Ezra 10:1 Now when Ezra had prayed, and when he had confessed, weeping and casting himself down before the house of God, there assembled unto him out of Israel a very great congregation of men and women and children: for the people wept very sore
Someone has said, “You can never go home again.” Maybe you know the experience of going back to the place where you were born or reared and thinking, “Things have changed. The house is smaller. Everything is older.” I once went to the house where my mom grew up in Colorado and knocked on the door. The couple who bought the house from my grandparents in the 60s was still living there. That house seemed smaller and older than my mom remembered because it had been quite some time since she had been there. My dad once went back to the home where he lived as a small child and where that house had been was a parking lot. Literally, you sometimes cannot go home again.
The book of Ezra is the story of God providentially returning His people to Jerusalem where they laid the foundation for the temple and started the reconstruction of that which had been destroyed by conquering armies. God did this through a pagan king named Cyrus. Cyrus had been prophesied about by name 150 years before he was even born. God was providential in this.
When the Jewish people who chose to return laid the foundation for the new temple, the old men wept and the young men cheered. The young men cheered because they were about to begin the process of rebuilding. The old men wept because they remembered the temple of Solomon and this new temple would be nowhere near as grand as the old one. So, the people returned, but you can never go home again. God’s people returned to the place where God’s house was, to Jerusalem, to all of this, yet there was a need to return to God Himself.
Ezra 9:1 says, “Now when these were done, the princes came to me, saying, The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations.” He goes on to say they had lived in open sin. In fact, the chief of the fathers was the chief in doing this. Perhaps he did it for the same reason Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter, as a way of gaining power. I don’t know the motives; I just know that what they were doing was sin. They were not living a life that was holy to God.
When he heard this, Ezra says, “I fell upon my knees, and spread out my hands to the LORD my God, and said, O my God, I was ashamed and I blush…[You] give us a little reviving in our bondage…God hath not forsaken us in our bondage… [but] we have forsaken thy commandments.” Then verse 15 says, “We cannot stand before thee because of this.” Ezra is saying, “We cannot stand before You because we have violated your commandments and rejected You. We have returned to the land and the house of God, but we have not returned to God.”
Chapter 10 is a very sobering chapter. It begins, “Now Ezra had prayed, and when he had confessed, weeping and casting himself down before the house of God, there assembled unto him out of Israel a very great congregation of men and women and children: for the people wept very sore.” One man said, “Yet now there is hope.” There is always hope when you return to God because for the people of God, home is not a place, but a person. So many times, you think, “If I can go to a certain place geographically or return to our former glory chronologically, then we will be where we need to be.” The truth is for God’s people, home is not a place; it is a Person, God Himself.
First, we need a return to God, not a return to greatness. Now, I do think the church needs a return to power, not political, but actually changing the world for the glory of God and the good of people. I think the country in which I live needs to return to God. Recently, I spoke to an older lady who was talking about a town that had been famous for being a hotbed of evangelical Christianity. It had colleges and publishers and churches. Now, those institutions are either gone or have been taken over and are no longer doing what they were intended to do. Friend, you can never go home again in the sense that you can return to a place or time, but you need to return to God not greatness. The greatness we need is found in the God we have left.
Second, we need to return to God, not to a place. I was recently talking to an acquaintance in Murfreesboro who had moved from a state I happen to love in the American West. She said, “Well, it is not what it used to be.” She talked about the social and moral decay, and now she is living in middle Tennessee. I don’t blame her at all for moving. We live in a good place here in Tennessee. But the fact is you are never going to avoid the world as it is. What we need is God as He is.
Yesterday my wife and I were in a line at a coffee shop in town. We saw a couple ahead of us who were transparently confused and without the Lord, searching for something. If most people saw them, they would think, “They just need to go back home to people who love them and can help them.” But I would think their home may very well be the place that produced this confusion in the first place. These people don’t need to go home; they need to go to Jesus.
What we need is not a return to a place or time, but to a person, God. He is holy and forgives. There is hope when people turn to Him. Because for the people of God home is not a place it is a person. That person is God.