Ezra 7:1

There is a long break in the history, of about sixty years, between Ezra 6 and Ezra 7. The Book of Esther belongs to that period, if the common view is right that the Ahasuerus of Esther was King Xerxes. Ezra 7 records what happened in the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus. Here Ezra, "a ready scribe in the law of Moses," appears for the first time, and is God's agent for blessing. He is spoken of elsewhere as priest and scribe.

Between the two parts of this book there are 60 years. In those 60 years the events of the book of Esther took place. They show that God in sovereign mercy kept His people, so that His own service could be set up again.

Notice again that the signs are everywhere: ruling power on the earth has passed from the Jew to the Gentile. So the date of Ezra's mission is given as "in the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia," and the commission the king gave him for his work is recorded in full (vv. 11-26). This proves that God's people were at this time under the authority of the Gentiles, and that God Himself always recognizes the powers that have their source in His own sovereign appointment.

But now their turning away from God had laid them at the feet of the Gentile world-power. So God worked in His compassion — first by prophets and His own word, and now by help that came at the king's word from Babylon. And the faithful priest, who had the king's confidence, comes up to Jerusalem to call the remnant back to the law of Jehovah, which they had neglected and broken.

First (vv. 1-5), we find his genealogy, and it has no gap in it. He came from the priestly line. Through his ancestors and their virtues — the faithfulness of a Zadok, the zeal of a Phinehas — his descent goes back to "Aaron the chief priest."

He became a priest by birth and consecration. But he only became "a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which the LORD God of Israel had given," by personal study of the Word. So an inherited office, even among the Jews, could not give a man the fitness to use it. That fitness could only come from time spent alone with God in the Scriptures.

Where, then, can one find a resource against this spiritual decline and its results? There is but one resource: the word of God. God raises up Ezra to teach the people the law of Moses and to remind them of its importance. This is not a matter of new revelations, as it was when Haggai and Zechariah spoke to the people. It is simply a matter of bringing the "statutes and ordinances" (v. 10) found in "the law of Jehovah" back to light, and of applying them to the conscience.

All is ordinary: his resources are only what ours in this day are, the word and the presence of God. But he used them, and used them well and faithfully throughout. Before he began to act, he prepared his heart to seek the Lord. He had meditated on His statutes until his progress, as we may surely say, was plain to everyone.