PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

Things aren’t so easy anymore.  Even though the Israelites had permission of the king, the local leaders were not so happy to see the wall being built.  No one likes a fortified city in their midst.  They began by making fun of the builders, saying just a fox standing on the wall would tear it down.  But then when they saw that the Israelites were determined and continued to build, and it started to take shape, they plotted to stop the work through force.

The Israelites heard about the plot to take them by force and divided up their men where half would work on the walls and half would protect the city.  As a result the enemies of the Israelites decided not to attack because they saw that they were prepared.  What is that statement, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of something.  This is certainly the case in the case here for sure.  Notice the time that they spent to make sure that this was accomplished.  They never changed their clothes because they went from building to defending, always having a sword in their hand to be ready.

The repairs to the wall is laid out in detail in this chapter.  If you notice it is not just the Israelite’s who are doing the work, but also some of the people in the surrounding area who were involved in pagan worship.  One of the truths that we find in this fact is that there have always been people living in Jerusalem who have not been from the Israelite tribes.  To this day we find two different Christian groups, Muslims, and Jews living in Jerusalem and each claiming Jerusalem as their own and as their capital.  This is why moving our embassy to Jerusalem is such a bad idea.  It validates the claim that Jerusalem is only the property of the Jewish people.  This simply has never been the case.  

There is one line which is somewhat bothersome.  Look at vs.5 and we read that the nobles did not put their shoulders to the work.  We find a vast majority of those who are doing the work are actually from the priestly class.  Maybe that is why I enjoy doing small repair work around the church, I can and there is a historical biblical precedent to it.  That might be a bit of a stretch, but I’ll take it.  But this implies that if you were in a certain class that you were exempt from the work.  This might come back to bite them in the future.  Remember once the people on the Mayflower landed the rule was if you don’t work you don’t eat.  Not a bad rule at all.

Slowly but surely the wall is being rebuilt with each person doing their share.  Did you notice that the vast majority of the repair work is being done by those who have homes right in front of the section that they themselves have agreed to repair?  It would have been more difficult to get people to do general repairs to the entire wall.  This was a smart strategy for each person to do the work closest to their home because that would be the area that they would want to have protected the most.  They would be the most invested in making sure that the area in front of their home was done well.

It has been a while since I read Nehemiah.  What a great story!  So remember we saw in the last chapter that the prophet Nehemiah was the cup bearer to the king.  Just last chapter he had heard from those who had returned to Jerusalem and they said that while the temple was rebuilt, the walls of Jerusalem were a mess and so they were exposed to any sort of danger that might be around.  This made Nehemiah sad, and the king noticed his sadness as a sadness of “of the heart”.  “What’s wrong?” the king asked Nehemiah, which gave him the open door that he needed to request to return to his beloved homeland to rebuild the walls.

I love the covert mission on which he finds himself.  He is all alone and goes out and inspects the walls, he gets to a point that his animal cannot pass through so he goes out on foot.  When he comes back he declares to the people gathered that it was time to rebuild the walls because they were a mess.  I’m guessing because of the covert nature of the mission that he expected the people to object.  Instead they say: “Let’s start building!” , and as a result they get to work.

Once the foreign locals heard that they were going to get to work in rebuilding the walls they mocked them.  They said that they were rebelling against the king in building this fortified city.  But Nehemiah doesn’t point to the permission that he got from the king but rather to the promise that the Lord would be on his side.  He didn’t need permission, he just needed the assurance of the Lord.

And so just like that we begin our last book that we are going to be seeing in this 90 Day Challenge part IV.  Nehemiah speaks of the prophet who was responsible for rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.  The temple has already been rebuilt and now it is time to build a wall  to protect it.   That falls on Nehemiah and his people who are now fairly well ensconced in the new Jerusalem that has been rebuilt after the Babylonian captivity.  Nehemiah hasn’t made his way over there at the beginning of the book, but he will be soon.

We find at the end of this first chapter that Nehemiah was the cup bearer of the king.  That is quite a position of power for a Hebrew.  He asks about those who actually never were captured and wanted to know what the message was about the homeland.  The message that he gets is sad.  The walls have been torn down, the gates have been broken, so Jerusalem is standing naked without being able to protect itself.  This leads us to believe  that Nehemiah is going to do something about this.  

His first action is to pray to God and ask for forgiveness because he feels that this is a result of the sin of the people of Israel that they have not followed what God asked them to do so He allowed this to happen, if He did not cause it to happen Himself.  So Nehemiah asks for mercy as he meets with the king.  I am sure that he will be approaching the king with a request to go back to Jerusalem and help rebuild the walls.  The story will continue next chapter.  

It is interesting that the first thing that he does is not cast the blame elsewhere and look for someone who might be liable other than those who are directly involved.  That is so different from  today.  When something goes wrong or when we hear bad news we automatically look for someone to blame.  Not Nehemiah, he doesn’t turn the blame on God, like Adam did, but rather directly on the people who were unfaithful, the Jewish people themselves.  It is refreshing to see people take responsibility.

This is nothing less than a purge.  So Ezra calls out all the people of the exiles who have made their way into Jerusalem and the surrounding areas and he demands that they give up their foreign wives and their children by their foreign wives.  A decree was made  that those who did not give up their wives and the children by those wives would be stripped of their property and would be banned from the people of Israel.

Yes, that is  really harsh and there is no excusing this proclamation or this action which left the most vulnerable even more vulnerable.  But do you understand why this was done?  The people of Israel had to have one God and only one God and there could be nothing that got in the way of that God.  The sin was primarily the fact that they had married foreign wives in the first place.  That sin was then compounded by kicking out the defenseless in order to make up for the sin that they had committed.  It is in this instance that we have to see that two wrongs don’t make a right.  But it is what was demanded by Ezra, and honestly, it was what God approved of as well in that instance.

Remember, we do read about God who leads His people into battle and doesn’t allow a living soul to be left unscathed.  This is important to understand.  What we are reading in the Old Testament is not able to be supported today.  We cannot just explain it away, but it is the way in which God acted in that time period.  I think we can look at Jesus and see that in Him we have our way, our truth and our life.  It is only through Jesus that we can get to the Father.  It is through Jesus’ life that we see how we are to live as well, which is very different from what we read in these verses.

A notice  has come out that those who have been given permission to leave Babylon and make their way back to Jerusalem, some of them have intermarried with those who worship other gods.  This mortifies Ezra to the point where he tears his robes and fasts until the evening service.  At this service he approaches the altar of the Lord and asks for forgiveness.

So, what is our current thinking in regards to marrying outside of the faith?  And what do we think in regards to marrying outside of our denominations, or our own Protestant faith communities?  Is  there a litmus test that we should use for our sons and our daughters to see if they are marrying within the faith or not?

Not too long ago I called around looking for a rabbi to do a “mixed marriage” with me.  I didn’t get any positive response.  I got some flack from some people close to me because they felt that it was not right to perform a marriage  as a Christian pastor with someone who did not believe in the same god that we worship.  In the past I have written about the understanding that yes, there is only one God, but that does not mean that we all worship the same god.  This would be a case where those close to me felt, and I agree,  that this marriage is not glorifying to God because we are commanded in passages such as this one in Ezra, not to marry outside of the faith.  The argument goes that I am facilitating that by being a part of the service.

I do understand that argument but I also know that Paul speaks about not being unevenly yoked while at the same time speaks about those couples where one is a believer and one is not, that the believer should stay in that relationship.  I will always counsel against being unequally yoked for if we cannot share the most important thing in our life, our faith in God, then much is missing.

We get an accounting of the people of God who traveled with Ezra.  We find the heads of the families and they are just about to depart when Ezra realizes that they don’t have nearly enough people from the house of Levi, from the priestly families.  So he calls in a favor and he finds himself 12 heads of household from the family of Levi to come with him out of Babylon and into Jerusalem.

We hear from Ezra that he had spoken so highly of the God of Israel that when the king had offered protective soldiers to go along with them, that he had refused referring to the promise that the Lord had made that He would protect them.  It seems almost as if Ezra is second guessing himself  and maybe even sorry that he hadn’t taken the king up on his generous offer.  As a result we see that he declares a time of fasting and prayer in order to ask for the Lord’s protection for their unprotected journey into Jerusalem.  

We read that they fasted and then they traveled for three days to reach Jerusalem and the Lord protected them from any ambushes.  It was considered an answer to prayer and an answer to their fasting.  Much emphasis is also placed on the silver and gold that the people brought from Babylon back to Jerusalem.  Remember, this was the gold and the silver that had originally been plundered from the temple so it was really returning to its proper home.  Amazing how over time whenever there is a war and a people is conquered, plunder takes place.  I think of all the precious art work and all the precious gold that the Nazi’s took as they made their way through Europe.  Once again, much of that was taken from the Jewish community which lost all property under that regime.  The more things change…

All of a sudden now we have a transition from the third person which describes what has happened to people directly related to this story, to Ezra who comes into the picture and takes on the first person direct accounting.

Ezra is now introduced here and we can follow his genealogy all the way back to Aaron who would have been the originator of the Jewish priestly families.  This was crucial because it solidifies his pedigree and removes any doubt as to the right that he has to be the chosen one of the Lord in regards to setting up a theocratic government during this time.  He is compared to Moses in the role that he now plays.  Notice that the ruler of the land, King Artexerxes, sets up Ezra as the one who has the power to establish justice within the region of Jerusalem and beyond.  What happens is that during the times of Haggai and Zechariah there was one return from captivity and now there is another during the time of Ezra.  The first six chapters dealt with the first return, and now the second return is taking place.

So in this chapter through the first 26 verses we have the decree of the King in regards  to Ezra and the people of Israel.  Then starting at vs. 27 we have the input of Ezra himself who gives thanks to God for allowing him to be in the position in  which he is to be able to bring a group of people with him to worship God in the temple.  It almost seems as if the book of Ezra begins now.

You need to understand that for the people of Israel to have a foreign government on their side was pretty unusual.  A decree was actually found that was proclaimed by King Cyrus, just like the people of Israel who had been challenged said.  Surprisingly King Darius honored that treaty and fulfilled it to the end.  In fact, he said to those who were pursuing this on behalf of the overseeing ruler in that local area, that they were  to let the Israelites alone.

Now, by itself this would have been unusual.   But as it is written in this Scripture, he also pronounced a curse on anyone who refused to honor this treaty.  This person would have a beam taken from their own house and they were to be impaled upon it.  Not a normal legislative action taken by the executive branch, but I guess it was effective since in the end the temple did end up being built.  It is so very important to see how the people of the land did allow the building and even contributed to the animal sacrifices which were to be made once the temple was built.  Also, the builders were to be paid with the taxes that were collected in the land.  Yes, the Israelites were foreigners in a land controlled by another power, but they were still treated with respect while they built the temple in Jerusalem.  

The remnant of people who came from captivity and were still  around celebrated Passover in the temple that year.  I am sure that it was a celebration which could have been even imagined a few years earlier.  What are some things that seem so far out of reach that not even God would be able to make it happen in our life?  In this situation God made it happen not through a miraculous power, but through  the collaboration of area nations.  This could be a miracle enough.

Did you notice the overlap of prophets in this chapter?  Ezra speaks about the prophets Haggai and Zechariah who came a long before him.  Now Ezra would have been around 458 and Haggai and Zechariah would have been about 70 years before that.  It is important to see Ezra within the time frame of history, while at the same time understand that the 5th chapter also demands a witness from history.

What we have happening in this part of the story is that there are those who do not want the temple built and so are asking those who are building it if they have a permit to build it.  Their response is that we have the permit of almighty God.  I’m not sure that would work for the Borough council, and it really didn’t work for the associates of the ruler of that day either.  They demanded that the ruler look back in the annals to make sure that they had a permit from King Cyrus for the rebuilding of the temple.  Otherwise, they should stop  the building.  There was a lot of church politics back then as well.

But the difference is that this was not internal church politics, but rather external.  There were outside forces wanting the temple to be stopped from being built.  We will see what happens as these pressures intensify.