Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - God of History | The Writings | Ezra 1-2

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Why is the book of Ezra in the Bible? How does it fit inside God's bigger story? How does it's ancient context speak to our lives today? In today's episode, Tanya gives the context for Ezra 1-2, reminding us of how God used real people of history to bring about His kingdom. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Ezra 1-2

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. Hey, listeners, so today we're starting a new book. We're starting the book of Ezra, which is going to go right into Nehemiah. And if you don't know where that is, don't worry, you're not alone. It's tucked into your Bibles. It's between the larger books of First and Second Chronicles and then Psalms and Proverbs,

which comes a little bit later. So what happens is if you're reading your physical Bible, it flaps open to some of these larger books and you just kind of have to dig or use your table of contents to find Ezra. Now, if you read your Bible on your phone like a lot of us do these days too, that's also confusing because Ezra in the table of contents is listed earlier in the Old Testament. While historically or chronologically speaking, it actually covers the events at the end of the Old Testament leading right up until the 400 years of darkness before the Masonic King. So just a little tidbit about Ezra as we get into it, but I think you're really going to enjoy it.

So I'm glad that you're going to be with us for hopefully the next few days as we go through this book. Now, if the events chronicled in the book of Ezra were to happen to us today, I think we would be just as shocked, or it would be just as shocking as it was in 539 BC. You see, if today the world's most powerful political leader just suddenly changed his mind, whatever their policy, whatever their view, whatever they were in power or control of if they just suddenly changed their mind about how to handle that. Wouldn't we wonder why? What on earth just happened?

But see, in 539 BC, that's what happened. The Israelites had been in captivity since King Nebuchadnezzar took them by force into Babylon almost 50 years earlier. So exile was really all two generations of Israelites had ever known. But when King Cyrus of Persia overthrew Babylon, king, it probably didn't seem like much was going to change. I mean, here's just another king who's even getting more territory. They probably thought that returning to their home at this point was a long shot. Maybe they even had lost some hope. But in 539 BC, we see something shocking happen

when King Cyrus overthrew that Babylonian king, when he took over the territories, including Israel and Judah, and when he made a decree that the people could go home and rebuild their temple. He was going to let the people go. Now, that sounds very promising, doesn't it? But Ezra covers almost a century's worth of events. It actually begins in a very dark place before this decree is issued, and we don't actually see things come into complete fruition through the entire book. We do start with Israelites who are away from home. They're people whose temple has been destroyed, their city gates have been burned, and they're probably struggling with the prophecy of Jeremiah 2512 that said after 70 years, God would punish the king of Babylon and that

nation for their iniquity, because that prophecy was not yet in view for them. But as Ezra opens, God was at work. He was at work in the heart of one man, King Cyrus, to make his promises true. God was about to do something that probably didn't make any sense if you were looking at things from a historical perspective based on the people's experience about how leaders ruled and based on the political environment of the day. But God had bigger plans. Listen in to the first few verses of Ezra chapter 1. It goes like this. In the first year of Cyrus, King of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah 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.

Thus says Cyrus King of Persia, the Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. And whoever 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 rebuild the house of the Lord. Okay, what we just read in those verses is something outrageously, surprising, and historically shifting. God stirred the heart of King Cyrus to issue not only a verbal decree that the temple should be rebuilt, but that the Jewish people should be let go to rebuild it.

And he also put it into writing, which meant that no matter what happened after had been issued, it could not be undone. See, this is important, because, without this decree, without this shift in history, without this happening in King Cyrus's heart because the Lord stirred him, there would be no nation of Israel, there would be no Jewish temple, there would be no city or family for the promised Messiah to be born into in his Jewish home and Jewish culture. Yet God was fulfilling his promises. He stirred the heart of King Cyrus in the way that it was described not only in Ezra, but also in Second Chronicles,

Chapter 36, which also says, Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be filled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia. Now, there are some scholars that think that even if Cyrus was declaring that the Lord is God, that the Jewish God is Yahweh or is Lord of all. He also might have just been hedging his bets. As the most powerful ruler in the world,

he could have thought that the more people he had worshiping and praying to God, the greater his chances that God would show him favor or would grant favor on him would come true. But I love no matter what Cyrus was doing if he was being authentic or manipulative. I love what Proverbs 211 says. about the way the Lord guides the hearts of kings. It says the king's heart, it's a stream of water in the hand of the Lord. He turns it wherever he will. So God is fulfilling his promise to his people, through Cyrus,

to give them a nation, a home, a temple, a genealogy, a messianic king, Jesus. But it's going to look pretty messy for a while. Ezra and Nehemiah are books about God's faithfulness, about God keeping his promises, but things don't move as quickly or as neatly as the Israelites think it should, as they hope it should. They must depend on the Lord and prayer. They must believe that he'll keep his word even when it looks like things aren't progressing. In fact, even with this decree from King Cyrus, the problems the Jewish people face didn't just go away.

In fact, in some ways they got worse. Some of the problems you were going to hear about in the following chapters sound a lot like, hours. For example, the people had been in exile a really long time. So when the younger generations started returning Jerusalem, these people were going back to a place they'd never seen before. And when they got there, they were returning to a land of strangers. They're returning to live among people who had not experienced exile, who had nothing in common as far as past experience. And they also had people from other places who had moved into the city. So they had to press, to claim their ancient entitlements. They had to face opposition from the people who were currently

living there. Now, the Israelites were also under a severe moral and religious challenge to remain set apart, to remain a people distinctively faithful to the Lord as things shifted and changed in their homeland as things changed even in their own households. They were pressures to assimilate, and they had to wrestle with what it meant to be faithful to God. They also faced economic pressures, even though they were granted a decree by the king, it took years to rebuild the city. And there was a changing of the guards before everything was finished. Sometimes the work came at great personal cost, and it must have seemed like it wasn't going to actually happen sometimes.

We understand some of those problems, and we also have problems that are uniquely ours. We have real problems. We have real hurt. Just knowing that God's promises are true doesn't mean we don't have real problems. problems. We have problems with kids. We have problems with infertility. We have trouble at work. We have financial insecurity. We have problems in our marriages. We have struggles sometimes if we're not married. But our real problem has been solved by Jesus. We have problems with kids. We have problems with infertility. We have troubles at work. And we have financial insecurities. We have

problems in our marriages and struggles in our relationships. We have hurts in our thought lives. But our real problem has been solved by Jesus. Our real problem was spiritual exile. Separation from our father and from our eternal home because of sin. And Jesus took that away. Jesus rescued us from our sin. He delivered us out of that our greatest problem. So there are several applications that you could take from these first two chapters of Ezra that we've talked about today. I mean, you could talk about the way that we shouldn't idolize the power of our political leaders because we trust that God is sovereign and in control. Or we could talk about how we, like the Israelite leaders, should be ready for action,

and we should be ready to stand up and do what God wants us to do when the time comes. But the hero of this story, the real hero of this story and the whole Bible, is King Jesus. And the people that were going to meet in Ezra, even the best leaders were going to meet in Ezra and Nehemiah, they're just shadows that point us to a greater leader. See, without God stirring the heart of King Cyrus, like we said, there would have been no Jewish family for Jesus to be born into. And without then Jesus' sacrifice on the cross for our sins, there would be no possibility for us to enter into God's family. I truly believe that God cares about every single one of our problems. I truly believe we can talk to him about every single thing

that worries us and troubles us and keeps us up at night. I truly believe we can take every single problem to God, but it's because he solved our greatest problem. I believe we can wait. I believe we can grow impatient. I believe even though things are messy, we can live in peace instead of fear. I believe we can have real and actual genuine hope no matter what our circumstantial evidence suggests because he solved our greatest problem. I believe that for those we love, we can have a real and can absolutely ask God to solve their problems with grief, addiction, relationships, anxiety, disappointment. But I also think we can ask God to do what he did in the heart of King Cyrus, in Ezra, in the book of Ezra, to stir the heart, to make himself known, to solve the greatest

problem and bring them into his family.