<p>11:17 <em>And he taught and said to them- </em>The Lord several times quoted an OT passage which if quoted further would have made a telling point. Thus He quoted Is. 56:7: &ldquo;My house shall be called an house of prayer&rdquo;, leaving His hearers to continue: &ldquo;...for&nbsp;<em>all</em>&nbsp;people&rdquo;. He recited Ps. 8:2: &ldquo;Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise&rdquo;, leaving them to complete: &ldquo;...that thou mightest still through their witness the enemy and the avenger&rdquo;. For the Bible minded, these things ought to have taught them. There is reason to think, in the subsequent response of a Jewish minority after Pentecost, that at least some did make these connections. They made use of the spiritual potential they had been given.</p><p><em>Is it not written- </em>The Lord quotes from Is. 56:7, but the surrounding context of the quotation is relevant to the Jewish leadership who were present and deeply critical of the Lord's actions. Is. 56:10,11 condemns Israel's elders as &quot;blind watchmen... dumb dogs... greedy dogs which can never have enough, shepherds that cannot understand, every one looking for gain&quot;. &quot;Dogs&quot; was understood as a reference to the Gentiles- and the Lord is saying that they are effectively Gentiles. Significantly, Is. 56:6 has spoken of &quot;the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the Lord, to serve Him, and to love the name of the Lord... taking hold of His covenant&quot;. This is often how God works- for those who are sensitive to His word, the quotations given speak far more deeply. The potential for greater understanding is thereby given to those familiar with His word. This is one reason why I encourage perseverance in reading the Bible even if at the point of reading we feel we are not understanding much and simply building up a familiarity with the text. That familiarity can be a basis for later revelation to us.</p><p><em>My house shall be called-</em> Luke uses the present tense, &quot;<em>is</em>&nbsp;called&quot;. The Lord surely said both, His point being that prophecies of the future Kingdom are to be lived out by us in essence today.&nbsp;</p><p><em>A house of prayer for all nations? But you have made it a den of thieves</em>- The Kingdom prophecy of Zech. 14:21 that there will no longer be a trafficker in the Lord's house was fulfilled by the Lord's casting out the traders from the temple. Many of the Kingdom prophecies of healing were it seems consciously fulfilled in the Lord&rsquo;s healings: Is. 35:6 LXX the stammerer healed = Mk. 7:32-35; Is. 35:3 = Mk. 2:3-12; 3:1-6; Is. 35:8,10 = Mk. 11:1 Bartimaeus following on the Jerusalem road. This doesn&rsquo;t mean that these passages will not have a glorious future fulfilment. But in the person of Jesus and in the record of His life we see the &ldquo;Kingdom come nigh&rdquo;, as He Himself said it did. We can so focus on the future fulfilment that we can forget that He was the Kingdom in the midst of men; the essence of our eternal future, of the coming political Kingdom of God, was and is to seen in Him. Satan fell from Heaven during His ministry (Lk. 10:18), as it will at the second coming (Rev. 12).</p><p>This invites us to see the thieves who robbed the man in the Samaritan parable as the Jewish leadership, whose priests and Levites refused to help people after the damage they themselves had caused (Lk. 10:30). The thieves &quot;stripped him of His clothing&quot; just as they later did to the Lord Jesus. The Lord uses the same figure of thieves for the Jewish leadership in Jn. 10:1,8. The Lord quotes here from Jer. 7:11, which speaks of the temple being profaned by adultery and Baal worship, resulting in the Babylonian invasion. He is saying that Israel's hypocritical piety in His day was none less than Baal worship, and therefore the Gentiles would come and destroy that place.</p><p>Some of the Bible&rsquo;s &lsquo;prophecies&rsquo; are command more than prediction. The Lord Jesus criticized the Jews for trading in the temple because &ldquo;Is it not written, My house <em>shall be</em> called of all nations the house of prayer&rdquo; (Mk. 11:17). We can easily read this as meaning that one day, a &lsquo;house of prayer for all nations&rsquo; was to be built in Jerusalem. But in that case, why should not the Jews trade in the temple there and then, well before this was to happen, say, 2000 years later? The Lord surely means that the prophecy that the temple &ldquo;shall be called&hellip;&rdquo; a house of <em>prayer</em> was a command more than a prediction. It &ldquo;shall be&rdquo; a place for <em>prayer</em> and not <em>trading</em>. The &lsquo;fulfilment&rsquo; of this statement was dependent upon them praying there and encouraging all nations to pray there; yet they could limit the fulfilment of the &lsquo;prophecy&rsquo; by stopping Gentiles praying there, and by discouraging prayer there because of their trading policies. Thus the Lord saw the prophecy as more of a command than mere prediction. &lsquo;Prophecy&rsquo; really means the speaking forth of God&rsquo;s word, rather than the foretelling of the future. The closer one looks, the more conditional prophecies and Divine statements there are. &ldquo;My house shall be called a house of prayer&rdquo; had the extent of its possible fulfilment limited by the Jews turning the temple into a trading centre (Mk. 11:17).</p>