Ever read that part in the Gospels about Jesus Cleansing the Temple?
Wikipedia editors show their ignorance by leaving out the background stuff found in even the cheapest Bible commentaries. There was some ambiguity in the minds of the Temple officials on hand that day. Was this troublemaker pretending to be another tiresome prophetic reformer, was it a partisan political act, or did he have some warrant from a government authority? Even among the Jews there was a very complicated political wrangling at the best of times. On top of that, Rome, Herod and the Sanhedrin each exercised some overlapping legal power there, and it was possible on-duty officials hadn’t gotten the memo.
Their question to Jesus was pretty standard, with guards forming around Him in preparation for arrest if He said the wrong thing, along with various partisan activists ready to defend Him if He said the right thing. He had disturbed the concessions licensed by Annas. You probably know that Annas (AKA Ananias) was not a nice guy, but the Bible colors him as a greedy and hateful SOB. He was first and foremost a politician, and even the little we know of him is pretty complicated. A Roman official had appointed him High Priest around age 26; he was deposed a decade later, yet remained fully in power without the title. He’s still exercising that power more than a decade later when Jesus comes on the scene. The Temple concessions were very unpopular with its outrageously inflated prices, so Jesus was hardly the first fellow to do something like this.
Can you imagine? If you brought your offering from wherever you called home — wherever it was faithful Jewish folks had migrated — your sacrifice might not pass inspection. So you brought money, but you have to exchange it for the Temple currency. Well, guess who had the only big supply of that sacred Temple coinage? Exchanged at a premium, of course. And even if you did manage to bring your perfect offering intact, the inspecting priests were in on this deal, and would reject it because it wasn’t purchased in the Temple bazaar. Meanwhile, you might easily pay ten times what it lawfully cost otherwise.
But Jesus’ point was pretty simple: This bazaar took over the Court of Gentiles and there was no room for non-Jews to approach Jehovah during the holiest celebration of all. How do we explain what an abomination this was? It’s a long list of violations against the Covenant Law, not to mention a spiteful rejection of the underlying purpose for the Covenant in the first place. Israel the Nation existed solely to manifest Israel the Mission — to convey the revelation of God to all mankind. At this point, there was very little of Israel’s existence that was not blasphemous, especially things like this bazaar.
Use your heart logic to abstract the moral fabric here: A materialistic orientation is inherently evil. There is a lot of room for doing what’s right in God’s eyes outside the realm of ritual and worship. However, Westerners build on an assumption about reality that is fundamentally hostile to morality. Westerners vary widely on moral issues as they see them, but the entire discussion and debate starts on the grounds of rejecting everything God revealed. Western Civilization itself is inherently immoral because it is inherently materialistic. Westerners can’t even define the term “materialism” properly.
So I don’t expect anyone to understand my moral grousing so long as they remain within the Western realm of thinking. I fully expect my explanations to fall flat with them. Yet the Truth of God’s revelation calls to a few of them and they feel drawn on a level they refuse to admit to themselves even exists.
Let me offer an example: By now you probably understand that the most ethical and “moral” marketing folks are unspeakably repulsive. We have no calling to make war against them, but there comes a point where they are intruding on our dominion of authority from Heaven and we can crack the Jesus Whip. A critical part of my dominion covers discussion of computer technology and Internet surfing. I’m cracking the whip.
I’ve already warned you that Google is not your friend. Recently I learned that there is new module built into Google Chrome browser. Ostensibly they sell it as a convenience: You can use voice-activated Google Search. Isn’t that cool? You don’t have a choice; it’s there. The developers claim this module can be deactivated, but the source code is not available, and I’m pretty sure they’ve been ordered to lie about it. This module can turn on any existing microphone on the system so long as Chrome is running, and pick up any ambient noise. How often have other companies lied about how that stuff is used?
If that’s not bad enough, they slipped this module into the Open Source version of the browser called Chromium, very popular among us Linux users. Recently there were some ugly words between Linux folks and the Google developers because the latter had Chromium secretly download and install this module on Linux computers, too. Someone with technical savvy caught it and complained. Google developers had slipped this past everyone, and were miffed at the reaction when they got caught. It’s been fixed, but it’s just a new source of tension and everyone already has too many other things requiring strict attention.
Your biggest threat is not government snooping into your privacy. It’s a mighty struggle to avoid being snooped on all sides, including every two-bit operation that can make a dollar through advertising. On top of this is the doors it opens to genuine criminals. The marketers are psychopathic about it, utterly lacking in any sense of empathy for your feelings on the issue. They might well be aware and savvy about avoiding telling you, but if they claim to care, it’s a psychopath’s lie. On top of this, these same folks will not hesitate to sell any data they collect to any government that will pay, never mind warrants, etc. We are not dealing with ordinary folks here; they live in some alternate universe, utterly alien to you and me. In moral terms they are off the scale on the nasty side.
Crack the Jesus Whip and refuse to play along.
I won’t take up the space here to list and explain all the ways you can protect your privacy from such snooping. I’ve done that often enough in previous posts and in my books about computers. My point is that a lot of things you never bother to think about can actively interfere with our divine calling. Don’t grab hold of this out of fear, but out of righteous indignation that someone would dare to defy your God. Make sure you understand what He demands of you; search your heart in reference to these issues. Ask questions until you find peace with God.
