I love the way the Bible begins in Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters” (1:1-2). On the sixth day of creation, God made mankind, “in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (v. 27). The three commands given to the first couple were simple: 1) Have lots of children and fill the earth with people who worship me, 2) manage creation and subdue it, and 3) do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because, “on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die” (2:16-17).
Eden was the very first temple that Adam and Eve, as the people of God, were able to worship and enjoy God both as His children and as His royal priesthood. This is why Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden after they sinned against God. This is why the very last verse of the infamous third chapter in Genesis ends with these words: “So He drove the man out; and at the east of the Garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life” (v. 24). But before they were expelled from the Garden, God made this promise to the first couple and the serpent who deceived Eve: “And I will make enemies of you and the woman, and of your offspring and her Descendant; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise Him on the heel” (3:15).
Israel Enjoyed an Ancient Glory
There is nearly 2,500 years separating Adam from Moses, and all that history is crammed in between Genesis 4 and Exodus 2. Within those 2,500 years, God honored His promise to Abraham to multiply his descendants into a nation of people who would experience 400 years of slavery in Egypt, only to be miraculously liberated as His people. As a freed people, God spoke through Moses to all of Israel: “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings, and brought you to Myself. ‘Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel” (Exod. 19:4–6).
God gave Israel the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law; He also instituted a sacrificial system to address their sins, religious feasts to remind His people of His faithfulness to them, and the plans for a Tabernacle that would eventually be used to build a Temple. Its design would serve to remind them of the Garden and what Adam and Eve enjoyed, and it would serve as the place where the presence of God would be known, experienced, and seen, so God told Moses: “Have them construct a sanctuary for Me, so that I may dwell among them. According to all that I am going to show you as the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its furniture, so you shall construct it” (Exod. 25:8–9).
The Tabernacle, and eventually the Temple, would serve as the center of worship for Israel as a people. In the wilderness as pilgrims journeying to the promised land, God would lead them by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When the presence of God moved, Israel moved; when the presence of God rested, Israel rested. At the center of the Temple was the Ark of the Covenant where it would sit in the place known as the Holy of Holies. The Ark of the Covenant is the container where the broken tablets of the 10 commandments were placed among a few other things, it is also symbolic of the presence of God.
Nearly 500 years after Moses died and Israel finally entered the land God promised Abraham, David was anointed as King over Israel. Even though most of the psalms that are in the Bible were written by David, because he was a man of war, he was not permitted to build a Temple modeled after the Tabernacle. However, God did allow Solomon (a son of David) to build the temple in Jerusalem where the presence of God would be known, experienced, and seen. The Temple would forever be known as Solomon’s Temple not because it was dedicated to Solomon, but because of the great care that Solomon invested into the building of it. When it was finally completed and dedicated before the people of Israel, God spoke to Solomon:
“…if you turn away and abandon My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot you from My land which I have given you, and this house which I have consecrated for My name I will cast out of My sight; and I will make it a proverb and an object of scorn among all peoples. As for this house, which was exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and say, “Why has the Lord done these things to this land and to this house?” And they will say, “Because they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who brought them from the land of Egypt, and they adopted other gods, and worshiped and served them; therefore He has brought all this adversity on them.” (2 Chron. 7:19–22)
Solomon started off so well, but his life ended so tragically. Solomon’s life did not end well, for he “loved many foreign women” (1 Kings 11:1). Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines… he was the Hugh Heffner of his day. The thing is, Solomon knew his Bible well, he knew what Exodus 34:16 said, “You shall not enter into marriage with foreign women, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.” Solomon’s heart turned away from God and participated in the worship of other gods that included child sacrifice, rampant sexual immorality, and set the entire nation on track to do the same.
So, the thing that God warned Solomon and Israel would happen if they turned from Him, happened. After the death of Solomon, all of Israel would eventually become known not for the nation that worshiped Yahweh, but the nation that worshiped the gods of the other nations. God judged the nation of Israel and eventually they were handed over to a foreign nation.
In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were driven from the presence of God, but in the wake of Solomon’s idolatry, “the glory of the Lord departed from the threshold of the temple…” and left the place He promised Israel (Ezek. 10:18). Not long after the glory of God departed the temple and Israel, Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by Babylon.
Israel Pursued a New Glory
After hundreds of years in exile and the desperate prayers of those who truly loved and worshiped Yahweh, God allowed a small remnant of Hebrew men and women back into Jerusalem. The two things that were in ruins were the temple and the walls of Jerusalem; Ezra would eventually oversee the building of the temple, while Nehemiah would manage the building of the walls of Jerusalem. The first six chapters of Ezra give us the back story for Ezra’s role in overseeing the construction of the temple. The first three chapters tell us about the very initial planning for a new temple; I only want to focus on the first three chapters and the very last verse in the book of Ezra.
The only thing that happens in Ezra 3 is the exiles set up the altar where the sacrifices could be made, then the people began to celebrate the different festivals that were designed to remind them of God’s faithfulness, then hired masons and carpenters, and then laid the foundation of the temple. It would take another 20 years before the new temple would be completed. The best illustration I can come up with the kind of frustration the exiles in Jerusalem must have experienced, is to think of I-25 from Fort Collins to Denver.
Just so you know, it was not because the workers were part of the Union or that they worked for the federal government that it took so long to build the temple. There were legitimate obstacles the people faced by real adversaries. God stirred and moved King Cyrus to make a proclamation that bore the authority of any of the laws of Persia. The very first sentence in Ezra begins: “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia…” (Ezra 1:1). So, the king proclaimed that the Hebrew exiles could return and rebuild their temple (vv. 2-4).
King Cyrus would not live to see the day when his proclamation was finally fulfilled. Just after the foundation of the temple was laid, a group of people in Jerusalem who did not want the temple built, “…frightened them from building, and bribed advisers against them, to frustrate their advice all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia” (v. 5). For ten years the building of the temple was put on hold. In Ezra 3, with the laying of the foundation of the temple, the people celebrated, but before they could begin, Ezra 4 happened! In chapter 5, the work began in the second year of a new king (Darius) and four years later, it was finally completed (Ezra 6:15ff). When it was finally finished, the people rightfully celebrated:
And the sons of Israel, the priests, the Levites, and the rest of the exiles, celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy. They offered for the dedication of this temple of God a hundred bulls, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs, and as a sin offering for all Israel twelve male goats, corresponding to the number of the tribes of Israel. Then they appointed the priests to their divisions and the Levites in their sections for the service of God in Jerusalem, as it is written in the Book of Moses. (vv. 16-18).
What I find most startling about the book of Ezra is that the people seemed to have been in a really good place spiritually in their lives. As soon as they entered the land, they set up the altar before anything else so that they could worship God. They celebrated the feast of booths, which was also known as the “Feast of Tabernacles” as a way to celebrate the ways God preserved Israel in the wilderness and how his presence dwelled among them. They also celebrated all the other important days such as the Day of Atonement, and so much more. And, just after the new temple was dedicated, they celebrated Passover together!
Everything was going so well until we come to Ezra 9 and learn that the people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites did the same thing Solomon did that led to great evils in Israel – they married the same type of women Solomon married who turned his heart away from God, and so the very last verse in Ezra serves as the epitaph of a story that began so good but ended so badly: “All of these men had married foreign wives, and some of them had wives by whom they had children” (10:44).
Israel Missed a Better Glory
I believe we are given a clue as to why Ezra’s book ends tragically. Notice how the people respond to the new temple in Ezra 3:10-13,
And they sang, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, saying, “For He is good, for His favor is upon Israel forever.” And all the people shouted with a great shout of joy when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. Yet many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ households, the old men who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, while many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the shout of joy from the sound of the weeping of the people, because the people were shouting with a loud shout, and the sound was heard far away.
This is so easy to miss if you are not paying attention! Out of joy the people sang, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, saying, “For He is good, for His favor is upon Israel forever” (see also 2 Chron. 7:3). The people sang the same thing the people in Solomon’s day sang when the first temple was completed; this is how I know they were expecting the glory of God to return:
Now when Solomon had finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the house. And the priests could not enter the house of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled the Lord’s house. All the sons of Israel, seeing the fire come down and the glory of the Lord upon the house, bowed down on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshiped and gave praise to the Lord, saying, “Certainly He is good, certainly His faithfulness is everlasting.”
Everything the people practiced in Ezra 3 was good. But the reason why the old men wept was because they could not get past the beauty of Solomon’s temple and failed to appreciate the point and purpose of the temple in the first place. I also believe the younger men missed the point of the new temple for the same reasons the old men wept. The point was not a building for God’s glory to dwell in, but to know and worship the God whose plan has always been to dwell with His people face to face! The reason why the men turned to foreign women is the same reason Solomon turned to foreign women who worshiped other gods—they failed to appreciate that there was a greater glory than the lie Adam and Eve believed, the wisdom and women of Solomon, and the illusion of the past that what is gone was better than what God is doing today.
Conclusion
Now, there was no way for Israel to understand all that God was doing in the world, but what He was doing was more beautiful than Eden, greater than Solomon’s temple, and more permeant than the blood of bulls and goats (see Hebrews 10:4). The greater glory they missed was the promise of a deliverer who would remedy their sin. The greater glory they missed was the One the Passover and all the feasts pointed too. The greater glory was not the history of the Davidic kingdom or Solomon’s Temple, but a better and greater Son of David whose kingdom will know no end and will endure forever (2 Sam. 7:14). He is the greater glory who lights up the darkness (Isa. 9:2-7). We have the benefit of being able to look back to Ezra with New Testament eyes and see that the greater glory Israel missed was the glory that would come in the form a person who was fully God and fully man.
The glory eventually returned to Israel, but not in the way Israel ever saw coming. The glory came and it was heard in the sounds of an infant’s cry; see if you can hear the overtones of what we explored through scripture in the words of the Gospel of John concerning Jesus:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of mankind. And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt [tabernacled] among us; and we saw His glory, glory as the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-5, 14).
Here are some of the things we learn from the first three chapters of Ezra and the promise of the greater glory, who is Jesus Christ:
- God is faithful on His terms, in His ways, and according to His character.
While Israel was experiencing the just and severe discipline of God, it was God who promised that the discipline was for a season and not the end of their story. In Jeremiah 29:10, God made the following promise: “For this is what the Lordsays: ‘When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill My good word to you, to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for prosperity and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer. 29:10–11).
Unbeknownst to those in exile and those in Jerusalem, overwhelmed by the ashes of what once was, God was working and moving in one of the more powerful men in the world: “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia…” (Ezra 1:1).
Just because you cannot see or understand what God is doing, does not mean that He is not working out His purposes for His glory and your good.
- The best way to fight fear, is through faith in the God who is bigger than your problems.
I believe this is the reason why Israel built and installed the alter and worshiped God even though they were terrified of the people who surrounded them. Remembering the ways God delivered their forefathers from the great and tyrannical power of Egypt enabled them to fight against the terror they experienced. The people fought their fear by remembering who God was, the problem is that they were nearsighted and failed to see a greater glory existed for their good.
- The safest place to be is in the will of God.
The story of God’s people is a lesson on this principle. The reason why there was a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night that guided His people was so that they moved only when He moved and that they stayed only when God remained. Anytime the people of God moved when God was not moving or stayed when God was moving, they found themselves in trouble.
If you are a Christian, the glory we follow is Jesus, and we are to go where He goes and stay where He stays. If you are not a Christian because you have not surrendered your life to Jesus as the one who died for your sins and conquered the grave by raising from the dead, then you need to run to Him who stood in your place to bear the wrath of a holy God that you deserved.
