In September 1857, a man of prayer, Jeremiah Lanphier, started a businessmen’s prayer meeting in the upper room of the Dutch Reformed Church Building in Manhattan. In response to his advertisement, only six people out of a population of a million showed up. But the following week there were fourteen, and then twenty-three when it was decided to meet everyday for prayer. By late winter they were filling the Dutch Reformed Church, then the Methodist Church on John Street, then Trinity Episcopal Church on Broadway at Wall Street. In February and March of 1858, every church and public hall in down town New York was filled. Horace Greeley, the famous editor, sent a reporter with horse and buggy racing round the prayer meetings to see how many men were praying. In one hour he could get to only twelve meetings, but he counted 6,100 men attending.
Then a landslide of prayer began, which overflowed to the churches in the evenings. People began to be converted, ten thousand a week in New York City alone. The movement spread throughout New England, the church bells bringing people to prayer at eight in the morning, twelve noon, and six in the evening. The revival raced up the Hudson and down the Mohawk, where the Baptists, for example, had so many people to baptize that they went down to the river, cut a big hole in the ice, and baptized them in the cold water. When Baptists do that they are really on fire!
There are also stories of revival in what is called the miracle city in Guatemala where all the jails have closed, there’s almost no more alcoholism in the primarily native community, over half the population of about 20,000 have been born again, poverty has been eliminated and even crops are producing at much higher rates and quality.
These are just a couple examples, but real revival brings change on individual and community levels. It often brings miracles as well, but the key is that people change what they’re doing and become more obedient to God. There were several revivals in the Old Testament before Jesus too, and that radical change is what we see beginning in the Jerusalem revival of 458 BC as described in the last 2 chapters of the book of Ezra.
When was the first exile of God’s people? Wasn’t it with Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden? In reality God’s people have been in exile here on earth ever since. The Bible says this is not our home, that we are aliens in this world. So what we witness in the exiles and return of the Jewish people time after time in the OT, is just a reminder of the actual state of all mankind since the fall.
Every human being since the fall has been in exile from God. The process of salvation is essentially a return from this exile. So as we look at these revivals and returns to the Promised Land we can see how they reflect the process that all people go through as they return to God. A process not only of salvation, but also sanctification.
So first of all we must look at what causes this exile. The simple answer is sin. More specifically it is the choosing of idols over God. Even more specifically it is choosing our way and our desires over God’s commands.
When I was a kid I loved those electric racing car sets. You know with the cars that went in these little slots on the road tracks. You used a little gun to control the speed and watched these cool little cars race around the track. The cars were never meant to go full speed around the sharp corners. If they did they’d fly off the track and sometimes get damaged so you couldn’t use them anymore.
That used to frustrate me but I still wanted go as fast as I could around those corners. So rather than slowing down, I just hoped the cars would eventually stay on the track, and of course you try tweaking the cars and such. Eventually though, all my cars would be damaged and I wouldn’t be able to use them anymore. My desire to do something that the cars were never designed to do was exciting at the time, but in the end left me with nothing.
That is the true nature of sin. God says this is how you and the universe are designed. I promise your life will be perfect if you stay within those design guidelines. But if you use your life outside of how it was designed, I can’t be responsible for the consequences, and ultimately you will be greatly disappointed.
In Ezra the primary sin that is mentioned is intermarrying with other cultural groups of the region Read 9:1-2. Why is it “breaking faith” when they intermarry? It’s not because God is racist, it’s because these marriages would pollute the spiritual make up of God’s people and draw them away from Him. These marriages would cause God’s people to commit adultery against God, thus breaking the first commandment that you shall have no other gods. And that leads to death.
And again this isn’t because God is an egomaniac. It’s because he knew these other gods were like scarecrows in a melon patch, they were useless. But not only that, the worship of these other gods included sacrificing children by burning them alive, and incredible sexual immorality. If the gods were lifeless, the people had to jazz things up in their worship.
But the main reason was because the God who miraculously delivered these people out of Egypt with numerous miracles, told them not to intermarry in Deuteronomy 7, because the daughters would turn your sons away from following ME. God is very clear about the result of this, rapid destruction. But he is also clear about the promise for obedience, he will love you, bless you, multiply you, bless your land and flocks, take away all sickness, and consume all your enemies.
Now if anyone ever says that the Bible takes away women’s power, we see that the opposite is true. Eve easily got Adam to eat the apple, and these idol worshipping women could easily cause the Jewish men to give up all these wonderful promises, and risk destruction. It even happened to the wisest man ever, King Solomon. And the strongest man ever, Samson.
All men know who really has the power in this world, and that is unfortunately one of the reasons why some men need to abuse their physical power over women, to compensate for their powerless feelings on other levels. Why did men not want women to have the vote and have the same jobs and so on? Because they knew the true power of a woman and felt they needed to keep some areas of superiority over women. Its insecurity not power. The bottom line is that women can influence men without force much easier than the other way around.
Anyway, you get my point. Intermarrying in that culture at that time is flat out sin, and sin has consequences. You can call yourself God’s chosen because you are a Jew or now a Christian, but if you don’t act like one, there are serious consequences from God himself. Faithlessness here is simply as it always is, a lack of belief in God’s promises demonstrated not by our words, but by our actions.
And what’s worse here is that the leaders and priests are leading by bad example as we saw in verse 2. Read 9:6, 8-9… Ezra acknowledges that they are still slaves even though in God’s mercy he has allowed a remnant to return by softening the Persian king’s hearts. They are still under Persian rule though, and in fact they were always under gentile rule since the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 until 1967. Still the temple mount is trodden down by gentiles to this day as the Muslim dome of the rock stands near where the temple stood.
They and us are all slaves to the world until we become children of God, as Paul tells us in Romans 8. Children obey their father for different reasons than slaves obey their master, but make no mistake, God expects children to obey their parents. So we see that adultery with idols was and is the primary sin against God.
In our day what would we say we are married to instead of or above God? How are we trying to make him one of many things of importance in our lives, rather than the most important thing? God doesn’t have to compete for our affections, in fact he won’t. So it’s not about who we marry and what religion they might be, though that can still have an impact on our faith. But it represents what we spiritually put above God in terms of our devotion and obedience.
A very simple question is if we’re honest, do we obey the world including our own fleshly desires, more than we obey God?
So we see here that God has given some revival in allowing them to have a remnant return to Jerusalem and build the house of God. Does this relate to God giving us some revival by allowing us to have the church, but it’s not the culmination of the revival?
The temple (house of God) has been rebuilt for about 58 years when Ezra arrives on the scene. And just because they have a church and do all the church things like burn animals, they are still living out of the will of God, so much so that Ezra has a huge fit, pulling out his hair and beard, tearing his clothes, couldn’t eat. I can assure you many pastors today feel like that.
And in Ezra’s prayer, he again asks for mercy because he sees that they don’t deserve even the mercy they have received. He says at the end of chapter 9 that we deserve to be consumed, we are guilty, and none of us can stand before you because of this. That is the beginning of repentance.
When I read this I couldn’t help but have my mind go to some of Jesus words like, “many will say Lord, Lord, and I will say to them, I never knew you. Only those who do the will of my Father in heaven are my brothers and sisters. Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life.
I don’t ever want to believe that I am right with God because I go to church, because I’m a pastor, because I do the religious things I’m supposed to do. The Bible is very clear that obedience and repentance are required more so after you are saved than even before. It is a covenant relationship not rituals.
So moving into chapter 10 now we see that at least the majority of the people confess with Ezra and suggest that they make a covenant with God that they will all send away their foreign wives and children. Go ahead Ezra this is your task and we are with you in this. And they all took the oath.
Now this is no small deal. It sounds like from verse 13 that the majority of the people had done this intermarriage thing, and it would mean completely severing ties with their wife and children and sending them away forever.
Now look at the reaction of the people. They basically in verse 12 say that, “yep what you say is true we do need to do this, BUT…” And they make some excuses that sound pretty reasonable. They say let the leaders represent us all. HMMM. Do some people in the church think that it is only pastors who are expected to be holy and study the word of God? The pastor feeds, the people eat. Whether it be by bottle feeding or cutting your meat for you.
And look how the passage ends. They sat down to examine the matter, for two months. Oh Oh, you know that when you get a bunch of people together to “examine a matter” in church we’re in trouble. Do you remember last week how I said the high priest Phinehas dealt with this problem in Moses time? Immediate execution. You see this wasn’t a new problem, and we will see that it doesn’t stop here with Ezra either.
The thing of it is, if we want spiritual revival we can’t fiddle around with obvious sin, we have to take decisive action immediately. No examining necessary. Back to Deuteronomy 7 where this command originated, look at what else God says: “When the Lord brings you into this land and clears away many nations before you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction”.
Now before you get all God is cruel, that’s not the God of love I worship, let me remind you that God knew there was no hope for these people. The nations were deceived by Satan, there was no eternal hope for them. They outright refused the true God, so whether they died right then or 50 years from then wouldn’t really have mattered.
Where we see the love in these actions is that God wanted a relationship with his people so bad, and because he knew the heart of man and how easily we succumb to temptation, he said completely destroy all traces of evil and idol worship otherwise it will take root again. If you don’t completely destroy down to the roots, it’s like plucking the flowers off a dandelion hoping they won’t grow back. These nations simply represent sin and what we are to do with sin. We don’t mess with it. It’s a picture of what will be in heaven anyway.
Now true the people confessed here, but did they repent. Repent meaning to stop what they were doing and turn in obedience to God? Well it appears not. Apparently they just got to examining the matter and determining who all had done this intermarriage, because at least many of these people did not get rid of their foreign wives and children (frankly I don’t blame them). Because in Nehemiah 9 Ezra is reading the Law again and we have what seems like an instant replay.
This is at least 14 years later and we see the people again confessing their marriage to foreign women. But this time it also says they did separate themselves from all foreigners and then they confessed their sins and their father’s sins. Here’s some revival happening. Very interesting that they confessed after they did something about their sin. Isn’t it easy to confess a sin and then feel OK about it, and proceed to continue with that sin? I think the message might be, don’t bother confessing unless you have already committed to put away the sin.
It was after that, that the new walls were dedicated and Nehemiah completed the reforms and got things back to normal for a while anyway. And look at how he deals with those who lied and tried to get away with having foreign wives and children. It’s actually a little humorous. It says in Nehemiah 13 that Nehemiah when he heard the children of some of these people talking the wrong languages, that he took the men and cursed some, beat some, and pulled out some of their hair. Now he wasn’t a priest but a civil leader like a governor, so I guess it was easier for him to get away with that.
He mentioned to them that even Solomon couldn’t resist worshipping these people’s idols. Most of them then changed. But then he found out that one of the high priest’s grandson’s was married to a Horonite, and it says I (Nehemiah) chased him from me.
Then look how Nehemiah closes. Thus I cleansed them from everything foreign (by the way this is something many of the good kings of Judah like Josiah had to do time after time). And he says remember me, o my God, for good.
So did a revival happen in the book of Ezra? Not really. Many of the components were there. There was confession, there was even agreement that the sin had to stop, but it was all words. Revival is not everybody weeping and confessing all their sin and having an emotional experience, that’s a good start, but true spiritual revival, which means bringing back to life, causes repentance in the real sense of the word, and that repentance creates mass change in a person, community, or culture.
I wonder what was happening during those 14 or so years before Nehemiah showed up and chased off all the foreigners. Obviously Ezra couldn’t police a whole country, just like a pastor can’t know everything that goes on in people’s private lives outside of church. I bet the people worshipped at the temple, heard the word of God preached, burnt their sacrifices. All the while continuing in their sin and disobedience. Maybe they just got better at hiding it. Do any of us need to do some repenting?
It’s also true that not all revivals are instant, sometimes they begin and percolate for a long time before the actual revival comes. But it has to start as it did here in Ezra only to come to fruition over 14 years later.
But you say that’s all Old Testament, things are different today, once you’re saved by Jesus blood, you don’t have to worry anymore. By the way, these people were very precious to God as well and they had about another 500 years to get it right with attack after attack coming against them to wake them up, until finally they were totally obliterated by the Romans in AD 70 only to return this time about 1900 years later. God never gives up trying to save the people he loves, even after he has already saved them. And yes sometimes he does it through judgment that leads to repentance even after we become His children.
Listen to what John says to believing Christians in his first letter probably to the churches around Ephesus. “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep sinning because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are children of God and who are children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness (not breaking God’s laws) is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother”.
And of course there’s Paul’s famous words to the Roman church in Romans 5, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?”
With this I’ll close. I don’t know if you ever pray for spiritual revival for yourself or anyone else, or your community. But let me just say that if you do, and you are knowingly continuing in some sin, it ain’t gonna happen. It won’t happen in you, and it won’t happen through you. Revival happens when sin is removed from the picture, and it usually dies down after sin re enters the picture. The only permanent revival will occur in heaven, but the more at least temporary revivals we can have here, the more populated heaven will be. And there’s plenty of room.
