The Priest Sent - ANB Week 3, Day 1 - 3.18.13

Week 3

Monday, March 18                                                               The Priest Sent

Ezra 7.1-10

For the past two weeks you have read and studied about events that actually took place 60 years before Ezra ever enters the picture. If you look back over the names of the people we have met thus far, you will see that his name never appears. And now, we are seven chapters into a ten chapter book and the man whose name appears on the book is just now coming forth. There is something very important to understand about this. The Bible is God’s self-revelation to man, every word of it inspired and breathed by God Himself, so there is a deeper meaning to the words we read beyond what is on the page. King Darius, who God used to finance the completion of the temple, has passed on, and so has his successor, Xerxes. It is now Artaxerxes who sits on the Persian throne, where he has been established for seven years. We will talk in a minute about who Ezra was, but let us first look at what Ezra did and why he was sent.

In the nearly sixty years since the completion of the temple, nothing new really took place in the lives of the Israelites. That in and of itself is no small fact. It was not that the people of Israel had everything together and that they were on a course that was perfectly fine in regards to their spiritual health. They had the temple and they had begun their system of worship once again in Jerusalem. But, nothing changed. Nothing was new. They were spiritually dry. When a church congregation does the same thing for sixty years, nothing will change that church for those sixty years, especially in a culture like ours that changes evermore rapidly. For us in our day, the church must be willing to adapt and change with the culture or prepare to die. Churches that effectively reach out and minister to the community around them do not do things the same way today as they did ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, much less sixty or seventy years ago. Israel became stagnantly ritualistic and did not grow in their knowledge of God or their experience with them.

Enter Ezra. Ezra was noted as a “scribe skilled in the Law of Moses, which the Lord God of Israel had given…the hand of the Lord his God was upon him” (v.6). God prepared a man who knew His Word and was ready to teach that Word to the people of Israel. Let us not overlook the genealogy of Ezra given. It is too easy for us to look at these verses and the genealogies in Genesis and think they are given for information only and do not hold any true weight to what we are studying. Again, Paul makes it clear that “ALL Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching…” (2 Tim 3.16, ESV), that includes the genealogies. In the verses under our inspection, it becomes clear to us why Ezra’s family line was included as he is traced back to Aaron, the brother of Moses, the first priest. His position in the line of Aaron and by nature of his being sent by God to Jerusalem signals that something momentous was to come and that Ezra was going to be right in the center of it. Ezra was the priest to renew Israel in Jerusalem. God sent Him, through the authority of Artaxerxes to the land of Israel to be their priest. He was sent with the very hand of God on his life (v. 9).

For sixty years Israel had been doing the same thing, but now they had a priest who “had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach His statues and rules in Israel” (v. 10). What is so significant about Ezra’s entrance into Israel is the renewal of spiritual worship in Israel. Part of the reason for Israel’s stagnant spiritual life was due to the fact that they had no teacher. There was no one in Israel to rightly divide the Word of Truth for their lives. They became ignorant, so much so that they did not realize they were. They were blindly going through the motions of their faith, upholding the Law, yet remaining ignorant to what that Law truly was. It is clear to see why good, God-qualified leadership is important for the people called by God’s name. It is imperative that we do not allow ourselves to slip into a pattern of going through the motions, which leads to a similar stagnancy as the people of Israel and why we must pray for our leadership daily. Our new beginning must start with a fresh spirit that is fully yielded to the work of the Spirit, allowing Him to work in our lives and tear away those things that can cause us to lose focus and end up stagnant and useless.

Prayer:

Lord Jesus, I thank You that You are not satisfied by stagnant going through the motions when it comes to my spiritual life. Please make me usable for Your kingdom. Renew me, Lord. Renew my pastor and the leadership of my church, that they may remain faithful to the responsibilities You have given them.