God’s Good Hand of Grace - Ezra Chapters 7 – 10
The following is the transcript of a message I have on Ezra back on July 31, 2022:
Good morning Church!
This is going to be interesting…How is
this going to go?
There’s
probably more than a few you of you going…“Oh boy, where did they get this guy?
It’s okay, I get it. I’m there with you.
For those that don’t know me, I am Dan
Benjamin, I have been covenant partner here at MVC for 12 years or so, and I am
currently serving as an elder.
As
you might know… a few weeks this summer where we needed some guest speakers,
and I thought. Hmm, I kind of have always wanted to do a sermon at least once
in my life, so I figured, if there is ever going to be a time to give it a go,
this is the time.
Gave Pastor David the heads up that I
would preach this week, and he said, “GREAT, so we will be in a series on Ezra
and Nehemiah.”
I hadn’t done much study in Ezra or
Nehemiah, so I said “cool, so, do I have to stick with the series, or could I
do a one-off on another topic?”
David - “Yeah, we really want to have
the guest speakers stick with series and not get disjointed from week-to-week.”
Okay, I said, I can hang with that.
And I ask, “What chapters will we be in at this point in the series?”
David says, “Well, that should put us
right at the end of Ezra.”
Great! I’ve got it!
Then I go read the end of Ezra (and
some of you have probably read ahead and you are thinking, hmm, what is Dan
going to do with this one?)
So the end of Ezra turns out to be one
of these potentially controversial scriptures in the Bible where intermarriage
between the returned exiles and the people of the land is called out and the
remedy for it is the men were told to divorce their wives and leave their
children. Yikes.
So…this is going to be fun…shouldn’t
be hard to navigate…Thanks for the easy one David.
Before we dive in…Let’s pray…
As David said at the outset of this
series, the way we are covering these 2 books is a bit different than maybe
some other series. We aren’t doing a complete 30000-foot overview of the books,
but we also are not going verse by verse and getting super granular. We are taking
several chapters focusing on some important elements and themes from a wide-ish
point of view.
So let’s review a bit…
We started out in the book of Ezra
with King Cyrus being stirred by the Lord for him to release the exiles and to
have them return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. That was pretty
remarkable, right?
It’s one thing for those of us that
are believers to hear the voice of God and then to respond, but God spoke to a
Persian king who had nothing to do with Israel, and the guy not only heard the
voice of God, but he responded.
And I think it is really important to
note something about what King Cyrus did… This was a foreign king, of this
great Persian empire, who were polytheistic (in other words they worshipped
several gods), and out of nowhere, King Cyrus is moved by the one true God and
decrees that that Israel should be released and rebuild Jerusalem.
The only explanation is that God truly
spoke to this foreign king and he listened. I just find that so incredible, and
to me it is such a great example of the truth of God’s existence. You can go
look at secular history books and you are going to find that what is portrayed
in the book of Ezra is what actually happened.
There is absolutely no plausable
reason that King Cyrus ended the Jews’ captivity other than the one true God is
real and intervened to make that happen.
Folks, we worship an active and living
God! Amen?
So a large group of exiles heads back
to Jerusalem and as we read through the book of Ezra, we find that they work on
rebuilding the temple over several years, and there are some fits and starts,
and there are people trying to thwart their efforts to rebuild Jerusalem.
Things go a bit off the tracks, and then as we learned from Pastor Kim last
week, another king, King Darius, get things back on track.
So now in this case today, we’ve gotten
to the very end of Ezra – we have chapters 9 and 10 – which deal with what I
just alluded to…intermarriage, divorce, repentance, etc….and, we have got
chapters 7 and 8 which have a bit of a different focus. So there is almost,
kind of 2 sermons here, so I am sure you will be okay if I just go for double
the time…that works right?...No, I’m just kidding, I won’t do that to you, I
think it all ties pretty nicely together and so you will get more of a two for
one.
So let’s start with chapters 7-8, as
you get reading into these chapters, you will notice there is a phrase repeated
at least 6 times…”the good hand of the Lord was upon me”
I really love that phrase, and it got
me thinking…what are those times in my life where “the good hand of the Lord
was upon me.”
And
there have really been a lot.
And…every good sermon has a good
personal story of how the subject somehow relates to speaker. Am I right?
Alright, here’s one for you:
·
I had just
finished my 1st year of college
o
I was flailing a
bit.
o
I had started out
down at Arizona State.
§ At the time, ASU was designated as the #1
party school in the county. I embraced that designation way too much
o
after 1 semester,
I had had enough of Arizona
o
came back to the
Bay Area
o
did a second
semester there at home at a community college, and I looked to decide on where
my true college home would be.
·
Parsed different options
o
I decided, I am
going to University of Oregon, and I am going to be a Duck.
o
I had a buddy
there too, and it was all set.
o
I would start in
the fall, join the ATO fraternity and as Todd Goldsmith likes to say, wham bam
and a can a spam, there you go, all set, all good.
o
I had paid the
deposit (well, my folks had paid, sorry about that mom and dad), I even had a
class schedule assigned. It was locked in.
·
MY plan was all
worked out. The (not so good) hand of Dan was upon me.
·
That summer
before starting my 2nd year of college, I went off to be a counselor at a great
Christian camp in the Santa Cruz mountains called Mount Hermon.
o
God started
working on me.
o
surrounded by
friends with incredible faith, and with hearts for God that I surely did not
find at Arizona State.
o
It was an
incredible time where I consistently saw God move in and through people and
truly impact kids lives and plant seeds of faith with them.
·
Throughout the
summer, one of the counselors I was closest with, Travis Marsh, who
consequently is now a pastor down at Canyon Creek Presbyterian Church in the
Bay Area,
o
anytime I would
mention something about being at U of O in the fall, would innocuously drop a
statement saying, “yeah, you are not going to UofO.”
o
I would kind of
laugh and say uh, yeah I am, it’s all done, that’s what I am doing. It got to
the point where it was weird that he would keep saying that and I was getting
kind of annoyed.
·
Toward the end of
the summer, I remember it being somewhere around the beginning of August, my
cabin was out on a camp out trip with another guys cabin
o
and those were
great because it always gave good chance to really get into good conversation
with another counselor that I may or may not have known too well.
o
So, me and him
are talking making dinner on the camp fire, and we get to talking about fall
plans,
§ and mind you, this guy did not have any clue
about the little side comments Travis had been dropping all summer long.
o
As he an I are
talking, he says something like, “man, are you sure about going to Eugene, I
don’t know why, but I just don’t see God calling you to that.”
o
And at that time,
it felt like God hit me with a brick and I finally saw it too. I remember
saying something like, “you are right, I don’t know what I am going to do, but
I am not going to U of O in the fall, that is not God’s plan for me.”
·
From there it was
incredible how God put everything in to place,
o
our camp
director, and who I would say is a life mentor, Bryce Lund, had gone to Seattle
Pacific and God quickly put it on my heart that was the place for me.
o
I got on the
phone (in August mind you, school starts in September) and I get an admissions
counselor on the phone and he’s like, yeah, I think we might be able to pull
this off.
o
I fax off the
application, 2 weeks later SPU formally accepts me,
o
they say housing
might be tough, but that all works out fairly quickly,
·
and 1 week after
finishing my summer at Mount Hermon, I am in my car driving 14 hours up to a
school I had never been to, a city I had been to once before for a couple of
days, and the rest is history.
·
I was
unbelievably blessed by my time at SPU. Those events of that summer truly set
the course for a blessed life.
·
The good hand of
the LORD (not of Dan) was upon me.
Do you have situations like that in
your life? Situations where when you really take a step back and look, you can
see clearly that the good hand of the Lord was upon you?
I encourage you to search your mind
for those obvious, but maybe more importantly to look for the everyday things
where you can say, “wow, the good hand of God was really upon me in that.”
If you truly want to deepen your faith
and have that anchor for when things are not going so well, and to have a
confidence that God’s good hand is upon you through the more difficult times,
find those things where his hand is upon you and praise him for that
providence.
Let’s stand to hear read about how
God’s good hand was on Ezra:
7And there went up also to Jerusalem, in the
seventh year of Artaxerxes the king, some of the people of Israel, and some of
the priests and Levites, the singers and gatekeepers, and the temple servants.
8And Ezraa came to Jerusalem in the fifth month, which was in the seventh year
of the king. 9For on the first day of the first month he began to go up from
Babylonia, and on the first day of the fifth month he came to Jerusalem, for
the good hand of his God was on him. 10For Ezra had set his heart to study the
Law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.
Ezra 7:1-10
This is the word of the Lord…Thanks be
to God
We are now in the reign of King
Artaxerxes I which means about 60 years have gone by since the first group of
exiles had returned to Jerusalem and completed the Temple, but had not ever
been able to rebuild the city.
Ezra is raised up by God to bring a
new wave of exiles back to Jerusalem to finish the task of rebuilding.
We find out that Ezra is a few things:
·
He was skilled
scribe in the Law of Moses
o
The term scribe
sounds a bit pedestrian, but for Jewish culture of that day, that would signify
he was an EXPERT in the Law of Moses. A kind of sophisticated lawyer of sorts
in the word of God
·
He is connected
to Seraiah who was the last high priest before before the captivity
·
And ultimately
connected all the way back to Aaron, the chief priest
It would seem that Ezra was probably a
pretty big deal there with the Jews in Babylon, but he was likely completely
unknown to anyone in Jerusalem.
These genealogies we find in scripture
can be tough, right? It’s like, what am I supposed to do with all these names.
Why should I care about all these names?
Well…it’s really important here.
Ezra’s genealogy is established because the fact that he is connected to
Seraiah and ultimately traceable all the way back to Aaron makes him an
instantly credible leader to the people of Israel whether in Babylon or
Jerusalem. That was a big deal.
We can also surmise from the text that
Ezra possessed a pretty bold faith in God.
Ezra gets called by God, and gets an
audience with the king.
Can
you imagine that? That’s fairly audacious. I don’t know about you, but it’s not
every day that I just show up at the White House and start asking for stuff.
So scripture says Ezra went up from
Babylonia, and the king granted him all that he asked. And we don’t have
to take the narrator’s word for it, in much of the rest of Chapter 7 we get to
see the actual letter that the king wrote which clearly gave Ezra EVERYTHING he
must have asked for, because it’s really an amazing list of stuff that the king
provides or decrees.
When you get a chance, read through
the list of what he decrees in the letter based on what Ezra asked for. It’s
fairly stunning:
Uh,
hey king, yeah, Ezra here, you probably don’t know me. Anyway, I want to take a
bunch of people out the Babylon economy, I want you fund us with lots of your
gold and silver and other goods, I want to have complete autonomy to use the
money as God would have us use it (yeah, yeah I know you don’t worship my God,
but don’t worry about it), I want you go ahead and put me in charge of Judah
and Jerusalem, oh and one last thing, we don’t want to pay any taxes.
Is
that cool?
Apparently, not only was it cool, the
king sends Ezra with a letter to ensure no one messes with him.
(by the way, I calculated what just
the silver mentioned would have been worth in today’s dollars and that was
about $2.3M of silver)
Again, this is a PAGAN KING who by my
count, he references the God of Israel, 15 times, in this letter.
Folks, it is a pretty short letter,
almost every other sentence that this pagan king wrote refers in some way to
the supremacy of the God of Israel.
I said a bit earlier, none of any of
this can be explained by anything other than, we worship the ONE TRUE GOD who
has the power to work in and through people whether they specifically believe
or don’t. Our God is in control, and our God is working all things together for
good to those that are called according to his purpose. Amen?
As we move from chapter 7 to chapter
8, Ezra assembles a group of exiles to head back to Jerusalem.
Once again, through this narrative we
get in chapter 8, we see clearly how God’s good hand was on them. The journey
from Babylon to Jerusalem would have been about 1000 miles.
Listen to these verses:
21Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river
Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe
journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods. 22For I was ashamed to
ask the king for a band of soldiers and horsemen to protect us against the
enemy on our way, since we had told the king, “The hand of our God is for good
on all who seek him, and the power of his wrath is against all who forsake
him.” 23So we fasted and implored our God for this, and he listened to our entreaty.
Ezra 8:21-22
Remember, the king gave Ezra
EVERYTHING he asked for. Why in the world would he have not asked for
protection by the king’s guards on their journey?
Because Ezra had faith and truly
believed that God’s good hand was on them.
There was also a certain level of
evangelism going on here too. It’s one thing to talk about an all-powerful God,
but it is another to show the king that they truly believed in God’s power and
that God was truly mighty to save.
And isn’t that a great example for us
as we evangelize to our friends and neighbors. Talking about our faith is one
thing, but isn’t it really the way we live out our faith and the fact that
folks can really see the evidence of God working in us the thing that makes the
biggest impact?
Okay, let’s boil down Ezra 7 and 8.
Here are three big takeaways from these chapters:
1. Be on the lookout for the “Good hand of God”
in our lives
a. Isn’t that absolutely the correct response to
all of these things going your way?
b. I don’t know about you, but I am so tempted to
give myself the credit when things are going well, do you all do that?
i.
Oh I made that
big sale because I am so skilled, and I was able to explain the value of my
product better than anyone else, and I and I and I….Do we do that? Shouldn’t my
thoughts turn to “The good hand of the Lord was upon me” more than I, I, I?
2. Act with humility
a. From what we gather about Ezra, he was clearly
an incredibly smart, capable guy. He had the pedigree with connections to the
chief priest, Aaron,
b. but we never get any hint of arrogance or
self-aggrandizement from Ezra. It seems that in every case, he completely
defers to the Lord’s divine providence.
c. I pulled out my Nave’s Topical Bible to see
how many times humility is mentioned throughout the Bible. There are 5 pages of
references to humility. I stopped counting at 100
d. Clearly there something to being humble and
Ezra gives us a great example of that
3. Praise the Lord with thanksgiving and
gratitude
a. This is exactly what Ezra does in verses 27
and 28 of chapter 7
Ezra 7:27-28
b. Ezra names exactly what God had done, and he
praises the Lord for His steadfast love. Quoting a commentary I read, “He
praises the Lord for moving the king to cooperate with his plans, and he see
this event as proof of God’s mercy or covenant love.”
c. Ezra takes no credit for what has been
accomplished, but he defers completely to God’s good hand
d. I don’t know about you, but I don’t take stock
and praise God with gratitude for the love he lavishes on me anywhere near
enough
Alright, on to chapters 9 and 10….
Oops, look at the time….
No, let’s look at these chapters just
a bit.
Just to summarize chapters 9 and 10
·
Ezra and the
group with him have arrived in Jerusalem after a 5-month journey
·
Fairly quickly,
it is brought to Ezra’s attention that the people of Israel, and moreover
priests and Levites had been marrying peoples of the lands.
·
Ezra then tears
his clothes, pulls out his hair, and makes a very public show about his disgust
and despair about what has taken place by the returned exiles in just the 60 or
so years they had been back in Israel
·
Ultimately, the
people saw their error and went about to correct that by divorcing any foreign
wives they had and even send away their children they had with those wives
·
There was a
month’s long tribunal process of sorting through who had foreign wives and what
should be done
Okay, whoa, pretty harsh
Now let’s get some context:
o
In chapter 9, we
see a list of nations listed which at first glance you might just read right
over
6“For you are a people holy to the LORD your
God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured
possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.
Deuteronomy 7:1-6
o
The time between
Ezra and Moses was about 800 years – these nations mentioned by Ezra are not
even in existence anymore
So why is that important?
It’s
not the mixing with those particular people groups, it a broader point…
They
were supposed to be a holy people, set apart by God, and by mixing with these
other peoples in the land who did not recognize the one true God, and
worshipped all kinds of other gods, God’s chosen people would eventually fall
to the wayside
What is the greatest commandment?
14You shall not go after other gods, the gods
of the peoples who are around you— 15for the LORD your God in your midst is a
jealous God—lest the anger of the LORD your God be kindled against you, and he
destroy you from off the face of the earth. – Deuteronomy 6:14-15
Are you starting to understand why Ezra was so
apoplectic? Ezra is appalled because since Moses, there had been time and time
again that Israel made the exact same mistake. Here we were in the very near
aftermath of being completely exiled to Babylon for 70 years due to not
adhering to God’s command and they are right back doing the same thing again.
My friends I think that is what they say is the definition of insanity.
There is a
great verse in Proverbs that goes like this: As a dog returns to its vomit, so
fools repeat their folly.
It’s so clear, right? But I get it wrong time
and time again.
I know what God desires for me…I know he
desires that for my own benefit and to be in right relationship with him…and
yet so often I am that dog who bangs his head against the wall over and over
again.
So when the people see the sin that Ezra
publicly points out to them, they take extreme measures to correct the sin.
I have to point out some important caveats:
1. You will notice from the scripture that this
process to identify those who had taken foreign wives was many months long.
a. If Ezra and the others adjudicating these
issues were simply identifying those who had taken foreign wives in a black and
white fashion, that could have been accomplished pretty efficiently
b. No, the time taken indicates that there was
more of a determination of whether the foreign wives had converted and were now
adhering to the worship of the one true God of Israel.
c. These divorces were seemingly really about
ridding Israel of foreign wives who had no interest in turning from their
polytheistic worship and those wives indoctrinating the future generations into
a lack of recognition of God
10 To the married I give this
charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should
remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should
not divorce his wife.
12 To the rest I say (I, not the
Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to
live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 If any woman has a husband who
is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.
14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the
unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children
would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if the unbelieving partner
separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved.
God has called you to peace. 16 For how do you know, wife, whether you will save
your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?
1 Corinthians 7:10-16
Alright, to close this all out, I want
to give you 3 important takeaways I get from chapters 9 and 10:
1. Step 1 is admitting you have a problem…
a. Ezra points out the sin the people have
committed
b. He humbly falls down before the Lord and takes
responsibility for the sin
c. The people respond by acknowledging and owning
the sin they have committed against God
d. I recently listened to a sermon by Tim Keller
and I loved what he said about this:
“You heal of guilt to the degree of how much you
grasp the magnitude of your sin.”
That is the opposite of what society tells us
isn’t it?
Society tells us just blow off and minimize your
sin, you stop thinking about your sin. You decide you are not a sinner, you are
not so bad.
But look what scripture says in Romans 5:8:
“but
God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for
us.”
Do you see that? It’s when we see we are
sinners, God’s love is truly evident and real to us
The greater you see the nature of your sin,
the more transformed we are when we get a hold of what Jesus did for us on the
cross
2. Engaging in true confession and repentance for
the sin is key - The people of Israel take pains to engage in true confession
and repentance for their sin
a. Thinking about what I just said a second
ago…this is more about a desire of our heart in response to how we are
transformed by the cross
b. The Hebrew word used here in Ezra is Tow-dah
and it really speaks to this notion
i.
Simple
translation is “thanksgiving”, but here it is used in it’s more complex meaning
of: give praise to, in both of praise rendered by acknowledging and abandoning
sin
ii.
Another
translation is that of a thank-offering
c. True confession and repentance of our sin is
not a passive…”oops I messed up, forgive me for that”
i.
True repentance
involves action and turning from that sin…because we are so thankful for the
gift of the cross
3. Recognize God’s grace despite our sin
Ezra and the
people rightly recognize God’s grace despite their sin and it is transformative
a. Now think about this, Ezra and people of Israel
had the law of Moses, that’s it. Living under the law was their only way to be
redeemed with God.
i.
And given the
fact that we are totally depraved since Adam, and they could not and did not
meet the standards of “The Law”, they were constantly needing to do burnt
offerings, and sin offerings, and guilt offerings in order to get reprieve
b. They rightly recognized, “Oh shoot, we have
completely failed in following the law, it’s amazing God hasn’t destroyed us
yet.”
c. But we don’t have to do that! Do you get that?
Just like the returned exiles, our sin deserves far more punishment, but we
have Jesus, the lamb of God, who became the sin offering for us at the cross. –
this amazing grace should penetrate our souls
d. Are you truly moved and transformed by the
grace God has bestowed upon us?
Romans 5:18-21
Let me read part of that one more
time:
Now the law came in to increase the
trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more
Let that penetrate…WITH JESUS…YOU
CAN’T OUT-SIN GOD’S GRACE!
AMAZING GRACE. HOW SWEET THE SOUND.
WHO SAVED A WRETCH LIKE ME
Let’s pray….
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