June 30, 2024: Message: God Draws Near to the Brokenhearted | Scripture: Ezra 10:18-44| Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
Worship Songs: All Creatures of Our God and King | Christ Our Wisdom
Full Manuscript
Introduction
If able, please stand as I read to you from Ezra 10:18-44. TWoL: 18 Now there were found some of the sons of the priests who had married foreign women: Maaseiah, Eliezer, Jarib, and Gedaliah, some of the sons of Jeshua the son of Jozadak and his brothers. 19 They pledged themselves to put away their wives, and their guilt offering was a ram of the flock for their guilt. 20 Of the sons of Immer: Hanani and Zebadiah. 21 Of the sons of Harim: Maaseiah, Elijah, Shemaiah, Jehiel, and Uzziah. 22 Of the sons of Pashhur: Elioenai, Maaseiah, Ishmael, Nethanel, Jozabad, and Elasah.
23 Of the Levites: Jozabad, Shimei, Kelaiah (that is, Kelita), Pethahiah, Judah, and Eliezer. 24 Of the singers: Eliashib. Of the gatekeepers: Shallum, Telem, and Uri.
25 And of Israel: of the sons of Parosh: Ramiah, Izziah, Malchijah, Mijamin, Eleazar, Hashabiah, and Benaiah. 26 Of the sons of Elam: Mattaniah, Zechariah, Jehiel, Abdi, Jeremoth, and Elijah. 27 Of the sons of Zattu: Elioenai, Eliashib, Mattaniah, Jeremoth, Zabad, and Aziza. 28 Of the sons of Bebai were Jehohanan, Hananiah, Zabbai, and Athlai. 29 Of the sons of Bani were Meshullam, Malluch, Adaiah, Jashub, Sheal, and Jeremoth. 30 Of the sons of Pahath-moab: Adna, Chelal, Benaiah, Maaseiah, Mattaniah, Bezalel, Binnui, and Manasseh. 31 Of the sons of Harim: Eliezer, Isshijah, Malchijah, Shemaiah, Shimeon, 32 Benjamin, Malluch, and Shemariah. 33 Of the sons of Hashum: Mattenai, Mattattah, Zabad, Eliphelet, Jeremai, Manasseh, and Shimei. 34 Of the sons of Bani: Maadai, Amram, Uel, 35 Benaiah, Bedeiah, Cheluhi, 36 Vaniah, Meremoth, Eliashib, 37 Mattaniah, Mattenai, Jaasu. 38 Of the sons of Binnui: Shimei, 39 Shelemiah, Nathan, Adaiah, 40 Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai, 41 Azarel, Shelemiah, Shemariah, 42 Shallum, Amariah, and Joseph. 43 Of the sons of Nebo: Jeiel, Mattithiah, Zabad, Zebina, Jaddai, Joel, and Benaiah. 44 All these had married foreign women, and some of the women had even borne children.
If I summarized what Ezra-Nehemiah teaches us up until this point in the book, I would say that it calls the people of God to fight for faith. And, in particular, it’s a call for them and for us to fight for a faith that is unafraid to fight our sin, even when doing so comes at great cost to us and maybe even to those whom we love.
Ezra 1-6: it’s about a faith in overcoming the world who stands against us while obeying the commands of God at all costs. Ezra 7: it’s about a faith in the Word of God as the true testament to his character, which requires us to respond, reflecting and teaching his character in our own lives. Ezra 8: it’s about a faith that leads us to desperate, dependent prayer upon a God who, alone, can deliver us from our enemies. Ezra 9 and 10: it’s about a faith in a God who was merciful to us to bring us out of darkness and enslavement, and in our knowledge of his mercy, it brings us to plead to that God once again for more of it when we know we deserve none of it.
Ezra is a book about what true faith looks like in all its joys and sorrows, cleanliness and filth, victories and defeats. It’s a book that calls us to fight for an authentic faith that is unafraid to deal with our real sin so that we might one day stand in righteous confidence before our real and holy God.
And I hope you can see that our text, this morning, is perhaps the best text to show us that this is what Ezra is all about. The people are found to be in rebellion of the law of God because they’ve married foreign women of the land, and Ezra is broken over it. Certain priests have responded to Ezra’s weeping and praying, saying that these foreign women and their children need to be cast out from Israel’s midst. These verses, that we’ve just read, are the resolution to that great tension of the book: will Israel respond in faith, or will they continue in disobedience and incur God’s wrath?
While we know what the answer is, I hope it is not lost on us that their response in faith is not devoid of hardship and suffering. I hope we get how it is heavy in its cost. It’s a fearful thing to consider. Faith is very much a fight and not a simple decision that you can make without consequence—consequences that will make you flinch at times—perhaps even make you doubt whether the fight’s worth it at all.
Yet, I need you to know, this morning, that it’s worth it. I mean to remind you that though the cost may be great, the reward and the joy are and shall be far greater. I want to give you three reasons, from our text, why—why the fight for faith that is unafraid to fight your sin is worthwhile—why the fight for God-fearing holiness is meaningful, and the first reason is …
1) Because Evil Battles (in Us), and We Are (Too) Weak (to Oppose It)
Faith is first and foremost about finding and receiving help in our helplessness. This is a theme we find throughout the entire Bible starting right in Genesis in the contrast that it makes between the Creator and the creature. The Creator is infinitely powerful and helpful. The creature is infinitely dependent upon the Creator’s power and help, and so it goes, if we, creatures, are dependent, then faith is about trusting that the Creator will help us. He will help us because he made us for him—for a purpose. If we’re to carry out that purpose, we need him. We trust he will help us because we are nothing without him.
But our human tendency is to blur this distinction between Creator and creature. It is easy to forget that we are specks in a universe of wonders, and, instead, we think of ourselves as the wonder. Our egos tend to become overinflated the second another creature gives us any kind of attention.
Some of you might know the name Tullian Tchividijian. He is the grandson of mega-evangelist Billy Graham, and Tullian was a pastor of a very large church in Florida. I’ve spoken of him before. And I say he was a pastor because it was found that he had not one but two affairs with other women during his tenure as a pastor. In fact, he ended up divorcing his wife in order to marry one of these other women.
Now, I am in no way advocating that we support his ministry now. I think he has disqualified himself permanently from the pastorate, but in his lucid recounting and evaluation of those great, terrible events in his life, he had this to say:
We are all comprehensively dislocated. [We are curved in upon ourselves]. In other words, we are by nature self-absorbed and self-focused. We are all a barrel of selfish thoughts and desires and wants. The history of this world and our lives proves that we humans have a huge capacity for screwing up, a natural tendency toward self-defeating behaviour … In what I did, I wasn’t thinking about how my repeated selfishness would deeply wound my kids. Who knows, maybe if I had, I would’ve saved myself and countless others a lot of heartache … But [what I do know is that] I was [only] thinking about [myself] throughout what happened—what I wanted, not what others needed. I was popular and was loving every minute of it. I lost my way under the glaring lights of my success.
Here, friends, is how the blurring of the Creator-creature distinction works. The more infatuated we get with ourselves—the more we allow the praise of the world and our hearts to influence how we think about ourselves, the greater the damage we tend to wreak in our lives and in the lives of others until all of it implodes before our faces. Why? Because we’re trying to play the part of the Creator when we were made to be the creature.
And this is what we see in Ezra 10:18-44, isn’t it? Whose names do we receive first as those who had lost their way and married foreign women of the land? It’s not the common dad. It’s not the homeless wanderer. It’s the priests and the Levites. It’s the leaders who were meant to be closest in their walks with the Lord.
But instead of thinking about the Lord and serving him with their lives in response to all that he had done for them, they thought of themselves. They were becoming too caught up in the success of their ministry. “Just look! The temple’s up. The Israelites are flourishing in Jerusalem again. Ezra the great scribe is on his way. We’ve done a good job, and we deserve a pat on the back. We deserve to be able to marry these foreign women.”
These were men who should have been teaching everyone else how to abide by the Law, but they go and break it, and because everything still looks good to the rest of Israel—because the temple’s still standing, their homes are still intact, their wealth is growing, it makes everyone else think, “Well maybe it’s okay for me to do this too.”
And, perhaps, you should be filled in on the broader context—this wasn’t just single men looking for women to marry. No, Malachi 2:11 and 14 tell us that these were men who were so overcome in their desire for these foreign women, and so unthinking towards the Law of God, that they were breaking their covenant to their Jewish wives—wives who they’d been married to since their youth—divorcing them for any reason they could think of. See, according to Deuteronomy, some priests read the law as if it permitted you to divorce your wife for anything you found indecent about her (maybe she didn’t brush her teeth one morning), and you could say, “I want a divorce.” And they’d take that divorce as license to then go out and marry these foreigners. This was the extent of their abomination before God.
So, what I don’t want you to read as we come to this text where there’s a mass picture of divorce is that the Bible condones divorce because it doesn’t. Even in marriages where one spouse believes and one does not believe, the Bible is clear: don’t get a divorce! Pray for that husband or wife who doesn’t believe. Labour to show them Christ. Labour to display grace to them.
But what Malachi and our text do reveal to us is that Ezra 10:18-44 is taking place because there’s a deeper sin that needs to be dealt with. Something is truly wrong in the hearts of Israel, and they need drastic help. They’ve become stained and corrupted with evil, and the root cause of that evil is their own conceitedness—their own misplaced wonder of self.
And this is deeply applicable to us, not in its command to go out and get divorced, but in its call for us to emulate the posture that we find amongst these Israelites as they’re made aware that they’re not so great, that their sin is deep, and that the wrath of God stands over them not just for what they’ve done but for what they’ve become. What we find in our text is the imperative that we’re to do whatever it takes to make things right with our Creator—to escape our sin and his wrath and pursue peace.
Only the problem is that doing such a thing is really, really difficult—for some of us, we might think it’s impossible. Why? Because to uproot that sin might cost us everything—not just that wife or friend—not just that house—not just that job—but more than all those things, it’ll likely cost us our pride—our self-worth. And what are we, friends, if we don’t have our pride—if we can’t save ourselves—if we can’t be the answers to our own problems. Wouldn’t that make us weak? Wouldn’t that make us mere creatures?
What our text is meant to do for us this morning, church, isn’t to tell us that the task of fighting sin is an easy one—or even a possible one on our own because it isn’t. Our sin is so deeply engrained in our bones that we’d die before being able to extract it. No, what our text is meant to do for us this morning is to bring us to one simple fact: we need God.
We need God because the battle inside us is too great, and we are too weak. We need God because he is our Creator, and we, his creatures. We need God in those moments when everything is going wrong, definitely, but we need God even more in those moments when everything we think we’re doing right has nothing, whatsoever, to do with him—when those glaring lights of success become too bright, and we’ve fallen too in love with ourselves.
This is what Israel had to come to grips with as they parted with their foreign wives—the truth that they were now losing everything because they had forgotten that without God, they are nothing. And yes, like them, it may cost us everything, but I imagine that the same conviction—the same faith that came upon Israel is the faith that we need to pursue with all courage in the fearful battle against our sin: that unless we have God—unless he is our strength and our hope of salvation, we, too, shall become nothing.
So, this, then, is how we must begin in our path towards reconciliation, repentance, and greater holiness—this is how we find our worth. It must begin with fighting to acknowledge that we are creatures dependent upon our Creator, and we must ask him for his help because without him, the evil is too great, and we are too weak. We need God to do what we cannot do ourselves, which leads us to our second point: fight for faith that is unafraid to fight your sin …
2) Because I Am Yours, and You Are Mine
We’ve spent a good amount of time on the topic of accountability in our previous weeks studying Ezra 10 simply because Scripture makes it clear that God helps us by giving us other people to protect us and guide us from our own foolishness. And we often come away from those sermons or discussions thinking about who might be accountable for us—for me. Who should I look to? Who can I confess my sins to and depend upon to be a faithful example and friend when I’m in the darkest night of my soul?
But where we often fall short in our thinking is asking who might I go to to be that person for them? Who might need to have that constant and vigilant ear or that reliable response to a desperate phone call in the middle of the night? How might I play that role in someone’s life? And the reason why we often fall short of this—why we do not actively go out to disciple or be accountable for others unless we’re asked to do it is because we’re afraid—because we’re really busy and don’t want to make time for it—because we don’t feel we have anything good to say or teach—because we simply don’t think we’re gifted enough for it.
In other words, I’ve already said it this morning, we don’t think this way because we always make it about ourselves. Yet, how different would our church look if we realized that we fight for faith that is unafraid to fight our sin because we belong to someone other than ourselves? How different would our posture as a community be if the reason we strived to be holy is so that we might enable and empower others in their own pursuits of holiness?
We’re so used to thinking that “I” need to be holy so that “I” might face God with a clean conscience one day, which is true—we do. But think of that passage in Matthew where you have two groups of people—the sheep and the goats. We all know what happens to the unrighteous goats, but the righteous group standing at the right hand of Christ—to them he will say when I was hungry, you fed me, thirsty, you gave me something to drink, naked, you clothed me, in prison, you visited and ministered to me—have you ever given thought to how these righteous few respond? They don’t respond in relief. They don’t respond with a “Yes, I did it.” They respond with a “when, Lord, did we do these things?” And Christ will respond to them, “whenever you did it for the least of my brothers, you did it for me.”
In other words, someone who is truly holy isn’t thinking about how holy they are. They’re thinking about how they might help others become holy despite themselves—in sacrifice of themselves. We’ve been saved not for our own sakes but for the sake of those others who Christ came to save. This is the purpose of the church! This is the purpose of the people of God.
That same God has blessed me with great covenant friends in this life—friends who, as members within the same church, have walked with me and my wife in seasons of great joy and sometimes even greater sorrow. One of those friends comes to mind who is likely the oldest one that I have. We went to school together. We fellowshipped together. We discipled one another. We discipled others together. We even ended up getting married to our respective wives at very similar times in our lives.
So, it should be no surprise that when Candace and I started wanting kids, my friend and his wife also started wanting kids. I remember nights praying for one another, asking that God might grant us this wonderful desire in our hearts. And just as we had experienced so many similar things growing up, my friend and his wife also received news at a similar time as us that they were unlikely to be able to have children of their own. I remember nights, thereafter, still praying for one another, only the prayer had changed, slightly, to asking that God might grant our hearts peace in the midst of our shared sorrow.
But then a few years and a few moves later, Candace and I found out that we were going to be parents, and I asked the guys that I’d grown up with if they’d like to meet, hoping that I could break the happy news to them. And once I had, after the celebratory statements were made, someone in this large group spoke with wisdom and said, “let’s pray for you. Does anyone want to pray for Stephen, Candace, and their little one?” And before anyone else could respond, a gentle hand came upon my shoulder, and just like he had done for me a thousand times when we went to the same church, and as he had continued to do for me, even after we had become members at different churches, my dear, oldest friend prayed with tears in his eyes for me, my wife, and my child. And I know he was only able to do this because God had sanctified him in order to encourage undeserving sinners like me to give glory back to the One to whom it all belongs.
Friends, I’ve said a lot here without even referring to our text, but I hope you can see its relevance not only to what’s taking place here in verses 18-44 as these leaders repent and through their repentance foster a greater repentance in their people. How their collective sorrow and encouragement of one another must have been great both in its rejoicing and weeping. But I hope you also see how what I’ve said here is connected to the whole book of Ezra. How God sent Zerubabbel and Jeshua, Zechariah and Haggai, Ezra and Shecaniah—he sent these men with faith to fight not only so that they might be holy but so that they might tarry for the people of God and call them to their own holiness.
We fight for faith that is unafraid to fight our own sin because we do not belong to ourselves—because, in God, as his church, I am yours, and you are mine. This is how it becomes possible for any one of us to seek God when we want nothing to do with him. He sends those who have faith already to help us in the fight. Fight, then, to be one of those whom he has sent to help. Fight not only because I am yours and you mine, but also …
3) Because God Is Ours, and We Are His
I know I’ve stated briefly why God gives us lists like this—and, really, there are several reasons, but do you know the number one reason why we have these kinds of lists in the Bible? Why verses like Ezra 10:18-44 exist? We have them, pre-eminently, to show us that our God is personal—that our God loves us individually and knows us by name—that our God draws near to the broken-hearted, even when their brokenness is caused by their own wickedness.
Each of these names represent someone who’s gone through something terrible. They all had to let go of their wives—wives that we have every reason to think that they cared for. And we’re told some of them had borne children—and these, too, they were forced, by their own conviction and covenant to God, to let go. Yet, God intentionally includes them in Scripture so that we might rejoice in their repentance—that we might see their faithfulness has not been forgotten. God has secured their names, literally, in his Book. And he means to comfort them and us that he never ignores righteousness done for his name’s sake—especially when that righteousness is born out of hardship and suffering.
Conversely, I hope you also feel the intentional uneasiness that this text is meant to leave us with—that although God means to comfort us here, he does not mean for us to be comfortable with what’s happening. This is not how things are meant to be. He does not take joy in these men having to leave their wives. He does not take pleasure in the mourning that would inevitably follow their sacrifice. In this list, we’re meant not only to see God’s faithfulness to his repentant people but also how much it now costs for us to know that faithfulness—to possess his peace.
This is why the cross is so pivotal to everything that we fight for. It’s pivotal in understanding that for all our fighting, there will always be a struggle. We will never be able to provide the perfect solution for our problems because we, as creatures, were never meant to be our own salvation.
The fight for faith that is unafraid to fight your sin will be messy. It will seldom put things back together the way they were, and we have to come to terms with the fact that every victory we find in this life will be both bitter and sweet. I am sure that the Jews were relieved to be restored in their fellowship and covenant with God, but I am also sure that the imprint left by these foreign women and their children upon Israel would have been indelible, and for all their repentance, there would always be a great sorrow associated with this day.
Yet, this shows us the other reason why the cross is so pivotal. It’s there to uphold us, in that, though our fighting will always be imperfect, we have a perfect Saviour who’s already won the fight. This is the ointment for our aches—the salve for our wounds. Our Christ was nailed to that cross of wood so that all our imperfection, rebellion, bitterness, and sorrow might be healed by his sacrifice. God, himself, pays the cost, so that everything might be restored and renewed as it was meant to be.
And what’s more is that we can persist in the fight—as imperfect as we are—because we are never alone in it. We not only have the cross to make our past indiscretions right, and we not only have each other to help with what is to come, but because of that cross—because Christ has poured out on us his all-sufficient blood—we live knowing that even if everything in this life were taken from us, we would still be able to rejoice because, in Jesus, God is ours, and we are his forever.
This is the gospel according to Ezra—that because of our great Teacher’s intercession for us, for those who repent from sin and believe in the One who sent him, there is a hope that defeats all suffering and loss—there is a hope that defeats all folly and sin. Our names have been written in the Book of Life without any hint of shadow or doubt. Fight, then, for faith that is unafraid to fight your sin because your God gave his own Son to win the battle, and surely, we shall overcome by the blood of that Lamb and by the Word of his testimony.
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