Read Ezra chapters 9, 10
Ezra, who was a priest came back to Judah in 457 BC to help restore the nation by leading it in the right direction spiritually. He came with the degree from Artaxerxes that gave the nation full authorization to not only re-establish the temple and its services, but to set up a provincial government. As we studied before, things had finally progressed to where the temple was completed.
Unfortunately, the other leaders came to him and said that many of the people, even the priests and Levites, married with people from the Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites, Jebusites, Perizzites, Moabites, Egyptians, and the Hittites! Not only that, but they were already engaged in practing tenets of these people’s religious beliefs!
Ezra is distraught. He knows all to well that this is the exact thing that led the Hebrews into idolatry and as a result brought God’s judgment and wrath upon their ancestors, resulting in their captivity. At the time of the evening sacrifice, he humbles himself before God and prays. He, like others we’ve read about before, has a specific structure to the prayer. He acknowledges that his people’s sin from years past until now has brought them death and captivity. Ezra acknowledges God’s goodness in preserving a remnant of the Jews and freeing them from captivity. However, now they are back doing the same things that as their ancestors did in intermarrying among heathen nations and engaging in false religious practices which was contrary to the commands of God through the prophets.
Soon a group of Hebrews, including men, and children, joined in mourning with Ezra over the sins that have been committed. Shekaniah admits too that the people have sinned against God. He says that according to the law, they should send the foreign women and their kids away to have them go back to the countries where the women are from. He says the people will do whatever Ezra wants them to do since it is in his hands. A proclamation was made for all the exiles to appear in Jerusalem for the matter to be settled. Ezra stands up among the men and tells them they have been unfaithful to God by marrying foreign women. He tells them to separate themselves from their wives and the pagan nations in order to deal with their sin.
The men admit they had sinned. They request time to make good on this decision and the nation goes through a systematic review to find out who the men are who were guilty of marrying foreign men. Once they had found out who they were, those women and kids were sent back to their lands of origin.
Food for thought. The situation that Ezra and his people faced was a very difficult one. It is very easy to see how the men of Judah could interact with the women of the surrounding nations and fall in love and have families with them. It would seem to be not a big deal, especially if they were “good” women. But as we found out in many previous posts, the road to rejecting God and following other gods often is paved with making decisions that seem at first to not be a problem. The enemy is so relentless that he tries to derail our spiritual restoration by getting us back into the same things that caused us to wander from God in the first place. For the Hebrews, it was marrying themselves to non-believers. As a consequence, they had to deal with the painful decision to break up families that had been created in order to preserve the spiritual revival that had begun to occur years earlier. Ezra no doubt felt horrible in demanding that his fellow countrymen make those difficult choices but he was determined to make sure that nothing, not even wives and children, would come between his people and God. We have to make the same choices, because even people we may deem to be friends and acquaintances can interfere with our spiritual growth. Let’s keep our focus on God alone during our time of restoration to avoid making painful decisions in the future.
Up next: A man responds to a desperate need….
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