Happy Tuesday! There is nothing I love more than walking our property! I get to think, pray and just enjoy God’s great outdoors. Well, as I sit on an old log,and look out toward our home, I open my Bible and read all about where Jesus was thousands of years ago on this day. So, as we are following along in the gospels this week, the Holy Week of Jesus’ life from Palm Sunday to Resurrection day, on this day – Tuesday – we find Jesus having just stirred up some temple controversies in Jerusalem having cleared the temple of merchants. One of the best accounts of this event is here...I hope you will read this and see that when we are consumed with righteous anger, it’s not harsh and brutal “toward” a person, but it WILL be expressed through our words, our tone and our actions that God’s holiness and righteousness is what we are defending. Righteous anger is anger, and it’s what we see in Jesus as He clears out the temple. Christ’s zeal for the holiness of His Father’s house consumed Him, to the point that He had to take a whip in His righteous hands and just like herding cattle, He herded the merchants out of the temple. With His own bare hands, He turned over tables.
If anyone in that temple that day had approached Jesus and said, “That anger of yours is not going to get you anywhere. I see and hear anger in you and that is not good. You shouldn’t be angry, Jesus. That’s just not a good thing and I’m disappointed in you for being angry. God, Your Father, can’t work through You when You are like this”, I’m sure they would have heard these words pierce their judgmental accusations – “Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house a place of business,” Mark 21:13. And He would have also reminded them, (because they would’ve been the voice of Satan by not speaking in accordance to the will of God), “Is it not written, ‘Zeal for Your house will consume Me” Psalm 69:9.
Jesus’ righteous anger worked! It got the job done. And His Father was much pleased.
When you have the heart of God beating in you, and you desire nothing more than to surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, then you will love what He loves and hate what He hates. You will show loving-kindness when needed and you will show righteous anger when that holy anger is appropriate. But it will be an anger due to the “wrongness and unholiness” that is being displayed. It will be an anger at the evil and the uproaring of Satan in his stirrings and schemes. It will be an anger that works! And it works the holiness and the will of God in a situation, not expressed to a person, but expressed to a circumstance (as with the merchants) that is demonstrating unrighteousness.
This is a huge lesson for all of us as we draw closer to Easter because as we walk with Jesus this Holy Week, we are going to see that by Tuesday He has already cursed a fig tree for not producing fruit. He has cleared a temple of unholy acts of buying, selling and trading, and He is also having an open Olivet discourse on His return to Bethany.
I hope you are diving into the Bible this week, walking the path Jesus walked and truly taking to heart all that the Father orchestrated for His Son’s life….all the way to the Cross! And all the way to Easter morning!
He is Risen,
lisa
