Coming Home

Read it: Ezra 1; Nehemiah 8; Esther 4

Seventy years is a long time to be homesick. When we left the story, Jerusalem was a ruin. The Babylonian army had burned the temple Solomon built, pulled down the city walls and marched thousands of people hundreds of miles east to Babylon, in what is now Iraq. But through the prophet Jeremiah, God had made a promise with a number on it: “When Babylon’s seventy years are complete, I will attend to you and confirm My promise to restore you to this place” (Jeremiah 29:10).

Then the world changed. In 539 BC the Persians, from what is now Iran, captured Babylon, and their king, Cyrus, did something no one expected. The book of Ezra opens like this: “In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken through Jeremiah, the LORD stirred the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia” (Ezra 1:1). Cyrus announced that any Jew who wanted to could go home and rebuild the house of the LORD in Jerusalem. He even handed back the gold and silver bowls that Nebuchadnezzar had looted from the temple. Long before, the prophet Isaiah had named him, with God saying of Cyrus, “My shepherd will fulfill all that I desire” (Isaiah 44:28). The most powerful man on earth was a piece in a story he didn’t know he was in.

Laughing and crying at once

Not everyone went, but a company of about fifty thousand made the long journey back and found their city in rubble. They set up the altar first, then laid the foundation of a new temple. When the stones were in place, the priests blew trumpets and the people sang, “For He is good; for His loving devotion to Israel endures forever” (Ezra 3:11). But some of the old men, who could remember Solomon’s temple in its glory, looked at this small foundation and wept. “The people could not distinguish the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping” (Ezra 3:13). Coming home after a disaster is like that: grateful and grieving in the same breath.

It took about twenty more years, with plenty of opposition and delay, before the temple was finished.

A queen in a dangerous palace

Meanwhile, far to the east, the Jews who stayed behind were in danger. The book of Esther is set in Susa, one of the Persian royal cities, under King Xerxes. Esther was a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai, and she was chosen out of many young women to be queen. She kept her family background quiet.

The king’s most powerful official, Haman, hated Mordecai for refusing to bow to him. So Haman “sought to destroy all of Mordecai’s people, the Jews, throughout the kingdom of Xerxes” (Esther 3:6). He cast lots, called pur, to pick the day, and got the king to sign a law ordering the slaughter.

Mordecai begged Esther to go to the king. But Persian law said anyone who walked into the king’s inner court uninvited could be put to death, unless he held out his gold sceptre. Mordecai’s reply is one of the most famous lines in the Bible: “And who knows if perhaps you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14). Esther made her choice. She asked all the Jews in Susa to fast for her for three days, and then: “I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish!” (Esther 4:16).

The king held out the sceptre. Haman’s plot was exposed, and a new law allowed the Jews to defend themselves on the day set for their destruction. The end of the book records that fighting honestly, and it is hard reading. Jews still remember the rescue every year at the festival of Purim. Oddly, the book of Esther never once mentions God by name. Yet His hand is everywhere: in a girl in the right place, and in Mordecai’s confidence that “relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place” (Esther 4:14) even if she stayed silent.

The day the Book was opened

Back in Jerusalem, the city still had no walls, which in that world meant no safety. A Jew named Nehemiah, cupbearer to the Persian king, heard the news: “When I heard these words, I sat down and wept. I mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven” (Nehemiah 1:4). The king let him go, and despite mockery and threats, “the wall was completed in fifty-two days” (Nehemiah 6:15).

Then came the moment this chapter is named for. The people gathered in a square inside the walls “and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses” (Nehemiah 8:1). Ezra stood on a wooden platform and read aloud from daybreak until noon. When he opened the scroll, everyone stood up. Teachers moved among the crowd explaining it, “so that the people could understand what was being read” (Nehemiah 8:8).

The people began to weep, because God’s Word showed them how far they had wandered. But Nehemiah stopped them: “Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). So they went home to feast, “because they understood the words that had been made known to them” (Nehemiah 8:12).

They were home, but the story wasn’t finished. There was no king from David’s family on the throne. The land was a small corner of someone else’s empire. The new temple was plainer than the old. God had promised through the prophet Haggai, “The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former” (Haggai 2:9). How could that be?

Where Jesus is in this

Haggai’s promise came true in a way nobody predicted. Centuries later, in that same rebuilt temple (by then enlarged by King Herod), a young man from Galilee walked through the courts. When people asked Him for a sign, Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” John explains: “But Jesus was speaking about the temple of His body” (John 2:19, 21). The greater glory was not a grander building. It was God Himself, present in a human body.

And the scene in Nehemiah 8, God’s people standing to hear the Scriptures read and explained, has a sequel too. In the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus stood up, read from the scroll of Isaiah, sat down and said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Ezra explained the Book. Jesus said the Book was about Him.

Think about it: Esther didn’t choose where she ended up, but she did choose what to do there. Is there a place you’ve been put, a school, a team, a family, where staying silent is the safe option and speaking up would cost you something?

Go deeper: Prayer and Praying Men by E. M. Bounds — Bounds follows Nehemiah from the day he heard about the broken walls to the last line of his book, and shows prayer woven into every stage of the rebuilding, including the quick, silent prayer he sent up while the king waited for his answer. Start with chapter 9, “Nehemiah, the Praying Builder”.