Beginning the Work/ March 3, 2019
ITEMS YOU WILL NEED: When students see a visual aid or write something down, they are much more likely to remember it. We remember 10% --20% of spoken information versus almost 65% of visual information. This is why Jesus pointed to everything from birds and flowers to coins and bottles of wine when He taught.
Read the Link section of the lesson. If you have a story of waiting for something for a long time, bring something that represents that story. It could be a photograph of the thing or person for whom you waited. If there is a place to which you have longed to return, bring a photo of it or some object that represents that place.
Instructions for the teacher are given throughout the lesson in italics.
Suggested answers to questions are given in parentheses. These answers are only meant to offer guidance. Unfortunately, most teachers allow no more than three seconds of silence after they ask their students a question. Don’t hesitate to let a question hang in the air until a student answers. If you are still faced with silence after fifteen seconds or so, you can offer some of the ideas in parentheses to encourage discussion.
This spring, The Quarterly is written by Dr. Iain Duguid, an ARP pastor and
professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
Be sure to read the commentary by Dr. Duguid in the student and teacher editions before using this lesson plan. (Iain is pronounced “EE-uhn.” Duguid: Du is like the short U in put. “Guid” is pronounced, “gid.”)
Link
This section of the lesson helps students start thinking about the lesson with a personal connection between their own lives and the general idea of the Bible passage.
Ask your students:
● Have you ever received good news after a long wait? What was the good news, and how long did you have to wait?
● Have you had a dream fulfilled? What did the fulfillment look like?
● Have you longed to return to a place that you once called home? If you were able to go back to that place, where was it? Were you there for a visit or to stay
permanently?
Display the pictures or objects you brought.
Today we begin the book of Ezra. This book tells part of the story of the Jews’ return from exile to their homeland after a long wait.
Learn
This section will help you and your students examine the Bible and Dr. Duguid’s commentary in greater depth.
We will study Ezra and Nehemiah over the next several weeks. In the Hebrew Bible, the two books were combined into one. If you studied The Quarterly last fall, note that Ezra follows 1 and 2 Chronicles and Daniel chronologically. At the the end of 2 Chronicles, Jerusalem falls, and the Babylonians capture many people of Judah (the southern kingdom of the people of God) and take them into exile in 586 B.C. (The exile began decades earlier when the Babylonians took other captives from Judah, but 586 marks the end of the kingdom.) In 539, King Cyrus of Persia overthrows Babylonia and
destroys its control over the Middle East. The Persians also take control of the territory formerly controlled by Judah and Israel. (Israel was the name of the northern kingdom of the people of God). Thereby are fulfilled many prophecies that God would not
abandon his people. He promised to reestablish a remnant of the nation in the Promised Land. This came to be because the Persians had a policy of allowing captured people to return to their homelands. The ESV Study Bible commentary says, “Ezra 1-6 covers the return of the first wave of exiles, who came with their leaders, Zerubbabel and the priest Jeshua. . . . [Chapters 1-6] continue the narrative up to the time when they rebuilt the temple at Jerusalem (516 B.C.)” (ESV, 799)
As Dr. Duguid says, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah show three waves of people returning to Palestine under the leadership of Zerubbabel (Ezra 1-6), later under the leadership of Ezra (chapters 7-10), and under Nehemiah (Nehemiah 1:1-7:3). “Each return is initially authorized by the Persian authorities; each faced almost constant opposition to their reconstruction efforts; and each overcame that opposition with divine help. Each resulted in a different reconstruction project: the temple, the Judean
community, and the walls of Jerusalem, respectively.”
In today’s study, we will cover the beginning of the reconstruction of the temple.
Read aloud Ezra 1:1-4.
Read to your students this portion of Dr. Duguid’s commentary:
[King Cyrus of Persia] had conquered Babylonia and inherited a situation in which many of the residents of [Babylonia] were exiles from other countries. His solution to this political problem was to repatriate many of them to their
homelands, placing carefully selected national leaders over them and funding the rebuilding of their national institutions. The idea was to strengthen the various parts of his new empire with a core of people indebted to Persian benevolence and therefore hopefully inclined to be loyal to him.
Yet what seemed to Cyrus simply a smart political move is recognized by the author of Ezra-Nehemiah as the result of divine intervention. The seventy years of exile prophesied by Jeremiah are now compete, with the destruction of
Babylon (Jer.25:11-12), and it is time for the exiles to return home. Jeremiah also anticipated the Lord “stirring up the spirit of the King of the Medes” to destroy Babylon (Jer. 51:1, 11). Yet returning home to Jerusalem was not a simple task.
The city had been devastated and the temple lay in ruins. A major rebuilding task lay ahead of them, one which would not be easy, even with the support of the Persian authorities.
● Dr. Duguid calls Cyrus’ actions “a smart political move,” but Ezra 1:1 says that God “stirred up the spirit of Cyrus.” How can both things be true?
In verses 1, 2, and 3, LORD is written in all capital letters. This is English translators’
way of rendering the Hebrew word YHWH. This word means “I was, I am, I will be,” and it is the name God gives for himself when he speaks to Moses at the burning bush before the exodus from Egypt (Exodus 3). The name was considered so holy by ancient Jews (and remains so to many modern Jews) that it could not be spoken. When the Jews read Scripture and came upon this word, instead of speaking the word, they substituted another word such as Adonai, which means “Great Lord.” This is why our English translations have the word LORD in capital letters when YHWH appears in the Hebrew. (In about 600 A.D., Hebrew scholars added vowels to the language to indicate correct pronunciation. Centuries later, scholars began to write the name of God in English as “Yahweh.”)
Cyrus says that the God of Abraham, the God of the Jews, the LORD, has given him power. He wants the temple of the LORD to be rebuilt. Cyrus calls him “the God who is in Jerusalem.” (v.3) The ESV Study Bible commentary says, “The name God of heaven [v.2] is used elsewhere for the Lord when Jews relate to non-Jews (see 5:12). Cyrus
uses diplomatic language typical of the time, yet what he says corresponds to the message of the book of Ezra.”
Cyrus believes that the LORD has given him all kingdoms. However, he says that the LORD is the God who is in Jerusalem, as if the LORD is especially tied to Jerusalem.
● Was the LORD especially tied to Jerusalem? (Until the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., the presence of the LORD was in the temple in Jerusalem in a way that it was not anywhere else. Ezekiel 10 says that the Spirit of God left the temple when Jerusalem fell. However, Psalm 24 is just one of several Bible verses that say, “The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it.”)
● Do you think that Cyrus was a follower of the LORD? (It is impossible to know if Cyrus was a follower of the LORD in the same way that faithful Jews were. It is not unlikely that Cyrus believed in many gods and that he believed that the LORD was merely the particular god of the Jews and of Jerusalem and Palestine. On the other hand, Cyrus says that God has given him “all the
kingdoms of the earth,” as if Cyrus believed that all the kingdoms were God’s to give.)
The entire Jewish community in Persia gave “silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, besides freewill offerings” [v.4]. Dr. Duguid notes, “Those who remained behind in Babylonia [supported] those who returned.” The reasons why some Jews remained in Persia probably varied. By 535 B.C., most Jews living in Persia had been born there.
They only knew of their homeland through the stories of their parents and grandparents.
Persia was home to them, and they may have had no desire to return to Israel. Others who wanted to return may have been unable to. For example, if a Jewish family was caring for an elderly grandparent, that family may not have had the freedom to journey to Palestine because it would have been too strenuous for a frail, elderly person.
However, those who remained in Persia were to help by sending supplies or money.
Palestine was still their ancestral home, and they were obligated to support those who returned to live there.
● Do you have an ancestral home or land in your family to which you feel a connection even if you do not live there? If so, where is this place, and why do you feel a connection?
Before reading the next portion of Scripture, point out that the three tribes mentioned in verse 5, Judah, Benjamin, and the Levites, “are those that had constituted the former
kingdom of Judah [the southern kingdom] and had thus been taken off to Babylonia in 586 B.C. No mention is made here or elsewhere of any large-scale return of other tribes, though a few people from other tribes are sometimes mentioned or implied.”
(ESV, 804) The other tribes constituted the northern kingdom which was called Israel after the two kingdoms formed in about 1,000 B.C. after the death of Solomon. The northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 B.C. However, as the ESV commentary says, some individuals from the northern kingdom did survive, and they or their descendants came back to Palestine. For example, the prophet Anna, who
prophesied when Jesus was presented as an infant in Jerusalem, was from the tribe of Asher, one of the tribes of the northern kingdom.
Sheshbazzar, “the prince of Judah” mentioned in verse 8, was a leader of the exiles who returned. The title “prince” means that he was a leader. “In 5:14-16 the initiation of the temple reconstruction is attributed to Sheshbazzar, and there he is called
‘governor.’” (ESV Study Bible)
If you studied the book of Daniel last fall, you recall that in the account of the writing on the wall, the last Babylonian ruler, Belshazzar, brings out vessels stolen from the temple by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian ruler who destroyed Jerusalem. As Belshazzar and his guests drink wine from these vessels, a disembodied hand writes on the wall about Babylonia’s demise. Now Cyrus brings out these vessels and returns them to
Sheshbazzar so that he can take them back to Jerusalem to be used in the temple again for the worship of God.
Dr. Duguid says, “The writer of Ezra-Nehemiah loves lists and official documents. For him it is a marker of the care and attention to detail with which the returning exiles approached their task.”
Read aloud 1:5-11.
Verse 5 says that God “stirred up” the spirits of the leaders of families to return to Jerusalem.
● When has God stirred you up to do something big? It may have been a project for your family, for your workplace, for the church, or some other organization. Or it could have been a more personal endeavor, such as when God gives a person the desire to help someone in a special way. It can also be the desire God gives a couple to conceive or to adopt a child. God may stir us up to befriend a girl or
boy, or to give foster care or legal aid to a child. When has God stirred up a desire in you to do any of these things?
● Why was it important to rebuild the temple? (The temple was the center of worship in the nation of Israel. It was the center of the national religious life. The temple gave them a place to focus their worship and their thinking about God. It was the place where sacrifices could be brought when a person needed to ask for forgiveness or when people wanted to offer thanks for God.)
Live
This part of the lesson will help your students apply the lesson and may help you think of your relationship with God in a new way.
Dr. Duguid says, “When we undertake a large-scale enterprise for God, there is always a great deal of planning and organizing to be done.”
● When has your family or your church undertaken a big project? Who kept track of the resources used on the project? What other talents were necessary to carry it out? What was your contribution to the project?
● Perhaps you are an older adult who does not have the physical or mental energy or health to play a “front and center” role in a project. However, you can play a crucial role by praying for others. Why is prayer just as important as other kinds of work?
● How can you encourage children to pray for the work of a project and to join in the work that adults are doing?
Use Dr. Duguid’s application questions:
● Why was it important that the people of Judah returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple? What would that accomplish?
● How have you seen God stir up the hearts of his people (and the hearts of those who are not his people) to accomplish his purpose for you?
● Why does God sometimes not stir up the hearts of his people or remove the roadblocks to progress so that our work for him stalls? What is he up to in those times?
● How are our lives similar to those of the exiles returning to Jerusalem? What do we have in common? How is our position in Redemptive History dramatically different?
Close in prayer, asking God for clarity when he calls you to a large undertaking. Ask God for perseverance whether you are involved in a large project right now or simply in typical day-to-day living.
Recommend that students read chapter 2-6 of Ezra before next Sunday. We will pick up the study of chapter 7 next week.
Bibliography
ESV Study Bible. Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2008.
-Online lessons by Wendy Herrmann Smith
