In The World You Will Have Trouble

Maybe you’re reading this, and you recognize that because God is holy and because you are sinful, you’re not even qualified to belong to Him, to say nothing of serving Him. N. D. Wilson asks,

You must understand that you are wretched so that you will understand that you need Jesus. Christ has taken all the things that disqualify people and paid for them by dying on the cross. Those who trust in Jesus are qualified not because they are not wretched but because they know they are wretched, they know that Jesus is not wretched, and they trust Him. If you would qualify to belong to God, you must trust Jesus.

Ezra 4:5 tells us that the efforts of the inhabitants of the land kept the returnees from rebuilding the temple from the time that they returned shortly after 539 bc until the days of Darius, who came to the throne in 522 bc. Imagine brackets around Ezra 4:6-23, and look at Ezra 4:24: “Now the construction of God’s house in Jerusalem had stopped and remained at a standstill until the second year of the reign of King Darius of Persia.” The prophets Haggai and Zechariah encouraged the returnees to rebuild the temple in the second year of Darius, 520 bc (Hag 1:1), and the rebuilding was completed in 516 bc.

So this is like me pointing at that acorn and then pointing at the oak. You know what is going to happen. The weak little returnees are going to overcome the opposition by faith, but it won’t happen overnight. It might be like that acorn growing into an oak, in that it will take 37years. In fact, some of the faithful Israelites might not live to see the triumph.

Ezra 4:6-7

Why would Ezra insert this material from a later time between Ezra 4:5 and 4:24? Ezra himself returned to the land in 458 bc. Nehemiah joined him 13 years later in 445 bc. This means that Ezra would have known how the earlier opposition to the rebuilding of the temple turned out. In spite of the opposition from the inhabitants of the land, the temple was rebuilt.

The challenge in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah was not to rebuild the temple. That had been done for more than 50 years. The challenge in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah was to rebuild the city and its walls. Bracketing the opposition to the rebuilding of the city and its walls with the account of the opposition to the rebuilding of the temple is a statement of faith. When Ezra arranged the material this way, he communicated his belief that the opposition to the rebuilding of the city and the walls would be overcome just as the opposition to the rebuilding of the temple had been.

We know they were successful, so it looks obvious to us. It seems inevitable to us that Nehemiah would succeed in leading the people to rebuild the walls. But before they got it done it was anything but obvious and inevitable!

So Ezra, from his perspective around 450 bc, begins to fast-forward from the opposition to the rebuilding of the temple in the 530s and 520s bc. In 4:6-7, we read of the opposition in the time of Ahasuerus, who reigned from 485 to 464 bc, and of the opposition in Ezra’s day, the time of Artaxerxes, who reigned from 464 to 423 bc:

Before we move on to consider the letter, let the impact of verses 1-7 land on you: the returnees refused to compromise, and it didn’t necessarily look like God blessed them for it. They faced ongoing opposition 38from the time they got back to the land shortly after 539 bc until Nehemiah got the wall rebuilt in 445 bc. In other words, their faithfulness didn’t make the opposition go away immediately.

How do you expect the world to respond to your faithfulness? Make no mistake about it: worldly people hate God. Their opposition will be like what we see here in Ezra 4. They will play nice and offer to collaborate, not because they love God but because they want influence and control. Then if you are faithful to God rather than being faithful to them and their ideas, they will go from veiled opposition to explicit opposition. An offer to help that will lead away from holiness and faithfulness to the Lord is nothing but hidden opposition. It is treachery. If you recognize it for what it is, refuse it, and stand strong for the Lord, they will continue to oppose you; they’ll just take the smiley face off their opposition.

Mark it down: Satan hates you. People who do not worship God and give thanks to Him are rebels. Jesus said you are either for Him or against Him. Don’t be duped by the adversaries, and don’t be surprised if your refusal to be hoodwinked only leads to more opposition. God is glorified when the weak overcome the strong by faith. And no matter how the odds may be stacked against God and His people, all Satan’s triumphs will come to nothing.

Ezra 4:8-16

In verses 8-16 Ezra focuses in on this letter just mentioned in verse 7. The authors of the letter are identified in 8-10, and then the body of the letter is given in 11-16.

If Zerubbabel’s reply in verse 3 struck you as rude, look at the other set of values on display in this letter. Ezra now has the inhabitants of the land speak for themselves, and they show themselves to be the “enemies” Ezra said they were (v. 1). Zerubbabel answered firmly because he recognized that the inhabitants of the land operated from a worldview at odds with the worldview acceptable to Yahweh.

These worldly inhabitants of the land regard holiness to Yahweh as “rebellious and evil” (v. 12). They warn the king that if Yahweh’s city is built it will result in him losing money (v. 13), and they protest that they love the king more than they care about this Yahweh (v. 14). They urge the king to look into the matter and see for himself that Jerusalem is 39“rebellious,” “harmful,” and a place of “revolts” (v. 15). In passing, note also that this section is concerned with the rebuilding of the city and the walls, not the rebuilding of the temple (vv. 12-13, 16).

It is increasingly clear in our culture that worldly people regard faithfulness to God as rebellion. Faithfulness to God is regarded as wicked. Faithfulness to God is regarded as a threat to the economy. Worldly people think this way because God is nothing to them.

The claims of this letter written against the returnees had a veneer of truth, but that is all. The letter picked up true things about Jerusalem, slanted them, gave them the worldly spin, and convinced the king.

The claims worldly people in our culture make against Christians and Christianity might also have a veneer of truth. These claims often pick up truths, slant them, and spin them, and if the claims are not examined they might be convincing.

Don’t fear doing things that the worldly might spin against you. They can spin everything against you. So go in with guns blazing. Believe the Bible. Act on principle. Love the truth. Be valiant for the truth. Speak the truth in love. Follow Jesus. Don’t worry about the way they will spin your words or your actions against you. Follow Jesus, love people, trust God, and the truth will be vindicated.

Along these lines, don’t let the spin that the wicked put on the truth make you dizzy. Analyze the insinuations and get to the true nature of things. See past the wicked slant some skeptic puts on the truth. Keep looking. Trace out the logic to see if it is sound. Examine the Scriptures. Think!

Some snob with a PhD might snort at the notion that God created the world, that Jesus was God and man, and that trusting Jesus is the only way to be saved. If that snob applied the same logic to the butterfly, he would never believe it came from a caterpillar. God is glorified as the weak overcome the strong by faith.

Ezra 4:17-23

Artaxerxes didn’t analyze. He was taken in by the slant and the wicked spin. He found a degree of correspondence between the allegations and what had happened in history (vv. 19-20), and he decreed that the rebuilding stop until he gave permission for it to resume (v. 21). This is the Artaxerxes whom Nehemiah served as cupbearer (Neh 2:1).

40The events of Ezra 4:23—the forceful halt of the work on the city and the walls—were probably the events that led to the report Nehemiah received: “The remnant in the province, who survived the exile, are in great trouble and disgrace. Jerusalem’s wall has been broken down, and its gates have been burned down” (Neh 1:3).

Do you know what this is like? This is like the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, like the acorn seeming to be dead in the ground, like the caterpillar seeming to be dead in that cocoon. These weak returnees to the land obviously could not protect themselves against the forces that came against them to break down the walls and burn the gates. How will they ever rebuild city and wall? I’ll tell you how: God will be glorified as the weak overcome the strong by faith.

Ezra 4:24

As noted previously, in verse 24 Ezra returns from the crisis in his own generation, just described in verse 23, to the suspension of the work on the temple. Ezra 5-6 describe the resumption of the work on the temple and its completion. This declares to Ezra’s generation that God will overcome the opposition to the work on the city and the walls. The weak will overcome the strong by faith, and God will get the glory.

Jesus told His disciples in John 16:33, “You will have suffering in this world. Be courageous! I have conquered the world.” We see this community of returned exiles struggling through opposition. Jesus had His share of trouble from the world, as did Paul, and the church throughout her existence has been slandered and opposed. The early Christians endured all kinds of lies and distortions—claims that they were cannibals because they partook of the Lord’s Supper, claims that they were incestuous because they referred to spouses as “brother” and “sister” in the Lord.

Let me close with some encouraging opposition faced by colonial evangelist George Whitefield. Here again, we think of Whitefield as an oak tree, as a butterfly, and it never occurs to us that he was an acorn or a caterpillar. It never occurs to us that there were times when the sapling 41tree was bent by the winds, that the caterpillar had to search for a suitable place to make his cocoon. Biographer Arnold Dallimore writes,