Morning, brothers and sisters.
I just want to turn to a short verse out of Psalm 42. There was a brother who did an opening in Psalm 42, and I do not remember who it was, but when he was reading it, there was a part of it that really struck me. The psalm is about how, as a deer pants for the water, so the soul pants after God.
But in Psalm 42:8, there was a verse that said:
The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime,
And in the night His song shall be with me—
A prayer to the God of my life.
“The God of my life.” That phrase has really stuck in my craw. It has been like a little burr. You go out walking in the forest, and instead of getting ticks, you get burrs that stick to your socks and things like that. Especially if it gets in your shoe, you are aware of it all the time because it is irritating.
I am not saying that this has been irritating, but it has been attention-getting. So, even though I am not going to be talking about this psalm, it is this phrase—“the God of my life”—that has really been on my heart. As I share today, that is really the focus: seeing that He is the God of my life.
Oh Lord, You are God. You alone are God. Only You are God, and we worship You. We thank You, Lord, for this morning, and for how our hearts have been refreshed by knowing that You have such a great love for us that You brought us to Yourself.
Lord, we thank You for the price You paid for us. But most of all, we thank You that we are here now before You, without blame and without sin. We can be right here in Your presence without You being angry at us.
We can come before You and say, “Lord, we want to hear You. We want to hear what You want to speak into our lives today.” Lord, it is Your Holy Spirit whom we want to speak to us. Use Your Word to speak into our lives. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
What I want to do this morning is paint a picture. I do not have the equipment here, but there are three parts of the picture I want to bring out: a background, a foreground, and some details.
All good works of art have some type of background in them. Even the Mona Lisa has a background: the winding road, the trees, and everything. It is not because the artist had extra paint and said, “Well, what am I going to do with this? I might as well paint a background.” No, the background is part of the painting. It was thought of; it was in the artist’s mind when he was going to paint.
Then there is a foreground. This is the main thing in the picture. Within the foreground, and even in the background, there are details that strike us and sometimes give us insight into the mind of the artist.
We have been studying Ezra and Nehemiah on alternate Friday nights. I want to take something out of that study. First, I want to give you the background; then I want to give you the foreground.
When we started Ezra and Nehemiah, we began with the reality that God’s people, Israel, had been exiled. They were taken away to Babylon. I am not going to say it was through no fault of their own. It was all their fault. They went into exile because of their unfaithfulness.
They were unfaithful to the God who redeemed them. They fell into idolatry, and with that idolatry came immoral lifestyles. Their character was negatively affected. These people who were supposed to be the people of God could not be distinguished from the nations around them. They worshiped idols and did what everyone else was doing.
So the Lord had to discipline them. In disciplining them, He sent them away to Babylon. There they remained for seventy years under the discipline of the Lord.
After those seventy years, the Lord brought them back from exile. He had told them that He would bring them back, but things had to be fixed before He brought them back.
He did not bring them back merely for the sake of bringing them back, or simply because He had said He would do it. He had a purpose for bringing them back.
God wanted to recover what had been lost. It was not simply that He wanted to fix it; He wanted to have it back. He wanted to have what was supposed to be His.
The thing He wanted back was His testimony. In other words, He wanted a witness of who He was in the land. These people were supposed to be a light to the Gentiles, a witness of who He was. But they were not.
When He put them out, the light had gone out, so to speak. Now He said, “I want to restore that light. I want to put that light back in the place where it is supposed to be.” When He brought the exiles back, it was for that purpose.
God does not change. He keeps constant in what He wants. This testimony that He desired from the beginning, when He called Abram to begin the nation of Israel, has not changed.
There may be failures and all kinds of things, but God is the same. He does not change at all. His purpose remains steady all the way through.
God did not want to bring back the glory days. He did not say, “Oh, I wish it were back when Moses was there,” or, “When David was king, those were the days.” No, He does not want to bring back the glory days. He wants to go forward.
Even when we mess up in our own lives, fall away from the Lord, or fall into sin, the Lord never says, “I want to take you back.” When we repent and get right with Him again, the Lord says, “We go forward from here.”
We are not going back to the way it was, because it is never going to be the way it was. As Christians, we need to understand that we do not live in the past. The past is gone. You can never have it back. You can never make it up. There are no do-overs.
But there is always a going forward, because God always goes forward. He does not go back; He goes forward. The only time we look back is when we remember the Lord for what He has done. We look back and say, “Oh Lord, thank You. This is where I get my feet established in what You have done.” Then we can go forward.
We are not supposed to have a static relationship with God, where we do not move anywhere. It is like Deuteronomy: “You have circled this mountain long enough. Go north.” It is time to move.
The Spirit of the Lord moved among the people. Even though there was not a great number who returned, there were people who went back.
When the Israelites returned, I am going to call them the exiles. I try not to use “the remnant,” because we have religiousized that word. These exiles had been dealt with.
They returned first to reestablish the altar. The first thing they did was rebuild the altar. Our way to God is through the altar: sacrifice, blood sacrifice, and the dealing with our sin. That is in Ezra 3.
In Ezra 3–6, they rebuilt the temple. In Nehemiah 1–7, they rebuilt the walls around Jerusalem, the city of the great King.
They also reestablished and renewed the priesthood. The priesthood was not functioning in exile because there was no temple. If they were going to reestablish the worship of the Lord, they had to reestablish the priesthood and its functions. You find this in Zechariah 3, Ezra 6, and Nehemiah 8.
They also met opposition. The opposition stopped the building of the temple, as recorded in Ezra 4. That opposition made the exiles complacent concerning their purpose. They said, “Now is not the time to do it. We will just kick back. When God makes the storm stop, then we can continue building.”
There was also opposition that made them afraid to work on the wall. The enemies threatened them: “You do not know when it is going to happen, but we are coming after you.” So the people were afraid.
In all these things of opposition, God countered. Every opposition had a counterplay. You might say, “Well, that is good defense.” No, it is good offense. You go after your enemy.
First, He sent prophets. He sent Haggai, an older prophet. Haggai admonished them. What does “admonish” mean? It means he gave them a good swift kick in the pants and said, “Get off your duffs and get about what the Lord told you to go back for.”
Haggai instructed them: go up, get the wood, and bring these things down. Then he encouraged them: “Now you have these things. Let us go with the building.”
Then God sent Zechariah, a young man and a visionary. Zechariah spoke about the future: “These are the things God is going to do.” Through these prophecies and visions, he gave the people hope for a future.
Sometimes we are so honed in on the days in which we live that we do not look up. Zechariah was saying, “You need to look up. Do not think about the decree of this king or that king. Look up. That is where your hope is. God has a future for you.”
Then God sent Ezra. Ezra was a scribe and a priest. At the end of Ezra, he dealt with mixture and intermarriage. But Ezra also preserved the genealogies.
You can thank Ezra for 1 Chronicles 1–6. Those genealogies may seem tedious and boring, but Ezra made them to ensure that the priesthood would remain pure and that the Messianic line would remain intact. These were important things that he was doing. They were a God-save for what God was doing.
Then God sent Nehemiah. We cannot say that he held some great position where he was, except that he was a cupbearer, but he was a leader. God sent a leader to do something the people needed, and Nehemiah led the people in rebuilding the wall.
The wall was finally finished in Nehemiah 6. So why does Nehemiah not end there? Because this is just the background.
God had done all these things. So what is the foreground? The foreground is the effect that all these events had on the returned exiles: the opposition, the sending of prophets, and the rebuilding of the altar, temple, and walls.
To see that effect, we need to go into Nehemiah 8.
When the seventh month came, the children of Israel were in their cities.
The wall was finished on the twenty-fifth day of the sixth month. The Hebrew calendar is lunar, with months of about twenty-nine or thirty days. So only four or five days may have passed.
Now all the people gathered together as one man in the open square that was in front of the Water Gate; and they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded Israel.
So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly of men and women, and all who could hear with understanding, on the first day of the seventh month.
Then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the Water Gate from morning until midday, before the men and women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law.
Then, in Nehemiah 8:7-8:
Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites, helped the people to understand the Law; and the people stood in their place.
So they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading.
Then, in Nehemiah 8:18, after they had reinstituted the Feast of Tabernacles:
Also day by day, from the first day until the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God. And they kept the feast seven days; and on the eighth day there was a sacred assembly, according to the prescribed manner.
Then Nehemiah 9 begins:
Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the children of Israel were assembled with fasting, in sackcloth, and with dust on their heads.
Then those of Israelite lineage separated themselves from all foreigners; and they stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers.
And they stood up in their place and read from the Book of the Law of the Lord their God for one-fourth of the day; and for another fourth they confessed and worshiped the Lord their God.
What is in the foreground here is that the people—the people, not a prophet, not Nehemiah, not even Ezra—the people called for the Book of the Law to be read.
Why would they do that? Of all the things they could have asked for, why the Book of the Law? The passage refers to the Book of the Law three times: at the beginning of Nehemiah 8, at the end of Nehemiah 8, and at the beginning of Nehemiah 9. This must be something really important.
We cannot look at the Law as they did with New Testament eyes. They did not look at it as, “Oh, we are under the Law.” For Israel, the giving of the Law was a revelation of who God was.
In Exodus 20, the first thing God says is essentially, “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt.” This is a revelation: “This is Me. This is who is talking to you as I give the Law. I am the very One who took you out of bondage in Egypt.”
God had judged the gods of Egypt. The plagues were against the gods of Egypt. He was saying, “I am greater than these gods. I can snatch My people away from them because you are not as powerful as I am.”
He says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” There is no other god like Him. In giving the Law, God showed that He was different from every other god. This is one way we can understand holiness: “I am not like all these other things. I stand outside of them. I stand alone. They do not even match Me. I am holy.”
If you go into Leviticus, which can be a tough read because it has all these offerings, what is God saying to the people? He is saying, “I am not like these other gods.”
Other gods demanded, “Sacrifice your children to me.” God did not ask that. Other gods demanded sensual forms of worship that corrupted people. God did not ask that. He said, “I am different. I am holy.”
Because He is holy, He wants His people to be holy. He redeemed them to be His people, a people different from the peoples in the land into which they were going.
Another thing about the Law is what other Old Testament writers said about it. Psalm 19:7-10 says:
The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul:
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart:
The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever:
The ordinances of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.They are more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold:
Sweeter also than honey and the droppings of the honeycomb.
Even Paul the apostle, drawing from his background as a Jew, said in Romans 7:22, “For I delight in the law of God after the inward man.”
The Jews saw the Law as something that restores the soul. Let me dwell on that for a minute. What is the soul? We have body, soul, and spirit. The soul deals with our intellect, our emotions, and our will.
When man fell, self ruled the soul. But the Hebrew word translated “convert” or “restore” means to turn back—to turn back to. The Law was turning their souls back to God.
Instead of saying, “I want this, and I want that,” their intellect was saying, “I want to know what You have to say. I want to know.” Not merely in an informational way, but because what God says is right and true and to be desired.
Their emotions were saying, “You know what makes me happy? What makes me happy is that I can please You.” When little children are growing up and say, “Daddy, I just want to please you,” it is wonderful to hear. But for a person’s soul to say, “Oh God, I see these things and I want to please You,” that is something wonderful.
“I see what You have done for me, and I say, ‘How can I give back to You? I want to please You in return.’” Then the will says, “I want to do what You show me is right. I want to do those things.”
That is what was happening when the people heard the Law. It was turning them back, and they were saying, “Oh God, I want what You want from me.” It is not merely, “I want to obey.” It is, “I want the things that You want from me.”
That makes it a lot different than saying, “You better knuckle down.” When you see that the things God wants for you are good, you begin to say, “Lord, I want the good.”
The people’s calling for the Book of the Law to be read was like saying, “Lord, in the light of all we have seen You do—we have seen You bring us back from exile, rebuild the temple, and rebuild the walls of the city—we see that truly we are Your people.”
“Who else could we be, after You have done all these things? We have to be Your people. Because we see that we are Your people, we want to live our lives in a way that testifies that we are Your people.”
“We want to live lives that glorify You. We want to live lives that mark us out as Yours. It is not enough that the temple is rebuilt. It is not enough that the walls are rebuilt. That is all great and good, but Lord, what good are those things if You do not have a people who want to be Yours?”
“We want to be that people.” This is the foreground: God now has a people who are saying, “Oh God, we want to be Your people. Show us how to live.”
Francis Schaeffer wrote a book in 1976 called How Then Should We Live? He was writing about the decline of Western culture. Here we have returned exiles in the land, under Persian rule, living among a mixed population, and they are saying, “God, we want to live for You. Show us how.”
God was not merely building a temple or building walls. He was doing those things so that He would have a people who would follow Him. Otherwise, the buildings would only result in empty worship.
God wanted a people, and they had come to the point of saying, “We see all You are doing. We see that You have called us to be Your people. We want to be Your people. You have to show us how to live like Your people.”
Now to the details. We have the reappearance of Ezra. Ezra is not mentioned in the book of Nehemiah until Nehemiah 8. From the end of Ezra 10 to this point, we do not see Ezra anymore.
What do we know about Ezra? First of all, he was a scribe and a priest. What is a scribe? A scribe was not merely a copyist.
Barb, my kids, and I went to the Bible Museum a few years ago. I thought it was going to be hokey, but on one of the upper floors they had an exhibit about how the Bible has been preserved through the years and how we can know that people did not simply write into it or mess with it.
The way the Jews copied the Scriptures is fascinating. They were so meticulous. Hebrew writing has all these little jots and tittles. Jesus said that not one jot or tittle of the Law would pass away. The copyists had to be exact. If they were not exact, they had to get rid of the whole thing and start over.
A scribe was not only a copyist. As he copied, he read what he copied. One thing I have found lately, as I have changed my study habits, is that when I study for a Bible study, I have begun to copy out the section we are going to read.
I write it out on paper, sometimes more than once, sometimes in different versions. The more you do that, the more you connect with what you are reading. You are not just fast-forwarding through it. You see things, go back, underline, and begin to gain understanding. You get questions: “Why is he saying it this way?”
Ezra did that. I read in one Jewish source that Ezra was responsible for bringing the Law back to Jerusalem because he was a scribe. He brought back copies of the Law.
But he was not only a copyist; he was a teacher of the Law. In the New Testament, we read about the scribes and the Pharisees. The scribes sat in the seat of Moses because they not only copied and read the Word, but they taught what was in the Word. They gave interpretation.
Ezra had set his heart not only to teach the Law, but to do the Law. That is a wonderful thing. He was saying, “I do not just want to teach these things. I want the things I am teaching to affect me. I want them to affect me first.”
“I want them to have their effect on me first, so that when I am teaching, I know the power and the holiness that are in this Word because it is having an effect on my life.”
Ezra means “help.” Some say Ezra is a shortened form of Azaryahu. The “yahu” means God, so Ezra’s name can be understood as “God helps.”
The people called for Ezra to read. Ezra was a ready scribe. I do not know how many years there were between Ezra 10 and Nehemiah 8, but he had been sitting in the background for all those years. Now came the moment when he was really used.
God always has the right man at the right time. Here He had Ezra as a ready scribe. Is this not a great picture of the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is a ready scribe for us. He takes the Word and gives sense to it.
When we say, “Lord, I do not know what this means. Help me with this,” the Holy Spirit is right there: “Here I am. I am ready.”
Ezra also had Levites who were teaching. Some people think Ezra had a small school of scribes in Jerusalem. He taught others, not merely the vocation of being a scribe, but how to read the Word, copy the Word, and understand the Word.
He mentored and discipled these men. Then, when this was needed, they were ready. There was a whole crowd of people, and they did not have little microphones to help them. The Levites went out among the people and gave sense to the Word.
They expounded the Word. As it was read, they explained what it was saying, what it meant, and probably how it applied to the people.
Here we have the detail that Ezra the scribe was there, and that other brothers were ready to come in and help.
This is what God was doing. If we do not see what is in the foreground, all the stuff in the background does not mean anything.
Not only does the background give meaning to the foreground, but the foreground gives meaning to the background. All that background leads to this: God now has a people who want to live for Him, who are saying, “We want to be Your people.”
The buildings are not the end. The temple and the walls are not the end. The end God is after is that He would finally have a people for Himself.
The temple and these other things are shadows. The temple points to the church, and what is the church? It is the people. It is the people of God saying, “We are Your people. We want to be Your people.”
These people were also saying, “We do not know everything. We have had the prophetic ministry of Haggai and Zechariah, but the one thing we do not know is: How do we live? Lord, show us how we are supposed to live as Your people.”
At the end of Nehemiah 9, after that long and beautiful prayer, they make a covenant with God. There is a new dedication to God. They are saying, “We want to be Your people.”
It is not dedication to the temple itself. God had shown before that He could destroy the temple if He did not have a people. He was showing them that He wanted a people.
Then, in Nehemiah 11, they begin to repopulate the city. Part of living as God’s people was being brought together in the city where God had said His name would dwell. People were saying, “Lord, I want to go back. I want to live in this city as Your people.”
Later, there was a separation from the mixture that had entered through intermarriage. The question was, “How do I live, Lord?” The answer was that the ways and thinking of the world were not for them.
This is why a Christian view of life is so important. At the center of a Christian view of life is not freedom of religion in the United States, and it is not merely social or political matters. The center is that Christ is coming back—and soon.
The Lord is not for the United States. The Lord is for His kingdom. That is the thing that counts: His kingdom.
If you want to be in His kingdom, there are things the Lord will show you: “This needs to be tweaked. This needs to be done away with. You need to get away from this. You need to embrace this.”
When we come to the Lord and say, “Lord, I do not know how to live. Show me,” He says, “Come to the place where I dwell.” God dwells in His Word.
Then again, He gives us a ready scribe: the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes the Word and gives us light concerning what it means. He is the One who writes it on our hearts.
In these last days, is this not what the testimony of the Lord really is—that He has a people who can be seen as His people, who do not bow down to other gods, and who live in accordance with His will?
Is that not what the Lord is really after in this world? Is that not what His kingdom is?
Brothers and sisters, the whole painting comes together. Everything in it is relevant. Especially relevant is what is in the foreground: God wants a people who want to be His people, and who say, “Show me how to be it.”
That illuminates the whole background. It shows why all these things happened.
With these things in mind, then, the question is: how should we live? That is a question of simply saying, “Lord, I do not know. Show me, please.”
Not “show me” in some demanding way, but, “Lord, show me for my own life. Show me, because I want to glorify You. I want You to be the One whom people see.”
“Lord, I do not want to be like my fathers, who left You and went into idolatry. I want to be that new person. I want to be that new creation that You have meant me to be in Christ.”
Heavenly Father, we are so grateful that You have a great work. It was not Nehemiah who merely said, “I am involved in a great work,” but it is You who are saying, “I am doing a great work, and I will not come down.”
Lord, that is why we know that You speak to us. You are not coming down because You have a work that You are doing. You have a work to make us Your people.
Lord, we want to bow to You. We want to go with You. As individuals, we want to be Your people. As a group, we want to be Your people. We want to have the testimony that Christ lives in us and can be seen.
Oh Lord, we do not want merely some kind of morality. We want the very life that portrays You—the life that is Yours.
So, Lord, we call upon You now and say, “Here we are.” What did Mary say? She said, “Be it done, as You wish.” Lord, that is what we say: let Your will be done in us. In Jesus’ name, amen.