Ezra 5
Ezra chapter five, beginning
at verse one, we’ll read all the way through 17, the whole,
the whole chapter. Remember, Israel is back rebuilding
and they’ve got all these enemies that are trying to stop the rebuilding
of the temple. And this goes on for about a
hundred years and we’re about 20 years in this antagonistic
rebuilding of the, not just the altar or the temple or the walls,
but the city and the houses and everything. And it says, now
the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the son of Iddo, 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 Shaltiel,
and Jeshua, the son of Jehozadak, arose and began to rebuild the
house of God that is in Jerusalem. And the prophets of God were
with them, supporting them. At the same time, Tatanai, the
governor, of the province beyond the river, and Shethar Bozenai
and their associates came to them and spoke to them thus,
who gave you a decree to build this house and to finish this
structure? They also asked them this, what
are the names of the men who are building this building? But
the eye of their God was on the elders of the Jews, and they
did not stop them until the report should reach Darius, and then
an answer be returned by letter concerning it.” This is a copy
of the letter that Tatanai, the governor of the province, beyond
the river, and Shethar Bosnai and his associates, the governors,
who were in the province beyond the river, sent to Darius the
king. They sent him a report in which was written as follows.
To Darius the king, all peace. Be it known to the king that
we went to the province of Judah, to the house of the great God.
It is being built with huge stones and timber is laid in the walls.
This work goes on diligently and it prospers in their hands.
Then we asked those elders and spoke to them thus, who gave
you a decree to build? this house and to finish this
structure. We also asked them their names for your information
that we might write down the names of their leaders. And this
was their reply to us. We are the servants of the God
of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding the house that was
built many years ago, which a great king of Israel built and finished.
But because our fathers had angered the God of heaven, he gave them
into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, the Chaldean,
who destroyed this house and carried away the people to Babylonia. However, in the first year of
Cyrus, king of Babylon, Cyrus the king made a decree that this
house of God should be rebuilt. And the gold and silver vessels
of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of this temple
that was in Jerusalem and brought into the temple of Babylon, these
Cyrus the king took out of the temple of Babylon and they were
delivered to one whose name was Shesh-Bazar, whom he had made
governor. And he said to him, take these
vessels and go and put them in the temple that is in Jerusalem
and let the house of God be rebuilt on its site. Then the Shesh Bazar
came and laid the foundations of the house of God that is in
Jerusalem. And from that time until now, it has been in building
and it is not yet finished. Therefore, If it seems good to
the king, let search be made in the royal archives there in
Babylon to see whether a decree was issued by Cyrus the king
for the rebuilding of this house, this house of God in Jerusalem
and let the king send us his pleasure in the matter. Amen. This is God’s word. This
week I read an interesting article and as I usually do, I get pretty
excited and think I’m going to send this to a few people. This
is worth reading. And as I read on through it,
I thought I probably ought not to send it. But this was the
gist of the article. The premise was something like
this. America and other places, I think this was written by an
Australian. America, for example, is about to go through some pretty
difficult times. We’re in the thick of it, I think.
And so how will the church not only survive, but thrive. And
I think our study of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Haggai help us think through
this a bit. But how will the church survive
and thrive in hard times? Well, this man’s premise was,
okay, hard times are coming. Okay, what should we do? And
Okay. He’s from Australia, different
situation. Maybe there’s no government benefit
to the church. Like we don’t pay property taxes. We don’t pay income taxes on
the tithes and offerings. And there’s some other blessings.
I think the American government still thinks the church is beneficial.
We live in a world where nonprofits are abounding. And so it’s hard
to touch us because there’s such a big benefit from other areas,
maybe in the same line of work, so to speak. But anyway, his
assessment, because he’s Australian, was this. Churches ought to be
light and lean. Well, I agree with that. You
drive down the main street of most American towns and cities
and you have this these monstrous church buildings that were built
in the 50s, you know, these three and four stories of education
buildings. And the only way they’re possibly
used today is if the church is running a daycare center. Um,
you know, we, we need to be light and lean, smaller buildings,
just a house of worship and maybe a place for, for fellowship and
instruction, but, but we don’t need these 50 acre campuses and
mortgages and debts and all that. And the reason he says that is
we’re going to come into a time where Christians are going to
be a huge. minority, I guess that’s a wrong
way of putting that, huge and minority are opposites, right?
But Christians are more and more gonna become the minority. And
he says we should sell all our church buildings, we should dump,
or his phrase was sack, I guess he’s got a little Aussie or British
in him, something like that, but we should sack our staffs,
we should really just have a pastor, and maybe a little administrative
help, and we should just dig in and preach and teach, and
disciple the church. And he says, then what, what
do you do with the, the money that the giving is still coming
in? And what do you do with the sale of all this property and
not paying all these salaries? And he says something like this,
you should have, um, a fund, a fund set up for Christian schools,
a fund set up for Christian startup businesses. And this is where
I got a little, and I don’t know about that, I don’t think the
church should be in the business of venture capital, and I don’t
think the church should really be in the business generally
of starting Christian schools. That can be a cumbersome sort
of thing. But you got to see where he was going. We’re living
in a rotten society. We’re living increasingly in
a society where the church ought to be the chief influence. We’re gonna be small, but we
ought to whatever way we can be a bright light in the community
where we live and where we serve and offer bits of hope where
we can. I think the days of church being
Main Street, I think the days of the Judeo Christian values
being mainstream in America are definitely gone and are increasingly
gonna be stamped out. I don’t know that we need to
really do anything radical. I think we just keep following
the Great Commission. And if we can do it in the building
where we are and with the people we have, great. If not, you make
adaptations. But I like his spirit. I like
his thinking. We should be thoughtful and creative of how to survive
as Christians in the world. Increasingly, you can’t work
for corporations. You can’t tow the woke line and
those sorts of things. Well, I think what this guy’s
pointing out is we’re living towards an increasingly socialistic
sort of world. And you think of where we were,
say, 15 years ago, 10 years ago. Do you remember back when Edward
Snowden, the leaker, oh, big brother was on the forefront
of our minds, the NSA, the National Security Administration. And
then you fast forward to today’s headlines. You know, has the
FBI abused its power? Has the FBI been spying on private
citizens? And, you know, you watch the
news and, you know, somebody commits a crime and how do they
catch them? Well, they search all the camera feeds from doorbells
and DMV, toll booths, all the rest. You can quickly put together
the pieces of the life or the actions of a person. We saw it
when they caught the killer from the Idaho schools, the Idaho
University back in the winter. You see it pretty quickly when
something goes on in this world. We’re thankful in a sense that
there’s technology and it can help. but we don’t like to be
spied on. We don’t like to be listened
to. And that’s where the people of God are in our passage tonight. The surrounding governors, so
to speak, are looking in on Israel. They’re looking in on Judah.
They’re looking in on this little 17 mile, square mile piece of
property that is Jerusalem and its outskirts. And they’re looking
in and they’re seeing the people of God return from Babylon to
rebuild the city, to rebuild the temple, to rebuild the ministry
of the sacrifices and to rebuild houses and to rebuild the worship
of Yahweh in some small way on this piece of the promised land. And so we get a glimpse into
the big government of Persia As it were the big government,
uh, looking in on Israel and what they are up to in the promised
land. Well, Israel. is returned, Israel
is resourced and Israel under the ministries of Ezra and Nehemiah
are resolute in doing the work of God, doing the work of rebuilding
the temple at Jerusalem. And as we’ve looked at over the
last many weeks through the ministry of Haggai, but even before that,
we looked at that hundred years war, we see that their work is
being opposed. As soon as they built the altar,
as soon as they built the foundation of the temple, they had about
20 years of opposition, both interior spiritual and exterior
enemies, and they got sidetracked by their self-interest, by their
spiritual weakness, but also outside enemies, and they had
stopped building the temple. That was their one task, that
was their one charge, that was their one duty. They had God’s
presence, they had God’s help, and they just quit. And so remember
Haggai came. Zechariah also came. And during his three little stretches
of ministry that we looked at, he got them building again. And I love what it says in chapter
five, at the very beginning, it speaks of, It speaks of the
prophets with them and supporting them. That’s what we wanna think
about first from this passage is. the ministry of the prophets. Uh, they were with Israel. Think of when we have a work
day, um, you know, we get about a dozen or so people, sometimes
six or eight. Uh, we’ve had as many as 20 or
so out before on a work day and we, we have our chore list and
we get it done and you know, sometimes walk around and pitch
in with this group or help that group or drag a hose here or
there. And I think that’s in a sense
what Haggai and, Zechariah were doing, they were with the people
of Israel. They were with them working and
encouraging them. And they were encouraging them
with the word. They were encouraging them with God’s strength. And I think it ought to encourage
us when we are discouraged or opposed. or when we are feeling
spiritual weak to find the spoken word, to find the preached word. Maybe this has some echoes of
what we heard this morning, has some echoes of what the young
adults talked about in Sunday school class, the word. Christ is our prophet. He speaks
his word through his ministers. And that ought to lift us up,
encourage us, motivate us and get us moving. We’ve got these
prophets with them and supporting them and speaking the word. And
their response to the word was to repent of their paneled houses
and their self-interest. and to put their shoulders again
to the burden of building God’s house. And they were powerful
and they were effective in the work of rebuilding the temple. So the ministry of the prophets,
we’ve looked at it for several weeks now, it was quite important.
And we also ourselves ought not to overlook the ministry of the
word and its blessing on our lives. There’s also, in addition
to the ministry of these prophets, there’s the ministry of the Persian
government. We don’t use that word ministry
in our government. We just watched the crowning,
the coronation of the king a few weeks ago. At least some of us
probably did. Maybe some of you got your People
magazine now and you’re looking at all the pictures and keeping
up with Meghan and Harry and William and Kate and the little
kids and all the scandals and who’s in, who’s out, who’s loved,
who’s hated. But, you know, in Great Britain,
they speak of the ministry of defense, the ministry of public
service or whatever. They use that word ministry because,
well, as Romans 13 and other places teach us, those who serve
in governing positions of authority, they minister by Christ and for
Christ. And so we can speak here of the
ministry of the Persian government. They are an authority on earth
instituted and ordained by God himself. They submit and they
rule under the eye of Christ. And our passage says it’s the
second year of Darius. Remember when we started all
of this, It was King Cyrus, the leader of Babylon. We fast forward
now. Cyrus has died. One of his rotten
ancestors became leader for a year or two or three. Everybody hated
his guts and I forget why he died, but he did. And so now
we’re under Darius, who’s going to reign for, I don’t know, about
40 years. And so second year of Darius, there’s unrest across
the Persian empire. They’re losing some battles.
Egypt is becoming a threat again. There’s little revolts in all
their territories and government isn’t big enough, strong enough,
organized enough to settle these things. It’s a huge empire, a
large empire. See in verses three to five,
you see Tatenai, who is the governor of the province beyond the river.
Assume that would be the river Euphrates, so over towards Israel. But Judah, Jerusalem, Israel,
that’s not his territory. He’s a meddler. He hears word
of a big project, a big house, a big temple, a big religious
project here. And did you catch the questions?
Who? gave you the decree to get this work done. And then he’s
got his clipboard out. I need to know your name. You’re
going to write them down. It’s for quality control purposes,
of course. But you begin again to feel the
sinister nature of the oversight of the enemies of the people
of God. Well, they write a letter to
the king and you can see it in verses six through 17. You know,
they can’t text it, they can’t email it. It’s, you know, put
on a scroll, it’s stamped and sealed and signet ringed and
all the rest. And it’s sent off to Darius through
all the bureaucracy, maybe through a courier system. But they tell
Darius, we’ve made an inspection. And I don’t know if you caught
this when you’re reading through chapter five, as we read it just
a little bit ago, it struck me. Hopefully it caught your eye.
The description of Tatanai and what’s his buddy’s name? Shethar
Bozenai. If you get a dog you don’t like,
maybe be a good name. But Tatanai and Shethar Bozenai,
they write a pretty flowery account. If you put their account alongside
maybe the first person account of a, of an Israelite, a person
of Judah, who’s, who’s on the ground rebuilding, particularly
one of the men who’d seen the former temple where the stones
that big. Were the timbers that were being laid in the wall that
big? You begin to see a contrast, don’t you? This is flowery language.
They’re building this massive place of worship. You know, somehow
they’re trying to, in a veiled way, and we do this with our
language, don’t we? We say things in such a way that
it implies what may or may not be true, but we hope people assume
it. These people are gonna be worshiping a God that’s contrary
to the Babylonians. These people are gonna be, serving
their own interest. And Oh King, this is not going
to be good for you. So they write this letter of
their inspection of the work that is going on. Then they make
their request. We want the work to be stopped.
We want you to inquire in the filing cabinets of Babylon. We
want you to open the books and see if there is really a decree. There’s trouble. They want the
work to stop again. Can you imagine? the frustration
of the governor of Judah. Can you imagine the dismay to
Haggai and Zechariah? Here we just got the fire kindled
again. Here we just got the forge burning. Here we just got the hammer swinging.
Here we just got the saw zipping through the timber. Here we just
got the cutting of stone, the chiseling of rocks, the mixing
of mortar. Here we go winning the hearts
of Israel again. Here we go on this spiritual
and this physical building and just what we needed, enemies.
Just what we needed, Persia. Just what we needed, big brother.
Just what we needed, the devil coming in. And so as we walk
through this passage and see the ministry of the prophets,
now the ministry of the Persian government, there’s more to come
on that. We’re gonna get Darius’ response.
Next time, I believe. Now we see the ministry of God’s
providence. And that is the overarching thing
that we need to think on. You know, again, I read that
article from that fellow last week with great interest. Because
I think we are going into hard and dangerous and different times. It’s nothing God’s church has
ever experienced. And I think the solution is just
stay obedient to the Great Commission. Do stay light and lean. But churches,
churches always should have been light and lean. I don’t understand
why churches need to have playlands and campuses. Really, all you
need is a good sanctuary and maybe some space for fellowship
and Christian education. But anyway, maybe a good piece
of advice. Trust the providence of Almighty
God. We remember that we are never
alone. Several of you are in the men’s
lunch study, and we’ve been working our way through Providence. Several
of you are in the ladies study. We did Providence a couple weeks
back, maybe a month or two back. And we remember the definition
of Providence according to the Westminster Divines. It is God’s
most holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing all
his creatures and all their actions. And what a wonderful comfort
it is to know that in the midst of Big Brother, in the midst
of a rotten culture, in the midst of a crooked and depraved generation,
God’s big government is better than any big government on the
earth. He can outwit any big government
with all their cameras, all their listening devices, all their
techniques and toys and tools. And he can put big government
to shame because he sees all and he orchestrates all. If you
don’t believe that, just go back to the beginning of the book
of Ezra chapter one. God put it in the heart of Cyrus.
God moved in the heart of Cyrus. God moved in the hearts of the
people to go back to Jerusalem and to Judah and to rebuild the
temple. And so when we get all worried
about the actions and the machinations and the capabilities and all
the things that we see in this world, and our hearts and our
minds begin to sink, we need to have a fresh memory of who
God is. We need to have a fresh remembrance
of what he has done. And we need to have a fresh recollection
of his promises. God knows all, sees all, and
acts above all. The actions of Persia are in
his hands. And this is the ministry of God’s
providence. And isn’t it the same in the
storms of life, whether they be meteorological storms or storms
in our families, our homes. He’s the God over our travels. He’s the God who restrains. He’s
the God who gives permission to those on this earth that will
do this or that. He is sovereign. He is absolute.
He is universal. He is over all the nations. I think some of you this morning
in the Sunday school class were listening to Robert Godfrey’s counsel,
his, I don’t know, estimation of what’s coming in this world. And his, uh, commendation to
you was Psalm three, I believe. Uh, that’s a Psalm I’ve been
thinking a lot on. So yesterday we’re working out in the yard,
had my ear protection things on the play from my phone. I
was listening to him and that talk and he brought up Psalm
three. I thought, Oh, that’s been on my mind. That’s been
in my heart lately. A fresh view of God. David is, laying down in the
camp of soldiers. And he simply says, I lay down,
I slept and I woke again. God was with me. And I think
that’s the hope that we have to have. We can plot against
governments. We can strategize, we can come
up with all these great plans, but there’s something about resting
in the wisdom and the power and in the providence of the sovereign,
absolute universal God who rules all over all nations and whose
eyes, I love that in this passage, I believe it says it. In verse
five, the eye of their God was on the elders of the Jews, and
that did not stop them. They did not stop them until
the report should reach Darius. So we think about our work as
Christians, maybe in the church, maybe in the family, maybe in
the marketplace, and we think to ourselves, how much longer
can we be faithful? How much longer can we have success
or make inroads? Well, if the eye of God is on
you, you can press on until he says no or until he says stop. And I think there’s a, there’s
a word for us here. Let’s let God be God. And I read
that article, got excited about it. I read the article and thought
he’s got some good points. And then I realized by the end,
he’s not letting God be God. He’s trying to be God. He’s trying
to build up a war chest of money in order for the church to thrive
financially. God desires his temple. God desires
the trials. God desires that his word be
the thing that gets us through these hardships, gets us over
the spiritual humps and even the enemy bumps in the road. It’s his providence. that we’ll
see through. They’re going to go to the file
cabinets in Persia. They’re going to see that Cyrus
wrote a decree. Darius is going to read it. Darius
is going to affirm it. Tatani and Sheshbar Bosani or
whatever his name is, they’re going to have to submit to this
decree that was written sometime back 20 years or so. Let me encourage you. the little
phrase, let God be God. Won’t that simplify your life?
Won’t that de-stress you? Won’t that let you, well, do
what Jesus says, seek first the kingdom and everything else will
be added unto you. Let’s do pray. Our Father, we
pray that we would release all of our stresses, all of our fears,
all of our worries about our culture, about our nation, about
the future of your church, about the this or the that or the other,
and help us to rest in you. Help us to rely on the ministry
of your eyes, your providence, your plan and your governance. Lord, we want to be involved
so Show us your way through your word. Let us be diligent to do
our part, but not worry, not try to outrun you, not try to
outdo you. Help us to rest in what you are
and what you’re up to. Help us to seek first your kingdom
and remember that all else will be added. Give us your comfort
now we pray in the name of Christ. Amen.