Christ in Ezra

Ezra opens in the ruins of a promise kept. Seventy years before, the temple had been burned and the people dragged to Babylon, and Jeremiah had said the captivity would last exactly that long and no longer; 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 long silence breaks - not by an army, not by a Jewish revolt, but because the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus. The whole chapter rests on that q…

Ezra 2 is a register - nearly seventy verses of families, towns, temple servants, and gifts belonging to the people who went up out of the captivity from Babylon to Jerusalem. To the eye it is a column of names and round numbers; to faith it is an act of remembering, for the exile had carried this people away but had not erased them, and here every house is counted, named, written down. That is the very thing the New Testament catches up. When the seventy returned elated,…

The first thing the returning exiles built was an altar - before walls, before houses, before the temple itself - and on it they offered the morning and evening burnt offering, the same daily Tamid that pointed forward to the one final offering of Christ (Heb 10:10-14). When the foundation of the temple was laid, the old men wept for what was lost and the young men shouted for what was being built, and “the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the no…

Ezra 4 sets the work of God against the opposition that work always draws, and at every turn the pattern points forward to Christ. First comes an offer that wears the face of help - Let us build with you; for we seek your God, as ye do (v. 2) - from peoples whose worship had long been mingled with the gods of Assyria; and the builders refuse, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build (v. 3). The refusal guards the pu…

Ezra 5 turns on a single sentence dropped into the middle of an official confrontation: But the eye of their God was upon the elders of the Jews, that they could not cause them to cease, till the matter came to Darius (v. 5). The temple work had stalled for years; then Haggai and Zechariah prophesy, Zerubbabel and Jeshua rise to build, and a Persian governor named Tatnai arrives demanding to know who authorized the project. He has the power to stop everything - and he cann…

Christ Connection - God Turns the King's Heart

The proverb says, "The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will" (Proverbs 21:1). Darius does not come to this decree through his own inspiration. His heart is turned. And in the New Testament, the same truth applies: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east" (Matthew 2:1). God guides even pagan rulers toward His purposes. And ultimate…

Christ Connection - The True Scribe and King

Ezra is a scribe who has "prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach." But there is One who embodies this pattern perfectly: Jesus, who said, "I do nothing of myself" (John 5:30), yet whose heart was eternally aligned with the Father’s will. Christ came "not to be ministered unto, but to minister" (Matthew 20:28). He sought the Father’s will, doing it perfectly, and teaching it through word and example. And unlike Ezra, Christ needed no paga…

Christ Connection - Refusing Armies

In Matthew 26:52-53, when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter draws a sword. Jesus says: "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?" Jesus refuses the way of armies. He could call angels to His aid…

Christ Connection - The Nail in the Sure Place

The image of the nail in the holy place finds its fulfillment in Christ. Isaiah 22:23 speaks of one who is "a nail in a sure place" - a foundation that cannot be shaken. Christ is that nail. He is driven into the holy place of creation and redemption. And He holds all things - holds the covenant, holds the promises, holds the people who have no strength of their own. As Hebrews 7:25 says, Christ "ever liveth to make intercession" - He is the eternal Nail, the fixed Peg, th…

Ezra 10 is the hardest chapter in the book, and the most surprising word in it is hope. Ezra has wept and confessed over a people who had let the worship of other gods into their own households; a great congregation gathers and the people wept very sore (v. 1). Then, into the very middle of the guilt, Shechaniah speaks the sentence the whole chapter turns on: We have trespassed against our God… yet now there is hope in Israel concerning this thing (v. 2). The Hebrew…