Restoration 2013: Jesus.

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Restoration Ministry

Mark Howard

Jesus:  The Refiner

Heavenly Father, I thank you for the privilege we have of coming into your presence, for the privilege we have of your Holy Spirit speaking to our hearts and our minds and giving us the opportunity and invitation to follow you.

I pray tonight that your Holy Spirit would be present to give us ears to hear, minds to understand, hearts to respond to this message tonight.

And Father, I ask and pray it in the name of Jesus and for his sake.

I'd like you to take your Bibles tonight and turn to Malachi chapter 3.

Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament and Malachi was the last prophet before a 400 year drought, you might say, before the next prophet showed up, John the Baptist.

Malachi 3 verse 1 says, Behold I send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me.

The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight.

Behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.

But who can endure the day of his coming?

He is like a refiner's fire and a launderer's soap.

He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver.

He will purify the sons of Levi and purge them as gold and silver that they may offer to the Lord an offering in righteousness.

The Lord whom you seek is going to come to his temple and he is going to come as a refiner.

Behold I send my messenger beforehand to prepare the way the Lord says." Now that should ring a bell to you a little bit.

Jesus here is speaking, we looked at this earlier in the week, or was it last week, at John the Baptist.

Jesus is giving his eulogy of John and he says, For this is he of whom it is written, Behold I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.

Jesus applied what we just read in Malachi to who?

Now if John the Baptist was the messenger, then who was Jesus proclaiming himself to be?

Let's see, if those words applied to John and he prepared the way for the Lord coming to his temple, then, whoa, lo and behold, Jesus was the Lord of Glory.

Jesus applies this to John, which would mean that that other part applies to him.

And it's not, I was going to say it's interesting, but it's not just interesting.

That twice in the ministry of Jesus, once at the beginning and once at the end, he literally cleansed the earthly temple.

The first time we read about in the Gospel of John, it was 6 months after Jesus began his public ministry at the time of the first Passover.

At least 1 reason being that Passover season was when people from all over came to Jerusalem.

And something you need to understand is that the Jewish leaders had impressed upon the hearts and the minds of the people that when you worship God for Passover, you need to come to Jerusalem.

Part of the Passover ceremony involved them bringing their own sacrifices.

But you can imagine some of the difficulty in bringing sacrifices on a very long journey.

They sold sacrifices at the temple, which wasn't altogether bad, but what began to happen is first and foremost, because they came from different places, they had different currency.

And so the temple provided money changers.

And what would happen is, you come from Egypt, or you come from Assyria, or you come from somewhere else, and you come into the temple, and we'll change over your money, and the exchange rates were very high.

We'll give you the temple shekel only it really was an unfair exchange rate.

In other words, the priests would charge you a lot more, they'd give you a lot less for your coins.

So it was intended to be a convenience for the people, but when they came to the temple, there were many of those people who didn't have the money.

They were coming to find peace and forgiveness with God.

And the priests who should have been enabling that were making it impossible for them.

Besides that, they were charging high prices for the animal sacrifices.

And so when we come to the Gospel of John and we find this first cleansing, John chapter 2, this is the scene that Jesus is coming into where he's hearing these money changers shouting.

In fact, the shouting, what began to happen in the temple is that people would begin to try to bid for the animals and try to get the price down.

So here you're coming into the temple which should be sacred, which should be holy.

Let all the earth keep silence before him.

The worshippers who were trying to pray to God were being drowned out by the shouts of the money changers.

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand and Jesus went up to Jerusalem and he found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves and the money changers doing business.

When he had made a whip of cords he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen and poured out the changers' money and overturned the tables.

And he said to those who sold doves, take these things away.

Do not make my father's house a house of merchandise.

Then his disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house has eaten me up.

And it goes on to have an interchange with the Jewish leaders there.

It's tomorrow night, right, that we hand out Desire of Ages here.

If you don't have a copy of that book, or even if you do, you need more copies because everybody should have a copy of that book.

You read there are 2 chapters because there are 2 cleansings of the temple.

But as this scene is described in that book, it's a powerful picture as Jesus walks in to his temple and he sees this scene and his divinity flashes through his humanity and everything in the temple is hushed.

All the changes, the money changes, he doesn't speak a word but everything hushes into what the author of Desire of Ages calls a painful silence as the conviction rested on the hearts of the money changers.

Even the disciples of Christ were there in the glory of Christ and that divine presence.

And the money changers and the priests were driven out of the temple.

The livestock was driven out of the temple.

And Jesus sanctified that earthly temple for worship.

Now there's more to that story, but we see the same thing happens again at the end of Jesus' ministry.

We find it in Matthew 21, and it's a very similar situation.

In fact, it's kind of sad that he started his ministry with cleansing the temple and you think it would have registered in somebody's minds that maybe we ought to reform.

And yet at the end of his ministry, during the last Passover season, we can pinpoint this cleansing of the temple in Matthew 21 at the Monday before his crucifixion.

It is 3 days prior to his arrest in Gethsemane.

And again he goes into the temple in Matthew 21.

Again he casts out the money changers and cleanses the temple at the beginning of his ministry and at the end of his ministry.

Now the question I have for you is, do you think this was coincidental?

Or do you think there was something significant in Jesus cleansing the temple at the beginning and at the end of his ministry.

Well we know it wasn't coincidental because Malachi foretold it, right?

And Jesus applied the messenger to John the Baptist, so if you're following along, then the 1 who's going to come, the Lord whom you seek, who's suddenly coming to his temple, would have applied to Jesus.

And in direct fulfillment to Malachi, we see that very thing.

When they built the temple that Jesus came into, the temple that had existed before was a temple called Solomon's Temple.

It's God's temple, but they call it Solomon's Temple.

It was a magnificent temple and when they laid the foundation, you may remember them laying the foundation of that second temple, or that temple, it wasn't the second 1, the 1 after Solomon's Temple, the people actually, multitudes of the people wept.

Some of them rejoiced, some of them wept, and the Bible said you couldn't tell the weeping from the rejoicing.

But the old men of Israel were weeping because the new temple was so much smaller.

Jesus: The Refiner

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