The Book of Ezra records one of the most remarkable moments in Israel’s history: the return of the Jews from seventy years of exile in Babylon. This overview of the Book of Ezra will give you the framework you need to understand the post-exilic period — the three returns from exile, the rebuilding of the temple, and why the prophet Haggai had to preach to a people who had stopped working on God’s house. But more than history, Ezra confronts us with a sobering spiritual truth: we never plan to stop for long, but temporary breaks have a way of quietly becoming permanent.
When I first became a Christian, I knew almost nothing about the Bible, and I had lots of questions. But God, in His kindness, put a man in my life who never seemed to tire of them: Barry Branaman. Barry was the first person to make me feel like the Bible was not too big for me to understand. After a midweek study at his house, we would sit in his living room for hours — sometimes late into the evening — as he helped me understand the Old Testament. So when I opened a book like Haggai, a book many people might skip right over, I was not lost.
In 2012, my wife, Katie, and I drove down to California to stay with Barry and his wife, Kathy. By then, I had been a pastor for about five years, and I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him that the hours he had spent with me in that living room had borne fruit. Sadly, he unexpectedly passed away in his sleep two years later at only 58, so I am glad I had that opportunity.
Here is a verse that comes to mind when I think of Barry:
Hebrews 11:4 — Though he died, he still speaks.
I know this verse is not about Barry, but many things I teach today are influenced by what he taught me. In that sense, though he died, he still speaks when I pass along what he taught me. So in this post, I want to do for you what Barry did for me: give you some Old Testament framework so you can better understand Ezra and Haggai.
Here is a simple way to view the 39 books of the Old Testament:
17 history books — Genesis to Esther
5 wisdom books — Job to Song of Solomon
17 prophets — Isaiah to Malachi
And here is a high-level view of the story contained in the historical books. God created a people for Himself and gave them a land — the Promised Land — and at the center of that land, in the city of Jerusalem, He gave them a temple. The temple was the great sign that God dwelt in the midst of His people. As long as it stood, the message was unmistakable: God is here with us.
But over time, the people turned from God and worshiped idols. God sent prophets to rebuke and warn them about what would happen if they did not repent, but they refused. Eventually, God did what He said He would do. He sent the nation of Babylon, and in 586 BC, Babylon tore down the walls of Jerusalem, burned the temple to the ground, and carried the Jews into exile — hundreds of miles from home, in a foreign land.
But here is the interesting thing. God prophesied through Jeremiah that the Jews would be in exile for only seventy years, and then they would return to their land:
Jeremiah 25:11–12 — [The Jews] shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation.
God said that after seventy years, He would punish the Babylonians. He raised up the Persian Empire to do so, and then Cyrus, the king of Persia, allowed the Jews to return to their land.
Pre-Exile, Exile, and Post-Exile
This allows us to divide the Jews’ history into three sections: pre-exile (before 586 BC), exile (586–538 BC in Babylon), and post-exile (after 538 BC, the return).
It is important to notice that no historical books record the Jews’ exile. The historical books cover the period before the exile (Genesis through 2 Chronicles) and after the exile (Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther). To understand the Jews’ history during the exile, we have to use the prophets — and the prophets can be divided into the same three sections:
Because Haggai prophesied after the exile, we really need to understand that period of Jewish history — and the Book of Ezra covers the history from the time of Haggai’s prophecies. That is why we must understand this book.
Ezra 1: God Keeps His Word
Let’s look at Ezra 1:1 to see what happened with the Persian king, Cyrus. Because this is a long verse packed with important information, we will break it up piece by piece:
Ezra 1:1a — In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia,
This is 538 BC, about seventy years after the Babylonians took the first group of Jews into exile.
Ezra 1:1b — that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled,
This refers to the prophecy from Jeremiah 25 that the Jews would be in exile for only seventy years, which brings us to our first lesson.
Lesson One: We Can Trust God to Keep His Word
Let me tell you what doesn’t happen: nations don’t conquer nations and then release the conquered people. When God made the prophecy through Jeremiah, it looked historically impossible for the Jews to return from exile. But God delivered, right on schedule, using a pagan king to do it.
And there is great application for us. When we see God’s faithfulness to previous things He said, it should encourage us to trust Him to fulfill the other things He said:
He has promised He will never leave us nor forsake us.
He has promised to work all things together for good for those who love Him.
He has promised that He who began a good work in us will bring it to completion.
He has promised that Christ will return.
Some of those promises can feel as unlikely to us as release from Babylon must have felt to the exiles — especially when we are in the middle of the seventy years, so to speak, with no evidence that anything is changing. But we can be confident that God will do what He has said He will do.
How God Stirred Up Cyrus
Now look at how God accomplished this:
Ezra 1:1c — the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia,
How did God stir up Cyrus? There is a fascinating possibility: God had prophesied through Isaiah over one hundred years earlier that He would use Cyrus to see Jerusalem rebuilt:
Isaiah 44:24, 28 — “I am the Lord… who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose’; saying of Jerusalem, ‘She shall be built,’ and of the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid.'”
Someone could very well have shown Cyrus this prophecy, and he would have seen his name written in Scripture one hundred years before he was born. If I had to guess who showed him, it would be Daniel, because we can tell from his book that he became very prominent and favored in Persia, just as he was in Babylon.
So God stirs up Cyrus, and here is what he does:
Ezra 1:1d–2 — so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Cyrus recognized that God commanded him to have the Jews rebuild the temple.
A Spiritual Mission, Not Just a Homecoming
This is the first of five times the temple, or the house of God, is mentioned in Ezra 1:2–7:
Ezra 1:3 — Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem.
Ezra 1:4 — And let each survivor, in whatever place he sojourns, be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, besides freewill offerings for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.
Ezra 1:5 — Then rose up the heads of the fathers’ houses of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites, everyone whose spirit God had stirred to go up to rebuild the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem…
Ezra 1:7 — Cyrus the king also brought out the vessels of the house of the Lord that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the house of his gods.
You can see the focus of this return is not just re-occupying the Promised Land. It is a spiritual mission to rebuild the temple, or God’s house.
Here is an important question: we are talking about the temple being rebuilt, so why is it called the house? I might be wrong, but I think this is God’s way of looking beyond just the rebuilding of a physical temple to the house of David — connecting this with the Davidic covenant, or with God’s promise that the Messiah would come from David’s house.
Additionally, I want to invite you to read Ezra this way: Luke wrote Luke and Acts, and Acts is a continuation of Luke. It is the same with 2 Chronicles and Ezra — Ezra wrote both, and Ezra is a continuation of Chronicles.
Only 2% Returned
Let me show you something interesting:
Ezra 2:64 — The whole assembly together was 42,360,
This is the total number of Jews who returned in the first wave. That might sound like a large number, but there were probably two to three million Jews, so this represents only about 2%. If only about 2% returned to the Promised Land, what happened to the other 98%? They remained in Persia — and that brings us to the next important part of the Jews’ history after the exile.
The Three Returns in the Book of Ezra and Nehemiah
The Jews did not return all at once. They returned in three waves over almost a century:
Here is the simplest way to think of the three post-exilic historical books:
Ezra and Nehemiah record the history of the Jews returning to the Promised Land in those three waves.
Esther is the history of the Jews who remained in Persia, and it occurs between the first and second returns — between Ezra 6 and Ezra 7.
A helpful timeline of the period: first return under Zerubbabel (538 BC) → Haggai and Zechariah prophesy (520 BC) → temple completed (515 BC) → Esther (480 BC) → second return under Ezra (458 BC) → third return under Nehemiah (444 BC) → Malachi (430 BC).
Ezra 7: The Second Return
Now let’s briefly look at the second return, led by Ezra himself:
Ezra 7:1 — Now after this, in the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, Ezra the son of Seraiah, son of Azariah, son of Hilkiah,
“After this” means after the first return. The first return took place in 538 BC. We are now jumping ahead eighty years to 458 BC, the seventh year of Artaxerxes’ reign. Artaxerxes is the son of Xerxes, the king Esther married.
Ezra was a priest, and because he led the second return, the chapter begins by introducing him, showing that his return reestablished the Aaronic priesthood in the land.
Ezra 7:6 — this Ezra went up from Babylonia. He was a scribe skilled in the Law of Moses that the Lord, the God of Israel, had given, and the king granted him all that he asked, for the hand of the Lord his God was on him.
The other office Ezra held, in addition to being a priest, was that of a scribe. Ezra’s expertise in the Law was very important because the Jews had been in Babylon for seventy years, and it was not a Jewish environment focused on God’s Law. It took an expert like Ezra to reestablish the Law in the land and rebuild the spiritual condition of the people.
Ezra 7:7 — And there went up also to Jerusalem, in the seventh year of Artaxerxes the king, some of the people of Israel, and some of the priests and Levites, the singers and gatekeepers, and the temple servants.
So here it is: the second return. These are the people who accompanied Ezra.
Follow me for a moment. Luke wrote the book of Acts, and he joined Paul in chapter 16. From then on, much of Acts is written in the first person because Luke is recounting what happened firsthand. The Book of Ezra is similar. The first six chapters are written in the third person as Ezra recounts what happened with Zerubbabel during the first return. Beginning at Ezra 7:27, the rest of the book is written in the first person as Ezra recounts the return he led:
Ezra 7:27–28 — Blessed be the Lord, the God of our fathers, who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king, to beautify the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem, and who extended to me his steadfast love before the king and his counselors, and before all the king’s mighty officers. I took courage, for the hand of the Lord my God was on me, and I gathered leading men from Israel to go up with me.
Notice Ezra blessed the God “who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king.” This is another remarkable example showing the sovereignty of God over earthly kings.
Lesson Two: God Turns Kings’ Hearts
We’ve now seen God turn a king’s heart twice. For the first return, He “stirred up the spirit of Cyrus.” Now He does the same thing with Artaxerxes.
And if we looked at the third return with Nehemiah, he didn’t march into the throne room and demand to return to Jerusalem. He prayed for about four months, and his prayer ended this way:
Nehemiah 1:11 — “Give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.”
“This man” is Artaxerxes, the most powerful ruler on earth, and God answered Nehemiah’s prayer so that we also read this:
Nehemiah 2:8b — “The king granted me what I asked, for the good hand of my God was upon me.”
God controlled the king’s heart in Nehemiah’s day just as He did in Zerubbabel’s and Ezra’s day. Proverbs 21:1 is almost a theme verse for the three returns:
Proverbs 21:1 — The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will.
Here is the application for us: sometimes — or maybe all the time — the world looks really crazy. It is important for us to remember that God is still in charge. The Old Testament focuses on Israel because it is the nation from which the Messiah came, but this can lead us to think God cared only about, or was only working in, the nation of Israel. These are good examples of God working in the hearts of Gentile, pagan kings.
The Work Stops for Sixteen Years
During the first return under Zerubbabel, the people gathered in Jerusalem, built the altar (Ezra 3:1–2), and began rebuilding the temple. But whenever work is done for God, there is opposition. When God wants us to do something, we can be sure the devil wants to stop it. Ezra 4:4–5 tells us the people of the land discouraged and frustrated the builders “all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius” — the work stalled almost as soon as the foundation was laid.
Ezra 4:24 — Then the work on the house of God that is in Jerusalem stopped, and it ceased until the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia.
They stopped working on the temple, but God had a remedy for them. Look at the very next verse:
Ezra 5:1–2 — Now the prophets, Haggai and Zechariah the son of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem, in the name of the God of Israel who was over them. Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak arose and began to rebuild the house of God that is in Jerusalem, and the prophets of God were with them, supporting them.
Haggai and Zechariah began prophesying, and the people resumed work. Now I know what you’re saying: “I wish I knew what Haggai and Zechariah said to get people working again!” Well, I have good news: our next study begins at Haggai 1:1 so we can see exactly what he said. And if you want to know what Zechariah said — mostly visions he shared — you can read his book.
For now, I want to draw your attention to something significant by asking a question: when the Jews stopped working on the temple, how long do you think they expected to stop? A few days? A few weeks? Maybe a couple of months?
Ezra 5:1 immediately follows Ezra 4:24, but as is often the case with Scripture, even when verses sit next to each other, a lot of time can pass between them. There are about sixteen years between the stopping in one verse and the starting in the next. I doubt a single person laid down his tools that day and said, “I will get back to work on the temple in sixteen years.”
Lesson Three: We Let Temporary Breaks Become Permanent
Nobody wakes up and says, “I am going to neglect the things of God for the next decade and a half.” That is not how it happens. It happens one ordinary day at a time. We stop temporarily, and then the temporary quietly becomes permanent.
Think about how this works in our spiritual lives:
We missed our devotional time one morning because we were up late the night before. Completely understandable. But one morning becomes one week, one week becomes one month, and then one day we realize we cannot remember the last time we read our Bibles on our own.
Maybe our routine changed. We used to get up early, pray, and read the Word. Now it is our routine to sleep in, shower, and rush to work. We did not decide to build a new routine — we just stopped the old one “for a little while.”
A family misses a Sunday of church because someone was sick. Next week, there is a birthday party. The week after that, a camping trip. No one in the family said, “Let’s stop gathering with God’s people.” They just kept saying, “We will be back next week” — and next week kept moving to the next week.
A couple stopped praying together during a busy season — a new baby, a demanding job, a house project. The busy season ended, but the praying never resumed.
Or maybe it’s a relationship you used to invest in — with a spouse, a child, or a coworker God wants you to share the gospel with or disciple — and you put it on pause, but now it has been months or even years.
And here is the sobering part: with each passing day, restarting gets harder and harder.
Think about this. The Jews laid the foundation for the temple. It was in the middle of Jerusalem. It must have become part of the landscape. They saw it regularly. Walked past it regularly. Until they finally stopped noticing it completely. We stop praying, or stop fellowshipping, or stop reading the Bible, or stop going to church for so long that it becomes normal to us.
Lesson Four: We Start Again When God Stirs Us
If Lesson Three left you discouraged, this lesson is the remedy, and I do not want you to miss it, because it is woven through everything we have read.
Notice a word that keeps appearing. In Ezra 1:1, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus. In Ezra 1:5, the people who returned were “everyone whose spirit God had stirred.” And in Haggai 1:14, “the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel… and the spirit of Joshua… and the spirit of all the remnant of the people. And they came and worked on the house of the Lord.”
Every forward movement in this story — the decree, the return, the resumption of the work — happens the same way: God stirs, and people move.
Here is the hope in that: what took sixteen years to slide into did not take sixteen years to reverse. When we study Haggai, we will see that from the day Haggai first preached to the day the people were back at work was about three weeks. Sixteen years of neglect, undone in twenty-three days — because they heard God’s Word and responded to it.
Conclusion: Let God’s Word Stir You
Consider how God stirred up the Jews in Ezra 5:1:
He didn’t send an army.
He didn’t send a new king.
He didn’t even send another nation to come and beat them up again.
He sent two preachers with His Word. Sixteen years of compromise, but what finally convicted them and brought them to repentance was God’s Word.
So if the Holy Spirit has convicted you about something in your life, don’t walk away thinking the drift is permanent. Let God’s Word work in your heart, too. The same God who stirred up pagan kings and a stalled nation is able to stir us up into action. And the ordinary way He does it is the way He did it here: through His Word. Put yourself under it. Keep coming back to it. Restarting is not something we work up; it is something God stirs up — and He delights to do it, if we will only act on it.
Overview of the Book of Ezra: We Never Plan to Stop for Long
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The Book of Ezra records one of the most remarkable moments in Israel’s history: the return of the Jews from seventy years of exile in Babylon. This overview of the Book of Ezra will give you the framework you need to understand the post-exilic period — the three returns from exile, the rebuilding of the temple, and why the prophet Haggai had to preach to a people who had stopped working on God’s house. But more than history, Ezra confronts us with a sobering spiritual truth: we never plan to stop for long, but temporary breaks have a way of quietly becoming permanent.
When I first became a Christian, I knew almost nothing about the Bible, and I had lots of questions. But God, in His kindness, put a man in my life who never seemed to tire of them: Barry Branaman. Barry was the first person to make me feel like the Bible was not too big for me to understand. After a midweek study at his house, we would sit in his living room for hours — sometimes late into the evening — as he helped me understand the Old Testament. So when I opened a book like Haggai, a book many people might skip right over, I was not lost.
In 2012, my wife, Katie, and I drove down to California to stay with Barry and his wife, Kathy. By then, I had been a pastor for about five years, and I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him that the hours he had spent with me in that living room had borne fruit. Sadly, he unexpectedly passed away in his sleep two years later at only 58, so I am glad I had that opportunity.
Here is a verse that comes to mind when I think of Barry:
I know this verse is not about Barry, but many things I teach today are influenced by what he taught me. In that sense, though he died, he still speaks when I pass along what he taught me. So in this post, I want to do for you what Barry did for me: give you some Old Testament framework so you can better understand Ezra and Haggai.
Table of Contents
How the Old Testament Fits Together
Here is a simple way to view the 39 books of the Old Testament:
And here is a high-level view of the story contained in the historical books. God created a people for Himself and gave them a land — the Promised Land — and at the center of that land, in the city of Jerusalem, He gave them a temple. The temple was the great sign that God dwelt in the midst of His people. As long as it stood, the message was unmistakable: God is here with us.
But over time, the people turned from God and worshiped idols. God sent prophets to rebuke and warn them about what would happen if they did not repent, but they refused. Eventually, God did what He said He would do. He sent the nation of Babylon, and in 586 BC, Babylon tore down the walls of Jerusalem, burned the temple to the ground, and carried the Jews into exile — hundreds of miles from home, in a foreign land.
But here is the interesting thing. God prophesied through Jeremiah that the Jews would be in exile for only seventy years, and then they would return to their land:
God said that after seventy years, He would punish the Babylonians. He raised up the Persian Empire to do so, and then Cyrus, the king of Persia, allowed the Jews to return to their land.
Pre-Exile, Exile, and Post-Exile
This allows us to divide the Jews’ history into three sections: pre-exile (before 586 BC), exile (586–538 BC in Babylon), and post-exile (after 538 BC, the return).
It is important to notice that no historical books record the Jews’ exile. The historical books cover the period before the exile (Genesis through 2 Chronicles) and after the exile (Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther). To understand the Jews’ history during the exile, we have to use the prophets — and the prophets can be divided into the same three sections:
Because Haggai prophesied after the exile, we really need to understand that period of Jewish history — and the Book of Ezra covers the history from the time of Haggai’s prophecies. That is why we must understand this book.
Ezra 1: God Keeps His Word
Let’s look at Ezra 1:1 to see what happened with the Persian king, Cyrus. Because this is a long verse packed with important information, we will break it up piece by piece:
This is 538 BC, about seventy years after the Babylonians took the first group of Jews into exile.
This refers to the prophecy from Jeremiah 25 that the Jews would be in exile for only seventy years, which brings us to our first lesson.
Lesson One: We Can Trust God to Keep His Word
Let me tell you what doesn’t happen: nations don’t conquer nations and then release the conquered people. When God made the prophecy through Jeremiah, it looked historically impossible for the Jews to return from exile. But God delivered, right on schedule, using a pagan king to do it.
And there is great application for us. When we see God’s faithfulness to previous things He said, it should encourage us to trust Him to fulfill the other things He said:
Some of those promises can feel as unlikely to us as release from Babylon must have felt to the exiles — especially when we are in the middle of the seventy years, so to speak, with no evidence that anything is changing. But we can be confident that God will do what He has said He will do.
How God Stirred Up Cyrus
Now look at how God accomplished this:
How did God stir up Cyrus? There is a fascinating possibility: God had prophesied through Isaiah over one hundred years earlier that He would use Cyrus to see Jerusalem rebuilt:
Someone could very well have shown Cyrus this prophecy, and he would have seen his name written in Scripture one hundred years before he was born. If I had to guess who showed him, it would be Daniel, because we can tell from his book that he became very prominent and favored in Persia, just as he was in Babylon.
So God stirs up Cyrus, and here is what he does:
Cyrus recognized that God commanded him to have the Jews rebuild the temple.
A Spiritual Mission, Not Just a Homecoming
This is the first of five times the temple, or the house of God, is mentioned in Ezra 1:2–7:
You can see the focus of this return is not just re-occupying the Promised Land. It is a spiritual mission to rebuild the temple, or God’s house.
Here is an important question: we are talking about the temple being rebuilt, so why is it called the house? I might be wrong, but I think this is God’s way of looking beyond just the rebuilding of a physical temple to the house of David — connecting this with the Davidic covenant, or with God’s promise that the Messiah would come from David’s house.
Additionally, I want to invite you to read Ezra this way: Luke wrote Luke and Acts, and Acts is a continuation of Luke. It is the same with 2 Chronicles and Ezra — Ezra wrote both, and Ezra is a continuation of Chronicles.
Only 2% Returned
Let me show you something interesting:
This is the total number of Jews who returned in the first wave. That might sound like a large number, but there were probably two to three million Jews, so this represents only about 2%. If only about 2% returned to the Promised Land, what happened to the other 98%? They remained in Persia — and that brings us to the next important part of the Jews’ history after the exile.
The Three Returns in the Book of Ezra and Nehemiah
The Jews did not return all at once. They returned in three waves over almost a century:
Here is the simplest way to think of the three post-exilic historical books:
A helpful timeline of the period: first return under Zerubbabel (538 BC) → Haggai and Zechariah prophesy (520 BC) → temple completed (515 BC) → Esther (480 BC) → second return under Ezra (458 BC) → third return under Nehemiah (444 BC) → Malachi (430 BC).
Ezra 7: The Second Return
Now let’s briefly look at the second return, led by Ezra himself:
“After this” means after the first return. The first return took place in 538 BC. We are now jumping ahead eighty years to 458 BC, the seventh year of Artaxerxes’ reign. Artaxerxes is the son of Xerxes, the king Esther married.
Ezra was a priest, and because he led the second return, the chapter begins by introducing him, showing that his return reestablished the Aaronic priesthood in the land.
The other office Ezra held, in addition to being a priest, was that of a scribe. Ezra’s expertise in the Law was very important because the Jews had been in Babylon for seventy years, and it was not a Jewish environment focused on God’s Law. It took an expert like Ezra to reestablish the Law in the land and rebuild the spiritual condition of the people.
So here it is: the second return. These are the people who accompanied Ezra.
Follow me for a moment. Luke wrote the book of Acts, and he joined Paul in chapter 16. From then on, much of Acts is written in the first person because Luke is recounting what happened firsthand. The Book of Ezra is similar. The first six chapters are written in the third person as Ezra recounts what happened with Zerubbabel during the first return. Beginning at Ezra 7:27, the rest of the book is written in the first person as Ezra recounts the return he led:
Notice Ezra blessed the God “who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king.” This is another remarkable example showing the sovereignty of God over earthly kings.
Lesson Two: God Turns Kings’ Hearts
We’ve now seen God turn a king’s heart twice. For the first return, He “stirred up the spirit of Cyrus.” Now He does the same thing with Artaxerxes.
And if we looked at the third return with Nehemiah, he didn’t march into the throne room and demand to return to Jerusalem. He prayed for about four months, and his prayer ended this way:
“This man” is Artaxerxes, the most powerful ruler on earth, and God answered Nehemiah’s prayer so that we also read this:
God controlled the king’s heart in Nehemiah’s day just as He did in Zerubbabel’s and Ezra’s day. Proverbs 21:1 is almost a theme verse for the three returns:
Here is the application for us: sometimes — or maybe all the time — the world looks really crazy. It is important for us to remember that God is still in charge. The Old Testament focuses on Israel because it is the nation from which the Messiah came, but this can lead us to think God cared only about, or was only working in, the nation of Israel. These are good examples of God working in the hearts of Gentile, pagan kings.
The Work Stops for Sixteen Years
During the first return under Zerubbabel, the people gathered in Jerusalem, built the altar (Ezra 3:1–2), and began rebuilding the temple. But whenever work is done for God, there is opposition. When God wants us to do something, we can be sure the devil wants to stop it. Ezra 4:4–5 tells us the people of the land discouraged and frustrated the builders “all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius” — the work stalled almost as soon as the foundation was laid.
They stopped working on the temple, but God had a remedy for them. Look at the very next verse:
Haggai and Zechariah began prophesying, and the people resumed work. Now I know what you’re saying: “I wish I knew what Haggai and Zechariah said to get people working again!” Well, I have good news: our next study begins at Haggai 1:1 so we can see exactly what he said. And if you want to know what Zechariah said — mostly visions he shared — you can read his book.
For now, I want to draw your attention to something significant by asking a question: when the Jews stopped working on the temple, how long do you think they expected to stop? A few days? A few weeks? Maybe a couple of months?
Ezra 5:1 immediately follows Ezra 4:24, but as is often the case with Scripture, even when verses sit next to each other, a lot of time can pass between them. There are about sixteen years between the stopping in one verse and the starting in the next. I doubt a single person laid down his tools that day and said, “I will get back to work on the temple in sixteen years.”
Lesson Three: We Let Temporary Breaks Become Permanent
Nobody wakes up and says, “I am going to neglect the things of God for the next decade and a half.” That is not how it happens. It happens one ordinary day at a time. We stop temporarily, and then the temporary quietly becomes permanent.
Think about how this works in our spiritual lives:
And here is the sobering part: with each passing day, restarting gets harder and harder.
Think about this. The Jews laid the foundation for the temple. It was in the middle of Jerusalem. It must have become part of the landscape. They saw it regularly. Walked past it regularly. Until they finally stopped noticing it completely. We stop praying, or stop fellowshipping, or stop reading the Bible, or stop going to church for so long that it becomes normal to us.
Lesson Four: We Start Again When God Stirs Us
If Lesson Three left you discouraged, this lesson is the remedy, and I do not want you to miss it, because it is woven through everything we have read.
Notice a word that keeps appearing. In Ezra 1:1, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus. In Ezra 1:5, the people who returned were “everyone whose spirit God had stirred.” And in Haggai 1:14, “the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel… and the spirit of Joshua… and the spirit of all the remnant of the people. And they came and worked on the house of the Lord.”
Every forward movement in this story — the decree, the return, the resumption of the work — happens the same way: God stirs, and people move.
Here is the hope in that: what took sixteen years to slide into did not take sixteen years to reverse. When we study Haggai, we will see that from the day Haggai first preached to the day the people were back at work was about three weeks. Sixteen years of neglect, undone in twenty-three days — because they heard God’s Word and responded to it.
Conclusion: Let God’s Word Stir You
Consider how God stirred up the Jews in Ezra 5:1:
He sent two preachers with His Word. Sixteen years of compromise, but what finally convicted them and brought them to repentance was God’s Word.
So if the Holy Spirit has convicted you about something in your life, don’t walk away thinking the drift is permanent. Let God’s Word work in your heart, too. The same God who stirred up pagan kings and a stalled nation is able to stir us up into action. And the ordinary way He does it is the way He did it here: through His Word. Put yourself under it. Keep coming back to it. Restarting is not something we work up; it is something God stirs up — and He delights to do it, if we will only act on it.
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