"God Knows Your Name" Ezra 2 Sunday Evening Worship Service

You know, it is amazing what is happening here tonight, that it really is supernatural that the world outside is going on doing its thing and people are driving to I don't know, friends' houses or back from lake houses or back from work and just the world is happening as it normally happens on a chilly Virginia Sunday afternoon.

And yet you all have set aside those other activities and you've come here to do lots of things.

To pray with each other, to God who is in heaven and hears our prayers, to sing songs, one of which written by Chinese people 200 years ago, to build us to the point where we open the Bible and hear from God's Word and hear what the Word of God says.

And we believe what Paul writes to Timothy, that all scripture is God-breathed, that all scripture is profitable for teaching, correcting, training, rebuking, so that the man of God might be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

And so that we would not be sh put to shame able to handle the Word of God.

And that's a very easy thing to say.

It's a very easy thing for pastors to say, but that's why we do expositional preaching.

That's why we open the Bible in a book.

And when I say we, I don't just mean me, I mean Christian pastors in general.

This is what we do.

We open the Bible to a book and we preach through that book.

And there's always the temptation to just choose specific passages of scripture and preach about that.

And I give into that temptation occasionally, often.

But what I pray is true for you guys is you realize that there is a steady stream of truth that just comes from going to whatever passage is next.

And that God really did design the Bible.

There's the joke that I often make that whatever I'm preaching on at that moment is my favorite passage.

And that's because I do believe that every passage of the Bible is able to build us up in the faith, is able to challenge us, is able to convict us of sin and to cause us to grow more like Jesus Christ.

And that's true in long, meandering books of the Bible like Job that just seem to weave and go back and forth, which is intentional to show you that the path of suffering and mourning is long and meandering and it's not a straight line.

Like the book of Proverbs that you can read over and over again and always be learning stuff.

The book of Psalms that are powerful gut punches and the history books with all the kings and their villainous battles.

And I think everybody agrees with that.

But it is also true, I say to you tonight, it is also true in genealogies.

And that's the one where some of you are like, uh, I don't know about that.

All scriptures God breathes, except for genealogies.

All scripture is profitable for teaching and training and the building up of the men of God in righteousness, except for Ezra 2 or Matthew 1?

You know what we're gonna do when we're done with Matthew 9, by the way, Sunday morning, says I think we're gonna go back to Matthew 1 and just start Matthew 1 for Advent and go through the genealogies up until Advent.

And I'm not joking.

I heard some laughs as if that was a joke.

No, it's it's true.

Uh but tonight we're in Ezra chapter 2.

Ezra 2 · chapter mention

And this is 70 verses of names.

7-0.

70 verses of names, which will appear again in Nehemiah, by the way, almost identical list, and I will approach it very differently in Nehemiah.

Um but for our time in Ezra, we're gonna focus on this list of genealogies because I think that there are lessons from this for us.

I think there's truth in this passage from us.

In fact, I'm gonna title tonight's outline Lessons from Forgotten Names.

Lessons from Forgotten Names.

We're gonna look at a list of names of really forgotten people.

Some of them are people names, the first 25 verses.

After that, we're gonna get to place names where people were just named after the city they were from.

But the list begins with names that have been forgotten.

And before I start reading this, and we will read all 70 of these verses, not at once.

I'll break it up in four sections or so tonight.

But I'm gonna read all of these names.

I'm gonna mispronounce probably 25% of them.

Uh, but I don't see the Hebrew professors here, so I think I'm going to get away with it, actually.

Yeah, looking good.

You know, there is a tension when you think about God between God's transcendence and his eminence.

That God transcends all things, that he predates time, he pre-exists time, but the time is the progression of events, and before God created the universe, there was no conception of time.

There was only the Trinity in love and fellowship and happiness, and then all time comes from them in the act of creation, beginning with creating the heavens and the earth, beginning after that with the angels, and then the division of the stars and the dry land from the water and the animals, and he goes through creation.

All that happens, and at that moment there's a progression of time.

But God is above all that, he's before all that.

And in his active creation, he creates a world where he will interact with them personally and directly.

And this is the big tension in the Bible.

Some passages are transcendent, they describe God's eternality and they describe his infinite attributes.

But then in the Bible, there is this personal element of God that he cares about every single individual.

This is his meticulous providence, that he cares about how long an insect lives.

He cares about the weather of any particular day.

He cares about all details of creation.

And in the middle of that, more important than insects, more important than the weather, is us.

And God doesn't just care for us with a blanket care, like he does for his creation, but he cares for us individually, personally, which is why when we pray, we believe that God hears us and answers our prayers, because God knows us and he loves us.

And so that's what I love about a list of names like this.

These are people that we have forgotten.

These are people that Ezra has forgotten, probably.

Ezra shows up not on this list, he's gonna arrive in chapter 7.

These people, many of them, were dead by Ezra's lifetime.

But God records them in the Bible just to make this basic point that God cares for people.

And we get to that as our first point tonight.

God knows your name.

And here's a list of names and numbers that God knows.

I'm gonna begin reading in verse 1, and I'm gonna read through verse 25.

These were the people of the province, which is the Medo-Persian Empire, is what they mean by the province there, who came up out of the captivity of those exiles whom Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, had carried captive to Babylonia.

They returned to Jerusalem.

We looked at this last week, the decree in Ezra chapter 1, which Cyrus gave.

Ezra 1 · chapter mention

Remember that the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken the Jews captive, brought them to Babylon, and then the Babylonian Empire fell, the Medo-Persian Empire took over.

This is described in Daniel 5 and then Daniel 6.

Daniel 7 is Cyrus and Daniel's vision.

And this Cyrus gives a decree that the Jews can go back, and so that's Ezra 2, verse 1.

Ezra 2:1

There's a list of people that have been taken captive.

They in the middle of verse 1 returned to Jerusalem and to Judah.

Jerusalem, the city, Judah the state in Israel, the tribe, each to his own town.

These people went back to the very towns their ancestors were from.

They came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Sariah, which is not the same Nehemiah as later.

This is a different Nehemiah, just the same name.

Sariah, Reliah, Mordecaiah, Bilshan, Mizfar, Bigvah, Rehum, and Benah.

The number of those, and by the way, that's 11 names.

And if you take the prince earlier, that was mentioned at the end of chapter 1, Shes Bazar, that gives you 12 names.

I find it very interesting that God at the start of this genealogy is going to repopulate Israel, again, starting with 12 people.

He did it with 12 tribes.

Then he's going to have the 12 apostles, the 12 apostles indicating really a new Israel in the land.

God is now working with a new people.

And you get the same effect here.

This is kind of in the Old Testament, this is the bridge here between the captivity and the entrance of Jesus Christ 400 years after this, 500 years after this.

But for now, he's repopulating the promised land, beginning with 12 Jews that are going to be representative of the rest of the people.

But we're then get the rest of the people by name.

Verse 2, the number of the men of the people of Israel, the sons of Perosh, 2,172.

The sons of Shephpatiah, 372.

The sons of Aras, 775.

The sons of Paoth, Moeb, Moab, namely the sons of Jeshua and Joab, 2,812.

The sons of Elam, 1,254.

The sons of Zatud, 945.

The sons of Zachiah, 760.

The sons of Bani, 642.

The sons of Babai, 623.

The sons of Azgad, 1,222.

The sons of Adenekhaim, 666.

I mean, couldn't he have added one more?

You just laugh when people say, hey, the numbers in the Bible are not meant to be exact.

You know, they're figurative.

Well, okay.

That's bad for Adonaican, I guess.

But I do believe these are actual numbers.

They were counted for a reason.

Remember, these names are the person that went into captivity, and these are their descendants that came back with them.

The sons of Bigviah, 2056, the sons of Aden, 454, the sons of Adder, namely Hezekiah, 98, the sons of Beziah, 323, the sons of Jorah, 112, the sons of Hashim, 223, the sons of Gibbar, 95, the sons of Bethlehem, 123, the men of Nato Netoaf, 56, the men of Anatoath, 128, the sons of Asmavath, 42, the sons of Kiryath, Arim, Cheferiah, and Baroth, 743.

Now these are names with particular numbers in them.

It's demonstrating that all the people that came back to Israel were connected to those that left.

They're connected to God's people who were settled in the land.

They're tracing their ancestry all the way back.

Remember, the days of Joshua, Israel enters the promised land.

It's divided up by tribes.

They settle the promised land.

Some of the tribes, especially Dan, wouldn't take their land captive because they were intimidated by the people.

So Dan was supposed to have the Mediterranean coast, but the Philistines were there.

And so Dan went up to what's modern day the border with Lebanon up there, where the traumatic transfiguration was that was Dan's territory up there.

It shouldn't have been, but that's where they ended up settling.

A tribe and a half state on the other side of Jordan.

Levi didn't have land, they were supposed to be spread around.

The Jews were supposed to be giving their land back every 70 years, back to the family who it originally had.

They would even sell land based on uh every 50 years, sorry.

They were supposed to sell land predicated on the price away from the year of Jubilee.

So you could buy land from some of their family, but you knew when the year of Jubilee came, it had to go back to that family.

The Jews never kept that.

Remember, they never kept that.

That's why they're in exile.

Jeremiah tells them, you're going to exile because you did not keep the year of Jubilee.

So now they're going back to the land.

That's why this genealogy is so important.

That God is saying, I want these families back in their lands that 500 years earlier, or you know, really 900 years earlier, after they crossed with Joshua into Israel, they should have had this land.

I want them back where they're supposed to go.

And this time, honor the year of Jubilee.

Go back to where you belong and honor the year of Jubilee.

So this is not an abstract concept.

This is particular people that God knows and he knows them by name.

They're going to come back to the land and dwell in real land.

Understand, these are not imaginary people.

You can scan through this list for a list of baby names, I suppose.

But I want you to know that behind these list of names are actual people that have a real identity, real families, a real heritage, real property that God has given them.

I think sometimes we lose track of that significance.

I know that Mormons, for example, are big into names, and Mormons love family heritage for nefarious reasons.

You know, they're trying to track you back down to the lost tribe that came over here on the boats and got stranded in Missouri, and so they are fascinated by your names.

They want to baptize the dead people to trace you back in all the way back.

They have an obsession with that kind of thing for bad reasons.

For Israelites, they also had an obsession with that kind of thing, not to baptize on behalf of the dead, but to get the families into the right part of land.

Because in their minds, knowing your family identity connects you to God's faithfulness.

You want to see God's faithfulness?

Think of your family identity.

That's the way the Israels thought.

Because they believed God knew them and they knew them by their family name.

It's interesting that in verse 2, and it says up at the top of my ESV column, the verse 2, they came with Zerubel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Sariah, Reliah, but they came back into Israel.

Look at the start of the next paragraph.

The number of the men of the people of Israel.

That should jar you because so far this list has all been Judah.

They were the ones that were taken in exile by Babylon.

The Babylonians did not take Israel into exile, remember?

The Babylonians took Judah into exile.

The Assyrians took Israel into exile.

But when they come back, God is done with those other ten tribes.

The Assyrians have them somewhere.

But God is going to repopulate Israel, starting with the tribe of Judah, and he's going to identify them as Israel.

I love again those twelve names are given at the front here.

That highlights what they're doing.

God has a relationship with these people.

They're part of, they're going to be the new founding order of these twelve tribes, and he will know them by name.

Well, that's true of Israel, but I want to make the second point here.

It's true even of you.

The God knows even your name.

He knows you personally.

And to make that point, I want to read the next section.

Starting in verse 21, not with every name, but some of the names, but definitely in verse 25, forward through verse 35, it switches from person names to place names.

These are people that had forgotten their ancestry.

They didn't know the names of their relatives that were brought into exile.

They didn't know their names, but they knew what city they were from.

And so the list is starting with some of the names in verse 21 and all the way through verse 25, but all the names starting here in verse 26 are going to be place names.

The sons of Ramah and Giba, 621.

The men of Mikmas, 122, the men of Bethel and Ai, 223, the sons of Nebo, 52, the sons of Magvish, 156, the sons of the other Elam, 1,254, the sons of Harim, 320, the sons of Lod, Hadid, and Onoh, 728, the sons of Jericho, 345, the sons of Sinath, 3,630.

You get here place names that the people become attached to.

And God is still interacting with these individuals.

They have forgotten their ancestry, but God knows who they are, and he knows them by name.

As I mentioned, for some Americans' family identity is important.

We even have kind of a question we ask people, where are you from?

And sometimes we mean where are you born?

But oftentimes we mean, no, where, you know, where did your grandparents immigrate from?

And the grandparents beyond that.

And you know, Madison at ICS did Heritage Day, and she was supposed to come with her, you know, her nation's heritage.

And what they meant by that was not the United States.

I tried to have her come with a New Mexican heritage.

That's what I wanted.

But bring like so papapillas or something, and it would be cool, green chili, and the kids would love it, but no.

I don't know any kind of national identity for myself.

I know that my uh dad was from New Mexico, and his dad was from Montana, and his grandpa was from Montana, and so I traced my ancestry back to Montana.

My mom was adopted, but my dad was from Montana, and that's where my people are from.

I found out recently, though, my dad got into the uh Ancestry.com thing, and we've traced down like his great-great-grandparents that were from Missouri.

So I go back to Missouri.

I don't know.

Which I liked Montana better.

No offense.

But offense intended.

Um that's my people right there.

But I understand that God is faithful and knows me by name regardless of where I'm from.

We lose track of our family connections, people forget each other.

This is the abrasive point in here.

I hope you see this.

Switching the list of city names is meant to be a little bit abrasive.

It's supposed to remind you that, listen, I mean, frankly, you're not going to be remembered when you die.

Your kids might remember you, your grandkids might remember you.

But I mean, at that point, it kind of runs out.

You know, my dad, his mom died when he was nine.

His younger brother, uh, I don't think remembers his mom.

My dad, maybe, will be the last person alive who remembers his mom.

That's just what the way the world works.

Sometimes people have it as their goal to be remembered, but to be remembered by who?

You know, you want your kids to remember you remember you, that's good, and you want your grandkids to you want to live long enough to meet your grandkids, and and that's good and it's noble, but I mean, I don't know how long you're gonna live, but some of your grandkids might forget you.

But pretend your grandkids are the last people that remember you.

What happens when they die?

It's almost like you die a second death then.

You died once and your your own life ended, and then then the last person remembers you when they die, it's gone again.

That's the category of people we're dealing with here.

They don't remember their grandparents' names.

That's unusual for us.

But if you make it great-grandparents, I mean I don't know how many of you would know your great-grandparents' names.

Or just chalk it out one more generation and be like, oh, my great-grandparents, that's easy.

Go back one more generation.

Your great-great-grandparents, you know their names?

Do you know where they're do you know anything about them?

How tall they were, were they funny?

I think mine were ruggedly handsome, but it's just it's just conjecture, really.

And what do you know about those that went before you?

Even when the memory of you leaves this world, understand that what matters is that God knows you personally.

He remembers you.

Even when you don't know where you're from, he knows you.

Even if you don't know who your biological parents were, God knows you.

Even if you don't know where they were from, God knows you.

And that's what matters.

That's the point of this passage.

These people were welcomed back into the land, even though they had lost track of themselves.

God remembers us and he knows our names even when we forget.

Which leads us to our third point.

God has requirements for worship.

That's the point that is going to get picked up here in verse 36.

The priest, and remember, the priests did not have land allotted to them.

They were supposed to interspurse among the twelve tribes or the other eleven tribes.

The priests, the sons of Jediah, the house of Jeshua, 973, the sons of Emur, 1,052, the sons of Peshur, 1,247.

The sons of Harim, 1,017.

God here is providing priests to go back to the land.

Priests, by the way, they basically had the function of being a butcher.

They were sacrificing animals, they were doing sacrifices.

David had originally organized the priests into 24 families.

Here, notice there are only four that remain.

By Jesus' time, the Pharisees reinvented those other twenty families, by the way, to give themselves particular offices.

They created them, I mean, it's really fiction.

They knew there were supposed to be 24 that David had designated, but they had invented their own because they had died out and they filled themselves in those offices.

That's what happens there.

But particularly here of the Levites, verse 40, the sons of Jeshua and Kadmiel, the sons of Hodaviah, 74.

The singers, the sons of Asaph, 128.

The sons of the gatekeepers of the sons of Shalom, the sons of Atir, the sons of Talmon, the sons of Akub, the sons of Hatatiah, the sons of Shobiah, in all 139.

God was providing not just priests when they went back to the land, but God is giving them everything they need to worship him in conformity with the old covenant law.

God's not just giving them the land back, in other words.

He's not just saying, go back in the land and try again.

No, he is stalk them.

He's giving them stocking, like putting the right things on the shelves.

He's giving them all they need to do old covenant worship in the way God requires.

When they come back, they will have priests.

When they come back, they will have little Levites.

They'll have the sons of Asaph who write the Psalms.

They'll be back.

They can write their new songs to They'll have the gatekeepers to watch the temple.

They'll have everything they need.

There you're going to even have people that will serve in the temple.

Verse 43, the temple servants.

And here the names, many of these names in this next part of the list are no longer Jewish.

The sons of Ziha, the sons of Hashuah, the sons of Tabioth, the sons of Keras, the sons of Zesiah, the sons of Padon, the sons of Lebanon, the sons of Hagaba, the sons of Akub, the sons of Hagabab, the sons of Shamaliah, the sons of Hanan, the sons of Gedel, the sons of Gehar, the sons of Raiah, the sons of Rezin, the sons of Nakota, the sons of Gazm, the sons of Uzzah, the sons of Passiah, the sons of Basiai, the sons of Asna, the sons of Mayum, the sons of Nepheshim, the sons of Bakbuk, the sons of Hakafah, and the sons of Harur, the sons of Basluth, the sons of Mahedaiah, the sons of Harshah, the sons of Barcos, the sons of Sisera, the sons of Tamah, the sons of Neziah, and the sons of Hatipha.

And that was the hardest part of the list when I was practicing earlier, just so you know.

I've made it through.

Many of those names are Arab names.

Many of them are Persian names.

Many of them are Assyrian names, which leads me to believe that these are people that had been even taken captive as far back as Solomon, and they've been passing down their own ethnic names.

They've started serving in the temple in Israel's history and kept giving their own ethnic names.

They're Jewish, of course.

They were taken captive by the Babylonians, but their ethnicity is not, it doesn't go back to the original twelve tribes.

Already Israel is becoming a melting pot.

And if you go to Israel today, you you you would encounter that.

I mean, you cannot tell the difference between an Israeli and a Palestinian by skin color.

I mean, it's the there's every shade of Israeli.

There's Jews from Yemen, there's Jews from Spain, Sephardic Jews, there's Jews from all over the world that have taken on the skin color and the skin tones of their own nations that are Jewish and living in Israel.

And it was like that already back then.

Israel had already become a bit of a melting pot, owing to the fact that they're always under siege, and sometimes they win the wars and take slaves, and sometimes they lose the wars and become slaves.

And after 900 years of that, it's all intermingled.

And then you get a little bit of picture of that.

But these people were all supposed to be servants of the temple.

The sons, it says, of Solomon's servants, the son of Satiah, verse 55, the son of Hasparath, the sons of Peruthus, the sons of Jelah, the sons of Darkon, the sons of Gedel, the sons of Shephatiah, the sons of Hatael, the sons of Pokareth Hazabaim, and the sons of Ami.

All the temple servants and the sons of Solomon's servants were 392.

That was a lot of names just to get to 392.

But that's them.

These are all temple servants.

Now imagine that you identify as a temple servant, that that's who you are.

You're a singer, but you have never seen the temple.

You're the son of Asaph, but you've never sung a song of ascent.

You're a gatekeeper, you're a temple servant, and you've never been to Jerusalem.

That's why these people come back after the exile.

They want to go back to where their identity is.

That's how these people look at their heritage, not so much of the land in Israel, not so much what tribe they came in at, because many of them didn't come in with the tribe.

But they look back at their legacy with Israel and what they see is service in the temple.

But they've never been.

Imagine being, hey, some of you can relate if you were in the choir.

I see some of the choir members out there.

We were, what, six months without the choir?

Because we were meeting in here.

We were like the Israelites in the in the Exodus, wandering through the desert, meeting in the atrium in the gym, wherever we could meet, but there's no choir.

And visitors come to the church, and you know, they'd been going here five months, and they loved the music and everything.

And I would tell them, you know, we've got a choir and an orchestra, and they'd say, Yeah, right.

No, I can show it to you.

Look, oh no, I can't show it to you.

Find a video or something.

Here, here, so and so.

She's in the choir.

Okay.

You're in the choir?

When's the last time you sang?

Oh, generations ago.

Generations ago.

If you're a choir member, you want to sing in the choir.

You want to sing in the choir.

That's these people.

They're temple servants, and they've never been to the temple.

But God is giving them back to Israel.

So when Israel comes into the land, they will have the people that can lead them in temple worship, exactly like God requires.

This leads to the fourth point.

God has requirements for worship, and even our worship.

And what I mean by this is that there is no waving of the requirements.

There's no way to get around God's requirements.

When God gives a requirement for worship, he does not wave it.

He doesn't give waivers or exception clauses.

And we're going to see that here beginning in verse 59.

The following were those who came up from Telmalah.

And Tel is just the Jewish word for city or mound, so it's an older place.

Tel Harshah, Cherum, Adan, and Imur, though they could not prove, this is a key phrase right here, they could not prove their father's houses or their descent whether they belong to Israel.

So now this crew of people shows up and they say they're Israeli, they say they're Jewish, but they lost their passport.

I mean, they've been gone for 80 years.

They lost their birth certificate.

They can't prove their identity.

It's a four-month journey, by the way.

Four months from Babylon to Israel.

Four months.

I once went to catch a flight at LAX from my house in the San Fernando Valley, and as I crest it over the pass, I realized I'd forgotten my passport.

That was that was a fiasco.

Can't do a U-turn on the 405.

Going back home, and it's just, it's, I mean, that's inconvenient.

Imagine walking four months.

And you show up at Jerusalem, and after like month one, you realize, oh, I don't have the paperwork.

Oh, but surely they'll let us in.

Well, let's look at what happens.

Verse 50.

The sons of Deliah, the sons of Tabaoth, the sons of Nakota, 652, verse 61, also the sons of the priests.

Some of these people are priests and they lost their paperwork.

The sons of Habiah, the sons of Hakos, the sons of Braziliah, who had taken a wife from the daughter of Braziliah the Gileadite, who was called by their name, whole section in 2 Samuel about this.

These sought their registration among those enrolled in the genealogies, but they were not found there.

I mean, one of these guys is named after a guy who's very infamous in Israeli history, so he's like, I got the name.

All right, well, that's not good enough.

Where's your paperwork?

Verse 62.

These sought their registration among those enrolled in the genealogies, but they were not found there.

So they were excluded from the priesthood as unclean.

The governor told them, they appeal up the process, because I don't think the governor was the one manning the gate here.

You've got thousands and thousands of people coming in, pouring into Israel here from all these, you know, over 40,000 people are pouring back in.

So they've got a whole system set up.

They've got their own immigration workers there set up, checking the paperwork, and this guy doesn't have his paperwork, and the immigration worker says, You'll have to step into this line over here.

Well, actually, in Israeli culture, they don't do lines very well.

That's one thing they don't do very well.

You'll have to step into that mob over there.

And that's for the supervisor.

And then you go through that.

Some of these guys appeal all the way to the governor.

The governor gets involved.

The governor tells them, verse 63, that they were not to partake of the most holy food until there should be a priest to consult Urim and Thuman.

Now, those were stones that the priest would wear in his priestly vest that were enabled to, they said it was predictive.

You could tell yes or no.

You could divide one way or the other.

It was a 50-50 call, and the priest could discern it.

And so I don't even picture this being handled in a bureaucratically polite way.

I picture lots of yelling and shrieking, and I've walked for four months.

I have a Jewish name.

My grandmother's more Jewish than you are.

This huge argument, and it just makes work for lawyers.

That's what they do, is we'll get lawyers.

They have a whole immigration panel, and lawyers will work for years to sort this out.

And they're going to find a priest.

Yeah, that's it.

Wait for a priest who gets the stones, and they'll be able to tell.

But notice that they don't waive the criteria.

The bottom line: if your name cannot be proved to be part of the Levites, you are not allowed to do temple worship.

That's it.

That's it.

The whole assembly, verse 64, 42,360.

Besides their male and female servants, of whom there were 7,337.

They had 200 male and female singers.

Their horses were 736, their mules 245, their camels 435, their donkeys 6,720.

Some of the heads of families, when they came to the house of Yahweh that is in Jerusalem, made free will offerings for those house, the house of God to erect it on its site.

This is down in verse 69.

According to their ability, they gave the treasury the work of 61,000 darks of gold, 5,000 minas of silver, a hundred priest garments.

This is a massive offering.

Massive number of horses in 66, massive number of camels in 67.

They're filling this place out now with gold.

This is such an extreme free will offering that some commentators say it's got to be exaggerated.

But no, I think this is legit.

In other words, remember we talked about this in chapter one, that some of the tribe would come, and some of the family left in captivity would just give them gold.

They say, We can't come, but we're giving you gold to take.

We're giving you camels to take, we're giving you donkeys to take.

Take all this treasure with you.

We're gonna stay in Babylon, you take all this gold and go back to the temple.

And we see the same kind of language here in the New Testament, of course, most famously in Revelation chapter 20, verse 15.

Revelation 20:15

If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

This same kind of concept from Ezra chapter 2, verse 62, is repeated in Revelation 20, 15.

Ezra 2:62

You can show up and you can protest all you want, but if God does not have your name in his book, you're not getting in.

You're not getting into Israel back then, and you're not getting into heaven when you die.

It's appointed once for man to die, and then comes the judgment, the scripture says.

Everyone whom God has made will die and will be judged by him.

That's the reality.

That God knows you individually by name.

He can be in a relationship with you personally, he knows you and he will judge you.

He knows you and he loves you, and you will still die, and you will die at the day that he appoints for you to die, and not a moment sooner and not a moment later.

He is the one who has made you, he knows you, he keeps the record of your life.

Second Corinthians 5 describes the records of deeds done in the flesh, both good and phalon, both good and vain, empty.

Matthew 7, verse 21.

Matthew 7:21

Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

On that day, speaking of the day of judgment, many people will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?

Did we not cast out demons in your name?

Did we not do many mighty works in your name?

And then I will declare to them, I never knew you.

Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.

That's the idea.

That when you die, you will stand before God for judgment, and there will be many people who die and protest at just as if they were at the gates of Israel.

And protest and say, No, we belong here.

We belong here.

We should go to heaven.

We were, we did, we led a good life, we did good things, we deserve to be in heaven.

I remember a guy that I met in Los Angeles whose name was Armin.

He was Armenian.

And you would ask him, I asked him what he thought was going to happen to him when he died, and he said, I'm going to heaven, of course.

And why are you going to heaven?

And Armin said, I'm going to heaven, because my name is Armin.

I mean, come on.

Like, okay, I haven't heard this one before.

What does that mean?

Your name is Armin, you're going to heaven.

And he said, Well, Armin, I'm named after Armenia.

Armenia is the world's first Christian nation.

So obviously I'm going to heaven.

The world's first Christian nation, like officially Christian nation, in like what, 300 AD?

Year of our Lord 300?

Is that 1700 years ago?

And your name, I mean, that's that's not going to get you into heaven.

That you have the right name.

That you have the right physical ancestry.

And this is a fundamental difference between the old covenant and the new covenant.

The bridge that is the same is if you don't meet the requirements, you're not in.

But what's different is you had physical requirements to enter the promised land, physical requirements to be part of Israel.

That is different in the new covenant.

In the new covenant, it's not about physical requirements, it's not about a geographic place.

In the new covenant, it's a spiritual requirement that your name must be written in the book of life.

Philippians 3, verse 3, Paul says, We are the real circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and the glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.

Philippians 3:3

That was a stumbling block for the Jews.

The Jews could not believe that Jesus, the Savior, was coming to be the Savior of the world.

They couldn't believe that he would do miracles in the Gentile nations and the decapitus.

They wouldn't believe, they couldn't believe that he would go and leave Israel and show grace and mercy to those outside of Israel.

They couldn't believe that he'd be a savior to Gentiles, but he was.

They couldn't believe that the gospel would go to the world.

Even the disciples had a problem with it.

Jesus has to tell the disciples, go into all the world Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the uttermost parts of the world, and they don't want to go.

It takes persecution to throw them out the door.

But what remains is the declaration by God.

Unless your name is written in the book of life, you have no part in heaven.

And you don't put your name in the book of life by virtue of physical ancestry.

You're not a Christian because your parents were Christian.

You're not a member of Emmanuel Bible Church because your parents were.

You're not going to be a member of heaven because your parents were.

That's the point.

This was such a happy occasion here in Ezra II.

The people are celebrating their return.

They wrote a song about it, Psalm 126.

Let me read you.

Psalm 126.

When Yahweh restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

Our mouth was filled with laughter, our tongue with shouts of joy.

They said among the nations, Yahweh has done great things for them.

Yahweh's done great things for us.

We are glad.

Restore our fortunes, O Yahweh, like streams in Negev.

Those who sow in tears will reap with joy.

He who goes out weeping, bearing the seeds for sowing, will come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.

I mean, that is like the happiest psalm in the Bible.

They say, God sowed the seeds in mourning.

We were taken to exile and we were weeping and crying and mourning in exile, but it's producing joy in the promised land.

That's an Ezra II psalm.

They were so excited, not the ones that were excluded, but everybody else.

So happy to be back in the Promised Lands.

But it does not work well for them.

And you don't even need to read the rest of the book of Ezra, although it would be a reoccurring theme.

The book of Ezra starts off with this happiness.

It starts off with Psalm 126.

It ends with tears in the rain.

But you see a little bit of the seeds of their own undoing already planted here.

Think of all the gold they had to rebuild the temple.

They did not rebuild the temple.

They had so many gold, they had temple singers with them, but they forgot to rebuild the temple.

This little line here, they made free will offerings.

Look at verse 68.

Some of them, notice that phrase at the beginning of verse 68.

Some of the heads of family, some of them made free will offerings for the house of God.

Some of them.

Not all of them.

Some of them.

Just that word, it's so ominous, isn't it?

The old covenant is inferior to the new covenant.

Because the old covenant by design had believers and non-believers in it.

There's a physical requirement into the land, not a spiritual requirement.

And so non-believers, people who did not place their faith in Yahweh, are already in the, already mixed in.

This is why the new covenant is so different.

Because the criteria to be a member of the new covenant is faith.

Faith in Jesus Christ.

That is the only criteria.

Again, there's no physical criteria in the church.

It's only spiritual.

Do you have faith in Jesus Christ?

Lord, we're thankful that the new covenant is superior to the old in every way.

Of course, there are still sinners in the church.

There are those who are deceived.

There are those that show no signs of saving faith that are part of the church, but that's not by your design.

Your design is that the church should be made up of those who are believers, regenerate, born again, because our names are in the book of life.

We look to this passage in Ezra II, and we see their joy, their excitement, their precision in numbering all those who came back, their expectation that this time it will be different.

We also see their heartache.

That without a new heart, this new start will profit them nothing.

Lord, we're thankful that though you are the God of heaven and earth, you're the Lord of the universe, you do know us.

You know us individually.

You know my name.

And you have met my requirements.

You have met your requirements to worship you on my behalf.

I can approach the throne of grace.

This church can approach the throne of grace.

We can pray to you, not because of anything we have done, not because of any ancestry we have inherited, but because you have met the requirements for worship on our behalf.

You have met them in your Son, Jesus.

He is our loan requirement.

He is the perfect gatekeeper of heaven.

Because he fulfills our requirements to be there, and then we come in with him.

Lord, as we are wrapped up in Jesus Christ, we are adopted into your family.

You know our names as your own children.

You know our names personally.

You know our names personally because our sin was placed in your Son.

His death was in our place, his resurrection gives us life, and your Holy Spirit has brought that life to our hearts.

So we are indeed thankful tonight, Lord Jesus, that you know you, that you know us, you have set your love on us, and you bring us into glory with the resurrected Jesus Christ.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.