Ensign: The Restoration Draweth Nigh, or First Things First
All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye. Isaiah 18:3
AN
ENSIGN ON THE MOUNTAINS 16 August 2013
[Once
in a while, we just need a good old Bible study! And as I'm reading
through the Old Testament book of Ezra right now, I thought I'd take
a study I like of the third chapter of said book and share it would
you … okay, so it's part of a study I actually WROTE, The
Persian Trilogy
(ISBN 9781489502254), and I present it here today not only because
it's a good study of an often difficult book but also because the
text I was going to share got caught in some bluescreen hell, so I'm
saving it. Have an awesome weekend!]
“And
when the seventh month was come, and the children of Israel were in
the cities, the people gathered themselves together as one man to
Jerusalem.” The third chapter of the book of Ezra opens with
all the people mentioned as resettling the land of Judah in chapter
two as a result of the decree of the Persian king Cyrus in chapter
one assembled in Jerusalem, or what was left of it after Babylon’s
conquest of Judah seventy years before for what they would do next.
“Then stood up Jeshua the son of Jozadak, and his brethren the
priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and his brethren, and
builded the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings
thereon, as it is written in the law of Moses the man of God.”
Back in chapter two verse two we saw these gentlemen appointed to
lead the people back to Judah from Babylon and now they will lead in
reestablishing the worship of God upon the Jewish “holy ground”.
After
a journey of four months (that figure’s based on how long it would
later take Ezra to get from Babylon to Jerusalem, per chapter seven
verse nine) the returning exiles are understandably eager to get
started. But while we may want to rush with the slightly dim
expectation that we know what we’re doing, God won’t. The
specific writing of Moses mentioned in verse two comes from the
twelfth chapter of Deuteronomy, verses five and six, and it’s meant
to be done there after the children of Israel utterly destroyed all
vestiges of idolatry and non-God worship. It’s not just
enough to figuratively pitch your tent, you have to dedicate the
place – like you can’t fill an empty pitcher with air to replace
air, you have to fill it with something stronger. “And they
set the altar upon his bases [read “its foundations”]; for fear
was upon them because of the people of those countries: and they
offered burnt offerings thereon unto the LORD, even burnt offerings
morning and evening.”
The
land of and around Jerusalem hadn’t just sat fallow over the last
seventy years. By this time [the seventh month, the ordained
beginning of the Feast of Trumpets called a “holy convocation” in
the twenty-ninth chapter of Numbers, by our calendar this happened
here about the end of September, 536 B.C.] there were a great many
other peoples settled there from other parts of the Babylonian Empire
and even the Assyrian Empire before it. One people from the
latter conquest, the Samaritans, would generate quite the friction
with the returnees but that’s another story. Keeping the
burnt offerings going day and night as well as paying the masons and
carpenters of Zidon [Sidon] and Tyre for their time and for the
materials they’d be bringing that Cyrus had already authorized by
decree as documented in verses four through seven was a sign that the
Jews – this term is first used in 2 Kings, so it’s already a few
centuries old to describe the people of Judah and survivors of
Israel, hence still being called as a whole “children of Israel”
– were back to stay.
“But
the foundation of the temple of the LORD was not yet laid.”
Flash forward one year and one month. Of course it took time
for all the materials needed to rebuild the Temple to get to
Jerusalem “from Lebanon to the sea of Joppa [the Mediterranean Sea
today]” and by the time they arrived Zerubbabel and Jeshua and “the
remnant of their brethren [disallowed because they couldn’t prove
their ancestry, per chapter two] the priests and the Levites” and
everyone who was able came to work on building the Temple, called in
verse eight the house of the LORD. Verses nine through eleven
detail the successes of building the foundation and then celebrating
with trumpets and cymbals playing “after the ordinance of
David king of Israel”, by the precedent recorded in 1 Chronicles
16:4-6, minus the ark of the LORD, the historical Ark of the Covenant
which had probably already been destroyed. So Indiana Jones
will probably not find it … but along with this worship, along with
this establishment of the foundation of the temple of the LORD, along
with this celebration, came some nostalgia.
You can’t really fault many of the priests and Levites and “chief of the families [or family leaders]” in verses twelve and thirteen for alternately weeping with sorrow and shouting for joy. Many of them “had seen the first house”; that is, they remembered worshiping in and seeing the original Temple in Jerusalem that had been torn down by Babylon decades ago. Yet today we can stand in Jerusalem, and if we did not know Babylon from the Biblical record, would we even remember the latter had existed? But back to the last third of the sixth century B.C., the noises of joy and sorrow sounded so similar that verse thirteen says that “the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people: for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was heard afar off.” Again, the new and not-so-new neighbors of the Jews knew people had come back to stay, and regardless of everyone living under a relatively happy and peaceful Persian rule, people with distinct ethnic and religious beliefs are STILL people with distinct ethnic and religious beliefs. And there will be trouble.
David
P.S.
I write this weekly devotional to keep in touch with all of you in my
address book, and I hope to be an encourager too! If you find that
I’m not or you want me to get lost, just let me know, thank you!
We
praise You, Lord, for this beautiful day You have given us! Please
pray with me for the peace of Jerusalem on both sides of the fence
and for physical and spiritual communities around our world.
Lord,
we need Your strength to fight the natural disasters and human ills
to ultimately treat the cause and not just the symptoms; until we who
have power change, this world You have made us stewards of won’t
either.
Thank
You, Lord, for all those in leadership and service here and abroad.
Thank You for the opportunities we have been given as well as the
promise of new life through Your Son. And may we all seek and have a
blessed week! Amen.
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