They Finished the Temple

Introduction
1. We’ve been on quite the roller coaster ride with the Tribes of Benjamin and Judah…
• They basically embarked on returning to their homeland…
• After 70 years of captivity..
• On their own.
• The other 10 tribes of Israel didn’t relish leaving the homes and the lives that they had built up during that 70 year captivity…
• They didn’t want to face that long journey…
• And the hard work of rebuilding the Temple…
• Rebuilding their city…
• And rebuilding their homes once they arrived back in Jerusalem.
• So the Tribes of Benjamin and Judah made the long hard journey…
• When they finally made it back to their homeland…
• They put first things first…
• They started in rebuilding the altar…
• And worshipping God.
• But, it wasn’t always easy…
• They faced challenges of many kinds…
• And ultimately, the church was stopped dead in its tracks…
• The people allowed the circumstances of life to interfere with the rebuilding effort…
• And, for 15 long years…
• They left the Temple to deteriorate…
• The weeds began to take over…
• Little critters began to make their home among the remnants of the building materials…
• And, by and large, the people didn’t seem to really care that the Temple was falling apart…
• They were so focused on building their own homes…
• Rebuilding their own lives…
• They got so busy…
• That the Temple…
• And the worship of God…
• Took a back seat to their own plans for their own comforts…
• Then, God sent 2 prophets to stir the people to action…
• Haggai and Zechariah laid it on pretty heavy…
• And the people really took it to heart…
• They responded to God’s message to the people…
• And they began to re-build the Temple once again…
• Of course, whenever the Church starts to grow…
• Whenever the Church starts to accomplish something of eternal value…
• There are those who will try to stop it…
• And, thankfully, as we saw last week in Ezra chapter 5…
• The peope didn’t allow the challenges to interfere with the building of the Temple…
• They didn’t give up..,.
• They decided to keep on keeping on…
• And that’s where we find God’s people as we come to Ezra Chapter 6.
Read Text: Ezra 6:1-22
Body
1. God will provide
A. As they continued working…
• a search was made of the government archives…
• And thankfully, after almost 20 years…
• They were able to find 1 lost paragraph…
• the one paragraph where Cyrus issued his decree…
• and the current king, Darius, embraced the decree…
• and allowed the work of God’s Temple to continue…
B. Not only that, but Darius told the governor of that region…
• a man by the name of Tattenai…
• that, not only was there to be no inference in the work…
• they actually had to help finance the work…
• In verse 8, we see that the financing of the work of rebuilding the Temple…
• Would come from the revenues of Trans-Euphrates…
• The very place where Tattenai was Governor!
C. The story is told about a Christian lady who lived next door to an atheist.
• Everyday, when the lady prayed, the atheist could hear her.
• Many times while she was praying,…
• he would go over to her house and harass her, saying
• "Lady, why do you pray all the time?
• Don’t you know there is no God?"
• But she kept right on praying.
• One day, she ran out of groceries and she didn’t have any money to go shopping…
• So, as was her custom, she