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Yeshua’s excited anger at the leaders of the Temple in Luke 19:45-48 (cf. Matt. 21:10–17; Mk. 11:11–18; Jn. 2:13–25) came with quotations from prophets Yeshayahu (Isaiah) — “My house will be house of prayer for all nations” (Isa. 56:7) — and Yirmeyahu (Jeremiah) – “den of robbers” (Jer. 7:11). The full context of those prophecies directly relates to why the leaders should have understood why Yeshua was quoting from those passages and why those prophecies applied to them.

Robbing God to pay Ba’al? We can be close to the things of God but far from the heart of God. We will see this theme repeatedly as reviewed these passages, particularly their Tanak parallels.

When Yeshua said “My house will be house of prayer for all nations” this discourse is recorded in all four gospels so it must be a very important discourse, one we should pay close attention and understand.

The House of Prayer…

In Luke 19:45, Yeshua says,  “It is written, ‘and My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a robbers’ den.” The phrases “a house of prayer” and “a robbers’ den” are direct allusions from the Tanak. 

When we see or hear Yeshua or the Apostles quoting snippets of the Tanak, it behooves us to take a closed look at the text they are quoting to understand the context and get a better idea of their real message.

The prophets constantly hearken back to Solomon’s prayer that the Temple in Jerusalem would be a house of prayer for all people: Jew and Gentile. It was not is not just a house of prayer for the Israelites and the Gentiles were outcasts on the other side of the wall. Foreigners who joined themselves to the Lord were supposed to be welcomed into God’s temple to come to Him.

There is only one people: Israel. Romans 11’s illustration of the olive tree where you have native and wild shoots being attached and cut off from the tree shows this truth. But there is also a parallel in 2 Cor. 5:16-21 and Eph. 2:8-22 when Paul discusses how Yeshua accomplished our reconciliation to God and how we are to help bring people into God’s reconciliation.

Do we have one monarch with separate nations, like the British common weath? There’s a problem with that. In the original, the Greek word politia is what is translated as commonwealth doesn’t mean what many people think it means?

Some assert that this “commonwealth” is a loose association similar to the British commonwealth, with separate nations but under the same monarch. Under that thinking, believers from the goyim are separate and distinct from believers born from physical descendants of Israel. But the Greek word for “commonwealth” — πολιτεία politeia (G4174) — really means fully granted citizenship, with all rights and responsibilities of it.

That’s seen in another use of πολιτεία in Acts 22:28 when Paul was chained and nearly beaten by the Roman centurions in Jerusalem. The word politia shows up in this text in regards to the discussions of Paul’s Roman citizenship status. Paul was born a citizen of Rome while the centurion had to pay a large sum of money to become a naturalized Roman citizen. This is analogous to Eph. 2. It was a death penalty offense to falsely claim Roman citizenship so it was not a status to take lightly. Roman citizenship had a lot of rights and responsibilities that came with it. Roman citizenship included a right to a trial and due process.

People who are naturally born citizens whether of Rome or Israel and those who paid a price for that citizenship whether by themselves, as in Roman citizenship, or vicariously as those who accept Yeshua’s payment as their naturalization into Israel are both full citizens. There is no dividing line between them any longer. In Isaiah 56-57, those who are “far off” (a euphemism for the goyim) and those who are “near” (a euphemism for those who are naturally born citizens of Israel) are brought in.

The enmity between Israel and the nations is the theme of Eph. 2. When God lifts people up into Israel, the enmity is gone. he Gentiles who come into the Israel through Yeshua was not just loosely affiliated with Israel but full heirs and citizens with rights and responsibilities. When you come into faith in God, you are a full citizen that is true whether you read Isaiah, Jeremiah, or the New Testament writings.

The Jews of Yeshua’s day wanted to build a wall between the two groups but God had nothing to do with that and He did not condone that. Yeshua’s blunt words here testify to that. In God’s economy, all children of the Lord enjoy the blessings and responsibilities of the Torah.

Paul in Eph. 2:17, Paul quotes “he came and preached you who were far away, and peace to you who are near” comes from Isa. 57:15–21.

Paul is quoting from the Septuagint. Paul and Isaiah are talking about the hearts of those who are “near” (Jews) and those who are “far off” (Gentiles). God wants to lift up the contrite to Himself, both Jew and Gentile. It’s a head start to be born of Israel but it doesn’t get you to the finish line. Gentiles are at a disadvantage because they have a lot of untruths to unlearn and a lot of truth to learn but many converts are more adept at picking up truth and listen more closely to God than those born into the faith.

Familiarity breeds contempt, which can be true about the things of God just as well as the things of the world.

turned into a den of thieves

The second phrase Yeshua uses is the “den of thieves” or “robbers den”. This phrase comes from Jer. 7:1-15. Those people who were making the Temple a “den of thieves” or a “robbers den” were stealing from and it’s not an issue of money.

They were performing Temple rituals yet they were robbing God of His holiness and uniqueness. They were robbing God of His people. The Pharisees and those in the Temple, they were robbing God of the people who had come for Him. People from all over the Roman Empire, and even beyond into Parthia were coming to worship God and they were being kept on the outskirts, which offended Yeshua very much.

People have latched onto the phrase “the temple of the Lord” because the people believed that the Temple of the Lord was like their lucky charm and that He would protect them for the sake of the Temple, even though they were rebuffing and ignoring His instructions and treating Him and one another with contempt.

Shiloh was one of the first victims of the “abomination of desolation.” There’s no tabernacle there and it’s not there for similar reasons to what Jeremiah says here. Shiloh had become a den of thieves and Yeshua is warning His contemporaries that they were on the road to Shiloh too.

God’s vision, revealed to the prophets and the Apostles, is His desire to make mankind one happy family, with the fruition at the Day of the Lord and in the Messianic Age. Instead, Yeshua had to confront a system that clouded that teaching and vision.

God is the gardener and farmer, not mankind. When we get into there and do unauthorized pruning, this does not sit well with God. A litany of rules and regulations can became a hammer to beat one’s fellow believers. We can forget to have mercy on others and on ourselves when we overstep our bounds.

It is eternal life to know God. Because if you know who God is and what He is doing, you will not be fooled that you can live a double life. You can’t compartmentalize your life. When God says to be separate from the nations, He didn’t mean that the nations come in and God wants to create a new family, that you block their way in.

When you study the book of Galatians, the Pharisees did something very significant and we all reap the benefit of it today. They brought the workings of the Temple, that were only seen by the family of Aaron out into every day life.

The synagogue comes from the pharisees and they replicated the Temple in a devotional sense. The problem came in when they applied the rules that only applied to priests to everybody. You encounter this in Mark with the confusion of the phrase “purging all foods” or “making all foods clean” in the context of the pharisees and their handwashing. That’s an extrapolation of the temple into everyday life. If a priest is in temple service, there are very reasons why when priests, when they are on duty, must be clean. but to take that into the outside world, now everyone is obsessed with ritual cleanliness, not only their own cleanliness, but their neighbors as well.

Speaker: Jeff. Summary: Tammy.