EZRA: A MAN OF THE WORD
The article was originally published in the Covenanter Witness. For the latest on the Covenanter Witness Magazine make sure you follow them on Facebook @covenanterwitness.
In this series of articles, we have been exploring the theme of ‘restoration’, and we have seen a three-fold restoration taking place. Phase one involved the restoration of God’s people to Jerusalem (chapters 1 and 2; phase two involved the restoration of the temple to its function (chapters 3-6).
In chapter 7, we enter a new section of the book. We have jumped forward 58 years to 458 B. C., and at last we meet the man for whom this book is named. Ezra is the man who God will use for the third phase of the restoration: faithfulness to God’s Word.
As we look at Ezra the man, at least three things are worth noting about him:
1) Ezra was immersed in God’s Word
In the opening verses of the chapter we are given a genealogy of Ezra, underlining his priestly credentials. However, as well as being a priest he is also a scribe – someone trained as an expert in God’s law. “He was a scribe skilled in the Law of Moses that the LORD, the God of Israel, had given…” (Ezra 7:6).
Ezra was immersed in God’s Word. Verse 10 is the key verse for summing him up: “Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.”
Firstly, Ezra set his heart to study God’s Word. He thought long and hard about what the Scriptures say. One can imagine Ezra getting up each morning, taking a scroll down from the shelf, and routinely sitting down to consider what God’s word had to say. Not just reading it, but studying it, learning it, inwardly digesting it, meditating on what it meant, praying for God to give him greater insight into his Word.
But more than that, Ezra lived in line with what he learned from God’s Word. Ezra was no ‘ivory tower’ theologian, who enjoyed gaining lots of head knowledge about the Scriptures, reading lots of theology and knowing all the big bible doctrines, but whose life was left unchanged; rather, he set his heart both to study God’s Word and to obey it. Ezra’s mind was saturated with the Bible, but so was his life. He studied it, and he did it.
In the first chapter of the letter of James, we’re reminded of the importance of this. James writes, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22). That’s the kind of man Ezra was – not a hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts.
Thirdly, Ezra was committed to teach God’s Word. That was the main reason for him making the journey back to Jerusalem; he went to teach God’s Word to God’s people, so that, as God’s Word was preached, God’s people might be drawn back to lives of greater faithfulness to God.
As we get to the later chapters of the book, we’ll see that this was not always easy. Ezra encountered big moral failings in God’s people, and it would take some spiritual guts for him to apply God’s Word to their lives; but that is what he had set himself to do.
In these three ways, Ezra was a man immersed in God’s Word: he studied it; he obeyed it; and he taught it.
2) Ezra enjoyed God’s blessing
There is a phrase that keeps on cropping up in this chapter, and in the next chapter as well. We’re told that ‘the hand of God was upon Ezra’. In other words, he enjoyed God’s blessing in all that he did.
Notice verse 9: “on the first day of the first month [Ezra] began to go up from Babylonia, and on the first day of the fifth month he came to Jerusalem, for the good hand of his God was on him.”
Babylonia to Jerusalem was a long journey, probably about a thousand miles, through dangerous territory. It was a huge risk for Ezra to make that journey, but make it he did, and it went very smoothly and safely. It took him and his travelling companions only four months, and the reason is given in verse 9: the blessing of God was on Ezra’s life.
That same phrase occurs back in verse 6 as well: “the king granted him all that he asked, for the hand of the LORD his God was on him.”
We find out here that this journey to Jerusalem was at Ezra’s instigation. He had approached the King of Persia, Artaxerxes, asking for permission to go to Jerusalem and do the LORD’s work there. Thanks to the LORD’s hand of blessing, the king granted him everything that he had asked. In verses 11 to 27 we have a transcript of a letter that King Artaxerxes gave to Ezra, promising him all sorts of provision from the Persians to help finance and support the reforms that Ezra wanted to bring to life in Jerusalem.
It’s a remarkable thing that a pagan, unbelieving king should be so incredibly generous, and so supportive of God’s work and God’s law. But, as the book of Proverbs puts it, “The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1).
Ezra was a man immersed in God’s Word, and who enjoyed God’s blessing. In all that he sought to do for the LORD, the hand of the LORD was upon him, protecting him, guiding him, providing for him, even working providentially in the hearts of unbelievers so that Ezra might accomplish the work that God had for him to do.
3) Ezra gave God the glory
Ezra is a great example to us in many ways. But he is not the hero of this chapter, or this book – God, of course, is the hero. He works through Ezra, but it is ultimately God who is doing the work of restoration here, as he has been all the way through the book.
Ezra knows that – and so for the first time in the book, Ezra speaks for himself in the final two verses of the chapter, verses 27 and 28. It is notable that what he says is a word of praise to God for all that he has done: “Blessed be the LORD.”
He praises God for the way in which he had worked in the heart of the King of Persia to be so generous and supportive of the religious reforms going on in Jerusalem. He also praises God for his steadfast love extended to Ezra, so that the king and all his officials acted favourably towards him. For all of this, Ezra gave God the glory.
May God take these lessons from the life of Ezra and apply them to us in our day as well. May we be those who, like Ezra, are immersed in God’s Word – studying it, obeying what it says, and teaching it to others. May we enjoy God’s blessing, as we seek to do what he has called us to do, and see him opening the way for us in the process. And, as we see that happen, may we follow Ezra’s example by giving all the glory to God!
