May 5, 2024: Message: Love Undivided | Scripture: Ezra 9:1-5 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
Worship Songs: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel | The Goodness of Jesus
Full Manuscript
Introduction
If able, please stand as I read to you from Ezra 9:1-5. TWoL: 1 After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, “The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. 2 For they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race1 has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands. And in this faithlessness the hand of the officials and chief men has been foremost.” 3 As soon as I heard this, I tore my garment and my cloak and pulled hair from my head and beard and sat appalled. 4 Then all who trembled at the words of the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of the returned exiles, gathered around me while I sat appalled until the evening sacrifice. 5 And at the evening sacrifice I rose from my fasting, with my garment and my cloak torn, and fell upon my knees and spread out my hands to the LORD my God.
In college, my friends and I were being discipled by our pastor in systematic theology. Every other week, we’d read two chapters of Wayne Grudem, then come together at 7 am on Friday morning and talk about what we’d read. And on one of those Fridays, we came to the chapter on biblical manhood and womanhood, and the topic about dating came up.
At that time, Candace and I had been dating for around two years, and our pastor was telling us about how dating changes nothing in one’s relationship to the opposite sex. That person we were either with our wanting to be with—she was still our sister in Christ, and our leadership over her never extended beyond a brother’s care for his sister. Boyfriends have no covenant responsibility over girlfriends—that’s for a husband and wife. Boyfriends have no right to any physical expressions with their girlfriend that would be wrong or inappropriate for brothers to have with their sisters—that’s for a husband and wife.
Naturally, I had more questions, since this was the first time I’d really talked about dating biblically, so as our pastor was leaving, I remember going up to him, and before I even talked about our relationship, he asked me, “how long have you two been dating?” I told him, “About two years.” Then, he looked at me, like he knew exactly what was going on in my heart, and he asked me, very simply, “Stephen, what are you doing?
I know two years of growing in social and emotional dependence upon each other is meant to lead to physical intimacy—intimacy reserved for husband and wife. Entertaining that possibility is sin in your life. Allowing her to entertain that possibility is causing her to sin. And it’s likely that you’re even leading some of your friends and others into temptation and sin. Stephen, it’s got to stop. Marry her or walk away from her until you’re ready to marry her. And if you marry her—make sure you marry her an honest man—a man with integrity—a man who values purity not just with her but with your God.”
The questions found in our text today are similar to my pastor’s on that day: how seriously do we take the problem of sin in our own lives and to what extent are we willing to fight for purity from them? The Israelites thought they were in a good place. Ezra 7 and 8 tell us that the temple was done and looked in order. The Persian king and governors were helping them. They weren’t being persecuted. They weren’t at war or under threat.
But Ezra 9 says that things weren’t going so well—that there was something at issue in their hearts, and our text teaches us that we have a tendency to ignore the problems within when everything around us seems comfortable. It teaches us that sometimes we are our own worst enemy, and we would do well to ensure what we are on the inside looks as pure as we think it should look on the outside. We must ask who deserves the greatest honour in our lives—is it our own desires and ambitions or is it God?
Our passage carries a deep, resonate warning here that for those of us who say we know God and desire the things of God—if he is our greatest joy and treasure, then we ought to do all that we can to make sure our love for him is pure—to make sure that it is undivided in its allegiance because God will not coexist with our sin. Only those who are pure in heart shall see him, and this is of paramount importance. We’re to set ourselves apart for a most holy God if we desire to be his people, and we start doing that, first, by …
1) Take Responsibility
Ezra 9:1 begins with the words, “After these things had been done …” After what things? After Ezra, by the hand of God that was upon him, had set out from Susa to come to Jerusalem to intercede and lead these people back to holiness. After God had sovereignly orchestrated not only the gift of the temple but a man by which that temple would retain its significance. After God had softened the heart of King Artaxerxes to the will of Ezra. After God had delivered Ezra safely without guard to Jerusalem.
In other words, Ezra 9:1 opens with grace. After grace had been poured out upon a people who were not only historically undeserving of it, but who, clearly, forgot or took advantage of it, the officials reveal something to Ezra: the people, the priests, and the Levites had not extricated themselves from abominable practices with the inhabitants of the land, and I want to draw two things to your attention from this verse.
The first is that everything I intend to say in this sermon does not precede grace. In fact, for me to say what I need to say in a passage like this, grace must be evident in your life. This text is for grace knowers and receivers. All that we’re to observe in this chapter presumes the presence of grace, and I think we’ve experienced a lot of it not just since the introduction of the person, Ezra, but since the first chapter before Ezra even came onto the scene.
Grace has been a major theme of this book whether the word grace has been explicitly used or not. Grace in the sovereignty and providence of God in orchestrating events to get these exiles back into their land and keep them there. Grace in the joy of God as he enabled them to finish the temple and worship in it. Grace in the protection of God from enemies in the land. Grace in the restoration of the people of God when they had lost their identity. Grace in the fellowship of God through the words and leadership of his prophets and priests.
God’s handprint is indelibly mixed with every event and every happiness that these Israelites have experienced since leaving Babylon. And what I want us to have etched into the very forefront of our minds this morning, if not felt in the marrow of our bones and in the softest, most affective parts of our hearts, is how much God’s grace defines, sustains, and brings satisfaction to us. He gives you grace so that you might know him—so that you might be affected by him—so that you might be in awe of him and transformed by him in a way where your life is markedly changed!
Yet, the second thing I want to draw your attention to is that grace is what makes our passage this morning so difficult because whether we want to admit it or not, the more grace we receive, the less capable we tend to become. Now, this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t receive grace when God or others offer it to us, nor is it to blame God for giving us grace. But because of our sinful nature—because we are so easily distracted, complacent, forgetful, or just plain wicked and selfish—when we taste grace in our lives, our instinct isn’t to reform ourselves and take an active approach of using that grace to change.
No, our reflex is, and perhaps you can identify with me in this, to receive grace, and when I fall into sin, it’s not to take responsibility over it, but to be more passive aggressive like, “God, if you love me, please take this away from me,” or “please help me not to do this anymore,” or “please cause me to be more obedient to your Word.” Do you hear it? My approach is to take the blame off myself and put the onus on God to do the work.
This is our default approach when it comes to sin. It’s to expect more grace that alleviates us of any burden or any effort on our part—an expectation that it’s God’s job and not ours. And it’s an approach riddled with problems, the most glaring of which is that it shows we, at least in part, do not understand how grace is meant to work. Yes, it’s good to seek help from God—it’s good to ask for grace, but grace is given so that we might be active participants in our change. Grace is given to make us capably holy.
That’s what Ezra 9:1 says: the people, the priests, and the Levites have not separated themselves from abominable practices. The verb is reflexive—it’s not passive. It’s not saying sin is God’s fault or God’s responsibility. It’s not saying that your tendency to sin is up to God to change you suddenly or magically. No, the grace has already been given for you to walk away—to change—to separate yourself—to take responsibility, and the question is: is your reflex to react in a way that honours the one who’s given you that grace, or is it to react in a way that demands that he give you more of it, while you do nothing in response?
If our desire is to be holy—if our desire is to offer the seat of honour to our God in a way that is worthy of the grace we’ve received, then this is where the purifying process must begin: with our taking responsibility and recognizing that our sin isn’t the fault of anyone or anything other than ourselves. And this may seem like the most obvious thing to do, but history tells us that it’s not. This blaming of others didn’t start with Israel.
No, it began with Adam when he blamed not only his wife for his own fall but God himself: “The woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit to eat.” It’s God’s fault. It’s my wife’s fault. It’s everyone’s fault but my own, and if we’re going to get this right—if we’re going to be a people pleasing and holy to the Lord, then we’ve got to fight against history—against our lineage—against our own natural human inclinations and take responsibility.
This is why this passage means nothing unless grace precedes and pervades your life—unless God has found you wanting, and in so doing, made you able to do what Adam and all of historical humanity could not do. Purity of this sort is difficult—the sort that pleases our Creator—and yet I pray that we understand why our God is worthy of our effort to be accountable and responsible for our own sin—because he’s given us the grace to do it. So, purify your love for God by, first, taking responsibility for your sin.
2) Consider the Effect
It may be the case that we are to blame for our own sin, but we must also see that our sin doesn’t affect us alone. Israel’s particular sin, in this case, was that they neglected the command in Deuteronomy 7 that requires Jewish men to marry Jewish women not because of racism or xenophobia, but because Israel was to be a nation set apart in its holiness. These surrounding nations were idol worshippers—lovers of money, food, power, their own intelligence, their own rhetoric, their own systems of government. To marry someone from these nations who had not disavowed or cleansed themselves of their idols would be to welcome into your home other gods, other values, other causes of strife.
In other words, to marry with the nations was to bring disorder and chaos into the house of the Lord, which was meant to be a house of peace, unity, singular, dedicated worship. I’ve said it before, but the point of salvation history was to bring a particular group of people into everlasting rest with their God, and there can be no rest where there are competing gods. There can be no rest where there are competing values and beliefs—just look at our nation and the political upheaval that exists between two competing parties—imagine inviting into your home hundreds of competing parties. Such a home would cease to exist.
But this is what was happening, and it wasn’t just affecting one home. What happens is that when pollution comes into one home, all the homes that are attached to it, aligned with it, related to it become polluted because it provides license for others to do the same. Worse yet, the people who were encouraging it and taking part in it were those in the highest positions of Jewish culture. They were the people who knew or ought to have known better—teachers of the law, and if the teacher’s doing it, then the students will too.
You know, I’ve often wondered why and how this happened. How the officials and chief men might have been the foremost of the unfaithful—and how their sin led to the corruption of an entire nation, so much so that when Jesus came into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, he wept over these people. He was broken over them. How could it have gotten so bad—how could leaders, who were supposed to cherish their people, lose sight of what’s good for them so completely? ([1] In my own life, it’s not that I stop loving people, it’s that I love myself more, and I lead others into sin because by focusing on myself, it permits them to focus more on themselves).
And [2] it was recently brought to my attention that around this time the culture of the world was booming. Confucius was born in 551 B.C., roughly a hundred years before Ezra comes to Jerusalem. Athens would have been reaching its zenith in power and influence in areas like philosophy, mathematics, and rhetoric. This was the time of Socrates. Pythagoras was developing his theorem. The Olympic Games had been around already for over 200 years. The whole world was coming alive and doing incredible things.
Yet, what we learn in the book of Ezra is that, out of all of that—out of all the incredible things taking place in the world—the center of God’s attention and the outworking of his plan for salvation was upon a city that just 125 years ago had been reduced to rubble and ash. It’s in Jerusalem where the events of eternal significance were unfolding.
And still yet, what is so distressing here, in our passage, is that it seems like the people of Israel were more interested in what was happening out there, marrying people from out there, bringing gods into their holy places, because they likely felt like they were being left behind—that they were being made too insignificant—that they were missing out.
And here, church, is what happens when we embrace the lie of the world and pursue the lusts of our sin—when we start trying to pursue what’s out there and attempt to bring it in here without warning. It doesn’t just ruin the opportunity for you to experience the matchless worth, power, and wisdom of our God, but it ruins the chance for your fellow believers and the generations after you from having that opportunity for themselves. It ruins the testimony. It ruins the significance of knowing a God who works in, through, and amongst insignificant people like us to accomplish the most significant, eternal things.
There may be times where you think, “this little sin I have, I’m just going to keep it to myself, I’m not going to confess it, and I’m not going to work on it or make plans to kill it because it won’t hurt anybody,” but right here—don’t you see—we’re told that’s us deceiving ourselves—that’s us thinking that God’s plans for us—that God himself is insufficient. But, church, please, I beg you to see that God and his gospel are always sufficient. We need nothing else (Ps. 23:1). Bringing the world in, letting it influence us, corrupt us, or turn our eyes from our greatest treasure in God through Christ is precisely how Israel fell apart, and if we’re not careful, it’s how we’ll fall apart too, which leads me to my third point …
3) Humble Your Heart
We are to vigilantly protect this house from the destructive decay that our sin causes. And I hope you see how we might do this in several ways according to our text. The most obvious way being to simply stay away from sin and those things that tempt you toward sin. Now, I say “simply” knowing that such a thing is not simple at all. Let’s take the most direct example that we can draw from our passage, namely, that of dating or marrying people who are not Christians.
Some of you here may be dating a non-Christian, thinking of dating a non-Christian, maybe even considering marrying a non-Christian, yet what is clear not only from our passage but from many texts in the New Testament as well (1 Cor 7, 9; 2 Cor 6; Eph 5; Rev 21) is that to do such a thing is sin because it brings inherent strife into your home, and if you’re a part of a church—it will likely bring strife into the church as well!
Now, for those of you who are Christians already married to a non-Christian, I’m not telling you to divorce your non-Christian spouse. You’ve made a covenant that is not to be broken—1 Cor 7 makes that clear, but for those of you not yet covenanted, the Bible tells you, “Stop it.” And I know that that kind of conversation—putting an end to that kind of relationship that may be very important and dear to you is not a simple thing to do. Yet, it is something that you must do for the safety of your faith, the faith of those around you, and for the hope we have in God. Choose to flee sin and hold fast to your God.
Secondly, you’re to protect this house not only by fleeing sin and its temptations but by coming together and identifying with those struggling in the difficultly of putting their sin to death as they are confessed to you. If someone comes to you seeking accountability for their sin, which we all ought to be doing, you’re to cling to them, comfort them, weep with them, take drastic actions for them, pray for them., listen to them, speak truth to them, and befriend them even when they are not worthy of your friendship. Because in so doing, you display Christ, and you win them to his heart.
This is what Ezra did. He didn’t run towards them with spear in hand, looking to condemn them. No, “as soon as he heard this, he tore his garment and his cloak, he pulled his hair from his head and beard, and he sat appalled—he sat utterly devastated.” Yet, what we need to know is that a person who did these things—tearing clothes, etc.—in that day was not because he was angry or merely sad for those who had sinned. Rather, such an act showed that he, himself, identified as the sinner.
Here is where the majesty of this story comes to its peak because Ezra has done nothing wrong—he is blameless in every sense of the word—and yet, he treats himself and identifies himself as one who is deeply acquainted with the sin and the sorrow of his people. So, distraught is he by what he sees as a condemnation upon his own self that he simply sits there—unable to move, unable to speak, unable to function. Why? Because he bears up their sin, he suffers it, and he grieves over it as his own, and as the man sent by God for his people, he cares so deeply for them and is so concerned for them—that the wrath of God might now come for them—that he simply does not know what to do.
And such a thing needs to be asked of us: when was the last time we wept for the brokenness of someone we loved? When was the last time we were so pained in our chest that it was hard to move, to breathe, to speak because we identified with the agony of their sin and yet found ourselves at the mercy of God? Christ does this for us, yet not as one unable to act or do anything in our hopeless. No, he does something—something not even Ezra could do by dying upon a cross and bearing the full weight of wrath for our sin.
How has his death humbled you? How has it changed you, who upon receiving such immense grace, to be willing to go to the sinner and broken hearted and give yourself up as a sacrifice for their sake?
This is what it means to be in Christ. This is what it means to be his church—that the sins of others, together, become our sorrow, and the injury done by them to God’s honour and the souls of others is what affects and injures our hearts (Matthew Henry). Don’t let sin be unaffecting—let it affect you greatly towards humility. And when that sin shows you our hopelessness and sorrow—when it becomes evident that we can do nothing to cancel its debt, I hope we are humble enough to bring it to God, just like Ezra does as he fasts, as his people gather to him, and as he falls to his knees, spreading his hands to heaven for their sake.
One who came after him did this for us, as well, only when his hands were pointed to heaven, nails were driven through them, his garment and cloak weren’t torn by himself, but torn off of him and gambled away, and instead of ripping out his hair, they stuck a crown of thorns on his head so that by his blood our sin-infested wounds might be healed.
Christ died and became that which might be appalling to God so that we might become the righteousness and treasure of God. Make sure, then, that your love—your devotion for this God who gave us his only Son is pure and undivided, for he is worthy of the effort, and his glory shall be a people who desire and pursue holiness, as he, our Lord, is holy.
Comments are closed.