Ezra 3
by Pastor David Groendyk
In many ways, chapter 3 is an encapsulation of the entire book Ezra. It demonstrates to Israel and to us how God has been faithful to his covenant, and it reinforces our need to love God and do what he commands.
God’s faithfulness is evident throughout. Zerubbabel (the king figure and a descendant of David) and Jeshua (the priest) are the ones leading this charge to rebuild the altar and the temple. The Davidic king and the priesthood have survived exile and are reinstituted in the land of Israel. Moreover, the altar upon which offerings were given, as well as the foundations of the temple, are being rebuilt. This was the place where God met with his people and his people would find forgiveness and worship him. They had gone without their temple or the sacrifices for scores of years, and it’s finally back. After such great devastation and destruction and hopelessness for so long, what a sweet song it was to sing, “For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel” (v. 11).
And yet… what great sorrow filled the people’s hearts (vv. 12–13). The older generation who had seen the original temple wept. There was no way this new temple would ever reach the grandeur and glory of the old one. Surely a great tension and a great longing swept over this people. God’s great redemptive plan for history was to form a people to be his own, give them their own land to live in, and set up for them a place to worship him, but every single one of those pieces are lackluster at this point. The people are not nearly as numerous and nowhere close to being like the sand of the seashore or the stars in the heavens (chapter 2), the temple is not nearly as glorious or grand as it was in Solomon’s time, and even the Davidic king Zerubbabel is still a servant of a foreign ruler and not truly sovereign over God’s people. The longing for something greater grows.
The longing for something greater will not be met until Jesus Christ comes. Christ is the great King in the line of David who ultimately reigns on the throne forever and executes justice; Christ is the great high priest who offers himself up as substitute on the altar of the cross to make peace and grant forgiveness; Christ is the temple in and through which God and mankind meet one another and dwell together. The same mixture of rejoicing and weeping is something we will always experience on this earth, because this earth is not the grand and glorious end of God’s redemptive plan. We’ll always experience the tension of rejoicing in Christ while also weeping at what this earth is not.
Until, that is, we reach the new heavens and the new earth, which is the climax of God’s salvation, where weeping will be no more. And do you know what won’t be in heaven? A temple. Because we will have God himself dwelling with us directly without any need for an intermediary. And we’ll sing the song that Israel sang, “For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever,” without any tension or longing or weeping, because we will see our God face-to-face. What a glorious sight that will be!