Introduction Slide -1 Now that the second wave of people have returned from exile in Babylon to Jerusalem…the building work on the temple has been largely done…and the rebuilding of the city walls can get underway… Ezra…turns his attention to people…and the rebuilding of the community of God…in their homeland… However…the problem is that…they are in their land…but they are not in control of their own destiny….actually…God is…but they were still under the control of the Persian Empire…and would continue to be under the control of one empire or another…for the foreseeable future… So…until God returned to the temple…until He displaced the foreigners who ruled over them…they would be continually in exile…I know I have explained this before…so that we could understand the mindset of the people when Jesus came…(Luke 4 etc)… However…last week…the Bible Project released a new video on the theme of exile… I think this is worth watching…in order to understand that anything we say regards rebuilding people…has to be taken in this context of exile…both for Israel past and for us…… Show video…Exile…from …lasts 5 minutes… People in Exile live with the consequences of sin Slide - 2
Broken covenant Israel’s promise of land had been conditional…and the conditions had not only been broken to the extent that it caused them to be exiled…but…as the video described…after this…they returned to their wicked ways…they continually broke that covenant which had been made with God… Therefore…they…as do we have to live continually with the consequences of sin…in our own individual lives…and as we see…day in day out…in the world round about us… Exile is the human condition …as the video said…Since the garden, for Ezra’s time, for us all…we know that it also told us that Jesus is the resolution of that…but for now…let’s focus on the symptoms…before we get to the remedy… Ezra…had a huge task ahead of him… …and here he seems to recognise that it is not just about the physical building of walls…it is also about rebuilding people…and one of the problems with rebuilding people seems to be that they need to be broken down…before they can be built up… So…Ezra sets about the task by being broken himself… Slide – 3 While Ezra was praying and confessing, weeping and throwing himself down before the house of God, a large crowd of Israelites—men, women and children—gathered around him. They too wept bitterly… (Ezra 10:1)
We may fail to notice it…but this would have been an unusual sight…for Ezra was a priest…he was also an official of the Persian king’s court…such dignitaries did not normally act like this… But…the hand of God…as mentioned last time and recorded 3 times in chapter 8…moves in mysterious ways…not just in unexpected physical manifestations of power…but…in spirit… His hand…moves our hearts…before he moves our hands…and Ezra’s heart was moved for himself and as he resonated with his people… And he wept…while praying and confessing and throwing himself down on the ground…and as he did so…others joined in to the extent that a large crowd gathered… Perhaps there is something relevant there for the church today…if we expect God’s Hand to move in our times…we need to allow Him to move our hearts…to see the plank in our own eyes…and to confess our sins…which is a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith…as taught by Jesus… Slide - 4 A new covenant… However…the response of the people is interesting…first of all they identified their sins…in the taking of foreign wives…and then they thought that they should make a new covenant with God…since they had broken the original one… Their response is admirable but perhaps does not go deep enough because the catalogue of sins leading to the exile…was much more extensive…