There is a tiny remnant of people in Judea. The crumbs of a once great kingdom. They are descendants of those who survived exile. Their fathers and grandfathers had witnessed the collapse of their nation.

And why did the nation implode? Why did God depart from His temple and hand them over to cruel foreign armies?

Sin.

It’s very simple. God had made His will and rules for them very clear. And they believed they could “tweak” the parts they didn’t like and completely ignore other parts.

And the idolatry crept in.

Small at first.

Then more open.

And each generation got further from knowing the Lord.

There were occasional revivals. And those were wonderful and changed the course of many families. But they weren’t enough to change the course of the whole nation. The nation had to learn the hard way.

And when the fires of war and devastation were over and the rebuilding begun, what does Ezra find? He finds them headed right back down the old path of sin.

Can’t be bothered to learn the Word of God. Leave that to the experts. I’ll just do what I think is good and right.

THIS is why Ezra has a full-on meltdown. Have they really been through a century of Hell only to go back to the patterns that drug them to Hell in the first place? “God forbid!”

And then he does what most preachers today find VERY unpalatable. He speaks the truth. He tells them they have sinned. He even uses the pronouns we & us; identifying himself with the sinners.

Ezra shoots straight with them. God said to them don’t marry foreigners. Why? Because they do not know or care about the God of Abraham and they will pull you away from Him to serve their idols.

As a teen at church camp, we once had a speaker who spoke very frankly to us about “missionary dating.” That’s the idea that a Christian can date an unbeliever and win them to Christ. He got a teen boy and a teen girl to come up front as volunteers. He had the young man stand on a bench. The young lady stood on the floor below him. He asked the young man to take the girl’s hand and try to lift her up onto the bench. He was a stout guy but he couldn’t deadlift this girl 2 feet off the ground while standing on a rather narrow bench. Then the speaker asked the girl to attempt to pull the young man down. That was actually quite easy though he was stronger than her. Because he was standing on a narrow path, she simply pulled him off his center of gravity and he jumped off as he began to fall.

Paul told the Church, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?”
‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭6‬:‭14‬ ‭ESV‬‬

In Christ there is no longer any problem of marrying a person from a different race because all the nations have been invited into the fold and we are all one in Christ. But the instruction still stands for the people of God not to be joined to nonbelievers. And that was the bottom line for Ezra’s situation.

God is very gracious and many times (after YEARS of faithful prayer) He saves that lost spouse. But there are also many homes that slip further and further from the community of faith because one person in that marriage does not follow Christ.

But in Ezra’s time, they did not yet have the Gospel or the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. So most unequally-yoked marriages ended in pulling the Jewish man away from Yahweh.

Even the priests’ families were guilty of this.

And Ezra is putting his foot down. He has read the prophets and the histories. He knows how this ends. He demands they all assemble in Jerusalem on pain of having their property confiscated.

This is serious.

They’re all standing there in the pouring rain. In mid December. It’s freezing. And Ezra stands up and preaches it straight. You have sinned. And you WILL make it right. There will not be an alternative option. You can get right or leave. And they agree. They will send away their foreign wives (which is going to require financial compensation). But they agree to do it.

It takes several months to go through every name on the list and make sure each man has followed through. They finish just before Passover in the Spring. There are now a lot of unmarried men in Jerusalem. I’m sure the meals suffered and the state of their clothing was probably questionable. But they have gotten back on the narrow way and averted future destruction.

What can NT believers learn from this? This isn’t some kind of command to divorce your unbelieving spouse. The Holy Spirit gave the Apostle Paul fresh counsel befitting a New Covenant on that subject in 1 Corinthians 7.

No, I think what we can glean from the final chapters of Ezra is – the ability to identify what has derailed your life, your family, your nation, your culture in the past – and then put your foot down and say, “We’re not going down that road again.” It will probably mean severing ties. Perhaps there are friends or hobbies or habits that you need to “divorce.” Maybe it’s what you watch or listen to or read. Maybe it’s what you are neglecting to do that needs doing. If it takes standing in a cold shower confessing your sin to God then so be it. It might take months of making lists and systematically going through them, and cutting sinful influences out of your life, your phone, and your home, perhaps even your community and nation. This wasn’t done in some brief, heated emotional rampage. This was persistent and systematic examination and work. But if a person, a family, a culture, or a nation is going to survive live…

“Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matthew‬ ‭16‬:‭24-25‬ ‭ESV‬‬