Ezra 1:1-2 (2 Chronicles 36:22-23): You Can’t Go Home Again.

Presented to Swift Current Corps, 21 August 2010
by Captain Michael Ramsay

“In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing: ‘This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah.”

We are going to spend the next couple of weeks looking at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Did you know that some scholars consider that they are actually one book? Ezra-Nehemiah has two distinct sections pertaining to 1) the Temple (Ezra 1-6) and 2) Holiness (Ezra 7- Nehemiah 13)[1] and some people even lump them together with 2 Chronicles as one whole work – if you flip back to the last two verses of 2 Chronicles you will notice that Ezra begins – with overlap – right where 2 Chronicles leaves off.[2]

I used to be a teacher once upon a time. When I was going through my teacher training many years ago, we were always advised to establish prerequisite knowledge prior to commencing a unit. There are a number of ways to evaluate what people know about a subject; can anyone tell me what one of the easiest (for the teacher) and most effective ways to find out what people know about a subject? [a test]

I am going to give us an introductory test about Ezra and Nehemiah[3]

1) In what Testament are they contained: the NT or the OT?
2) Is E-N a part of the Pentateuch (the Law, the books of Moses), the Prophets, Wisdom, or History?
3) Who is the primary figure in the book of Ezra (esp. the last half)?
4) Who is the primary figure in the book of Nehemiah?

By the time of the events in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah (middle of the 4th Century BCE),

5) Persia was the foremost superpower of the day and they controlled Palestine, who was its leader recorded in Chapter 1 that we read from earlier? (You can look it up, verse 2)
6) Israel (721-721 BCE) and Judah (586 BCE) prior to the time of Ezra were conquered by the Assyrians and Babylonians respectively and many of their people were deported and the city of Jerusalem was totally destroyed (because of the people’s contempt for God among other things Chronicles 36:15-21; cf. 2 Kings 25:1-21 and Jeremiah 52:4-27; cf. also Leviticus 25:1-23, Amos 3-4).
6a) There are 2 key parts of Jerusalem that are being rebuilt in Ezra and Nehemiah: what is Zerubbabel, in the book of Ezra concerned with rebuilding? (hint: Ezra 1:2)
6b) Bonus marks: what is Nehemiah concerned with the rebuilding of…? There is a famous one now in China and one was torn down in Berlin near the end of last Century.

You can imagine this situation then with me if you can. God totally wipes out the nation-states of Israel and Judah because of their contempt for Him, and their disrespect for the land (Leviticus 25:1-23), and the poor, the widow, the immigrant (Cf. Exodus 23:6,11, Leviticus 19:10,15, 23:22, 27:8, Deuteronomy 15:7, 15:11, 24:12-15, 1 Samuel 2:8, Psalms. 22:26, 34:6, 35:10, 82:3, Isaiah. 61:1, Ezekiel 16:49, 18:12, 22:29, Amos 2:7, 4:1, 5:11-12, 8:4-6, Zechariah 7:10.); and their disregard for His very important covenant (Cf. Genesis 12-17; Deuteronomy 4-26, 31; Leviticus 25:1-23; Jeremiah 52:4-27; Amos 3-4; Lamentations 4; Ezekiel 21,22; Joel 1-2:10).[4] The people are removed from the land, just like the Lord told them they would be if they disregarded His covenant and they are removed for the period of time that God told them that they would be removed for disregarding His covenant (2 Chronicles 36:21; Jeremiah 25:11-12, 29:10). God told them that they would earn the loss their territorial inheritance if they continued to sin but they continued so they earned the wages of their sin (cf. Romans 6:23). They did. This was a traumatic time and it caused a lot of people to lose their faith and even their identity – the whole concept of the ‘missing tribes of Israel’ relates to the deportations starting with Assyria and some of these deportees’ descendants never did come back home (cf. Ezra 1:5).[5] This destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple that we are talking about today all happened about 70-100 years before the events of Ezra Chapter 1 (2 Chronicles 36:22-23). For the people who were heading ‘back’ to Jerusalem, which is through whose eyes Ezra is written, then it would be quite something.

In our own time, we remember the Berlin Wall (1961-1989). It was erected during the Cold War to separate the East Germans from the West Germans. It went up quite stealthily and as a result families were split apart and there was a lot of personal tragedy. The whole of Germany was actually split into two separate nations by their conquerors for much of the 20th Century (1949-1990) and I don’t know if you remember but when they were reunited there were a lot of difficulties because life had gone in those places. They had grown apart and all of a sudden were thrown back together. This is sort of what is happening in our text today but add to the mix a whole bunch of migrants.

I was just in Victoria, BC and they had a new batch of Tamil migrants in the news a lot there. Were they in the news here? A boat of people, who by the looks of things barely survived their trip all the way across the Pacific Ocean looking to be processed (as per international and Canadian law) as refugees show up in Canada and we promptly take the people and… throw them in prison. Some British Colombians are scared of the new arrivals (not without some reason, I suppose) and they are reacting.

The time of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah combines the sentiments of both these situations: German reunification and Tamil migrants. There are still people living in Palestine (probably with direct family ties to the exiles, like with East and West Germany) and now the superpower of the day has relocated 50 thousands of people who left Israel generations ago to Jerusalem. Can you imagine if thousands of people whose great grand parents lived in Saskatchewan all of a sudden showed up here to live in Swift Current? It would be the same thing. This would be quite a bit of a shock to both the people living in Palestine (the Samaritans, named after Samaria, the capital city of Israel) and those immigrating (the Jews). This is the setting of Chapter 1 of Ezra (and 2 Chronicles 36:22-23).

Can you imagine how things would have changed for the Jews returning to Israel? Susan, the girls and I just returned to Vancouver Island where we are from originally. My oldest two girls were very young when we left and, of course, our baby is returning to a home she’s never seen before (much like the people returning in our scripture today). Now we hadn’t been gone nearly as long as 70 years so there was a lot that is still the same in my old hometown. At nighttime when baby wouldn’t sleep, I would often drive around the city at night and reminisce, as I would see all the places that I used to live and work and play. It was neat for me. Of course baby was oblivious: it meant nothing to her necessarily.

I remember at some point my wife or my mother or someone sends me to the pharmacy to get something. I think this will be fun, I know all the back roads and the traffic lights, I think; I’ll see how quickly I can get there and if I can avoid stopping at any of the lights. Well, I am doing quite well. I am cruising along the shortcuts that I know and if I see a red light I just make a right turn and continue along my path. I still know my old hometown pretty well - I don’t think I needed to come to a complete stop even once in getting across that whole section of the city. I am making really good time. I get to almost where I am going in no time flat, turn the corner to where the parking lot is supposed to be and almost run head-first into a Wall – Mart. Apparently in the four years since our family last lived in Victoria, they have gone a built Canada’s biggest Wall-Mart directly in the path of where I want to go. I then spend the next 5-10 minutes navigating this maze of streets, box stores, skyscrapers, and apartment buildings that is brand new since I last lived there. I don’t recognize this area at all and this very strange neighbourhood that I have all of a sudden arrived in is the very same neighbourhood where we used to work and where I used to live when my oldest two daughters were born. Things have changed quite a bit in just a few years. What’s the old expression: ‘you can’t go home again.’

There was more that changed too: next to the house I grew up in there was a potato field where the neighbourhood kids would often work in the summer and where we would always cut through on our bikes when we wanted to head in that direction – its gone now. There was another field of blackberry bushes that we used to cut through at the end of the street when we wanted to head in another direction – can’t do that any more. My old high school - I can’t walk there any more because the field I used to cut through to get there is now a subdivision and what makes that even worse is that that field was the athletic field for my old elementary school which is no longer a school. Even though my old elementary school is right next to low income housing for young families, they decided to close it down and sell off all the land to developers. This same thing happened to a building I used to work as well – SJ Willis. They took the property and sold it (for $1, I believe to some developer). I left Victoria less than a decade ago but a lot has changed very quickly. When we were leaving town too, we went to stop by a park that was very special to Susan where she used to be able to go and play in the tidal pools by the ocean - but the access to the ocean there is now completely eliminated. Things change. I don’t know if any of you have grown up elsewhere and returned home to explore or not but things change. ‘You can’t go home again.’ Time makes the place different.

If there was anyone in the time of our text today who did live long enough to remember Israel before the exile, I can only imagine what their shock would be because remember their whole city was destroyed by the superpower of their day – the Babylonians. It would be like someone who lived in Hiroshima before the superpower of our day, the Americans, dropped the Atomic bomb on all the people there – if they were returning home now for the first time now (1945-2015 will be 70 years). Everything is different. This is sort of what it is like in Ezra Chapter 1 (and 2 Chronicles 36:22-23) – things change; you can’t really go home again. It is as if a whole boat full or a flotilla of boats full of 50 000 migrants of families who used to live in Hiroshima showed up on their shores with a letter from their rulers telling them to rebuild a Temple that used to be very important to everyone.

This Temple – this is the other key to understanding the book of Ezra and a key to understanding all of Judaism - before it was completed with Christ and the final Jewish temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. I don’t know if you know it or not but there have actually been 4 temples on this same site:

1) Solomon’s Temple (ca. 957-586 BCE),
2) The temple that is being built in Ezra (Zerabbubel’s Temple, 516-19 BCE; cf. Josephus, Antiquities xi. 4,6; xv. 11,1),[6]
3) Herod’s Temple (19 BCE-70 CE),
4) and by far the longest Temple, The Dome of the Rock (692-present), is unrelated to Christianity. It has been on this location for more than one thousand three hundred years. [7] The Dome of the Rock is that Muslim temple that is on the site today is as important to Muslims as the earlier ones were to first Israelites and then Judeans.[8] (NB: If you want to learn more about the Temple in pre-Christian Judaism and what it must have been like, you might want to look at the Muslim Temple worship - particularly in Mecca).

In our text today the only temple that the people had known here was the first one; Solomon’s Temple that was commissioned by God and it was quite something. From its completion and dedication this temple was thought of as where heaven and earth meet (cf. 2 Samuel 7; 1 Kings 5:3-5, 8:17; 1 Chronicles 22, 28:1-29:9; Joel 3:5). There were four things that were very important to God’s covenant people before His covenant was completed through the death and the resurrection of Christ. These were the non-negotiables:

1) Moses, the leader and Law-giver
2) Election, the fact that the Israelite people were chosen for a specific purpose: to share the gift of salvation with the world (Genesis 12:3)
3) Torah: the books of Moses, the first five books of the Old Testament.
4) The Temple

Solomon’s Temple, contracted by God, was an impressive structure. It took 7 ½ years to build (1Kings 6:1,18), and thousands of labourers to build it (1 Kings 5:16, 9:23; 2 Chronicles 25:18); the walls were made of hand-cut stone, the roof of cedar and the floor of cypress wood (1 Kings 6), inside was a giant molten sea of bronze (1 Kings 7:23-39; cf. 1 Kings 8:64, 2 Kings 6:14, 2 Chronicles 4:1, 15:20) and the whole interior of the building was overlaid with gold (1 Kings 6, 2 Chronicles 3:7-10). It’s estimated cost in today’s dollars to build is $174 billion USD. By comparison, the world’s tallest building today – the Burj Dubai only cost $800 million USD.[9] Even with all of this, what is most important was that Solomon’s Temple was thought by many to be where God lived so no matter how much the people disobeyed God; they thought He could never destroy Jerusalem and the holy Temple because He lived there. They were wrong. Like they say, you can’t go home again: God destroyed the Temple and God destroyed the City and God deported the people (2 Chronicles 36; cf. for ex. re: God’s providence Genesis 50:20; Isaiah. 10:5ff.; Acts 2:23, 3:17f., 4:27f., 13:27) and many people thus lost their faith in God.

Do we ever fall into that same trap? Do we ever forsake God to worship the Temples in our life? (Cf. Number 21:4-9, 2 Kings 18:4) Do we ever put our faith into things or people and then when they fail us, blame God. Do we ever try to go home again to a home that doesn’t exist? I know more than one person who has left the church because they were disillusioned by the sins of the Christians in it. I don’t know if you remember the 1980s but it seemed like every week then another famous US televangelist was falling from grace taking many innocent people with him and how about the sex abuse scandals that have rocked churches across this country? How many times have we or our loved ones put our faith in people (like televangelists or pastors) or institutions (like residential schools or churches) and lost our faith in God when people let us down. Lamenting our lives, cutting off our nose to spite our face, and bemoaning the fact that we can’t return home again because the Temples in our own life have been torn down.

This is what it was like between the last chapter of Chronicles and the first chapter of Ezra. It had gotten so bad that many people even elected not to return with the exiles at all – they turned their back on the city, they turned their back on the Temple and they turned their back hopefully not on God (Ezra 1:5; cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XI:1-3). Things change. The good old days of Temple worship are gone. You can’t go home again.

But just when they are at their worst, just when everything seems to be lost, just after the chronicler in 2 Chronicles 36:1-21, retells the tragic story of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, and the exile of the people, in Verse 22, he tells us, as we read today from Ezra 1:1 that God moves the heart of Cyrus[10] and God rebuilds His temple so that God’s people can go there to worship God (cf. Isaiah 44:28; 45:1ff).[11]

And in more recent history, when the final pre-Christian Temple was destroyed in the 1st Century CE, followers of our Lord never rebuilt it again because God sent his only begotten son to live and die and rise again and to –himself- stand as the new temple of the new covenant. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus the purpose of the Temple has been fulfilled – we can’t go home again to a time before our Lord, praise the Lord. And this is neat too: if we flip to Revelation 21, you will note that when all is said and done, at the end of the end, when Jesus does come back, when God creates the heavens and the earth anew and when the New Jerusalem descends here to earth there is NO TEMPLE in it. We don’t need it. Christ now fulfills that roll.

Likewise when the symbols we use to worship God, or the wonderful Christians we look to for leadership when they fall or when their time is completed, it doesn’t matter because Christ fulfills their roll too. He is our raison d’etre. He is our reason for living. He is our all in all. It is Christ and Christ alone.

Let us pray: Lord we thank you for all the symbols of worship that you have provided us with traditionally in the church. We thank you for all the people that have gone on before us. We thank you for the heroes of the faith that have run the good race. And Lord if there is any person – a pastor, an author, a spouse, a televangelist – or any tool of worship – communion, the mercy seat, the Sunday meeting – that we value more than you, that we worship instead of you, Lord please forgive us, and please tear down its distractions in our lives just like you tore down the temple and build us anew as new creations so that we may worship you and you alone.

---
www.sheepspeak.com

[1]Cf, Derek Kidner,: Ezra and Nehemiah: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1979 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 12), S. 16. The second section can be further subdivided into Holiness and the Law (Ezra 7-10), Holiness and the Wall (Nehemiah 1-13).
[2] Cf. Sara Japhet, “The Supposed Common Authorship of Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah, Investigated Anew,” VT 18 (1968), 330-371. and Ralph W. Klein, “The Books of Ezra Nehemiah” (NIB III: Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1999), 663-664.
[3] 1) OT 2) History 3) Ezra (also Cyrus and Zerubbabel) 4) Nehemiah 5) Cyrus 6a) Temple 6b) Wall
[4] Cf. Donald E. Gowan, Amos. (NIB 7. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1996), 347, 383. Cf. also Thomas E. McComiskey, The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Pradis CD-ROM:Amos/Introduction to Amos/Theological Values of Amos/The doctrine of election in Amos, Book Version: 4.0.2
[5] Edwin Yamauchi, The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Pradis CD-ROM: Ezra/Introduction to Ezra and Nehemiah/Background of Ezra and Nehemiah, Book Version: 4.0.2: Deportation began with Tiglath-pileser III, who attacked Damascus and Galilee in 732 (2 Kings 15:29), carrying off at least 13,520 people to Assyria (ANET, pp. 283-84).
[6] Cf. Hugh Claycombe, ‘Zerubbabel’s Temple’ in NIV Study Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA: Zondervan Publishing, 2002), 674.
[7] Cf. P. Alexander, ‘Temple’ in Lions Encyclopaedia of the Bible (Herts, UK: Lion Publishing, 1986).
[8] The Temple: Some people even believed that God lived in the Temple. because among other things the site that it is built on is believed by some to be the sight where Adam was created, where Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac, where the venerated ‘cornerstone’ is located (cf. Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10, Luke 20:17), where the rock that Jacob slept on and the one that the Muslims believe Mohammed ascended from towards heaven. The Temple there today is very important to Muslims, just like the earlier temples were very important before the purpose of the temple was fulfilled in Christ (cf. Matthew 4:5-6, Mark 13:1, Acts 3:1-11). If you want to learn more about the Temple in pre-Christian Judaism and what it must have been like, we should probably look at the Muslim Temple worship (particularly in Mecca). As opposed to contemporary Judaism which has abandoned much of its historical beliefs and practices around the temple, the Muslims still have all the important animals sacrifices and similar rituals to that which the people of God were supposed to partake in prior to the advent of Christ. Christians have of course moved on. We know that through the death and resurrection of Jesus the purpose of the Temple has been fulfilled and that if we flip to Revelation 21, you will note that when God creates the heavens and the earth anew and when He makes the New Jerusalem there is NO TEMPLE in it. Christ fulfills that roll.
[9] ‘The Temple’ in The Masonic Trowel. Available on-line at http://www.themasonictrowel.com/
[10] Cf. Derek Kidner: Ezra and Nehemiah: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1979 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 12), S. 36: According to Josephus, however (Ant. xi. 1), Cyrus had been shown the prophecy of Isaiah 44:28, which names him, and was eager to fulfil it. While this is not impossible, it has no corroboration; and Cyrus’s own inscription shows that any knowledge he may have had of the Lord was nominal at best. Isaiah 45:5f. insists that to know the Lord involves acknowledging no god beside him.
[11] Cf. ‘Cyrus Cylinder’ in Ancient Near Eastern Texts edited by J. B. Pritchard, 1955, page 316. Cf. also Derek Kidner,: Ezra and Nehemiah: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1979 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 12), S. 16 for a discussion of the Persian leaders’ position on religious tolerance and diversity.