The temple was created. Built with love. Built stone by stone with purpose and a plan. Intended to be a place reserved for worship and connecting with God. The temple is beautiful, but it doesn’t know its beauty. It’s unaware of its purpose as a sacred structure. Unaware because men are violating her. They have made her a place of business. Soliciting in her courts, selling cattle and doves-they are undermining her purpose for their own earthly desires and fulfillment. In the background, I can hear Jesus shouting: “How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”*
The temple is not a place, but a person. For we are the temple of the living God. We are temples and we are turning a blind eye to the violations occurring in our courts. Beautiful young girls are being sold and violated. Trafficked. Every day. Men who raise up sex and money as their idols are using God’s temples for evil. God’s temple is being vandalized. I want to live like Jesus did. I want to overturn their selling tables and drive them out. Who allowed these men into the courts? Which of you will stand by idly allowing them to use these sacred places and leave brokenness in their wake? Which of you will ignite with the jealous love of Christ and drive them out so that he may reclaim the temple as his own?
I hear my Father’s voice crying out in the background and I am convicted to be his messenger. “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.”** I want to rise up and, with a bold voice and an unwavering determination, declare: “These girls are not a marketplace and these lives are not for sale! The only way we can be bought is by the blood of Christ and that price has been paid. We belong to Christ and he is coming again to take his own. He will overturn your selling tables and redeem his temples with his love!”
*John 2:14-16
**1 Corinthians 3: 16-17
