I'd Rather Have Babylon

I believe in God, but I will never let on, lest I risk my academic standing. I believe in God, but I will continue to lie in order to close the deal and sign the contract. I believe in God, but I'll never pursue His kingdom because that means I have to give some of my money away and I want to keep it for myself and my family. I believe in God, but I'll allow sexual immorality in my relationships. I believe in God, but I'll never let on.

I don't want my friends to leave me. That's another way of saying basically I believe in God, but I'd rather have Babylon. There are people who want to have just the perks of a relationship with God. For example, they really like the promise of eternal life in heaven, but they pursue their relationship with God right up to the point where it begins to change the way they're supposed to live now. That's where people struggle. They want heaven later, but they want to live however they please now.

Do you ever see that tendency in yourself? We're going to explore that today. Stephen Davey continues his teaching series through the book of Ezra. He calls this lesson I'd Rather Have Babylon. He told me a story of something that happened in this concentration camp and it was incredible and I asked if he could possibly verify it for me. And this past Monday I received an email verifying it, which was sent by a rabbi in Jerusalem. He wrote, The true story took place in Auschwitz towards the end of the war. As in all the camps, there was no lack of great Jewish Talmud scholars at Auschwitz. And one night, 10 of the great scholars there made a Jewish court of law and put God on trial. How is it possible that God, who is totally good, could create such a living hell as Auschwitz?

The debate raged backwards and forwards all night until finally the court returned a verdict of guilty. God was guilty of failing his people. However, on finishing the court, the entire barrack got up and began to pray the morning prayers. Even after finding God guilty, they prayed to him. The rabbi goes on to say a few more things and then closed.

Best regards from Jerusalem Rabbi Reuven Laufer. What an incredible statement of faith it was for these Jews to continue praying to a God that they felt had failed them. And yet I thought how tragic that Monday morning prayer must have been with these men who were now praying to a God they believed had left them all alone. If you ever come to the conclusion that God has somehow disappeared and you are left on your own, all you have to do is crack open the Old Testament book of Ezra and you are struck by the fact that God has been there all along. Now in our last discussion which began our study, we observed some of the mystery of ancient prophecy fulfilled, the mysteries fulfilled. And I've given you in your notes several prophecies that God had given that are actually fulfilled in and around the time of Ezra Chapter one.

So before we start there, let's go to Isaiah forty four and hold your finger there and look at verse twenty eight. Here is a prophecy that we looked at briefly, predicted two hundred years before the birth of Cyrus, shown to Cyrus by Daniel, I believe, after he overthrew the Babylonians. But look at what this prophecy declared nearly two hundred years before his birth. It is I, God says, who says of Cyrus, he is my shepherd and he will perform all my desire. And as I mentioned, when Josephus was writing his history in the first century and he said that when Cyrus saw this prophecy and read it and read his name, that he was seized with an earnest desire to fulfill it. God knew Cyrus's name before he was even born.

And you know, what's wonderful about that? If he could know his name, he knows your name and mine. He knew where you'd be born. He knew where you'd live.

And for how long? The question is, are we seized on the basis of that understanding with a desire to obey the word of God? Another prophecy is in Jeremiah Chapter 25, verse 12 fulfilled in and about the time that we're studying in Ezra Chapter one. Then it will be when 70 years are completed. I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation declares the Lord for their inequity, goes on to say, and I will bring upon that land all my words which I have pronounced against it.

The principle is simple here. God may seem to wink at evil. He may seem to be distracted with other things and not care, but ultimately he judges sin. Turn over a few pages to Jeremiah Chapter 29 and look at verse 10 again. Thus says the Lord, when 70 years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill my good word to you to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans that I have for you, declare the Lord plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. A classic passage that was actually delivered to the people while in captivity through Jeremiah.

I have a plan for you. God's plans for his people then often involved and maybe even require difficulty, but God will always bring about his good plan and that gives us hope. Then finally, and we won't turn, but we discovered in Daniel's prophecy as he had been planted deep within the Babylonian kingdom, that among other things he could deliver the prophecy to Belshazzar's conqueror, Darius, the general of King Cyrus. We discover the simple truth that God has his people placed at the right place, at the right time to fulfill his purposes. God knows who you are too, by the way. He knows where you are. He knows why he has you where he has you and his purposes to fulfill he knows perfectly. As a new believer recently asked me, why am I here? God knows.

God knows. He knew your beginning and he knows your future. In fact, he has already been to your future and he has come back to shepherd you through it.

Now with that as an introduction, prophetically setting the stage, let's go back to Ezra chapter one and let's look again at the proclamation of King Cyrus. Whoever there is in verse three, whoever there is among you of all his people, may his God be with him. Let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel.

He is the God who is in Jerusalem. This again is nothing less than the supremacy of God over a pagan king. It is sovereignty.

One author writes it this way. Talk about the sovereignty of God. Here's a pagan king who just inherited somewhere around two to 3 million Jews from his predecessor.

By now they have bought homes, opened businesses and blended into society. These Hebrews represent a lot of labor and tax income for Persia. Yet Cyrus says, go home, rebuild.

Cyrus is not in charge. God is. And by the way, God is in the process of stirring up more hearts than his. Look at verse five. Then the heads of father's households of Judah and Benjamin and the priests and the Levites arose.

Even everyone whose spirit God has stirred to go up and rebuild the house of the Lord, which is in Jerusalem. And all those about them encouraged them with articles of silver, with gold, with goods, with cattle, with valuables, aside from all that was given as a free will offering. You can almost sense the excitement as the people hear the proclamation.

And there is this, there's this rumbling about and excitement and thrill that people are out able and willing those who are to go home. In fact, everybody's giving donations and Cyrus even gets into the spirit of it and he gives his own donation. Look at verse seven. Also King Cyrus brought out the articles of the house of the Lord. This is highly significant, which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and put it in the house of his gods. And Cyrus, King of Persia, had them brought out by the hand of Mithridath, the treasurer, and he counted them out to Sesh-bazar, the prince of Judah.

I wonder what these women were thinking when they had these boys. Sesh-bazar. Sesh-bazar. By the way, that's another name, as we'll see in a later discussion, of Zerubbabel.

Not much better, but it's another name for Zerubbabel. Now look at verse nine. Now this was their number. Thirty gold dishes, a thousand silver dishes, twenty-nine duplicates, thirty gold bowls, four hundred and ten silver bowls of a second kind, and a thousand other articles. All the articles of gold and silver numbered fifty-four hundred. Sesh-bazar brought them all up with the exiles who went up from Babylon to Jerusalem. Why in the world would Cyrus ever give away this wealth? Because verse one says that God stirred up his heart. Solomon wrote, the heart of the king is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord and he turns it whithersoever he will. God was just turning the heart of Cyrus and here's a pagan king giving away gold and silver to his subjects.

That's unusual. That's akin to the Internal Revenue Service sending me a fat check with a note that says you've been given to us for so many years we thought it'd be time to give you something back. That'd be equally miraculous. Whether the Israelite believed it or not, God was going to keep his word and he begins by doing such incredible things as stirring up the heart of a pagan king to give away gold. God is not guilty of jumping ship. He is not guilty of leaving his people alone in Babylon or in Auschwitz. He is faithful to his word. It's a poor analogy but God struck me here as I study this passage as sort of being like the little boy who is it in a game of hide and seek. You can just kind of see the little boy over by a tree and he's got his head in his arm and he's counting to a hundred but he counts kind of like one of the 98, 99 and then he finally reaches a hundred and then says, ready or not, here I come.

That's what I hear rumbling in this historical context. God has counted and he has affirmed his word. He's counted and will yet reach 70 years. You can calculate that 70 years by the way, one of two ways, either between the first captivity and the rebuilding of the altar, that's 70 years or the destruction of the temple to the rebuilding of the temple, which is 70 years. Either way, God has counted 70 years and it's as if he is saying ready or not, here I come. He is faithful to his word. That's the exciting part of the story and yet as I studied this, though it is exciting and fulfilling and adventuresome and stretching in their faith, there is a hollow ring to this proclamation.

There's an overcast gray sky above it. Now you have to look carefully through the details of chapter two especially to find it. If you read through chapter two and eventually after what one man said enduring an exercise of pronunciation, you get to the end of verse 67 and if you do your math from around 60, all those verses 64 through 67, you discover, ladies and gentlemen, that less than 50,000 Jews went home. The announcement has been made to nearly three million Jews. You can return home. You can rebuild the temple. You can reinstitute the worship of your one true and living God. You can go back to the homeland and 2.9 million Jews said, nah, that's okay.

We'd rather have Babylon. I can imagine the turmoil that was created, by the way. The book of Ezra doesn't record it, but I can guarantee you that an incredible amount of turmoil was engendered that day.

Are you going to leave? And soon those who had decided by faith to follow God were in the minority and they, I'm sure, were so troubled. But what an emotional scene and all the problems that must have been created because of this. And I will interject here at this point that I truly believe that so much of the turmoil in Christianity today, so much of the pressure, so many of the emotional conflicts and problems, so much of the stress, so much of the topsy turvy upheavals in the lives of Christians is directly rooted to a prediction in scripture to the New Testament believer. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. Those who say, I believe in God, but I'd rather have Babylon.

One author called it spiritual schizophrenia, which is rampant in the church and its basic symptom is by those clinging in futile attempts to both worlds. I believe in God, but I will never let on lest I risk my academic standing. I believe in God, but I will continue to lie in order to close the deal and sign the contract. I believe in God, but I'll never pursue His kingdom because that means I have to give some of my money away and I want to keep it for myself and my family. I believe in God, but I'll allow sexual immorality in my relationships lest I be left alone.

I believe in God, but I'll never let on. I don't want my friends to leave me. That's another way of saying basically I believe in God, but I'd rather have Babylon. How could an entire generation come to this decision? A generation, by the way, that had been born during captivity who are now in their thirties and forties and fifties.

Well during this period of captivity, while the Jews have been away from the homeland, they failed in two critical areas, and I want to camp out here for the rest of our time. Two critical areas in which they failed to communicate to the next generation. And by the way, I believe we're failing in the same way today. Number one, they had communicated to the next generation their family descent, but had forgotten the dynamic of worship and relationship. You see, the significance of verse five and all of chapter two is more than the fact that they kept records. It's more than the fact that everybody knew who their grandfather was and who their father was and what tribe they belonged to. You see, they kept these records as a statement of faith in their national unity, as a statement of faith and belief that one day they would return to their homeland. You need priests to offer sacrifices.

We have to know who the priests are. We have to go back to the right spot of land in that holy land we call it. So you have to know what tribe you belong to.

Oh yeah, one of these days we're going to go back. We know what tribe we belong to. We know where we're supposed to live. We know the stories of God's work.

We know all about the holy city of Jerusalem. Yeah, one day we're going to go back, but you want us to go back now? That's a problem. How many in this auditorium, if I ask for a show of hands and I'm not, but how many would say, I will live for Jesus Christ?

I will. How many of you will live for him now? In the corporate world, now. In the middle of that deal, now.

In the middle of that relationship, now. How many of you will live for him now? You see, all of them knew what tribe they belonged to. All of them talked about the holy city.

All of them as a statement of faith kept their records. All of them would have said, yeah, we're going to go back, but now I'd rather have Babylon. You notice the significance of verse 5 again of chapter 1?

Look there. Then the heads of fathers' households of Judah and Benjamin and the priests and the Levites arose. These are the ones that are going to go. And you can imagine the priests and Levites, no wonder they arose. They're useless in Babylon, right? You see, their tribal history was meaningless in Babylon. They were designed for the centrality of worship in Jerusalem around the temple that now lay in Rome. But you see, an entire generation of Jews had never seen Jerusalem. They had never worshiped in the temple. They'd never seen it with their own eyes, and they were unable to embrace the vision of what it could be.

Why? Because their parents had grown accustomed to Babylon. Persian records, in fact, reveal that during this time of captivity that great freedom was allowed for the Jews to generate business and then profit from those businesses. And many of them, according to Persian records, had actually accumulated great wealth. Now, there isn't anything inherently wrong with wealth.

We are all, in global standards, wealthy, if we had more than one meal today. But now they're given this option. Stay where it's comfortable, or travel back over a thousand miles to a 50-year-old pile of rubble and start over.

I don't think so. So they chose the comforts of captivity, and their grown children followed their example, and of course they did. My friends, don't ever expect to impart to your children something you do not have. Why should they have a vision for worshiping God in Jerusalem when their moms and dads are satisfied with Babylon? So first of all, they had communicated to their children, their family descent, but they had failed to communicate the dynamic of worship and relationships, so the temple in Jerusalem is not important. Second of all, they had disconnected what they believed from how they lived.

Follow this, they had lost the relationship between what they believed and how they acted, so that they could somehow say those incredible words in their minds. I am a Jew, and I will live in Babylon. I imagine if you had interviewed a Jew in the streets of Babylon during this time, it would have gone like this. Do you believe, sir, in the God of Israel?

Oh, yes, I do. I pray the Shema every morning. Do you believe that Israel is the land God designed for His people to inhabit? Oh, oh yes, that is the holy land of God for us. Do you believe that God would have His temple rebuilt and worship reinstated around that sacred ground? Oh, oh yes, that is the design of God for His people to do that. Will you go back and rebuild it?

Me? I believe all that, but I like it here. A Gallup poll surveyed mainline denominational people who consider themselves believers a few years ago and discovered the same alarming disconnection. Only 32 percent believed that their faith had anything to do with their life.

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, 68 percent of professing believers that Gallup and his organization talked with had somehow come to the conclusion that what they believed had nothing to do with how they live. Do we have that problem today in the church? The same statistics for sexual immorality among young people in the church is the same for teens outside of church.

The statistics of divorce outside the church are the same for those within the church. And I could go on. Are you infected by this? Did you have somehow said, oh, I believe in God, but give me Babylon. And so, men and women, the joy of Ezra chapter one is just overshadowed by this gray moment where a choice was made and only a handful in comparison to the nation chose to go home. The key phrase again is in chapter one, verse five, and you've noticed it in verse one as well. I've asked you to underline both phrases. It's the same phrase. Notice again the middle part of verse five.

One more time. Everyone whose spirit God had stirred to go up and rebuild the house of Jerusalem. Your theologians out there, you're saying, aha, Steve, and I caught you. God didn't stir everybody's hearts to go back.

Good point. God would have or could have had more if he had stirred more hearts up. You are right in that God is the initiator here, and he always is in reformation. God is the motivator of hearts to turn back toward himself. But don't overlook the responsibility of the believer. You read enough of your Bible and you'll discover the mystery of two truths that no one can quite figure out how they work together. The truth of divine initiation and the truth of human cooperation. And what's more, God in scripture holds the believer responsible for the choice made here, whether to leave or stay us, whether we follow him or disobey, and he holds the believer responsible so that we can read another comment in James where he says to him who knows to do good and does it not to him.

It is sin, sin. What are you choosing today? You know, one of the tragic things about this is not that so many left. Somebody stayed behind, but so many missed what God was going to do. This is my family, and I heard Henry Black could be a few weeks ago state basically the premise of his experiencing God. And it is this find out in which direction God is moving and go with him. That's the exciting thing about Christianity, which ways got moving. And here God was moving in this reformation and revival and there and the re institution of worship. He's going to rebuild his city, and only a handful will experience the joy of that faith.

And you know what you have in your lap? You have a little book called Ezra, which is God's decision to record for you the lives of those who chose not to stay, but to go. There's is the story worth reading.

You won't hear much about those who decided to stay, but you'll read about those who decided to go home. Why don't you pack your things away and let me tell you a story about something that I remember hearing a long time ago, and I think it best illustrates this about two young men who were both very talented singers. One was a tenor, and one was a baritone, a rich baritone voice. Both were believers and both were singing on a radio program, singing Christian songs and tunes. It wasn't long before their talent was discovered in the twenties. And both of these young men were offered lucrative contracts, but they had to leave this and become licensed by and under contract by, it was sort of the nightclub scene.

One of the men said, I'll go and he signed a contract. The other man said, no, I'm going to use my talent for the glory of Jesus Christ alone. The one who decided to follow after Babylon, I have never heard sing and more than likely you haven't either. The one who decided to stay and follow after God's will and use his talent for the glory of Christ has sung to millions of people the world over. I have heard him sing as the traveling companion of Billy Graham. And I think it's ironic, maybe not so ironic, that God would allow him to write the music to a tune or to lyrics. Let me read you these lyrics. The title of it that has become as famous as he has become. I'd rather have Jesus.

Let me read it to you. I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold. I'd rather be his than have riches untold. I'd rather have Jesus than houses or lands.

I'd rather be led by his nail pierced hand. I'd rather have Jesus than men's applause. I'd rather be faithful to his dear cause. I'd rather have Jesus than worldwide fame. I'd rather be true to his holy name than to be the king of a vast domain and be held in sin's dread sway. I'd rather have Jesus than anything this world affords today.

What song are you singing? I'd rather have Babylon. Or when it comes to making the choice, I'd rather follow God. Every day, following God comes down to these kinds of choices. You either pursue this world and the things that it offers, or you pursue God and the way he wants you to live. Here at Wisdom for the Heart, it's our desire to help you choose to live wisely. And I hope this lesson helped you toward that end today.

Stephen Davey is working his way through a series from the book of Ezra. He called today's lesson, I'd Rather Have Babylon. In addition to being our Bible teacher here on this program, Stephen is the president of Shepherds Theological Seminary. Learn more about our ministry at our website, wisdomonline.org. Join us next time to discover more wisdom for the heart. Amen.