Overview of Ezra & Nehemiah

Church, we are in beginning a series through the book of Ezra and Nehemiah.

This morning we're gonna do an overview, where we're gonna kind of take a big wide look at these books.

We're gonna read chapter one of Ezra this morning.

Ezra is in the Old Testament, after 1st and 2 Kings, Samuel, 1 Samuel, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, then Nehemiah.

If you get into the Psalms or Job, you've gone too far.

Ezra is 10 chapters.

Ezra and Nehemiah originally were one book.

They were together, and then they were separated, because one tracks mainly the story of Ezra and one tracks mainly the story of Nehemiah.

So picking it up in Ezra, chapter 1.

Ezra 1 · chapter mention

This is God's holy word.

In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and also put it in writing.

Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, the Lord the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judea.

Whoever is among you all of his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judea, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.

He is the God who is in Jerusalem.

And let each survivor in whatever place he sojourns be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods, and with vents, besides free will offerings for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.

Then in Benjamin, up in the head the heads of the father's houses of Judea, of Judah, and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites, everyone whose spirit God had strengthened to go up to rebuild the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem.

And after all who were about them aided them with vessels of silver, with gold, with goods, with beasts, with costly wares.

Besides all that was freely offered.

Cyrus the king also brought out the vessels of the house of the Lord that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the house of his gods.

Cyrus, king of Persia, brought these out in the charge of Methoridith, the treasurer who counted them out to Sheshabazar, the king of Judah.

And this was the number of them.

Thirty basins of gold, one thousand basins of silver, twenty-nine censors, thirty bowls of gold, four hundred and ten bowls of silver, a thousand, and a thousand other vessels.

All the vessels of gold and silver were five thousand four hundred.

All these did as Sheshbazar bring bring up when the exiles were brought up from Babylon to Jerusalem.

This is the word of the Lord.

Now maybe you can relate to this.

This is how I feel at times.

When you're going through your day or your life, and you're doing something, and then you just you pause for a minute, and there's a moment of reflection while you're driving or something, and you just begin to think, is this it?

Like is this really it?

Is this the point of life?

Like, is this why I'm here on the earth?

Is this why I'm spending my days at work and cook and eat and clean and repeat?

What am I doing?

Maybe you feel that way.

Like, am I missing something?

I feel like there's not a whole lot of significance in my life.

Am I missing something?

Maybe you're on the other side of the coin and you're just kind of content with life.

Yeah, the world's kind of crazy and things are falling apart, but for your little corner of the world, things are okay.

You're content, life's comfortable, kind of everything's kind of going how you want it to be.

And so you're not really bothered by the mundaneness of life.

And you're not really bothered with this bigger, heavier question of what am I doing with my days with the time the Lord has given me.

Whatever side of that coin that you're on, this morning, my goal is that we look at these two books and it gives us the right perspective.

We have the right perspective of what God is doing.

Now that might sound offensive maybe to some people, because it what I'm implying is that maybe you don't have the right perspective.

And I want to be clear that look at the world is wrong.

You're seeing things wrong because your perspective is wrong.

Your vision is not accurate because you don't know Jesus Christ.

You're still dead in your sin.

You're still trying to find purpose and meaning.

But for those who are followers of Christ, whose Christ's blood has atoned for them, this isn't that you need to change your perspective, but that we need to bring it into focus to see what God is doing, what God is into.

Our perspective gets out of focus easily.

So we need to, with His people, He is not careless.

God has given us a life to live.

So whatever your situation, wherever you're you're whatever's going on in your life, God is real and He's genuine and He has a purpose for your life.

Now, what I'm gonna share with you isn't new.

How many times have you heard that that those words?

God has a purpose for your life.

Right?

You hear it everywhere, even from people who don't even know God.

God has a purpose for your life, it's good.

He does have a purpose for your life.

And if you're in Jesus Christ, it is very good.

God is faithful.

This is what we see through these two books.

This is what we see, the narrative of God's people, is God is faithful, he renews and he restores.

This is what this is his deal.

He's been doing this from the beginning.

So wherever you're at with God, he is a God who is faithful, who renews and restores.

This morning we're gonna see that God has a plan for his people.

That God has his people, that God has proven himself.

Again, the theme as we walk through these books, God is faithful to renew and restore his people.

God is faithful to renew and restore his people.

So wherever you're at, you don't know what the point of life is, you're just kind of worn out, you're you're kind of been ground down by life.

What's the point?

Is there something more to this?

God will renew and restore.

If you feel just kind of comfortable and you want to stay comfortable, but your affections for God, your desire to be obedient to God, your desire to take risks for God, and to be pushing yourself out of your comfort zone in obedience to God, he will renew that, restore that.

And if you are walking in the ways of the world, wondering, why am I so sick of my sin?

What will satisfy me?

When can I have some kind of purpose or meaning?

I want to tell you that God is faithful.

He can forgive you of your sin, save you, and bring you from death to life, and he will be faithful to you.

We need to work to bring the truth that God is faithful, He restores and He renews into perspective and to see it clearly and to see it fully.

So God has a plan.

So we pick up this story in Ezra.

It's a God's people, God's chosen people, and they've been in captivity for 70 years, right?

They were rebelling against God, rebelling against God, rebelling against God.

These are the people that God delivered out of Egypt, set apart for himself, showed them love, showed them his affection, his faithfulness, and they rebelled and rebelled.

And God didn't say, Well, you know what?

I've done with you.

I've tried, I've tried everything, but you don't want to listen, so have it your way.

That's not what God does.

But he did something so gracious and so loving.

He disciplines his people, he disciplines them.

They get carried off into captivity by the Babylonians.

They're taken away from their homes, their lives, and they're living as aliens and strangers.

They don't even have a home.

They've been occupied, they've been taken, they're living in a foreign land for decades and decades.

Where is God?

What was he doing?

Is he gonna come back for us?

Generations ago, they had seen God's faithfulness in the desert for 40 years and then bring them into the promised land.

And then they flounder.

Then God allows them to be disciplined, taken by the Babylonians.

At least in the wilderness, they at least had a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to know that God was guiding them.

But in captivity, where is God?

Does he even have a plan?

So this story, this narrative of Ezra and Nehemiah, it covers about a hundred years of Jewish history.

A hundred years from around 539 BC, for those who care about dates, to 433 BC.

Israel was exiled, carried off by King Nebuchadnezzar.

And the people are waiting, wondering, this is when Daniel was living, this is when Ezekiel was living, prophesying, as Ezekiel was.

What's the Lord going to do?

Is he gonna rescue his people?

Does he have a plan?

He does.

He does have a plan.

Shows it right here in the first few verses of Ezra.

In Ezra 1 through 6, we see the first wave of exiles because Cyrus releases the people to say, man, we're gonna let them go to their homeland.

So he releases them.

And so the first six chapters of Ezra actually have nothing to do with Ezra.

It's about this guy named Zerebal, and he takes the first wave, about 50,000 people from Judah, back to Judah, back to Jerusalem.

And he starts to kind of clean up the land and establish the altar, then establish the temple.

And then in the midst of that, there's this disruption, the ceasing of the rebuilding of the of Jerusalem for about 50 years.

And in this time between the first wave and then the second wave, which is what Ezra brings, about 50 years past.

And this is where the story of Esther takes place.

All these times, God is working to redeem his people.

He's faithful to preserve his people.

He's working.

God has a plan.

If you will, turn with me in your Bibles to Jeremiah.

Book of Jeremiah, it's to the right, past Psalms, Ecclesiastes, past Isaiah.

Keep going all the way to Jeremiah.

I want you to see this in your Bible.

Jeremiah chapter 29.

Jeremiah 29 · chapter mention

One of the most quoted verses.

It's a good verse.

It's good that we know it in context.

First Jeremiah chapter 29.

Jeremiah 29 · chapter mention

We're going to pick it up in verse 11.

For thus says the Lord, when seventy years have completed for Babylon, I will visit you.

I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.

Plans for welfare, not for evil, but to give you a future and a hope.

Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.

You will seek me and find me.

You will seek me with all of your heart.

I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where you have driven, where I have driven you, declares the Lord.

I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

These aren't a forsaken people.

These aren't a neglected people.

These aren't a people kind of left to wander and figure it out.

These are God's people.

And God has a plan for his people to drive them out so that he can gather them together again.

Gathering them together that they may call upon him, that they may seek him, they may love him.

Maybe you're in a place in your life where you're feeling driven out.

This isn't our Babylon.

You're here.

You're right here in this congregation, in this church.

God desires that you walk with him.

God desires that you turn from the things that are robbing your affections for him, that you turn from sin and that you follow him.

And then as believers, you continue to turn from sin and follow him.

For he does have a plan for his people.

He will sustain his people.

But make no mistake, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, God is working in you.

And though you might be under discipline, he might be pushing his hand down on you.

The pressure just grinding you.

It is so that you would cry out to him and follow him.

And you see him more clearly and love him more wholly, more purely.

This is what God does with his people.

God has his people.

God has a plan.

And we see him even using the things of the world to work out his plan.

He uses this king of Persia, Cyrus, not a Christian, doesn't believe in the God of Israel.

But God stirs something in him to send the people back.

In chapter 6 of Ezra, we'll see that King Darius, another king of Persia, similar thing happens.

He hears about this oppression of these people, and so that like those people, they're kind of ratting out the people of Israel, like, hey, they're rebuilding their temple and they're rebuilding these walls.

And they write to King Darius, and Darius writes back, yeah, and you need to help them.

You need to support them.

And if you don't do this, this is what it says in chapter 6, verse 11.

If you alter this edict, you will be killed.

You'll be driven onto a stake on top of your house.

So here, King Darius doesn't know God, doesn't really probably, like, isn't fearing God at this point, if ever.

And God's using him to say, listen, these are God's people, you support them.

So you see, worldly people who are like, I guess we gotta like support these people.

These are God's people.

This isn't because Ezra or Zerebel or Nehemiah are just like these great, awesome, charismatic leaders.

It's because these are God's people.

And God will do his thing with his people.

He will preserve them, and he has a plan for his people.

We see then a similar thing in Nehemiah, right in chapter one.

A different king of Persia, Art Xerxes, right?

Nehemiah's broken about the wall, and he's like, hey, let me help you out.

Same thing.

He writes a letter, he sends Nehemiah, take what you need, all the supplies you need.

The Lord is using these wicked rulers to preserve and to build his people.

The Lord is at work.

He has a plan and he has his people.

So this God has his people.

Again, if you took like a snapshot of the people in this kind of era, this story, right?

They're in captivity, they're traveling between Babylon and then they're Susa, turn where they're at, over to Jerusalem, which by the way is 900 miles.

Took about four months, not a good time.

They arrive in this broken kind of rubble of a city.

So if you see the kind of a snapshot of these people, you think, these are God's people?

This is what it means to be God's people, like God of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac, the creator of heaven and earth, these are his people.

You might think, I'll pass on that.

I appreciate it.

Thanks but no thanks.

And see, this is where we like to kind of, in our own lives, we kind of focus in and we just kind of put these blinders on, and we just see like the day-to-dayness of life.

Sharing with Rob before the sermon that it's been one of those weeks where you're just like, man, meaningless, meaningless.

Like, are we doing this again?

Are we gonna do this again?

We gotta do dishes again, we gotta clean, we gotta like load the again?

Like, how many times?

We gotta come into church, gather together again, we're gonna sing the same song, again, we're gonna open the same word again, we're gonna pray the same thing again?

Like, how long, O Lord?

And that's kind of the crime of our hearts.

And that's not all bad.

Because it points to a hope that Christ is coming, and that the grind, the hard thing that we're in, the trial that we're in, the suffering that we're in, it will come to an end.

It will cease when Jesus Christ returns.

Because God will come for his people.

God loves his people.

And as I mentioned earlier, God disciplines his people.

Proverbs 3, 11 through 12 says, My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline, or be wary of reproof.

For the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father, the son, whom he delights.

Don't be despising God's discipline.

His loving, affectionate, pressing into you.

Now that feels so contrary.

How are we supposed to not grow weary of reproof?

What does that even mean, right?

As Christians, to not grow weary of the Lord's reproof?

I don't even know if he's reproving me and I'm weary.

You must look to the Lord.

And there's a second application here to parents.

We are to be disciplining our children.

That is the loving thing to do.

Do you grow weary in reproofing your children?

Do you grow weary in teaching them right from wrong?

Let us not grow weary of that.

Because we love them.

And just as Christ, who loves us, is training us, in forming us, in teaching us as parents, may we not grow weary.

And when we are growing weary, may we turn to Christ, confess that we are weary, and say, Lord, give me strength to raise these children, to love you as best as I can do, and to follow you as best as I can, knowing their salvation is in your hands.

May we as parents be faithful, because God is faithful to us.

Deuteronomy 8, 5 and 6 says, Know then your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you, so you shall keep the commands of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him.

This is the root of all discipline.

We're trained, God's training us to have a good and right, reverent fear of the Lord, an awe of the Lord, an affection for the Lord that says, I will obey you because.

Because you're God.

And likewise, we're training our kids to fear the Lord.

To fear the Lord.

Not me.

I'm just a man.

I will die.

To fear the Lord, to respect, admire, and follow and obey the Lord.

God disciplines his people.

But God sustains his people.

God's people were sustained throughout their life.

Provisions were given.

We see provisions in chapter 1 from the people they're leaving.

We see provisions again in chapter 6, given in chapter 1.

God continues, even if it's the hard thing, providing for his people, practically, tangibly providing.

It's good to remember that the people of God were not going back to rebuild their old glory.

This people of God.

They were not going back to rebuild, to do something great in the eyes of the world.

They weren't coming back to kind of start waving the flags and hey, we're God's people, y'all can just eat it.

We're it.

We're back.

Have had it.

No.

They weren't coming back to rebuild something for the world just to gawk at.

They were coming back to obey.

They were coming back to worship.

They were coming back to the land, the place that God had promised for them, preserved for them, so that they could worship the Lord.

So their hearts wouldn't be wandering again.

They'd be seeking Him and crying out to Him.

God's people were returning to obedience, returning to obey God.

We see this in chapter 3, they rebuild the altar in the temple.

In chapter 7, Ezra reads the law aloud to the assembly.

In chapter 8, the people fast and they pray.

In chapters 9 and 10, they confess their sin and they resolve to obey God again.

These are people in the humdrum of life who sought to obey God, acknowledging their sin, saying, I want to turn from these, I want to follow the Lord.

They weren't there to build a name for themselves or to get what they could out of life.

They were seeking obedience, to walk in the commands that God had given them.

And he began to restore.

He began to restore their relationships, to restore their identity in him as God's people, to restore their understanding of who he is, to restore their desire for obedience.

I don't know about you, but there's been times in my life where I'm just praying, Lord, give me a desire for your word.

I want to want it.

Give me a desire to hate sin.

I don't hate it.

Give me a desire to honor you.

Give me a desire to be more godly.

Give me the desire.

God renews our desires, He restores those things.

Because Jesus, because of King Jesus, He has proven himself faithful.

He has proven himself faithful to his people.

Time and time again.

He proved himself faithful when he called Abraham as his people in Genesis 12.

He proved himself faithful when he called Moses and brought the people of Israel out of Egypt.

He sustained, he disciplined, he provided, he redeemed his people.

He proved himself faithful with his people while they were in captivity and when they returned to the promised land.

He proved himself faithful when he, Jesus Christ, came to earth.

Emmanuel, God with us, teaching us the way, the good news of the gospel, that Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone can save.

And his raising from the dead, defeating death, that we can have our sins forgiven, that we can live for eternity with our Creator.

God has proven himself again and again and again.

So as you're going through this next week, and you just and all you see is what's before you the problems, the issues, the brokenness, just the tasks that never end.

Let's get perspective.

Let's look at what God is doing.

He is redeeming his people.

He is faithful to do this.

He has proven himself to do this.

So in the midst of all these things, you trust his word and you walk in obedience to him.

Now listen, these two books, Ezra and Nehemiah, they do not end well.

They don't end on a high note.

They don't end with like, man, we're back and the walls built, and like, let's just clap it up.

This is great.

Now we're just gonna, Jesus is probably gonna come soon, you know, the first advent, the first time, then he'll come back.

Like, it doesn't end that way.

It doesn't end on a high note.

It ends with everyone else doing what they did before.

Turning from God, forgetting God, rebelling against God, doing what they wanted to do, forgetting God.

In a sense, this makes sense.

This makes sense because anything that does not end in Christ is destined for brokenness.

Anything that does not end in Jesus Christ is destined for brokenness.

Now we know because Christ has come, and we're on this side of the first coming of Christ, and they were not.

We know that Christ has come, that Christ does redeem his people.

So it's not as if the people of Ezra and Nehemiah are just, man, they they they lost.

Forget it.

It's gone, it was worthless.

No, there is one who will come.

There is a Savior who will come, and when it is in him, when all things are in him, it is glorious, and it is good.

So just like everything that ends apart from Christ is broken, so everything that ends in Christ is good.

And everything that finds its purpose and its meaning and its conclusion in Jesus Christ is good.

Praise God for that.

So as a church, as people, we must remember that God has proven himself.

We must turn to him, knowing that he is our ultimate hope.

Not the rebuilding of a temple, not the fixing of a relationship, although that's good, not the problems of our life being figured out, although we be grateful for those things, not all the sick people being well, although that would be a wonderful thing.

That is not our hope.

Our hope is in Jesus Christ.

And that when we wake up tomorrow and there's all these things that need done, and there's all these pressures on us, and there's all the temptation of the world to give in to sin, to be fleshly, that we don't, we're not stuck there, we're not slaves there.

We as God's people are in Christ.

We walk, we worship Him.

We walk with Him, we worship Him.

So here you are.

I mean that.

Here we are.

You can't fast forward time, you can't rewind time and go back.

You can't wake up and be richer or be 30 pounds lighter or be more godly or love people more.

We're here.

Similar as Ezra, the people who are leaving captivity and going back to Jerusalem, that's where they were.

And so here we are.

We have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be faithful to God?

What does it mean to see God restore and renew our hearts yet again?

What does it mean to be obedient to Him?

So instead of asking, man, when's life gonna get better?

When's this all gonna just kind of go away?

Let's ask the Holy Spirit to give us perspective.

That God's word would give us perspective that God is faithful, that He has a plan, He's preserving His people, He has proven Himself again and again.

So do not look, church, hear me, do not look to other things to renew you or to restore you.

Don't do it, and they can't do it.

Look to God, He alone will satisfy you.

Let's pray.