“Get This Thing Out of Here!”

John 2: 15: “And He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the moneychangers, and overturned their tables.” Here in the beginning of His ministry Jesus cleanses the temple of the abuses going on inside. Three years later, a few days before His departure (Luke 9: 31), He did it again. Why the persistence? He was applying the lesson learned from Gideon: Don’t leave behind anything to mislead your people. And after forty years, as they continued to worship in their “robber’s den’, He returned to destroy it forever, in an act that was more love that judgment. He doesn’t want His people confused about proper worship!