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Regarding the Church as an institution, with its possessions, its laws, its days of worship, its rulers, its teachers, its outward services, we may find for ourselves a lesson in this incident. And that lesson is, that the spiritual character of the Church is everything, and that its first object is to deepen in men's hearts the sense of the Divine and the spiritual. When that great end is lost sight of, the Church has parted with her strongest claims upon the world, and it has forfeited also its privilege as a witness for God on the earth. The spiritual influence is the first and chief purpose of the Church of Christ. The lesson of this narrative comes home to us in these days, when so much time and thought are given to the outer framework of Church forms and usages; and that lesson may be needed to correct our spirit of bustling and restless energy in what is at the best only the machinery of spiritual life, and not spiritual life itself. There is no class of men who are more in danger of losing the true meaning of religion than those who are employed in its service. If I were to seek for cases in which spiritual truth had been travestied and turned to not only secular but profane purposes, I do not know that I could find them more readily than in men to whom all sacred words and acts have grown so familiar that they have ceased to express spiritual facts at all. Those who are always engaged in religious works are apt to lose the sense of their sacredness. No man more needs to be on his guard against an unspiritual life than the man who is perpetually employed in spiritual offices. He brings within the courts of God's house what ought to be left without; he forgets his high spiritual functions in the bustle and care which attend them; and it is really no absolute guarantee of a religious and spiritual life that a man's profession is the teaching of religion. Christ's words and acts read us all a lesson, then; they tell us that in the most sacred occupations of life there may be found cares and anxieties which are less religious, and which are apt to swallow up too much of a man's time and thoughts. There is another temple of a different kind, of which a word may be said. The whole Christian body is, in the words of the New Testament, a temple of God. There is a sacredness in that temple, the spiritual community of Christians, if we would only think of it, much greater than in the Temple of Jerusalem, or in any building devoted to holy uses. And just as the whole Christian community is a temple sacred to God, so each individual heart is in itself a temple where God Most High is honoured and worshipped.

(A. Watson, D. D.)

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KJV: And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought;

WEB: He entered into the temple, and began to drive out those who bought and sold in it,