Year 2, Day 47: Ezra 9

Struggling

Ezra 9 is a tough chapter.  It is a difficult chapter for two reasons.  First, it is difficult to read.  There is no action here.  Ezra discovers sin and prays to God.  It is a chapter of conversation and theology, which makes it hard to read and understand.  Second, it is hard to read because it is a chapter that should cause deep and internal probing.  It is a chapter that once understood it will cause us to enter into a period of deep introspection.

A Godly Pattern

So let’s begin where the chapter begins.  Ezra hears the news: the people are intermarrying with the native inhabitants.  Their hearts are turning away from God.  Before long their hearts will follow their spouses into the religions of the Canaanites and all the other native inhabitants.  Before long, the Hebrew nation will be back where it was before the Assyrian captivity.  Ezra tears his clothes and weeps, because He knows what is going on.  It seems like such a sad moment after so much joy in this book of the Bible.

But let’s stop here for a second and go one step back.  The fact that Ezra is able to be in this place is actually a good thing.  Look at the flow of this book.  The people return to the land.  The Temple is rebuilt.  Worship begins anew.  A man of God comes into their midst and begins teaching.  Sin is exposed.  {Imagine that, right?  A teacher of God comes into our midst and sin is exposed!  It’s a natural consequence to the Word of God coming into our life.}

This is inherently a good thing!  Even though the last step in that chain is a dark one, the chain itself is a wonderful chain!  It is good to build people up to a point of desiring a greater place of worship!  But we must understand that a necessary step in that process is this step where sinfulness is exposed.  All of us who have ever returned from a point in our life of captivity under sin have had to come to a point where our sin is exposed.  It is a natural part of the process – it is a good part of the process.  It may not be particularly enjoyable, but it is a good part of the process!

At the same time, it is important to understand that the process as I listed it above is not the complete process.  Exposure of sin must bring about one final step.  It is a step in which we must make a choice.  Up until now God was doing all the work and making all the earlier steps possible.  God makes it possible to return to His Promised Land.   God makes it possible for the temple to be rebuilt out of the consequences of our sinful corruption. {For us in the Christian era the temple is our being.} God makes it possible to worship Him.  God makes it possible for His ways to be taught among us.  God exposes our sin.  Then we hit the one step that is under our control: respond.

The Response

How do we respond?  Well, that is what ultimately will determine whether or not the process is a good process or a tragic process.  If we respond by hearing our sinfulness and repenting of it, then it is a great process!  If we respond in rebellion and refuse to repent of our sinfulness, then it is still a good process but it has a tragic end.  It is still a good process because God’s hand was at work.  It is tragic if we don’t respond to God’s hand at work.

But you will notice something about the response.  It doesn’t only involve confession.  It is not enough for the people of the land to say, “Yup, we screwed up.  Sorry, God.”  No, they have to make it right.  They have to fix the consequences of their sin.  In fact, they have to put away their sin.  They have to put away their foreign spouses.  Trust, me, there isn’t much of a bigger life altering repentance than what this chapter suggests.

I imagine it quite literally went something like this.  Ezra’s teaching is that the people need to say to their spouses: “Either you become Jewish and follow my God with all your heart or this marriage is over.”  That’s pretty blunt, but that is pretty much what this chapter is suggesting.

Please don’t hear me saying that this is my Christian advice for marriage.  I believe that there are several places in Paul’s writings especially that talk about being loyal to non-Christian spouses in hopes of winning them back to Christ.  I think that point has a very valid place in this conversation if we are solely talking about this chapter as it pertains to marriage.  {See 1 Corinthians 7, for example.}

But in more general terms, I am saying that this is great advice when it comes to dealing with sin.  There is no place in our life for “entertaining sin.”  The true disciple of God doesn’t say, “I’ll follow God, but I’m going to keep this sinful dynamic of my life around over here and hope that I’ll learn how to redeem it for God.  Because you know what?  Sin cannot be made righteous!  Sin can only be tacked to the cross and abandoned.  Those who sin can be made righteous and forgiven, but in doing so we are called away from our sinfulness.  That, I believe, is the point of Ezra’s prayer and his interaction with the people.

Once more I find myself repeating a truth that I tend to forget.  Becoming a follower of Christ is about becoming the person God wants me to be.  I often want my faith to lead me to a place where I can be a Christianized version of me still doing the things I want to do.  Following God is about abandoning sin, not manipulating God’s forgiveness so I can embrace it.

What can we learn from this chapter?  God’s process in our life is good, but it is also often painful.  God leads us to crossroads of repentance.  But it is up to us to decide if we are going to follow the sin and abandon God or if we are going to follow God and abandon sin.  In either case, we cannot think we can follow God and keep sin around.  Those paths diverge at the point of repentance.

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