Ezra 9

That's the whole counsel.

Ezra 9 and 10, the whole thing divor- in the chapter nine he explains- Wow ... that why all these people must be divorced.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

I'm sorry that I'm going into all this now but- [laughs] ...

I want you to see Ezra 9:1.

Yeah.

Hallelujah, what a friend.

Our text for today is Ezra 9:9.

Ezra 9 verse 9.

In Ezra 9:9 we read this, "For we were bondmen, yet our God hath not forsaken us in our bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and in Jerusalem." Ezra 9:9 is in the middle of Ezra's prayer to God after hearing that the people of Israel had not separated themselves from the people of the lands around them.

God had commanded them not to marry people that were not Jews, what He called strange wives, and they, they had done this.

They had not separated themselves from the people of the lands around them.

And that's what they were commanded to do.

They had married strange wives, and those women were not Jews, so Ezra is praying and confessing their sins to the Lord, hoping for mercy from the Lord to break up these unapproved marriages.

And in fact, God himself is said to be just in many passages.

Deuteronomy 32, 4, Ezra 9, 15, Revelation 15, 3.

These are all passages in which God is expressly called just, and he carries out justice.

And yet I want to warn you again a little bit here.

This is the promised land, of course.

Now, Ezra 9, all the way at the end, in Ezra 9, we've got this wonderful summary And there's this passing comment.

And listen to how Ezra is going to summarize what these pagan nations did.

For we have forsaken the commands you, Yahweh, gave through your servants, the prophet, when you said...

So, now watch this.

This is what I'm going to do.

I'm now going to take Leviticus 18, Ezra 9, and I'm going to come back to Exodus 23, and I'm going to paraphrase Exodus 23 for us.

I think I can do this.

They were still really in slavery.

Nehemiah 9, Ezra 9 says we're slaves.

They're still in captivity, even physically, even though they're back in the land, but especially spiritually.

And so we come to something very important here.

It is day two hundred and seventy-one.

We're reading from Ezra, the end of Ezra, the last two chapters, although as we know that Ezra and Nehemiah are the same book.

It's all one.

But in our Bibles, they're two different books.

We're reading Ezra chapter nine and ten, also Zechariah chapter nine, ten, and eleven.

We're getting kind of close to the end of the book of the prophet Zechariah, as well as Proverbs chapter twenty, verses sixteen through nineteen.

As always, the Bible translation that I'm reading from is the Revised Standard Version, the Second Catholic Edition.

If you want to download your own Bible in a Year reading plans, you can follow along and keep track of every day.

And when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you're invited, you eat of his sacrifice and you take of their daughters for their sons and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.

Ezra 9, verse 1, after these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, the people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves.

From the peoples of the lands with their abominations.

From the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jezebites, Jebusites, and Ammonites, and Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites.