the gospel of God? 18And, “If it is hard for the righteous to be saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?”… 1 Peter 4: 16-18
You have made it a den of robbers - Not the place of prayer or beacon of light and hope it should have been. So many churches and "Christian" book stores have modeled themselves after this today. The Roman Catholics sold their indulgences, book stores sell misleading self help, copy and paste garbage, all under the guise of Christianity. "Pastors" get up on stages rather than accurately expounding the Word of God from pulpits, they instead say what is pleasing to the masses. They always have a thermometer stuck in the culture, hoping to draw big crowds and stay relevant. They preach a prosperity gospel, a political gospel, but not the gospel. It becomes a place to make people more lost than they were when they first arrived.
The Shushan Gate - The Eastern Gate, (aka the "Beautiful Gate") one of the five gates of the Temple Mount. The source of the name Shushan: The Jews that returned from the Babylonian/Persian exile etched the image of the city of Shushan (the Persian capitol) on the gate - to signify their appreciation to the Persian kingdom that was instrumental in building the Second Temple. A medieval Jewish tradition "foretells" (aka "prophesies") that the prophet Elijah will lead the Mashiach (Messiah) into the Temple grounds through this Shushan Gateway. Elijah is a Kohain (Priest) and a Kohain may not enter a cemetery. Many centuries ago, some scheming Muslims placed an Arab cemetery along the Eastern Wall to foil Messiah's entrance. The tragedy is that the Messiah entered the Temple (most likely) through the Eastern Gate (at that time named the Sushan Gate) and the Jews failed to recognize the time of His visitation! - Precept Austin
And began to drive out (ekballo) those who were selling - This is like throwing a match into a can of gasoline! Explosive fire! Jesus is exercising His authority in a clear, unmistakable way and this act will force the hand of the religious leaders to destroy him. He was now destroying one of their sources of income. As Bock points out " In the other Synoptic Gospels, when the trials of Jesus start it is his attitude toward the temple that is the prosecution's launching point." Keep in mind this is to have been a place of worship! The painting above by A N Mironov shows Christ with a "scourge of cords" which is specifically described only in His first cleansing of the Temple at Passover in John 2:13-16. Robertson quips "It is amazing how short a time the work of reformers lasts!" It is intriguing that Jesus began His ministry cleaning out the corruption in the Temple complex and three years later ended His ministry carrying out the same cleansing! Is there a message here for us in America where so many are using their version of "Christianity" to make money and receive acclaim from men? (That's a rhetorical question!) For context let's look at His first Temple cleansing...
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 And He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers (kermatistes = only here = dealer in small money) seated at their tables. 15 And He made a scourge of cords (NOT DESCRIBED AT HIS SECOND CLEANSING), and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers (kollubistes) and overturned (anatrepo) their tables; (STOP FOR A MOMENT AND IMAGINE GENTLE JESUS FLIPPING OVER TABLES!) 16 and to those who were selling the doves (CHARGING POOREST OF POOR EXORBITANT RATES!) He said, “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business.” (John 2:13-16+) - Precept Austin
Seeking to destroy Him - We know that it has to happen because it has been prophesied and God is always faithful to His word, but here we see the real reason for their fury. They were mad because He interrupted their business, not because He defiled the temple, for they had been doing that themselves for some time. They wanted Him dead and called Him a blasphemer, but that is who they are.
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