Ezra 8

So Ezra 21 through 23.

There by the Ahava Canal, I proclaimed a fast so that we might humble ourselves before our God and ask him for a safe journey for us and our children with all our possessions.

I was ashamed to ask the king for soldiers and horsemen to protect us from the enemies on the road.

Because we had told the king, the gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him.

But his great anger is against all who forsake him.

So we fasted and petitioned our God about this.

And he answered our prayer.

So let's pray.

God, we lift up ourselves to you in our limited capacity.

We ask that you would open up our eyes to see wonderful things out of this text.

Speak into our lives through this book of Ezra.

Lord, we we are entrusting ourselves to you, anticipating an encounter with God.

Speak to us, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

You may be seated.

Let's keep going through Ezra.

We only have two weeks left after today.

All right?

And we've covered some really good ground up till this point.

We are in the second part of Ezra.

You'll recall that part one of Ezra is chapters one through six.

Part two of Ezra is chapters seven through ten.

The first part of Ezra is all about Zerubbabel's leadership in rebuilding the temple.

This is post-exilic history.

In other words, the people, the children of Israel were taken into exile in Babylon because they had rebelled against God's rule.

They were for 70 years captive by another nation.

And then God supernaturally changed the heart of a king named Cyrus and sent Zerubbabel and 50,000 Hebrews back to Jerusalem to build the temple.

And we've covered that in our past studies.

What we've seen is that they had some opposition and they got delayed in the process.

It took about 15 years because of persecution.

But the temple was built.

Then last week we jumped fast forward 60 to 80 years, depending on which Arctic Xerxes was the one who sent Ezra back to Jerusalem.

It's 60 to a 60 to 80 year jump into chapter 7.

So we looked last week at, it was all about letters, right?

We were looking primarily at a letter that was written by King Artaxerxes explaining to the local government 900 miles away from Babylon, all about Ezra, that he's a scribe, that he knows God's word really well, and he is coming to teach the people about the law, the Torah.

This week we're going to look at the actual narrative of how the material we read about in the letter was carried out.

So last week we're given a letter from Artaxerxes, a word-for-word letter.

And then this week we're actually going to see the narrative of how this unfolded.

Now I'm praying I can be timely.

I will try to talk fast and do this well because I just love some of the stuff we're going to cover.

Okay, the first part of this is this whole idea of where are the Levites.

So starting in verse 15.

Now, why are we starting in verse 15 and not one?

Verse 1, I kind of referenced this last week.

Verse 1 through 14 is a list of names of people that came with Ezra from Babylon back to Jerusalem.

Okay, and I'm gonna reference them in just a second, but let's pick up in verse 15.

It says this I assembled them at the canal that flows toward Ahava, and we camped there three days.

When I checked among the people and the priests, I found no Levites there.

So I summoned Eliezer, Ariel, Shemiah, Elnathan, Jerobah, Elnathan, Nathan, Zechariah, and Meshelem, who were leaders, and Jorib and Elnathan, who were men of learning.

And I ordered them to go to Edo, the leader in Kishfiah, or Kashfia, is maybe how your version puts it.

I told them what I what to say to Edo or Edo and his fellow Levites, the temple servants of Kashfiah, so that they might bring attendance to us for the house of our God.

Because the gracious hand of our God was on us, they brought us Sherubiah, a capable man, from the descendants of Mali, son of Levi, the son of Israel, and Sherebiah, the sons and prophets, in all, and Heshbiah, together with Jashiah, from the descendants of Morai, and his brothers and nephews in all.

They also brought two hundred and twenty of the temple servants, a body that David and the officials had established to assist the Levites, all were registered by name.

So Articerxes is the king.

He is well acquainted with this guy, Ezra.

We don't know exactly what their relationship looked like, but they uh Articerxes allowed Ezra to leave.

And in the first 14 verses of chapter 8, we have a reference to 18 family heads.

Basically, 1,496 men are listed that come from these family heads.

Then after we get these Levites added to the mix, we're going to add another 258 men with a total of 1,772 men.

If you include the women and children, you would end up with between 4,000 to 5,000 people.

Now, the original group that we read of in chapters 1 and 2, 80, 60, 80 years earlier, was 50,000 people, were released, commissioned, set free to come and build the temple.

So Ezra gets a much smaller group to go on this journey, which is somewhat fascinating.

Ezra brings the traveling party to this canal or river, three days' journey, and he realizes that the Levites are missing.

So he goes probably close to 60, 70 miles away from Babylon to the edge of this river, sets up camp, counts out the people, and realizes the Levites are missing.

Now, we saw last week that Ezra himself has an amazing pedigree.

He can track his family line back to Aaron.

So he himself is a Levite, but there's no other Levites that are represented in this group.

So let's pull this thread for just a minute, right?

Let's go backwards and look at who are these Levites and their role.

I think this is a, we'll do what we call biblical theology.

When you're studying scripture, let's say you go to seminary, you have a couple of different types of theology that you study.

One is systematic theology.

Systematic theology is like when you take your junk drawer at home and you dump it out on the counter and you start categorizing.

Here's all the rubber bands, here's all those little chip, these clips that go on the top of your bags for your bread.

That's what your junk drawer looks like, right?

Thumbtacks, yeah.

You kind of categorize it all, right?

That's what you're doing in systematic theology with scripture.

So it's like, okay, here's every verse that deals with uh the Messiah, and here's every verse that may deal with um government, right?

And we put all those verses together.

Now, there's another type of theology, and that's biblical theology.

Biblical theology tracks the progression or the development of a theme, biblical theme.

And so when we go here and we're gonna look at the who are the Levites, we're gonna track the progression, the development of the priesthood.

What is the priesthood and how did it develop?

Now, we only have a little bit of time this morning, right?

We're not in Bible college.

We could spend two hours on doing a whole biblical theology of priesthood.

But I want to just uh point to a couple of, so keep in your mind that these guys are on the edge of this river and they're like, Where are the Levites?

This is a crisis for Ezra.

It's like, I think Ezra's bummed, to be honest.

Okay, and we'll see why here in just a second.

First of all, in Genesis 29, there's a man named Jacob, who's the third generation from Abraham.

You have Abraham, he has a son named Isaac, Isaac has a son named Jacob, and Jacob ends up with two wives, right?

One is named Rachel, and the other one is Leah.

Now, this is not something that Jacob chose.

It was kind of foisted on him by his father-in-law.

He basically got the better of Jacob.

So he ends up with these two wives who are sisters, and they're upset at each other because they're um one can't have kids, the other one is having kids, but Jacob loves Rachel.

He doesn't really like Leah a whole lot.

That's not the one he picked out, but he got stuck with her first, right?

It's a crazy story.

I love that part of the Bible.

It's just so weird.

Um, it's not like anything we can relate to, right?

Um, so in Genesis 29, 34, it says that Leah conceived again.

She's already had two sons.

She's conceived again and bore a son, and said, Now, this time my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.

Therefore his name was called Levi.

So this is the beginning of the Levites, right?

Now we're gonna fast forward a little bit into 400 years, not just a little bit, 400 years in history, and the children of Israel, who is Israel?

Jacob, right?

Jacob had his name changed to Israel.

He had 12 sons.

These 12 sons uh have a bunch of descendants, and they are captive prisoner in Egypt.

And uh that's what the whole Exodus story is about.

Moses is bringing them out.

Now in Exodus chapter 6, 6 through 19, it says this these are the names of the sons of Levi according to their generations.

Exodus 6 · chapter mention

Gershon, Kohath, Mereri.

Wait, Meri.

Didn't you see Meri in our text in Ezra?

Wasn't one of the Levites that's found the son of Meri?

There he is, right?

It's an important line.

So it goes through these, and then it concludes in verse 19.

These are the families of Levi according to their generation.

So Levi has these sons, these three sons, Gershon, Kohath, and Meri.

Very important, right?

If we were gonna had more time, we'd go into following them.

Oh, there's Mali down there.

The other guy that we uh in our story in Ezra comes from Mali.

Now, let's go to the next book, Numbers.

This is as God is giving the children of Israel, right?

God takes the children of Israel out of Egypt through the wilderness into the promised land.

But before they can go into the promised land, God tells them, here's your common constitution.

Here's how you're arranged, here's the moral law that you're to follow, here's how you're to worship, here's how the worship space is to be arranged, the tabernacle, the temple, um, here's how the sacrifices are to be offered.

And so the Levites have a specific role.

So in verse 23 of Numbers 18, it says this it's the Levites who are to do the work at the tent of meeting and bear the responsibility for any offenses they commit against it.

This is the last ordinance for the generations to come.

They will receive no inheritance amongst the Israelites.

Notice that.

This is why I said concerning them, they will have no inheritance amongst the Israelites.

So the Levites, now, you you know, I mean, you guys are smart and you've read through the Bible, you know that these other tribes are getting land designated out to them once we get into the book of Joshua.

But the Levites don't get a special land in the Promised Land.

Instead, they're completely in charge of worship.

So they don't have an inheritance.

Their inheritance is solely based off of worship functioning in Israel.

So the Levites are taken care of as long as the nation is spiritually healthy.

Now, I don't know if you've ever had a job where you've been incentivized, but that's what this is.

God is incentivizing a whole tribe of leaders to make sure that the nation is spiritually healthy.

Isn't that fascinating that God arranged that?

I just I love that.

But they're carried off to be in exile for 70 years.

Way, way down, you know, another few hundred years into their story, they're carried off into exile for 70 years there in Babylon.

Now, Babylon was what we would call first world, right?

We today we have these things called third world countries where the resources are very limited, the infrastructure is very limited, um, the uh poverty rate, probably somebody here that's in Hopkins knows actually the true definition of what is a third world country.

Now we do.

Oh, thank you.

Is that that's like the the PC way of saying it, right?

A low-income country.

Man, I would love to know how that developed, but not right now.

Thank you for adding that in there.

Okay, so it's a low, so at this time, this would not be a low-income country.

Jerusalem would be, because it's been barren and uh like captive for 70 years, right?

It's 70 years plus the 80 since um the first the 50,000 came back from Babylon.

So here's Levites who've never had a land.

They're in Babylon where it's prosperous.

This is an opportunity to do really, really well.

So if you're a Levite, you've been born into a calling to minister and lead your nation spiritually, but you have this incredible opportunity to make a lot of money.

Now, even to this day, Jewish people are notoriously known for doing well monetarily, right?

They can run stuff well.

And these guys, it's very likely that these Levites, the reason we get three days into the journey at the edge of the river, and there's no Levites there, is that this would be a huge sacrifice to go back to Jerusalem.

You're talking about forsaking 70 years of being established.

Now, I don't know about any of you, but but some of some of you I do know that that you you've come from poverty and you're finally up on your feet, and it's just like that you're the first person in generations to finally kind of have secure financial security and things are going well.

That that may be how these Levites felt.

And so they are faced with do we follow the call of God or do we stick with what we've got?

Fascinating.

I mean, look, if you've if you've come from poverty, you can you can um relate to the maybe the crisis of faith that these individuals felt.

Now, I I am not drawing that contrast.

Oftentimes, God's work in a person is that he wants us to purposely that uh having wealth is not necessarily in contradiction with God's plan for your life.

God uh is not opposed to wealth.

I want to make sure that that's clear.

But for this group of people, they had a specific calling, and by not coming out to the river here, they're forsaking their calling.

Right?

But Ezra, he does what a good leader does.

He says, We need to go get them.

We need to get them, we need to bring them back.

Now, that's not the end of the story of the Levites, because Levite worship, the Levites are gonna come with Ezra into the city, they're gonna help in the temple, but then we fast forward 500 years because you know we're on the edge of biblical, uh like a cliff in biblical history, right?

Once we read Ezra and Ezra and Nehemiah ends, all of a sudden there's 400 years of silence until Jesus comes back on the scene.

There's no more biblical history that's recorded for us.

Now, if you're Catholic and you have a Catholic Bible, you have in it what's called the Apocrypha.

And it has some um history books that fit into that period, but those were not ever considered by Hebrews or the early church as scripture.

Now, there's nothing that is heretical in the Apocrypha.

It's not gonna really um conflict with your faith uh too badly, but it's never really been considered scripture by the Protestant church or the um Hebrew uh the the to the Jews in Jesus' day.

Jesus never quoted from, like the book of Maccabees, but there's some good history in there that's accurate.

So um we do have, so in other words, if you have a Catholic Bible and you're here, you're welcome to be here, right?

You're not you're not in trouble, okay?

You actually could get some good history out of there.

So we get into Jesus' day, and Jesus, is he a Levite?

No.

Jesus was not born a Levite.

What tribe was Jesus from?

He's from Judah, and we know that there's these prophecies in Isaiah that there's going to be a root that comes from Judah, right?

There's gonna be a branch that comes from Judah.

All these prophecies talk about how something significant, an individual of significance, is gonna come from Judah.

And Jesus is born of the royal line of Judah rather than being born a Levite.

So you get through Jesus' life, right?

He's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

He um there's a bunch of obviously important stuff that happens through Jesus' life, but then what I want to do is get to Hebrews.

In the book of Hebrews, it's a letter.

We don't know who the author is.

A lot of people think it's Paul, but there's no signature on that letter like other letters from Paul.

The book of Hebrews or the letter of Hebrews is written to the Jews around 65 AD, 30 years after the death of Christ, and it's all about Judaism.

So it sets the context for this.

So look in Hebrews chapter 7, 11 through 18.

Hebrews 7 · chapter mention

Hebrews chapter 7, 11 through 18.

Hebrews 7 · chapter mention

It says there if perfection could have been attained through the Levitical priesthood, and indeed the law given to the people established that priesthood, why was there still Still a need for another priest to come, one in the order of Melchizedek, not in the order of Aaron.

Now, we really don't have time to get into this, but David, who was the king of Israel, wrote a psalm that prophesied about a new priest coming after the order of Melchizedek, not after the order of Levi.

Melchizedek's this mysterious character that Abraham interacts with.

He's the king of Salem, and he brings out bread and wine to Abraham.

Bread and wine, wait, bread and wine, that's what Jesus did at the Last Supper.

So Melchizedek is a type of Christ at the time of Abraham, pointing to this priesthood, because Melchizedek was a priest and a king.

He points to a priest that's not coming from Levi.

Trippy, right?

Way trippy.

Crazy stuff going on there.

And so the writer of Hebrews says, well, why is there a priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, but not after the order of Aaron?

And then you have in verse 12, for when the priesthood is changed, the law must be changed also.

He of whom these things are said belonged to a different tribe, and no one from that tribe has ever served at the altar.

For it is clear that our Lord descended, speaking of Jesus, he descended from Judah, and in regard to that tribe, Moses said nothing about the priests.

Are we probably here?

Moses said nothing about the priests.

And what we have said is even more clear if another priest like Melchizedek appears, one who has become a priest, not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry, but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life.

Okay, here's what's going on.

The Bible anticipates a priest that will come, not of the line of Levi, that is more significant, more important than Levi's tribe.

If you go through and you read the entire chapter of Hebrews 7, you'll see this whole thing laid out.

But basically, Jesus is this perfect priest that comes in because the law was deficient.

And the fact that Jesus came as a priest shows us, it reflects that the priesthood of Levi was deficient.

And you know what?

We feel the deficiency of the Iranic or the Levitical priesthood in our text today.

Our hearts reading Ezra 8 should give us an internal longing for a better priest because Jesus shows up.

Right?

Jesus shows up.

When we're on the edge of the river and we need to go to work, there's no absence of a high priest.

Jesus is there with us.

In fact, at the end of Matthew, he says, Lo, I'm with you.

To the end of the age.

There was this problem.

One of the problems with the priesthood is that they would die.

And you're going to have to get a new priest.

You never know what you get with a new priest.

I mean, we never know what we're going to get with a president, right?

Every four years or every eight years, it's like, yeah, it's a hit and miss.

What are you going to get?

Imagine, here's the person, not that's supposed to rule the country, but supposed to help you relate to intermediate your relationship with God.

What are we going to end up with?

And these priests would die.

And some of them were corrupt.

Some of them could be bought off.

We see that in Israel's history.

There was a need for a better priest.

And Jesus came after the order of Melchizedek.

He himself was the sacrifice.

He himself was the intermediary between us and God.

That's why, and this is the second time I've mentioned Catholicism this morning, but that's why in Protestantism we do not have a person functioning in the church as a priest.

We don't call anybody priest in this church or father for that matter.

It's because Jesus is the only one that has that title as priest.

He functions as the high priest for us.

He's the only one that can intermediate between us and God.

Like so I'm not your intermediator.

I hope you're not looking to me to talk to God on your behalf.

When I was a kid, I gotta tell you a story about that, okay?

When I was a kid, when I was a kid, I was a pastor's kid, and um, I was uh about nine years old, and I was with a youth group and we went for a hike in Hawaii, and we got terribly lost for about five minutes.

And as 12-year-olds are able to do after about four minutes of being lost, we were panicked, we were freaking out.

We couldn't see where and we were in a heavy brush.

And um as 12-year-olds do when they're panicked, they said, We have to pray.

We need to pray, we're stuck.

And I said, That's a great idea.

Let's pray.

And they said, You're a pastor's kid, you pray.

And I knew at that time, I knew I have nothing special to offer you.

And you guys can pray.

I know how evil I am.

I got nothing, I got nothing better to offer God than you have to offer God.

Jesus is our high priest.

He showed up.

So Ezra gets these two guys and they uh take their place.

Here's again Ezra, the people, they're waiting for the priests.

We don't have to wait.

Our priest is available immediately.

In fact, as you go through Hebrews, it says that in your time of need.

In Hebrews 10, it says that God sits on his throne of grace, and we're called to go before the throne of grace in our time of need, and to make our needs known to him, and that he helps us in our time of need.

We have full access into the presence of God because what of what Jesus has done on our behalf.

Because we have a good high priest who has himself been the sacrifice on our behalf, we have full access to God.

No waiting around at the edge of a river for days to hopefully the priests will show up.

No, he's there immediately.

Second, Ezra was faced with this meager, reluctant response from the Levitical line.

Who wants a spiritual leader that you have to kind of beg him to come out, right?

And who really only has three days to get over there?

It's like, hey, you're gonna come?

Yeah, okay, pack your stuff up, we're going right now.

I mean, who wants that to be their spiritual leader?

Jesus willingly offered himself.

He was not reluctant.

He didn't have to be begged.

In the garden, he said, Not my will be done, your will be done.

And so here we are.

We've got Ezra has now got his 1,700 people together, or men and 5,000 uh total, and they're on their way.

It's a four-month journey from Babylon to Jerusalem, and we get into verse 21.

21 through 23.

This is the passage that um we read earlier, and for the sake of time, I just want to point out that Ezra proclaimed a fast.

And then we have a substantiation.

And you guys are good Bible students, you know what a substantiation means, right?

Substantiation means we have cause and effect.

In other words, the text says for us why there was a fast.

It's so that we might humble ourselves.

Sorry, this is a causation.

It's so that we might humble ourselves before our God and ask him for a safe journey for us and our children and all of our possessions.

Fascinating.

He fasts, they they proclaim a fast.

So a fast means they're going to abstain from eating food.

They're probably going to drink some water, but they're going to abstain from food for a couple of days and just pray and pray.

The need of the hour was that they needed protection on this trip.

It's very dangerous to go 900 miles with millions of dollars of gold and silver, which we'll see in a second.

And Ezra opened his big mouth and said, Hey, look, God's hand's upon us, you know, Artaxerxes.

We don't need your help.

And then he gets out to the river.

He's got, guys, we gotta pray.

There's no armed guards going with us this time.

And they're like, Well, why didn't you take the armed guards?

I don't know.

I told him, God's hand's on us, you know.

We we gotta pray.

What a mess.

What a mess.

But but this is but this is genuine.

This is their expression of faith, right?

Now you'll notice when you get to Nehemiah, which is the partner book, right?

In Nehemiah chapter two, Nehemiah's offered armed guards in his travels.

He doesn't reject it.

And the reality is that we're all called to express our faith differently, right?

So uh you have two famous evangelists, D.

L.

Moody and Hudson Taylor, right?

Dial Moody was a missionary in China.

He was one of the first missionaries to that we know of to really contextualize himself.

He grew out his hair, he shaved the sides of his heads, he even pulled back his ponytail tight on the side of his head to try to make his eyes squint a little bit more so he would look like the people.

He dressed in the Chinese garb.

He tried to speak the language as fast as possible.

He only ate the food of the people, and it really hurt his physical body deeply, but he wanted to be Chinese.

Anyway, his approach to fundraising is that he would never ask for money.

If people asked him what the need was, he would let people know.

But for him, he felt like God wanted him to never ask for the money and to just trust him.

At the very same time, over in America, there was a famous missionary who actually came or evangelist who came to Baltimore during his ministry named D.

L.

Moody.

And he would do these big evangelistic crusades, kind of like Billy Graham did.

But Billy Graham kind of took the idea from evangelists like D.

L.

Moody.

So D.L.

Moody, his approach to doing ministry, he was coming to a city, he'd see a venue, and he felt like God's stretching him and calling him to live by faith was to go to the wealthy person and ask that person for the$7,000 to rent out the facility.

And they both were expressing faith, but radically differently.

And the funny thing is they knew each other.

Hudson Taylor and D.

Moody were aware of each other later on in life, and initially they were critical of each other.

So Hudson Taylor, Hudson Taylor was like, that's so unspiritual.

He shouldn't be asking people for money.

And D.L.

Moody's looking at Hudson Taylor saying, that guy's so unspiritual, he doesn't ask anybody for money.

But later on they came to appreciate one another.

They both wrote publicly about their appreciation for one another, and D.L.

Moody sponsored Hudson Taylor late in life and actually gave money to his efforts as a missionary.

All that to say, the way that you're called to live by faith may be different from me.

Right?

Our call to live out our faith is contextualized to us.

We have a vibrant living relationship with God, and God tells us how we ought to live.

Now, I am so far off the plot here from the text.

Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.

Okay, this is why I said that, right?

So Ezra rejects, Ezra rejects the armed guards.

And so they fast and pray.

Here's what I actually put in my notes.

There is a connection between your physical body and your emotions, how you feel, right?

To illustrate this, in 2012, there's a famous TED talk by who was it?

Amy Cuddy.

I'm sure you guys have seen this.

Have you seen TED Talks?

This is one of like the top TED Talks that's out there.

All about power poses.

Have you seen this?

Okay, some of you've seen this.

I've tried this.

It's fascinating, right?

The whole idea of power poses is that the way you place your body has an impact upon your hormones and how you feel, right?

So the physical position of like putting your hands up in the air, like victory, has a biological impact upon you to cause you to feel more confident.

You put your hands on your hips, makes you feel more confident.

So in the TED talk, she's saying, do this before you go into an interview.

Some of the opposite, like the position, body positions that you don't want to take that kind of reduce your confidence is hands folded, in your lap, kind of bent over.

Right?

That causes you to feel less confident.

It's a fascinating talk about our biology and how they've studied it.

All that to say, God has wired us in a way where our physiology is connected to who we are spiritually and emotionally.

And so there is a valid purpose for humbling yourselves.

I love how this is written here.

It's we humbled ourselves so, or we proclaimed a fast so that we might humble ourselves, right?

They're not fasting and inflicting pain on themselves to earn the favor of God.

They are aware that God, well, let's put the verse up here.

It says in Scripture that God opposes the proud, but he shows favor to the humble.

What do these people need right now?

They need the favor of God, right?

If you need the favor of God and it's it's through humility that you can get God's favor, then it just makes sense.

Let's humble ourselves, let's humble ourselves through fasting, and we'll get God's favor, right?

Makes sense.

So so in a later on in the chapter, I think they're they're kneeling in prayer.

Why do we kneel in prayer?

Well, it's it's it's probable that that posture, that physical posture, helps us be have the right heart.

Why do we lift our hands in worship?

Oftentimes it's helping our hearts feel as it ought to feel.

So fasting, very briefly, because we're running out of time, fasting doesn't earn you the favor of God, okay?

But it does place you, it does coax your body to be in the right condition to gain the favor of God.

It's this fascinating thing.

If you haven't spent time fasting, it's fasting is more popular, I think, right now than ever.

There's documentaries on Netflix about it that are super interesting.

Like intermittent fasting is a part of like dieting now.

So I love that.

But the Bible, when it's talking about fasting, has really nothing to do about it.

It's not really tapping into that stuff right now.

But we are seeing, wow, it is, it has some incredible benefits.

So these guys fast, they pray.

Verses 24 through 34.

Let's go through this quickly.

Integrity, the integrity of this group.

Then I set apart twelve of the leading priests, namely Shereh, Hechebiah, and ten of their brothers, and I weighed out to them the offering of silver and gold, and the articles that the king, his advisors, his officials, and all Israel presented there had donated for the house of God.

He goes through uh the measurements.

Um verse twenty-eight, I said to them, You as well as these articles are consecrated to the Lord.

Verse 29, guard them carefully until you weigh them out in the chambers of the house of the Lord Jerusalem, before the leading priests and Levites and the family heads of Israel.

Then the priests and Levites received it.

Then on the twelfth day they leave Ahava.

The hand of God is upon them, protecting them because they get to Jerusalem.

Verse 32, we have arrived in Jerusalem, and we rested for three days.

Then on the fourth day in the house of our God, we weighed out the silver and gold and the sacred articles into the hands of Merrimauth, son of Uriah, who's a the existing priest in Jerusalem, Eliezer, son of Phinehas.

Everything was accounted for by the number and weight, and the entire weight was recorded at that time.

So here's the thing.

You have the original amount that's weighed out publicly, then it's distributed to these different Levites.

They're told, carry this with you.

Then we get to Jerusalem.

Everything is weighed again, and they say, everything is there.

Now, does this ring any bells for you who are nerds right now?

This is like the first distributed ledger, right?

You know what blockchain technology is?

Cryptocurrency?

Anybody follow that?

Okay.

So this is like what's really over the last five years, this is the new kind of internet.

A distributed ledger is a decentralized way of tracking things, right?

Just go watch like a YouTube video on what's a blockchain, right?

So on top of the blockchain was built currency.

So that's what Bitcoin is, and all the other cryptocurrencies that are out there.

It's a distributed, and what's what's so powerful about the blockchain is it's de it's a decentralized ledger.

So you have a ledger, like an accountant's ledger, on thousands of computers.

So when I do a transaction, it's not being kept track of through a centralized bank.

It's all this whole network of computers that are cross-checking one another.

So there's radical accountability with a distributed ledger.

It's fascinating.

So here's Ezra saying, let's take everything, let's distribute it, right?

That's what a distributed ledger is.

Let's distribute it.

We'll get back and we'll cross-check one another.

It's a fascinating, it's fascinating that this is the modern day technology that like people are like, this is the currency that's going to take over the world.

They're even using this uh now to track produce uh blockchain technology because like when there's a recall of romaine lettuce, we have to wipe out how much what lettuce, like half the country's supply of lettuce.

And it's devastating, right?

But if you can track each individual head of lettuce through the blockchain, then we have much less lettuce being destroyed, right?

Sorry, that's just you gotta go with me here on the geeky, nerdy stuff in the text.

Ezra, man, he's a smart guy.

There's a ton of integrity here.

The bottom line is integrity is important.

We live in a time where uh there's a deficit of integrity in the church as well as in government.

And Ezra is doing stuff in such a way where there is just um radical integrity.

Can I just show you something that's fascinating?

That as I was just wrapping up my study this morning, Paul, in um on his third missionary journey, there's a famine that Jerusalem's suffering from.

And he's planted all these churches in southern Europe and he tells them look, you guys, you Gentile churches are all the result of this Jewish church, founding church back in Jerusalem.

We owe our faith, our heritage back to them, and they're the Christians suffering back in Jerusalem.

We need to put together an offering, some supplies that we can take back and bless the brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.

We owe it to them.

They helped plant this church.

So when Paul puts together this offering that's going to be taken on a long journey, he says this.

For Titus not only welcomed our appeal, but he is coming to you with much enthusiasm on his own initiative, and we're sending along with him the brother who is praised by all the churches.

So there's a known brother who's being sent, uh, his service in the gospel.

What is more, he is chosen by the churches to accompany us as we carry the offering.

Do you see that?

There's a guy who's known to the churches, respected by the churches, that's supposed to carry the offering with Paul, which we administer in order to honor the Lord himself and to show our eagerness to help.

Now look at verse 20 and 21.

We want to avoid any criticism of the way that we administer the liberal gift.

For we're taking pains to do it, uh do what is right, not only in the eyes of the Lord, but also in the eyes of men.

Do you think he got this from Ezra?

I was thinking as I was sitting there this morning that, I mean, it's practical what he's doing, because he's carrying a ton of wealth from Macedonia, modern day like Greece.

Um he's carrying it hundreds of miles back to Jerusalem, and he doesn't want to be the only one carrying the money.

He goes and he recruits, he says, You churches need to designate people to go with me because I want to be accountable, not just before the Lord, but in the eyes of men.

All right, let's uh let's land the plane, as it were.

Verse 35 and 36, worship and the delivery of letter.

This is the closing part of the chapter.

The children of those who had been carried away captive, who had come from the captivity, offered burnt offerings to the God of Israel, twelve bulls for all of Israel, 96 rams, 77 lambs, and 12 male goats as a sin offering.

All this was a burnt offering to the Lord, and they delivered the king's orders to the king's satraps and governors in the region beyond the river, so they gave support to the people and the house of God.

So the local government got Artic Xerxes' letter and the offerings that Articerxes wrote about and even supported, they're being offered, and that closes out chapter 8.

First of all, we want to humble ourselves.

No, that's not actually the first of all.

That's the second of all.

This morning, Jesus wants to be your high priest.

He wants to intermediate your relationship with the Father.

He is the perfect sacrifice for your sin.

He's the perfect intercessor for your needs.

Um, and so the question is: will you allow him to be your high priest?

Your answer is yes, then we want to do what they did.

We want to humble our hearts before him.

Even I put here, even hacking our humility or hacking our body so that it's humbled, by using our physical body, fasting, kneeling in prayer, and we are called finally to be a people of integrity.

We demonstrate God's life in us by being a people of character.

Let Jesus be your high priest.

Manipulate.

Feel free to manipulate your physical body so that it can produce spiritual fruit in your life.

And third, we want to be a people of integrity.

The first example is Jesus, man.

Jesus was a person of integrity and he lived, he lived before us.

He lived in the light, and he's called us to live in the light as well.

Lord, we thank you for these principles embedded in the story of Ezra.

And Lord, we need a high priest.

We need an intermediary.

We need you, Jesus, to make it so that we can come before you in our time of need.

Man, every week, Lord, we're in need.

Every day, every hour, as the hymn says.

We need you, Lord.

Thank you that Jesus, your blood was shed on our behalf, and that we could say, Lord, help.

And you're willing.

You already accomplished the work, so you could help us.

We are so grateful, God.

We're so grateful.

Lord, we lift up our hearts before you, unburden our hearts as we just place our affection upon you.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.