Mining the Minors: Hosea (25)

The text over the photo to the right is nicked from a 1986 Steve Camp song entitled Threshing Floor, one of my favorite Christian lyrics ever, a great melody atop a characteristically elegant bottom end from legendary bassist Leland Sklar. Consider this post my homage to a job extra-well done. If “Pastor Steve” is still dishing it from the platform like this, I suspect the Lord would say he is doing okay.

But that raises a question: do most people even know what a threshing floor is? I imagine urbanized Westerners unfamiliar with the Bible probably don’t. I’ve certainly never seen one; they have been obsolete in the West since the 19th century.

A House of Trade

“Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

Jesus had nothing against pigeons; he made them after all, as John’s first chapter well establishes. Furthermore, the poor pigeons were only present at the temple to serve as sacrifices, a practice the Lord had himself authorized.

But these pigeons were not in the process of being carried to the altar in the arms of guilty or devout Jews. They were caged, on sale, and probably marked up at a premium for the convenience of having a cheap sacrifice handy when you needed one.

The Father’s house had become a house of trade.

The Bit in Between

It has long been noticed that of the four gospels, Matthew’s is the most distinctly Jewish.

This being the case, it may surprise you to find that the Gentile Luke actually mentions the temple in Jerusalem — the very heart of Judaism — more than Matthew, a Jew. Matthew mentions the temple explicitly in only five of 28 chapters, and the majority of these references are quite incidental.

Doing It the Hard Way

The Wailing Wall: Last vestige of Herod’s temple

How much does the church matter to the Lord?

When we look at the condition of most local churches today and compare them to Christ’s original intention as laid out in the epistles and patterned for us by believers in the first century, we might well wonder why the Lord continues to bother with the church at all.

Most of us do not really understand why we’re here and what we’re supposed to be doing. Great numbers of professing Christians atrophy in the pews, putting in an hour or two a week listening to a lecture and going home to a largely secular existence into which God is only allowed to intrude when things have gone disastrously wrong.