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The Stirrings of God: Part Two (3) 1:1-11
Introduction
“the LORD stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia . . . everyone whose spirit God had stirred” (1:1, 5).
“I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness; . . , he shall . . . set my exiles free” (Isaiah 45:13). In these texts the Hebrew verb “stirred up” with the Lord as its subject and King Cyrus of Persia as its first object and the Judean exiles as its second object, gives us our entrance to this first chapter of Ezra-Nehemiah. Last time we looked at the actions of Cyrus the Great as one whose spirit was “aroused . . . in righteousness” by God on behalf of the Jewish people in Babylon exiled from their homeland. Today we begin to look at the actions of the exiles “whose spirit God had stirred.” A month ago as we began our study of “The Stirrings of God” we asked, “How are we to interpret Ezra and Isaiah’s picture of God’s providential action in the heart of a pagan king on behalf of the Hebrew people in exile?” Can there be a present day application, that is, are we able to discern God’s actions in the seemingly world-wide rise of a militant Islam and the response of the Western world to it? There are those both in radical Islam and in evangelical Christianity who have precise and certain answers! But we could only muse, “do we simply live in a time when God has become indeed Isaiah’s ‘hidden’ God?” Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior (45:15). As suggested by our key texts from Ezra 1:1 and 5, we examined the historical records and the biblical reports of King Cyrus the Great of Persia. The latter’s edict, sending the exiles back home to Jerusalem in Judah with financial support to rebuild their temple, was ascribed to the Lord’s doing by both Ezra and Isaiah (45:13). So we ask again out of our previous study, from our first focal point of interest in our look at “Cyrus and the Return (1:1-11)” in 1:1-4, I. “The LORD stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus” if we can at least say that Cyrus’ role in restoring a nation from exile would suggest from the biblical perspective that we should not too easily dismiss God from the affairs of the nations of the world? That perspective, of course, raises more questions than it answers as you and I look out over the present world scene and attempt to handle the daily impact of the “bad-news” media penetrating our fragile psyches. Some of us have had to limit our exposure to the vivid media portrayals—the human tragic side is often too overwhelming, locally and on the world scene--like the heart-breaking death toll in the Middle East and Africa.. Yet the question still remains: “What are God’s plans for the nations? The role of our nation in his purposes? What is his will for his people in our time?” With these questions in the back our minds we come to our second focal point of interest in Ezra 1:1-11, the action of the Jewish exiles themselves, again attributed to the Lord’s doing: II. God stirred up the spirits of “the heads of the families of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites” 1:5-11 The heads of the families of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites—everyone whose spirit God had stirred—got ready to go up and rebuild the house of the LORD in Jerusalem. All their neighbors aided them with silver vessels, with gold, with goods, with animals, and with valuable gifts, besides all that was freely offered. King Cyrus himself brought out the vessels of the house of the LORD that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the house of his gods. King Cyrus of Persia had them released into the charge of Mithredath the treasurer, who counted them out to Sheshbazzar the prince of Judah. And this was the inventory: gold basins, thirty; silver basins, one thousand; knives, twenty-nine; gold bowls, thirty; other silver bowls, four hundred ten; other vessels, one thousand; the total of the gold and silver vessels was five thousand four hundred. All these Sheshbazzar brought up, when the exiles were brought up from Babylonia to Jerusalem. By the time Ezra-Nehemiah was written, some measure of restoration of normal life for the people in their homeland had been achieved. As a people they had assimilated the affliction of the divine judgment on their nation that had resulted disturbingly in their historical discontinuity as a nation. The was need now to encourage their faith “by reminding them of the riches of their heritage and the legitimacy of their present institutions as vehicles through which that heritage could be mediated to them.” The first chapter of Ezra does this in three ways. As we have seen, (1) continuity with their past as a people is recognized first as the historical facts of the return are interpreted “as an act of the same Lord who had both permitted the exile as an instrument of judgment and prophesied that it would be of limited duration.” The gracious promptings of the Lord can be identified first in the decree of Cyrus and now again in the obedience of a portion of the people in answer to God’s own promises through Jeremiah and Isaiah, no doubt passages read or prophecies heard, or heard about by the exiles and therefore taken up into the very process of God’s “stirring” their spirits to action. This continuity is supported (2) by the presentation of the return from Babylon to Judah as a “second Exodus”: “all their neighbors aided them with silver vessels, with gold, with goods, and with valuable gifts” (1:6). The restored nation is encouraged to interpret their return to their homeland “as an act of God’s grace than can be compared in its significance with the very birth of the nation of Israel itself.” Their eyes of faith are to be opened “to the hand of God behind the historical process, inviting an appreciation of his action in bringing his people to a point of rebirth no less wonderful than that which had been accomplished in the deliverance of Israel from the slavery of Egypt.”
Finally, (3) the stress on “the vessels of the house of the LORD that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the house of his gods” (1:7) speaks of (3) the continuity of religious life which these vessels symbolized for these instruments were to be used in their future temple worship:
the new temple at Jerusalem and its paraphernalia were indeed a restoration in direct, physical line with what had gone before, and not an innovation without historical roots. More significantly, as the people of that time made their response to God in worship at the temple, they were reminded in a direct manner that that very act was a testimony to the oneness of God and the unity of his people.”
And it is so with us that we need in our worship as a church to be in touch with our own tradition, that is, by what we do in church to remain connected with the Church as the people of the one God have worshipped through centuries. We are not new on the scene, mere spontaneity does not last forever, for warned Reinhold Niebuhr, “when it is gone a church without traditional liturgy and theological learning and tradition is without the waters of life.” It has been said that “the best way to serve the Church Universal is to dig deep into your own tradition.”
It is the second aspect of continuity touched on both in the edict (1:2-4) and in the report of the return (1:5-11), that is most striking in our text, the typology of the Exodus, that is, the presentation of the return to Judah from Babylon as a second Exodus. As N. T. Wright has so ably expressed it,
Exile and homecoming, the great theme of Jewish storytelling from that day to this, was cemented into the consciousness of the people who once again began to go up to Jerusalem in the belief that heaven and earth overlapped in the Temple, that their YHWH would meet with his people in forgiveness and fellowship, that his project to rescue his people and set the world to rights was still on course despite everything.”
Is not exile and homecoming planted deep within our hearts as well inspiring us in our time to believe in hope that God’s purposes to “set the world to rights” is “still on course des;pite everything? 1. In Exodus 3, as Moses stood before the bush that refused to burn up, this hunted and frightened fugitive received a commission from “I AM WHO I AM” (3:14) to go back to Pharaoh in Egypt and lead the Israelites out of their Egyptian slavery. Among God’s instructions to Moses were the words, So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all my wonders that I will perform in it; after that he will let you go. I will bring this people into such favor with the Egyptians that, when you go, you will not go empty-handed; each woman shall ask her neighbor and any woman living in the neighbor’s house for jewelry of silver and of gold, and clothing, and you shall put them on your sons and on your daughters; and so you shall plunder the Egyptians” (Exodus 3:20-22; cf. 11:2; 12:35-36; Psalm 105:37). Remember Cyrus’ edict read, “and let all survivors, in whatever place they reside, be assisted by the people of their place with silver and gold, with goods and with animals” (1:4) followed in the account of the return by “all their neighbors aided them with silver vessels, with gold, with goods, and with valuable gifts” (1:6). In the light of these accounts in Exodus and Ezra, the return of the Hebrew exiles to Judah and Jerusalem laden with gifts expresses the narrator’s concern to understand and present the exiles return as a Second Exodus. This concern explains the clear shift from the text of the decree itself to the narrator’s account of the peoples’ response to it. We have seen earlier in our study that the prophet spoke of the Persian King Cyrus and his edict allowing the captive Jewish people to return to their native land: “I have aroused Cyrus in righteousness; . . , he shall . . . set my exiles free” (Isaiah 45:13). The prophecies of Isaiah 40-55 of the book were probably addressed in their original oracle form to the Hebrew exiles by an unnamed prophet during the sixth century. As Brueggemann puts it, the prophecies in these chapters are commonly thought to come from around 540 B.C. “just as the Babylonian empire was about to collapse in the face of rising Persian power.”
These prophecies of Isaiah 40-55, however, as we now possess them are not only to be viewed in the sixth century setting. In their place in the biblical canon they comprise the central section of a larger document (the book of Isaiah), itself set among “the latter prophets.” In this larger context of inspired canonical Scripture reaching even to include the New Testament, Isaiah’s message of promise became a prophetic word tied not only to folk in a specific historical setting, but also directed to the future and offered to sinful Israel as a promise of God’s purpose with his people of every age—the redemptive plan of God for all of history. As theologically shaped “in the context of sin and judgment, these chapters testify to Israel’s real future.” We are and will be partakers of that future! As Bernhard Anderson sums up this connection of the Exodus stories, “the story of the deliverance of Hebrew slaves from bondage to Pharaoh has had a powerful appeal to the religious imagination, even to the present day.” We remember the role of the Exodus motif in the worship of the Negro people under slavery and the role it has played in their preaching and singing ever since, climaxing of course in their struggle for civil rights as led by Martin Luther King. This was likewise clearly true for the prophet of the exile in Isaiah 40-55 “in whose poetry the Exodus is both the classical instance of Yahweh’s redemptive activity and, at the same time, the type of the new exodus of salvation that was about to take place.” So we take the presence of the Exodus motif in Ezra-Nehemiah back into Isaiah’s prophet word to the exiles in sixth century Babylon, prophetic oracles that had impacted the hearts of the exiles and were even more obviously in the mind of the writer of our books. So we will examine next time these prophecies of Isaiah 40-55 for their impact on the exiles as they returned to their homeland, and at the same time to get a brief glimpse of what they hold for us in our 21st century situation. Before we close, in anticipation of our next study, we note the echoes of the Exodus tradition that are present throughout the poems of Isaiah 40-55 both open and close this central section. In 40:3-5 are the familiar A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” And then as the section comes to a close with 55:12-13 the prophetic word is For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. Conclusion Our New Testament builds on these promises with its focus on Jesus of Nazareth. As N. T. Wright succinctly expresses it,
Matters came to a head when Jesus, with his disciples and a growing crowd, arrived in Jerusalem for one last Passover. The choice of festival was no accident. Jesus was as alive as anyone to the symbolic power of the ancient scriptural stories. His whole vision was for God to act in one final great ‘exodus,’ rescuing Israel and the world from the ‘Babylons’ that had enslaved them, and leading them to a new Promised Land, the new creation of which his healing had been advance signposts.
At the transfiguration of Jesus Luke reports that “Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his exodon (departure), which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (9:30-31).
With N. T. Wright we declare, that
Christianity is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this—the finding, the saving, the giving of new life—in Jesus. With Jesus, God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut.”
Last week we were privileged to have on campus for the “Writers Symposium by the Sea” Anne Lamott, a somewhat irreverent “hippie,” brilliant, and successful Christian writer whose books evangelical “Christian” bookstores will not carry. A recovered alcoholic whose conversion is narrated in her book Traveling Mercies, she spoke effectively in the Wednesday morning PLNU chapel and in the afternoon was interviewed by Dean Nelson in Crill Hall for television. The hall was full at $15 per person. Her political stance out of her background is liberal, raised by parents who thought Christians were idiots and whose “religion” was the liberal causes of the day. In the course of answering a question from the floor Lamott remarked that she felt that Bush should be tried by the Hague for war crimes. Then she quickly backed off, musing “I don’t know, but perhaps this is a tragic period in our history that God is using to do a new thing for us, and his thing in world affairs.”
Perhaps God is not finished yet with our nation and with the nations of his world:
“the LORD stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia . . . everyone whose spirit God had stirred” (1:1, 5).
We take hope from these ancient words. Would that I were able to live long enough to understand the present world scene from a biblical perspective! Perhaps! February 25, 2007. From North, “The Chronicler,” 385-386. The Second Temple (Ezra 1:1—6:22 A. Cyrus and the Return (1:1-11) Zerubbabel and the List (2:1-70) C. Laying the Cornerstone (3:1-13) Interruption: The Samaritans (4:1-24) Prophetic Nudge to Completion (5:1—6:22) Ezra’s Return and the Torah (Ezra 7:1—10:44) Rearmament of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1:1--7:72) Ezra’s Torah Promulgated (Nehemiah 7:73—9:38) Nehemiah’s Reform (Nehemiah 10:1—13:30) Timeline for the events in Ezra-Nehemiah Reign of Cyrus II of Persia (550-530) Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus II (539) Edict of Cyrus and Return of the Exiles (538) Reign of Cambyses in Persia (530-522) Reign of Darius I in Persia (522-486) Temple Rebuilt (520-515) The same Hebrew verb as in Ezra 1:1, 5. Hebrew is simply “him.” NRSV translators, believing the reference is to Cyrus as he is mentioned in verse 1, inserts the name with a marginal note. Lesson on January 28, 2007. See Isaiah 64:7. We remember Pascal’s dictum from his Pensées,, “Every religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true.” This perspective and the occasional quotations are taken from Williamson, Word, 20. See Jeremiah 51:1-58 as well as 25:11-12 and 29:10 where the prophecy of “seventy years” refers probably to the years of Babylonian domination (612-539 B.C.?). The period from the fall of Jerusalem to the edict of Cyrus was only from 586-538 B.C. Ezra 1:11 may be in part a response to “a temptation to play down what had happened, and from a historical point of view, it [the return] was probably a slow, drawn-out process.” See Isaiah 52:11-12. This was Cyrus’ practice with other conquered peoples as well. Our direct dependence on Williamson, Word, ends here. Rob L. Staples, “Things Shakeable and Things Unshakeable in Holiness Theology,” The Edwin Crawford Lecture, Northwest Nazarene University Conference on Revisioning Holiness (February 9, 2007), 6. The quotation is from Niebuhr’s Essays in Applied Christianity, 62. Staples, 7. Italics mine. N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 78. Wright is a very prolific New Testament Scholar (more than thirty books) and now Bishop of Durham, England. This book is said to be for this generation what C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity was to previous generations of young (and old) Christians. The same Hebrew verb as in Ezra 1:1, 5. Hebrew is simply “him.” NRSV translators, believing the reference is to Cyrus as he is mentioned in verse 1, inserts the name with a marginal note. For example, Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 325. But if they date from the eighth century as some scholars hold, they are still addressed with prophetic insight to the time and situation of the exiles in Babylon. Cyrus edict is dated at 538 B.C. Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 90. Using the designation of the Hebrew canon (former and latter prophets) rather than that of the Alexandrian canon (major and minor prophets). With the exception of Daniel the latter prophets include the major and minor prophets. The former prophets are Joshua and Judges and the books of Samuel and Kings. Childs, Introduction, 326. This paragraph is dependent on Childs. Bernhard W. Anderson, :”Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah and Prophetic Tradition,” in Frank Moore Cross, Werner E. Lemke, and Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God: Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976), 343. Earlier prophets as well had appealed to the memory of the Exodus: Hosea, Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Wright, Simply Christian, 108-109. Ibid., 92. Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 1999). This I have read along with her Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing (1994) and Crooked Little Heart (1997, a novel). Her published books total eleven. I checked my memory with Dan Nelson who said her remarks at this point included something like “perhaps God is saving us from an even worse catastrophe.”
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