EZRA 2
Read Ezra 2:1-70
I hope you didn’t fall asleep reading this great long list of Old Testament names. Sometimes these passages can be a little bit difficult to get through. But we must remember that although it is just a long list of names to us, it is about real people who lived and breathed at an important time in the history of God’s plan of redemption.
The very first verse puts this chapter into context. These are the people who came up from captivity in Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and took them into captivity in Babylon. There is a reminder that they were captives – and that was because of their unfaithfulness to God; they worshipped false gods even after repeated warnings from God through his prophets. But we see that God is faithful and that judgement is not the end of the story, and they can be restored to their homes and have the visible symbol of God’s presence, the Temple, with them again.
They had a big task before them. They were called upon to repair the Temple, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians and we are told that they returned to their own towns, which, even if not destroyed by the Babylonians, would have been in a poor state of repair after seventy years. Building projects do not come cheap. So they had a collection, each giving as best they could, to help fund the work (vv 68-69).
All this may not seem to be relevant to the modern day, but we could say that the House of God needs to be rebuilt in our time as well, at least in a figurative sense. It is true that there is growth in the church in some parts of the world, such as Latin America, South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and we can rejoice in that. But in the traditional heartlands of the church there has been a great decline. In Europe and North America there needs to be revival; we need to keep rebuilding God’s house with prayer and proclaiming the word of God.
To re-build God’s house we need to have strong leadership in the church. When we looked through the books of Samuel and Kings we saw that so often problems were caused by poor leadership. It is no surprise then that Ezra’s list starts with the leaders of the returning exiles (v2) as they are going to have a crucial role in rebuilding Jerusalem. We might say the same about the modern church; that at least some of the decline has been due to leaders in the church moving away from God’s word, just like the kings of the Old Testament that did evil in the eyes of the Lord. It will take strong, dedicated leadership to revive the church.
The priority in the Book of Ezra was to rebuild the House of God. The priority today is to reconnect the church with its king, the Lord and our saviour, Jesus Christ.