Messianic Hope in Ezra–Nehemiah
Main Idea: God’s Messiah will come and make all things new.
Introduction
Imagine what life would be like if you were given at Christmas every gift you ever wanted.14 Maybe this is easier for children!
Perhaps the adults would prefer to wish that all the circumstances of their lives would be exactly as they would have them: exactly as you would like for everything to be. Imagine that coming to pass on Christmas except for one thing.
What if you got everything you wanted, but you didn’t have Jesus? What if you had everything except the good news that Jesus was born as a baby, lived a righteous life, died on the cross to pay the penalty for sin, and rose from the dead to conquer the grave?
If God gave us everything we wanted, but we didn’t have Jesus, we would live miserable lives and then go to hell. Those who reject the gospel live miserable lives even when they have everything they want. Those who embrace the gospel can live joyfully even when all goes wrong.
Christ has come, and this is still a broken world. The Messiah has come. He died and rose, but He has not yet made all things new.
This is a broken world. Just this week we had a massive water leak in our living room. A toilet in an upstairs bathroom overflowed, and water came gushing down through the ceiling, soaking the couch. My parents and sisters and brother and their kids were all in town staying at our home, and we didn’t know what we were going to do! Thankfully the water stopped and the couch dried and all is well. Then we took our van in for service, and it turned out we needed four new tires. Merry Christmas! And then we had kids knocking each other’s noggins in ways that were at times frightful to us as parents. Thankfully they weren’t fighting each other, just accidentally crashing into each other. Fortunately, everyone survived.
This is a broken world where people are sad on Christmas.
The message of Christmas gives us the good news that God keeps His promises. That means the promise that Christ will come and make all things new will be kept.
The Bible is a book about Jesus. We have worked our way through Ezra and Nehemiah, and in this chapter we will examine the ways that these two books testify to the hope that a Messiah would indeed come. This chapter is about the fact that God keeps His promises, and we will look at Ezra and Nehemiah to see how they testify to the messianic hope.
This world is not as it should be. We long for Jesus to come and set the world right.
Preview
This chapter has three sections:
In the first, we will look at the fulfillment of promises in Ezra–Nehemiah. We will look at five promises.
In the second part we will look back in order to look forward. What I mean is that in Ezra–Nehemiah there are these key patterns that are repeated. So after we look at five promises we will look at two patterns.
In the third part, we will look forward to Jesus in order to look back at Ezra and Nehemiah. We will pay particular attention to these two prototypes, Ezra and Nehemiah. Five promises, two patterns, and two prototypes.
As humans, we are people who associate seasons and holidays with things that have happened to us, with patterns that have recurred in our families across the years. I would invite you to consider this question: What does Christmas mean to you? What do you think of when you think of Christmas?
I invite you to put this in your mind and discipline your thinking to make this what comes to mind when you think of Christmas: God keeps His promises. Christmas is about God keeping His promises.
As we have seen in Ezra and Nehemiah, after the people of Israel were driven out of the land, they returned to the land. That’s what these books are about. Ezra and Nehemiah tell the story of what happened when the Israelites returned to the land of promise and began to rebuild. They first rebuilt the altar, then the temple, and finally the walls of the city.
Imagine returning to the land after the exile during the time narrated in Ezra–Nehemiah and waiting for the promised king from the line of David, the Messiah. Imagine returning to the land and expecting a king from David’s line to reign, and the years beginning to crawl by. No king arises, and Israel still is not exalted as a nation as Isaiah 2:1-4 declares it will be. If you had returned from exile and you were waiting for the Messiah, your hope was based on God’s promise to David in 2 Samuel 7 that He would indeed raise up someone from David’s line to sit on his throne.
Christmas is about God keeping that promise. Perhaps you can identify with those who lived in the times narrated in Ezra–Nehemiah, and maybe you wonder now whether God is going to keep the promises He has made, whether God will do what He has said He will do.
In order to press this on our hearts, let’s think together about what God promised. Then we’ll look at evidence in Ezra–Nehemiah that God has kept, and will keep, His promises.
Here are some of the things God promised in 2 Samuel 7:8-17:
God has given David a great name, fulfilling the promise of 2 Samuel 7:9. The people of Israel returned to the land, but the peace described in 2 Samuel 7:10-11 and sung about in all our Christmas carols has not yet been realized. That peace will be achieved only when God raises up the seed of David promised in 2 Samuel 7:12. Christmas is about God keeping His promises; these are promises of a kingdom of peace, where orphans are comforted and widows defended.
Our hope is not for a better world with better health care that the government is going to provide. Our hope is for the offspring of David to come and make a better world where health care isn’t even necessary because we will be in resurrection bodies.
We see attention to these promises in Ezra–Nehemiah. How? In Ezra 3:2 we read of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel. That’s the Zerubbabel from the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1:12. This shows us that the line of descent from David was being carefully tracked. Ezra and others hoping to see the promise fulfilled were keeping record of who descended from David’s line (e.g., Hag 2:23). The mention of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel shows us that the believing remnant was holding on to the promise of a Messiah, a king from David’s line. We see the same in Ezra 5:2, where we read again of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel. The fact that there was a descendant of David meant that God was preserving the line of David so that God could keep the promise He made to David. Other indications that the believing remnant clung to the promise to David include things like Nehemiah 3:16, where we see that they knew where “the tombs of David” were. The city was destroyed, the walls were broken down, there was rubble everywhere, but the tombs of David were known. Then in Nehemiah 12:37 we read of “the city of David” and “the house of David.”
You might object that these texts are not claiming that a Messiah from David’s line is going to arise. You would be right. The texts are not overtly saying that. What I am suggesting is that the perspective reflected in these books shows that the authors of these books were holding onto the promise to David. I would affirm that the Old Testament is a book about the coming Messiah in the sense that the perspective from which these books were written is a perspective that includes this hope for the coming Messiah. We should read the Old Testament sympathetically, trying to understand the perspective of its authors.
David and Zerubbabel were not significant in and of themselves. They were ordinary humans. They were significant because of the promises that God made to them, because they believed those promises and held on to them.
In David’s day, Zerubbabel’s day, Ezra’s day, and Nehemiah’s day, there were people who were more glamorous, more famous, more wealthy, more powerful than any of these men whose names we know. Those famous and glamorous people are now lost to history. No one knows their names.
If you desire significance, what will make you significant is not something about you. It’s the Word of God, the promises of God, and the question is whether you will believe those promises and live your life to speed their fulfillment. If you want significance, the way to attain it is by trusting the promises that God has made. That’s the path to lasting significance. What I’m really saying here is that God is the One who is significant, not us.
God keeps His promises. We see evidence in Ezra–Nehemiah that God is keeping the promise to David, since He has preserved the line of descent down to Zerubbabel, and the genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 show that God kept right on keeping that promise until Jesus came.
The people who lived at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah had returned to the land, and they were waiting for the Messiah to come. We are much like them. Jesus the Messiah has come, and now we are waiting for Him to come back. We want the fruits of the Holy Spirit to characterize our expectation of the coming Messiah. We should not expect too much from ourselves. We can no more bring in the kingdom of Jesus and cause the renewal of all things than someone living in Ezra and Nehemiah’s day could. That’s not our job. But we can be like Ezra and Nehemiah: men who loved God’s Word, devoted themselves to prayer, and did whatever they could to hallow God’s name and help His people to prepare the way of the Lord.
God promised a new David, and God promised to restore the remnant of His people. There are several ways that we see faith in this promise and hope that God would indeed restore the remnant of His people. Again, there is not a direct statement in Ezra–Nehemiah that explicitly says, “God promised through the prophets that He would restore the remnant of His people.” But we do find things like this:
These are not overt statements that God will restore the remnant of His people, but Ezra and Nehemiah record the people doing things that testified to that hope, the hope that all of God’s people would be restored.
Are you concerned about one of God’s people? Are you burdened for a brother or sister in Christ who has wandered from the faith? Let me encourage you to put your hope in God, who will fully restore all His people. God has kept and will keep the promise to David, and God has kept and will keep His promise to restore the remnant.
Are you processing this message as an unbeliever, but you feel God tugging at you? You may feel like you’re not ready to identify as a Christian, to be one of these Bible-bangers, and yet you know that God is drawing you to Himself. Even having the privilege of sitting in peace to study the Word of God—this is God drawing you to Himself; this is God doing what He has to do to overcome your resistance to Him. You should believe. You should trust Jesus. You will not find victory in resisting God. You don’t want to succeed. If you do, your life will be miserable and then you will go to hell. You don’t want that. That is not success. You should believe. Turn from all the things that are ruining your life and trust in Christ, who will make all things new. He will restore all His people.
Brothers and sisters, we can trust God. He will restore His people. Our hope does not depend on anyone other than God Himself, and God will keep His word. He is faithful, and He will do it. Christmas is about God keeping His word, and Christmas exists because God Himself came, born as a baby, and kept His word.
God made a promise to David, He promised to restore the remnant, and God also promised to use Cyrus in the restoration of His people. What does this have to do with the hope for the Messiah? Well, in Isaiah 45:1, Cyrus is called the Lord’s “anointed”—but no one expected Cyrus to be the Messiah.
The promise about Cyrus has to do with the Messianic hope because the restoration that God promises to use Cyrus to accomplish is not distinguished from the restoration that will be accomplished in the days of the Messiah. Now we know that there was a long time between the restoration to the land under Cyrus and the coming of the Messiah, but consider some statements from Isaiah 44–45.
The Lord declared in Isaiah 44:26 that Cyrus was the one
who says to Jerusalem, “She will be inhabited,” and to the cities of Judah, “They will be rebuilt,” and I will restore her ruins.
Isaiah prophesied before the exile, but what he was saying to the people of Israel was that Jerusalem would be destroyed, the people would be exiled, but then the city would be rebuilt and the land would be re-inhabited. Then Isaiah declares in Isaiah 44:28 that Yahweh was the One
who says to Cyrus, “My shepherd, he will fulfill all My pleasure” and says to Jerusalem, “She will be rebuilt,” and of the temple, “Its foundation will be laid.”
The Lord says this to Cyrus, His anointed, whose right hand I have grasped . . .
In Ezra 1:2, we read of the first year of Cyrus, where the Lord stirred up his spirit to fulfill what Jeremiah prophesied. Isaiah’s prophecies are not mentioned by Isaiah’s name, but they are invoked through the mention of Cyrus (cf. Ezra 5:17). To name Cyrus was to call to everyone’s mind what Isaiah prophesied regarding Cyrus. Ezra did not footnote his every allusion. Rather, he allowed the name “Cyrus” to function as a keyword that pointed his audience to Isaiah, and in that way Ezra pointed to the fulfillment of the promise made in Isaiah about Cyrus.
God kept His word. He preserved the line of David. God has kept, is keeping, and will keep His word to preserve a remnant, His people. And God kept the promises that He made about Cyrus.
In addition to the promises we have seen, God promised to send one who would prepare the way. This is a promise made in Isaiah 40:3 and reiterated by a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah in Malachi 3–4. I suggest that what we have in Ezra and Nehemiah are men who are like the prophesied forerunner. They prepare the way for the one who will prepare the way, John the Baptist. Consider what Malachi says:
“See, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. Then the Lord you seek will suddenly come to His temple, the Messenger of the covenant you desire—see, He is coming,” says the Lord of Hosts. But who can endure the day of His coming? And who will be able to stand when He appears? For He will be like a refiner’s fire and like cleansing lye. He will be like a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver. Then they will present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. (Mal 3:1-3)
In Ezra 8, as Ezra prepared to return to the land, no Levites joined the party of returnees (Ezra 8:15). Ezra called the Levites to repentance and sent messengers, and Levites joined the party of returnees(vv. 16-20). Then in Nehemiah 10:37 and 12:10-13 Nehemiah made provision for the sons of Levi, and in 12:30 and 13:22 they were purified because of his ministry, along the lines of what Malachi 3:3 describes. Both Ezra and Nehemiah, then, worked to purify the sons of Levi. Ultimately what they did would be fulfilled in Jesus, the One who purifies those who worship the Lord so that they bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord.
So we have seen promises about the son of David, about the restored remnant, about Cyrus, and about the one who prepares the way, and there is also a promise of restoration when the Sabbath is kept.
Maybe you’ve heard that some Jews believe that if all Israel would keep the Sabbath correctly one time, God would send the Messiah. I think these ideas are based on texts like Jeremiah 17:24-25:
If you listen to Me, says the Lord, and do not bring loads through the gates of this city on the Sabbath day and consecrate the Sabbath day and do no work on it, kings and princes will enter through the gates of this city. They will sit on the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses with their officials, the men of Judah, and the residents of Jerusalem. This city will be inhabited forever.
This verse sounds like a king from David’s line will sit on his throne if Israel will keep the Sabbath. In Nehemiah 10:31 the people commit to honor the Sabbath, and in 13:15-22 the people are bringing in burdens on the Sabbath day, which is exactly what Jeremiah 17:24 says not to do. I would suggest that the concern for the Sabbath that we see in Nehemiah arises in part from the desire to see Jeremiah’s prophecy fulfilled. Nehemiah wants to see a king from David’s line on David’s throne in Jerusalem.
We should want to obey Scripture for the same reason Nehemiah wanted to obey: to please the Lord, to advance His kingdom, to see Jesus enthroned. So the concern for the Sabbath points, I would suggest, to messianic hope.
We see evidence, then, of faith in and at least partial fulfillment of these five promises in Ezra–Nehemiah, all connected to the coming king from David’s line and the kingdom over which he will reign: the seed of David, the restored remnant, Cyrus the Lord’s anointed, the one who prepares the way, and the restoration when Sabbath is kept.
Let’s think together now about these two patterns.
These patterns look back at Israel’s history in order to look forward. We humans tend to see patterns in life. For instance, my friend Josh Philpot wants me to tell you that Ohio State always loses to an SEC team in a bowl game. And I would mention for my friend Denny Burk that LSU always loses to Arkansas. The point is that we look for patterns. Political pundits will describe a current president in terms of previous presidents. We compare what we see in the present with what we saw in the past.
The biblical authors did the same thing. They saw a pattern of God’s activity with God’s people, and they compared what God was doing in their days with what He had done in the past. The biblical authors then highlight correspondences that they noted. So Abel was slain by Cain, Isaac was mocked by Ishmael, Jacob was opposed by Esau, Moses was opposed by all Israel. In Ezra and Nehemiah we see this pattern repeated as both men faced opposition from within the people of God.
What we are thinking about here is called typology. Here’s what I think happened: God made promises, and the promises drew attention to the repetition of certain things, such as the enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The biblical authors were guided by the Spirit to notice those repetitions, and they styled their accounts to record those repetitions.
The recurrence of events and the promises that have been made thus form a dynamic relationship, each contributing to the other to create typological expectation. Typology focuses on the historical correspondence between various persons, events, and institutions across Israel’s history, and the significance of these increases as they recur, finding fulfillment in Jesus the Messiah and His deliverance of the people of God.
Typology takes on a predictive, forward-looking element as God’s promises cause God’s people to notice the repetition of key sequences of events, significant correspondences between key people, and the renewal of key institutions (renewal of Passover and Festival of Booths, rebuilding of temple and altar). Those who recognize this repetition expect additional instances and fulfillments in the future.
I want to highlight two patterns here: the exodus pattern and the pattern of Davidic worship.
Ezra calls attention to the similarity between the return to the land and the exodus from Egypt. In Ezra 1–2, the heart of Cyrus was stirred up, and he funded the people’s return to the land. That is similar to the way that God had hardened the heart of Pharaoh and the Israelites had plundered the Egyptians as they left Egypt. Then just as Numbers had enumerated the people, there was a concern for numbering the people in Ezra 2. They had built an altar after they had come out of Egypt, and they rebuilt the altar when they returned to the land. They had built the tabernacle at Mount Sinai, and they rebuilt the temple when they returned to the land.
There are similar parallels between the exodus from Egypt and Ezra’s return in Ezra 7. Ezra 7:1-10 presents Ezra as a new Moses figure from the line of Aaron. Just as Pharaoh had been hardened by God, Artaxerxes was prompted to issue a decree allowing the return. Just as they had left Egypt, they left Persia. Just as they had plundered Egypt, Artaxerxes provided funds. Just as the Torah had been given at Sinai, Ezra was given authority to enforce that Torah. Just as they had numbered the people, they accounted for the genealogy of the returnees. Just as the Levites had rebelled against Moses, no Levites volunteered to return with Ezra.
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Exodus |
Ezra 7 |
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Pharaoh hardened |
Cyrus stirred |
Artaxerxes decreed |
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Out of Egypt |
Out of Babylon |
Out of Persia |
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Plunder Egypt |
Cyrus provides funds |
Artaxerxes provides funds |
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Torah Given at Sinai |
Ezra Enforces the Torah |
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Number the people |
Number the people (Ezra 8) |
|
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Build an altar |
Build an altar |
|
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Build tabernacle |
Build temple |
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Levite rebellion |
In addition to this exodus and return-from-exile pattern, we see the repetition of the pattern of Davidic worship.
David had made regulations for the worship of God in Jerusalem. Those regulations were renewed when the people returned from Babylon. So there was a renewal of the pattern of Davidic temple worship. It’s as though the pattern of the exodus from Egypt was repeated, and then the pattern of the institution of the worship of God in Jerusalem was repeated.
This includes the similarity of detail between the way materials had been acquired for the building of Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 5:6,9) and the way materials were acquired for the building of the second temple (Ezra 3:7). It includes the way that David had appointed the Levites (1 Chr 23:4,24) and the way that Zerubbabel and Jeshua (Ezra 3:8) and Nehemiah (Neh 12:24,45) did the same.
As the returnees set about rebuilding the temple, their enemies saw them repeating what David and Solomon had accomplished (Ezra 4:20), and the rebuilders themselves stated that they were redoing what Solomon had done (5:11). Just as the plunder of Egypt had been used to construct the tabernacle and the plunder of the nations had been used for the building of the temple (1 Chr 22:2-5,14; 29:2), Cyrus the pagan king funded the rebuilding of the temple (6:4)
The repetitions of the patterns teach God’s people that God delivers them in unexpected ways; it shows God’s people the type of thing God does when He saves; and it shows God’s people the type of response—worship—that is pleasing to Him. The people of God also see that the enemies of God typically act according to a set pattern: they lie, they manipulate, they intimidate, and they are like chaff that the wind drives away (Ps 1:4). They will not overcome God Almighty.
We’ll see these kinds of patterns in our own lives. We will find ourselves treated the same way that the people of God in the Old Testament were treated, the same way that Jesus and the apostles were treated. We should expect the same treatment. Jesus said that if we kept His word the world would treat us the same way they treated Him, but those who received His word would receive us (John 15:20). We should persevere the same way that Moses and the prophets and Jesus and the apostles persevered, for the love of God and the love of people.
We’ll also see, as those before us have seen, that God keeps His word, that God’s people are preserved through persecution, and that God accomplishes His purposes through Messiah Jesus.
At this point I am not looking at Ezra and Nehemiah and looking back at Israel’s history, as we’ve just done with the exodus and Davidic temple worship. Rather, I’m looking at Ezra and Nehemiah and looking forward to the way that the patterns in their lives would be fulfilled in what Jesus would do. The promise-based typological expectation that develops across the pages of the Old Testament was ultimately fulfilled in Jesus, and we can see points of contact between Jesus and key figures in the Old Testament.
Ezra was a man of the Word and prayer who was passionate for the purity of God’s people, seeking to hallow God’s name, to bring in God’s kingdom, and to do God’s will on earth as in heaven. Those are pretty general, but what Ezra also does that is fulfilled in Jesus can be seen in Ezra 9.
In chapter 9 Ezra responded to the disobedience and rebellion of God’s people by weeping over Jerusalem, just as Jesus would weep over Jerusalem’s refusal to receive and welcome Him. Ezra returned to the land, learned that the people had intermarried, and he sat appalled until evening. This is a pattern of one who is concerned for the good of God’s people and who is grief-stricken at the rebellion of God’s people. That’s a pattern that would ultimately be fulfilled in Jesus.
This aspect of what we see in Ezra and Jesus is comforting, isn’t it? Jesus loves people. Jesus wants what is good for people. Jesus is saddened by rebellion and disobedience.
Ezra was also a priest and scribe devoted to the law of Moses. Jesus came as the high priest according to the order of Melchizedek, and He countered temptation and those who challenged Him in debate with appeals to Scripture.
There is typological correspondence between Ezra and Jesus, and there is typological correspondence between Nehemiah and Jesus.
Typological Correspondence between Nehemiah and Jesus
Nehemiah was like the One who would enter the temple and cleanse it. We saw Nehemiah cleanse the temple in Nehemiah 13. Nehemiah was also concerned for the resumption of the worship instituted by David. Nehemiah initiated a renewal of the covenant, anticipating the One who would usher God’s people into a new covenant.
Like Ezra (Ezra 10:1), Nehemiah typified Jesus as one who wept over Jerusalem (Neh 1:4). Just as Jesus would call His disciples to come, follow Him, and build God’s kingdom through the church, Nehemiah called the people of God to rise and build with him (Neh 2:18). The nations rage against the Lord and His Anointed One, as Psalm 2:1-3 describes (cf. Acts 4:25-28), and they raged against Nehemiah too (Neh 4:1-3,7). Just as plots were made against Jesus, there was a plot to ambush Nehemiah (6:2). Just as there was a politically incendiary statement made against Jesus, “we have no king but Caesar,” there was a politically incendiary charge made against Nehemiah’s intentions in rebuild the wall (6:6). Jesus finished the work the Father sent Him to do, and Nehemiah finished the wall (6:15). With the temple and walls rebuilt, Nehemiah initiated a covenant renewal, typifying the way Jesus would come and replace the temple, provide the people with security, and initiate the new covenant.
Conclusion
In Ezra and Nehemiah we have seen five promises, two patterns, and two prototypes. This survey does not exhaust what could be said about issues like these, but it does say to us that God keeps His promises. Christmas proves it.
Ezra and Nehemiah show God keeping His promise of a new David, His promise of a restored remnant, His promise about Cyrus, His promise of the one who prepares the way for the Messiah, and His promise of full restoration of Sabbath rest.
Ezra and Nehemiah look back to point the eyes of God’s people forward, and we see this in the way that the new exodus and the new Davidic worship are heralded in these books.
Ezra and Nehemiah also typify Jesus, and when we consider Jesus in light of these books, we see that Jesus fulfilled the pattern of activity seen in the lives of both Ezra and Nehemiah.
We can trust God. Let us hope fully in Him. Let us study God’s promises, meditate on them, long for them to be fulfilled, and walk in the fruits of the Spirit until Jesus comes and makes all things new.
Reflect and Discuss
14 This sermon was preached December 26, 2010.