Lesson 21 - Ezra 10 Concl. (End of Book)

[Music] [Music] well this lessons going to end the book of Ezra hasn't not been an eye-opening um just how much what is R experienced and his goal of reforming the seriously degraded Hebrew religion this day is so similar to the state of 21st century judeo-christianity it's startling the the crux of the disease that affected and debilitated the Jewish religion of 450 BC is the same as what harms our Christian and Jewish faiths today adultery on the surface that may sound like a shocking and may be an unwarranted statement but the issue of illicit marriages in the book of Ezra teaches us that any unfaithfulness in our relationship with the Lord especially bringing in outside influences to add to our religion to mix the pagan with the holy this is adultery God created the institution of marriage between a man and a woman as a physical earthly type or pattern of the spiritual relationship the Lord wants with his worshippers thus marriage metaphors are used at times in the Bible when describing the ideal relationship between God and human beings God is depicted as the husband the body of believers is his bride thus for believers to seek after or accept or even tolerate another God in our lives as to be as the betrothed who has become unfaithful to her bridegroom for a believer to come into marriage and/or sexual union with someone who worships other gods or in our ear and no God at all is compared to one who is seeking after a different husband or lover it is a violation of the seventh commandment that prohibits adultery thus the central storyline of Ezra's chapters 9 and 10 explains the problem that many Jewish men had married foreign pagan women who by definition worshiped another God this is defined as unfaithfulness to Yahweh by the men of Israel joining these themselves to these foreign women they were being unfaithful to the God of Israel which according to God is called adultery let's reread a few verses of chapter 10 and Ezra to get started today if you have a complete Jewish Bible we're gonna beginning on page 11:30 11:30 we're gonna read verses 9 through 17 of Ezra chapter 10 all the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled in Jerusalem within the three days it was the 20th day of the ninth month all the people sat in the open place in front of the house of God trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain Ezra the : Ezra the priest stood up and addressed them you have acted treacherously by marrying forward foreign women hid and have thus increased Israel's guilt now therefore make confession to AH deny the God of your ancestors and do what will please him by separating yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign women in response the whole Assembly cried out yes our duty is to do as you have said but here but there are many people it's the rainy season we can't stay out here in the open also it isn't the work of a day or two for there are many of us who have committed this crime let our leaders represent the whole community let all those in our cities who have married foreign women appear at prearranged times accompanied by the elders and judges of each city until our gods fears anger over this has been turned away from us only Yonatan the son of a Sahel and Yaya the son of Shiva supported by mesh alam and shook tie the Levite opposed this the exiles did as agreed Ezra the priest took chose heads of father's clans by name and they began their sessions to look into the matter on the first day of the tenth month they finished dealing with all the men who had married foreign women by the first day of the first month so here on a cold rainy day in winter the 20th day of the ninth month of the year the Jewish people living in Judah who had been summoned to the temple arrived and they waited to hear their fate from Ezra several days earlier a lay leader named chicken yaa had courageously stood in front of a large crowd that had gathered because of Ezra's loud wailing his very public morning in a temple courtyard and told them a truth they didn't want to hear it was that many of the Jews had behaved in a treacherous way towards God in their unlawful marrying of foreign women of pagans and he told the crowd that he felt that the only thing they could do now was as a group make a commitment to send these foreign wives away they and the children they might have more the people voiced approval of this and then Ezra stood up and made them swear about God that they would act on their agreement and since the crowd at the temple consisted only of passers-by not the bulk of the returned Jewish exiles a message was sent under Ezra's Ezra's authority demanding that all the returned exiles guilty of this offense or not were to show up at the temple in a few days and the penalty for not coming would be forfeiture of all property to the temple authorities and then excommunication from the Jewish community for a Jew this is about the nearest thing to a death sentence there was without losing one's life and now as we pick up today the people who arrived as ordered and they're ready to carry out what they vowed well as reminds them of their treachery and that the guilty should confess their sin to the Lord and then do what pleases God which is to first separate themselves from the people's people's plural of the land that means foreigners living in Judah and also from their foreign wives so as it is usually described as rrah orders mass divorce in God's name for all the guilty parties now as you can imagine this is deeply bothered Christian commentators for centuries let's investigate a couple of aspects of this unsettling situation first as we discussed in an earlier lesson the words used to describe both the Union and now the disillusion of those unions with foreign women are not the typical Hebrew words for marriage and divorce instead the word used for the Union as yesh of which means to cause to dwell and the word used for the dissolution is yet saw which means to send away therefore I have much doubt that the Lord saw these relationships as actual marriage even though the couple certainly felt they were married because illegitimate hebrew marriage requires a covenant vow by both parties that invokes the name of the God of Israel the said if in God's eyes there's never been a true marriage the destruction of that unions not true divorce second of all most Christian commentators don't seem to recognize this important nuance so they see this story as an unfortunate but all too common situation of Hebrew marriage and divorce even though this divorce is one that's been forced upon the Jews by Ezra as God's representative this thus it's typically rationalized in one of two ways either that this was simply a matter of biblically endorsed racism that although tolerated in ancient times was nonetheless wrong or that this is an issue of Ezra ordering that the Jews should take the path of the lesser of two evils that is in this case divorce was seen as the least worst option when compared with continuing on in the status quo by the Jewish men remaining in union with their Hebrew wives but either way it was evil and while the first accusation of this being a problem of Jews marrying outside of their race is flatly incorrect the second accusation does have a certain appeal to it that is with only two possible options before them the Jews took the one they thought would please God the most and the negative would upset God the least and I disagree with this this is not an issue of accepting the lesser of two evils because it wasn't evil to send the pagan women and their children away any more than it was evil when Abraham Haggar away with her child however it was the sad result of sinning and a bad judgment and of not believing God in the first place that these women were put in a bad way that many innocent children unfairly became homeless and fatherless by being ripped away from their households in Judah is terrible that most of these Jewish husbands and fathers love their wives and children some had been happily together for many years and no doubt they were devastated to send them away forever this is heartbreaking however it was the illegitimate Union that was the sin not the dissolving of the Union because the dissolving of the Union essentially terminated the sinful act what a mighty lesson this is for all ages and eras the effects of our sin can have a long reach a lasting effect that most often is accompanied by unintended consequences and more often than not our conscious choice to disobey God and to trespass against him harms others as much or more as it does ourselves collateral damage is the norm even if sometimes we're just too self-absorbed in our own misery to notice it sometimes even sincerely writing the wrong can be excruciating as it is here in the case with Ezra and another of the lessons we hopefully learn here is it the longer we wait to change our ways by returning to God's ways start undoing the miss we've made well at least the ones that can be undone the harder it is the more devastating the after-effects but there is yet another lesson in God principle does it play here the principle of dividing electing and separating now although many here have studied the book of Genesis with me I would like to briefly review this principle that is so fundamental to everything God does in the way he behaves that I call it a governing dynamic like gravity and the laws of thorough thermodynamics are the governing dynamics that describes the behavior of our physical universe so here in a nutshell is God's prime governing dynamic the Lord achieves his will by dividing electing and separating in the beginning he divided light from darkness he elected light as good and he separated them he divided male from female he elected each to a diff well-defined role and function and separated them he divided and separated the land from the Seas animal life from human life he divided the world's inhabitants into groups elected each of them for a purpose and separated them into nations with boundaries he divided the twin-brothers Jacob and Esau elected one as the carrier of the line of covenant promised the other who would oppose it and then he separated them he took the entire world's population of humans and divided us into two categories Gentiles and Hebrews he elected the Hebrews to be a set apart people separated to serve him and since the coming of Messiah Yahshua he's divided the world into those who trust Christ for salvation versus all others who do not he's elected to believers for eternal life and then spiritually separated us from them and has also demanded a certain degree of physical separation I could go on for several more minutes giving you examples of God dividing electing and separating now naturally our human evil inclination prodded along by Satan wants to reunify everything dissolve every distinction and division the God ordained we want to put an end all this dividing and electing in separating because as the world sees it this is the overriding cause of our endless conflicts and strife even the church has four years cried unity usually at any cost declared in a godly goal urged consensus tolerance compromise whatever it takes to achieve it we live in a world that now sees the concept of nationalism and therefore national boundaries as archaic faulty something that needs to be eradicated the rules and defined behavior of the sexes should no longer have distinction there is a drive by the political elites and the academic intellectuals to unify all people on earth under one currency one economy and one government the so-called Interfaith movement wants us to meld all the world's religions into one so that we might have equality and peace unity sounds so good so right what a noble endeavor at least from a human philosophical viewpoint but in fact it is the opposite of God's will and it inherently defies his prime governing dynamic he divides elects and separates and thus in the Ezra story of the mixed marriages we have a demonstration of God's will to divide and separate over it against mankind's will to unify verse 11 says in Ezra 10 now therefore make confession to ah deny the God of your ancestors and do what will please him by separating yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign women separate yourselves in other words God had originally done the work of separating the foreigners who aren't his people from Israel who are his people he had given the foreigners their own separate land separate governments they had created their own separate God's from Israel's God long ago the Creator had made distinctions between Israel and all others but the Jews in our story thought it good in their own eyes to take down those barriers to end the division and separation just like the Tower of Babel when Nimrod sought to unify the nations under one language and one King himself in our time many Jews no longer want to be the chosen separated people of God they want to undo the Hebrew Gentile division that yahwah created and become part of one universal people why because they've decided that the distinction of being elected and separate it's not an honor but rather it just has become too large and difficult to beware this philosophy is well represented in Israel's government and has created countless problems for the because they don't appreciate the unique status that God has given to them in the 21st century especially in the West distinctions among people clearly defined roles of sex and marriage national boundaries differences in religions even the existence of evil versus good are today countered as bigotry discrimination intolerance and some recognitions of distinctions and God defined morality are disparagingly called phobias thus in Christianity many mainstream denominations declare that the God of the Old Testament you Dave Ave who has made those distinctions has been superseded by the god of the New Testament yeshua who has led us to erase those distinctions because they've proven to have been a mistake or they were only for a certain people israel and only for a certain time pre christ and with that said I can't let it stand without following it up with this I rebuked that line of thought and I plead with those denominations who have deserted God's laws of Commandments to renounce their false doctrines and I urge those believers who are members of those congregations to do as god and ezra commanded separate yourselves do it now before the consequences and the collateral damage becomes unavoidable revelation 18:4 that I heard another voice out of heaven same eye people come out of her so that you will not share in her sins so that you will not be infected by her plagues in the book of Ezra we discovered that many jews not only in judah but also in the persian diaspora decided on their own to take down the barriers to remove the boundaries to dissolve the distinctions that the Lord had created and nothing could be more emblematic of that rebellious mindset than to take pagan women as marriage partners but now being confronted by their great sin God says and I paraphrase you yourselves divide and separate back to where originally I had you I divided elected and separated the pagans from the worshipers of Jehovah and you undid it it's up to you put it back the way it was as I said to begin today's lesson as with the the Jews of the mixed marriages the church and Judaism are also deep into adultery spiritual adultery perhaps not in the sense of husbands and wives cheating on one another but certainly turning our hearts away from the Lord our faith institutions preferring our own doctrines our own traditions to God's laws and commandments intertwining secular and foreign and man-made observances with the whole phase holy word chasing after the gods of this world and all they entice us with see it's become common today for believers to marry non-believers as though it doesn't matter as long as we're in love it matters we have adopted pagan observances and practices and that incorporated them into our Christian traditions and customs because it's inclusive and it's fun all at the same time I'm refusing to acknowledge God's laws and the pointed times because we find them irrelevant or just too old-fashioned if my reading of the times is correct the raptures not far off and it's going to be the greatest most complete and definitive process of division election and separation there has ever been in human history think about it those whom the Lord deems worthy will enter a permanent new state of being that is incorruptible glorious and righteous all others will perish in their wickedness it will be as stark as it was with the great flood and yet while it is the Lord alone who's going to determine that final division it is us just like it is with the Jews and Ezra who are called to separate ourselves from all that is ungodly or that pretends to be godly if so has it no place in the lives of worshippers of the God of Israel and his son Yeshua this governing dynamic of dividing electing and separating that began in Genesis is only completed at the end of Revelation then and only then will there be true unity one is written 12 all the Jews who came to the Assembly responded to Ezra's demand to do what pleases God by sending away the foreign wives by separating themselves from the foreign people in the land of Judah by saying yes our duty is to do as you have said but in verse 13 some practical realities have to be faced first there were many people present they were all wet and cold and needed shelter the second to sort out just who had committed all the sin and to devise a plan to deal with all the nuances and details involved would take time a lot more in a couple of days besides who would make these determinations what if a Jew had married a former foreign woman but now she declares for the God of Israel he denounces her pagan gods in order to stay who determines if she since their what of a foreign woman had brought a dowry of great wealth into the marriage or if this foreign woman was the daughter before a man who had acquired land in Judah and now she and her husband were living on that land figuring it as theirs who keeps it what about the children produced from these marriages at what age is the cutoff point that the child must stay with his or her mother and suffer her fate what if the child produced from this illicit marriage has become an adult considers him or herself a Jew and has married a Jew in fact this matter of Jews marrying foreigners has gone on for so long now what's the status of the grandchildren of these illicit marriages bottom line every case was unique every case there's going to have to be judged individually what would be the guidelines would there be a Court of Appeals no particular person is said to have uttered the suggestion to proceed carefully and thoughtfully but rather was kind of a general consensus of the crowd the solution was that the leaders no doubt elders would represent the community they would set the guidelines and appointments would be made for those families who the leaders believe were involved and they were to appear before a council of elders and judges the nearest city to where a family lived would be where their case would be heard and decided and this would continue till all the cases had been examined in tourism resolved however not everyone was enthusiastic about this approach verse 15 gives us a rather ambiguous statement that a fellow named Jonathan supported by a couple of Levites named mesh Alam and Shabtai disagreed with the majority but disagreed about what exactly about the forced disillusions of these unions in general about who would decide which are legitimate marriages of which or not about the methodology of of decisions being on a case-by-case basis so it would take weeks for it to get done was it happening too slow was it happening too fast we don't know any of this nonetheless the next verse tells us that the former Jewish exiles agreed to the plan instead about carrying it out so the opposition of these three men obviously failed and the first cases to be reviewed happened ten days later on the first day of the tenth month it took until the first day of the first month in other words three months to finish all these cases so they worked on these cases beginning in winter and only finished in the spring a few days before Passover what follows to the end of the chapter and the book are the results of all this here's the thing to notice those on the list of the guilty that are at the end of this book of chapter 10 of Ezra chapter 10 are of returned exiles it definitely seems as though this entire exercise has not been aimed at the Jewish families who had been left kind after the bulk of the Jews have been carted off to Babylon more than a century earlier rather this was almost exclusively about those who had been exiled to Babylon had returned beginning with zerubabbel and now ending with Ezra's group but we know historically that all the time between those two returns that are spoken about in the book of Ezra separated by by 80 years small independent groups of Jews continued returning back to Judah in dribbles as well thus we have kind of a mixed bag of Jews who return from Babylon Persia with wives that they had married during their exile others came back to the land from exile and either divorced their Jewish wives once they returned or they came back unattached perhaps his children then married a foreign woman while they were living in Judah why those left behind didn't seem to be as important in this process I don't know but no doubt some of them were affected as well but what we do know for certain from the listing of names because that even the high priest family married foreign pagan women imagine that then a number of common priests families are called out as guilty after that Levites singers gatekeepers and compared to the list of names given us in ezra about the priests and the Levites who returned it seems that the mixed marriage debacle involved the majority of them so what we see is at the highest level of the jewish religious hierarchy was as guilty of this crime against god as were the laypeople no wonder ezra was so dumbfounded and shaken and to his credit the leadership wasn't given a pass while only the laypeople suffered the consequences that's the more usual scenario in both political and religious purges it is self-evident that all these religious leaders who had lived in exile for so many years had eventually turned away from the Torah as their whole holy manual for godly living and instead they fashioned their own doctrines and traditions that permitted much of what the Lord expressly prohibited you know it doesn't take very long especially when the leadership declares themselves as the authority to decide what is right and what is wrong to fully pervert a religion or a way of life and once that happens whatever the new way is it becomes the accepted norm and orthodoxy that's to be followed without question to challenge the orthodoxy or to explain to the followers in to the leadership that what they're doing is wrong it's against God's laws of commandments as if courts met with sneers and incredulous retorts that have hey if everybody agrees upon it and everybody's doing it how can it be that you're right and we're all wrong my goodness if the entire priesthood including the incomparable High Priest marries pagan women and pronounces as good and right in God's eyes how can it be otherwise this explains why Ezra the pious Torah scholar was by God's providence able to become closely associated with the king of Persia and his royal court whereby he gained their confidence in their support and then awarded highest authority over all the Jewish people in the beyond the river province province that included Judah and this Authority extended from the high priest to the lowliest Jewish bondservant because if Ezra didn't have such unquestioned dictatorial authority there is no way he could have enforced any reform of the Hebrew religion whatsoever he would have been laughed out of town he would have been considered a troublemaker you have been considered a heretic by every level of Jewish society sound familiar not much changes over the ages here we stand in 2014 a small but energized movement of reform minded believers consisting of Gentiles and Jews almost all of us who have come from many years and either synagogues or churches but at some point realizing that something has gone substantially off-track with our faith institutions so why doesn't everybody else see it foundational premises that we heard from the Baima are from the pulpit sometimes for decades simply didn't and doesn't match with God's written word and when we finally noticed it and we thought about it and we fretted about it and we prayed about it and eventually became bothered enough to point it out to friends and even to the pastor or the rabbi we were told we weren't qualified to know such things or to properly interpret the Bible or that it doesn't matter what the Bible says because this church or synagogue has its own set of faith doctrines and traditions that it was founded upon and by gosh it's dedicated to them we could take Azeris story bring it straight into our contemporary judeo-christian religious setting as is not have to modify a thing the ultimate question that the book of Ezra asks us all to decide is this which do we desire more the praise of men or the approval of God it's that simple a comfortable man-made faith that has an aura of godliness or far less easy Bible based faith that has been given to us by the Lord I believe that most who are listening to my voice have already made that decision and that's why you're listening in the first place our struggle is neither new nor unique we find it all throughout the Old and New Testaments so as we close out this book of Ezra the inescapable question that I believe that the Lord confronts us now all of us with is this will we have the faith the perseverance the courage the devotion to God's truth as the only true religion will we stick with it no matter the personal cost how weary we might get as did Ezra another zealous followers of God in all ears Solomon so wisely decided late in his reign as written in Ecclesiastes one four through nine generations come generations go but the earth remains forever the Sun rises the Sun than it speeds to its place and it rises there the wind blow south and it turns north the wind blows all around and it keeps returning to its rounds all the rivers flow to the sea yet the Seas not full to the place where the rivers flow there they keep on flowing everything is wearisome more than one can express the eye isn't satisfied with seeing the ear not filled up with hearing what has been is what will be what has been done is what will be done and there's nothing new Under the Sun please rise [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Torah Class

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Keywords: Ezra, Old Testament, Torah, Seed of Abraham, Torah Class, Tom Bradford, Bible Study

Id: Dft1Asf2wyU

Length: 41min 43sec (2503 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019