Who Says You Can’t Go Home?

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If you would, turn with me to Ezra chapter 1. Ezra chapter 1. That’s not one we look at a whole lot.

So if you’re not sure where it is, I had to double check and sing the little song, but it’s between 2 Chronicles and Nehemiah, so if you find one of those, that’ll help you find Ezra. Talked to you a few weeks ago about how I guess it was two weeks ago, I talked to you about how the nation of Israel split in two. And there was basically, I don’t know if you want to call it a civil war or if you want to call it a cold war because the southern kingdom was going to invade the north and then God said no. So there wasn’t an invasion right at that point when the northern kingdom broke away.

But there was for a couple hundred years this rivalry where sometimes they’d be at war against each other. And sometimes there’d be this uneasy peace where they’re not fighting but they still really didn’t like each other. And then sometimes they’d be allied with one with this country and one with this country, and then they’d fight alongside their allies against each other.

And sometimes it’d be like, well, hey, they’re Jews too. You can’t pick on sort of this thing like with siblings. I may hate you and fight you to the death, but hey, you’re my brother or sister, and nobody else is going to pick on you.

That’s just for me. It was a weird dynamic between these two kingdoms where sometimes they’d like each other a little bit. Sometimes they’d hate each other.

And what it did was it split and it weakened the nation of Israel. It split and weakened the Jewish people and made it much easier for them to be picked off by the bigger powers around them. Now, God had always protected them from the larger powers.

And even as I say, had always protected them. He had let them at times be overrun by other countries as a means of, hey, getting their attention, shaking them a little bit and saying, you need me. And when the people’s hearts would turn back to God, he would then throw the invaders out of their land.

And so even when it didn’t look like it, God was always protecting his people. But there came a time where God said, you really just have not learned. And so through this time where they were divided and they were divided because of sin, they were divided because of selfishness.

During this time, during this time, God used the fact that they were divided to discipline them for not following him. And it was the northern kingdom, it was Israel, that was the first to fall. I told you two weeks ago, whether you remember or not is a different story, but I told you two weeks ago that the northern kingdom never had a good king.

They never had a king that we could look at and say, you know, in general, he was a man who loved God and served God. Not talking about a perfect king. David was considered a godly king and he did some horrible things.

Solomon was considered a generally godly king, but he did some bad things toward the end as well. Israel never had anybody who could be mistaken for a godly king. They had some real awful people.

I mean, we look at some of the awful leaders of our lifetimes and in recent history, and we think, man, these guys are just shameful. You know, your Hitlers, your Stalins, your Mauls, your Pol Potts, your Saddam Hussein. These guys were in those leagues in those days because they were allowing just brutal, violent, wicked things to happen in their countries and they were slaughtering people who still clung to God and to the old faith.

So the northern kingdom never had a good king and it was sort of this vicious cycle where the people would get behind wicked rulers and enable them to be wicked and their wickedness would encourage the people to go further in their wickedness. I’m not really sure in the life of a nation whether the rulers are wicked because the people are wicked or the people become wicked because of the rulers. But in Israel it seems like it was both.

And so they went through about 200 years of just wicked king after wicked king and God saying you need to get it together. You need to pull it together or you’re going to be punished. I’m giving you chance after chance after chance here.

You’ve got to pull it together. And they just never did. And so in the 700s, I believe in 722 BC, they were the northern kingdom of Israel.

They’d been eaten away a little bit at a time as the Assyrians came in and took over small parts of their land. But in the 720s BC, the Assyrians finally came in and wiped them out. Wiped out the northern kingdom.

They totally took it over. It became part of the Assyrian Empire. And the Assyrians were smart.

They said, if we conquer the Jews, or we conquer this group, or we conquer this group, and we leave them together, they’re going to be pockets of resistance. And they’re not going to like that, hey, we’ve been taken over. And these pockets of resistance are going to get together and get stronger.

It would be sort of like if a hostile power came in and took over the United States and say Texas is not going to like being told what to do by the UN, for example. And Georgia is not going to like to be told what to do by the UN. And Montana is not going to like, and Oklahoma.

And people would get together because they’re right there together and they share a common culture and, hey, we’re going to unite under our flag and we are Oklahoma, they can’t tell us to do this. We are Texas. They can’t tell us to do this.

We are Montana. They can’t tell. .

. And people would sort of join up together and they’d have a little rebellion on their hands. So the Assyrians were smart and they said, we’re just going to scatter everybody and we’re going to mix them in together to where they can’t really get together in their little culture groups and rebel against us.

And so the Israelites were scattered in amongst all the other people. These northern ten tribes, they’re not really the lost tribes of Israel. They’re just sort of the scattered about tribes of Israel.

in between all these other nations that they’ve conquered. So it’d be like if God, not God, excuse me, it’d be like if, say, hypothetically, we were taken over by the United Nations, and they said, we’re going to scatter everybody together, and suddenly you’ve got Texans and Californians and New Yorkers and Massachusetts, what do they call it? I just want to say Massachusetts people because I’m not sure what the word is there, and Floridians and Oklahomans, and they’re all mixed in together.

They’re not going to, they’re probably going to have a harder time coalescing and forming a rebellion. because the Texans aren’t going to trust the New Yorkers and the Yokees are not going to trust the people from Massachusetts and so on and so forth because we’re different cultures. And so the Assyrians said, we’re going to mix them up together.

And it was a couple hundred years after that that the nation of Judah stood on its own. These two southern tribes, Judah and Benjamin, stood there on their own and they at times did have good kings. Now they had a lot of bad ones too, but there were times, though, that a good king would come in and he would sort of lead the people in a national awakening.

Josiah came in and said, we’re going to get rid of all these idols. We’re going to chop down the idols. We’re going to take their pagan priests out and we’re going to deal with them.

And they had several kings that would do that. Sometimes even kings that started out badly would come in and say, we’re going to clean house because we need to get right with God as a country. And so that really bought Judah some extra time.

But eventually it got to the point where Judah’s wickedness was so beyond what God was willing to put up with for even a short time, that God finally said, you know what, within just a generation you’re going to be gone as well. Not gone in the sense of all slaughtered and wiped out, but gone in the sense that, hey, I’m going to take your kingdom away from you to get your attention. And yet there was still enough love for God and there was still enough concern among enough people.

I won’t say that it was the majority of the people in Judah. But there were still enough people concerned. I’ve talked to you all throughout these messages on the history of the Bible about this idea of a remnant, that God uses a small remnant.

It’s not necessarily the mass movement that God uses. It was the 7,000 that hadn’t bowed their knees before Baal that God told Elijah, I’m going to use. It wasn’t that everybody in Noah’s day woke up.

it was that God used eight people to repopulate the earth. God always works through a remnant. And there were enough people in Judah that still feared God that there was something there to be saved.

So God didn’t totally wipe them out. God said, I’m going to allow the Babylonians to come and take you over. And it’s going to be hard.

And there’s going to be some suffering involved. But he said, your captivity is going to last for 70 years. And then there’s going to be a restoration.

And much of the Old Testament, we look at these minor prophets, and a lot of them, and even the major prophets too, are written during this time of captivity. And the things that they’re writing about are about the captivity of Israel because they got in this 70 years when they’ve been captured by the Babylonians, and that’s about as bad as it sounds. You know the stuff that was going on in Daniel’s day?

That was under the Babylonians. That was under the Persians. That was during this exile period, When people who prayed to God were thrown into a lion’s den.

Where people were being thrown in a furnace because they refused to bow before a big gold statue. That was during the exile. This was a bad time.

And so the prophets in the Old Testament, a lot of them were writing about this time. And reassuring Israel that God is going to restore you because God is faithful even when you’ve not been faithful. There’s the book of Habakkuk.

And I remember when I was in the youth group and in college, You know, girls would talk about this passage in Habakkuk. The vision is not yet. Wait for it.

God will bring it to pass. I’m paraphrasing just a little bit. And all the girls had convinced them that that meant God had wonderful plans for them.

And he’d find him a husband and he’d come at just the right time. And I was asked to lead a Bible study one night. And I explained why.

That was actually talking about the slaughter of the Babylonians. And I was not asked to lead our college Bible study anymore after that. What God was talking about was saying, you know what?

You’re in dire straits right now. And you’re suffering under the heel of the Babylonians. But everything that I’ve told you is still true.

But I’ve said, you know, I’ve used the Babylonians to chastise you and to discipline you. Well, guess what? The Babylonians are going to be disciplined too.

The Babylonians who’ve been far worse, we’re not going to get away with their wickedness forever. And so there’s that promise in Habakkuk that, hey, the vision, this restoration of Israel where God comes and boots out the Babylonians and they get theirs and God restores Israel. It hasn’t happened yet, but don’t give up because God’s still at work here.

Which to me is way cooler than to think that, oh, God’s got a husband picked out for you somewhere. But that’s the time period that we’re in here in Ezra chapter 1. When they are waiting, they’ve been promised by God that, hey, half of, well, five-sixths of our country has already been scattered to who knows where by the Assyrians.

And what’s left of us, we’ve been captured under the Babylonians, and they’ve taken a bunch of us captive, and they’ve come and colonized our land, and we’re under their heel, and they’re forcing us to, I mean, we’re slaves to these people, and God’s been promising that, hey, I’m going to restore you, and things are going to be better, and it’s been all these years, and we’re still waiting for it to happen. And on top of that, it might have started to look less and less likely to them. But then God came along, and we see in the book of Daniel, we see that God came and he did punish the Babylonians.

That the Babylonians did, in fact, get what they deserved because God sent the Persians and the Medes in to conquer the Babylonians. And I’ll talk about this a little bit more next time, about this progression of countries that comes through. But God used another country to come in and punish the Babylonians.

And really an even stronger empire. the Persians and so imagine the imagine the despair that would fall to you as a Jewish exile to think God’s supposed to restore us from this captivity to the Babylonians and yet after all this time the Babylonians have just been taken over by somebody even stronger and now we’re underneath somebody even stronger and that’s when God stepped in and showed them that it doesn’t matter how strong that empire is and God’s even bigger.

And so we turn to Ezra chapter 1, starting in verse 1, and it says, Now 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, and he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, the Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he hath charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? His God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel.

He is the God, which is in Jerusalem. And whosoever remaineth in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver and with gold and with goods and with beasts beside the free will offering for the house of God that is in Jerusalem. You know, we can sort of lose the power of it sometimes in the King James English because we don’t talk that way anymore.

Don’t be confused about what’s being said here. This really is an amazing thing. The king of Persia, the Shah of Persia, they would call themselves by the title even until the 1979 revolution in Iran, they called themselves the Shahanshah, the King of Kings, which we think of as a title reserved only for God.

This ruler who thought of himself and was thought of by his people as a God on earth, probably not a humble man, probably not somebody who’s wide open to whatever God has in store for him, of this massive empire, one of the biggest empires known in the world up to that time, God gets a hold of this man and puts it in his heart and says, wait a minute, we need to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. And this is a little bit before Nehemiah goes back and rebuilds the walls. But he says, the city is laying in ruins in the temple.

They need a temple. Guys, this man was not a Jew. This man was not a follower of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

He was a follower of pagan gods and a leader of the country that eventually became Iran. Okay, so not necessarily on the best of terms with the Jews anyway. And yet he gets up one morning and says, God told me, and by the way, he’s the real God, he says, God told me it’s my responsibility to make sure a temple is rebuilt for him.

It’s my responsibility to make sure that we go in and fix what the Babylonians did over here. I don’t see a whole, I mean, Cyrus is recorded in history as being a fairly good and tolerant king by ancient standards. We wouldn’t look at him today and say, oh, what a nice man.

But by ancient standards, a fairly open-minded king. And yet I don’t see a lot of evidence in history of him looking at all the religious minorities in his empire and saying, we need to do something to improve there. We need to fix what we’ve broken over there.

you know I say a lot of times I quote, this is about the only time I quote Rush Limbaugh from the pulpit but he’s right when he says the job of armies is to kill people and break stuff, that’s what they do that’s what they’re trained to do is to go to war and it was unheard of in that day to say we broke stuff at first it was the Babylonians but then we came in and broke what they broke we came in and broke stuff and now we need to go back and fix it I know that’s what we try to do now as Americans. It’s unheard of in their day. Say the temple’s broken down and the city of Jerusalem’s broken down.

Let’s go rebuild it. And the Bible’s exactly correct when it says that God got hold of his heart. God stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus.

There in verse 1 that the words of the prophet Jeremiah would be fulfilled. By the way, when this exile was starting, When the Babylonians were trying to invade Judah and the people of Judah were trying to put up a defense, Jeremiah was thrown in prison because he was telling everybody, don’t fight back. Don’t fight back.

Just lay down and let it happen. And they said, you’re a traitor. And they threw him in prison.

But he wasn’t really, they might have seen him as a traitor, but he was just being faithful to what God told him to do and really telling the people of Judah, God’s already decided this. We’re going to be conquered. You might as well make it easier on yourselves.

but Jeremiah also told them that God was going to restore what was broken. That after that 70 years, once the people were ready and once their hearts were open toward God, God was going to restore what was broken. And so not only does Cyrus come along and say, this amazing turn of events that we’re going to rebuild the temple, we’re going to rebuild what our armies broke, and we’re going to restore Jerusalem, but he says we’re going to pay for it.

We’re going to pay for it. I want these people provisioned with a free will offering to go back and people to donate, but on top of that, I’m telling the people in my kingdom throughout all my realm, if you see these people headed back to rebuild, you give them gold. You give them silver.

You give them provisions. You give them beasts. You give them whatever they need, you give them.

It’s incredible. We’re not talking about you give me whatever I need. Give my army whatever they need.

You give my army gold. You give my army food. He’s talking about this, by historical standards, this insignificant religious minority from a far corner of his empire.

And he says, give them whatever they need. I don’t know if y’all are as blown away by this as I am, but this is not normally how history works. That a man like Cyrus looks at a small group like the Jews from this far corner of his empire and says, we need to fix what we’ve broken here.

And to me, that illustrates that God was at work in Cyrus’ heart and in the affairs of the Jewish people to fulfill his promises. So in verse 5, it says, Then rose up the chief of the fathers of Judah and Benjamin and the priests and the Levites, with all them whose spirit God had raised, to go to build the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem. And all they that were about them strengthened their hands with the vessels of gold, excuse me, of silver, with gold, with goods, and with beasts, and with precious things besides all that was willingly offered.

Also Cyrus the king brought forth vessels of the house of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had brought forth out of Jerusalem, and had put in the house of his gods. Okay, hold up there. If you remember back to the book of Daniel, if you’re familiar with that aspect of it.

When the Babylonians took over Jerusalem, guys, they didn’t just break stuff. They went into the temple. They went into the temple, and they got hold of all of the vessels from the temple, all of the things that were used in the ceremonies, in the worship of God, all of these precious things that were sacred objects to the Jews that they used in the temple worship that God said would be set aside for his worship.

They stole those and they took them back to put in the temple of these pagan idols back in Babylon. And what they were doing was they were essentially telling the Jews, Ha! Our gods are bigger than your God.

That’s how things operated in this time. If I could take hold of your stuff from your temple and put it in mine, it shows that my God’s bigger than yours. Now, we know that’s not true.

We also know God didn’t stop it from happening because this was a punishment for them that he had set up. And yet amazingly in all that time these vessels hadn’t been destroyed. They hadn’t been melted down.

They were still there and Cyrus says, hey, we better take those back too. Because we’re not just going to rebuild the temple and all this and rebuild the city. We’re going to fix this.

We’re going to restore things to what they’re supposed to be. Even those, verse 8, did Cyrus king of Persia bring forth by the hand of Mithradath the treasurer and numbered them unto Sheshbazar, the prince of Judah. And this is the number of them, 30 chargers of gold, 1,000 chargers of silver, 9 and 20 knives, 30 basins of gold, silver basins of a second sort, 410, and of other vessels, 1,000.

And all the vessels of gold and of silver were 5,400. And all these did Sheshbazar bring up with them of the captivity that were brought up from Babylon into Jerusalem. So, I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about the numbers of the vessels, but the fact that they kept track of them shows that they were serious.

Cyrus was serious about making sure we have this many in my possession in the temple, and this is how many of each of these things that I want back at Jerusalem. We’re not going to lose any of these things. They’re not going to fall in somebody’s pocket on the way back to Jerusalem, you understand.

They go back to the temple. This many things better show up back in the temple in Jerusalem for their worship of God. Folks, God really had said it in his heart to restore Jerusalem, to restore the temple, and to restore the worship of the one true God.

And this is what they had been waiting for for 70 years. I know the idea of a temple is foreign to us. Because as Christians, we realize the Holy Spirit indwells us from the moment of conversion, And we honestly can worship God anywhere.

I was talking to a group of people on Thursday night, and I told them that, I said, other than being the pastor, which means I kind of have to be here, but other than that, the reason I go to church is not because that’s the only place I can worship God. I’ve told you I have great prayer times in my car at Sonic. I can go and sit in a field somewhere and have a wonderful time of prayer.

I can sit in my living room and sing, and I can have a time of worship anywhere. I don’t necessarily go to church because this is the only place I can worship. I come to church, and hopefully we all come to church, because God has put us together to draw strength and draw encouragement and to be challenged by one another.

God intended us to do this together. But if something happened and a tornado took this building tonight, this group of people, we could still be together as the church anywhere else. We could meet at McDonald’s if they’d let us, or we could meet in my living room.

We could meet somewhere. we don’t have to go to this specific geographic place so it’s a little foreign to us this idea of having to have a temple but they had a place that was set apart set aside to God and that’s where they were expected to go to worship if not every day or every week then at certain times they had to go there and offer sacrifices they had to go there and offer animals they had to go there and offer incense they had to go there and pay their tithes this was part of the law and for their relationship at that time to be what it was supposed to be with God, they had to have this temple and for 70 years it had been broken down. Right now, what it takes for us to have a relationship with God is Jesus Christ. And this would never happen, but imagine for 70 years, Jesus Christ is not available.

I don’t even know how that would work. But imagine if God said for 70 years, Jesus is putting a moratorium on reconciling men to God. Thank God that’s not even possible, first of all.

But if you think about how that works, we have no access to God. There’s no sacrifice offered on our behalf. There’s no provision for our forgiveness.

There’s no way we talk with Him, we deal with Him. That’s kind of what they were going through. That’s a picture of what they were going through.

Something very important in their relationship with God as a nation had been severed. And it was now about to be restored. Can you imagine if God said for 70 years, you’re not really going to have access to me.

There’s not going to be the forgiveness that there once was. There’s not going to be. And then we come to the end of that 70 years and God says, okay, wide open again for forgiveness, for a communion between us.

Can you imagine the hunger in the people for that? And that’s what God was bringing about through this man Cyrus, who wasn’t even a believer. And yet God used him to restore the temple so they could go back and worship.

So they could go back and make their sacrifices. So they could go back and do the things that God had told them to do. So they returned.

we see in the later verses of that chapter they returned and began work rebuilding and reconsecrating the temple for the Lord now what this shows us why this is such an important part of history and of biblical history and really for us today as believers is that God during this time brought many of his people back from exile and he not only was restoring the temple he was restoring the people because they hadn’t been together as the Jews. They’d been all scattered throughout the empire and under somebody else’s thumb, no temple to worship. They were not really, they had missed their identity as God’s chosen people.

And yet God, after 70 years, was bringing them back to that at a time, folks, when very few people would have imagined it was possible. And what that tells me is that God, who promises to restore his people. God who promises to take care of his people is able to restore anything he pleases.

The God who promises it is able to bring it to pass. And it doesn’t matter how unlikely it looks because like I said, first we were conquered by the Babylonians and now they’ve been conquered and we’re under somebody even stronger. It wasn’t any harder for God to restore his people under the Persians than it would have been the Babylonians.

If God promises it, God is able to bring it to pass, I can assure you. And it doesn’t matter what seems to stand in the way. But God, our society is so sinful, it doesn’t matter.

God’s able to do what He’s promised to do. But God, we’re a small group, it doesn’t matter. God is able to do what He’s promised to do.

And in bringing, in bringing these people back, in restoring these people to the land of Judah and to the city of Jerusalem and to the temple, He was preparing the way, still preparing the way for Jesus to come into the world, which would be the ultimate restoration of his people to him. See, we’ve talked so many times over the last few months how God created us for a relationship with him, and we fell away from that relationship through sin. We fell and ruined that relationship when we disobeyed him, and yet God is able to restore what we’ve destroyed, and God is able to bring us into a relationship with him.

He’s able to reconcile us to himself and he’s able to do that through Jesus Christ. So not only was he restoring the people to the temple and to their identity, he was also preparing the way for the ultimate sacrifice who would restore people to a relationship with God. So we need to be reminded that when God tells us, when God promises that he’ll do something, when God promises to take care of us in a way that seems improbable, or implausible or impossible or any of those words that we use as a smokescreen for a lack of faith. When God promises to take care of us in this way or if God says, do this and I’ll take care of this and I’ll make this happen.

When God makes us a promise, He’s able to bring it to pass. He’s able to make it happen. And we need to have faith that it doesn’t matter what our circumstances outside look like.

If God’s made the promise, that’s the only circumstance we need to know. A few weeks ago, Ralph was telling a story in, I think, discipleship training. He was talking about the prayer meeting when the people got together to pray for rain because it had been so dry and said only one lady bothered to bring an umbrella.

Tell you what, that’s faith that God can and will bring the rain. We need to have an umbrella. Whatever the umbrella is for the situation.

When God makes a promise and says, whether it’s I’m going to restore the people of Israel or whether it’s a promise that he makes to us today about caring for us, we need to have our umbrella. In other words, we need to be prepared and we need to believe that he’s able to do it and that he will do what he promised. Because it seemed impossible.

Or even if not impossible, it seemed really, really, really unlikely that God would restore, even though he promised that God would restore the people of Israel, that he would restore the temple, that he would bring people back to Jerusalem. But you know what? He got hold of the heart of an unlikely character, King Cyrus, and he did just that.

And he got Cyrus to take care of the permission. God took care of the permission through King Cyrus. God took care of the provision through King Cyrus.

God took care of everything but the work that he called his people to do. So we need to trust God, realize that He can do everything He promises to do, and we need to work like we believe it.