March 17, 2024: Message: Keeping It Together and Pressing Forward | Scripture: Ezra 4:24-5:2 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
Worship Songs: Before the Throne of God | Jesus Paid It All | Worthy of Worship
Full Manuscript
Introduction
If able, please stand with me as I read to you from Ezra 4:24-5:2. TWOL: Then the work on the house of God that is in Jerusalem stopped, and it ceased until the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia. Now, the prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, the son of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem, in the name of the God of Israel who was over them. Then Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua, the son of Jozadak, arose and began to rebuild the house of God that is in Jerusalem, and the prophets of God were with them, supporting them.
In case we’ve all forgotten, we last left the people of Israel in a parenthesis. Ezra 4 begins on a real high note. They’re beginning to build the temple. They’re laying its foundation. They’re pondering their restoration as those who dwell in the midst of the Lord. But then adversity comes, and Ezra wants us to know that it doesn’t just come once, but it comes over and over again, and it doesn’t just come in a single period of time but throughout the ages. And in all that adversity, what we learn is that despite our suffering, we’re to persist because God intends for us a greater glory—a glory that is ultimately satisfied in Christ.
The problem for Israel, however, is that they don’t persist. Our passage in verse 24 comes back to the events following Ezra 4:5—after looking forward to all the suffering that Israel will face in vv. 6-23, the sad fact of the matter is is that Israel kind of gives up as these Samaritans are discouraging, terrifying, and bribing state officials to prevent the Jews from building their temple.
This is where the narrative picks up—the people of God in Jerusalem have stopped building the house of God. Their original plans and hopes in returning to Jerusalem and carrying out God’s will for them are, for all intents and purposes, dead in the water. The passage itself has no mention that, in the stopping of their work, they intend to pick it back up again.
And the question is, can it be restarted? Can their lethargy—their deadness to doing the will of God—be revived? And in light of knowing about Israel’s not only past persecution but about their present and future persecution, how are they to restart it, revive it, and persist in it? More applicably, how are we to persist and seek revival in the midst of our own cultural anarchy and social rejection in doing that which God desires us to do? How do we push through the adversity, keep everything together, and press forward?
I hope, even for you seasoned Christians, that it’s not cliché to hear the answer when I say that it starts and ends with the Word of God. A friend of mine told me about an argument that he was in with his own good friend not too long ago about how she was prioritizing her Sunday to watch football instead of going to church, and he began to show, in Scripture, why she needed to go, and do you know what her response was when he did that? It was, “Oh, so now you want to bring God into it?”
Church, the issue isn’t whether or not God is there desiring to help us, restore us, or protect us, it’s whether or not we want to acknowledge that he’s always been there—that he’s always given help—that he’s always sought both to bring the dead to life and to keep them alive, and it starts and ends, for us, with his Book. If what you want to do today is to do the will of God—to be restored in your strength in order to do it—then immerse yourself in the Bible because apart from it, there is no revival, restoration, nor persistence. Be in the Bible.
And what does the Bible tell us to do when we open its pages—when we look at our text today—how does it restore our strength to do God’s will? Well, it starts by telling us to …
1) Put on the Fear of God
Like I said, we pick up, in verse 24, with Israel having given up on building the temple. Why? Because they’re terrified of what might happen if they keep going. The author of Ezra goes on this long parenthetical diatribe so that we know how grievous the threat was—how persistent—how difficult the situation was for these Jews. Here’s what I don’t want any of us to do when we read the Bible, and that is, I don’t want us to minimize the struggle when we talk about the devil, when we talk about worldly powers and influence, when we talk about sin. And I don’t want it to sound like I’m casting it off like sin is an easy thing to deal with.
It’s a real, difficult struggle. Why? Because sin isn’t just something we come to like—something we just stumble into, but it is something we are prewired, predisposed, predetermined, through Adam, to like.
What do I mean by that? Well, I hope most of us know that in Genesis, we—all of humanity—are made in the image of God. All of us, men and women, are created in complementary fashion after his likeness. This doesn’t simply mean that we bear or have the image of God. No, it means we are the image of God—our imaging him is essential, not accidental, to our existence. We are purposed to mirror and represent him in the world.
By mirroring, I mean that as creation generally depicts the glory of God—his presence, his power, his divinity—all of it generally displaying his unmatched divinity, we are meant to be the special depiction—the special revelation—the special expression—of his glory. In man, God reveals himself in a unique way—in an incomparable way. This is why the second law within the ten commandments was so important: you shall not make or worship images of God. Why? Because God has already created an image of himself in you and me. If you want to see God—what he is like—we’re supposed to be able to look at each other and be astounded by the wonder of it—that we reflect his love, kindness, joy, and goodness.
Yet, we aren’t only meant to mirror him, we’re meant to represent him in the world like ambassadors come to proclaim the majesty of the King in a foreign place—as those who have authority from the King, himself, to do so. We’re to advance God’s plans for humanity. We’re to support and protect those things that God values—his ethics, his principles, his desires. Our representation is supposed to be so reflective that his desires are our desires. In us, the rest of creation is meant to experience and encounter God.
But how do we meet this purpose of mirroring and representing God? We are made able because God has given us two essential components in our creation: he’s given us structure and function. Structurally speaking, God gives us gifts, capacities, abilities to make decisions and act in unique ways. He has made us intellectual and rational. He has given us powers of deduction and creativity. He has imbued within us a conscience to be responsible and morally sensitive to right and wrong. These structural endowments display, in a limited way, God’s capacities—his rationality, creativity, responsibility, morality, sociality, and power.
Yet, our structural likeness to God is meant to serve our functional likeness of God, in that, our gifts, our abilities, our capacities were meant to grow us in our love for God, for our neighbours, and for our world. The structure is our essence, and the function is the way in which our essence is expressed. God gave us a structure so that we might move forward and carry out his task, his mission, and his calling. God gave us a structure—he gave us gifts—he imparts to us his character—so that we might pursue his great glory as his image bearers.
And sin distorts this. See, we keep all or most of our structural likeness. We still have gifts. We still have rationality, to an extent. We still have abilities to act in distinct ways from the rest of creation. Of course, there are parts of our structure—our essence—that are corrupted, but the thing that really goes wrong—the thing that Herman Bavinck says is devastated—the thing that John Calvin describes as being deformed, vitiated, mutilated, maimed, disease-ridden, and disfigured—is our function. The thing that sin rots away from us is our desire to do God’s will.
Sin doesn’t change our essence as those created in the likeness of God, but it changes the direction in which we express our essence. It isn’t just a removal of that which is good from us, it is an active rebellion against God’s mandate for our lives. It is, as I was recently reminded, cosmic treason, and it is something that poisons and corrupts every single one of us in how we image our Creator as we live out our days on this earth. We no longer function—we do not move—we no longer exercise our God-given power—for the sake of God’s intended glory. We might go about as those who have the capacity to do neat things, but in our sin, we are dead to using those capacities in a worthwhile way.
And this understanding of sin is vitally important for our first point in Ezra 4:24 because Israel, a people who are comprised of incredibly gifted, able, and capable men and women, as they stop building the house of God—they disregard their function and thereby forsake the one whom they image. And why do they forget? It is because they are sinful. It is because they’ve replaced their fear of God as those made to mirror and represent him in the world with a fear of man—with a fear of what the world threatens to do to Israel if they do not move and use their gifts in a way that pleases it (the world).
And this is why sin is so difficult to combat—because it tricks us—it has been tricking us since Adam—into thinking that because we are still able to carry out our structural God-given abilities, we must be pursuing our God-given function—that because we can be successful or happy in the world, this must mean that we have success and happiness in God. And this is a lie that is leading billions upon billions of souls to hell—that submitting ourselves to our fear of man can coexist with a fear of God—that having the structural essence of God is sufficient without moving in the way of God.
But the Bible—our text here in Ezra—tells us such distortion and divorce of the structural from the functional cannot be. Our will apart from God will always stand in opposition to God. Our desire to be like God without pursuing the way of God is a sure recipe for disaster and death, and it’s possible that some of us are following one such recipe—that we seek only to grow in our essence—in our abilities and gifts for selfish, worldly reasons—without seeking to deepen our expression of those gifts in a way that honours our Creator—without seeking to follow his will for us—without seeking to be holy as he is holy.
What, then, is the remedy for this? How do we put off the discouraging and sinful fear of man and adopt, in its place, a proper fear of God? We do it by prioritizing …
2) Prioritize the (S)Word of God
I wanted to refer to Scripture as the Sword of God because this is how Scripture refers to itself in Ephesians 6 and Hebrews 4, and it’s named this because it is with an active view to knowing and engaging with Scripture that we combat the active rebellion of our hearts. We tend to think Scripture is the Sword of God because it helps us fight the temptations and the devil out there, but really, it’s called the sword to help us first, fight sin in ourselves.
Where our sin leads us into death, the Word of God is brought to us—given to us—so that we might not only receive life but be able to put to death the very thing that brings death. And this is precisely how God renews the Israelites in Ezra 5:1—he gives them his Word, and he does it through two specific prophets named Haggai and Zechariah.
Now, Haggai is a book intended to admonish and speak against Israel for its sin. In fact, right at the beginning in Haggai 1:4-9, the prophet says in all bluntness that God’s people have neglected the building of the temple. They’ve refused to follow the singular, important command of God, and instead, they’ve sought to carefully build up their own homes while God’s house lies in ruins. Even more than this, they’ve sought to fatten their bellies and dress themselves in fine clothing instead of seeking after the riches of God’s favour. Sounds a little like us, perhaps? Where the fear of man pushes us to pursue comfortable lifestyles and call those things the blessings of God? When they aren’t. Like I said, they sought to use their God-given gifts apart from their God-given function.
And in response to their dysfunction, God tells them that he will withhold from them the good things of the earth—the dew, its produce, grain, wine, oil—until they get their act together and do as he commanded. He means to discipline them so that they might obey, and some of us may see this as punishment when it’s not. It may seem like God is kicking a dog while it’s down—while the people of Israel are in the throes of suffering, but he’s not.
See, this is the first thing that happens—that needs to happen—when we open, receive, and sit under the Word of God. No matter where we open the Bible, I can assure you, brothers and sisters, the first thing that it will confront us with is the depths and severity of our sin—even if the passage does not speak of sin itself, the very fact that we struggle and fight to understand its words and apply it to our lives shows how blind we are on our own, and how utterly dependent we are upon his Spirit to illuminate its words to our hearts.
This is a good thing. It’s an encouraging thing because his discipline of us—his opening our eyes to the disease our sin—is so that we might seek out the cure. His opening our eyes is to show us he still cares. It’s to point out that as long as you’re still living, it’s not too late. No one likes hearing that they have cancer, but they need to hear the bad news so that they might hear the options that will enable them to pursue good news.
And what is the option that’s given? Well, that’s where Zechariah comes along. Here, we’re told that Zechariah is the son of Iddo. But we ought to know, Iddo is really Zechariah’s grandfather, and he’s named as the son or descendant of Iddo instead of his actual father, Berechiah, because Iddo was the head of a priestly family when they were in Jerusalem before the exile. He’s referenced throughout 2 Chronicles 9, 12, and 13. So, the author of Ezra here is establishing the authority of Zechariah—that he is a proper priest from a priestly house established before the fall of Judah.
Yet, if we look at Zechariah 1:1, we’re given the full lineage: “the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, son of Iddo.” And knowing this full lineage is quite important because Zechariah is two Hebrew words: זכר and יָה—this second word is short for יהוה, and these two words put together means God remembers. Berechiah is, again, two Hebrew words: ברך and יָה (again, short for יהוה), which means God blesses. And, finally, Iddo is two words, as well, one of them being a third-person singular pronoun: his and the other word meaning timely or lovely. Put it all together, and this is what you get: God remembers, and God blesses in his time and in his love.
This is what the prophetic book of Zechariah is about. Haggai means to confront Israel with its sin. But Zechariah means to remind Israel that despite its sin, God has not forgotten them. God desires to bless them. And he desires to remember and bless them in his appointed time—in his gracious love that abounds over their sin.
Yet, both prophets give these wayward Jews the same remedy to their problem. The way to overcome the deadness of their sin, and the way to enter into the remembrance and blessedness of God, is through repenting at this appointed time. In fact, Zechariah, just like Haggai, begins in verse 3 by saying, “Thus declares the Lord of hosts: ‘Return to me, and I will return to you.” So, then, this is the second thing that happens when we open God’s Word—he doesn’t only confront us with the disease of our sin but provides us with remedy: he calls us to receive life through repentance.
And he doesn’t offer the call of repentance generally. No, he does it specifically. Haggai and Zechariah aren’t prophets who bring the Word of God to anybody. They bring it to the Jews—those in Judah and Jerusalem. In the same way, God gives the Bible specifically to sinners, and he calls those specific sinners to come back! You—specifically, you, were once dead in the trespasses of, specifically, your sin, but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved, specifically, us, made, specifically, us alive together with Christ. This is the third thing that happens when we plumb Scripture’s depths—it gets personal. It digs down deep, and it means to flood your life with the infinite mercy of God!
But then, fourthly, it doesn’t just point out your sin, call you to repentance, and flood, specifically, you with mercy and grace—it doesn’t leave you with you. It points you back to God—the giver of good gifts—the redeemer of sinners—the Father to the fatherless—the comforter to the broken and discouraged. These things said by Haggai and Zechariah are said in the name of God—the God who is over them. And this Word that we possess is given to us by that same God so that we might not go astray—so that we might not only do as we’ve been gifted to do, but so that we might have strength to fulfill our divinely-given function—to keep it together and press forward for the glory of God to know God.
3) Prove the Power of God
This is precisely what we see in Ezra 5:2. The Israelites were dead in their ability to continue doing what God wanted them to do. So, what does God do? He gives them his Word. He saturates them in it. He offers, specifically, them repentance from their sin through it. And in their repentance, what happens? Life happens! The Power of God is proved and displayed! Zerubbabel and Jeshua arise and begin to rebuild the house of God.
And look at the words that the author of Ezra means to include very intentionally: “and the prophets of God were with them [as they rebuilt], supporting them.” In other words, when God revives, renews, and restores you, he also persists and preserves you! His Word goes with you. His Word inspires you. His Word encourages you. His Word strengthens you. And it does these things so that you might bring glory to him—so that you might rebuild his house—so that you might show his power—so that you might bring all of creation into an experience and encounter with the living God as those who are his image.
Let me say this another way, you can do a lot of good things in the world. You can even do things that feel right and more efficient or successful or incredible in the eyes of your people, but unless it’s supported by the Word of God—unless you’re sure that it’s backed by the Creator of the sun, moon, stars, heaven, and earth—it is worthless. Why? Because without the Word of God—without its reviving power—all you have is dysfunction and sin.
But we, dear Christians, endeavour to do everything and be everything we can be according to the Book because we want what we are and what we do to be worth something—not because we are worth something—but because the only way we receive worth—the only way any of this is worth our time—is if God is in it and pleased by us. And the only way we know if God is in it is if we’re in this (the Bible)—working to understand it, working to saturate ourselves in it, working to live it, working to magnify it, working to exemplify it, working to glorify the One who has poured out his blood to fulfill every iota and every dot within it. The way to persist and the way to thrive begins and ends with the Book.
Perhaps, you’ve noticed that I’ve intentionally played on the themes of death, restoration, and resurrection throughout this sermon. That Israel was dead in its sin, that God gave his Word to speak into their deadness, and that that speaking in leads to life and revived action amongst his people, and I hope you can hear how even these three verses show the pervasiveness of the gospel.
Our beginning and end must be the gospel. If the Bible is our beginning and end, then the gospel must be our everything in everything. In our character, we’re to reflect the character of Christ. In our action, we’re to reflect the conduct of Christ. In our feelings and emotions, we’re to reflect the heart and desires of Christ. In our thinking, we’re to reflect the thoughts and mind of Christ.
And what do all of these things boil down to? What is it to reflect Christ’s character, conduct, heart, desires, and mind in our lives? What does it mean to be a Bible people? Jesus tells us himself in John 6:38: “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of my Father who sent me.” The whole Bible in its gospel gets us back to one thing: being like and imaging God.
The question, then, is this: is it your will to do the will of the Father?—in your watching that show—in your conversation with that brother or sister—in your time at work—in your relationships with your family and friends—in your vacationing—in your child-rearing—in your passing by the needy and homeless—in the building up of your church? Do you do your Father’s will, because if you don’t, if there is any part of your life where you can think, “this isn’t what the Father would want me to be doing,” then it also means that there are parts of your life that don’t begin and end with the Book. There are parts of your life that still need to be transformed by the power of its gospel.
Nothing we do is worthwhile unless we conform ourselves to Scripture—unless we’ve rightly applied the gospel—the work of Christ’s righteous life, substitutionary death upon a cross, and glorified resurrection—unless we apply that gospel in this Bible to our lives. We do this by putting to death the very thing that brings death in our sin, clinging to him who remembers us, desires to bless us, and who comes at the right time in love for us. He is our great high priest from the priestliest house established from before the foundation of the earth. And he is worthy of every glory.
He is whom our Bible proclaims from Genesis to Revelation. He is the one in whom all Scripture declares is the only way, truth, and life. Restore, then, Your Strength and Do the Will of God by being, first, in the Word of God—the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. In him, we have received grace upon grace, so then, reflect this grace in the world, and exalt the name of Christ as those who function—who live—according to the words of the Bible.
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