Or, When We’re in Sin Over Our Heads
Scripture: Ezra 9:1-14
Date: February 2, 2025
Speaker: Sean Higgins
You can’t build/re-build a culture of faithfulness and be in bed with unfaithfulness. And as soon as unfaithfulness is exposed, further rebuilding requires repentance.
In Ezra 9-10 this is not a metaphor. Their mixed marriages brought covenants into conflict. As a nation they were in covenant with God, but many of their leaders made marriage covenants with other-god-lovers. They were in bed with those who practiced abominations. You can’t repair the ruins on a compromised foundation.
You can have a culture of unfaithfulness that doesn’t immediately collapse. Unfaithfulness can scale, but it isn’t sustainable. A culture that disregards God will be disregarded by God; it’s the Romans 1 road. In the other direction, faithfulness compounds, faithfulness builds, faithfulness recognizes graces, faithfulness resists compromise. Repentance rebuilds faithfulness.
Ezra and about five-thousand men, women, and children arrived back in Jerusalem as the second big wave of rebuilders to return from Babylon. It had been 80 years since Cyrus’ repatriation decree, and the Persian kings after Cyrus maintained his policy of aid. A lot had happened in Jerusalem, and a lot more work needed to be done. We haven’t even gotten to the city walls yet. The Jews had renewed their sacrifices, and worship at the house of God was to be at the center of national life. But whatever identity they were building via liturgy they were tearing down by their lives.
Chapter 9 records the initial report and then Ezra’s representative response. In this chapter and the next we’ll consider the appearance of racism, the need for divorce, and the place of corporate confession.
Ezra was settling in, and so was some conviction.
What are the after these things in verse 1 ? The answer colors some of our perspective on what’s happening, because Ezra 10:9 tells us that it was now the ninth month, though Ezra 7:8 tells us he arrived in the fifth month. How could this have escaped Ezra’s notice for over four months? If he did know, then is his reaction an overreaction? Is Ezra’s display sincere or theatrical?
One possible answer is that he’d been traveling most of that time around the province Beyond the River delivering Artaxerxes’ commissions to the satraps and governors (see Ezra 8:36). Maybe he just got back again when the officials came to him.
Another answer is that he’d been busy teaching the law for four months, such as Nehemiah 8:1-8 describes, and which Nehemiah 7:73 took place in the seventh month. Maybe Ezra did not fully realize, and maybe these officials began to be convicted by the teaching.
Ezra was a “scribe skilled in the Law of Moses” (7:6), and the language in chapter 9 contains language from the Pentateuch. Even the names of the “-ites” in 9:1 are historical names of peoples found in the Promised Land when Israel entered after Egypt and the wilderness wandering (for example, Exodus 3:8). Not all these people groups dwelled in Israel when Ezra entered, but the law still applied. We’ve seen echoes in Ezra of a “second exodus,” from Babylon, and now we see the same sort of temptations.
The sin is not a lack of racism (if “race” is actually the best term; I prefer “ethnicity”). The holy race, per the ESV, even as the ESV notes, is holy seed. This is a covenant term going back at least to Abraham.
The problem is described as a culture of worship problem. See abominations (1, 11) which are disgusting religious practices, faithlessness (2, 5) to the covenant, impurity (11), uncleanness (11). The Israelites were not allowed to mix with idolators. It’s not a lack of shared language, or different physiognomy/skin color, but they didn’t share the same God.
Laws that prohibited marrying a foreigner provide their own reasoning. See, for example, Exodus 34:11-16 (and Deuteronomy 7:3-4), not eating sacrifices to other gods, not taking “their daughters for your sons, and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.” Note Ezra 9:14 at the end of this chapter.
Some of the most “holy” men/patriarchs married non-Jews (not least of which, Moses and David). Some of those women became part of the Messiah’s birth-line. But those women had to convert (Ruth, the Moabite, is a prime example). It was not okay to be unequally yolked, as an apostle put it later. The forbidden mixing was god-mixing, religious syncretism. Just as bad was worship apathy. So combining gods in worship, or neglecting the exclusive worship of the Jealous God (Exodus 3:14), was the sin.
A culture’s god’s matter. The God worshipped shapes the life of a people; we always become more and more like who or what we worship. This is true whether it’s Islam or secularism, paganism, mysticism, or humanism. This belongs in a political discussion about immigration, what defines a nation, and even more close to home, marriage and family.
Ezra’s response included death-grieving behavior in verse 3: tearing clothes, tearing hair, not eating, and sitting in silence. He was appalled, “dumbfounded” (Fensham); he was at a loss for words; in a state of shock (Williamson). It is at least emphatic, if not dramatic. Nehemiah pulled other people’s hair (Nehemiah 13:25), Ezra ripped out his own. (It hurts.) It was also public because many gathered around him, all who trembled at the words of the God of Israel (verse 4). The conviction of sin wasn’t limited to Ezra. We might say Ezra could tell he had a mandate for repentance and reform.
His state of appalled-ness apparently lasted for some hours, until the evening sacrifice. Then he got down on his knees to pray, and spread out his hands to show need (verse 5).
The prayer was directed to God, yet public so that all could hear. It was also personal, though Ezra himself hadn’t committed the sin. He knew that what happens to one part of the body will affect all the body. As a leader, and with the sins being committed by other leaders, Ezra identified as being part of the guilty party.
In verse 6, our iniquities have risen higher than our heads means they were drowning in sins, mounted up to the heavens, perhaps a reference to the flood. The sins have a long history, and even if you didn’t sin like your fathers, there can still be generational consequences, to this day.
The fresh sins are especially wrong in light of fresh favor. God had given them a secure hold (verse 8), which is really a “tent peg”; now they could stop wandering. God had brightened their eyes, making us think of Jonathan’s eating honey after a day of fighting without food (1 Samuel 14:27). There were obvious providences as God stirred the hearts of Persian kings to send the Jews back to their land, to repair (the) ruins, and to give a “fence” for protection (verse 9).
Verses 10-12 are the confession proper. There are half a dozen references to the law, written by Moses, who was a proto-prophet.
Again, the concern over mixed marriages was about the impurity and abominable practices, the uncleanness that didn’t belong with Israel’s required holiness. They couldn’t be both set apart to God and be allies with those who loved false gods.
Two questions, clear answers come in verses 13-14. What they were doing had no excuse. What they were doing was deserving of complete destruction. God would be right if God showed no more mercy or grace.
No pulled confession. No defensiveness. And in prayer, no pleading, just acknowledgement. The conviction of sin that gets all the way down is what makes grace amazing. If it wasn’t amazing, we probably are taking grace for granted.
The prayer ends in verse 15. A remnant existed because of God, and that remnant was guilty again before God. You are just.
You can’t build/re-build a culture of faithfulness and be in bed with unfaithfulness.
We are not in the same situation as the Jews, but we can invite false gods and abominable practices into our homes/families/culture without marrying into them. Marrying an unbeliever demonstrates an unbelieving world and life view regardless of a profession of faith. But again, we subscribe to streams that conform us to compromise, and unfaithfulness will yield its own fruit.
And, as for corporate confession, it is good to keep the liturgy of it. Every prayer doesn’t need to be corporate, but remember the “Our” in “Our Father in heaven.” Even more than Ezra’s corporate confession is the Messiah’s identification with us sinners, He was “numbered with the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12; see also 1 Corinthians 5:21 and 1 Peter 3:18).
What action Ezra and the people took comes in Ezra 10.
As God’s chosen ones, you are beloved and holy. You are His saints. His grace is training you to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live godly lives in the present age. He is purifying a people for Himself. Work with the grace, unto glory and excellence.
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. (2 Peter 1:3–4 ESV)