April 7, 2024: Message: The Meeting of Wills | Scripture: Ezra 6:1-12 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
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Introduction
If able, please stand as I read to you from Ezra 6:1-12. TWoL: 1 Then Darius the king made a decree, and search was made in Babylonia, in the house of the archives where the documents were stored. 2 And in Ecbatana, the citadel that is in the province of Media, a scroll was found on which this was written: “A record. 3 In the first year of Cyrus the king, Cyrus the king issued a decree: Concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, let the house be rebuilt, the place where sacrifices were offered, and let its foundations be retained. Its height shall be sixty cubits1 and its breadth sixty cubits, 4 with three layers of great stones and one layer of timber. Let the cost be paid from the royal treasury. 5 And also let the gold and silver vessels of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took out of the temple that is in Jerusalem and brought to Babylon, be restored and brought back to the temple that is in Jerusalem, each to its place. You shall put them in the house of God.”
6 “Now therefore, Tattenai, governor of the province Beyond the River, Shethar-bozenai, and your associates the governors who are in the province Beyond the River, keep away. 7 Let the work on this house of God alone. Let the governor of the Jews and the elders of the Jews rebuild this house of God on its site. 8 Moreover, I make a decree regarding what you shall do for these elders of the Jews for the rebuilding of this house of God. The cost is to be paid to these men in full and without delay from the royal revenue, the tribute of the province from Beyond the River. 9 And whatever is needed—bulls, rams, or sheep for burnt offerings to the God of heaven, wheat, salt, wine, or oil, as the priests at Jerusalem require—let that be given to them day by day without fail, 10 that they may offer pleasing sacrifices to the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons. 11 Also I make a decree that if anyone alters this edict, a beam shall be pulled out of his house, and he shall be impaled on it, and his house shall be made a dunghill. 12 May the God who has caused his name to dwell there overthrow any king or people who shall put out a hand to alter this, or to destroy this house of God that is in Jerusalem. I Darius make a decree; let it be done with all diligence.”
[Mini-series on freedom] Our question today is: what does it mean to have freedom in the biblical sense of the word? If I were to summarize our findings from Ezra 5:3-17 into one sentence, I’d define it like this: freedom is that which only exists and can be possessed in God’s sovereignty. We cannot be free apart from God’s sovereignty. If God is not sovereign, we are not free. If God is not sovereign, we cannot be anything. God is the one who defines who and what we are.
Now, if you’re anything like me, as you’re hearing those words, they tend to make you scratch your head a little because if God is telling me how to be free or defining how it is I am free, how is it that I am free at all? Doesn’t freedom mean control? Doesn’t freedom mean having the ability to ultimately control or decide for myself—having the last word?
Yet, what we often find is that the freedom we receive under God’s sovereignty is not what we expect. What we often find in Scripture is that the freedom that God gives us has nothing to do with what we ultimately control. Rather, freedom is often articulated in such a way where we are made able to submit to God’s will knowing that his plans shall prevail. The freedom is in being with God and not against God—that he gets the last, victorious word, and that his word will always be better than any we’ve spoken ourselves.
This morning I want to talk about a greater freedom than the one we often think we need. We think we need control and power to be free. But the Bible tells us that we don’t need those things. Rather, Scripture—Ezra 6:1-12—tells us that we need to give God the last word—to submit ourselves to his often unexpected, yet sovereign way. We’re to find freedom in giving God the last word, and the way we do this is, firstly, by (waiting) …
1) Wait as He Orchestrates
Let’s briefly consider our text’s context. In 529 B.C., king Cyrus, the one who issued the original edict that the Jews could return from Babylon to Jerusalem and begin rebuilding their temple, dies, and for 7 years there’s civil unrest and infighting within Persia to determine who will succeed Cyrus. Darius comes out on top in 522 B.C., but the control of his empire is shaky, at best. Seven years without any true authoritative oversight amongst the provinces (satraps) in Persia has left the governors of each province with a lot of power, very little direction, and the opportunity to potentially leave or quietly rebel against the empire without the king really knowing.
But it’s around 520 B.C., two years after Darius becomes king, that the prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, tell the Jews to get back to building the temple, which they’ve wrongfully neglected for 15 years since Cyrus sent them back, and the Samaritans don’t like this. So, they confront the Jews: Who are you? Why are you building? And the Jews tell them the truth—they are the people of God building the temple that God commanded them to build, and the Samaritans go back to Darius to find out if what they’re saying can be proved.
Our text today is a result of that search but let me add that, from context, it’s probable that the Samaritans were hoping that Darius didn’t find anything, or that if he did, he wouldn’t acknowledge it. And there are a couple reasons for this: (1) It was very possible that Cyrus’ edict, which would have been written on clay tablets, had been destroyed and lost after his death or during the civil war. (2) The Samaritans were hoping that, even if found, the prospect of the Jews worshipping their God might trigger Darius’ vanity, like other kings of other nations who believed themselves to be gods. (3) The temple could be used tactically against the empire if the Jews decided to rebel.
But more importantly, (4) I believe the Samaritans were banking on the idea that Darius would support his governors, Tattenai and Shethar-bozenai, more than the Israelites because they [the governors] could be dangerous to the empire. Like I said, the balance of power in Persia was unstable in these first years of Darius, and the threat of unhappy leaders rebelling or seceding could prove to be an unwelcomed distraction.
But what our text says is that Darius doesn’t only find something, but that he goes against all the reasons I’ve stated to support what he finds. He goes against the vanity typical of monarchs in his day. He goes against the strategic threat of the temple. He goes against his own governors who could incite insurrection at any time, putting the stability and integrity of the entire empire at risk.
What’s more is that we’re told that Darius doesn’t just find Cyrus’ edict, he finds it in a place called Ecbatana, which is the summer residence for Persian kings almost 300 miles northeast of Babylon, meaning Darius and his servants go far out of their way to search for the document. And when he finds it, they aren’t their original clay tablets, rather they’re found in some archive upon a scribe’s scroll that Cyrus himself has probably never seen.
All this to say is that the circumstances that we find here upon which Darius is supposed to make a decision, and upon which the Jews depend, are extremely precarious, and if understood properly, it could have gone either way. In fact, it’s quite a marvel that Darius doesn’t simply dismiss the rebuilding project as soon as he’s realized there was no record of it in Babylon. What might have possessed this pagan, all-too-busy king to go to these lengths to uncover an inconvenient truth—a king who’s just fought for seven years to get himself on the throne only to now put it all in jeopardy?
Let me answer that this way: our common misunderstanding of grace is that it merely works to bring us into a favourable position with God—that grace is merely something given to us so that we might exercise our ultimate freedom—so that we might choose to do or not do what pleases God. Grace isn’t about how to live our lives. Grace doesn’t determine what happens in our lives. No, grace, in our minds, is only about how to get to living our lives on our terms. Grace is about God, yes, but once grace is given—once God’s job is done—it becomes about me.
But our passage and its context suggest something far deeper, more comprehensive, more durative about the nature of God’s grace. God’s grace doesn’t just open up the possibility of getting Judah into Jerusalem. God’s grace doesn’t just stop at the edict of Cyrus. God’s grace doesn’t just send Haggai and Zechariah to get us out of our complacency and self-sufficiency. No, God’s sovereign grace actively leads us home, opens the door, carries us over the threshold, furnishes the house, sets the table, provides the food, and enables us—strengthens us—to eat and be nourished. God’s grace is actively involved in the orchestration of every event in his people’s lives for their good, even when time seems to tell them otherwise, and even when all the reasons and odds of the world oppose them.
And the implication is that if he is orchestrating things to such a degree in the life of world powers like kings and queens, why would his attention and orchestration over every event of our lives be any different? Why would we want it to be different when we find freedom in God’s use of others to better our situation, or conversely, when he uses others to make our lives harder, does this make us less free in finding our hope, joy, and rest in him? It shouldn’t. Freedom isn’t control. It’s knowing and being known by God—that he orchestrates all things for and vindicates those whom he loves.
See, what I believe these first five verses are doing is that they’re calling us to find greater freedom in God’s orchestration and vindication of our lives—as we go about patiently waiting for his sovereign purposes to come to pass—because if God’s sovereignty is guiding us, helping us, directing us, then we no longer have to make it so much about ourselves. We no longer have to bear our worries, frustrations, anger, discouragements, pain, and expectations to bring about the plans that he is working out for us.
I read somewhere that “to be human is to taste sorrow in its multitudinous dimensions”—feelings of displacement, loss, brokenness, evil, poverty, rejection. And yet how often do we look at our situations of sorrow and forget that this is not the final destiny of God’s people—that he is leading all things towards a most magnificent end, and that he calls us simply to be patient—to wait as he does so?
In our text, Israel, as an exilic community, has experienced so much loss and heartache—yes, much of it sinfully self-inflicted, just like is often the case with us, but both their loss and their sin do not have the final word when it comes to the dispensation of God’s grace. God always wins that contest because God is using it all—our losses, our sin, our anxieties, our victories, and our desires—to accomplish his purposes and to assure our freedom in and with him. But we are not free unless we can submit to him—unless we can be patient in him as he works out what’s good for us.
Leave your need to control everything in his hands. And give him the last word over your life as the God who treasures every part of it, which leads us to our second point: as he directs you, and as you submit freely and patiently to his grace, trust him as he instructs you, guides you, and speaks into your life.
2) Trust as He Instructs
The real bombshell of this passage comes to us in what happens after Darius finds Cyrus’ edict in vv. 6-12. Here, we see king Darius give Tattenai, Shethar-bozenai, and their associates five instructions, and the first one is what you might expect because it falls in line with what king Cyrus decreed. Darius tells the Samaritans to “keep away,” which, we’ll see, means something more like, “don’t stop or hinder the Israelites from rebuilding.”
And while we might expect this, we have to see how it reaffirms our first point of waiting as God orchestrates history and vindicates his people. Because Israel was completely at the mercy of Darius, but they believed in God’s sovereign grace, and God, in his sovereign grace, rewarded their faithfulness. If we learn anything from this, it’s the simple, yet time-tested lesson that God is faithful with those who are faithful to him.
But then Darius’ second to fifth instructions really begin to escalate and go beyond both what Cyrus initially decreed in his edict and what one might reasonably expect, especially from the Samaritan perspective. His second instruction is that the building of the temple isn’t only to be paid from the royal treasury, as Cyrus instructed, but that the money, itself, is to come from the tribute—the taxes—of these Samaritans. In other words, he makes the Samaritans debtors to the Jews. He flips their roles where the Samaritans were once the aggressors and bullies, now the Jews are their superiors.
And not only does he require the Samaritans to pay for the parts and labour of the project, but he requires them to supply the resources that the Israelites might need to carry out their religious practices. Now, make sure not to miss the kicker: they’re to provide these resources, it says, day by day, without fail. There’s a legal phrase for this: it’s a right in personam in perpetuity—a trust. There’s a biblical phrase for this: Israel gets the Samaritans’ stuff forever. And it’s a staggering order to make—not just because of who the Samaritans are in the land—established and powerful, but because of who the Jews are—they’re comparatively nothing, yet God’s using their enemies to give them everything forever!
But look at what the purpose for Darius’ decree in these first three instructions is—it’s what we call a condition precedent in a trust, and this will be important later: it’s so that the Israelites might make their pleasing sacrifices to the God of heaven, and so that they might pray for the life of the king and his sons. Now, let me remark here that a lot of commentaries say Darius requests prayer from the Israelites for the sake of perpetuating Persian rule and power, and that’s probably partly true.
But it strikes me as odd how this pagan king orders his instructions: he first seeks to honour Israel’s God—who he calls, explicitly, the God of heaven—not the God of Israel—not the God of that land. No, the God who sits and sees over everything, and it’s notable because the definite article is used here. He isn’t just a god. He is the God who sees all, and because he is the God who sees all, this leads Darius to ask a second thing: pray for me.
In other words, if this God is the God, and if he sits over all things, then he must, by inference, sit over me, king Darius. And if he sits over me, then even I must submit to him and acknowledge that I am powerless and feeble compared to him. So, pray for me. Intercede that I might please him and that it might go well for me in his sight.
Brothers and sisters, some of the theological implications and applications from these first three instructions should be obvious, and the first is that even the enemies of God serve his purposes. Perhaps I’ve been a little misleading in telling you that this is a sermon about freedom when, really, it’s a sermon about the sovereignty of God. How sovereign is he? It’s not only that the devil, his minions, and worldly powers are unable to thwart his plans, but it’s also the fact that he thwarts their plans by showing that their plans—their freedoms—were always a part of his plan. Darius isn’t above God, and neither are we.
This ought to deeply sober us from any arrogance or unscriptural thought about our own claims to freedom—that we can act autonomously from the will of God—because, while we may not like foreign powers, or the devil, or his minions, we would be fools not to acknowledge that they are far superior in their knowledge, control, and power than we are. If you want to know just how capable the devil is you need only read about the temptations of Christ, and what that great serpent offers as true rewards if only Jesus worshipped him. Who are we to claim any right to ourselves if even Satan is subject to God? What good is autonomy if it makes us worse off than the most condemned being in the universe?
The second theological implication and application that we learn from these instructions is that because God is sovereign, and because he is zealous for his own name, he will build his house—he will accomplish his purposes, and he will often do so through the most unexpected of means. We’ve seen this already in how all of these instructions are the result of Darius finding a single scroll—a scroll that would have been a copy of the original edict—a scroll found in exile 300 miles away from where it should have been twenty years after it had been written—a scroll clearly legible enough where war, dust, and other contaminants had not yet destroyed its contents. Such a scroll shouldn’t have existed, but by God’s sovereign will, it did, and it saves Israel!
But if vv. 1-5 don’t prove how God uses the unexpected to accomplish his purposes, then vv. 6-12 definitely do because the enemies of Israel become their servants. The wealth of the Samaritans becomes the wealth of the Jews. The favour that Tattenai and Shethar-bozenai thought they possessed with the king is lavished upon the people of God and not only once, but according to the decree, for all time. It is the most incredible twist of events. I wish I could have been there to see the faces of these Samaritans as they were reading Darius’ decree—the humiliation—the death of their status and pride.
And what this teaches us is that, again, we are often far too impressed with ourselves—with our knowledge, with our possessions, or with our accomplishments. Why is it that we desire freedom so badly? It’s because we don’t think that God can do better than we can for ourselves. But all you have to do is turn to the first page of the Bible, and you’ll see instantly that that isn’t true. God is not only able to do better than we can, but in just the first few lines of Genesis, he does the unthinkable—the unexpected. He does more for us with a single word than we could ever do with an infinite number of words or even with an infinite number of lives. His word brings life, whereas our word leads only to death.
This leads us to those final two instructions that Darius gives, namely, that if anyone alters or neglects the requirements of Darius’ decree, it’s punishable by death through impalement to a wooden beam pulled from the lawbreaker’s own house. The name of that lawbreaker shall be regarded as dung. And adding to it, Darius asks God himself—the same God that he’s just confessed as being sovereign over and above his own kingly authority—to destroy anyone who transgresses this decree or causes harm to the temple.
The question I haven’t asked yet, is what happens if God isn’t sovereign? What happens if we really have ultimate agency apart from divine intervention? It doesn’t take a genius to know. You don’t need a theological degree to figure it out. Darius, a pagan king in Babylonia, knows! We go about collecting God anger. We, like sheep, go astray and turn, inevitably, to our own way.
And this is precisely why we need the gospel—this is why the centerpiece of that gospel is a sovereign, omnipotent, gracious, and holy God. It’s because on our own we can’t do better than sin and die. The truth of the matter is that despite Darius’ serious curses upon those who break his decree, it will still be broken, and this is more grievous than we might realize because, remember that condition precedent? It’s not just the Samaritans or the gentiles of the land who break the king’s command, but the Jews break it as well. The Samaritans can’t stop themselves from pestering their Israelite neighbours. But as for the Jews, notice Darius’ instructions to them. What are the Israelites supposed to do? They’re supposed to offer pleasing sacrifices to God.
And what is it, ultimately, that pleases God? It’s not goats. It’s not cows. It’s not pigeons or doves. It’s a lowly and contrite heart. It’s a humble spirit. It’s a repentant and obedient faith. And we know that, although the Jews might possess these things under Darius, it won’t be long before they don’t—before they forsake their love and their freedom in God.
Who, then, is to pay the cost? The final word of Darius was to invoke the name of God and condemn anyone who disobeyed his command. Who is to answer his word? Can we answer it for our own sin—for our own treasonous betrayal? And even if we could answer it for ourselves, who is to do it for the Samaritan, Gentile, and Jew? Whose name can be tarnished for the sake of all of them? Who can suffer impalement upon a beam of wood so that we might once again be free—so that we might once again offer pleasing sacrifices to the God of heaven and pray for the hope of the nations?
See, God has not done for Israel something that he has not also accomplished, more incredibly, for us in Christ who came as our unexpected Saviour—not by some miraculous, fire and brimstone display, but by his humiliation and death upon a cross. He was pierced and crushed for us, and through him, he reverses what we were—those who were once his enemies and are now his friends—those who were at war with him and are now at peace—those who were slaves to death and sin and are now set free.
Does it not seem right, then, that just as God spoke the first Word to give us life that we ought to give our lives for the sake and glory of Christ who is God’s final, unexpected Word over our death? Was this not his sovereign will for us from the very beginning? And is this not now our free will for those who have been ransomed in Jesus?
This, then, is what it means to be free—that we might entrust the last word to our sovereign God who has spoken it in Christ. Give him the last Word because you cannot bear it. Trust that he will not mishandle it for, by Jesus’ royal blood, the cost has been paid in full to rebuild God’s house, and by his resurrection, he has provided us with everything we need to be and do what is pleasing in his sight forever, without fail. Trust his sovereign will. Trust his gospel. Give him the last Word and find your freedom in his Son.
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