Ezra 10:1-17
Turn to Ezra chapter 10. Our
passage tonight will be 10, 1 through 15. And as you flip ahead, you’ll
notice there’s just one more little section we’ll look at
next week, and then we’ll zip right into Nehemiah. Remember
Ezra and Nehemiah were one book. And also during this period of
history, a little over a hundred years, there were the prophecies
of Haggai, which we looked at, and also Zechariah, which we
really mentioned. But Ezra has come and these are
his memoirs. Remember last week in chapter
nine, he was confronted by the officials with the sins of some
of the leaders and some of the peoples of Israel. They had married
foreign wives. Remember the issue is not they
married foreigners, they married unbelievers. And so tonight we’ll
see in chapter 10, one through 15, and then next week, um, the
resolution to the matter, how seriously that the people of
God took sin. So let’s give our attention to
God’s word. Ezra, uh, chapter 10, beginning
at verse one, while Ezra prayed and made confession, weeping
and casting himself down. Before the house of God, a great
assembly, a very great assembly of men, women, and children gathered
to him out of Israel for the people wept bitterly. And Shechaniah
the son of Elam addressed Israel, we have broken faith with our
God and we have married foreign women from the peoples of the
land. But even now there is hope for
Israel in spite of this. Therefore, let us make a covenant
with our God to put away all these wives and their children.
according to the counsel of my Lord and of those who tremble
at the commandment of our God. And let it be done according
to the law. Arise for it is your task and we are with you. Be
strong and do it. Then Ezra arose and made the
leading priest and the Levites and all Israel take oath that
they would do as had been said. So they took the oath. And Ezra
withdrew from before the house of God and went to the chamber
of Jehohannan, the son of Eliashib, where he spent the night neither
eating bread nor drinking water, for he was mourning over the
faithlessness of the exiles. And a proclamation was made throughout
Judah and Jerusalem to all the returned exiles that they should
assemble at Jerusalem. And that if anyone did not come
within three days by order of the officials of the elders,
all his property should be forfeited. And he himself banned from the
congregation of the exiles. Then all the men of Judah and
Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within three days. It was the
ninth month on the 20th day of the month. And all the people
sat in the open square before the house of God trembling because
of this matter and because of the heavy rain. And Ezra the
priest stood up and said to them, you have broken faith and married
foreign women and so increased the guilt of Israel. Now then
make confession to the Lord, the God of your fathers and do
his will. separate yourselves from the
peoples of the land and from the foreign wives. Then all the
assembly answered with a loud voice, it is so, we must do as
you have said. But the people are many and it
is a time of heavy rain. We cannot stand in the open,
nor is this the task for one day or for two. For we have greatly
transgressed in this matter. Let our officials stand for the
whole assembly. Let all in our cities who have
taken foreign wives come at appointed times and with them the elders
and the judges of every city until the fierce wrath of our
God over this matter is turned away from us. Only Jonathan,
the son of Asahel, and Jehaziah, the son of Tikva, opposed this. And Meshulam and Shabbatai, the
Levites, supported them. Then the returned exiles did
so. Ezra the priest selected men,
heads of fathers’ houses, according to their fathers’ houses, each
of them designated by name, on the first day of the 10th month.
And they sat down to examine the matter. And by the first
day of the first month, they had come to the end of all the
men who had married foreign wives.” Amen, the word of the living
God. There’s a little saying, well,
it comes from the book of James, doesn’t it? The truth will set
you free. Some have attached another little
saying to it. The truth will set you free,
but it will first hurt pretty badly. Maybe perhaps you know
this, you have experienced this, you understand exactly what that
means. You go through a stretch, a hard
patch of life, perhaps sin, and it hurts you, it hurts others,
and you understand the truth and know that it will set you
free, but there’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of hardship, there’s
a lot of fixing or setting things right in the first place that
must take place. Sometimes I’ll read an account or a story of ministers
and ministers in their weariness, ministers in their hardships,
lots of activity, lots of busyness, and they’re worn out and they’re
weary. And then you begin to look at
what have they been doing? What have they been up to? They’ve
been busy, but have they been busy doing the right things?
You look sometimes at the activity of ministers, and it’s not even
pastoral work. It’s, well, to steal a phrase
from American politics, it’s community organizing, or it’s
organizing events and things that hopefully will get people
in the door. Well, what have you got them in the door? to
do, you know, to have fun, to do various activities. And I
think a minister, and we see it in the life of Ezra, really
wears himself out in a fruitful ministry when he deals with the
messes of everyday life of the congregation, deals with the
messes that have been made because of sin. A hardworking pastor
rolls up his sleeves and he gets in the messiness and the business
of people’s lives, the muck of sin. He shows them the gospel
of grace and leads them to break with sin and to put it away.
That’s hard work, that is difficult work, but it’s very fruitful
and very rewarding. And I think that’s the first
thing we really ought to see in our passage tonight is Ezra’s
ministry from the minute he gets to town, his ministry is bearing
fruit. Remember at the end of last week,
if you take a peek at chapter nine, verse 15, the end of Ezra’s
prayer is, oh Lord, God of Israel, you are just. And we are left
a remnant that has escaped as it is today, but behold, we are
before you in our guilt and none can stand before you because
of this. Ezra realizes the predicament
Israel has got himself in. He’s fresh on the scene. He’s
new to town and the fruit of his ministry which has been his
prayer, it’s been his confession for the people, his weeping,
his casting himself down before the temple of God, his all day
fasting, praying and representing has borne fruit. And as he continues to fast and
pray, you get the sense that this crowd has gathered, men
and women and children from the, I don’t know, 15 square miles
or so that is Judah and Jerusalem. That’s all they have of the whole
promised land now, about 15 or so square miles. They begin to
pour into the city. Word gets out as the day progresses. Word gets out as Ezra is praying,
come to Jerusalem and let us deal with our sin. These folks are cut to the heart.
They are under conviction, as we might like to say. And our
passage continues in chapter 10, saying a little phrase that
was in chapter nine, there are those who tremble at the commandment
of the law of God. So there’s great fruit in Ezra’s
ministry as he begins life among the exiles. And you’ll notice
a second movement in our passage, not just the fruit of Ezra’s
ministry, but there’s the assurance of action. Apparently they drew
straws and our passage tells us, it tells us in verse three
of Shekeniah, verse two, Shekeniah, the son of Jeiel, of the sons
of Elam addressed Ezra. He comes and represents the people
and he says, we have broken faith with our God. We have married
foreign women from among the peoples, but even now there is
hope for Israel in spite of this. And he appeals to the covenant.
Let us make covenant with our God and perhaps we will receive
mercy. Sometime ago in another life,
when I worked for another church, I somehow drew the short straw
and was the, Um, I was the head of the staff there. And so we
had a couple human resource executives in the church and I would go
ask them for advice cause I had no idea what I was doing. And,
uh, one of the things, uh, one of the ladies, uh, she was part
of the HR department at, um, Oh, Lincoln financial group.
I think it was in Greensboro. She would tell me when you sit
down with an employee, And you talk to them, you know, you’re
doing a stinky job or you’re fired or whatever. At the end,
you need to hear back from them what you said to them. And so
she taught me this little technique. Now, you know, you’d look across
the desk at the employee, you just hurt their feelings. You’d
say, no, tell me what you heard me say, you know, cause you know,
they’re going to go put it on Facebook and whatever else, which
was the case in a few instances. Um, and there’s a real sense
where that’s a good question for us as believers. God is saying,
what did you hear me tell you? What did you hear me say about
your heart? What did you hear me say in my word about your
sin? What did you hear me say about your guilt and your pollution? What did you hear me say in the
sermon today or in your devotional reading or in your quiet time? What did you hear God say about
you? And what do you believe to be
true that he has spoken to you? Well, we get in this little glimpse
here in verses three, four, and five, an assurance of action.
We have sinned against God. We’re guilty. What he says about
us is exactly right. Shekiniah comes and he admits
the corporate or the whole church guilt. Uh, what a contrast that
is. You know, some of you have been
pastors and some of you have been elders. Um, you’ve, you’ve
met the wrath of a church member and the conversation goes like
this. What do you mean? You won’t marry my daughter who’s
living with her boyfriend, right? You chuckle, right? It’s painful.
Or, or, or if, if you don’t do what I say, we’ve heard this
one before. You don’t do what I say. I’ll
withhold my giving. Well, good. God’s richer than you. We’re
fine. We’re cool. Who needs you? We don’t say that
part, but we think it. I think we have thought it. But
isn’t it wonderful here to see assurance of action, not threatening
action. Don’t you dare, you know, cross,
you know, we’re founding members or giving members or whatever.
God’s really bigger than you. And it doesn’t matter. That’s
kind of what goes through our head. But isn’t it wonderful
to think the contrast here? Okay. God says we’re guilty.
We are. God says we’ve done it, and we did. God says we’d better
repent and make covenant. We better make an oath with him,
and so we will. And did you catch in the language
of Shekinah, he says, look, look, Ezra, you’re the man here, you’re
the pastor here, you’re the preacher here. You gotta help us through
this, and you better do it. When is the last time somebody
came to a group of elders or to the pastor and said, look,
we screwed up big, we need to take our weapon, and you’re the
one to do it. So go for it. You don’t hear
that. You hear, well, judge not, or
you’re not loving. You hear all kinds of things
like that these days. Well, there’s assurance of action
from the people of God. They’re not only pouring into
the city where Ezra is on his face in prayer for the people,
but they pick a leader to go to Ezra and say, look, we know
we’ve done it and we want to fix it. We want to get it right.
And so there’s fruit in Ezra’s ministry and the word of God
is doing its work. Well, there’s Ezra’s continued
intercession. It wasn’t as if his whole day
of prayer was enough. Verse six, Seems to indicate
more prayer is needed. So what does Ezra do? He goes
into a little room in the temple, and that whole night, no bread.
That whole night, no water. That whole night, prayers, and
mourning, and fasting, and representing the people and their sin before
Almighty God, begging for His grace. I don’t know about you,
but this is rather significant. Now, I’ll admit, you know, it’s
my job to be your pastor. It’s my job to pray for you.
It’s my job to bury y’all before the throne of God. And I mean,
to skip a meal? To skip a night of sleep? I mean,
you know. Let’s be reasonable here, right?
Well, that’s how awful was their sin. That’s how awful was their
predicament. Remember last week we said a
few times, what’s the big deal here? So a couple of them, well,
it’s about 110, 110 out of 50,000 married foreign wives. What’s
the big deal? Well, remember what all of Solomon’s foreign
wives did. They led him astray, led Israel
astray, the kingdom split. The kingdom was never the same
again. And this is all that’s left is a little remnant. And
it stretches back to the sins of Solomon, the sins of David,
even the sins of Adam. But Ezra takes it seriously and
he goes after a day of prayer into a night of prayer. And this leads to another significant
moment in the life of Israel, a proclamation is made. horns
are blown. Here is real. Everybody get here
within three days. You know, the, the, the town
criers went out, the people walked around with the sandwich boards,
you know, church meeting kind of like we’ve called one for
a few weeks from now. You better, better be there or
be square. Um, And did you notice the threat?
Do you want to keep your status as an Israelite? Remember last
year, all that we went through to go through Joshua, enter the
promised land, conquest the promised land, take the promised land
and bits and pieces of the promised land were allotted to various
tribes. And there’s a connection here.
I think in this proclamation, if you want to keep your tribal
land, If you want to keep the land of your ancestors as a part
of the tribe of Judah and Benjamin, if you want to keep your stake,
your claim, your hold on the promised land,
you better come to the town hall. You better come to the congregational
meeting. In three days, be at Jerusalem.
It’s by order of the elders, by order of the officials, and
therefore, in a sense, it’s by order of God Almighty. And you’ll come before him and
present yourself. Doesn’t this have echoes of Moses?
And he would go down to the people and say, God says, you know,
take a bath. God says, uh, abstain from things
you should abstain from and show up at the foot of the mountain.
And God’s going to present himself to you and speak to you. There
are echoes of that. And there’s a sense where each
Sunday is like that, isn’t it? We come to God’s holy mountain.
We come to the footstool of Jerusalem. We don’t forsake the assembling
together by order of the elders. God has called his people into
worship every week. And there’s a sense, you know,
we talk about it at elder meetings. Who haven’t we seen in a while?
Where are they? Why aren’t they coming? And there’s
a point after we try for a while, we can’t keep them on the membership
roles. And so this week we did some
pastoral work. I made some phone calls, you
know, so and so, we haven’t seen you in a bit. Where are you?
Are you in worship somewhere? You’re making a move to join
that church, so you’ll have pastoral oversight. Sort of the same idea,
it passes all through the scriptures. but they get a bit firm here,
don’t they? Not only will you lose your place in the promised
land, you’ll be cut off. You’ll be an outsider. You’ll
be as a Gentile. And so true Israel. the godly
in spirit and heart will come and they will gather. And so
as we peek at this passage and see the fruit of Israel or Ezra’s
ministry, as we see the assurance that the people wanna do the
right thing, we see Ezra’s continued prayers and intercession. We
hear the proclamation, come to Jerusalem. We come in verses
nine to 12 to the assembly. All of the people, all of the
exiles come back. You know, there’s a 15 or so
square mile region where people live in the outskirts or they
live in the city, they live near the temple, but they all come
and they come together corporately or body, corpus body. And you know, in our church service,
our morning service in particular, we have what we call the corporate
confession of sin. Somebody was telling me recently
they went to a church and there was no confession of sin. There
was a bunch of, there was actually a bunch of stuff missing. Um,
I remember going to a church to serve and I said, if I come,
you’re going to add a corporate confession of sin. I think it’s
a biblical thing to do. Why do we, why do we confess
together? Why is there a we have sinned?
Well, God’s people always gather before him in assembly and they
confess their sin, they confess their guilt. Maybe you didn’t
take a foreign wife. But what the rest of Israel does
affects the rest of Israel. And so we, we confess corporately
for God, we have sinned. And so they come into the square
around the temple. And I don’t know if you caught
the detail, but it’s, it’s winter. We know that because it tells
us what month, but it’s also raining cats and dogs. I’m sure they didn’t say it that
way back then. But it’s like Noah’s day. The rains are coming
up out of the ground. The floods are coming down out
of the skies. And it says the people of God
are trembling. Now, I would imagine they are
trembling because they are wet to the bone. You have one of
those rainstorms where Well, maybe last Sunday when we had
that big storm, you go out to get to your car and in the 100
feet between the dash from the door to the car, you couldn’t
get any wetter if you had jumped into a pool. But imagine standing
out on the square, you’re a long ways from home, and you don’t
have REI and LL Bean, there’s no Gore-Tex, there’s no London
Fog, right? There’s no Tiger Woods golf umbrella
that could cover a back porch. You just get wet to the core,
and it’s winter, and so you get cold to the core. And don’t you
imagine God in this assembly has a bit of method to his madness? He’s reminding them of judgment.
He’s reminding them of Noah’s day. He’s reminding them of the
flood. He’s reminding them of how terrible
his wrath can be. He’s reminding them that they
had better get right or else. And you see in verses 10 and
11, Ezra, the priest stood up. He said to them, you have broken
faith. You have married foreign women. You’ve so increased the
guilt of Israel. Now make confession to the Lord,
to the God of your fathers, to do his will, separate yourselves
from the people of the land and from the foreign wives. And what
did the people said? They said, it is so. and we will
do as you have said. And there’s a resolution, verses
13 to 17. We’ll see a little bit more of
it next week. It’s time to clean up the mess. What’s the saying? It took a long time to get into
this mess and it’s gonna take a little while to get out of
it. And so they say, the people, hey, it’s raining, it’s cold,
we’re wet, we forgot our Gore-Tex. We forgot our umbrellas. We forgot
our galoshes. We don’t have a change of clothes.
So let us go home and let the guilty parties go to their tribal
leaders. Let the guilty parties go to
their city gates and to their judges. And then by appointment,
if they’ve taken a foreign wife, they can come back to Jerusalem
and they can straighten out the mess. The rest of us can go home
and do our laundry. The rest of us can go home and
get a cup of hot cocoa. The rest of us can go home and
get warm by the fire. And so we’re gonna see in the
coming time how they resolve this. It’s gonna name names,
who done it, right? There’s a lot of Aikens, a lot
of sinners in the camp. Well, I wanted to end by thinking
through a critical New Testament word. Well, it’s a critical Old
Testament word, and it’s the word repentance. Repentance,
both in the Old Testament and the New, seem to have in their
meaning this basic changing of the mind, thought. Repentance
is a big word. It’s a big word full of meaning.
And I love how our confession of faith speaks of repentance.
It says that a person out of a sight and a sense of their
sin, a sight and a sense of the danger of their sin, the filthiness
of their sin, and I love this, the odiousness, the stink, the
stench of their sin, having a sight and a sense of the danger, the
filth, and the odiousness of their sin, And it’s contrariness
to the law, the holy law of God, they do with grief and they do
with hatred and godly sorrow turn from their sin toward living
in obedience to almighty God. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it?
But catch, if you will, the dynamics, the steps, the order of repentance. We get a sight and a sense of
the danger, the filth and the odiousness of our sin. That’s
a work of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it? We saw this morning in the
life of Felix. He had before him the apostle
Paul, the great orator, the great logician, the great reasoner
of the faith. And he presented to him how many
times the gospel and what did Felix say? Go away, I’ll have
you come back when I’m ready. And it takes the work of the
Holy Spirit to prick our hearts, to convict us of our sin, to
help us to see what God says sin is, what God says sin does,
and what God says he will do. with sin. And so a work of the
spirit gives us a sight. It gives us a sense of a weightiness
of the danger of filth and the stench of sin. And it leads us
towards grief, good grief, godly grief. It leads us to hate our
sin because we realize it is contrary to God’s holy law. And
isn’t that a work of the word? Why is America in the fix that
it’s in today? I would suggest there’s a lot
of reasons, but one of the main reasons is the church has quit
speaking of sin. You look back to the era of Norman
Vincent Peale, and then you bump on up to his next little disciple,
the Crystal Cathedral in Shuler, and now you have Brother Joel
Osteen. I guess you can call him brother. But what have they
done? They’ve taken out all the negative
and they only speak positively. You know, God doesn’t want you
unhappy. God doesn’t want you to lose your smile. Well, he
actually might want to rub your face in your mess, right? And he may want you to smell
it, and he may want you to see how filthy it is, and he may
want you to see how dangerous it is, because that’s the only
way you repent. And so if we Norman Vincent Peel
it, and we Shuler it, and we Osteen it, and all the other
gospels that are out there that are not the gospel of Jesus Christ,
we’re told, we’re patted on the back and said, you know what,
buddy, you’re just fine. God would never be unhappy with
you. And isn’t that false? Isn’t that quite a lie? Quite
contrary? And so the word of God has to
do its work. Paul has to say to Felix, you’re
a dirty, rotten, adulterous scoundrel. I mean, can’t you imagine what
Paul said to him? I mean, he had a 19 year old
wife and he was 60, right? That still appalls us to this
day. At least it should. But it leads us to godly sorrow.
There’s a weight we feel for our sin. There’s a weight we
feel for what we have done against God and to others. And we see
the cross. We see the spilt blood. We see
the shed blood. We see the dying savior. And that’s why, isn’t it wonderful
to be in church when the word is preached and the sacrament
is served. We get a double dose. We get
a hearing and a seeing of the gospel And perhaps because of
the work of the Word, the work of the Spirit, the work of Christ,
we realize we better turn. We’re going this away, the wrong
way, and we better turn and go that way, the right way. And repentance always leads,
true repentance always leads to an endeavor to walk in the
commandments of God to walk in his ways. We pray our father
who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come. by
will be done. Well, we can’t do his will if
we’re walking in sin. We can’t do his will if we’re
walking contrary to the scripture. And so revival is needed. And every Sunday, in a sense,
is covenant renewal, isn’t it? Every Sunday is, in a sense,
a revival. Every Sunday in a sense is a
come to Jesus moment. And perhaps tonight, perhaps
looking at Ezra’s ministry, perhaps looking at the people’s response
to sin when it has confronted them has given you a sight and
a sense of the filth and the danger and the odiousness of
your sin. Perhaps you didn’t mind your
sin, but now you see that it’s contrary to God’s law, that God,
the righteous judge, punishes sin, and maybe you see the cross
behind, and you realize that for you, God has laid your sins
on Jesus. He is your substitute. He’s your
sacrificial lamb. Last week we ended in 915 when
it said, behold, we are before you in our guilt and none can
stand before you because of this. Well, Jesus has come. And he’s
taken our sin, he’s taken our shame, he’s taken our guilt and
he has paid for it at the cross. And so we therefore can stand
before God and say, Jesus has paid it all. Let’s do pray together. Lord, we thank you for the chance
to think on the seriousness of sin, the weight of it, the stench
of it, the danger of it, the filth of it. And Lord, we pray
that In both instances today, watching Felix do nothing and
watching Israel do everything, may our response be a faithful
response, looking at the blood of Calvary, realizing that you
who made an oath, you made a covenant, and you’ve shed your own son’s
blood to fulfill it, that we have no reason to hide. no reason
to run, no reason to do anything but to turn from our sin, hating
and forsaking it and running straight to the foot of the cross
and believing on Jesus, who alone can save, hear us and help us. And may we deal faithfully with
our sins. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.