Temple Costs (1) Den of Thieves

When Jesus cleansed the temple, he accused the temple leaders of turning it from a House of Prayer into a Den of Thieves (Matt 21:12-14).

My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.

We should think about what Jesus meant when he said that the temple had become a Den of Thieves. We usually assume that the people selling stuff and changing money were charging exorbitant prices, but that was not the problem. They were charging stiff prices, but they could only charge what the market would bear. No one was forced to buy from them. People chose to buy in the temple for their own convenience. They could have purchased their offering before they arrived at the temple, or changed their money with other merchants. So, the people that Jesus threw out were technically not thieves.

The problem was that the temple system was shifting income and wealth away from the ordinary people. They were under pressure to pay for building the temple that Herod had built by making offerings that they could not afford. The temple was a great tourist attraction, so merchants and innkeepers prospered, but the poor people were being pressured into paying for it.

This was not how the law was meant to work. Under the law, money and wealth should have been flowing to the poor from the rich.

The temple itself had become a den of thieves because it was depriving the ordinary people of income and pushing them into poverty. This was the opposite of what the law required.