Disappointing Fulfillment

Thus, when we combine the way the festivals functioned in Israel’s life with the prophets’ promises of an exile from the land, a new exodus, and a new conquest, we begin to sense the meaning of the renewed celebration of the Festival of Booths after the new exodus from Babylon. As the returnees celebrated the Festival of Booths, they were not merely celebrating the way that God sustained their fathers through the wilderness, and they were not merely entering into the experience of their fathers. In addition to these things, they were now celebrating their own re-living of the exodus and their own experience of God sustaining them through the sojourn to the land of promise.

23What shapes your worldview? What forms the deeply impressed pattern that builds what you see as typically happening? Where do you get your dogma, your narrative, your symbol, and your liturgy? What we pastors are doing when we preach the Bible is trying to give you dogma and narrative. We have two primary symbolic re-enactments of our dogma and narrative in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and we are trying to bring all these things together in our liturgy, as we worship together (reading the Bible, praying the Bible, singing the Bible, preaching the Bible, and seeing the Bible in baptism and the Lord’s Supper). We are trying to build biblical worldviews.

So the festivals and sacrifices are renewed in Ezra 3:4, and it says that they kept the festival as prescribed and they offered the sacrifices by ordinance. They are following the law of Moses. Ezra 3:5 summarizes the resumption of worship according to Torah.

Verse 6 makes two more comments about the renewal of Israel’s worship: “On the first day of the seventh month they began to offer burnt offerings to the Lord, even though the foundation of the Lord’s temple had not yet been laid.” The first day of the seventh month is the day of the Festival of Trumpets, to which the first statement gives a nod. The second statement, that the foundation of the temple has not been laid, explains why there is no mention of a celebration of the Day of Atonement on the tenth of the seventh month. The Day of Atonement was to “purify the most holy place” (Lev 16:16, 20, 27), and there is not yet a most holy place to be purified.

In Ezra 3:1-6 we see the returned community in fear of the inhabitants of the land. Their response is not to cry out to Cyrus, king of Persia. They do not seek alliance with Egypt. Nor do they appeal for help from false gods. They seek help from the only place it can be found: from the Lord. They begin to worship, and they worship according to the law of Moses.

Ezra 3:7-11

Ezra 3:7 should sound familiar:

24Ezra has structured this statement deliberately so that it calls to mind the narratives related to the building of the first temple in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles. In 1 Kings 5, Solomon made arrangements with Hiram king of Tyre. In 1 Kings 5:6-9 we read of how Hiram’s servants would take the cedars from Lebanon to the sea, and then 2 Chronicles 2:16 adds that they rafted them down to Joppa. In exchange, Solomon provided food for Hiram’s household, and 1 Kings 5:11 details the wheat and oil that Solomon gave to Hiram. Ezra 3:7 deliberately and intentionally likens what the returnees did to what Solomon had done.

Verse 8 says that this took place “In the second month of the second year after they arrived at God’s house in Jerusalem.” Solomon had begun to build the temple in the second month (1 Kgs 6:1; 2 Chr 3:1-2). So it would seem that just as the returnees are reenacting the experience of their fathers at the Festival of Booths, they are in a sense reenacting the deeds of Abraham in the construction of the altar and the deeds of Solomon in the foundation of the temple.

Whose deeds are you reenacting? Paul has called us to follow him as he followed Christ (1 Cor 11:1). If we have our worldview shaped by the Bible, if we begin to expect God to act the way He typically acts in the Bible, it will be easy for us to heed Paul’s charge in Philippians 4:4-8:

By calling us to rejoice, Paul is essentially urging us to respond the way the exiles responded to their fear in Ezra 3:3—by worshiping God.

Ezra 3:8-9 continues,

So they are going to build the temple, and they appoint Levites to supervise the work on the temple, and then Ezra tells us the names of the Levites who supervised the work on the temple. These references to supervising the building of the temple use a Hebrew word (natstseyach) that is from the same root in the same stem as the word in many of the Psalm superscriptions that refer to “the choir director” (menatstseyach). In the next verse we read,

Let me summarize: in Ezra 3:8-10 we see the Levites supervising the building of the temple and leading musical worship when they lay the foundation, and they lead the worship “as King David of Israel had instructed.” I think this indicates that the word translated “choir director” in the Psalm superscriptions has to do with leadership in more than just music. It has to do with leadership in the restored community, leadership in the rebuilding of the temple and in the worship rendered to God. It might find its fulfillment in the One who will be the true temple builder, the true worship leader, the One who fulfills all that David and the Levites pointed forward to.

We read in 1 Chronicles 6:31 of David putting men in charge of the service of song at the temple. We read in 1 Chronicles 16:4-6 (cf. 1 Chr 25:1-2) of David appointing the Levites to minister before the ark “to celebrate the Lord God of Israel, and to give thanks and praise to Him.” He appointed Asaph to sound the cymbals and the priests to blow the trumpets, just as Ezra describes in Ezra 3:10. There in 1 Chronicles 16:34-35 David instructed the priests and Levites to sing,

Now in Ezra 3:11, with the people saved at the new exodus and gathered from the nations, Ezra tells us,

They affirm that God’s love endures forever because God has been faithful to them in the distant past and in the recent past, and they trust Him to continue to be faithful in the future.

The message of the New Testament enables us to join with this ancient community of returned exiles who praise God for the typological installments of His great acts of redemption. All those Old Testament patterns were fulfilled in the way that Jesus lived and died. God accomplished salvation in Jesus in a way that fulfilled the festivals of Israel, fulfilled the Levitical system of sacrifice, and fulfilled the ministry of the temple (see Hoskins, Jesus as the Fulfillment). Jesus has fulfilled the exodus in His death, and His resurrection inaugurates the return from exile. Christians are those who have been delivered from bondage to sin and death by the death of Christ, whom Paul calls our Passover Lamb (1 Cor 5:7).

If this is not the narrative—the teaching—that shapes your view of the world, we call you to embrace this story of the world. It is the true one. Jesus is the only Savior. Those who trust in Him participate in the symbols He gave. They are baptized, and they partake of the Lord’s Supper. If you are not a Christian, we call you to believe the true story of the world. We summon you to join us in worshiping the only One worthy by trusting in Christ through the power of the Spirit for the glory of the Father.

If you are a Christian, Ezra 3:11 is singing your song. The One who has fulfilled the Old Testament is the cornerstone of the new temple, and His apostles are its foundation. We are the living stones of this spiritual house, indwelt by the very Spirit of God (see Hamilton, God’s Indwelling Presence). Our lives are about worship, and we worship by obeying. The safest place to be is obediently worshiping God.

Ezra 3:12-13

In the midst of all this fulfillment, we encounter unexpected disappointment: “But many of the older priests, Levites, and family leaders, who had seen the first temple, wept loudly when they saw the foundation of this house” (3:12). This is a letdown isn’t it? Why are they weeping? Because from the foundation it was probably obvious that this temple would not be what Solomon’s was. There are other reasons, too: There has been no mention of the ark of the covenant in this passage. That probably means it is gone. We saw in Ezra 2 that the people number fewer than 50, 000, whereas they came out of Egypt with more than 600, 000 men (Num 1:46). They have been left few in number after the exile, just as God promised through Moses (Deut 4:27). They have been decimated.

Why have they been left so pitifully reduced? Because of sin. They had sinned against God. They had broken the covenant. He visited the curses of the covenant upon them.

This mention of the weeping at the foundation of the temple shows us that while the people have been restored to the land, they can tell that all the glorious end-time promises the prophets made are not coming to pass. The desert isn’t blooming. The Messiah isn’t reigning. Jerusalem isn’t being exalted. There is a sense, here, in which they are already seeing prophecies fulfilled, but not yet seeing all of them realized. This points the reader of Ezra forward, doesn’t it? This tells the reader of Ezra to keep watching because greater fulfillments are coming. The New Testament Gospels tell us about those greater fulfillments, and John’s Revelation tells us about how all things will be consummated.

Let’s not fail to learn from the weeping at the foundation of the temple. Sin will endanger you. Sin will ruin your life. Sin will steal your joy. Sin will make it so that even if God restores you, until He wipes away every tear you will feel sin’s remorseful consequences. Sin will make it so that though you worship you will weep. Hate sin.

Do you want fullness of joy? Flee temptation. Do you want unmixed gladness? Resist the Devil. Do you want to know how to overcome sin in your life? Worship. Find satisfaction in God. The powerful enjoyments 28God makes available in this world are to lead us to Him, the One who can create such pleasures.

There is a beautiful picture of this in Starr Meade’s book, Keeping Holiday (pp. 132-33). As Dylan and Claire pursue their journey, they want to get authorized so that they can keep Holiday. Along the way, however, they hear such marvelous things about the Founder of Holiday (Jesus) that Dylan begins to care less and less about Holiday and more and more about the Founder. At one point, they have been on an exhausting hike and they are tired and hungry. They come into a chapel, and there awaits them the most enticing bread. Dylan sees that the bread is warm, fresh out of the oven, and rather than satisfy his hunger for food, he rushes out, hoping to satisfy his desire to meet the Founder, to catch a glimpse of the Founder who has provided this bread. Hungry and tired as he is, he wants to be face to face with the Founder more than he wants to eat. That’s what knowing God is like.

That desire to know God, to be in His presence, to walk with Him all our days—that is the desire that will enable us to overcome sin. The safest place in the world to be is in the obedient worship of God because to worship God in obedience to His Word is to be in His presence. To be in the presence of God brings the feelings that result in the joyful shout that will be heard far away (Ezra 3:13).