Verse of the day · October 3
What does all things whatsoever mean in Matthew 21:22?
A foreigner could pray in one court of the temple. It was the court they kept the market in.
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And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.
Matthew 21:22
The outer court was counted the least sacred part of the temple in Jerusalem, and as far in as a Gentile could go. Inscriptions in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, on the next wall in and on its gates, forbade him to go further on pain of death. It was also where he was admitted to pray. The Jews prayed further in, past that wall, in a court he could not enter. And that outer court was where the market stood — animals on sale because worshippers came from too far off to bring their own. The money changers had their tables alongside, because the half shekel every man owed the sanctuary each year had to be paid in a Jewish coin and the money in ordinary use was Roman; they took a cut on the exchange. With many thousands coming up to the feasts it was profitable and easy to cheat at, and all its noise and wrangling were in the one court a foreigner was allowed to stand in.
Jesus had ridden into the city that week with the crowds going ahead of him shouting Hosanna to the Son of David — the way a king came into his capital. The next day he walked into that court and put the sellers and the money changers out. He had not come in as a worshipper. He came in as the lord and proprietor of the place. The traders were many and powerful, he was one man and unarmed, and nobody laid a hand on him. And he said: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. The house of prayer came from Isaiah; the den of thieves he took from Jeremiah and added to it, to name what they had done to the building. These men had made the temple a place of profit: the poor had no way round buying the animals the law required them to offer, and they were robbed by being charged an enormous price — a fraudulent trade the priesthood of that day had let encroach on the worship of God. The trade was a genuine convenience, and it was no less a desecration for being so convenient. With the traders gone, the blind and the lame were brought to him where the tables had stood, and he healed them there. He had just shut down the wrong use of that house; this was the right one. The chief priests and scribes were displeased at the authority he had taken over the temple, and at the people's evident favour.
What Isaiah had promised was a house of prayer not for the Jews only but for the Gentiles also — for all people, in the prophet's own words. And the part of the building that promise particularly meant was the outer court. The market was standing on the ground the promise was about.
He went out of the city to Bethany for the night, in part to stay out of reach of men who would have arrested him. Walking back in the next morning, hungry, he came to a fig tree whose leaves promised figs it did not have, and cursed it; it withered where it stood. How soon is the fig tree withered away! the men with him said, marvelling. What he said back was about faith — if they had faith and did not doubt, the tree was the least of what they could do. And asking in prayer is how that faith is exercised — asking in agreement with the will of God. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.
The promise is not only about miracles. Among the things it takes in is anything that may be for the honour of God, the spreading of the gospel, or a man's own spiritual good — or somebody else's, since he may ask for another as well as for himself.
What he said to the men walking beside him is the condition of our receiving — we ask in prayer, believing. Faith and prayer are two halves of one act: faith, if it is real, produces prayer, and prayer that does not come out of faith is not right prayer. The great thing that spoils faith is doubting God's power or his promise; faith ought to be as confident as the promise is certain.
Asked in faith, and in agreement with the will of God — his covenant, his word and his promises — the requests of prayer will not be denied, and the expectations of faith will not be disappointed.
Whatever it is. The sentence says all things, and then says whatsoever: all things is the promise in general, and whatsoever brings it down to the particular thing a man has in mind. Our unbelief will assent to a promise while it stays general and then fly off when it comes to particulars — and therefore it was put this copiously, all things whatsoever, so that we might have strong comfort.
He got no breakfast off that tree, and he went into the temple without one and started preaching: the preaching mattered more to him than his food. The chief priests and the elders of the people came to him while he was teaching. They came in a body — the leading men of the nation's ruling council, if not the whole of it — so that their presence and their authority would unsettle him and stop him. By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority?
These things were the driving out of the buyers and sellers, which had angered them because their own gain was tied up in it; the healings in that same court; and particularly the preaching he was doing as they spoke. They did not dispute whether his teaching was true, and they did not examine his miracles to see where the power came from; on either of those they might fear he would silence them. They went at the commission instead, and either answer was meant to finish him. If he said God had sent him, they would call it presumption and blasphemy for any man to claim he had been sent straight from God, since the offices of priest and teacher were fixed and nobody entered either except by their appointment. If he said men had sent him, they would deny it, and he was a usurper of the office and a seditious man. It was a false pretext, and what it was for was to stop Christ's mouth.
He asked them something instead, and made his own answer conditional on theirs: answer me this, and I will tell you. A straight answer either way gave them a hold on him, and the question he put instead would have answered theirs if they had answered it. The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men? They talked it over among themselves. If they said from heaven, he would ask why they had not believed John then — and what John had spent his ministry testifying was that Jesus was the promised Messiah. If they said of men, they were afraid of the crowd, because everybody held John to be a prophet. They were not weighing whether John had been sent by God. Their difficulty, evidently, was how to answer without shaking their own determination to reject his claims or damaging their standing with the people; for the truth itself they cared nothing whatever. So they said, We cannot tell. It was a lie, and they knew it was. And he said, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things. Their mouths were shut, and in the silence he went straight on with a story: a man told his two sons to go and work in his vineyard, and one refused and went anyway, and one promised and did not go. They were the second son, the kind that say and do not. The tax collectors and the prostitutes, who had believed John, were the first.
The men who wanted to know who had licensed him found him teaching in the temple he had emptied the day before. The part of it he had emptied was the one part of that whole building open to everybody, the only place a foreigner was allowed to pray, and it had been turned into somewhere to buy. The promise he had spoken on the road that morning was about asking, and it was put as comprehensively as a promise can be. What is asked has to agree with the will of God, and it has to make for his glory and the good of his people. Inside that it is given, whatever it is, however impossible it looks. Given: of God, through Christ, freely. That house had never been meant for selling anything.
Drawn from John Gill, Albert Barnes, B. W. Johnson, Matthew Henry, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary. How these teachings are made