Ezra 10 - Repentance

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Thanks very much, Kelly and the team. If you've got your Bible there, please take it out. You'll need that. If you use a digital Bible, open your app. We're going to be in Ezra chapter 10 today. As Doug said, we're in the final week of our church-wide study through the book of Ezra, the series we've been calling New Hearts Needed. And over the last nine weeks, we've followed the people of God as they've returned from exile, as they've rebuilt the altar, they've rebuilt the temple, they've faced opposition, they've returned to the Word of God, and then in these final chapters, chapter 9 and chapter 10, they're confronting the uncomfortable reality of their own sin. And as we come to Ezra chapter 10 to kind of finish everything off today, I guess the big question I want us to consider is actually quite simple. That is, do we take sin seriously enough? Before we dig into God's Word together, let's pray. Loving Heavenly Father, would you teach us your ways so that we might rely on your faithfulness. Give us this morning, Lord, undivided hearts to fear your name. As we come to your Word, would you soften our hearts? Show us, Lord, where we need to change. Help us to see again the greatness of your mercy and grace. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. In 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. Most of the journey towards Mars went to plan. The plan was it was going to get to Mars and then orbit around and check in out climate stuff. Instead of entering the orbit, though, as it was supposed to enter, around about 237 kilometres above the planet, the spacecraft actually came far too close. It had dipped down way too, too close, closer to like 57 k's, and it was lost. The mission was a failure, a huge one, a $327 million loss in 1999 by the time the mission was over. At first, engineers suspected some sort of hardware failure, some sort of glitch in the navigation software, maybe an issue with the asymmetrical design of the spacecraft. And to fix the trajectory, the engineers had calculated how far the craft was drifting, and they did four thruster burns from the time it was launched to the time it was lost. They had four goes at trying to fix this thing, and they put the numbers into the computer and they fired the thrusters to try and bring it back online. After the fourth burn, the tracking software processed the data and reported that it was perfectly on target, when in reality it was 180 kilometres off, too shallow. After weeks of investigation into the eventual failure, it was discovered the problem was remarkably simple. Two engineering teams had been working on different parts of the project, and they were using different units of measurement. One was working with metric units, and the other was using imperial units. And so all their attempts at fixing the problem were wrong solutions. It was an enormously expensive mistake caused by a problem that once identified seemed incredibly basic. I think there's a bit of a principle there, that in order to properly solve a problem, you need to first actually understand the problem, right? That's logic. We all get that. Ezra chapter 9 brings us, last week as Pastor Doug brought that to us, a really simple diagnosis of a very real problem among the people of God. They'd returned to Jerusalem, they'd rebuilt the temple, worship had resumed, they were listening and being taught God's word again. But the deepest problem that they had, the actual real problem underlying everything, hadn't disappeared. Their hearts were still prone to wander from God. They weren't taking sin seriously. And so we saw last week the leaders came to Ezra and told him that some among the returned exiles had been marrying people from the surrounding lands. Most of the priests and the leaders, they were leading in this sin, and they'd married these people from the surrounding nations. Now, the word of caution here: the problem wasn't ethnicity. God had no problem with interracial marriages. In fact, the problem wasn't even the race of these folk, because the Old Testament gives us some wonderful examples of foreigners, such as Ruth and others, becoming part of God's people in choosing to not worship their foreign gods, but giving themselves over to the worship of Yahweh, the one true God. So foreigners could become part of God's people. So that wasn't the issue. The problem was that God had specifically warned Israel, don't enter into these sorts of relationships because they're going to draw you away from me. They're going to draw you into the worship of other gods. This is what God told them in Deuteronomy chapter 7. He said, Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they'll turn your children away from following me to serve other gods. That was the danger. This is exactly what Israel had repeatedly fallen into. As they'd come back from this exile, as they're beginning to walk again into worship with God, they're starting to drift, and they're starting to walk down this same road of covenant unfaithfulness that had contributed to their exile in the first place. And so Ezra chapter 9 last week, it diagnosed the problem. Chapter 10 shows us the right response. And I think there's three things we can see about this this morning. And that right response begins with a softened heart of humility to God. And the first thing we see is that a softened heart is a heart that's grieved by our sin. It's a heart that is deeply sorrowful for sin. Have a look at the first couple of verses from Ezra chapter 10. It says, While Ezra was praying and confessing, weeping and throwing himself down before the house of God, a large crowd of Israelites, men, women and children, gathered around him. As Ezra is kind of broken by this announcement of the sin of his people, as he's praying, as he's grieved by this sin and throwing himself down at the mercy of God, people gather around him. His response was contagious. His grief over sin becomes contagious. The men, women and children, they gather around him, and we're told that they too wept bitterly at the end of verse 1. And then in verse 2, we're told that Shecaniah, the son of Jehiel, one of the descendants of Elam, said to Ezra, We've been unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women from the peoples around us. It's interesting that this guy doesn't blame the culture around him for the sin. He doesn't blame the parents. He doesn't blame the difficulty of returning from exile. He's not trying to minimize what the people have done. He doesn't say, Well, God is gracious and merciful and kind, so it's okay, he'll forgive us. He doesn't do that at all. He says, We've been unfaithful to our God. He's grieved like Ezra over the sin. And this is one of the marks of a softened heart. A softened heart is willing to call sin what God calls it. Friends, we need to see our sin as God sees it. And that can be difficult because we're so good at explaining our sin. I know I can be. We're good at comparing our sin with somebody else's sin and justifying our sin. We're good at finding respectable names for our sin. I mean, we don't gossip; we're just sharing concerns. We're not greedy; we just like nice things. We're not bitter; we've just been hurt. We're not proud. We just happen to know that we're right. We do it, right? We can minimize and downplay our sin this side of the cross. But Jesus has forgiven us, right? I mean, that's our thinking. Grace is there. But friends, a softened heart eventually has to stop making excuses and say, like Shecaniah and Ezra and the people there, Lord, I've sinned against you. We need to recognize that first and foremost, our sin is an affront to the character and the authority of our Creator God. Psalm 51, verse 4, is a remarkable example of this. King David, those of us that know his story know that he was involved in a terrible sin with Bathsheba and her husband Uriah, who he had murdered. And David prays to God and writes this prayer after that sin. And he says to God in his prayer in verse 4, Against you and only you have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. Now think about that for a moment. David had clearly sinned against a whole bunch of other people. He was the king. He was meant to be following God's commands and showing his people what that looks like. He'd sinned against his kingdom. He was meant to be—this was in the springtime when kings were meant to be at war. He should have been out with his troops, and yet he's at home in the palace slacking off. Not only that, he sins against Bathsheba. There's a whole power imbalance thing there. He sins against Uriah and has him killed, not to mention their families. Clearly, David had sinned against all those people. It profoundly hurt them. And yet he understood something important at its deepest level. Sin is ultimately against the God who made us. We think about it. Why is it that lying is wrong, and the Bible says not to do it? Well, certainly it hurts people, but I think it's deeper than that. It's wrong because the God who created us in his image is truthful and calls us to reflect his character. Why is sexual immorality wrong? Because it causes enormous harm? Sure, it does, but it's deeper than that. God created our bodies and our sexuality, and when we use them contrary to his purposes, we're rejecting his authority over us and his good plan for us. Why are greed, pride, bitterness, and envy wrong? Well, because ultimately every sin says to God, I know better than you. I'm going to live my life my way, not your way. That's essentially what lies at the heart of every sin. It's this desire to live our life by our own terms and not according to the Lord. J. I. Packer put it like this. He said, We never know what sin really is till we've learned to think of it in terms of God, and to measure it not by human standards, but by the yardstick of his total demand on our lives. That's why Ezra and God's people grieve. Not because they've broken a rule, but because they've sinned against a holy, good, and gracious God who made them. The New Testament says that this is the kind of posture of thinking about sin that we need. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 10, he says, Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. That word repentance is the title of our study this week, and as you dig into that in your discipleship groups or on your own as you spend time with the Lord in his Word this week, you'll see that word is there. It's in the Bible. It's something most Christians are familiar with. But for those of you that are here today, this morning, that you're still investigating Jesus, you're still exploring faith, maybe this is a weird Christian word. Repentance just means to change our mind, to turn around, to switch our thinking about something and to go in a different direction. The example I used on Friday night when I was explaining this to the youth group was to imagine that you're walking to your classroom at school and eventually you realize you're heading in the completely wrong direction. You could stand there feeling really bad about going the wrong way, or you could say, I can't believe I did that. You could blame your friend for getting you distracted, or you could blame the school signs for being confusing and getting you lost. But at some point, if you want to get to your class, if you want to get to where you're going, you've got to change your mind about the path that you're on, and you've got to do some action. You've got to turn around. That's what it means to repent. That's what Paul is describing in 2 Corinthians 7, verse 10, when he says, Godly sorrow leads to repentance. It's a change of mind about our sin, a turning away from it and a turning to God instead. There's a difference between worldly sorrow and godly sorrow. I mentioned that earlier in the interview, between regret and repentance. Worldly sorrow says, I'm sorry I got caught, maybe because it's embarrassing or because of the consequences, and that doesn't lead us anywhere helpful. Godly sorrow, on the other hand, says, I'm grieved because I've sinned against the living God, and it leads to repentance and life. Godly sorrow doesn't just leave us lying on the ground feeling terrible about ourselves. It gets us back up onto our feet and turns us towards obedience to salvation, and it leaves us with no regret. Before we move on, we can't miss the last bit of Ezra chapter 10, verse 2. Shecaniah says there, We've been unfaithful to the Lord by marrying foreign women from the peoples around us, but in spite of this, there is still hope for Israel. And I love that sentence because Ezra, Shecaniah, and the people there taking their sin seriously, and that's necessary, right, to have that soft heart of humility before God. But taking sin seriously doesn't mean we abandon hope. In actual fact, the seriousness of our sin is what helps us to see the beauty of God's grace. Sometimes we think that because we live this side of the cross that we can take sin less serious. I mentioned that earlier, you know, that kind of thinking that says Jesus paid it all, so there's so much grace. God is gracious. We just don't have to worry so much about our sin. But that's the wrong thinking. That's not what the Bible says. The cross teaches us the opposite of that. If our sin required the Son of God to lay his life down for us, then the cross doesn't show us that sin is insignificant. It shows us how serious it is. And yet at the same time, the cross shows us how extraordinary it is that there's mercy in the Lord. It was this mercy that filled Shecaniah with the hope for salvation only came as a result of their deep sorrow and grief over their sin. So that's the first thing. We've got to see sin for what it is. It needs to grieve us. We need to see it as serious. The second thing we see this morning is a softened heart gets serious about holiness. Look at verses 3 to 4. Shecaniah continues. He says, Now let us make a covenant before our God to send away all these women and children, in accordance with the counsel of my lord and of those who fear the commands of our God. Let it be done according to the law. Rise up, this matter is in your hands. We will support you. So take courage and do it. Shecaniah says to Ezra in these verses that something has to be done. We can't just feel sorry for our sin. We've got to actually turn from it and do something. And he says to Ezra, We're going to support you. You're the spiritual leader. Take courage. Do what needs to be done. In other words, they're asking Ezra to help them deal with it. And this is exactly what happens. Ezra gets up. The leaders take an oath, and a proclamation goes throughout Judah and Jerusalem for the returned exiles to gather and assemble together on the twentieth day of the ninth month. You can read that in the rest of the chapter there. Ezra confronts them on their unfaithfulness, and eventually, beginning in verse 16, individual cases are investigated and dealt with. We're not going to read all of that detail now. I'll leave that for you to read that during the week. But I think there's a movement that we can notice here. Chapter 10 doesn't stop with sorrow and tears and grief over sin. It moves from grief to action. And I think this gives us an important principle. Genuine sorrow over sin will normally produce genuine seriousness in dealing with it, a seriousness about pursuing holiness. Jesus uses extraordinarily strong language about this in Matthew chapter 5. Listen to what Jesus says. He says in Matthew 5, 29 and 30. He says, If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It's better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It's better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. That's some strong words. And Jesus isn't commanding Christians to mutilate themselves. He's not saying do this literally. He's deliberately using this shocking language to make the point: we need to take sin seriously. We can't negotiate with it. We can't pamper it. We can't make room for it and keep something around in our lives that leads us away from God and then wonder why we keep falling into the same sinful patterns. We need to get serious about holiness. This is especially worth thinking about on a morning like this when we just witnessed people getting baptized. Baptism is this wonderful picture of the gospel, that verse from Romans 6 that talks about us being buried with Christ into his death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might be raised to new life. What we witnessed this morning was Carol, Michelle and James publicly declaring before the church, before their family, friends, anyone that's here that can listen, my old life is not going to master me anymore because I now belong to Christ. It's a beautiful picture of the gospel. And Carol, Michelle and James would tell you they haven't made this declaration because they think they've arrived or that they're perfect or that they're never going to sin again. Baptism isn't a declaration that we've finally got our life together, but it is a declaration that Jesus has died and risen for us and that we're trusting him and he's now our Lord. A little later on in Romans chapter 6, verse 15, Paul anticipates a question that may be a question we all will ask from time to time. If we are saved by grace, then does it mean that sin doesn't matter anymore? Paul says in Romans 6:15, What then? Shall we sin because we're not under the law but under grace? Should we sin because we're not under the law anymore, we're under grace? The answer is an emphatic, by no means. In verse 16 to 18 of Romans 6, Paul says, Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey, whether you're slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness. But thanks be to God that though you used to be slaves to sin, you've come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You've been set free from sin. And have become slaves to righteousness, to a life of pursuing holiness and obedience to the commands of Scripture. It's a wonderful thought. But think about the logic of that picture that Paul gives us. We were once slaves to sin and death, but thanks to the good news of the gospel, Jesus has opened the prison cell door. He's paid the penalty for our sin. He's broken the chains that held us captive, and we can walk out that door into new life with him. Why would we then want to walk back into the cell and shut the door and decide to make ourselves comfortable and stay in prison? It doesn't make any sense at all. God's grace doesn't give us permission to make peace with sin. It actually sets us free to fight it. So let me ask you this question. Is there some sin in your life that maybe you've made peace with? It's a good diagnostic question to ask ourselves. Maybe something we excuse or minimize or keep hidden. Maybe it's something that we've confessed many times but have never actually taken practical steps to address. Ezra 10, as we read it, shows us that repentance gets practical. Dealing with sin requires a plan. Sometimes we can just stop at the confession part and not actually make a plan to do anything about it. Yes, we should confess our sin. We should grieve over it. We should repent and change our mind about it, but we don't stay there. At some point, we put it into action. We need to ask ourselves if there's a pattern of behavior that repeatedly leads us into sin. What needs to change? I think practically dealing with sin is always going to be inconvenient. We see that in the Scriptures. We see that in this chapter. I knew a young Christian man who chose to use an old-fashioned dumb phone without apps or internet access. Everyone around him, all of his peers, had smartphones, but he knew that unrestricted access to the internet was repeatedly drawing him into sin. And so it was inconvenient for him to walk around with this dumb phone, absolutely. But he decided that holiness mattered more than convenience. He was willing to work through the inconvenience in order to pursue a righteous lifestyle before the Lord. I think practically, too, dealing with sin requires accountability, and that's a striking feature of what we see in chapter 10. There's nothing private about what's going on here. The plan was public. They all gathered together. You couldn't not know who was involved or how to follow through. There was accountability. I'm not suggesting that we need to kind of line everybody up after the fire drill and all kind of confess our sins this morning. That's not what I'm meaning. But we were never intended to live the Christian life in isolation. So that means we don't have to struggle with sin alone. Sometimes it's helpful for us to say to a trusted Christian brother or sister, in confidence, I'm struggling with this. Will you pray with me? Will you ask me about it? Will you help me to get serious about holiness as I seek to follow Jesus? We can hold each other accountable. And then practically, dealing with sin always requires prayer. That softened heart towards the Lord doesn't just say, Lord, forgive me. It also prays, Lord, what needs to change? And Psalm 139, verses 23 to 24, is an example of that. The last thing we see this morning is that a softened heart accepts the cost of obedience. And you can read during the week from verse 18 onwards. It's just this long list of names. And if we're honest, this is a section of the scriptures that we're often tempted to skip over too quickly because they're just names and they're weird names for us to pronounce. But again, like I've said before up here as we've gone through Ezra, these are real people. I think it's really helpful for us to have these names. It's a real event. It happened in the life of this community. Imagine for a moment, put yourself in the shoes of one of the guys that had his name on that list. For generation after generation, God's people would read Ezra. They'd come to chapter 10 and there would be your name, the names of all of those, name after name after name. These were men who'd been unfaithful and were dealing with that unfaithfulness in a painful way, in an inconvenient way. But they were dealing with it. This is where we need to be careful that we understand the chapter properly. Because again, the problem isn't interracial marriage. Foreigners could be part of the people of God. The problem was the marriages involved this covenant compromise and the danger of worship of other gods. And so we just need to have that in our mind. And at the same time, we need to have in our mind that we can't take Ezra 10 as prescriptive for us today in the sense of what they did, because we can't conclude from this that Christians today who are married to unbelievers should divorce them, because that's essentially what they did here. They broke up the marriages. It was a pretty serious thing. And this is not what God is telling us to do now, to abandon wives and kids. God didn't even ask them to do that. This was something they came up with on themselves. They probably should have prayed and asked God for wisdom first before they made their plan. But anyway, that's another sermon. What we see in the New Testament is explicit commands about situations where a Christian might have an unbelieving spouse who's willing to remain in the marriage. And the Bible says, don't divorce them. Stay married to them. Worship God. Love them, and be a part of that relationship with all your might. So we can't copy exactly what happened in Ezra 10. But then what's the application? Well, I think the application is to look at how seriously they were prepared to deal with the unfaithfulness. The repentance was costly. It's not just an abstract theological decision. These were families involved. There were relationships involved. There was grief involved, and there was big consequences. I think sometimes we resist repentance because obedience seems costly. We've got to remember sin is costly too, right? The cost we often encounter when dealing with sin exists precisely because sin has already caused that damage. We see it in the broken relationships and damaged trust. We see it in the habits in ourselves that become deeply entrenched. But friends, God's grace and forgiveness are real, even if sin isn't harmless. Perhaps this is why part of Ezra finishes the book with the names. The list stands as a reminder for generations to follow that sin matters. But I reckon there's something else here too. The names are not simply names of men who sinned. They're names of men who were grieved over their sin, who repented of their sin, who made a plan to deal with it in spite of the inconvenience. It takes us back to Shecaniah's words in verse 2. In spite of all this, there is still hope for Israel. And I think that's a great place to finish the book of Ezra. Think about back when we started in Ezra chapter 1, verse 1. You know, it was the year of Cyrus, the king of Persia, and in order to fulfill the word of the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord moves the heart of the king, Cyrus, the king of Persia. It's a cool way to begin the book. A faithful God who keeps his promises, a God who's sovereign and powerful enough to even move the heart of a pagan king. And then have a look at the final verse of Ezra chapter 10, verse 44. It finishes this way. It says, All these, that list, all these had married foreign women, and some of them had children by their wives. It's a bit of an anticlimax. It's just a stark reminder of the hearts of God's people that were still in need of a much-needed spiritual change. It's quite a contrast from God who's faithful at the beginning of the book to the end, where we see just how unfaithful we human beings are. The God who keeps his promises and the humans who keep wandering. They needed new hearts. Now, friends, that's the message that's been sitting underneath the entire series as we've been going through these past nine weeks. Our deepest problem is the same problem they had. It's not merely the circumstances around us. Our deepest problem is not that we need better habits or better education or better circumstances or some other opportunity. That's not the problem. That's a misdiagnosis if we think that's the issue. We need God to do something within us. We need new hearts. The prophet Ezekiel looked forward to a day when God would say to his people, I'll give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. And we know that ultimately that promise leads us to Jesus. Because Jesus didn't come just to tell sinners to try harder or to deal with your sin. He lived the life that we failed to live. He died the death that our sins deserve, and he rose again so that through faith in him, there's forgiveness, cleansing, and freedom, so that there's new life. And this is the final message of Ezra. It's not, You're sinful. Go home feeling terrible. The message is, Sin is far more serious than we naturally imagine. That's true. But God's grace gives sinners more hope than we deserve. As Shekaniah said in verse 2, In spite of this, there's still hope. So where does that leave you? Maybe you're here this morning and you're not yet sure what you believe about Jesus. Maybe you've been exploring Christianity. You've been thinking about things, and you're sitting there thinking, Well, today is a pretty awkward day to come to Caboolture Baptist Church. We've spent the whole morning talking about sin and repentance. That's you this morning, don't miss the invitation. Christianity doesn't begin by pretending that you're better than you really are. It begins by admitting the truth that we have sinned, that we need God's mercy. And the wonderful news of the Christian gospel is that that mercy is offered to us in Jesus. He gives it freely to all who would believe. There's still hope. For those of us that are here this morning who've been Christians for years, perhaps the question for you is different. The question might be, what have you stopped taking seriously? What are you excusing? What are you minimizing? What are you burying? What is it that you've made peace with that Jesus actually called you to turn away from? Maybe this morning God's putting his finger on something, and if he is, my encouragement to you is don't run from him. Don't hide it. Don't excuse it, but bring it into the light. Confess your sin and turn from it, and then take whatever practical steps that that obedience requires. Pray first and ask God to lead you in that. Don't let your heart wander away or grow cold this morning. Jesus says to come back to him. Regardless of which question you find yourself answering this morning, there is hope. That's the message at the end of Ezra. It's not just that human hearts are sinful and need to change. It's that God remains faithful and is full of mercy. He stands ready to forgive all of us who would turn to him in faith and repent. Let's pray. I get the band up. Heavenly Father, as we come to the end of this book, we see your faithfulness and grace so clearly. We also see, Lord, such a stark picture of the human heart. We confess that we're too prone to wander from you. We minimize our sin. We excuse it. Sometimes we make peace with things that you've called us to put to death. Lord, would you soften our hearts? Give us that godly sorrow that leads to repentance. Give us courage to take sin seriously and to pursue holiness. And above all, help us to see again the greatness of your grace. Thank you that because of Jesus, we don't have to hide from you. That because of Jesus' death and resurrection, there's forgiveness and freedom and new life. We thank you that for sinners like us, there's still hope. We pray that in Jesus' name. Amen.