SPEAKER_00: 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 also to put it in writing.
SPEAKER_00: This is what Cyrus, king of Persia, says the Lord, 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 Judea.
SPEAKER_00: Any of his people among you may go up to Jerusalem in Judea and build the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem, and may their God be with them.
SPEAKER_00: And in any locality where survivors may now be living, the people are to provide them with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with free will offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Let's bow our heads in prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we do come before you and we ask that we would encounter you as we study the book of Ezra.
SPEAKER_01: It's a new book for a lot of people.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be some new territory.
SPEAKER_01: And we ask, Lord, that you would empower us by your spirit, that we would hear what you want to say to us through this book.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, you included it in your word.
SPEAKER_01: It's holy scripture.
SPEAKER_01: And we want to receive what you have for us.
SPEAKER_01: We pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: You may be seated.
SPEAKER_01: How exciting.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to read and study the book of Ezra.
SPEAKER_01: I am so excited to go through this book with you.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be fun.
SPEAKER_01: You've got to be Bible nerds to go on this journey with me.
SPEAKER_01: Hang in there.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what I want to start with.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we're going over to the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: If you're new to the Bible, there's the Old Testament and the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: The Old Testament deals with things that took place in history before the time of Christ, and it's primarily focused on the people of Israel, the story of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Then we get to the New Testament, which we've studied up to this point in the life of the church.
SPEAKER_01: In the New Testament, we have the story of Jesus, what he did, and then the church that came out of his life, right?
SPEAKER_01: He started the church.
SPEAKER_01: That's basically the Old and New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Now, when we read the New Testament, I want to give you two verses really quickly before we cover Ezra.
SPEAKER_01: This is 2 Timothy 3.16.
SPEAKER_01: Paul the Apostle wrote this in a letter to a guy named Timothy, who was a young man who he had basically was an assistant to Paul, and he said this about Scripture, right?
SPEAKER_01: All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see that comprehensive statement that he makes about Scripture?
SPEAKER_01: Now, when Paul was talking about Scripture, he was talking about the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: They didn't have the New Testament yet.
SPEAKER_01: He is making this comprehensive statement about the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Now it applies to the New Testament as well.
SPEAKER_01: But when Paul's writing this, he has in mind the Old Testament scriptures, including the book of Ezra.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see that he says that it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, training in righteousness?
SPEAKER_01: That means that when we come into Ezra, we can anticipate that there's an aspect where we're going to be taught, where we're going to be rebuked, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's where we're called out, where we're told, hey, this is wrong in your life.
SPEAKER_01: Where we're going to be corrected.
SPEAKER_01: That means putting things back in its proper place.
SPEAKER_01: And then we're trained on how to keep doing what's right.
SPEAKER_01: Look at this one other verse.
SPEAKER_01: Also, Paul wrote this to the church in Rome.
SPEAKER_01: He said, For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the scriptures and the encouragement, they more may they provide, uh, they encourage the encouragement they provide, we may have hope.
SPEAKER_01: So there's this process of the scriptures coming into our lives, encouraging us, and giving us hope.
SPEAKER_01: So the question that I have for you this morning is this are you ready to be taught, rebuked, corrected, and trained from Scripture?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I hear somebody has come this morning who is willing.
SPEAKER_01: Do you need encouragement and hope?
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I think we all do.
SPEAKER_01: Well, God says that you can find that in his holy scriptures.
SPEAKER_01: And so we have these promises as we go into the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Now, let's just jump right into these first four verses which we just read, because in your text you see this reference right in just verse one.
SPEAKER_01: We see the first year, Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah the Lord, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus, king of Persia, to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing.
SPEAKER_01: So, right off the bat, as you go through these four verses, we have these references to things that we're not familiar with, right?
SPEAKER_01: Cyrus, king of Persia.
SPEAKER_01: Then we have this reference to the word of the Lord spoken in Jeremiah.
SPEAKER_01: We have a temple that is being built back up in Jerusalem, of Judah, of God's people going to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: Then we have this talk about the locality of survivors.
SPEAKER_01: So it's clear as you go through these first four verses that we have to step back for a second and get some context.
SPEAKER_01: All right?
SPEAKER_01: We got to get some context.
SPEAKER_01: There is a great deal of world history that is going on as we step into Ezra.
SPEAKER_01: Ezra, well, let's talk about the book of Ezra in just a second.
SPEAKER_01: Let's stick with world history.
SPEAKER_01: The contemporaries to this book are Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates, right?
SPEAKER_01: Those three individuals are also contemporaneous to the writing of this book.
SPEAKER_01: The um great empire that ends as this book starts is the empire of the Babylonians.
SPEAKER_01: There was three or four major kings, but one major king kind of over oversaw the region of Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: There's a city named Babylon, and then there's a region of Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: That empire comes to a close as Cyrus comes and takes Babylon, the city, in about 538, 539 BC.
SPEAKER_01: And that is what we call the Medo-Persian kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: Where's Persia today?
SPEAKER_01: If we say somebody's Persian, what are we referring to typically?
SPEAKER_01: Iran, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So Cyrus originates, Cyrus originates in Persia, right?
SPEAKER_01: Southern Iran.
SPEAKER_01: He literally takes over it.
SPEAKER_01: He has a 10-year conquest where he comes across moving.
SPEAKER_01: Let's see, do I have a map here?
SPEAKER_01: I wish I had a map.
SPEAKER_01: I had all kinds of issues this morning with my computer.
SPEAKER_01: I almost didn't have any um any notes at all, any slides.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I and one of the things that I lost was my map.
SPEAKER_01: But basically, this Meto-Persian region goes from modern-day Turkey all the way over to Afghanistan.
SPEAKER_01: And that's massive.
SPEAKER_01: Like you go and look that up on, I mean, you're talking about so much territory that this guy Cyrus takes over.
SPEAKER_01: So we're introduced to Cyrus in verse 1, and we see that he um is um making this decree or this proclamation, which we'll talk about in just a second.
SPEAKER_01: But 539 BC is when um he comes to power.
SPEAKER_01: After Cyrus, we have his son, who's referred to here, which is Cambysus.
SPEAKER_01: He's not referenced in our text at all, but we do have quite a bit of reference to Darius and Artaxerxes.
SPEAKER_01: So there's a bunch of stuff going on on this.
SPEAKER_01: You see on the left-hand column, we have references to the chapters of Ezra.
SPEAKER_01: Then we have the Persian kings, their dates, biblical correlation, and a timeline.
SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot that's going on there just on that one slide.
SPEAKER_01: I'm spending a little bit of time on this this morning because the whole story, the whole book of Ezra, as we go through this over the next eight weeks, it's going to make allusions to its historical context.
SPEAKER_01: So being familiar with the Medo-Persian Empire, Cyrus, and Darius especially, um, is significant.
SPEAKER_01: Um, this is a uh just kind of a couple of things that are important to know about this guy, Cyrus.
SPEAKER_01: He's the founder of the Persian uh Empire, Cyrus the Great, formerly king of the small state of Anson, near the Persian Gulf.
SPEAKER_01: He had he had displaced his overlord, Astrides, in 549 BC, thereby inheriting the vast Mede Empire, which overreached to the northeast, and that of Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: This he extended to the far west of Asia Minor, that's Turkey, by defeating uh Croesus of Lydia in 547 to the growing alarm of Babylon in Egypt, the allies of his victims.
SPEAKER_01: In 539, Babylon fell to him without a struggle, and he began to uh fulfill unwittingly the prophecies of Isaiah 44, 28, and 45, 1, by repatriating the captive cult objects and the peoples of the Babylonian Empire, rebuilding their temples and asking their intercessions.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so check this out, right?
SPEAKER_01: You ready to have your mind blown?
SPEAKER_01: This, uh, let's see, we gotta go forward.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, in Isaiah 44, now mind you, on a timeline, this is a hundred years before Cyrus comes on the scene, there's a prophet named Isaiah who's prophesying and talking about the people of Israel being taken captive by uh Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: But in chapter 44, Isaiah says, calls out by name who it who says of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please.
SPEAKER_01: He will save Jerusalem, let it be rebuilt, and of the temple, let its foundations be laid.
SPEAKER_01: Then the next chapter, uh 45, 13, I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: I will make all his ways straight, he will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the Lord Almighty.
SPEAKER_01: That is so miraculous that this prophet would know about Cyrus a hundred years in advance and would literally say, here's what the guy's gonna do, that skeptics have said, Oh, well, this book had to have been written after the time of Cyrus, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's the only if you can if you don't want to accept the supernatural nature of scripture, you have to assume it was written.
SPEAKER_01: But then you can only make that argument so far because Isaiah predicts things about the Messiah that take place, you know, way hundreds of years beyond his capacity.
SPEAKER_01: So you can only rule out the supernatural nature of Isaiah so much until you really run out of runway in that kind of uh line of thinking.
SPEAKER_01: So this is written, the children of Israel are called are taken into captivity.
SPEAKER_01: Let's talk a little bit about um uh what we call uh the story of redemption or biblical history.
SPEAKER_01: I want to run you through um this very briefly so you know where we lie, where we lie in terms of the children of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know where the nation of Israel begins?
SPEAKER_01: With who?
SPEAKER_01: Abraham, right?
SPEAKER_01: God speaks to Abraham and says to him, Come out of Ur of the Chaldees, I'm going to make through you a nation that blesses the whole earth, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's going back to Genesis chapter 12.
SPEAKER_01: The rest of Genesis tells us of four generations Abraham, then Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
SPEAKER_01: Those four generations are the story of Genesis.
SPEAKER_01: And God is slowly developing a people that are his own, right?
SPEAKER_01: So Abraham has a son named Isaac.
SPEAKER_01: Isaac has Jacob.
SPEAKER_01: Jacob has 12 sons named Joseph.
SPEAKER_01: That's where we get the 12 tribes of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Then what happens to Israel?
SPEAKER_01: They're enslaved for 400 years in Egypt, right?
SPEAKER_01: Remember, they have to leave Canaan where they have been.
SPEAKER_01: They have to go down to Egypt because of a famine that they're running away from, and they stay in Egypt for 400 years, and that's when Moses comes on the scene in the beginning of the book of Exodus.
SPEAKER_01: And Moses is used by God to bring the Hebrews out of Egypt and bring them into the wilderness on their way to the promised land.
SPEAKER_01: Now God is forming a nation, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's the promise to Abraham.
SPEAKER_01: You can't have a nation without a common people, like an ancestry, right?
SPEAKER_01: A common ancestry, a common constitution, and a common land.
SPEAKER_01: Those are the three ingredients of how we would say, okay, that is a nation unto itself.
SPEAKER_01: And it takes hundreds of years for us to get to that place.
SPEAKER_01: We have the common people in Genesis.
SPEAKER_01: We get to the idea of a common constitution in Exodus.
SPEAKER_01: That's when God gives them the law, right?
SPEAKER_01: The civil law.
SPEAKER_01: Here's how you organize yourself as a nation.
SPEAKER_01: And then we get into Joshua as they take the promised land, that's their common land.
SPEAKER_01: And so we get uh we have Joshua's leadership taking them into the promised land of Palestine.
SPEAKER_01: And then what takes place in their story?
SPEAKER_01: They don't have kings, right?
SPEAKER_01: They have 325 years of judges.
SPEAKER_01: A judge is kind of this freak of nature that would be raised up when the people stopped, when they got off course and they were rebelling against God, God would raise up an individual who would violently rescue the nation, right?
SPEAKER_01: He would lead them in victory against their enemies, and he would have influence through that victory to call the people of God back to the law, back to their heritage, what God had called them to.
SPEAKER_01: So 325 years of the judges, that's found in the book of Judges, and then we get into the kings, right?
SPEAKER_01: The people are like, we don't want to be ruled anymore by judges, we want a king like all the other nations.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what God wanted.
SPEAKER_01: God didn't want them to ask for kings, but he knew that they would.
SPEAKER_01: And so God gave them uh first, who was the first king?
SPEAKER_01: Saul, and then we have David, and then we have Solomon, right?
SPEAKER_01: And this is what the golden era of Israel, right?
SPEAKER_01: When it had the most property, the most wealth.
SPEAKER_01: Um this is the high point of the nation of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: But Solomon is unfaithful to God, and so God's dealings with the King Solomon is that after his death, the nation of Israel splits in into a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: The northern kingdom of Israel represents the ten tribes of Israel, and in the south you have the um you have Judah, which is um Benjamin and Judah, the two southern tribes combined together.
SPEAKER_01: And there are kings that rule.
SPEAKER_01: In the north, there is never a good king that ever rules the northern kingdoms.
SPEAKER_01: In the south, we have a couple of good kings spread out through throughout the years, but basically, it gets so bad in the nation of Israel that God sends prophets on the scene to warn the people and say, You've turned from God, you're going to be carried away captive.
SPEAKER_01: And in 722 BC, that whole northern kingdom is carried away captive by the empire of Assyria, right?
SPEAKER_01: Assyria.
SPEAKER_01: It goes Assyria, then you have the Babylonian Empire, then you have the Medo-Persian Empire.
SPEAKER_01: So in 722, the north falls to Assyria.
SPEAKER_01: Then in 605, the south, the southern kingdom falls to the Babylonian Empire, and we have three waves of captives taken to Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: The first is in 605 B.C.
SPEAKER_01: That's where Daniel, remember Daniel and the lion's dead?
SPEAKER_01: That Daniel is carried away in the first wave of captives to Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: This is the southern kingdom being pillaged, taken to Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: Then we have the second wave in 597 B.C., and in that wave we have the prophet Ezekiel carried away, and then we have the third wave, 586 BC.
SPEAKER_01: That's when Jerusalem itself falls and the temple is destroyed in 586 BC.
SPEAKER_01: All through this prophet, all through this process, God is sending prophets to speak to his people.
SPEAKER_01: He is condemning the wicked, but all throughout, like Isaiah, he's encouraging them, saying, You're holding on to God.
SPEAKER_01: You're the very few that are righteous, you're the remnant.
SPEAKER_01: You need to know that this is only going to take place.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, through Jeremiah, he says, this will take place for 70 years.
SPEAKER_01: So Daniel, well, let's go to Jeremiah.
SPEAKER_01: Where's Jeremiah?
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah's not in the next thing in the slides.
SPEAKER_01: Basically, Daniel, Daniel prophesies, he remember he left in the first wave.
SPEAKER_01: So he's there in Babylon for this entire 70-year process.
SPEAKER_01: He may have lived long enough to see Israel set free by Cyrus.
SPEAKER_01: And he probably was instrumental in that process, but that's just a hypothesis that we have.
SPEAKER_01: Daniel's ministry takes place throughout this whole period of the Babylonian captivity.
SPEAKER_01: For our sake, Ezra, we are going to look at chapters one through six.
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of its own section.
SPEAKER_01: That six chapters deals with the rebuilding of the temple under Zerubabel's leadership.
SPEAKER_01: And then chapters seven through ten is Ezra's return to leadership.
SPEAKER_01: Ezra's return to leadership.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I know I'm throwing a lot at you, but you can handle it.
SPEAKER_01: I believe in you.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, Cyrus.
SPEAKER_01: Cyrus, these are those verses that we already saw about Cyrus.
SPEAKER_01: He was spoken of a hundred years earlier.
SPEAKER_01: I want to show you something really cool.
SPEAKER_01: This is a Cyrus cylinder.
SPEAKER_01: This was found 130 years ago.
SPEAKER_01: Let me read to you kind of a quote about it.
SPEAKER_01: It was discovered 130 years ago.
SPEAKER_01: That was written in 2013.
SPEAKER_01: It has been a striking example of an archaeological artifact that independently confirms a biblical account.
SPEAKER_01: The book of Azra begins by telling of an edict of King Cyrus of Persia that permitted the Jewish exiles in Babylon, which Cyrus had just conquered, to go to Jerusalem in Judah and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: So again, this is what that cylinder looks like.
SPEAKER_01: But here's what else we find out from this cylinder.
SPEAKER_01: Because when you read verses 1 and 2, doesn't it look like Cyrus is a Christian?
SPEAKER_01: It does, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01: It looks like he's giving God credit.
SPEAKER_01: He's saying God sent, uh God moved, or it says that God moved his heart.
SPEAKER_01: Um the reality is that Cyrus had a strategy where he would take uh the people who had been captive in Babylon and he was sending them back to where they were captive, and he was helping rebuild um all of their temples.
SPEAKER_01: So the Egyptian um temples were restored, and he told the Egyptians, Hey, pray to your gods for me.
SPEAKER_01: He told the Israelites, I'll help you rebuild your temple, pray to your god for me.
SPEAKER_01: So um don't Read too much into Cyrus's spiritual state from what you see in this chapter.
SPEAKER_01: In his head, this was strategy.
SPEAKER_01: He's keeping the peace.
SPEAKER_01: He was very organized with his kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: He had this tremendous government structure and amazing laws, but this is some people refer to this kind of as an early form of bill of rights, where everybody has the freedom to worship their own God and they have the endorsement of the empire to do that.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: So in Jeremiah, so what is this whole idea of it of that we get in verse 1 about this word that's spoken by Jeremiah?
SPEAKER_01: What did Jeremiah say?
SPEAKER_01: Because remember, Jeremiah the prophet is a prophet in Jerusalem around 586, and he is warning the people you are in trouble.
SPEAKER_01: There is not hope for this city.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be destroyed.
SPEAKER_01: He's fighting with the prophets that kind of had a different message.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of this crazy book.
SPEAKER_01: It's actually the longest book of the Bible, even longer than Psalms.
SPEAKER_01: But Jeremiah says in Jeremiah 25, 12, that it when the 70 years are fulfilled, that he's going to punish the king of Babylon and his nation, the land of the Babylonians, for their guilt, declares the Lord, and he will make it desolate forever.
SPEAKER_01: We also see this in Jeremiah 29, 10.
SPEAKER_01: When 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and I will fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what you need to see.
SPEAKER_01: God is telling his people his plan in advance.
SPEAKER_01: Daniel, the prophet, young boy, who's taken to Babylon, he's familiar with what Jeremiah said.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's very possible that near the end of this captivity, that he tells Cyrus, when Cyrus comes in, having sacked Babylon, he says, Look, Isaiah the prophet spoke about you, and Jeremiah told us that we are only going to be here 70 years.
SPEAKER_01: One way or another, Cyrus is familiar with Jeremiah's content.
SPEAKER_01: Daniel's our best guess.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, Josephus, who's an extra biblical historian, he says that Daniel was the one who showed these documents, these prophecies to Cyrus.
SPEAKER_01: Amazing, amazing way that God's working.
SPEAKER_01: Let's go through verses 5 through 11.
SPEAKER_01: 5 through 11.
SPEAKER_01: We're actually looking at the first two chapters today, which you don't have to be afraid of.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to be on time because the second chapter is a big long list of who the people were.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 5 through 11.
SPEAKER_01: Then the family heads of Judah and Benjamin and the priests and the Levites, everyone whose heart God had moved, prepared to go up and build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: All their neighbors assisted them with articles of silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with valuable gifts in addition to all the free will offerings.
SPEAKER_01: Moreover, King Cyrus brought out the articles belonging to the temple of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and had placed in the temple of his God.
SPEAKER_01: Cyrus, king of Persia, had them brought by Mithridath, the treasurer, who counted them out to Sheshbazar, the prince of Judah.
SPEAKER_01: This was the inventory.
SPEAKER_01: Gold dishes, thirty thirty, silver dishes, one thousand, silver pans, twenty-nine, ten gold bowls, thirty matching silver bowls, four hundred and ten other articles, one thousand, uh all other articles, one thousand, then it's chapter uh verse eleven.
SPEAKER_01: In all there was four uh five thousand four hundred articles of gold and of silver.
SPEAKER_01: Shesprazzar brought all these along with the exiles when they came up from Babylon to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: So a couple of things to notice in this um in these verses.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, we have this whole idea.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see it in verse five?
SPEAKER_01: Everyone whose heart God moved.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see that phrase?
SPEAKER_01: That's really important.
SPEAKER_01: Key on that, because um in the earlier set of verses, it says that God moved in the heart of Cyrus to do this, right?
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think Cyrus really necessarily knows that it's God who's moving in his heart.
SPEAKER_01: This is the commentary of a chronicler, a Jewish chronicler who's put this book together.
SPEAKER_01: But also God's moving in the hearts of the people to make this move.
SPEAKER_01: In a minute, we'll see that it's 50,000 that end up going up.
SPEAKER_01: The other thing I want you to notice is this guy, Sheshbazar.
SPEAKER_01: I hope you like reading that name because you're not gonna read it anywhere else in this book.
SPEAKER_01: Sheshbazar falls off the pages after this chapter ends, this section, right?
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't written in chapters, this section.
SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden we're gonna see Zerubbabel.
SPEAKER_01: And so the question is is how is Zerubbabel related to Sheshbazar?
SPEAKER_01: And we don't know.
SPEAKER_01: The the hypothesis is that is that they may be um uncle and nephew, they may be the same person, right?
SPEAKER_01: Or it could be a third alternative, which we're completely clueless.
SPEAKER_01: There are there are great um cases for for um all of those ideas, right?
SPEAKER_01: My my I lean towards the idea that Shesh Bazar is another name for Zerubabel, who we'll be meeting in chapter two.
SPEAKER_01: But it's not all that important for us in terms of the points that we're making.
SPEAKER_01: So following the story here, following the story, God touches the heart of a king to send captive people back to their homeland, and it's this open invitation, right?
SPEAKER_01: And 50,000 people decide to go, and they bring with them all these resources to accomplish the plan.
SPEAKER_01: Are you tracking with the story?
SPEAKER_01: This is the general framework of the story.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, good.
SPEAKER_01: Good for you guys.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Chapter 2, verses 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_01: We're not going to read much of chapter 2, but I want you to see verses 1 and 2.
SPEAKER_01: Now, these are the people of the provinces who came up from the captivity of the exiles, whom Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had taken captive to Babylon.
SPEAKER_01: They returned to Jerusalem and Judah, each to their own town, in company with Zerubbabel, Joshua, Nehemiah, Sariah, Reliah, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispar, Bigveah, Rehum, and Banah.
SPEAKER_01: The list of the men of the people of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: This is the list of the men of the people of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Some crazy names, right?
SPEAKER_01: Crazy names.
SPEAKER_01: So he goes through.
SPEAKER_01: After this, he's gonna go through, and he's and you see it in the text, right?
SPEAKER_01: He gives literally the name and how many are there, the name and how many are there, the name and how many are there.
SPEAKER_01: Once we get all the way to verse 64, it says this the whole company numbered 42,360.
SPEAKER_01: And then there's some additional, there's some musicians, uh, there's the dancers, right, that are not in this number of uh 42,000.
SPEAKER_01: So we we say generally it was 50,000 people that are brought back.
SPEAKER_01: That's not many, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's not a large number compared to the overall group that was taken captive.
SPEAKER_01: But these are the ones who God directed or laid on their hearts to return.
SPEAKER_01: Let's finish reading off the chapter, chapter two.
SPEAKER_01: It says this, and from among the priests, the descendants of Hobiah, Hakaz, and Barzali, a man who had married the daughter of Barzali the Geleadite, and was called by that name.
SPEAKER_01: These searched for their family records, but they could not find them, and so they were excluded from the priesthood as unclean.
SPEAKER_01: The governor ordered them not to eat any of the most sacred food until there was a priest ministering with the Urim and the Thumum.
SPEAKER_01: What?
SPEAKER_01: What's going on there?
SPEAKER_01: These guys are missing their papers, right?
SPEAKER_01: So this group, this is just like this interesting parenthetical note, these guys, this family, Barzali's family, couldn't find their records to prove that they were of a priestly line, that they were of the Levitical line.
SPEAKER_01: And so they're told you um cannot function as a priest, and you can't eat the food.
SPEAKER_01: So if you go back to Exodus and Leviticus, the priests, um, the Levites' families were to be taken care of by the other tribes, offering them food.
SPEAKER_01: And then they were eating food that was specifically kind of engaged in the worship of God, right?
SPEAKER_01: They were eating from the sacrifices.
SPEAKER_01: That was permitted, but you had to be a Levite, and they didn't know are these guys a Levite?
SPEAKER_01: And so the governor says to them, we've got to establish the priesthood, and then we're gonna have this Urim and Thumum.
SPEAKER_01: This is two stones that the priest would have in over his um chest pocket, kind of like this pocket right here.
SPEAKER_01: And those stones would be like a white stone and a black stone, and they would cast lots, and and that would determine kind of a yes or no question.
SPEAKER_01: So this was a way for them to uh find answers to yes and no questions from God.
SPEAKER_01: It was a way to discern God's will, and it was specifically set up for the priest to do, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of this weird, uh, weird part of their history.
SPEAKER_01: And um, so hey, we need a priest with the Urim and Thumim, um otherwise we can't move forward.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, now we finish off the chapter, chapter two.
SPEAKER_01: When they arrived at the house of the Lord in Jerusalem, some of the heads of the families gave free will offerings toward the rebuilding of the house of God on its site.
SPEAKER_01: According to their ability, they gave to the treasury for their work sixty-one thousand dirkas of gold, five thousand minas of silver, and one hundred priestly garments.
SPEAKER_01: The priests, the Levites, the musicians, the gatekeepers, the temple servants settled in their own towns along with some of the other people, and the rest of the Israelites settled in their own towns.
SPEAKER_01: So here's the route, right?
SPEAKER_01: We travel from Babylon this way.
SPEAKER_01: We're traveling from Babylon over to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: We get there, and then everybody spreads back out to their own towns.
SPEAKER_01: That's where we're gonna pick it up next week.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: So, what does God want to teach us through this story?
SPEAKER_01: How does God want to speak into our lives?
SPEAKER_01: The first thing that I want to draw your attention to, and we've spent a little bit of time on this, the redemptive plan of God is unfolding over a long period of time.
SPEAKER_01: God has a plan, right, that was started way back at the beginning of creation.
SPEAKER_01: And we talked through Israel's history.
SPEAKER_01: God's plan is unfolding over that long period of time.
SPEAKER_01: It's a redemptive plan.
SPEAKER_01: It isn't just putting, it's not like the game of risk where different leadership is put in places.
SPEAKER_01: No, God has this plan that's unfolding through this lineage of Abraham, right?
SPEAKER_01: He says, It's through you I want to bring a blessing upon the nations.
SPEAKER_01: And then God over and over again is redeeming his people back.
SPEAKER_01: The reason why all these people are moving from Babylon to Ezra is again to reestablish worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem, the city of God, where God has designated this special place where God wants to be worshipped.
SPEAKER_01: So what we are seeing is significant, but it should speak to you.
SPEAKER_01: It should speak to you the fact that God has a plan.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if if you're not a Christian and you're operating from a position of doubt, and you struggle with the idea that God has a plan, that there is a design, then I'd encourage you, just look at the nation of Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Look at all that God has done for that nation.
SPEAKER_01: Look at it's hard to not follow their story and say there must be a God.
SPEAKER_01: Only God could reestablish this people in their land.
SPEAKER_01: You may want to, look, I mean, if you're you're operating from a position where you don't know God and you're rejecting Jesus Christ, you may not want to have anything to do with God, but He has created you to find meaning in a bigger story.
SPEAKER_01: Your frustration and the angst that you live with is an unfulfilled desire to be a part of this grand plan.
SPEAKER_01: Another person may come to the text, then they're open to God.
SPEAKER_01: They may not yet be a follower of Jesus, but they're seeking God and they see this and they are convinced that there's a plan, yes, but they need to see that God is working comprehensively, even though there is difficulty.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: You need to, the the comfort, the the teaching of scripture is that there is um there are trials, there's tragedies that happen in God's story, but God is still redeeming, he's putting the pieces back together.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible gives us an interpretation of history and says the God of the Bible is the one orchestrating the rise and the fall of kingdoms, and it ultimately leads to an everlasting king and an everlasting kingdom.
SPEAKER_01: And the door is open, the door is open to us today.
SPEAKER_01: Not only does God love you and want to remove your guilt, your sin, the guilt of sin, he wants you to work in your life, right?
SPEAKER_01: He wants to make himself known in your life.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you come to the in this morning and you've you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, but you've grown cold.
SPEAKER_01: You've experienced this redemptive theme in your life, but you've become impatient.
SPEAKER_01: You may have drifted away from this person of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: You need to know that God is at work.
SPEAKER_01: Your state, your state this morning does not determine or deter the plan of God unfolding.
SPEAKER_01: If you've grown cold in your faith, it may be because you feel like you're the one that produced the redemption.
SPEAKER_01: You didn't.
SPEAKER_01: God is the one who is unfolding his redemptive plan, and you need to just let him continue to unfold that plan.
SPEAKER_01: And maybe this morning you're on fire for the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: You're you're what we call a disciple of Jesus, like you're following him.
SPEAKER_01: You need to know that as we read this story, your labor is not in vain.
SPEAKER_01: Just like there was a remnant that God brought back, you need to persevere.
SPEAKER_01: The work of God is finished in Christ, and your work is the outbreaking of that accomplished victory.
SPEAKER_01: This week, as you go and you love, this week as you go and you serve, this week as you decide not to operate out of a bad attitude, but instead to let the love of God flow through you, that is the outbreaking of God's plan through you, through your life.
SPEAKER_01: Keep praying that God would open up your eyes to see his redemptive work around you.
SPEAKER_01: When you see what he is doing, it is your invitation to join him.
SPEAKER_01: It is an impossible burden, one that you're not meant to bear if you come to Christ and then you think that the rest of God's plan lays on your shoulders.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what Christianity teaches.
SPEAKER_01: No, you've been invited into the plan of God that's unfolding, and and the the next step is that God wants to open up your eyes to the rest of the work that he's doing.
SPEAKER_01: When he opens up your eyes, that's just a simple invitation.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, join me in the work.
SPEAKER_01: God's kingdom does not, amen.
SPEAKER_01: God's kingdom isn't accomplished through your striving, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's through you obeying and letting it kind of invade territory.
SPEAKER_01: Can I can we just talk just one about one more, one more application here?
SPEAKER_01: If we go back to verses 1 and verse 5, we see this language of how God moved in the heart of a king.
SPEAKER_01: And the idea, I think, that comes through here, the principle that comes through this is that God can change impossible circumstances by changing unreachable hearts.
SPEAKER_01: God can change impossible circumstances by affecting unreachable hearts, right?
SPEAKER_01: You know there's things you may have, you may, you probably easily can think of some impossible circumstances.
SPEAKER_01: Some of those circumstances are impossible because there's a third party whose heart you can't affect.
SPEAKER_01: But you have to understand that the unreachableness of another person's the you have to understand the unreachableness of another person's heart.
SPEAKER_01: The circumstance is impossible because change is contingent upon another person's heart change.
SPEAKER_01: This is a story about an impossible heart change.
SPEAKER_01: This story of Cyrus, his heart is changed, and it leads to the reversal of an impossible circumstance.
SPEAKER_01: That is the God of the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: So if you're operating from a position of doubt this morning, you're reading a miraculous story.
SPEAKER_01: A secular king has this crazy idea that he's gonna let his captives go free.
SPEAKER_01: That's weird.
SPEAKER_01: Only God could change his heart to do that.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, in Proverbs 21:1, it says this the Lord's hand, the in the Lord's hand, the king's heart is a stream of water that he channels towards all who please him.
SPEAKER_01: God directs the heart of the king.
SPEAKER_01: In um Ezekiel 11, 19, it says this about the heart.
SPEAKER_01: I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them.
SPEAKER_01: I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.
SPEAKER_01: Look, if you're considering Christianity and you're like not necessarily the doubter, you're maybe the seeker, the Bible says, yeah, it's the heart.
SPEAKER_01: It's not you regenerating your own heart.
SPEAKER_01: It's not you just saying like a mantra or changing your own heart.
SPEAKER_01: No, God wants to give you a new heart.
SPEAKER_01: He wants to deal with your heart.
SPEAKER_01: Many religions are focused on you get your act together, right?
SPEAKER_01: You do these acts out here, and it'll work into your heart.
SPEAKER_01: But Christianity is completely different.
SPEAKER_01: We were talking about that this week with some with some of the some of the guys.
SPEAKER_01: The gospel is this thing that affects your heart and it works itself inside out, right?
SPEAKER_01: God works in you, and then it manifests out of you.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: The start of this inside out regeneration begins when you turn to God's Son, Jesus, and you accept him as the authority in your life.
SPEAKER_01: You return to God, you turn to God and believe in his son.
SPEAKER_01: Now, maybe you come in again this morning and you're cold spiritually, you feel like you're far from the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you've already accepted Jesus Christ, but you've drifted away into either mundane religious activity, you feel bored with Christianity, or you are living in an unrestrained way.
SPEAKER_01: You're giving into temptation, feeling condemned.
SPEAKER_01: Either way, you need to know that God can change impossible circumstances by changing unreachable hearts.
SPEAKER_01: You have you've surrendered your life to God, you've been baptized, but your heart is far from God.
SPEAKER_01: You need to know that nothing can separate you from the love of God.
SPEAKER_01: Even if you feel this morning cold, even if you feel bored or condemned, your emotions do not reflect the truth of Scripture, that nothing can separate you from God's love.
SPEAKER_01: The Spirit of God dwells in you and wants to work in your will and your activity.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, we look at Philippians 2 13 that says, It's God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purposes.
SPEAKER_01: That is, that's the truth.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I like clapping for God's words.
SPEAKER_01: It's simple, but as we look at a king and we see 50,000 people who their hearts are changed, not to go put on evangelism.
SPEAKER_01: Crusade, right?
SPEAKER_01: What does God do?
SPEAKER_01: He just turns their heart.
SPEAKER_01: One, he turns a king to like set people free, and then he changes people's heart to like, let's move back to Jerusalem and help build a temple.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the work of God.
SPEAKER_01: So here's again, here's the thing.
SPEAKER_01: Like, God's not waiting for you to come up with some good idea of how to save the world.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: He's not waiting for, he has good ideas, right?
SPEAKER_01: He just wants to work in your life.
SPEAKER_01: He wants to invite you into that work.
SPEAKER_01: He works in you to will and to do according to his purposes.
SPEAKER_01: For those of you that have trusted in Christ, you can say with deep conviction, God has my heart and is working on me daily.
SPEAKER_01: But just because your heart's in the right place, you still can face impossible circumstances because of the state of somebody else's heart.
SPEAKER_01: This text reminds us that God can change the heart of kings.
SPEAKER_01: You need to continue to walk by faith.
SPEAKER_01: You need to continue in faith.
SPEAKER_01: You need to persevere, right?
SPEAKER_01: I love, um, let's close with um, we won't sing it, but I love this refrain from this hymn.
SPEAKER_01: O grace, how great a debtor.
SPEAKER_01: Daily I am constrained to be.
SPEAKER_01: Let thy goodness like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee.
SPEAKER_01: Prone to wonder, Lord, I feel it.
SPEAKER_01: Prone to leave the God I love.
SPEAKER_01: Hears my heart.
SPEAKER_01: O take and seal it.
SPEAKER_01: Seal it for thy courts above.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: The magnificent, beautiful God that we see in this text is a God who can guide the hearts of kings, and the God who has taken up residency in our own hearts.
SPEAKER_01: May we, may our attitude this morning, oh God, be a heart or be in a place where we say, God, you can direct my heart.
SPEAKER_01: You can direct my heart into your work.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, if it's to rebuild a city, Lord, whatever that work may be, Lord, we want to be led by you.
SPEAKER_01: Open up our eyes to see what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01: And Lord, some of us are stuck, not because our hearts are out of the game, but because somebody else's heart is stuck.
SPEAKER_01: And Lord, we just intercede right now, just like you changed Cyrus' heart, we pray, Lord, and we ask for a divine work in that person's life, that the eyes of their understanding would be enlightened, that the truth and the knowledge of the gospel would shine out of their hearts in the knowledge of you, that every thought would be brought captive to the person of Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, that you would win in people's lives.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, help us to be patient.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for this long story, this history of redemption that is unfolding.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for the comfort that it gives us.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, a good thing is going on.
SPEAKER_01: We, Lord, we are going to just look to you, trust you, hold on to it because Jesus already did the work of the cross.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: We pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Let's stand.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Let's stand together.
SPEAKER_01: Let's sing this last song.