22. Artaxerxes, Ezra, and Nehemiah

okay friends pop quiz the first king of Persia who authorized the people of God to return to the Land of Israel and start building the temple was Cyrus second question for 50,000 dogs who is the son of Cyrus who wasn't such a good guy and who was somewhat hostile to the Jewish people and spent most of his career in Egypt and died probably by suicide on his way back because there was a coup back in Persia his name is can by seized I kind of heard it out there can be seized never mentioned by name in the Old Testament rather brief reign and not a guy that we have all that much respect for in terms of his general character but nevertheless we touched on and then there's a very short reign of a guy who holds himself out as the deceased while heals him saw how does the brother of camp Isis who happen to be deceased you know and so he's called anybody remember this weird name pseudo shmurda pseudo shmurda s-- there you are the most fun name of all and then of course we get the next one who is heroic he is the one who authorizes the completion of the building of the temple he also fights the first Persian war in the year 490 and his name is Darius the great reigns down to 486 and he's followed by the man who is at least apparently the husband of Esther fights the second Persian war defeated in it in the year 480 and his name is Xerxes very good girl doing great you did not flunk Sunday school and that is a good thing you get to come back that's right for Advanced Studies alright well the next guy we have then as I say is artaxerxes rains for about 30 years from 465 to 424 he did reach the throne in a somewhat dubious manner we're not quite sure how it happened but the best evidence is there were a couple of well-placed knives in a couple of select backs and as a result of that somehow he reached the throne but besides that he's generally regarded as pretty competent ruler and he certainly at least in terms of the longevity of his rule seems to have been fairly capable he inherited a expansive Empire we've looked at this map or something like it before the Persian world includes both the kind of brownish color and also the yellow at the edges there so it goes all the way over to the borders of India in the East it reaches down and covers Egypt to the southwest and also has a little toehold in Europe up to the northwest so it's a very large fact the largest empire to date in the history of the world it was only exceeded really by Rome which would come some years later our desert seas as was often the case had to deal with a revolt this was often an opportunity for subservient nations to you know try to wiggle out from under Imperial control and in this case Egypt attempted to do so they had been occupied as you recall under can be seized and can be seized didn't win any points with them when he slew the APIs bull you remember that story we looked at a couple of weeks ago and the Egyptians have been waiting for an opportunity to try to get out from under these Persians and their imperial presence and so innate in 461 just a couple or three years or so into his reign the Egyptians are in a state of revolt which wouldn't have been a big problem except that they were supported by an unlikely ally known as the Delian League now if you know ancient history you know the Delian League was a formulation of cities of Greece that bonded together even though they'd had a history of being at war with each other all the time they more or less united against a common enemy known as the Persians they'd fought the first and second Persian Wars successfully but they were fearful that the Persians were going to come by back for a third bite at the Apple you know and so they figured that they'd lay down their squabbles with each other and unite in facing this perceived common foe the Persians and that became the basis for this so-called Delian League it was called Delian League because its original capital was the little island of Delos but soon thereafter the capital shifted to Athens and Athens became therefore more or less the chairman of the board and all of the dues therefore for the Delian League flew sort of float in to Athens and it gave Athens huge amounts of revenue which created the financing for what's sometimes called the Greek Golden Age should be the Athenian Golden Age that's when Pericles was ruling the Parthenon was built and so on they developed quite a respectable military force and they didn't like the Persians and when they found out the Egyptians were revolting against the Persians they say hey let's get in on the fun you know so they send a fleet a pretty good-sized military force down to support the Egyptians in their rebellion and that made the whole fight somewhat more formidable from the Persian point of view the Persians didn't respond directly or immediately I should say the artaxerxes himself kind of was biding his time a little bit knowing that this was going to be more than your average difficult struggle and so he doesn't respond immediately what does happen is in 458 he sends Ezra to Jerusalem now Ezra as you know attributes the positive response from artaxerxes to the hand of God being upon him and rightly so but Ezra is also doing something that will serve artaxerxes purposes politically and this has been observed many times that artaxerxes whatever his interest was in Jerusalem from a religious point of view had a deep interest in Jerusalem politically because you'll notice the Jerusalem is going to be right on the path that our desert sees we'll have to take when he goes and tries to win back Egypt and it's always nice to have friends along the way when you're going into battle you don't want to have to fight a battle to get to the battlefield and so he wants to have those more or less positively disposed to him on route and of course he knows that if he does good things were ezrin for the people of Jerusalem that they will then provide some logistical support for him they'll sort of you know help them out and so that they can hit the battlefield fresh rather than having been through miles and miles of hard you know travel and so on so anyway there's there's probably a political explanation for artaxerxes helping Azra side from the providential care that was evident there from Ezra's own presentation of it Ezra arrived in Jerusalem in 458 and over the next year or so he does do a fair amount of sort of raising the bar you might say with respect to how worship is conducted in the city it seems that everything was going all right but there were certainly some little kind of loose ends that were not being observed as appropriately as they should have been and Ezra comes in as more or less an expert to improve the practice of the people there and he gives some details of that in the book of Ezra itself all right in 454 some 10 years after artaxerxes becomes king he does launch his campaign he does follow that very track and he does in fact successfully resist and put down the revolt which took place in Egypt and so he recovers and retains control of Egypt but it was a tough fight and especially those vicious Greeks who were such ferocious warriors did give him more of a struggle than he would have otherwise had and artaxerxes took notes on what had gone you know he knew of course their recent history in the Persian Wars and the losses there and he felt pretty good to get away with his skin after this conflict in Egypt and so anyway that was that was successful on the Persian part however it's interesting this is the last time that the persians ever actually go into a battlefield conflict directly until over a hundred years later when they meet another greek whose name is Alexander the Great and of course on that occasion they don't come out so well what happened on this occasion is that sir they had retained Egypt the head of the Delian League a man named ki-moon decided that the Persians were vulnerable enough that this might be a chance to actually strike a blow right to the heart of the Persian world this was like a little hors d'oeuvre for Alexander the Great you know ki-moon didn't have quite the tactical skill of Alexander but he's going to take a run at it and so he actually takes about 200 triremes and goes and seizes the island of Cyprus which really gives him pretty immediate access to the heart of the Persian Empire artaxerxes was deeply concerned about this he felt about the way we Americans felt some of you in the room were old enough to remember this when the Soviet Union was putting nukes on the little island of Cuba remember Cuba that was the way you pronounced it back then and that put JFK on a very in a very interesting pickle you know he was a new president young guy and was he going to have the verb to stand up to this Nikita Khrushchev guy who was pretty scary I was only 10 years old at the time and he was really scary you know from my point of view back then so you remember this don't you and we were worried about having missiles that close to our coast and it was the Cuban Missile Crisis this was like the Cyprus Missile Crisis for the Persians here you've got these Greeks who are pretty formidable warriors and they are they're just threatening the very heartland of the Persian world and artaxerxes is wondering what to do if I go to these hit these guys toe-to-toe I'm not sure who's going to win you see he was smart enough to know that it was not a completely predictable outcome and so what he does instead is opt for diplomacy sends a couple of emails to ki-moon says hey man hey buddy you know how's about we make a deal and so they negotiate a deal that came to be called the Peace of Callias this is in 449 based on the little town where they met together and negotiated this and essentially what they did was split the Mediterranean world right down the middle this is quite a tribute to the Greeks that the Persians were nervous enough about going a third time against them that they'd rather give them quite a bit of land in order to strike a deal with them than meet them on the field of battle he started circa seized seem to view it that way so this black line you see on the map essentially represents the dividing line and what happened here was the Greek Isles and Asia Minor which had once been owned by the Greeks and they called it IO Nia all of it was given back and the Greeks once again took possession of it the territory to the right of the line to the east was continued to be part of Persian Holdings Egypt remained part of Persian Holdings but nevertheless it does represent a real shift in the balance of power in the ancient world and what we see is of course Greece is rising now on the radar screen and eventually of course this will culminate in the career of Alexander the Great so this is what's happening so we have Greece and Persia more or less representing the two superpowers of the ancient world by the middle of the fifth century BC in 445 just four years later artaxerxes sends nehemiah to jerusalem nehemiah of course is going as we saw in the text we read because the city of Jerusalem continues to need some tender loving care Ezra's there providing for its spiritual well-being but the political well-being of the city is is more or less up for grabs and so Nehemiah comes to be the governor and to oversee really rebuilding the city and especially the walls and the gates and so on and so that takes place just in that timeframe and that shows his trip back he rebuilds the walls it only takes about a year and I was there at the time snap that with my digital camera and so that's exactly what it looked like Nehemiah 12 years later returns to Persia he was there for 12 full years and of course his role was not simply a contractor he was there as a governor and so he details for us in the book of Nehemiah some of his concerns and care for the people of God and some of the reforms that he implemented which are all well worth our reading returns in 432 and it's only two years later in about the year 430 in the absence of Nehemiah and after the death of Ezra that we have Malachi you may not know he's the only Italian Malaki he was malai key he was the Italian prophet my kids think that's pretty funny you know you are you're way too sophisticated for that kind of rude humor so I'll just leave it at that but anyway Malachi is the Prophet who comes and he's not real happy with circumstances even then and you may if you're familiar with the book of Malachi know that he critiques the people especially at two points one that now that Ezra's out of the picture and now that Nehemiah is gone they are once again allowing a little bit of slippage in the quality of their worship and they're not bringing sacrificial animals and offerings and so on that really are up to par really reflective of a heart of true reverential worship for God and Malachi goes so far as to say that they are robbing God very strong language and he says to them that if they will put God to the test if they will honor him with their ties and their offerings if they will really obey Him in these expressions of their devotion to God God will respond by opening the very windows of heaven and pour out a blessing and that of course becomes one of the great texts in the Old Testament encourage encouraging all of us to be generous as we support God's work in this world and Malachi is really the Old Testament classic text to argue for that the other point where he criticizes them more is at the point of our morale performance a lot of marriage and divorce going on a lot of kind of less-than-honorable practices along those lines the other theme however in Malachi that we noted is that he is the last prophetic voice and he gives them this wonderful prediction that a time is coming when the so-called messenger of the Covenant who we know of as Christ himself is going to come as the great final consonant expression of God's covenant 'el guarantees to the people of God the people of Israel in the Old Testament are unique in many respects one of which is that they were one of those people that I was always looking forward to their golden age rather than back on their golden age they were a forward-looking people and Malachi in a sense stands for the last great expression of that prospective anticipation of the people of God for a time when God would finally pour out this ultimate messianic blessing on them giving them fair warning of it by of course sending one in the spirit and power of Elijah who we know of as John the Baptist who would prepare the way and so that's the contribution that's made by Malachi I want to just skip through quickly what really happens through the rest of the rulers of Persia it's another about a hundred years or so and just in the spirit of kind of mopping up we're going to treat this briefly and then come back for a few more thoughts about malachi this is the tomb of artaxerxes the first if you're ever swinging through Iran you can drop by and take a look at that basically what it looks like the next king is a guy named Dirk seize the second he rules count them for one year he actually only rules for 45 days he was the son of artaxerxes he was assassinated while drunk by his loving brother so G honest so G honest this is when things start kind of melting down a little bit you know the telltale signs so G honest rules for one year he's assassinated by a kind of kingmaker in the ancient world named art varios he's a military commander he has no interest in being the key but he does like to create Kings and so he puts in place then a guy named Darius the second who is pretty good so Darius the second rules as you can see for about twenty years he's the son of Xerxes a second he does restore some stability to the Persian world this is when the Peloponnesian wars are taking place you know that the fifth century BC for the Greeks was a warring time they had the Persian Wars at the beginning they had the Peloponnesian wars at the end in the beginning they United to defeat the greatest power in the world the Persians at the end of the story they just tear themselves apart in civil conflict and the great philosophical divide between Sparta with their more Dorian background and the Athenians with their more Mycenaean background finally comes to a head and this awful time of bloodshed and really not much in the way of progress either way takes place and it's during that time the Darius is ruling and he sees this as an opportunity to kind of capitalize on the vulnerability of the Greeks he likes this civil war stuff you know he thinks this is an opportunity for the Persians to sort of come back and begin reasserting themselves and so he sent his son a guy named Cyrus the younger which distinguishes him from Cyrus the Great sent him to reestablish a person Persian presence in the city which had been the capital city of the Persians there in Asia - Sardis and so Cyrus comes back he doesn't come with great military show he doesn't come as if he's trying to conquer anybody but he does reestablish a kind of Persian beachhead there in Asia Minor at the city of Sardis Cyrus the younger was a fairly astute guy himself and realized that if he could sort of predict who the winner would be in this Peloponnesian conflict and help out the presumptive winner then he would be creating some allies in the Greek world and so that's exactly what he does and so Cyrus the younger here supports the Spartans and you may know the spark ultimately one it was kind of a Pyrrhic victory they won but at great cost to themselves and what they won wasn't really worth the effort as it all turned out but they did win and they won in part because the Persians gave them considerable assistance now Cyrus was probably hedging his bets a little bit here he probably had in mind an ultimate game plan that may not have been apparent to anyone else at the time but in any event the Peloponnesian War has fought and ends the next ruler that comes along as artaxerxes the second this is just right the end of the Peloponnesian War 404 and artaxerxes is the son to Darius who was the predecessor and the brother to Cyrus the younger Cyrus the younger didn't like this he thought he should have been the ruler and so he cashes in on his credit with the Spartans and says hey guys how about coming on a little military campaign with me I'll pay you that you'll be mercenaries you're the most ferocious fighters in the ancient world and I just have this little military expedition I'd like to take you on he doesn't tell them he's going to be attacking his brother the king of the Persian Empire you know and so these Spartans are all dressed up with nowhere to go they've just won the Peloponnesian War and so they say okay fine you know sounds good to us and so off they go and Cyrus actually then attacks with these Spartan mercenaries the very heart of the Persian world and this is in 401 Cyrus the younger is killed at the Battle of canosa the commander of the Spartans was a guy named Xena phone who you may have heard of Xena phone is the commander of these 10,000 Spartans and all of a sudden he's got a problem he's got a military campaign on his hand with nothing to gain anymore because the guy who's hired them is dead and so Xena phone is put to the task of trying to back the Persians out from the belly of the lion here what if what's the term the belly of the beast thank you yell Evan and without you know with this little bloodshed and loss of life as possible and so he brilliantly maneuvers a great retreat and this is called the march of the 10000 it's a classic piece of literature and if you ever come across it you should read it just for pure fun you know it's really it's Right written at about this time and Xena phones are guys so anyway that's that's really the end of the interesting parts of Persian history the next guy is artaxerxes the third I have precisely nothing to tell you about him the next guy is artaxerxes the fourth I have nothing to tell you about him the next guy is Darius the third is he's winding down Darius the third is the last ruler of the Persians he probably would have been a pretty decent ruler but it just so happens that he came to the throne just as this young man known as Alexander the Great inherited the Macedonian world and through that the Greek world and launches his campaign and of course the long and short of it is that Alexander defeated the Persians and the rest is history so we'll pick up that next time what I'd like to do in the spirit of our Sunday School lesson this morning is think a little bit about Ezra and the comment that he made he was ashamed to ask artaxerxes for armed support because he had bragged to artaxerxes about how powerful the god of israel is and our as Rollins doesn't realize he's kind of painted himself in a corner here God can take care of us oh by the way we did find sending us you know a couple of hundred troops to protect us along the way he felt the mixed message there wasn't worthy of the claims he was making so what to do and he declines what apparently was available to him armed support and the question that furs to me is how close was that to what we sometimes call putting God to the test you realize there's a lot of examples of this kind of thing in the Old Testament maybe the two extremes that we could think of would be on the one hand a has who you may recall this is from some weeks back was told by Isaiah in a sense to you know ask for a sign anything he wanted to prove that God would help him God God would protect him Isaiah says to a has asked a sign in heaven on earth whatever you want it's almost like the you've got three wishes kind of situations ask for a sign what do you want and of course a has responds sounding very godly Oh far be it for me I would never put God to the test you see oh thank you a has it's lovely at the same time we know that off to the side he's cutting deals with the devil he's making an alliance with tiglath-pileser the king of the Assyrians because he has more confidence and an assyrian king that he does in the god of heaven and earth so while he has this pretentious pious ness oh I'd never put God to the test he at the same time is double-crossing his faith in the God of Israel and everything else besides to make this deal with tiglath-pileser there's one extreme the other extreme comes to mind one's another example maybe the most famous example of all where the this statement thou shall not put thy the Lord thy God to the test pops up where is that Jesus on the temple on the Temple Mount or on the temple pinnacle there you know the devil says to him hey you're the Messiah I mean what can happen to you God's going to dispatch angels galore to make sure you don't even stub your toe that's how protected you are why do you show your faith in God why don't you show your great confidence in God just you know jump off this temple people will see they'll be sitting spectacle to behold and Jesus says the same thing a has said thou shall not put the Lord thy God to the test notice that when a has says it it's betraying an absolute lack of confidence in God when Jesus says it it's it's demonstrating an absolute heartfelt trust and confidence in God you know they both say the same thing don't they the rule in the scriptures and this is point one of my Sunday School lesson this morning is we should not put God to the test we should never paint ourselves into awkward corners where we are in a sense presuming on God's mercies rather than making use of the ordinary means that he may have provided us for our good in the you know bakeries and vicissitudes of life so those are the two those are kind of the bookends then you've got a couple of sort of compromise positions in the middle here you've got Hezekiah and Ezra if you remember Hezekiah Hezekiah was facing the attack by Sennacherib and Isaiah was saying to to Hezekiah God is going to protect you God will care for you and Hezekiah said thank you I believe that and then Hezekiah built a tunnel remember that so that in the in the event of a siege he'd have a predictable water supply if we translate that into modern terms we'd say Hezekiah trusted God but he bought insurance and Hezekiah is not condemned for that nobody came along and said Hezekiah you didn't trust God what's this tunnel you're building here don't you know God will provide no Hezekiah did a good thing he bought insurance and there does seem to be biblically an idea that though we trust God it's okay to use the ordinary mean so how come as roy didn't use the ordinary means they were available to him he had armed forces that were prepared to go along artaxerxes wouldn't have batted an eye this would be the ordinary course of events to provide a mean traveling out in the open there even in the Persian world could be somewhat risky here is rosanna warrior he doesn't know he is family as possessions stop he's a he's a no position to defend himself against a brigand along the way why didn't he invoke the ordinary means why didn't he buy insurance I was so flux by this question I asked my wife that's when you know your Sunday School teachers desperate you know and she said what what you say sweetheart beats me I don't know so I got no help there so here's the only difference I can find because I I don't think Ezra would have been in the wrong in the ordinary course of events two of you except that he'd said he'd sort of put the reputation of God on the line and that's what he was feeling at the point of his conscience he didn't want to compromise this great testimony that he'd given to the king by then I asking for support but the thing that I noticed in the in the text here is that Ezra fasted and prayed you know and so my second Sunday School lesson is hey sometimes in fact I think ordinarily we should use means that's why God has provided them but no matter what the decision no matter what the circumstance never neglect seeking the face of God Joshua got himself in a lot of trouble you recall he'd beaten Jericho the big mega city and he thought oh a is no big deal and he didn't bother to seek the face of God and he went and got his tail whipped by AI after he defeated Jericho what was the problem didn't seek God's counsel so whatever the decision is large or small whether you're tempting God or not you know the thing that we need to do is come before God and seek his we system God is happy to give us wisdom James commands us right off the bat in James chapter one if any man lacks wisdom let him ask of God who will not mock you for your requests and gives liberally so here's two examples one guy kind of goes one way one goes the other and the only difference I don't know maybe I'm certainly happy to hear you know maybe I'm missing something here but at least it seems to me one apparent difference as they both sought the face of God was that God gave counsel to them one to do one thing one to do another third point malachi malachi of course is giving the people of god a bit of a rough review because they are robbing god as he says and the one and only time in all the bible when we are actually authorized to put God to the test is of course the authority were given based on the book of Malachi where he says put God to the test and see if he won't open the windows of heaven there is a deep sense in which God is a giving God and he wants us to be those who reflect that deep character that he has by being giving people and to be honest I'm speaking very personally and I hope I'm kind of ringing a bell in all of our minds here that's hard to do sometimes it's very hard to really trust God at the point of giving giving time we're jealous of our time our treasure or money whatever it might be it's very easy to get fixated on what we have in the bank rather and and what we're getting rather than what we have the opportunity to give and God says put me to the test test me and see if as you give I will not pour out the very abundance of heaven showering you with vastly more than you could have ever given to me is he wants that so that God needs what we give but he wants us to learn something of him by being people that reflect his character in that way so Malachi gives us the one exception to the rule now shalt not test the Lord I got accepted this point test got all your testing at the point of your generous support of what God's doing this is Church Christian ministries and gentlemen places where your money can go to the help of lifting up the name of Christ and serving others it's a wonderful opportunity

Channel: Bruce Gore

Views: 59,725

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Keywords: Artaxerxes, Ezra, Nehemiah, Malachi, Bruce, Gore, Persia

Id: 7OOkYjCdx-k

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2015