Bible Survey - Ezra
Randy Peterman · Apr 27, 2014
Bible Survey, No. 17
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926425357393

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Alright, does everybody have a handout that wants one? So the book of Ezra is one of those books that, as we have kind of alluded to in the past with some of the other books, it was actually a mixture of Ezra and Nehemiah that were a book, or on one scroll, back so many years ago, a couple thousand years ago, but over time they got split up.

There are two different accounts and there are different things there. The interesting thing is that Ezra has two parts and the first part is actually Zerubbabel leading an exodus Oh, sorry, I saw my mom. She's counting heads. I thought she was trying to gesture at me. I was like, I don't know what that means. She was miming two syllables.

Sorry, apologies, rabbit trail, and that's going to be on the internet. So Zerubbabel led an initial exodus from the Persian countries and then Ezra followed up some years later and Then Nehemiah follows even after that so that's why there were three rounds of exodus from the from the or back to Jerusalem because they'd been taken captive, right and So we get the idea that Ezra is the one that compiled the book. There's various elements in the writing style that indicate that it is Ezra. So it is not too remarkable to believe that it's Ezra.

The skeptics, what do the skeptics do when we deal with books? The skeptic never believes that the author that's attributed to the book is actually the author attributed to the book, right? That's the first rule of skepticism, is that you never take anything at face value, regardless of what evidence may be there.

We're going to get into what Al is alluding to in a little bit here. I believe that this is written by Ezra. It's carried on by Jewish tradition as well, but the book fits his authorship in the context that's there. It was written somewhere between 457 BC and 444 BC, and 440 BC, as I've got in the brackets there, it was when Nehemiah shows up on the scene, approximately there.

And then the major theme is the restoration of the temple. and also obviously the exodus from the Persian Empire. So let's take a look at the outline. We'll kind of hit some high points of that. Cyrus is the king of Persia and he makes a proclamation that they should rebuild the temple. I'm going to read Ezra 1, starting in verse 1. We're not going to read all of Ezra out loud, just don't panic.

Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he sent a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and also put in writing, saying, Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, as far as he knew.

And he has appointed me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever there is among you of all his people, may his God be with him. Let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel. He is the God who is in Jerusalem. Every survivor, at whatever place he may live, let the men of that place support him with silver and gold, with goods and cattle, together with a freewill offering for the house of God, which is in Jerusalem."

And these first four verses actually set up the purpose of the rest of the book. So that's why I just read the first four there. So a decree from a Gentile king is put forth and he says, build this temple. Does he just say, go build the temple because I wanna? Obviously he wouldn't use American English slang, but why does he say that he's going to build the temple? Is it because He wants to look really cool in front of the Jews? No. He says there in verse two, He has appointed me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. So this Gentile king says, I have been appointed by God to build this house. That's really cool to think that God had done this thing. Now, why did Cyrus think he was appointed to build this house. Any guesses? Well Isaiah actually, as far as the text that we have, Isaiah 44, Isaiah prophesied 70 years earlier, plus or minus, that that the Persian king Cyrus would be building this. So Isaiah 44, verse 28. Well, that was definitely brought to his attention. And they did it right away. It was the first year of his reign. He's like, hey, you might want to check this out. It's kind of cool. So I'm going to read this, and then you can follow along.

Isaiah 44, 28 through 45. It is I who says of Cyrus, he is my shepherd, and he will perform all my desire. And he declares of Jerusalem, she will be built, and of the temple your foundation will be laid. Thus says the Lord to Cyrus his anointed, whom I have taken by the right hand, to subdue nations before him, and to loose the loins of kings, to open the doors before him, so that gates will not be shut.

I will go before you and make the rough places smooth. I will shatter the doors of bronze and cut through their iron bars. I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden wealth of secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who calls you by your name. For the sake of Jacob, My servant, and Israel, My chosen one, I have also called you by your name.

I have given you a title of honor, though you have not known Me. That would get your attention. I had two hands, so... What was that pathogen? That is Isaiah 44, 28 through 45, 4. And that's actually in the handout on page 2, but you're welcome to make note of that, obviously. Stan? So, was...

Ezra wasn't necessarily then... because he was using what Isaiah wrote. So what exactly is the position of Ezra and Nehemiah? Are they priests or prophets? Yeah, they are priests. They're priests, but not necessarily prophets, right? No. Ezra behaves more as a historian. He seems to have compiled things and put things together in a historical record to kind of just maintain a history of the Jewish nation, especially having been drawn out of Israel and brought as slaves. He was sent out, right, to build his temple, so he was kind of a leader, manager, worker being, so to speak.

Well, the first group that goes, as we're going to see in a second, is actually Zerubbabel. Zerubbabel? I can never pronounce. I always feel unconfident pronouncing these names because they're not like Matthew and Mike. I have a friend who's taught Bible at Denver Christian, and he always pronounced it Zerubbabel. He said Zerubbabel led Israel out of the rubble.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. So... Yeah. So Ezra is documenting this, but when we take a look and continue to follow through the text here, the people of Israel respond in verse 5 of chapter 1, Then the heads of the fathers' households of Judah and Benjamin and the priests and the Levites arose, even everyone whose spirit God had stirred to go up and rebuild the house of the Lord which was in Jerusalem. All those about them encouraged them with articles of silver, with gold, with goods, with cattle, and with valuables, aside from all that was given as a free will offering. So they're taken off, and the Jewish people, all the Israelites, gave their goods to their friends and said, I hope your journey goes well, and a bunch of them stayed behind, which I think is kind of funny. They had the order of the king, Cyrus, saying, go. But what is typically the case of life for most human beings?

Once you get comfortable uprooting your family and going, especially on this, this isn't a short journey. I don't know, I guess the best closest distance example would be like, hey guys, we're going to go to Carson City, Nevada, or Reno, Nevada, they're pretty close, by foot, from Denver. That's approximately the distance they had to go, plus it was like having to walk through Utah and Nevada, which you couldn't pay me to do. It's dry, it's not awesome terrain, and you're going to go for four months by foot with your family and any possessions you can haul with you and go to Reno. So we could say that is approximately the distance.

And based on what Ezra says for the starting and end times, it took him about four months. So we can assume probably the same amount of time for the people when it was rubbable. The other thing is that they did gather items that came from the king's storehouse when they had plundered the old temple. The king took all the valuables, the gold and silver and the various utensils and implements from the temple and stored them away. And those things were brought back out and sent back to be used. So chapter one closes with the exiles' possessions that were sent with them, and chapter two kicks in with genealogy.

And we're not going to really spend a lot of energy on the names of the people that were there and go over the headcount, but you can see there's groups of people from the different families that were there. and a group of priests and their families, and they all got counted. Got a little census there. So that actually makes it really easy to wrap up chapter two with a big hand wavy, and there's names of people. And so we saved a bunch of time just by not reading those names, right?

You were really worried. But chapter three, They make it there, and in chapter 3 it says they came together and gathered together as one man to Jerusalem. So the people came together, and in verse 3 they actually set up the altar, and they were terrified because of the people and the land.

Now, let's put ourselves in their shoes for a second. How would you deal with it if you had been traveling a thousand miles by foot for four months, you get there, and you arrive in the city. You've got the commission of the king, so thumbs up for that. But nobody around you likes you.

So the first thing they do is they go before the Lord, and they set up the altar, and they sought the Lord. Verse 4, they celebrated the Feast of Booze, as is written, and they put their offerings forth to the Lord. Verse 5, they did continual burnt offerings for the various festivals and new moons. But in verse 6, the foundation had not been laid.

So why does it matter that the foundation is laid? Based on what we read in Isaiah. We'll give it that context. Not just because, hey, without the foundation, you can't build the rest of it. What did we read in Isaiah about the foundation? Does anybody remember? God had commissioned and decreed that Cyrus would be the one that would get that foundation laid.

So they need to do it. It's part of what was going on. In verse 7, they gave money to the masons and carpenters and food, this is in chapter 3-7, and food, drink, and oil to the Sidonians and the Tyrians to bring cedar wood from Lebanon to the sea at Joppa, according to the permission they had from Cyrus, king of Persia. So they, financially, they start getting things going. They're going to do trading in cedar.

I got, all right, I got a husband and wife. You guys, rock, paper, scissors, who gets to ask first? Oh, ladies first, awesome. You said that, who were the main people that were living there? Let's see here, it tells us... You know it doesn't say, let me see here, I'm not reading This gives us names of specific people. You can come back to that later. Yeah, I'm not, yeah, I can't think of, in my studies, the names. So if you have inside data or anyone else has knowledge.

There are various Gentile groups that moved in. Yeah. You know, the Babylonians. their approach is just to strip people out. So whoever got stripped out, other people would just move in. They've got houses and everything. They just sit there ready to occupy. That's a pretty common practice even here in the United States. We have various patterns where that's happened. Yes, Stan?

Well, from what Ernst had under that cultural study that we had, obviously when Babylonians took certain nations and they would take some of those people and relocate them. I would assume that that would be true, that some of these people that were relocated were probably relocated. The Assyrians were, they're the ones who scrambled populations. The Babylonians took everyone and put them in Babylon.

Oh, okay. So that would have evacuated people in the area and moved in. The question I have, this money, I assume this is probably coming from Cyrus. It came from Cyrus and it came from all of their friends and family that sent them off. The king said you can either go with them or you need to help fund their expedition. Yes. In this place, I don't see it.

However, later on, when we see Ezra's group, they actually do have a patrol, and there's even more things that are taken from the storehouse. And everybody has counted out a stewardship that are the priests to take the things, and a patrol is actually sent with them, because they're worried about enemies. Yeah, I would certainly be concerned for the same reasons. I will say this, the excitement that the Jews would have over Jerusalem would be much more significant than most of our excitement about going to Carson City, Nevada.

I have family there, so for me that's exciting, but as far as the rest of the people in the room, besides my dad, I don't think anybody else has relatives in Carson City, so it's not much of a destination, comparative to Jerusalem. It's not a really hefty tourist population there or attraction. So, getting back to the text here. Sorry, I rabbit-trailed on that.

They set up some trade negotiations to get the cedar and to get things started. And in verse 8, 3-8, Now in the second year of their coming to the house of God at Jerusalem, in the second month, Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, He starts everybody to begin the work and appoint the Levites from 20 years and older to oversee the work of the house of the Lord. So the temple gets started and in verse 10, now the builders had laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord.

These last four verses are really significant. So listen to this and kind of put yourself in their shoes. The priests stood in their apparel with trumpets, and the Levites, the son of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord according to the directions of King David of Israel. They sang, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, saying, For he is good, for his lovingkindness is upon Israel forever. And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid.

And then in verse 12, this just resonates with me. Yet many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers' households, the old men who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, while many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the shout of joy from the sound of the weeping of the people. For the people shouted with a loud shout, and the sound was heard far away.

But if you had seen the previous temple, this was pretty inferior. This didn't strike. It was like, oh, that's the same. So that's pretty significant that the sound mixed together. It was pretty emotionally intense. If you're part of the new generation, you're like, yeah, we actually succeeded at this. And if you're part of the older generation, you're like, you have no idea that your success is not that awesome. But it was obviously an intense time.

And there was a point of completion there. Chapter four, we continue on and we see that the enemies were not cool with this. For some reason, the people that had taken over the place after the Jews were not happy about them building a temple and fortifying their city again. I wonder why.

But the verse Then the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah and frightened them from building, and hired counselors against them to frustrate their counsel all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia. And now in the reign of Asauerus, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem. And in the days of Artaxerxes, Bishlam, Midratheth, Tabil, and the rest of his colleagues wrote to Artaxerxes, king of Persia, and the text of the letter was written in Aramaic and translated from Aramaic. And I'm not going to read you all of the letter to Artaxerxes, but they say, hey, these people are devious. They don't respect foreign kings, and they're getting pretty strong here.

You probably want to shut this down. And Arta Xerxes says, hey, that's a really good idea. How about they not rebel? So the people have walked four months, 1,000 miles. They've lived there for a couple of years. They've been finally making progress on this foundation. They've obviously done trade negotiations and deals to get supplies. And Arta Xerxes says, shut it down.

That would be a little discouraging. So first of all, the foreigners are trying to disrupt you, and they're discouraging you, and then you get the cease and desist letter. Now just to kind of, again, keep this in context, it took four months for the letter to get there. Who knows how long it took for it to get in front of Artaxerxes and his counselors, but they figure out, yeah, we really don't want them to rebel, and then it takes another four months to get back. You've got eight months where It's a big question mark. I guess maybe you keep working, but you know that there's this impending judgment that's coming. And then they wait. They have to wait. They're put on hold. So Artaxerxes definitely says stop in 417. And of course, the leadership that Artaxerxes has there in Jerusalem is only super glad to comply, the folks that are not from Israel.

And then in chapter 5 we see when the prophets Haggai, the prophet, and Zechariah, the son of Edo, prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel who was over them. Then Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua, the son of Jozedach, arose and began to rebuild the house of God which is in Jerusalem. And the prophets of God were with them, supporting them. So Haggai and Zechariah are the prophets that we have in the Minor Prophets. We can read Parallel, which we won't this morning, but you can actually read some of their prophecies and the things that God inspired them to write at this time in parallel with the text that's there.

And so the leader at the time, Tatanai, the governor of the province, gets all hot and bothered and sends another letter because, you know, whoa, whoa, whoa, this isn't cool. But There's a new king in town, so to speak, back home, for Persia, and it's Darius. It's not Artaxerxes anymore. So Darius actually looks in the archives of the previous kings and sees that Cyrus has said, build the temple. And so Darius sends a letter back and says, absolutely, and I'm in chapter 6 with Darius finding the letter or the decree, and Darius sends a letter back and says, you will let them build and you will help provide for their needs so that they can build. So we have two kings who are pro-Jewish temple and one king in the middle who is anti.

God takes him out. Is he a son of Cyrus? No, I don't actually know the answer to that. I would guess that he is, but I don't know that. It says in Isaiah that he would be king while that foundation was laid. And the foundation is laid, and then Artaxerxes seems to step in and stop it, which fulfills at least part of that prophecy. from the Book of Esther? I believe so, yes.

So that fits in while all this is going on? Yeah, the chronology. There's a lot of overlap. In fact, the minor prophets and even the major prophets, some of those things are all clustered in this time frame within several hundred years where this is taking place. So the king decrees, you will fund this, you will move this forward and get this going.

So that concludes the first half with Zerubbabel as the representative leading the nation back to Jerusalem. The second half of the book, or actually it's less than half, but eight through ten, is Ezra and what Ezra is doing. So chapter 8, the first 14 verses, we see that there is some genealogy. And then 15 through 20, we get the genealogy of the Levites. And then in 21, moving forward, we see the preparation that goes into the journey.

And this is where there's an assignment of the wealth and the temple items. And they're actually specifically handed and given to certain Levites. So in verse 830, so the priests and the Levites accepted the weighed out silver and gold and utensils to bring them to Jerusalem to the house of God. Okay, so we have a responsibility and a stewardship that's given there.

And then they start their journey and they journeyed from the river and Then in verse 32, thus they came to Jerusalem and remained there three days. Now that doesn't mean they remained there three days and then they went home. It is like, okay, they've rested for three days.

Because in 33, on the fourth day, the silver and the gold and the utensils were weighed out in the house of our God into the hand of Merimoth, the son of Uriah the priest. And with him was Eleazar, the son of Phinehas. And with them were the Levites. And so they weighed everything out and they in verse 36, they delivered the king's edict to the king's satraps and the governors in the provinces.

So the king said, hey, we're going to really support this thing, and Ezra carried that letter and set things in motion. Now, 9 and 10 totally change direction from our first eight chapters of this book. 9 and 10 cover the purity of Israel as a nation. and restoration of relationship with God. It's Ezra, okay?

So he approached me saying, the people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands. According to their abominations, those of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites.

So we have an answer to your question. They've taken some of their daughters as wives, and they've intermingled. The holy race has intermingled with the peoples of the lands. Indeed, the hands of the princes and the rulers have been foremost in this unfaithfulness."

So Ezra says, hey, what are you going to do, right? No, what he actually does is he openly weeps and he tears his clothes. In verse 3, I tore my garments and my robe and pulled some of the hair from my head and my beard and sat down appalled. I'm glad that's not culturally normative anymore because the hair that I do have is thinning but I don't need to rip it out.

Then everyone who trembled at the words of the God of Israel on account of the unfaithfulness of the exiles gathered to me, and I sat appalled until the evening offering. Ezra stands and he goes before the Lord and in verse 6 he says, Oh my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen above our heads and our guilt has grown even to the heavens. Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been in great guilt, and on account of our iniquities we, our kings and our priests, have been given into the hand. of the kings of the lands, to the sword of captivity, and to plunder, and to open shame, as it is this day. But now, for a brief moment, grace has been shown from the Lord our God to leave us an escaped remnant, and to give us a peg in his holy place, that our God may enlighten our eyes and grant us a little reviving in our bondage. for we are slaves, yet in our bondage. Our God has not forsaken us, but has extended loving kindness to us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us reviving, to raise up the house of our God, to restore its ruins, and to give us a wall in Judah and Jerusalem."

How should we respond to this is the next question he asks Israel. And so, based on what we know about God's graciousness, as he so clearly identifies, how do you respond to that? You're the nation of Israel. Well, a remnant of the nation of Israel. How do you respond to that in this case? You've been sent to restore the temple.

And so the people actually are weeded through family by family, they go through the process of finding out who is intermarried, and then if they've intermarried, they're sent away. The wives are. And the priests are actually cut off from service as well. So there's a very serious consequence here. through the rest of the chapter is a list of those who, in leadership, offended the law and married outside of Israel. Now, let's ask an important question. Does the law account for someone to join Israel, who is a Gentile, and to become part of the worshipers of God, as outlined?

Yes. Do you remember the requirements? I mean, I knew the answer to that, but I was hoping that... You had to eschew... If you were male, you needed to be circumcised. And you had to eschew all of your pagan... You participated fully in their worship, but there was provision made for the strangers in your midst.

So the significance of this situation is not that there was just inter-marriage. It was inter-marriage and then inter-religion concepts, where it's like, well, you know, your mom's Catholic and I'm Jewish, so... I've heard so many stories about people from the East Coast in particular, where it's like, well, this person was in a Jewish borough and this person was Irish, and they were Catholic, and they got married, and they just decided that they'd do the Sabbath on Friday to Saturday, and then they'd go to Mass, and the kids grew up just confused. So you have the same result in this case, where you're just going to blend religion, and they don't know what's true, and they hope that at least one of them is right.

Maybe they'll make one of the gods happy. You do your best. Stan? Isn't that all part of losing the focus? I mean they were sent back to build the temple, that's what God wanted them to do, build the temple. They got back there and the task was overwhelming, which is what happens to a lot of us in life. So they kind of backed away from doing what God wanted them to do, so they were back building their own homes. and living in their own homes and doing their own life and all this other sort of thing which would go with the intermarriage because people were already there. So it seems like a natural recourse that they start assimilating back into society and not doing God's work.

That was the big problem, right? Yeah. They had ignored the things that were Outlined by God in the law and they'd even slowed down in their pace and dealing with the things that they were commanded to By the king it appears Yeah, there's a break here where they get distracted and and you know partial partially you see the prophets come in and they're Chastising the nation because they're distracted so that that is a fast race through the book of Ezra Obviously not verse by verse but but hitting some of the key key elements there. So I've got some items of interest in here, and most of those we've covered, but I just want to draw your attention to them. There's the cross-reference to Isaiah with the mention of the Persian king Cyrus.

There's the weeping for those who'd seen the previous temple. This would have been quite a sight, and I couldn't figure out which sight to use there. It was simultaneously the temple, so it was quite a sight. And it was also watching the people weep. It could be a malapropism or not, depends on how you look at it. But it would have been quite a sight, and it would have been quite a sight.

Then the other item I've got here is, imagine traveling all the way to Jerusalem, a thousand miles in a third of a year, and then being told by the king to stop. I think that to me, as I was reading through this, I just kept thinking, man, what a heartbreak. Because when you have separated from your family, you've got to know that some of those families were separated and they left their family back in Persia. And you go back and then you're told to wait.

That's going to be a significant thing to deal with. God has done that many times and even to this day in our individual lives. Our faith gets tested by the bumps in the road, whatever form they take. Whether money, whether health, whether opposition, God wants to show you whether our faith is really in Him or whether it's faith in the promise promises of a good life and a good future, and we emphasize the blessings or the security, you might say, of, oh, the Lord is my shepherd, and you're not really one of his sheep. You're just like the idea, the Lord is my shepherd, but I can handle it on my own.

It's just easy to get side-tracked like Stan does. Another parallel here could be Abraham. I mean, God called on Abraham, sending him away from his family, like Bernard's been talking about, sending him out to this land that was full of all these other people, and, you know, but the point with Abraham was the fact that he was constantly faithful. He was always faithful, always listening, always doing, almost always doing what Well, that was one of the major problems of being pulled by the secular nations around them was that they just constantly Over here, I always think of the fish hook, the shiny thing that comes passing by, and they're like, what? And so they get pulled into that. The second to last thing I've got on this list here is, Ezra recognizes the relationship that Israel has with God, and it strikes him deeply that the people have married outside of the nation of Israel.

The law was not just about compliance and righteousness, it was about separation unto God. When people get confused about the law, there's a lot of folks who'll say things like, well, the law was somehow tied to salvation. Was the law tied to salvation for Israel in any way? It wasn't tied to salvation, but it was tied to the idea of being separated from the Gentile nations in what is alluded to as a marriage to God, an intimacy with God. And that was a key thing. Al?

It reminds me of the parable that Jesus gave of the man with the unclean spirit, who the man threw out, as it were, and the end state of that man was worse than his start, because he separated himself, as it were, from the evil, but he didn't separate himself unto God, sanctification is supposed to be not just getting away from... I'm not supposed to go around saying I don't drink and I don't chew and I don't go with girls that do. It's not about what I don't do. It's about the new life in Christ that puts a new motivation in there to do the things which God would have me to do, that lead to holiness and righteousness and the rest.

So when you just consciously separate yourself from the things, all you end up with is a judgmental attitude toward people who do those things. And for many years, I occupied my high position and looked down on the rest of humanity as, well you, ignorant. Those weren't the words I was using, but that pride of the spiritual position is easy to sneak in when you're saying, I don't do this and I don't do that, just like the Pharisees. Jesus said, okay, you've got one part of it right, but your attitude toward widows and orphans stinks. enjoying the benefits that come along with worshipping God and being in the blessings of God. But then when the responsibility comes back to you, that you have to actually do something, that you actually have to step out, that you have to be accountable, that you have to actually, you know... Obedience. Obedience, yeah.

That falls short, but just like Judas when he was with Christ, he really enjoyed the time that he was a disciple and that he was enjoying the benefits with the rest of the disciples. And his ending wasn't too good. Obviously that was God's plan, but we could also say that he was not very accountable in the end. There's obviously a pretty strong conclusion in the case of Judas.

I've got Christ and Ezra in two different ways here. The interesting thing is, as we go through the Old Testament, there's all kinds of nuances that you can draw attention to, but I chose two here. The first one is that Christ is our encourager. In chapter 5, we saw that the prophets Haggai and Zechariah were encouragers.

The attention and the efforts of the nation passed the law. They've been given a law or a ruling or a decree, don't build the temple. And they said, this is what God's called us to. We've got to do it. This is the right thing. The world may surround us all the time and tell us, hey, you're one of those crazy religious people. Oh, you don't believe in evolution? You believe in a religious idea, the myths, and they say all kinds of things to discourage us, constantly trying to frustrate the efforts that the Lord has put in our lives. And so Christ is the encourager.

Christ sustains the universe, but when Paul ends his letter to the Thessalonians, what does 1 Thessalonians 4.18 tell us to do? It's the last verse in that book. Does anybody remember? My dad smiled. What does it say? Encourage or comfort one another with these things. To look forward to the coming of Christ. But Christ is our encourager. He's our life. He's our hope. And the next one I've got in here is Christ is our purity, our holiness, and our righteousness. Ezra just openly wept and openly tore his clothes and ripped out his hair. Because the holiness, the purity of the righteousness of Israel had been abandoned for all intents and purposes. For convenience, for lustful attraction, for political... It is politically convenient if you can marry into the other country or civilizations around you because now you're family.

You don't tend to attack family. Some had done that. It was astute for, in the worldly eyes, to enter Mary like that. But, as believers, we don't have to deal with those issues. We know that Christ has separated us from the world through identification in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seeding. Colossians 2, 13, and 14. I'm going to read that and we should, unless there's questions, we should close.

Colossians 2.13-14 When you were dead in your transgressions in the uncircumcision of the flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us which was hostile to us, and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. All of the things that made us unrighteous and unpure and unholy are gone. And that's obviously because of the work of Christ. Any other thoughts or questions? Things you wish I hadn't said, hadn't said? There is, and I'm totally drawing a blank. Dad, do you remember or someone else remember where it says that. It's the Maranatha. Yeah, the Maranatha is one of those extensions of the Aramaic for the Lord's coming.

I think the key, and also we have our kind of list of crowns and rewards, and one of those is looking for his coming. There's actually an eternal reward We're looking for him to come. This is a book of revelation in a sense, where John says even so, the Lord is going to come. It's a constant anticipation. It's one of the things like when I taught a couple of weeks ago, taking the Lord's table is until when? Until He comes. So even taking the Lord's table is remembering, but it's also anticipation. So it's constantly anticipating His coming, looking for His coming.

Paul, when he writes, I'm torn between My ministry here on earth and my desire are at home. That's not as much the Lord's return, though. It's more the idea that... He's looking for the fullness of God's revelation. He's anticipating. to live in the world, but continue to focus on their mission and their reason that they're there, and not to take them out of the world.

While we're here on the earth, as Paul writes in Colossians 3 and in 2 Corinthians 3.18, that we're to be beholding the Lord or to have our minds set on things above while we're on the earth, understanding things in a heavenly context. He's using the earthly condition that we're in to teach us things, to grow us. It's a mindset that is similar to the Israelites who had abandoned pursuing God's relationship. If we just focus on earthly things instead of having our mind on heavenly things and waiting with anticipation for our Lord, we're really not focused on the relationship.

This is an odd confession, but one that I think makes the point. When I was in high school, I really, really wanted the Lord to come After I got married. I thought that would be a really important life goal to have achieved and then he could come And and then I got married and was like, okay, yeah now the Lord can come that's good I really wanted this marriage thing. I wanted to have to tick that off for whatever reason off my list, but It was not focused on a relationship with the Lord.

My dad's smiling. He's probably thinking what did I do? so Anyways, let's close in prayer. The second bell is rung. Heavenly Father, thank you for the truth of your word. Thank you that Ezra was a faithful man and that he compiled the contents of this book for us to study and learn about who you are and what happened to your people in that time. We thank you and praise you for your son and who we are in him. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.