Ezra, starting in Chapter 1:
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah the prophet might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and also put it in writing, saying:
“Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord God of heaven has given me; and He has commanded me to build Him a house at Jerusalem which is in Judah.
Who is among you of all His people? May his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel—He is God—which is in Jerusalem.
And whoever is left in any place where he dwells, let the men of his place help him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, besides the freewill offerings for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.”
Then the heads of the fathers’ houses of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites, with all whose spirits God had moved, arose to go up and build the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem.
And then in Chapter 3, starting with Verse 1:
And when the seventh month had come, and the children of Israel were in the cities, the people gathered together as one man to Jerusalem.
Then Jeshua the son of Jozadak, and his brethren the priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and his brethren, arose and built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, as it is written in the law of Moses, the man of God.
Though fear had come upon them because of the people of those countries, they set the altar on its bases; and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord, both the morning and evening burnt offerings.
They also kept the Feast of Tabernacles, as it is written, and offered the daily burnt offerings in the number required by ordinance for each day.
Oh, Heavenly Father, we look to You this morning. Only You can open Your Word to us. Only You can show us who You are. Only You can say, “This is what I am doing.” Lord, only You.
And so we turn to You this morning. We thank You that You have brought us to Yourself, that we might be Your people. Lord, that is our desire. We do want to be Your people, walking with You wherever You lead.
Take Your Word this morning, I pray, and feed us from it. May there be real food for our hearts and our spirits. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Just to give you a little idea of how I came up with what I am going to speak about today: Jerry Eamon gave a word on Haggai, and it was about building the house. I started to think, “Well, Lord, how do You build, or how do You take part in building the house?” That is what started making me look to the Lord, wonder, and ask Him about these things.
The other thing is that we use big concepts, and they can become, at least to me, just key words—talking points. They lose their edge because I have heard them, and heard them, and heard them, and my own heart has not responded. That is what makes things go cold: if you do not respond.
There cannot be any building or rebuilding of the house without people going back to Jerusalem. We have to remember that when Ezra starts out, the people are not in Jerusalem. They have been exiled for seventy years.
In Ezekiel, we read that the Lord left the temple and departed. There was nothing there. The temple had been destroyed, the ark had been taken away, and the walls had been broken down.
So what is the Lord doing? That is really the key here. This is something that the Lord is doing. It is not something that we say, “You know something? I think it is about time we went back.” It does not come out of our own hearts or minds.
The Lord initiates everything, because the Lord always initiates. He initiates salvation. It was in His heart first. There are layers of things that happen before we get saved, things that lead up to it, but it is always initiated by God.
God initiates it because He created us for a purpose. He created man for His own pleasure and for His own purposes. It is for His own sake that He redeemed us.
In Ezekiel 36, when the Lord promised to bring His people back, He said that He would do it for His own sake. They had destroyed His testimony. The nations blasphemed His name because of the way His people acted.
He said, in effect, “I am taking you and putting you into captivity. I am going to judge you and discipline you. But I will bring you back.”
He says that to His people. He is restoring His testimony.
These are big words, so let me put it another way: what we see in the Book of Ezra is God moving. God is moving to bring about His own will and His own ends—His end for Israel and His end for His people.
He is not merely moving global or national puzzle pieces. He is also moving in my life and in our lives. This is not apart from us. God never wants to work apart from His creation, which is us.
There is a change in the heart of the people because they are beginning to listen. This is the end of Old Testament history. In Ezra and Nehemiah, we are at the end of that history of Israel.
It is in this time that we have the promise of the new covenant. Jeremiah spoke to those who had already gone into exile when he spoke in Jeremiah 31 of the new covenant: “I will forgive your sins, and I will remember them no more.”
Ezekiel was in captivity, and the Lord was speaking to them even there. He said, “I will give you a new heart—a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone. I will put My Spirit in you.”
In a sense, this is a transition between the old covenant and the new covenant, which would begin about four hundred and fifty years later when Christ came.
This is different from Exodus. In Exodus, the people were slaves. They were held against their will under a cruel taskmaster. God redeemed them with a mighty hand. He brought them out of slavery, defeated the one who held them captive, and led them into the promised land.
The people in Ezra and Nehemiah present a picture of restoration. They were not generally slaves. Jeremiah 29 told them, “You are going to be there seventy years, so build houses, have children, and do these things, because after seventy years I am going to bring you back.”
They were in captivity.
I was a basketball player in high school and college. I was in captivity to basketball, and it was wonderful. Do you understand that? It was wonderful.
Slavery is not a wonderful thing. Captivity does not have to be bad. I loved the game. I loved the competition. Even after my days of playing in college, I kept playing in recreational leagues and all sorts of things because I loved it. That was captivity.
The Lord brought me out of that captivity because I got old. It was naturally supernatural. The Lord was getting me out of that.
I like college basketball. I do not like the pros, but I will tell you: I liked being captive. In the same way, a lot of these people liked being captives. We will get into that.
God is working in men and through men to restore His testimony. His testimony is not the way they get together and meet, because they were meeting in captivity. It was not about the way they met. It was about who they were.
They were His people. That is the key. His testimony is His people. He has brought us to show forth who He is.
When I studied the law a few years ago, one thing I found was that it was not given merely to say, “Do not do this, do not do that, and do not do the other thing.” It was not simply a set of rules that separated them. It was a picture of who God is.
“Do not commit adultery,” because He is faithful. “Do not steal,” because He has all there is and needs nothing. If you have Him, you have everything you need.
It was a picture of who He is—not who He was, but who He is.
There are four actions in Ezra 1 and 3, in the verses we read:
We want to look at these as God’s way of recovery.
The first thing that happened was that they heard and moved. Notice: it was not merely that they heard. We are great hearers. We are good at hearing. But some of us are not very good at moving.
I was a history major. I loved lecture classes because I loved hearing stories about what was happening and putting things together. But I did not like writing papers. I did not like putting what I was learning back onto the page and being evaluated on it.
My senior project was role-playing the Russian Revolution. I loved it, but at the end we had to write a twenty-page paper. It was rough for me. I got a C-plus, but that was okay—I passed. Basketball player: I passed. That was good.
The whole thing is hearing and moving. Have you ever said to your wife, “Yeah, I heard you”? What does that mean? “I heard you, loud and clear—but I am not doing it.”
Hearing is more than discerning a voice or understanding words. When the Lord says, “He who has ears, let him hear,” He is not just talking about the ear. He is talking about the whole body. You hear with your whole being.
Hearing is heeding. I take in what I hear, and I respond to it.
This hearing began before Cyrus. It was not merely the edict that went out. Mac used Daniel 9 last week. Daniel ascertained from the prophecy of Jeremiah that the years were about to be fulfilled. He did not simply say, “Wow, that is great.” He prayed.
There was a hearing, and Daniel sensed that it was time—the Lord was saying, “I want to do this.”
Daniel never returned, but he was one who helped bring about the return of others. Sometimes the Lord shows us something not simply for us to enter into, but for us to pray that others will enter into it.
It is like the Lord saying to Moses, “You are not going into the land, but lead My people to the border.” Moses did not enter in, but he was an integral part.
This is something for some of us older saints. We need to look to the whole generation, not only our part of the generation. We are no longer the tip of the iceberg. We are the bottom, the unseen part, because the visible part is the ones we are supporting and praying for.
We hold them up by our prayers, our fellowship with younger brothers and sisters, and what the Lord has given us through our experience and our walks with God.
Daniel was an older brother, probably in his eighties or close to ninety. That means there is hope for some of us, does it not? Abraham was seventy-five before he really started to move. So there is hope for me.
Then there was the edict, or proclamation, of Cyrus. The important thing is not only that he made an edict, but who it was who made the edict.
Sometimes we read Scripture as though an edict were merely the Word of God spoken, revealed, or brought to us, saying, “Act on this.” It is that rhema word: “This is for right now.”
But we do not take into account who is speaking that word to us.
The first youth retreat I ever spoke at, I gave a message on, “Who do you say that I am?” Not, “Who do men say that I am?” but, “Who do you say that I am?”
Some of us do not know who is talking to us. Some younger saints may see God as the God of their fathers. When He revealed Himself to Jacob, He said, “I am the God of your fathers.” That was gracious, because He came to Jacob where he was. But He wanted to become Jacob’s God.
We have all these pictures of who Jesus is. He is Shepherd. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We sing about Him being King. But I do not know that we really see Him as King.
That is who He is today: He is King. He is seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high as King over us.
It is not like a friend saying something to me that I can simply blow off. If I really realized that the One on high was speaking to me, I might straighten up and say, “You are talking to me? You are the One on high, and You are speaking to me?”
I do not think the disciples fully understood that the Lord was King while He was on earth. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” can sometimes become a good religious summary. But in reality, He is King.
“All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth.”
John was the one who leaned on Jesus’ breast. Why did he fall at His feet in Revelation 1 as a dead man? Because he saw Jesus in a whole other light. He was not merely the One upon whose breast John had leaned. He was the all-powerful King.
That is who is speaking to us: the King.
Not many responded. The Lord was saying, “I want you to go back. I am sending you back. Everything you need is provided for you. Go there and build My house.”
But many were no longer captives; they were captivated where they were.
Many Jews had prospered during that time—in business, farming, and other things. Then another really important thing happened: they got religion.
It was during the captivity that the synagogue came into existence. We do not know precisely when, but it came into existence. A class of scribes began to develop.
When you read Kings and Chronicles, you sometimes wonder, “Why are they doing this? Do they not even read their Bible?” The answer is that they often did not. In Josiah’s revival, they said, “Look what we found!” It was the law. Then they realized they were in trouble.
Now, however, they had prosperity and religious structure. They had a meeting, and they had a law to guide them. “What else do we need? This is all we need. Why do we need to go back there?”
They could say, “You brothers who want to go, we will pray for you. Here, I have a couple of dollars. This will help you on the way down.” They had the best of both worlds, and they were happy with that.
But there was a group of people who not only heard but moved. They responded.
There is nothing better, humanly speaking, than having someone you love respond to you. I could give you examples, but I would get mushy.
About fifty thousand people went back. I do not know how many Israelites, Judeans, or Jews there were at that time, but they had seventy years to propagate. There must have been many Jews.
They were not without study either. The Babylonian Talmud became more influential than the Jerusalem Talmud. These people studied, looked at these things, and developed an ethic: ethical monotheism. There is one God, and He gives us rules to live by. We live by those rules. We have the Sabbath.
But they were satisfied with that. They had enough.
Then about fifty thousand people went. Ezra 2 mentions only around thirteen individuals by name, though it names many families. Those were the big names.
What does that tell you about the people who went back? Not many noble. Not many skilled. But God is glorified in the nameless people.
Is that not one of the wonderful things about the Bible? It speaks of many people without naming them. Sometimes we feel like nameless people. It is wonderful to know that God uses nameless people and calls nameless people to Himself.
The next thing that happened was that they gathered as one man. God always moves in individual lives, but that is never His end. That is not the end of His work in you.
When you come to the Lord, you are not meant to become a Christian who stands alone with a private testimony before men. God has never meant that to happen. He meant us to be in a body.
God moves individuals into gathering together because they are of like mind. By “like mind,” I do not mean they agree on every line of doctrine. I mean they all believe this: “God has called me to be here. God has called me out, and I have obeyed Him.”
When Jerry Lineberg and I were young Christians, we had been saved and were doing what Christians do. We were going to church. But something was missing, and we could not put our finger on it because we were doing the right things. We were going to church and Bible study. We did not go to prayer meeting because, you know, that was too much.
We were at a church that met in the park, and we were asking, “What do we do with ourselves? Is this what being a Christian is? Is there more to being a Christian?”
There were Jerry, Eddie, Lou Police—Floyd’s son—and me. Lou said, “I think my dad will teach us a Bible study.”
Another Bible study? But this Bible study was different. All of a sudden, we were like-minded. All of a sudden, we were brought together.
I did not know Jerry Lineberg except by name in school. He was football, and I was basketball, so we did not touch. I did not know Ed very well, and I knew little of Lou except that he drew a lot of stuff.
But we were like-minded. It did not matter that we did not know one another. We were drawn together to be together under the Lord. We wanted to know Him. We wanted to serve Him. We were asking, “How do we do this?”
The Lord brought us together, and He gave us what we needed. He opened the Word to us in a way we had never experienced before.
Part of that was the way Floyd taught. He did not simply sit up front and talk. He said, “You need to read your Bible. What are you studying? You should be reading that. Do you have questions from that?”
All of a sudden, there was dialogue. It was not only dialogue at the Bible study; it became dialogue between us and dialogue between us and the Lord.
We were gathering as one man, and the Lord was bringing us into something bigger. It is not simply my own walk with Jesus. I am related to each one of you.
I may be related more closely to some—Jerry, Bob Dordich, Mac, and Stella—but that does not mean I cannot be related to all of you. We show our relationship by being together.
It is not merely being together in a meeting. We are called to be together.
When we have breakfast on Saturday morning, that is a call of the Lord saying, “I want you to come together. Have fellowship.” That is what you do when you eat.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear My voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.”
The third thing that happened was that they rebuilt the altar. The altar does two things: first, it represents judgment; second, it is a place of offering.
The fact that it represents judgment is really important. The altar was a box of wood, and wood represents humanity. But it was overlaid with bronze. Bronze speaks of judgment. It tells us that God’s view of humanity was that it had to be judged.
But the wonderful thing is that we are bronzed. We have been judged in Christ. That is a wonderful thing to know. I no longer have to worry about being judged for my sin. I have been bronzed.
Back in the fifties, people used to bronze baby shoes. Well, we have been bronzed. When we come to the Lord’s Table, that is something to remember: I have been bronzed. I come in the good of being bronzed.
The altar is also a place of offering. In Babylon, there was no altar.
When they came to this altar, they did not come for atonement. This was not about atoning work. It was a place of offering, and the offering was themselves.
“What shall I render to God for all His goodness to me? What shall I render?”
In Babylon there was no altar, but there was a Sabbath. “I give God the Sabbath.” But what does God want? Does God want a day?
When they set up this altar, they reinstituted the daily offering. This was a daily offering. It speaks of offering myself to God daily.
Romans 6:13 says:
Present yourselves unto God, as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
Brothers and sisters, especially younger brothers and sisters, it can be hard to come to the Lord when you have experienced failure in your life. You do not feel that the Lord is happy with you. You think, “How can I come to the Lord like this?”
But remember: you are bronzed. You are not only dead; you are also alive.
When they set the altar on its foundation, it was established so that it could not be tipped over. That is the whole thing about your offering. When you come to that altar, you can stand on it.
You can stand and know that your sins are forgiven because the foundation is Jesus Christ.
By the foundation being Jesus Christ, I mean His incarnation—His becoming a man so that He could relate to you and you could relate to Him. I mean that He sacrificially died on your behalf. Because He died sinless, He was raised from the dead for your justification.
Finally, He gives you hope because He ascended into heaven as a man. That is important, because it is hope for me. I, as a man, can now enter heaven. That is a wonderful thing to grasp hold of.
Psalm 40:8 says:
I delight to do Thy will, O my God;
Yea, Thy law is within my heart.
Hebrews uses that truth: “Lo, I am come to do Thy will.”
Brothers and sisters, this is where all our service comes from. It comes out of this altar being set up. The altar is my daily offering of myself to God.
When I come to the Lord, I present myself. But I do not present myself based on what I have done, who I think I am, or what I have not done. That is not what the altar is for.
The altar is for laying yourself on Jesus Christ and allowing that altar to take you to God. He is the One who takes you to God. God is satisfied with Him, and that is why He has put you in Him: because He is satisfied with you in Him.
His death made us free so that we could present ourselves before God to do His will.
It is not just me doing this. Since we gather together as one group, we all do it. We are all in the place of coming to the altar.
That is why we gather together as one group: we see others coming to the altar and reestablishing that daily walk. We are encouraged to reestablish our daily walk—to walk before God in newness of life.
It is not your old life that you are presenting to Him anymore. It is a new life. It is the life of Christ in us.
Finally, they observed the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Tabernacles followed the Day of Atonement by about a week. Their sins were already atoned for. That is the whole attitude of the Feast of Tabernacles: our sins are behind us.
It was one of the most joyous of all the feasts because there was nothing to remember. God has separated our sins as far as the east is from the west. He has dealt with them. They are off the ledger.
Each feast has its own focus. Passover focuses on redemption and deliverance from Egypt. Firstfruits has the idea of resurrection and what lies ahead. Tabernacles concerns the harvest—the full harvest.
There were two things about Tabernacles. First, it was a remembrance of the journey in the wilderness and how God provided everything. The people would live in booths made with branches, remembering how God brought them out and provided for them.
It was a great way of saying, “God provided for us throughout all our wilderness journey, and we can rejoice in that.”
The second thing was that it came at the time of harvest. It celebrated what the Lord had done. He had blessed them in the harvest.
In making the booths, we can tritely say, “This world is not my home,” and that is true. But it is not simply a trite saying. What brings you to the place of saying, “This world is not my home,” is your time of presenting yourself to God.
If you do not present yourself to God, you do not see what He has done for you. You do not see what He is doing in you. The world remains your home, and you look for satisfaction there.
But when you have that daily time with Him, He brings you into things you had never seen before. You come into a love that is so precious.
The harvest was the hope of the farmer. Why does the farmer plant grain? In the hope of the harvest.
The Lord Jesus planted Himself. If a grain falls into the ground, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. There again is the whole idea of gathering together. There is a harvest to be gathered.
For us, this harvest is the hope of glory. We do not think about it enough. We look at the world outside and all the things happening in Iraq, or the disarray in our own country. Our eyes are everywhere.
But there is a hope that I am going to be complete.
What do you picture when you think of the hope of glory? What is the hope of glory for you?
I know what it is for me. It is a body in which Jesus can say, “The enemy hath nothing in Me.” I am looking forward to that transformation, where the enemy has nothing in me.
I am looking forward to a place where I am not overcome by the flesh, where my spirit is so strong that my flesh is in check. I am looking forward to no death—not merely no physical death, but no separation from God. Never separated.
Sometimes I think so little of what I have in Christ. Colossians 3 says, “If ye then were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above.”
What are the things that are above? New kinds of fruit? New modes of transportation? No.
The first thing I think of now is the fellowship between the Father and the Son—and that I can have that fellowship with Him.
That is what 1 John speaks about: fellowship with the Father and with His Son. Seek that fellowship. Seek that kingdom. Seek that rule in your life.
Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
Seek that harmony with the mind and heart of God. These are not merely spiritual ideas. They are realities that the Lord has placed before us and said, “These are yours. Respond to Me.”
I have done a poor job, but that is okay because the Lord has grace. I want to end with this: the Lord starts things in our lives, and the Lord finishes things in our lives.
But do not take that for granted and use Philippians 1:6—“He who began a good work will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus”—if you are simply going to sit and say, “Amen, let it be, Lord.”
Because then it is not going to happen.
When He called those brothers and sisters out of Babylon and brought them to that place, He took them step by step. “I brought you here so that you could restore My testimony.”
Little by little He brought them forward. When they laid the foundation of the temple, the older saints wept.
Sometimes we look for big things. We say, “I hoped the Lord would do something much bigger in my life.” Perhaps it is not the way we wanted it to be, or people do not see what we want them to see.
But Zechariah, one of the prophets of the restoration, said:
For who hath despised the day of small things?
The Lord says, little by little, take your steps and get there. Come and gather as one. Come. Rebuild the altar. Set it on its foundation. Offer that daily sacrifice.
Then see what He has provided: glory, and a home that is not on this earth.
Oh, Heavenly Father, I know that You are a great God. I want to thank You that You are able to do the things that You want to do, and I want to thank You that You want to include us in doing them.
Lord, I pray for myself first. I pray that these things I am talking about will not just fall to the ground in my life, that they will not simply be seed on the ground. Lord, bring life out of them.
When I see it and You say, “Can these bones live?” I can say, “Lord, I do not know, but You do.” You breathe on the bones and bring life to them.
Lord, for my brothers and sisters here, I do not know where they are except that they are in You, and I pray for them. I pray that everything You mean for them to be as a testimony to You, You will bring about in their lives.
Wherever they are lacking, bring in that which fulfills—not their lusts or their desire to be spiritual—but Your desire for them as Your testimony.
I pray for us as a group, Lord, that we would be a testimony to You. Not like those who simply have a meeting and a guide of rules. Lord, may we be a living testimony to You.
May we truly bring You that daily offering: that morning offering that says, “Lord, I am here for You,” and that evening offering that says, “Oh, Lord, thank You for keeping me.”
Lord, we want to give ourselves fresh to You. We want to be those who do not just hear, but move.
Lord, we thank You for Your Holy Spirit. We thank You for Your desire. We thank You for Your plans. We thank You for including us.
Lord, we want to be restored into that testimony, in Jesus’ name. Amen.