Throughout this series we’ve been working out what it means that God is the Creator and that we are made in his image. A great deal of what it means for God to be the Creator is that God is the King — he is the ruler over everything he has made. And a great deal of what it means for us to be his image-bearers is that we are meant to rule on his behalf, like small kings and queens set over his creation, his sub-rulers acting in his place. Our work, our culture, our technology, and our money — money being a form of technology — are all ways we exercise this kingly dominion over God’s world, for his sake, to reflect him and to honor him.
But we are not only rulers. We are not merely kings. We are also, and ultimately, worshipers. We are not just meant to be kings; we are also and ultimately meant to be priests. And once you see that, a famous and dramatic story in the Gospels starts to look very different from the way it’s often told — the story of Jesus storming into the temple and driving out the money-changers. Christian Bitcoiners love this story, and for good reason. But I want to suggest that we usually get the heart of it wrong.
King and priest in the garden
You can see this double calling at the very beginning of the Bible. In Genesis 2, after God makes Adam and Eve to bear his image, he puts the man in the garden:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
Genesis 2:15
Those two verbs — work and keep — are far more interesting than they first appear. The same pair shows up all over the Old Testament to describe what the priests are supposed to be doing in the tabernacle and later in the temple. You could just as well translate them “to serve” and “to guard.” The priests served in the temple — and not merely by running services, but by serving God himself. God says the special job of the tribe of Levi is to be his servants in these sacred duties. And the priests guarded as well: they guarded the holy furniture and the holy space, keeping unclean and filthy things out, making sure that proper worship and proper sacrifice were being offered to God. They had a guardian role alongside a serving role — and those are the very same words used to describe what Adam and Eve were to do in Eden.
That’s because the Garden of Eden is itself a kind of sanctuary — a garden temple. Later on, the tabernacle and Solomon’s temple are built to echo it. The lampstand is shaped like a tree, an almond tree, fashioned and crafted to look like something living. Images of angels are woven into the curtains, just like the angels who guard the way back into the garden once mankind is cast out. There is light, as at the very beginning of creation, with lamps set to shine on the bread — another image of food and of God’s provision for his people. Eden is a temple; the tabernacle and the temple are echoes of Eden; and at the very end of the Bible the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven as a garden city and a temple, tying the whole story together from beginning to end. From the very start, mankind was created to be not just kings but priests — to serve God, to worship him, and to guard his creation against everything that would defile it.
Reading Matthew 21 again
I was recently reading Matthew 21, and I was struck all over again by the story of Jesus clearing the temple — driving the money-changers out of the outer court. Bitcoiners, and Christian Bitcoiners in particular, are drawn to this story because here is Jesus getting genuinely angry over something to do with money — an unjust practice involving trade and currency. And there really are fascinating things to draw out of what was happening with money in the temple in the first century, and real parallels to what’s wrong with our monetary system today, and to what makes God angry when the powerful take advantage of the weak and the poor.
But as I read Matthew 21, what struck me is that this is not, at its core, a story about money or monetary injustice. That’s part of it. But it is really a story about something else. It’s not so much a story about dominion — about money and technology — as it is a story about worship. What is really going on is that Jesus is angry because worship is being hindered. The bad money and the corrupt practices in the temple are a problem precisely because of how they are keeping people from worshiping God.
There are four Gospels, of course. Matthew, Mark, and Luke we call the Synoptics; they tell many of the same episodes of Jesus’ ministry from slightly different angles. John is more of its own thing, telling mostly different stories in very different ways, though with some overlap. John does describe a clearing of the temple — there’s a longstanding debate about whether it’s the same event or a second cleansing, which I won’t get into here. What matters for us is that of the four, Matthew spends the most time on the dimension of worship in this scene. So that’s the account I want to walk through.
Palm Sunday and a king coming to worship
What happens just before Jesus clears the temple is Palm Sunday — Jesus entering Jerusalem to the praise of the crowds, who wave palm branches and go before him and follow him, shouting a very specific refrain:
Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!
Matthew 21:9
That word Hosanna means “save” — save us. And the whole cry is a loose quotation of Psalm 118, a psalm about the king coming to worship in God’s temple. The city is stirred up, asking, “Who is this?” and the crowds answer, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” So the framing is already set: here is the king, arriving to enter the house of the Lord, to the sound of a psalm of worship. Keep that in mind, because the psalm is going to come back.
And then, in verse 12, Jesus goes into the temple:
And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.
Matthew 21:12
What was happening in the court of the Gentiles
Several things are going on here. This was very likely taking place in the outer Court of the Gentiles — an outer area of the temple where non-Jewish people were allowed to come and worship God from a distance, in their own way, without going further in. By the first century, this whole market — changing currencies, exchanging money, buying sacrificial animals — had apparently been set up right there in the Court of the Gentiles. It was a huge scene, and it was getting in the way of worship. It was keeping the Gentiles, the nations, from being able to come near to God at all.
Why was the market there in the first place? Partly because of currency. People were streaming in for the festival from all over the Roman world, carrying all kinds of coins. The Jewish authorities were rightly sensitive about bringing idolatrous images into the temple, and much of the Roman coinage bore the faces of pagan gods and goddesses. So worshipers were told to exchange their coins for an acceptable currency — no pagan deities — and the temple tax in particular had to be paid that way. And partly it was about the animals. This was Passover week; Jews were required to come up to Jerusalem to worship, and you wouldn’t want to drag a sacrificial animal across the empire. So you brought money, exchanged it for the proper currency, and bought your animal there.
Now notice the details Matthew gives us. Jesus overturns the seats of those who were selling pigeons. You could offer many kinds of animals at the temple, but God had specifically allowed pigeons for the poorest of the poor — the cheapest, most accessible offering. So there is something particular in Matthew’s telling: Jesus is especially angry on behalf of the poor, the ones who could only afford a pigeon and not a larger, costlier animal. And notice this too — Jesus drives out not only those selling in the temple, the people getting rich off of God’s worship, but also those buying. When Bitcoiners tell this story, they tend to talk only about the money-changers, the ones ripping everyone off and exploiting the poor. And we should — it is genuinely wicked to do that. But isn’t it striking that Jesus is angry at the buyers as well? He doesn’t let the ordinary people off the hook. This isn’t only a problem about being powerful or wealthy or profiting from the poor. The problem has spread out to the whole people.
A den of robbers: Isaiah and Jeremiah
Then Jesus explains himself, and the explanation is everything:
It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.
Matthew 21:13
Both halves of that sentence are quotations, and both come from contexts soaked in worship. The first half is from Isaiah:
These I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Isaiah 56:7
In the wider context of Isaiah 56, God tells his people to keep justice and do righteousness — to stop murdering, to stop taking advantage of the poor. But again and again that command is bound up with keeping the Sabbath, with honoring God in worship one day a week. In the Old Testament, the way you treat other people is never severed from the way you treat God. God’s concern for worship is woven straight through the very things Bitcoiners and Christians today tend to focus on — justice, righteousness, oppression. You can’t pull them apart. Dominion and worship go together. And later in that same verse, where God calls his house a house of prayer for all nations, he also speaks of refusing the offerings and sacrifices of a people whose lives are unrighteous — once more tying worship and obedience together.
The second half — “a den of robbers” — reaches back to Jeremiah:
Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord.
Jeremiah 7:11
In Jeremiah 7, God’s people hear of the coming judgment from Babylon and shrug it off. We have the temple, they reason — the temple Solomon built. This is God’s house; we have nothing to fear. They are trusting in the temple itself. And God answers: why are you trusting in the temple? It will not save you. You are murderers and adulterers; you oppress the poor; you lie. But all through Jeremiah 7, God says something more: you are idolaters. You are worshiping false gods. You are not worshiping me. So in both passages Jesus invokes — Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 7 — the same intimate connection appears between murder, oppression, and financial injustice on the one hand, and false worship and idolatry on the other. God says you cannot have right behavior toward one another — in your work, your marriages, your families — unless you are also rightly related to him in worship, not bowing to false gods, not putting your trust even in good things like the temple. For even the temple God himself commanded them to build could become an idol.
The king they refused to welcome
Watch what Jesus does next:
And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.
Matthew 21:14
That detail is unique to Matthew. And in the broader context of the Isaiah Jesus has just quoted, we hear how God will give sight to the blind and cause the lame to leap and walk and rejoice. Jesus’ healings are never merely about fixing bodies, as though he cared only for physical problems. They are always an echo of those much larger promises — that God’s people, Israel, had gone blind, and that only God could make them see. Physical blindness is a real affliction, and God cares about it; but ultimately it is a symptom of a deeper spiritual blindness that sin brings on all of us. So when Jesus heals the blind and the lame in the temple, he is making a claim about himself: that he is the great Messiah Isaiah promised, come to turn God’s people around so that they actually want to follow and obey him. He has driven the buyers and sellers from the court, condemned them for turning God’s house into a ridiculous circus of profiteering and oppression and obstructed worship — and then he turns and heals. He is showing that he is the King.
There’s an echo of this in The Lord of the Rings. In The Return of the King, one of the signs that Aragorn is the true king is that he can heal the sick and the wounded — the hands of the king are the hands of a healer. That is a faint echo of what Jesus is doing here. You know he is the King — the Messiah Isaiah promised — because he is healing the blind and the lame in the temple.
Then comes a reaction Matthew alone records:
But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?”
Matthew 21:15–16
The chief priests and scribes — the men running the whole temple system — see the wonderful things Jesus does. That phrase comes from a Greek word for amazing, awe-filling things, the kind that make you marvel at how great God is. They see the children crying out, quoting Psalm 118: Hosanna, save us, calling Jesus the Son of David, the messianic king. And they are indignant. Now go back to Psalm 118 and notice something. In the very passage about “save us” and “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” you also read:
Save us, we pray, O Lord! O Lord, we pray, give us success! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! We bless you from the house of the Lord.
Psalm 118:25–26
The psalm originally pictures the king arriving at the temple, where a crowd stands ready to welcome and bless him from the house of the Lord. But that is exactly what does not happen for Jesus. He comes into the house of the Lord, and once he’s there he is not blessed, not praised, not welcomed — not by the crowds, and least of all by those who ought to welcome him, the priests and the leaders. Instead they oppose him. They hate him. One of the other Gospels tells us it is around this moment that they begin in earnest to look for a way to kill him.
The same psalm says more:
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
Psalm 118:22
That verse is quoted all over the New Testament, and here it is playing out in Jesus’ own life. In the last week before his death he is being rejected. He is the stone — the true cornerstone, the one everything in God’s economy revolves around — and the very builders, the priests who should be serving and honoring him, are throwing him aside, exactly as Psalm 118 anticipated. And that psalm, too, is all about worship. The king prays:
Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord.
Psalm 118:19
There it is again — a concern with righteousness, with right obedience and a right way of life, including how you use money and how you treat the poor. But it is never severed from worship. The king wants to enter the gates of righteousness as one who is righteous — for only the righteous can come into God’s presence — and he wants to do it so that he may give thanks to the Lord. He wants to worship. He wants to praise God.
Out of the mouth of infants
So the chief priests and scribes are furious — at the healings, and at Jesus accepting the praise of these children and of the crowds. And Jesus answers them:
Yes; have you never read, “Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise”?
Matthew 21:16
He is quoting Psalm 8. And if you go back and read that psalm, it is all about how God made mankind in his image to rule over creation — a psalm about the wonder of human dominion, of human beings as God’s sub-rulers. Yet that psalm of dominion opens and closes with the very same line of worship:
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.
Psalm 8:1
A psalm about exercising dominion in God’s world as his image-bearers is framed, beginning and end, by worship. And there’s one more thread. Remember that the priests were enraged when they saw the “wonderful things” Jesus was doing — the healings. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament that so deeply shaped the New, that same word for marvelous, majestic things appears right here in Psalm 8: “how majestic is your name.” The majestic name of God in Psalm 8 and the majestic, marvelous deeds of Jesus in the temple are described with the same word. Dominion and worship, the King and the praise of children, all bound together in a single line.
A worship problem, not a money problem
Jesus then leaves them:
And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there.
Matthew 21:17
There is no welcome committee at the temple. He simply leaves. Mark tells us that after Jesus clears the temple in his first act of Passover week, he looks around and goes — nobody there to welcome him, nobody saying, “We bless you from the house of the Lord.” Jesus has come to Jerusalem to die. And even John, who tells the temple story with a very different focus, still anchors it in worship: as the disciples watch Jesus drive out the money-changers, they remember Psalm 69 — “Zeal for your house has consumed me” (John 2:17, quoting Psalm 69:9). Every Gospel that touches this scene is finally concerned with worship, not merely with money and its abuses.
So, why was Jesus so angry at the money-changers? He really was angry, and what they were doing was genuinely terrible; they should not have been doing it. But the reason for his anger was not so much the monetary injustice as the spiritual injustice. Worship was being hindered — and that, more than the corrupt currency or the oppression of the poor by the well-connected and powerful (real as all of that was, and part of what provoked him), is what made him so angry. The problem here is a worship problem, not just a dominion problem.
And worship can be hindered in all sorts of ways. Even if the practices in that outer court had been flawless — perfect, honest, sound money — it could still have drawn people away from worship. Good, sound money can become a false god. And if that were happening, Jesus would have been every bit as angry. You could hinder worship in that court by holding a giant Bible study — imagine the scribes and chief priests gathered there, studying Scripture, congratulating themselves on how wonderful it all is, and keeping people from ever drawing near to God. You can keep people from worship with all kinds of outwardly righteous behavior. The trouble is not, in the end, the money trouble itself.
Think of it this way. We once had a terrible plumbing problem in our house — bad enough that a leak ruined the foundation and we had to move out. But the problem with the plumbing was never really just about the plumbing. Suppose we’d fixed the pipes and repaired the foundation, then sat out front and said, “Isn’t this wonderful? The house works again! We solved it!” We’d only be halfway there. The point of working plumbing and a sound foundation is so that you can live in the house — so you can have fellowship with friends and family around the table. It is the same with the temple. Jesus is not angry merely about the monetary injustice in the Court of the Gentiles. He is angry because it is keeping people from fellowship with God around his table.
We’ll keep unpacking this in the next couple of talks. But the point in this look at Matthew 21 is that dominion — technology, culture, money, Bitcoin — is not the goal. Worship is the goal. We are meant to be like those children as Jesus entered Jerusalem, made to praise God, to admire him, to wonder at his marvelous and mighty deeds. That is the whole point of exercising dominion in God’s creation. We are not just kings; we are also and ultimately priests. Next time we’ll follow that thread right into our daily labor and ask how it is that even our ordinary work is meant to be a form of worship.