Introduction:
Well, we come to the end of the book we began studying at the end of February. And all along we’ve been saying that the major point of Ezra was to bring about spiritual reformation according to the word of God.
You’ll remember that the book of Ezra follows the narrative that we pick up in 2 Chronicles 36 in which we read that due to the faithlessness of Israel, God sent a pagan king, Nebuchadnezzar, to destroy the city of Jerusalem and the temple within it. And that’s exactly what happened. In 586, Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Babylonians, marched on Jerusalem and sacked the city, tore down its walls, leveled the temple to the ground, and carried off the Jews and the precious vessels in the temple off to Babylon. And there they remained for some years until the new king of the new world empire, Cyrus of Persia, issued a decree to release the Jews. And that’s where we pick up the story in Ezra 1. And so a number of Jewish exiles return to Jerusalem under Zerubbabel and begin laying the foundation of the temple once again. Ezra himself leads a second group of exiles in chapter 7 and find that the people who came in the first wave had intermarried with the nations around them – one of the very sins that brought them into exile to begin with!
Well, last week we walked through Ezra 9 in which Ezra prays a prayer of confession on behalf of the returned exiles, and here in chapter 10 we see how they respond to Ezra leading them to confess their sins.
It’s here in chapter 10 that we see the story – unfolded for us so far in Ezra – come to its consummation. It’s here in chapter 10 that we see the nature of true reformation. It’s where the story of God reshaping his people and transforming them by his grace leads to. True Reformation involves God’s Word and Repentance.
- God’s Word
In chapter 9, we see Ezra distraught over the “faithlessness” of the exiles – and this faithlessness was expressed in the intermarrying of the people of God with the pagan nations that surrounded them. The faithlessness referred to in chapter 9 is expressed differently here in chapter 10 with the phrase, “we have broken faith with our God.” Ok, how had they broken faith with their God? This chapter presents at least two ways:
First, they broke faith by disobeying God’s commandments.
They knew what God had said about this. As I said last week, this had nothing to do with preserving ethnic purity. This had everything to do with pagan influences with their abominations coming into the covenant community of God. And God hadn’t been silent on this:
Deuteronomy 7:2-4 – ““When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire.”
Exodus 34:11-16 tells Israel to destroy the surrounding nations, to put them to utter and complete destruction, “lest…you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.”
Friends, time would fail me to read all the passages these Israelites had access to that warned them against this very sin they committed. This language is all over the OT, in the Law and the Prophets. But they disobeyed his commandments, and thus broke faith with their God.
Not only that, but secondly, they broke faith by not trusting God.
That’s exactly what breaking faith means, of course, so it’s a little redundant. But what I mean is that they were not just disobedient in not doing what they were supposed to do – they looked at what God had done and what he had said and found his words unworthy of their trust. They basically said, “What’ll happen if we obey? What’ll happen if we don’t intermarry with these people? Our trade routes could be compromised, our commerce would suffer, our economy will suffer if we don’t observe this practice.”
But those are all the wrong questions! What about God did they find untrustworthy? That’s exactly what God asks the pre-exile Jews through the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah 2: “What wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me?” Or Jeremiah 29: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Or Psalm 37:5 – “Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him and he will do this:” But they found his words altogether unworthy of their trust, and they broke faith with their God.
Friends, true reformation of the heart comes from heeding God’s words. True reformation of the heart comes by saying, “God’s way is better, my way is not.” This is the first step to true change in your life, Christian. It comes from having a posture of humility before God’s word by saying, “Whatever my God says, that I will do” and then committing to real change. That’s the first step to true change for you, too, non-Christian. It involves sitting under the authority of God’s word and listening to it with open ears and seeing the need for change in your life.
Church, this is one of the fundamental themes of the book of Ezra. It’s the word of God bringing about reformation in the people of God. And if you want true reformation, transformation, and renewal in your life, it first involves immersing yourself into God’s word and adopting his view on things and his commandments as the final say in your life. I’m not saying, “Read the Bible more,” although we could all probably stand to hear that. No, what I’m saying is a little deeper than that – I’m saying that you must read the Bible with a posture of reverence, humility, and submission saying, “Speak, O Lord, and I will obey with gladness.”
True reformation involves God’s word, but it also involves Repentance.
- Repentance
Repentance is the response from the people to Ezra’s prayer. They confessed their sins generally, and they confessed their sins particularly. Let’s look at both of those:
First, they confessed their sins in general by admitting to the fact they had been faithless – they had “broken faith with their God” (vs. 2). This is exactly what we were saying before, and it’s a statement that all their sins, no matter how big or small, no matter how much it affected them or not, all their sins were an act of essentially saying to God, “We don’t trust you.” It’s faithlessness.
Secondly, they confessed their sins in particular. In other words, they didn’t just say, “We’ve been unfaithful” and leave it there. No, they got specific about the ways in which they’ve been unfaithful. They had taken the daughters of pagans for their sons, and they gave their daughters to pagan men.
But what shows up as the fruit of their confession is genuine repentance. They admitted the truth, which is what confession is, but then they put their willingness to accept the truth into action which meant change. Change is what repentance means.
How do we know this? Look at verse 3 and following. “Therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God, and let it be done according to the Law. Arise, for it is your task, and we are with you; be strong and do it.”
Ezra then goes away and fasts and mourns, and they bind everyone within the covenant community to this lifestyle and the decision to deal with the consequences of their sins (vss. 7-8). Verse 9 tells us that they gathered to hear Ezra who says in verse 10, “You have broken faith and married foreign women, and so increased the guilt of Israel” and then tells them to divorce themselves from their foreign wives.
And what happens? They answer, “It is so; we must do as you have said” (vs. 12). Verses 13-15 tell us how they made provision to go through the thousands of exiles to accomplish this, and verses 16 and 17 tell us that they finally completed it shortly after the end of the year. All of this, by the way, from Ezra 7 to Ezra 10, happened in the span of one year. Incredible amount of change in a short span of time.
Friends, we can tell this repentance was genuine because of what it cost them. This is a heartbreaking situation – women and children separated from the community they were living in. This is one of the hardest narratives in the entire Bible. And what makes it so hard is that God hates divorce. There were all kinds of laws given in the Mosaic Law about divorce and remarriage in an effort to preserve marriages and prevent divorces. The 7th commandment in the Big Ten was designed to keep marriages intact and faithful. So, for a God who categorically hates divorce to command it shows the seriousness of the sin they committed. This doesn’t mean believers today should divorce their unbelieving spouses – Paul clearly teaches against that in I Cor. 7. Nor should we conclude that all foreign wives were divorced. I think it’s safe to assume that everyone who believed in Yahweh and forsook their false gods were just as part of the covenant community as Rahab or Ruth.
What this is teaching us is that God called for the unfaithful Jews to divorce their unbelieving spouses, because it was they who first divorced him, in the spiritual sense. By marrying these foreign women who introduced to them foreign gods that demanded rituals and abominations like throwing your infants into the fire, they were spiritually adulterous before God. God calling them to divorce, in other words, was in the wake of them spiritually divorcing God.
And so, before we talk about how severe this was, we need to stop and think how merciful God was for withholding his wrath from them for their covenant unfaithfulness.
The other way we know this repentance was genuine was the willingness to admit. Look down at chapter 10 and look at all the excuses they made. Just look at them all. You can’t find any can you… That’s because they’re not there. They didn’t excuse themselves. They didn’t bring any caveats, ifs, ands, or buts. They didn’t say like Adam, “It was this woman you gave me…” (thus blaming God). No, they stood honestly before God, confessed the truth, and displayed the deep heart change that had taken place.
Friends, this is what is means to be part of the covenant community of God: Faith and repentance. That’s the essence of what it means to be a Christian – trust in God’s word, taking him at his promises, believing it to be true, responding with humility by confessing and turning away from our sins, and offering costly obedience to him as worship. The essence of the Christian life, therefore, is that of constant, slow, methodical, incremental reformation of the soul. We’re being remade, changed, from one degree of glory to another as we behold God in his word.
As we come to the close of the book of Ezra, and as we think about being reformed and reshaped according to God’s standards in his word, I wonder what God is calling you to divorce. That is, I wonder what you’ve brought into your life that is turning away your heart from the good things God has for you in his word. What radical steps of obedience are going to help you be faithful to your God? Are you tempted to give your heart over to pornography? Maybe you need to download Covenant Eyes on your devices and invite an accountability partner into your life. Are you given to outbursts of anger? Maybe you need to get brother or sister in your life to confess your sins to and help you target that anger with God’s word and prayer. Are you greedy and struggle with being generous? Maybe you need to open up to a godly brother or sister within the church to admit your faults and help you be the kind of giver God wants you to be.
Do you see the common denominator here? These “radical steps” are happening within the context of the covenant community, the church. God has given you the church to keep you faithful to him, and to neglect that is to get closer to these things that divorce you from God.
Friends, throughout the book of Ezra, God has been calling us to renewed faith and repentance. And I hope you noticed something profoundly important in this chapter. They didn’t repent to obtain mercy; their repentance was itself a sign of God’s mercy. Shecanaiah came to Ezra and said that they had sinned, but “even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this.” Out of the sheer mercy of God, they were given hope and hope produced profound sorrow and deep change within their hearts. Their repentance didn’t produce the mercy of God; their repentance was the gracious outcome of the mercy of God.
And so it is with us. Because the entirety of the book of Ezra points us to the one who came not to bring judgment on those who were unfaithful to him, those who were faithless and disobedient to his commands, but to lay down his life for them and take that judgment on himself. That person was the sinless Son of God, Jesus Christ.
Friends, the good news of the book of Ezra is that God has ultimately and finally dealt with our sins in another man, the man Christ Jesus, whom he sent to bring real reformation to his people. All our sins of disobedience, lawlessness, spiritual adultery, faithlessness, giving our hearts away to false gods, losing focus on the task he’s given us – all of it was dealt with when God sent his only begotten Son into this world to become the ultimate and final sacrifice that would put an end to all the sacrifices in the Old Testament, and be the payment for our iniquities. He took our punishment on himself, stood condemned in our place though he was perfect and sinless, and died the death we should have died. God raised him from the dead, and Christ ascended to heaven taking his rightful place at the right hand of the Father, from where he will one day come to judge the living and the dead. All this he did sola Deo Gloria – to the glory of God alone. He did all this so that the fame of God’s name might spread throughout all the world, and so that salvation might come to the nations through his Son. He did this so that anyone who repents of their sin, and turns in faith to him, they will be saved.
We could almost rename this series, The Gospel According to Ezra, because it’s all about how God claims the ultimate praise and glory for the rescue of undeserving sinners like you and me.
Praise God for the book of Ezra. Praise God for all he’s done since. May he write its truths on our hearts.
Pete Thompson's Blog 
Leave a comment