Ezra 1:1

Seventy years before their return, the prophet Jeremiah, who lived in the closing days of the kingdom of Judah, had foretold that judgment would overtake the nation. Because of their wickedness they would be carried off into captivity at Babylon, and their land would be left in ruins. Even so, the prophecy said that after seventy years the LORD would bring them back to their land. The book of Ezra opens in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia — seventy years after the Captivity. At that time, so that the word of the LORD by Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, who issued a proclamation to the people of God setting them free to return to the Land to "build the house of the LORD God of Israel."

This prophecy came long before Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, and at least a hundred years before God called Jeremiah to his work as a prophet. So it shows that the eye and heart of God are always on His people and on their interests. It shows too that the public events of the world — the rise and fall of empires, the coming of mighty conquerors — are only the instruments of His power. Through them He works on through the governments of the world to fulfil His own purposes for His people on earth. How calmly, then, the children of God may rest amid political confusion and strife! In this way God had marked out, by the mouth of Isaiah, two hundred years before the event told in our chapter, the man He had chosen to restore His people and to build His house at Jerusalem.

But none of this was enough to bring the captives back: not these convictions of the mind (which might have nothing to do with a work of conscience or a living faith), and not even his certainty that God had chosen him as an instrument to carry out His plans (v. 2). God meant to show that it was He Himself and no other who fulfilled His Word. That is why it says: "the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia" (v. 1).

It is remarkable how God works. First He "stirs up the spirit" of this pagan king, so that he passes a decree inviting the Jews to return to Jerusalem. He then stirs up the spirit of those who went (Ezra 1:5). Whatever men do, a true revival is always a work of God.

In these books God is no longer seen stepping openly into the affairs of His people. He works, as it were, behind the scenes. At the same time He recognises the new order that He Himself has set up, and He uses the Gentile kings, into whose hands He had put the rule of the earth, to carry out His purposes.

So to fulfil this promise God used Jeremiah in prophecy, Daniel in prayer, and Cyrus — a man who did not know the Lord — in providence.

He discovers "by books," not by circumstances, that God would visit His people in captivity and open a way for them to return to their land. He has just seen the king of Babylon destroyed and his empire fall. But he does not guess at the meaning of the stirring events around him, or try to draw from them conclusions that favour God's people.

The Holy Spirit presents those who returned as showing the marks that a believing remnant should take on in a time of ruin. They are a very healthy example for us — an example that teaches us how we may be witnesses of God in difficult circumstances.