Returning Home Series

We are continuing our series called The Story. God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. Last week, we talked about the story of a guy named Daniel and the Lion’s Den. This week we are going to continue the story about the Babylonian captivity. Specifically, we are going to talk about the return home; the Jewish people being able to go back to their homeland after almost 70 years in captivity. You may recall that the Jewish people were basically in trouble, specifically the kings were in trouble, because they were involved in idol worship. God basically decided I am going to have to pull you away from you kingdom to learn a lesson. So he allowed wicked King Nebuchadnezzar to come in and pretty much destroy Jerusalem and leave their beautiful temple in ruins. But God, in his sovereign grace and mercy, came in and allowed the people to come back into Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. It was a very important thing. This temple idea was something where the temple was like our church. It was the center of worship of God. But more than that it was really the center of their identity and where people really believed that the spirit of God was housed in the temple. So the temple was very important for the Jewish identity at the time. God is going to allow the people to come back to Jerusalem and he is going to do it in a very unorthodox way. He is going to do it through a guy named Cyrus. A Persian king named Cyrus. We are going to be looking at some readings today. We are going to be looking at primarily two books, the Book of Ezra and the Book of Haggai. Those are books that you might not be familiar with. If you are using the red pew Bible, it is about page 460 and Haggai comes about 500 pages later. We are going to look at chapter 1 of Ezra and chapter 1 and 4 of Haggai. They are both starting in the first chapter. I am going to read through Ezra starting at verse 1:1. (Scripture read here.)

This is a big deal because this is a pagan king who God placed on his heart to release the people that had been placed into captivity for about 70 years. You wonder why did God use a pagan king to accomplish his will. We really don’t know. But we know that again God is an illustration that God can use anybody he wants to accomplish his will. As the story goes, the people were released. They had to travel approximately 900 miles through the desert back into Jerusalem, back into the Promised Land. As that opening verse tells us, he did not leave them without supplies. In fact, he gave them gold and silver. He gave them animals. He gave them food and water. He even gave them the various worship items that King Nebechudnezzar had actually taken out of the temple when he ransacked it about 70 years ago. That was a pretty amazing thing. God was supplying the needs of the people.

There is actually a passage, I think it is in Philippians chapter 4 around verse 19 that just came to mind. Paul was talking about how God would supply all our needs according to his riches in Christ Jesus. That is what he does. He provides us all our needs. So again, the people are going back to Jerusalem. They have all this enthusiasm going back because they are going to build the temple. The first thing they do when they get back is decide to build the altar first. The altar was a little bit in the outer courts of the temple, and it was a place where they would offer up the animal sacrifices to God. So that is what they did. Then they slowly began to, stone by stone, build the beautiful, glorious temple back. Just as they got started, about two years into the project, they began to hit all this opposition. These people started coming up against them. Mostly the people in the surrounding areas. Particularly in Sumaria they came in and began to have opposition against the Jews coming back and trying to build their temple. We don’t know exactly why, but there were probably some ideas that when you build the religious temple, it means you are going to be strong spiritually, which is a good indicator that you are probably going to be strong in military might and you are going to be strong in power. They were a little bit nervous about that situation. They went in and began to oppose the building project. They began to insight fear and discouragement in the people. The passage goes on to say in Ezra chapter 4 “The peoples around them set out to discourage the people of Judah and make them afraid to go on building. They hired counselors to work against them and frustrate their plans during the entire reign of Cyrus of Persia and down to the reign of Darius king of Persia.” They were there and they just wanted to stop the Jewish people from the rebuilding of the temple and ultimately of the whole city of Jerusalem.