Overview
Ezra: In the seventh month, the people of Israel gathered in Jerusalem and built the altar. They celebrated the festival of booths and started to offer the daily sacrifices and other festivals as prescribed by Moses. They did this though they feared the people of the land. They gave money to start laying the foundation of the temple.
In the second year and second month, they had the foundation built. The priests and Levites came with musical instruments and trumpets and sang responsively. The people shouted with a great shout but many of the older men wept because they had seen the previous temple. People could not distinguish between the shouting and weeping.
Israel’s enemies came and asked to build along with them because they said they had been worshiping Israel’s God since they were brought there by the king of Assyria. Zerubbabel and the elders told them that it was their job as commanded by Cyrus, not the adversaries. The enemies then discouraged the people of Judah and did things to frustrate their work from Cyrus to Darius’s reign. When Ahasuerus began to reign over Persia, they wrote accusations against the Jews in Judah and Jerusalem.
The letter to Artaxerxes said that the Jews who had returned and were rebuilding the rebellious and wicked city of Jerusalem. They said that if it was completed the king wouldn’t get any more taxes from them. They asked the king to search the archives to see that it was true how rebellious the city was and that is why it was destroyed.
The king replied that the made the search and found the city had a history of rebellion. It had powerful kings ruling the whole region beyond the Euphrates and taxes were paid to them. He told the adversaries to make sure the Jews stopped the work.
The king’s officials in Judah made the Jews stop the work on the temple. No work was done until the second year of Darius, king of Persia.
Psalm: David calls on the Lord to hear him. He doesn’t want to be cast away like evil doers and recounts some of their evils. He asks God to deal with them according to their evil. He praises the Lord for listening to him and reaffirms his trust in the Lord. He asks the Lord to save the people and take care of them forever.
Proverbs: The Lord directs our steps and we can’t understand every part of the path he has prepared. It is foolish to dedicate something to the Lord on a whim and then only contemplate the meaning of it later.
1 Corinthians: Paul passes along God’s wisdom to the mature Christians. It isn’t like worldly wisdom of people who are perishing. God’s wisdom is secret because the rulers of this age would not have crucified the Lord of glory had they known it. They didn’t understand what God had prepared for us. But God has revealed it us by his Spirit. The Spirit is the only one who knows God’s thoughts just like a man’s spirit knows his thoughts. We have God’s Spirit so we can know the spiritual truths that he has given to us. The natural man doesn’t accept these things because they think they are foolishness. These things are spiritually discerned by us because we have the mind of Christ.
Paul told the Corinthians that they were and are still not spiritually mature. That I why he gave them milk and not solid food. They are still not ready for it because they are following their flesh with jealousy and strife when they say they follow different people.
What Stood Out
Ezra: “Though fear had come upon them because of the people of those countries, they set the altar on its bases; and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord, both the morning and evening burnt offerings” (Ezra 3:3 NKJV).
Psalm: “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts, and I am helped;
my heart exults, and with my song I give thanks to him” (Ps 28:7).
Proverbs: “A man's steps are from the Lord; how then can man understand his way?” (Prov 20:24).
1 Corinthians: “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God” (1 Cor 2:12).
Insight
Ezra: it seems as though nothing but trouble came upon the Jews who returned to rebuild the temple and Jerusalem. The local people who had been settled in the land to replace the exiles were powerful. Yet, the returnees built the altar and started offering sacrifices though they feared these people.
There are times when we just have to do what is right even when we are afraid. If we really believe that God is sovereign, then we can trust that the consequences of doing right are in line with God’s plan. Peter acknowledged that we generally don’t have to worry about being harmed if we do right, but sometimes that happens (1 Peter 3:13). When it does, we are blessed and still should not fear them (1 Peter 3:14). What we believe about God and his plan for us makes a big difference in the way we approach difficult situations. As our faith is strengthened and we become more and more sure of God’s goodness and his sovereignty, we are able to persevere in trials and have the peace of Christ ruling in our hearts instead of fear.
Psalm: David looked to the Lord for his physical salvation in battles. He describes God as his strength and shield. When the people were rebuilding the altar and temple, they very well could have been thinking of verses like Psalm 28:7. They were afraid, yet they continued with the work to get the altar built so they could offer sacrifices. When we develop that assurance in God, he will be like a shield against our tendency to cave into resistance from people who do not want us to follow the Lord. He gives us strength when our hearts trust in him. With this kind of help we should be able to praise the Lord out of the overflow of our heart.
John Henry Sammis (1846-1919) wrote the hymn, Trust and Obey. The chorus is, “Trust and obey, For there’s no other way To be happy in Jesus, But to trust and obey.” That sums it up.
Proverbs: Trusting that the Lord is sovereign and is directing our paths has the advantage of being at peace about things that happen. However, it doesn’t mean the we will always understand why things happen the way we do. Most of our lives are a mystery if we really think about it. We may try to plan what we are going to do in the future, but we can’t see what will actually happen. We can’t ever be sure of it. We don’t know if our health will be good from day to day. We don’t know if we are even going to be alive ten minutes from now. We don’t know about global or national events and how they will affect us. We don’t know why good or bad happens to us but we can Trust and Obey for the is no other way.
1 Corinthians: There is a big contrast between becoming a mature Christian and an infant in Christ. Paul flat out told the Corinthians that they were still infants in Christ and couldn’t handle solid scriptural teaching because of their sinful attitudes toward each other with jealousy and strife.
The writer of Hebrews expressed the same thing in Hebrews 5:11-6:2. Many of our churches face the same problem. People have only a superficial knowledge of their faith. They know about salvation and not much more. I saw a link on facebook that said 96% of Christians can’t answer some basic questions about the New Testament.[1]If that is true, and these questions are really superficial, then 96% of Christians are exactly the way Paul described the Corinthians, infants in Christ.
Now, their problem was sin in their lives. They had all the gift of the Spirit but were still walking in their sinful nature. They hadn’t learned how to identify and put to death their sinful, worldly desires that kept them in conflict with each other. If we can’t even identify Jesus as the main character in the New Testament, know how many Gospels there are, who the authors of the Gospels are, how many loaves Jesus had to feed 5,000, and other biblical facts (listed in the quiz above), how can we expect them to know the deeper truths. How about the people who put that quiz together? It seems they don’t know about telling the truth. I put in false answers to get a 30% score and it told me I got 100%!
If we don’t study the Bible to find out how to live Christian lives, we will stay baby Christians. We will have strife in our churches, homes, and with people at work. In other words, we will be living for ourselves instead of Jesus. We will be ignoring the Holy Spirit who has been giving to us to teach us not just facts but how to live godly lives.
Application
The major theme of this reading is trusting the Lord. I need to do that, but to do that I also need to know who I’m trusting and what he expects of me. I can’t do that by being only a superficial Christian. I need to study and apply God’s Word to my life.
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