The Centrality Of Worship, Part 2 (Ezra 3:6-13)
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Good morning. We continue our sermon series this morning on the Book of Ezra, and we arrive today at Chapter 3, which is one of the most important parts of Ezra’s narrative. The exiles have returned, and they finally get to work.
Originally, I was going to preach through the entire third chapter, but I think there is enough material for us in the first half, the first seven verses. So let’s go there now.
When the seventh month came, and the children of Israel were in the towns, the people gathered as one man to Jerusalem. Then arose Jeshua the son of Jozadak, with his fellow priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel with his kinsmen, and they built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, as it is written in the Law of Moses the man of God. They set the altar in its place, for fear was on them because of the peoples of the lands, and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord, burnt offerings morning and evening. And they kept the Feast of Booths, as it is written, and offered the daily burnt offerings by number according to the rule, as each day required, and after that the regular burnt offerings, the offerings at the new moon and at all the appointed feasts of the Lord, and the offerings of everyone who made a freewill offering to the Lord. From the first day of the seventh month they began to offer burnt offerings to the Lord. But the foundation of the temple of the Lord was not yet laid. So they gave money to the masons and the carpenters, and food, drink, and oil to the Sidonians and the Tyrians to bring cedar trees from Lebanon to the sea, to Joppa, according to the grant that they had from Cyrus king of Persia.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God!
So when we went through Chapter 1, we saw that we were reading about a second Exodus. In the second chapter, we found a list of names. A second Book of Numbers.
And now, what we see in Chapter 3 taking shape is a new conquest of the Promised Land. Just as the Book of Joshua details the conquest of the Promise Land, leading to the eventual conquering of Jerusalem and the building of the first temple, well, now the exiles have come home. And it is their responsibility to restore the worship of Yahweh to the Promised Land. They are to build a second Temple, after the second Exodus, and to prove God has a sense of humor, they even have a second Joshua.
Then arose Jeshua the son of Jozadak, with his fellow priests...
Their high priest is named Jeshua. You can also translate it Joshua. You can even translate it Jesus, how’s that for New Covenant hints and whispers?
What shapes chapter 3 is the priority and centrality of the worship of God. Once they arrive, all accounted for, the priority is worshipping God according to His Word.
And I want to show you at least three things this morning from these first six verses about this worship. We will see
I. The Urgency of Worship
II. The Challenges of Worship
III. The Discomfort of Worship
Let’s Pray
Grant, Almighty God, that as you shine on us by your Word, we may not be blind at midday, nor willfully seek darkness, and thus lull our minds asleep; but may we be roused daily by your words, and may we stir up ourselves more and more to fear your name and thus present ourselves and all our pursuits as a sacrifice to you, that you may peaceably rule, and perpetually dwell in us, until you gather us to your celestial habitation, where there is reserved for us eternal rest and glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A Prayer by John Calvin
I. The Urgency of Worship
I. The Urgency of Worship
So our story here in Chapter 3 begins with these words
When the seventh month came, and the children of Israel were in the towns, the people gathered as one man to Jerusalem.
That does not mean that they waited seven months. Indeed, they had probably only been in and around Jerusalem for a few weeks at this point.
And the very first thing they do is rebuild the altar.
They set the altar in its place, for fear was on them because of the peoples of the lands, and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord, burnt offerings morning and evening.
Now what you must appreciate here is that they were re-establishing biblical worship. Which had, for about 70 years been impossible. For most it would have been an entirely new experience, something they would have only heard about in stories from their grandparents. This was more important than homes or jobs. It was their chief end--to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
Many of you might be familiar with the famous quote from John Piper about the relationship between Missions and Worship. It’s so good that I think we ought to hear it again here, in its entirety. Piper says this about missions, and I think we can also say it about evangelism more broadly as well. Piper says this:
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever. Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal of missions. It’s the goal of missions because in missions we simply aim to bring the nations into the white hot enjoyment of God’s glory… But worship is also the fuel of missions. Passion for God in worship precedes the offer of God in preaching. You can’t commend what you don’t cherish... Missions begins and ends in worship.
--John Piper
From Let the Nations be Glad!
This was the same heartbeat in the document that I sent out to all of you on Monday, that worship is at the center of what we do because all we do flows out of our worship and all we do flows back into our worship. It’s the fuel and the goal.
And we see here, Israel, gathered together “as one man” (verse 1). And they’ve got one principal aim--to worship God. This is more important than their homes and their businesses and any other consideration.
In fact--where are they living exactly? How are they sustaining themselves? The text doesn’t say. Apparently that’s not Ezra’s main concern.
But worship is. And so it should be ours as well. This time where God renews covenant with us. Refreshes our hearts. Tears out the sinful rubble and rebuilds our spirits with his Word and by His Holy Spirit. We often think it’s just going to church. And hell is happy for us to reduce God’s work to a duty we just show up for.
And this worship--as important as it is--brings some challenges.
II. The Challenges of Worship
II. The Challenges of Worship
These former exiles faced a number of challenges as they sought to re-establish worship. One of them was the growing turmoil and civil unrest between them and their neighbors. I’m actually going to put that off for now and address it in a later sermon, probably when we get to chapter 4. But just know for now that they were not the only ones around Jerusalem when they arrived, and for the most part, their neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to see an extra 40,000 people suddenly show up.
So that was one challenge.
And as they pursue their main concern (rebuilding the temple), they run into another challenge. And that is, it’s is going to take awhile. This was the last verse in our passage.
So they gave money to the masons and the carpenters, and food, drink, and oil to the Sidonians and the Tyrians to bring cedar trees from Lebanon to the sea, to Joppa, according to the grant that they had from Cyrus king of Persia.
How do we rebuild the temple? Well, there aren’t forests of cedar around Jerusalem, so they have to import the lumber from Lebanon. And that was going to take about seven months. So what do we do in the meanwhile? We rebuild the altar.
Why did they start there? Because the Altar is the place where God promised to meet with his people. The Altar of God and the Presence of God went hand in hand.
“Now this is what you shall offer on the altar: two lambs a year old day by day regularly...It shall be a regular burnt offering throughout your generations at the entrance of the tent of meeting before the Lord, where I will meet with you, to speak to you there. There I will meet with the people of Israel, and it shall be sanctified by my glory.
This answers the question of why worship was at the center. Because forgiveness and a sense of the Lord’s own nearness was at the center. The people, united together as one man (so we read in verse 1) were united in this reality: we need our sins forgiven and we need the presence of God. This should be the orientation of our hearts every Sunday when we come to worship. “We need to hear that our sins are forgiven, and we need the presence of God.” We need him present with us by His Words, Words illuminated by His Holy Spirit, receiving his body and blood at the table. We need God’s forgiveness, and we need Emmanuel.
But there is still another challenge we learn about. That part of their obedience to God in this moment was immediately moving back into the old festival patterns and celebrating the Feast of Booths (more on this in a moment).
But what that meant, what celebration of the Feast of Booths meant was an incredibly high number of sacrifices. Over two hundred sacrifices of bulls, rams, and male lambs were prescribed for the Festival of Trumpets and Booths.
And it’s hard for us to understand the revulsion that most of us would feel if we watched it. We’re actually talking about gallons of blood flowing down the sides of an altar. Something that had not happened in Jerusalem for over half a century.
But for the Israelites, every drop of it would have been a reminder of one central reality
...without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
They had been without this visual reality in their worship, presumably for decades. And you have to imagine that coming back to it would have been sobering to say the least.
But what this means is that one of the first things placed before their eyes when they came back home was their need for a Savior.
But this reality of observing the consequences of their sin--there was a reason why the sacrifices were always observed by the one bringing them. The priests did the killing, but worshipper had to watch.
Derek Thomas gives some interesting insight into this. He says:
From Derek Thomas:
Most of us feel that the problem is outside us and that the solution must come from within ourselves. The Bible turns this around and says that the problem is within us and that the solution must come from outside us. The problem is sin—our sin. The solution comes apart from our own accomplishments and resolve, deriving from the grace of God that is seen on the other side of atonement and sacrifice. God forgives sin only when his justice is satisfied. The substitutionary nature of animal sacrifice spoke of both the magnitude of Israel’s sin (the nation’s exile was, after all, a judgment on the people’s sin) and the need for justice to be met so that forgiveness could be offered. In the end, however, the blood of bulls and lambs could never take away sin. Only the blood of Christ, spilled in substitution for sinners, could do that.
III. The Discomfort of Worship
III. The Discomfort of Worship
As I said a moment ago, our text tells us in verse 1 that they arrived in the seventh month, and this meant that the first duty before them was to celebrate the Feast of Booths.
And they kept the Feast of Booths, as it is written, and offered the daily burnt offerings by number according to the rule, as each day required, and after that the regular burnt offerings, the offerings at the new moon and at all the appointed feasts of the Lord, and the offerings of everyone who made a freewill offering to the Lord. From the first day of the seventh month they began to offer burnt offerings to the Lord. But the foundation of the temple of the Lord was not yet laid.
Now as many of you might know, the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles was a time when Israel recalled the wilderness wanderings by spending several days in tents, most of the time on the rooftops of their homes.
Let me take a brief survey from the kids in the room. Kids--how many of you like to go on camping trips?
The Festival of Booths was a sort of communal camping trip. It was a time when the kids got excited about sleeping “outside” in a little tent. And the whole thing was meant to remind Israel of the time when they had been wholly dependent on God to lead them. Which is, in reality, every time of life.
And you can just imagine the possible sense of whiplash here. I mean, we just got here and now...tents? We’ve barely unpacked!
And this is, I think, a wonderful demonstration to us and to these returning exiles that their life was about God, not about their own comfort.
“Shouldn’t we focus on getting ourselves settled economically? Shouldn’t we figure out long-term living arrangements and agriculture?”
Well, no. Apparently not. Let’s break out the tents. And while we’re at it, let’s all go to the Temple Mount where it is depressing. Probably overgrown with weeds and such. Rubble upon rubble.
But why? Because God had told them what to do. And that was enough.
Then arose Jeshua the son of Jozadak, with his fellow priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel with his kinsmen, and they built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, as it is written in the Law of Moses the man of God.
As it is written.
God had given them direction. They were to follow it. That had not changed. And I want to urge you to take with deadly seriousness today that it has not changed for us, either.
It is remarkable that if you trace the history of Christian worship back to the early church through the middle ages, and up through the Reformation, where there has been remarkably consistent agreement is that God has called us to worship Him and He’s told us how to worship him. He has not abandoned us to our own imaginations and devices.
Now, it’s true that the worship of God looks very different in the New Covenant than it did in the Old.
New Testament worship is no longer dominated by the rituals of sacrifices and blood.
But that does not mean that the patterns that guided the people of God for centuries have simply been dissolved. My own conviction is that God still desires our worship services to imitate the patterns of the Old Testament, patterns we still see in the New Testament and even in the Heavenly worship in the Book of Revelation. We are not licensed to design our worship around what we happen to like, because the focus of our worship is not us.
Now when I say the patterns, I am not speaking of animal sacrifices, certainly not. But the patterns that we see in the Old Testament of people being called in, confessing their sins, having God’s forgiveness applied to their hearts, lifting up their songs and prayers, hearing instruction from God’s Word, and celebrating with a Covenant Meal together. These are things that God’s people have been doing for as long as there has been a group called God’s people.
And we are called to enjoy and celebrate the New Covenant fulfillment of those patterns. In other words, when we gather for worship, we should be asking “What has God told us to do? What is in His Word?” That doesn’t immediately answer every possible question that could come up concerning the arrangement and order of public worship, but it does give us a good sense of what the elements of our worship should be, though not always what shape they should take.
And there will be times when our worship feels uncomfortable. Maybe even a bit weird or strange. It feels uncomfortable in our culture of constant background noise to sit with our sins in silent confession every week. It’s probably one of the few moments of public silence left in our culture, except maybe time at the library.
It feels uncomfortable to confess our sins out loud, being made to acknowledge that we really have blown it.
It might sometimes feel uncomfortable to sing songs about blood and atonement and justification and glories that might stretch us to try to understand or even just imagine.
This is one of the fundamental realities about our faith, and it’s always been true of God’s people. First that Worship is training. Training to love God, to talk like him, to think his thoughts after him. And second, worship is strange to the world.
When the world observes it, they find it strange. And they ought to. It is not of this world, because it is our weekly dress rehearsal of life in a new world. A new heavens and a new earth.
But it is at the center of who we are as a people. Because at the center of our faith is a crucified, resurrected, and ascended God man who draws near to us that we might, as his body, indeed as his children, draw near to him.
Not all the blood of beasts,
On Jewish altars slain,
Could give the guilty conscience peace,
Or wash away its stain.
But Christ, the heavenly Lamb,
Takes all our sins away;
A sacrifice of nobler name,
And richer blood than they.
My faith would lay her hand
On that dear head of Thine,
While like a penitent I stand,
And there confess my sin.
My soul looks back to see
The burdens Thou didst bear
When hanging on the cursed tree,
And knows her guilt was there.
Believing, we rejoice
To see the curse remove;
We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice,
And sing His bleeding love.
(From the hymn by Issac Watts: “Not All The Blood of Beasts”)
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
