April 28, 2024: Message: Head or Heart? | Scripture: Ezra 8 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
Full Manuscript
Introduction
Last week, we met Ezra, a man convicted to return to Judah from Babylon to teach and guide the sluggish Israelites back towards holiness. His conviction leads him to organize a second wave of exiles of roughly 5,000 people (1,514 men), which is what we’re told in Ezra 8:1-14. Here, we’re given a list of those traveling with Ezra: two households of priests, and twelve families from the household of David, plus one other family, Adonikam’s, which is to come later. The significance of these twelve families is to show the completeness of what and who God intended to send back with Ezra—like the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve disciples—twelve families to help restore God’s kingdom in Jerusalem.
And it’s from this context that we pick up in verse 15, as Ezra pauses his caravan before heading out from Babylon at a river flowing to Ahava. Ezra 8:15-36 is where we’ll turn most of our attention to this morning. If able, please stand with me as I read from Ezra 8:15-36.
TWoL: 15 I gathered them to the river that runs to Ahava, and there we camped three days. As I reviewed the people and the priests, I found there none of the sons of Levi. 16 Then I sent for Eliezer, Ariel, Shemaiah, Elnathan, Jarib, Elnathan, Nathan, Zechariah, and Meshullam, leading men, and for Joiarib and Elnathan, who were men of insight, 17 and sent them to Iddo, the leading man at the place Casiphia, telling them what to say to Iddo and his brothers and3 the temple servants at the place Casiphia, namely, to send us ministers for the house of our God. 18 And by the good hand of our God on us, they brought us a man of discretion, of the sons of Mahli the son of Levi, son of Israel, namely Sherebiah with his sons and kinsmen, 18; 19 also Hashabiah, and with him Jeshaiah of the sons of Merari, with his kinsmen and their sons, 20; 20 besides 220 of the temple servants, whom David and his officials had set apart to attend the Levites. These were all mentioned by name.
21 Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river Ahava, that we might humble ourselves before our God, to seek from him a safe journey for ourselves, our children, and all our goods. 22 For I was ashamed to ask the king for a band of soldiers and horsemen to protect us against the enemy on our way, since we had told the king, “The hand of our God is for good on all who seek him, and the power of his wrath is against all who forsake him.” 23 So we fasted and implored our God for this, and he listened to our entreaty.
24 Then I set apart twelve of the leading priests: Sherebiah, Hashabiah, and ten of their kinsmen with them. 25 And I weighed out to them the silver and the gold and the vessels, the offering for the house of our God that the king and his counselors and his lords and all Israel there present had offered. 26 I weighed out into their hand 650 talents of silver, and silver vessels worth 200 talents, and 100 talents of gold, 27 20 bowls of gold worth 1,000 darics, and two vessels of fine bright bronze as precious as gold. 28 And I said to them, “You are holy to the LORD, and the vessels are holy, and the silver and the gold are a freewill offering to the LORD, the God of your fathers. 29 Guard them and keep them until you weigh them before the chief priests and the Levites and the heads of fathers’ houses in Israel at Jerusalem, within the chambers of the house of the LORD.” 30 So the priests and the Levites took over the weight of the silver and the gold and the vessels, to bring them to Jerusalem, to the house of our God.
31 Then we departed from the river Ahava on the twelfth day of the first month, to go to Jerusalem. The hand of our God was on us, and he delivered us from the hand of the enemy and from ambushes by the way. 32 We came to Jerusalem, and there we remained three days. 33 On the fourth day, within the house of our God, the silver and the gold and the vessels were weighed into the hands of Meremoth the priest, son of Uriah, and with him was Eleazar the son of Phinehas, and with them were the Levites, Jozabad the son of Jeshua and Noadiah the son of Binnui. 34 The whole was counted and weighed, and the weight of everything was recorded.
35 At that time those who had come from captivity, the returned exiles, offered burnt offerings to the God of Israel, twelve bulls for all Israel, ninety-six rams, seventy-seven lambs, and as a sin offering twelve male goats. All this was a burnt offering to the LORD. 36 They also delivered the king’s commissions to the king’s satraps and to the governors of the province Beyond the River, and they aided the people and the house of God.
I’m a big admirer of Dr. Al Mohler (president of SBTS), and what’s relatively unknown about Dr. Mohler is that when he was being hired by SBTS as its president at the age of 30, many people, including most professors, opposed his hiring because of his reformed views on Scripture. Yet not only was he decidedly set on bringing SBTS back into a Bible and gospel-centered practice, but he was willing to let go of any professor who could not get on board, regardless of how few other professors wanted to come to the school at that time. He would openly proposition that God would give them the right person(s) for the jobs.
Now, in hindsight, we can say that he made the right decision—SBTS is now all the better for it, but how would you have counseled him in that circumstance? Would you have told him, with all prudence and practicality that he should keep the professors there since school was starting in a week? Or should he step out in faith and risk it all—including the enrollment of students who wouldn’t come because there weren’t enough teachers? It’s not an easy circumstance to navigate. Was he to work with the means he had, or should he have simply trusted? What was the right thing to do, and how does one make those decisions?
More practically, how are we to make decisions when the rightness or wrongness of one decision over another isn’t quite so clear? I don’t really have an answer for you as to whether you should be more practical or more risk-taking in faith, but I do think our passage provides us with some wisdom in this area—that sometimes God gives us hardships and difficult situations so that in our embracing them and in the decisions we end up making, we might grow in and prove our holiness.
Ezra was on his way to Jerusalem to call his people to holiness, and I think this chapter is here to show us why these people, who had every reason to distrust him—this Babylonian, political, intellectual, wealthy, right-hand of a pagan king—why they followed him so quickly and fervently. It’s because he was holy, and he was willing to embrace the hardships that came with pursuing holiness—that sought to honour God over himself. I believe God wasn’t only making him a better leader, but he was also preparing Ezra for the hardships that were very much on the way for the people of Israel. His task was to go to Judah and call them to do very difficult things—to have very difficult conversations—and the question was, could he, himself, deal with that level of difficulty in his own life?
I believe he does—that he embraces the hardships of holiness with much grace, and he teaches us—all of us as leaders in some capacity—how to do the same—how to approach difficult, hard situations in a way that doesn’t seek to honour ourselves first or do what we’re necessarily more comfortable with, but that seeks to honour God above ourselves, and the first bit of advice we receive from Ezra’s situation is that we ought to:
1) Be Prayerful
The situation that we’re in here in Ezra 8 is an interesting one because the overarching problem as these Jews are setting out from Babylon is that you have roughly 5,000 people, maybe 1,000 fighting men, traveling with millions of dollars worth of precious stones and metals. And what would have been common in that day without a lot of modern advances like streetlights, hotels, secure cars, cellphones, and internet—was for pillagers and robbers to hide out on highways to steal and raid from caravans like this.
So, a question arises in Ezra’s mind: how are we going to get from point A to point B? How do we make sure that these people and these goods make it to Jerusalem in one piece? And you may think that this is an easy fix: Ezra, just ask the king for an armed escort, and you’ll be fine. But we find out that he intentionally doesn’t ask for one. Instead, he decides to do this without the help of the king. And, perhaps, this is the lesson you think we’re supposed to learn from the passage: it’s that you’re to leap out in faith and trust God when things get difficult.
But if you look over at Nehemiah 2, there we find Nehemiah in a very similar situation—coming from Susa, just like Ezra, obeying God’s call for his life to be governor of Judah, similar to Ezra’s call to be priest in Jerusalem, only in Nehemiah’s case, he asks for an armed guard, and the king gives it to him. So, who’s right in this situation? Who’s approaching it properly? Is it Ezra’s “hyper-spiritual, God-will-take-care-of-everything, blind-faith” kind of way, or is it Nehemiah’s practicality—the man who uses practical, ordinary means to make it safely to Jerusalem? Which leader ought we to emulate in our own lives?
And the answer that our text gives us is both. Only it’s not simply be practical or risk it all in faith, but that whatever we do, before we do anything, everything ought to be preceded by prayer. Both Ezra and Nehemiah make sure that before they set out to do anything—before choosing to wade out in trust or in the use of practical means, they both begin by asking and imploring after God.
And the question for us is in difficult decisions, even in those situations where it doesn’t seem wrong to choose one way or another, is our first inclination to go to God in prayer? Or what is our mindset when we face setbacks and challenges? Do we, by instinct, turn to God for help, for wisdom, for understanding? This may seem like such an obvious lesson, especially for those of us who have been in church for a long time. The first thing we do very often is pray. Eating a meal, pray first. Starting worship service, pray first. Going on a trip somewhere that requires long hours of driving, pray first.
But what happens when you walk into that doctor’s office, and he tells you the bad news, is your first inclination to pray? Or when your friend calls you in some desperate state and he or she needs you to get to them right away, are you praying? Or when it comes to dealing with your kid, or that job promotion halfway across the country, is it your first priority to pray?
See, when things got hard for Israel, they tended to do one of two things. They, on the one hand, would stop seeking after God and look for answers in all sorts of other places and people. Just think, the whole reason why Israel asked for a king in the first place was because the pagan nations had kings. They didn’t want to be ruled by God, they wanted a human figure that they could touch, see, hear, perhaps even control. But implicit in the act itself, prayer is an admission that God cannot be controlled, and that we are entirely at his mercy, even when we’re doing things that we’ve planned to do—even when things are going the way we’ve always hoped them to go.
Turning to God should be our first priority over going to anyone or anything else. And Ezra, whether or not his decision was the right decision to make, he made his decision by starting with prayer. Israel might be inclined to something else that they think is better in their mind and pride, but Ezra does better than them and can be trusted by them because his inclination would always be to seek God first and to place every problem before him.
Yet, on the other hand, sometimes Israel would act in a practical way—in a way that was good—but they’d go about it wrongly. Think of Abraham and Sarah—though Abraham wasn’t Israel, but the father to what would become Israel—God promised Abraham a son, and instead of trusting God to bring things about his way, Sarah told Abraham to sleep with Hagar, which wasn’t necessarily wrong in that day and age, and it did yield a son, but that’s not how God intended to give one to them. The problem with Abraham and Sarah was that they didn’t go to God. They looked to themselves to provide a good thing, and it created all sorts of problems.
On the first hand, you have Israel trying to trust and walk in faith, only they’re placing their faith and trust in the wrong thing—in what the nations had. But on the second hand, you have Abraham and Sarah trying to be practical when they should have had faith—believed that God would provide for them. And in both circumstances, a lot of hurt and grief could have been spared if God’s people had simply turned to him first.
And Ezra, seeing his situation as dire and riddled with possible, life-threatening snares, doesn’t just turn to God first, but he lays himself bare. This is how worthy Ezra is to be emulated. It says in verse 21 that he proclaimed a fast there—a fast, as we’re told in verse 15, that lasts three days, so that they might inquire of the Lord and seek his favour. Why was the situation so dire? It’s because Ezra knew he was going to do something that went beyond his ordinary means. He was to travel without the king’s guard, risking Judah’s well-being, as well as millions of dollars.
So, he calls his people to fast, and fasting is an act of total humility and submission, isn’t it? How much of our lives are dependent and surrounded around food? How much do we idolize food? We idolize it so much that there’s an accepted name for it now—we call ourselves “foodies.” Our lives revolve around not just eating food but worshipping it—marvelling it, when what it was meant to do was to cause us to worship God.
By fasting, Ezra is declaring that he’s not only going to go to God first in prayer, but he’s willing to lay aside that which the world thinks is worthy of our worship so that he might actually worship the one who is worthy of it. See our praying, petitioning, fasting—they’re meant to declare that we desire God’s satisfaction more than we desire the satisfaction of our own bellies—our own survival. When we pray and fast, we display an extraordinary dependence upon God—something the world isn’t accustomed to doing.
And Ezra knows that he needs this. There is no right decision unless God precedes it, and he knows God deserves more of our attention than what we tend to give priority to in our worldly lives. If we make so much about our food, God deserves to be approached as one more important to us than food! I like how one commentator puts it, “if you’re going to pursue a course of action that forgoes the use of ordinary means, you must be ready to petition God with extraordinary prayer.”
I’ve spent a long time on this point, but I hope it’s well received—if we’re to succeed, church, at whatever it is we’re doing, and whatever it is we plan to do, then before we make our decisions, we must be a church of prayer—prayer in our homes, in our small groups, in our services, in our prayer meetings—pray first in everything, pray without ceasing, and pray employing extraordinary means, like fasting, because unless our extraordinary God goes before us, we will only lead ourselves into our ordinary sin. Embrace, therefore, the hardships of holiness by being a church that first goes to God in prayer.
2) Be Reasonable
Notice, as crazy as Ezra is to choose to go on this trip without guards, he makes a lot of very practical and reasonable decisions before they head out. See, a second hardship arises in that not only is their way to Jerusalem riddled with potential thugs, but in order to carry these vessels to Jerusalem, you need the right people to do the lifting because these things belong to God’s temple. Remember, when the wrong person touches temple objects, the person often ends up dead.
So, you need Levites—people whom God has commissioned to carry things like this. But they get to the river that runs to Ahava, and Ezra, while counting the people with him, realizes, in verse 15, there are no Levites. How does he respond? He shows us that God has been preparing the means since before this trip, and Ezra practically decides to use those means.
Ezra doesn’t just pray and expect God to send Levites magically or inexplicably into their company. No, he sends some of his leading men to a place called Casiphia—likely where Levites are being trained and prepared for when the temple is rebuilt—to speak to Iddo so that those trained in Levitical duties might come. And by the hand of God upon them, Iddo sends 258 Levites to join their journey to Jerusalem.
This isn’t something that God provides in a miraculous, extraordinary fashion. It’s a very ordinary occurrence. Men were being trained for this task. Ezra knew and had pull from his previous relationship with these men, and when he asks, because he is a man worthy to be followed, they go with him. And it speaks to how God works most often, when we go to him in prayer—when we implore him—he usually provides for us through normal human means and hard work. Israel had taken practical steps for when God would rebuild his temple, and Ezra saw this as the time to take advantage of that preparation.
We see this kind of ordinary provision again in vv. 24-34 where Ezra shows he’s not only concerned with outsiders stealing from them but insiders—who’s to say that people within the camp won’t skim from the top? So, he does two things: he tells the Levites sent by Iddo to guard the deposit. Again, he’s not leaving things to chance. He’s not making a hyper-spiritual decision. He’s being as practical as it gets to deal with a very real problem.
But, secondly, he also weighs out all the gold, silver, and money himself before they leave. He records it. Then, once they get to Jerusalem, safely, they go and weigh all the metals again. It’s done by another individual who isn’t Ezra—this Meremoth, the priest—in order to make sure that everything Ezra accounted for before leaving Babylon was there—that no one both from without and within Israel was guilty of robbing from the house of the Lord.
Why is this important? Because God provides for his people through the exercise of human means—that trusting the Lord is not opposed to good planning to get you through difficult situations. He sees the problem that can arise if Levites don’t come and carry the gold. He sees the problem of how precious metals worth millions could be a temptation not just for thugs but for common Israelites. So, what does he do? He does what is reasonable.
And in the same way, brothers and sisters, we ought to follow his example and be reasonable both in the fact that he was clearly someone who could be trusted by Iddo with the Levites and by Israel in the counting of money—we ought to endeavour to be people of integrity, but we also should be reasonable in how we plan, prepare, and use the means that are at our disposal.
We have a number of very real problems as a congregation right now. We need to pay attention to our youth, we need to disciple one another and build up our accountability and biblical literacy, we need to grow in our gifts, we need to be more committed to prayer. Yet, in this church, we’re sitting on resources that many other churches have never had and will never have. And more than that, in this room, we have some of the brightest minds that I’ve ever met—are we using our resources and our minds simply to benefit our temporary life, or are we using them to invest in and build up one another—to build up God’s house—to store up eternal, living treasures?
To prepare and act in ordinary, human ways is not contrary to being spiritual—in fact, it’s gospel. For God planned and prepared to use the most human means to accomplish our salvation by sending his Son not in his divine form but in human form—to live perfectly obedient as a human, to die the human sinner’s death, and to rise so that in his atonement and resurrection, we might repent, believe, and have everlasting, human life with him.
God planned and fixed our problems, doing the extraordinary through the ordinary. Ezra accomplished the extraordinary through the ordinary. So, too, we ought to commit our lives to doing the ordinary, being reasonable in the use of our ordinary, spiritual, and earthly gifts to gird up this house against its problems and hardships, and through them, God intends to do extraordinary things—through them God intends to make us holy.
3) Be Flexible
Having said that, there are occasions where we ought to be flexible—where we ought, as Matthew Henry says, to be willing to decline relying on what we have or what we would normally do in order to be a testimony to others and to honour God above ourselves. There are times where we ought to go against our normal, typical inclinations and say, “let us trust God to provide for us and help us in our difficulty by forgoing human (practical) means.”
And we see Ezra do just that in verses 21-22. This is in fact why he prayed and fasted. He was planning to make this dangerous journey without asking the king for protection—something he could have done very easily. Why doesn’t he ask for protection? Verse 22 tells us, “For I was ashamed [to ask], since we had told the king, ‘The hand of God is for good on all who seek him, and the power of his wrath is against all who forsake him.” In other words, Ezra forgoes the use of ordinary means because he has just told the king about this extraordinary God who stands over Israel and who is for Israel, and he knows that if he asks the king for a guard after saying all of that, he’ll look like a hypocrite.
There are times where holiness requires us to step out into the unknown, unfamiliar, and maybe even uncomfortable. There are times where we should embrace being vulnerable and insecure to the world. But when, you might ask, should we do this? We ought to do this when the option to choose our human means stands against the honour of our God and the witness of his gospel. When the option is to protect ourselves and do what is comfortable or to lay it all out on the line to uphold the reputation of our God, we ought to choose to show that God and his gospel are dearer to us than our own lives.
I don’t know the circumstances in your life where you might need to apply this word, but allow me to ask this: is God and his gospel dearer to you than your own life?
Ezra was someone the people of Israel could follow because he embraced the hardships that proved his holiness—that in every decision, whether practical or miracle—whether head or heart, it would always redound to the glory of God. He always chose God over himself. This is what it means to be holy. This is what it means to have the hand of God on you—it is to seek him in all things first no matter how difficult. But know this as well, to those who forsake him—for those who do what is practical or hyper-spiritual for their own sake and their own ease, God reserves for them only the power of his wrath.
Let us, then, be a people who embrace the hardships both in our planning and in our submitting for the sake of being holy. Let us act for the sake of reflecting our sovereign God and the greater Ezra in Christ Jesus who both planned in his divine sovereignty and stepped out in faith as a human to die for our sins upon a cross. Let us follow and imitate him. May he receive all the glory, honour, and praise, and may his Spirit lead us in the way of life everlasting.
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