2. Learning in the School of Ezra: God’s Hand-Picked Leader

2. Learning in the School of Ezra: God’s Hand-Picked Leader.

“Ezra had devoted himself to investigating Scripture, he had set his heart to studying and practicing the Torah instructions of the Lord, and to teaching Israel its statutes and laws.” (Ezra 7:10).

Ezra is probably the most famous Bible scholar in the history of the Judeo-Christian faith, given credit for composing 1 and 2 Chronicles as well as Ezra and Nehemiah. Jewish tradition even holds that Ezra was actually the same person as the prophet Malachi. Ezra had humble beginnings, a Hebrew captive in Babylon during their seventy years of exile. He was a priest and had a celebrated heritage in his family line, going all the way back to Aaron the High Priest. During Ezra’s time in Babylonian exile, he had established himself as the ideal priest, one who had fervently studied Scripture, and practiced it in his personal life, while also learning how to teach the Scripture so others could understand it. Ezra was recognized as a “scribe highly skilled in the instructions of Moses that Yahweh, the God of Israel, had given.” (Ezra 7:6). Ezra was hand-picked by the Lord to be the pivotal leader in this crucial time in Israel’s history.

God tapped the shoulder of Babylon’s pagan king at the time, Artaxerxes, to participate in the return of his captives to their homeland in Jerusalem. God will use anyone He wants to achieve His will, sinners or saints, pagans or believers, and He will choose whoever He wants to further His plans. The king granted authority to someone he evidently trusted fully, Ezra, to return to Jerusalem and help rebuild the Jewish homeland. The king even specifically told Ezra to teach the people about the instructions of the Lord in the Torah, and reestablish the worshipful purposes of the rebuilt Temple. The King even provided loads of gold and silver to help replenish the Temple’s worship materials.

So Ezra leads this second group of exiles back to Jerusalem around 458 BC, 60 years after the first group of exiles were granted permission by the Babylonian king Cyrus. Ezra led a caravan of about 2,000 Israelites, mostly priests and singers and Levites to help in the Temple activities, as well as other willing exiles anxious to go home. This difficult journey took about four months to complete, walking over 900 miles. But Ezra was doubly motivated to obey the Lord’s directions… He desperately wanted to explain the Word of God to the people, probably around 50,000 of them in Jerusalem, so they wouldn’t have to suffer another devastating punishment from the Lord for breaking the Covenant and losing their faith in their Lord. Ezra was serious about God’s chosen people becoming faithful to God’s divine Covenant and recovering their nation’s reason for being.

Ezra was successful in God’s assignment to strengthen the people’s knowledge of the Torah, but also to renew the entire spiritual life of these settled exiles who had lost the vision for what their identity should be as God’s chosen people. Ezra was not merely asked by God to enlighten the people regarding the content of the Torah, but basically to rekindle Israel’s spiritual culture as the Israelites renewed their Covenant with their God. It’s important to see that Ezra’s success didn’t come by accident:

1. “The hand of the Lord was upon him.” (Ezra 7:6). God was zealous about His desire to bring His people back into the fold, back into the Promised Land, but also back into the Covenant that was always waiting there for them. God remained close to Ezra throughout his assignment in Jerusalem, enabling him to do what God wanted him to do. There are six different times in Ezra where we read that God’s hand was on him and the people… the time he was planning his momentous journey to Jerusalem (7:9); the time when Ezra was euphoric in his praise of God at the start of the journey (8:18); the time he led his people in a time of fasting and praying for protection from enemies during their journey (8:22); the time when he spoke in gratitude to God for giving them all a safe journey to their homeland (8:31). Once the Lord put his hand on Ezra, He never took it back.
2. Ezra was a prayer warrior. It seems like Ezra’s first impulse was to pray, accompanied not only with fasting, but also with tearing his cloak in guilty grief and greatly disheveling his hair out of mourning for the nation’s sins. He prayed in ecstatic praise and gratitude (7:27-28); for protection from enemies (8:21); weeping in brokenness and confession for himself and his people (8:6-15); and joining in with the prayers of the Levites in praise, confession and various petitions (Nehemiah 9:32-37).

So while other world leaders at this very time in history were influencing their nations to follow their mistaken ideas as to truth, leaders such as Buddha in India, Confucious in China, and Socrates in Greece, here we find Ezra carefully guiding his people to the ultimate truth of the Lord God of Israel, preparing the way for Jesus Messiah, Who fulfilled the very Scripture that Ezra read aloud to the people some 460 years later.

How did Ezra go about teaching the Word of God to thousands of people? You might want to keep reading on to part 3 of this series. It’s exciting stuff.