At some point when reading the Bible you come across these strange, almost 4th-wall-breaking insertions of God’s commentary on his own story. And surprisingly, it’s not all “and God saw that it was good” as we see him say repeatedly in Genesis 1. There are moments of “it’s not good” as well (as in Genesis 2).

For human beings, looking back on our past work or actions, cringing, and striving to do things better or differently in the future is a universal experience — like when an artist looks back on his or her earlier work with mild disgust. But when it comes to God, it sounds unlike him to think this way and maybe pokes a bit at our perceptions of his character, like his immutability or sovereignty. And yet, it’s this negative commentary that helps drive the story forward to its rightful climax in a way that a static, all-positive, “no problems here!” story can’t.

Though there are many places we can go to see this in the Bible, I like to pick up right in the middle, after centuries of covenant living are in the rearview mirror for Israel, and God begins to speak through the psalmists and the prophets. It’s during that time that David says, “Lord, you don’t desire sacrifice, but a broken heart.” Isaiah dials up the rhetoric further by saying (for God), “I don’t want your sacrifices, or your festivals, or your Sabbaths! I detest them!” and elsewhere “I live in heaven, not in temples built by human hands.” The attuned reader at this point might scratch their head and ask, “But, wait, didn’t God command these things to be kept and observed?”

When we get to the New Testament, we see this disconnect even more obviously with Jesus, whose freedom from the law reveals more than mere quibbles over interpretation. When it comes to the practice of Sabbath rest, Jesus proclaims himself its Lord (Mk 2:28), and even breaks it in favor of healing a paralytic (Jn 5:18). He refuses to throw a stone at the adulteress even though the law commanded it. He differentiates himself from Moses’s “Eye for an eye” and instead teaches his disciples to “Turn the other cheek.” He commends the faith of the unrighteous tax collector and scorns the righteousness of the Pharisee (Lk 18:9-14). He not only positions himself against the old ways but against things God himself spoke into existence. In this, David’s words become Jesus’s: “Father, you don’t desire these things anymore, you never really did, but I am here to do your will” (Ps 40:6-8, Heb 10:5-7).

Where I think we see this at the highest level, though, and where Jesus matches God’s Old Testament zeal over this matter, is when he flips over the money changers’ tables in the temple. Something often missed in this story is how Jesus sat down and “made a whip out of cords” before he drove people and animals from the temple, meaning that this wasn’t a spontaneous freak-out, but a calculated act that (at least temporarily) disrupted the entire sacrificial system of the day. An overreaction, you could say, if all he intended to do was to turn the dial 5 degrees or to “clean up” what was otherwise a good thing that was intended to last forever. Where was gentle Rabbi Jesus when you needed him? Wouldn’t a simple teachable moment have sufficed?

So, why is he doing this? Why is he flipping rather than teaching? The answer is that Jesus isn’t just overturning tables, he’s overturning eras. All due respect to the “temple cleansing” language we often use to summarize this Bible story, but I don’t think it does it justice. 

Jesus isn’t a small update to the operating system of the old covenant, but a new system altogether that renders the old obsolete (Heb 8:13). Between the two systems, the language is similar, some of the code persists, and the coder is the same, but they are as different as MS-DOS is from Windows 11 or the latest MacOS. 

It’s no coincidence that a few verses after Jesus flips the tables, he starts talking about his own body as the new temple and how he’ll raise it from the dead after it’s been destroyed. He’s signifying that he is the new way sinners will meet with and be mediated to God — not on the basis of our obedience, or moralistic “trade” (Jn 2:16), but by a broken heart, and moreover, Jesus’s broken and torn body. His own whipping.

Using Jesus’s suffering and death to shed light on the psalms and the prophets, as well as his position against the old Law in his early ministry, it becomes clearer why God has such zeal for all of this. It’s because fidelity to the rules lower our field of vision away from Jesus. Those who believe themselves to be healthy, after all, have no need of a doctor (Mk 2:17). The rules elicit pride and self-reliance more than faith and intimacy. Jesus’ prophetic demonstration in the temple sounds like anger, and in one sense it is because it’s linked with peoples’ sinful actions (the law incites disobedience), but digging deeper, it’s actually a veiled love story. It’s God in the flesh tearing up the thing that keeps his people from him, doing damage to the old way of “bring your sacrifices to God” and replacing it with a new and better way of “God brings his own sacrifice to us.”

A helpful quip to remember in Christian theology: God doesn’t change, but the covenants do. He isn’t aloof, or indecisive, nor does he make mistakes. He knew exactly what he was doing by sending the law first — to show us that our calloused hands aren’t the answer. But Jesus was always his plan A. His grace is the axis around which the entire story rotates. Everything else (even other parts of Scripture) falls subservient to it, and morphs and bends and aches at the whim of it. God has a heart, even a zeal, for this kind of scriptural drama. He puts us, the money-changing self-justifiers, out of a job. He beckons us to find rest in his son alone, the one who was struck on the cheek for our sins. And he invites us to stop the charade of striving to measure up and to be better versions of ourselves. These aren’t quaint lessons. They’re things God went to war over, and who took the bullet, that we might lay down our religious checklists and be spared.