The Restoration Era

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger.

We have been in Babylon with Daniel, and now we’re coming back from Babylon. We’re going to talk today about the restoration covenant. I’m going to begin by asking you, Greg, to articulate the distinction between this covenant and what came before. Why should we consider this a distinct administration of the covenant of grace? What’s new about it?

First of all, I do want to point out that not everybody notices this particular version, and probably some who do would say, “Nah, that’s not a distinct thing.” Here are my reasons for thinking it is, and other people can consider them to see if it makes sense.

The last covenant was the Davidic covenant. Now, in a sense, all of the covenants keep on going. We find references in Malachi, “Remember the law of Moses.” We get to the New Testament and we’re told we’re the children of Abraham.

But doesn’t that have to be because it’s one covenant?

Because it’s one covenant, and that’s covenantal theology speaking. It’s not broken up dispensations where each one closes and God tries something relatively brand new – at least that was classic dispensationalism. There is one covenant. It’s in Christ. There’s one God. He has one essential standard of morality. There’s one gospel.

So as God reveals himself more and more under historical circumstances, at timeS he radically changes the outward structure – not the promise, not who he is, not how we’re saved, not the gospel, not the Savior/mediator, but outward forms.

For instance, in the garden of Eden after the fall, Adam and Eve were given sacrifice. That was a new thing, and it continued on until Jesus died, so that’s an ongoing thing. They knew about cleanness and uncleanness, Noah did. We’re not told exactly what they did with it, but it was a thing that doesn’t continue past Christ coming, so there wasn’t a whole lot going on there.

We get to Noah and we get the rainbow in the sky and we get the death penalty, the status to enforce, but most of the rest of it is a reemphasis on what God had said way back in the beginning – “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth. All the animals will be afraid of you now. You’re still in charge of them, but they’re not going to like you much.”

Then after ten generations we run into Abraham and now something really new is happening. God sets apart a particular part of land that he claims is his for special purposes, and he calls Abraham to that land and he gives him the sign and seal of circumcision. Now, Abraham is still sacrificing and presumably still knows about cleanness laws, but they don’t seem to affect anything. There may be some slight side allusions to them. The land is new. The specification of a particular people, his seed, is new. He’s still married. That goes back to before the Fall, so we’re seeing continuity but we’re seeing some outward changes.

Then comes the exodus, and we get the biggest change probably until Jesus comes. We have Levitical priests. We have a tabernacle. We have all kinds of clean and uncleanness laws. We have festival feast days that are scattered across the calendar and across 50 years, in terms of the Jubilee. If you want to sacrifice, you have to sacrifice in a particular place. Originally that was at the tabernacle – you can’t sacrifice just anywhere. But circumcision continues in that narrow line, and they have a civil constitution of sorts. They have judges who administer civil laws, and that’s all part of this. Same God, same Christ, same gospel.

This is where dispensationalists missed. They understood that there were some changes, but they failed to understand that God does not change the gospel. It’s the same thing.

Then in terms of the Mosaic covenant, things go bad in the book of Judges, and then in 1 Samuel they lose the ark. The priests are corrupt. When they get the ark back, it never goes back in the tabernacle, so that system falls apart. Their first king fails, so God intervenes and gives them David. The promise there is that his son will build the house of the Lord, and that’s true on two levels – Solomon and later Jesus, in different ways. David is supposed to be king of Israel, and his seed after him.

Yet when we get to the Babylonian captivity, something has gone wrong because David’s seed is not on the throne. There is no throne, and for a while there’s no temple. During the Restoration all of that has shut down, so something really major has happened.

You can say, “Well, they put it all back together.” Not exactly. A lot of it goes back together, but until Jesus comes there will not be a king on the throne of David, and when he comes it won’t be the same sort of king on the same sort of throne, so that doesn’t exist anymore in that form.

So when we come here we see what is in effect a second exodus, arguably a third. Abraham was brought out of Ur of the Chaldees – the Chaldean empire. That’s where they’re coming out of. In between was that thing in Egypt, so this is technically the third exodus.

Which is also the first, because it’s going back further.

Yeah, they’re sent all the way back to where Abraham was, not simply back to Egypt, but all the way back to Mesopotamia, to Babylon. It’s as if God just sit reset. We should expect now something kind of major, and that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Rather than anticipate everything, what’s going to change is political. We’ll see the political changes, the geographical changes, the changes that are very visible to any outsider who can just look and say, “That’s not the way it used to be.” We’ll also look at heavenly changes, how worship is going to change. There are things that are not the same.

It’s a certain amount of ignorance or blasé-ness that says, “Well, a temple is a temple. Temple worship is temple worship.” No it’s not, when certain things are missing from it, things of key importance in the Mosaic covenant, and yet they’re ignored now, and God obviously knows what he’s doing.

The thing perhaps that throws people off the most is, “Well, it doesn’t say there’s a covenant.” Yeah, it does, actually. First of all, Ezekiel and Jeremiah both point to a new covenant, and you can read Calvin on this. Calvin kind of puts it at the Restoration, and then sees the covenant with Jesus as the super-fulfillment and the fullness of that. But ignoring the prophets, in the book of Nehemiah there’s a covenant, but the people make it themselves.

Wow, that’s really different, isn’t it? That’s enough to justify calling it a brand new covenant because the people understand what’s happened. Instead of being little children who are led by the hand, God expects them to figure it out and write the document and sign it themselves, under the authority of the people he’s inspired to put over them.

There are some other things we could say, and I mentioned a couple of them to you before we started, but I don’t think we’ll go there right now.

I think that’s what we’re looking for. Is the change here so significant that heaven and earth are altered by what happens? And is there in fact a new covenant document? The answer to all those is yes, so that’s my initial plea. There are some other things I could say, but I think that’s either going to get people thinking, or if it doesn’t then probably anything else I would say would not matter a whole lot.

Let me take a slight counter-argument maybe, and you can tell me what you think about this. The stipulations and sanctions don’t seem to be altered. The form of temple worship maybe is in there, and that’s altered, but it seems to be a reemphasis on what they had from Moses.

There is a renewed emphasis upon what they had from Moses but, because of their political situation, most of the sanctions they can’t enforce. Wait till we get to the Roman Empire. They can’t enforce the death penalty. They can stone anyone.

They don’t have the civil authority.

They don’t have the civil authority, so the sanctions are different. Rome will allow them to stone someone who actually defiled the temple out in plain sight, which is how they got away with stoning Stephen, but when it came to Jesus they didn’t have anything they could make stick. They could not enforce sanctions against him.

They were under a jurisdiction where they have a parental/imperial unit looking after them that severely restricts what they can and cannot do. So is the basic morality the same? Yeah, that’s one thing I keep saying. The morality doesn’t change. How you’re going to implement it does.

The final consequence of, “You turn your back on God and he’ll excommunicate you, possibly permanently,” that was way back in the Mosaic law, and now we see it played out. We get to the point where God does indeed enforce those sanctions, but that time it seems once and for all. We talked about some hints in Romans and elsewhere, that maybe God still has something for Israel, but there’s no hint that it’s as a nation. It would be as a people.

So yes, sin is still sin, and God still frowns on it and he hasn’t altered. This almost sounds like theonomy. He hasn’t altered the penalties any. Well, he kind of has.

Or at least authority.

Yeah, because now the church is moving out into a multicultural world where they’re not in charge. This is new. How do you maintain the law of God in a pagan land? That’s a brand new lesson they had to learn.

So I don’t know that that’s a counter-argument. I think it’s a just a further explanation of what’s going on here, and setting us up for what actually is going on here.

Out of curiosity, do theonomists consider the Restoration covenant one of a new administration?

It depends on who you call a theonomist, I suppose. I don’t know that there’s complete agreement in that camp over that, but some do and some wrote before anybody mentioned it, so I don’t know.

Am I theonomist? Not by any recognizable standard, probably. But do I respect the law of God and think that there is wisdom and application in it? Yup. Jesus did so we’ll go with that, but that doesn’t mean it’s cut and paste, and that we automatically lift everything from Exodus and put it into American civil code. That’s not understanding what God is doing.

Again, the Restoration covenant can help us see that as we look and see that God spread his people very deliberately among the Gentiles so that there would be a synagogue in every city when the apostles started spreading across the empire. In the meantime, they have to live in a pagan society where they have to deal with pagan civil governments, kind of like we do today. God is getting the church ready for thinking about what it means to live the gospel in a multicultural world.

Well, we got to the conclusion without really going through all the material, but maybe people will find that more interesting than really reciting the facts of the Restoration. If you don’t like Restoration covenant, call it the Restoration Era and see if what we have to say isn’t profitable.

Emily has already pointed out that as a restoration, it’s a new exodus. It’s a return from exile. Something that we talked about before we started recording is that the scripture books involved here are very unfamiliar, by and large. Most Christians probably can’t tell you very much of what’s in Ezra. They may know that Nehemiah has something to do with rebuilding the walls.

Knee-high-miah, the image of a man who’s so tall that the walls come to his knees. That’s what I was shown in Sunday school as a child, so I remember that.

I have heard that, but never so graphically before. I didn’t know you drew pictures.

We’re a little more familiar with the story of Esther, but what part it plays in all this seems vague. I think most Christians get the idea that this is an attempt to exterminate the Messianic line, and it failed, and that’s certainly true and that’s really important. That’s kind of the heart of things, but it does come at a particular time and a particular place under certain historical circumstances, and to see how it fits in is important.

Then there are the three minor prophets – Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi – and we know bits and pieces. Haggai, not so much. Zechariah is one of those weird books, like the apocalypse, where we say, “What in the world is going on here? What do you mean there’s a scroll flying through the air? I don’t get this. Why is there a woman in this thing, and why are people with wings carrying her? I don’t know.” Malachi, we probably know the line that God hates divorce, and we may know there’s something about robbing God.

And John the Baptist.

Yes, and predictions of John the Baptist.

Because we see the footnote when we read the text.

Indeed.

What I would like to do now is just kind of talk through the history as history. The Restoration era then begins with a man named Cyrus. Cyrus was king of Media and Persia. If you want to read what may be a fictional account of his childhood and how he came to power – based on a true story, one of those things – you can read Herodotus in his Histories. I was thinking at the end about recommending Herodotus as a book to read if you like history, but I think I’ll pick something else.

Herodotus, by and large, is fairly easy reading in a good translation, and he starts with the conflict between what for him is east and west – the Greek city-states being the west, and Persia being the east – which is a wholly Greek-oriented, Greek-dominated position on how history and geography worked.

He takes it back to the Trojan War and says, “It all started when both sides started stealing women back and forth, and then people just got crazy over it, but who cares whether or not you steal a woman here or there? They should just learn to deal.” Yes, Herodotus is a male chauvinist pig and is quite humorous to read, but he does tell the story of how Cyrus was nearly killed by his grandfather, and how he was delivered. It's the very familiar story of, “Kill the baby.”

“I’m not going to kill the baby. I’m going to pass the baby to somebody else and he’ll kill it, or not. Oh, he didn’t kill it? Rats, the baby grew up. Oh. The grandfather found out about that and now he’s killing my son, wonderful. That’s great. I must now avenge myself, so I’ll go…”

Somewhere in there, Cyrus is raised by a woman whose name means ‘wolf,’ so Cyrus, like everybody else in the world, is raised by wolves. But Cyrus eventually is informed of his background and resents being almost killed, and he raises up the Persian half of his family. He’s descended from both the Medes and the Persians, so he gets the Persians to follow him into battle. And the Medes, kind of not liking their ruler anyway, kind of join, and he kind of takes over. Then he takes over Asia Minor.

During this, Babylon is declining. In the last episode, in Daniel 6 we see Cyrus, although Daniel calls him Darius, which was a throne name or nickname. We see him take the city and make Daniel his chief guy, his right-hand man. It’s probably about that time that Daniel digs out a scroll of Isaiah. We know he had at least some of the scrolls. He had Jeremiah’s for sure, and he probably took it to Cyrus and he probably read this, because someone did. This is what Isaiah says hundreds of years ahead of time. Speaking of himself, the Lord says –

Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the LORD that maketh all things, that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself, that frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad, that turneth wise men backward and maketh their knowledge foolish, that confirmeth the word of his servant and performeth the counsel of his messengers, that saith to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be inhabited; and to the cities of Judah, Ye shall be built, and I will raise up the decayed places thereof:

Jerusalem was still standing, so God through Isaiah is telling people, “Your city is going to be leveled. All the cities of Judah are going to be leveled, but one day I will give an order to have it all rebuilt.” At this point everyone is listening – “How is that going to happen? Who’s going to do that? What’s the deal here?”

That saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers: That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.

Notice the foundation, not the rest. The rest comes in time.

Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings…

Think of Belshazzar’s knees knocking together because his loins were loosed.

… to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron, and I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel. For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me.

He goes on and talks to him and about him a little bit more, but that’s the heart of it. Through Isaiah, God names the man who will order the temple’s foundation re-laid, who will order Jerusalem rebuilt, who will conquer a good part of the world, and he calls him his shepherd, his anointed, and his servant. How messianic can we get here? This obviously is a huge deal.

Now, when we get to Ezra, and also the last chapter of 2 Chronicles – the two passages are almost identical – we hear Cyrus’s own words –

Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD God of heaven given me; and he hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah.

How did he know that if he hadn’t read Isaiah? Those are basically Isaiah’s words.

Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem.

The people who don’t go, help with money.

Cyrus becomes a key figure of Christ. He’s the shepherd, he’s the anointed, he’s the one who authorizes this exodus out of Babylon and back to the promised land. He orders, and funds to some extent, the temple being rebuilt and restocked, and Jerusalem rebuilt. He is a pagan figure of Christ, but he’s not a pagan, because he acknowledges Yahweh Elohim to be the God.

If we go back and read the lion’s den story, now that all makes sense. Darius/Cyrus was truly converted. He was impressed and he sent word throughout the whole empire, “No one delivers like this God, guys. Get a clue.” That’s the man we’re dealing with here. This is a huge thing in redemptive history.

God has scattered his people throughout the world, and now he’s bringing them back, but here’s the thing, not everybody goes back. In fact, the vast majority it seems don’t, and that can look like a big failure.

The interesting thing about this Restoration era is it’s not what you would expect in the flesh. If you’re spiritual, yeah, you’ll expect it, but you know. We would expect, “Well, you know, in the past, to change covenant administrations God drowned the world. He destroyed an empire. Okay, he raised up a king after defeating a giant. That’s not so big a deal, but…”

There were some fireworks.

Yeah, there were sometimes some very huge fireworks.

The splitting of the Red Sea sort of things.

Frogs and lice and hail and fire from heaven, and in the wake of that, when they entered the Promised Land the sun standing still, and even the Davidic economy as it’s falling apart. We have Elisha and Elijah ministering in the north doing some profound miracles.

You get here and you think, “Wow, God is really starting over, so everything is going to be super-miraculous!” No. Isaiah spoke of drying up rivers before Cyrus. That’s a figure of speech. There were no rivers dried up. He didn’t part the Euphrates. The children of Israel used normal standard means of transportation to get back home.

Secular history can look at this and have no problem with it because there’s no element of the miraculous anywhere, except the prediction in advance.

Mundane details like, “How is this going to be funded?”

“Yeah, how is this going to be funded? Oh, the king of Persia did it. Huh, that’s interesting. Hmm.” But he didn’t do all the funding. A lot had to come from the offerings of God’s people scattered about the empire.

And then there were legal battles and permits that had to be gotten and grouchy neighbors – all the mundane things.

Very mundane ordinary kinds of things. There are no angels drawing their swords. The sun does not move backward. There are no frogs being belched out by the rivers. It is, as you say, mundane. I like your remark about permits, because that’s basically one of the big things they struggle with. “Do we have government permission to go on with this, and can we prove it?”

For a while it stands in doubt. “Maybe we can’t. We won’t be able to do this. We’re halted by the same county building codes as everybody else. But this is the Bible! These things aren’t supposed to happen. Isn’t there supposed to be a miracle here?” No, there’s not.

The two men who lead the return – they’re named in the second chapter of Ezra – are Zerubbabel, who is a descendant of the line of kings…

A very ordinary sort of name.

Yeah, and Jeshua (Joshua, Jesus), a not so ordinary sort of name. He’s high priest. They both seem to be older men, because by the time they have done their thing they pass quickly from the scene, so they’re probably at least very mature. They’re not really young.

Their first task is getting the altar up and starting sacrificial worship again. They do that. Then they work on laying the foundation slab, or clearing the foundation slab or refurbishing or whatever exactly they did, for a new temple. Then neighbors show up who say they want to help, but really don’t, who then ask to see their permits and send word to the emperor.

By now, Cyrus is dead and his son is dead and an imposter is dead. There’s a new guy on the throne named Darius, a different Darius, who doesn’t even know about these people. So when he gets word that, “These people are building this city and it’s going to be trouble,” he says, “Okay. Well, stop them until you hear from me,” because apparently he’s learned enough about the laws of the Medes and Persians that don’t change to deliberately insert a loophole for later. He doesn’t know, but it sounds bad and he’ll look at it later. He’s got things to do, like stabilize the empire.

So that’s how this is beginning, but we need to look at that new temple when it’s finally finished. Darius does eventually not only say, “Yeah, you can build the temple. We were talking about the city. The temple is not a problem. In fact, you know what? We’re funding the temple. I’ve heard about this God of yours, the God of heaven. I want you sacrificing and praying for me and my sons, so do that. And all of you bad guys who were trying to interfere, give them your money so they can do it.”

So the temple does get built, but when the temple slab is laid or refurbished, the old people cry. Now, we’ve all had the experience I think of looking at a foundation slab and saying, “That is so tiny. What we envisioned could not possibly be exhausted by that slab. Shouldn’t it be two or three times as big?”

Where we used to live, right around the corner there was this triangular lot and it looked so small. When they started clearing it and putting in foundations I thought, “What’s going to go in there? What can even fit there?” Well, by the time they were done they had like two strip malls and lots of parking lot room, and I’m still not quite sure how it all fit, but I do know that foundation slabs are deceptive.

The older people see that, and they remember Solomon’s temple, and they weep. They’re very upset. They’re disappointed. The young people have no experience and they say, “Wow, God’s really on the move! We’ve got a temple slab going here,” so they’re very excited and they shout for joy. Far away, it says, you could hear a lot of noise, but you couldn’t tell the shouts of joy from the weeping, they were both so loud.

What was so disappointing? Here are some things that were disappointing, and again this is back to why I would argue that the change in worship is enough to signal us that we should expect a new covenant at this point.

The most obvious thing that this new temple did not have was the ark of the covenant. How do you do Day of Atonement ceremonies without the ark of the covenant? Answer: We don’t know. God did not explain what they were to do. There’s no record that they ceased as such, but what did the priest do when he went behind the veil? Where did he put the blood? There’s no ark, and that means, by the way, there’s no Ten Commandments. There’s no Shekinah glory, not a visible one.

So all of that, which was in effect the big deal about the tabernacle and then about Solomon’s temple, just isn’t there anymore, so that’s a huge thing. And yet it seems the festivals went on, and the sacrifices on the altar went on just as if God were present, because as God speaks through Zechariah, he makes it clear he is present.

In fact, he’s present not only in the new temple, but the whole city by the time Nehemiah is done building and sanctifying the walls is now the Holy City. God’s people are becoming the glory cloud. This is a major change, and somehow it still justifies a Day of Atonement, even though it can’t be done the same way. Worship has changed. Also the priest no longer has the urim and thummin, so direct contact with God has been shut down.

So again, a time-traveling secularist from the 21st century walks in and says, “Where’s the miracles?”

“Peek behind the curtain.”

“It’s an empty room with a lot of blood on the floor, apparently.”

“That thing that you…”

“Yeah, we lost that.”

“Uh huh, right. Well, how about the fire on the altar. I suppose God lit that from heaven.”

“No, we used a Bic lighter.”

God had lit the fire before, both for the tabernacle and the temple. He didn’t light this fire. They rubbed sticks together or used a flint box or a magnifying glass in the sun. However they did it, they just lit it.

Interesting that they had the confidence to do so, given what happened.

Yes, it is, because Nadab and Abihu tried something like that and got themselves killed for offering strange fire before the Lord. There’s no indication here that they had that kind of permission. Now, when you look at Zechariah’s visions and the issue of how does the priest start the cleansing rituals when he himself is defiled, the answer is, “Well, you get a priest who isn’t, and then he…wait, we don’t have one. We need the priest cleansed so he can do the cleansing rituals…on himself…that doesn’t work.”

It requires a prophet to step up and say, “Jesus has done it in the background. Go for it.” From there they apparently extrapolated that, “Oh, it’s alright. God has told us to do this. God by his prophet has authorized temple worship, so I guess we do what we do. We’re not seeing any lightning storm, so someone step up there and light that thing.”

It must have been an interesting moment, but it does shed light on this whole administration. God is withdrawing the miraculous, the theophanies. There are only three prophets that we know of. Some are mentioned in Nehemiah, but they seem to all have been false prophets. You could call Nehemiah, Ezra, and perhaps Mordecai prophets, because they were the words of God. But in terms of a regular office of prophet, someone who was known publicly as the prophet who kept having visions and revelations, it’s those three guys and then we’re done, and for 400 years God is silent.

God is throwing his people back on two things: the regularities of his providence, and the regularity of covenant life. In other words, what you said earlier – get out of bed, have breakfast, go downtown, get the permit, come back, pick up a hammer, start the work. Do not expect God to miraculously hand you a temple or anything else. Your Gentile neighbors? Tell them about the God of Israel. Tell them about Messiah. Yeah, they may persecute you, but they may come to faith. You won’t find out until you try.

Hammer in one hand, sword in the other.

Yeah. “But they may come for us!”

“Well, pick up a sword. Don’t expect God’s angels to swoop in and defend you. It’s not going to happen.”

It would be easy to say it’s all secularized now. The miraculous is gone. The genie is put back in the bottle. No, God was never a genie. God held the hand of his people and walked them through kindergarten for nearly 3,500 years or so, and now they’re at the point where, “You know what? You don’t need all this stuff. You don’t need the Shekinah glory.”

“You don’t need the yes/no answers, because you have the whole Old Testament.”

Yeah, they finished off the Old Testament. You don’t need that anymore. You don’t need a lifeline. “Can I phone a friend?”

“No.”

“Can I phone God?”

“No.”

“How about a prophet?”

“No, you don’t need any of that anymore.”

The Bible is in place for that time. Now, there’s still more to come when Jesus comes, but until then you have a Bible that is adequate for your daily needs right now. You have these worshiping congregations scattered throughout the empire, where people meet and, without benefit of prophet or sacrifice, read from the Old Testament, and read from the law and the prophets. They say prayers to God, they chant psalms, with or without musical instruments, depending on who you believe, they tell their Gentile neighbors about the God of Israel, and they win people to become God-fearers.

Beyond that, they go to work and earn money and take care of their families and raise children to believe the promises. In other words, it sounds an awful lot like us. God is getting his people ready to be us, and he starts before Jesus comes, so when the apostles go out in the empire, these synagogues in these Jewish communities are there.

Not everybody received the gospel. Many rejected it, but many received it, and the synagogues were always the first place the apostles went, and that’s what’s being established now.

God is setting this up, the 6-covenant administration, because this is the one where Jesus is going to come. This is where the true Son of Man will appear, and the beasts who have ruled the empire, as Daniel sees it, will give way to the Son of Man, who will have all power and dominion – and yes, I’m hinting at the creation week – so that’s what we’re seeing here.

Now, on the political side – and this is also important in light of the things we talked about up-front – Israel is not an independent nation, not initially. She is ruled temporarily by Babylon, then destroyed, then ruled by Medo-Persia, then by Greece. For a little time she gains independence from the Greek tyrants, but then Rome comes along and conquers her and that’s that. She will end her days as a province of the Roman empire.

She does not have a Davidic king on the throne. In fact, the Davidic line is cursed. Back when Jeremiah was writing, there was a young man on the throne, one of the last kings, a son of Josiah, whose name was variously Jeconiah or Jehoiachin or Coniah. As a young man in his teens, he was so wicked that God said, “We’re done. I’m done with the line of David.” The prophecy from Jeremiah –

O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.

And that was that. The Davidic line, as far as anyone could see, ended and the Davidic covenant apparently ended right there.

Now, God is incredibly sneaky. The Messiah has to be a true son of David according to the flesh, and yet the kingly line just got excommunicated. How could you possibly put that back together again? Well, what if his mother is the true seed of David and his adoptive father is in the kingly line? Then he would have a legal but not biological claim to the throne. But being a true son of David through his mother, he would also have that claim.

That happened exactly once, and that’s why the genealogies for Jesus are so terribly important, because they show us how the Davidic covenant can be put back into operation. As Israel looked at this, they could by faith hope that God had a solution, but it wasn’t obvious. “There’s no Davidic king. We’re a small province in a small corner of a pagan empire.”

In the days of Rome, they weren’t even directly accountable to Rome. Remember when Cyrenius was governor of Syria? That’s because it was part of the Syrian section of the Roman empire. They didn’t even have a direct line to Rome. They were under somebody who was under somebody and, as we said, that made a difference as to how you could and could not enforce biblical law.

There were a lot of things that the pagans would just say, “No, we’re not doing that.” Again, Rome specifically said, “We don’t trust you with the death penalty. You can’t actually kill people. You have somebody who you think needs executing? You bring them to us and we will try them in our courts.” Israel was effectively deprived of the law court, at least for more serious offenses.

The Israelites scattered throughout the world didn’t even have that much. They were generally non-citizens of the communities they lived in, because those pagan communities determined citizenship by worshiping the local god, and of course the Jews didn’t, so they were strangers in strange lands, making a living and worshiping God as best they could with what they had.

For most of them, it was not temple worship. They would try to make the trek back to Jerusalem for Passover or Pentecost, but just in reading the book of Acts it’s clear they didn’t always make it. So things are very, very different. This is not just more of the same, except it’s wearing thin. No, it’s broken and God is putting something new in its place.

Now, as we come to the books in question, we have Ezra. Ezra wants to be a teacher of law. He’s living in Babylon and he wants to go back and lead a great revival. This is after Zerubabbel and Jeshua have died. He gets permission from the king of Persia to do so, but he shows up all ready to teach the word of God and he finds that Israel is terribly compromised. All the leaders are marrying pagan women and the whole system is about to fall apart again. Ezra ends with him conducting an annulment or divorce ceremony, that goes on for a couple chapters.

Well, that was terribly underwhelming. What’s that all about?

What fits in somewhere just before Ezra is the whole story of Esther, and I won’t repeat all of that, but I think most people know that Esther is abducted, because it’s hard to put it any lighter than that, into the king’s harem, and is up for trial to be queen or not.

All of those women were put in the king’s harem, because the Persians too had great contempt for women. I mean they took care of them, but you come and you visit the king, and if he doesn’t like you then you’re put in the other group of concubines and you never know a man for the rest of your life. You’re protected. You’re given any material thing you could want – best food, best clothes, and all that – but you’re never going to be married, because you’re married to the king and that’s that.

But Esther receives favor. She’s promoted to be queen and is there at a crucial time to turn back a genocidal plot against the Jews that comes close to destroying the messianic line, had it succeeded. But she and her cousin Mordecai are there at a key event.

After that we come to Nehemiah, which is the last of the history books that belong to this period, and Nehemiah, living after that conflict – the Jews’ enemies still did try to attack them, but the Jews had Imperial support so it didn’t go the way the enemies hoped. But Jerusalem sustained attacks and Nehemiah hears, “Oh, the walls are broken down. The gates are burned.”

This was new knowledge, because why would he worry about something that happened 70 years ago? Whatever had been put back in place had been knocked down, and Nehemiah is very sad and develops a plan to get Imperial aid. After praying for a couple months with friends, he goes in and deliberately acts sad in the presence of the king, which you’re not supposed to do because being in the presence of the king is a joyful thing, and to be sad could get you killed.

He counts that he’s been faithful enough that the king may listen to him, and the note says, “So the king said to the queen sitting beside him…” – what queen do you think? Who’s the only queen we care about? Esther said, “Dear, you should listen to this guy,” so he’s authorized to come back and rebuild the walls.

The thing that’s marvelous at the end is there is this ceremony where they sanctify the walls. The walls had never been sanctified, but now Jerusalem becomes the Holy City very explicitly. There are a couple places where they’re standing on the walls, and yet it said they’re standing in the temple. Those are not the same thing, unless this administration has transformed things so that these are identical concepts. The whole city and the whole people are now holy, covenantally-speaking.

It's at that point that Ezra finally gets to do his preaching sermon and lead a great revival and, at the end of that, Ezra, Nehemiah, and all of the leaders say, “We need to write a covenant document that recognizes what just happened,” and they do.

It starts in chapter 9, and I’m not going to read it because a lot of it is just one really long prayer to God, recounting their covenant history, and how God has always been gracious and they’ve always been wicked. Towards the end of their prayer they say this –

Now therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the terrible God, who keepest covenant and mercy, let not all the trouble seem little before thee, that hath come upon us, on our kings, on our princes, and on our priests, and on our prophets, and on our fathers, and on all thy people, since the time of the kings of Assyria unto this day.

Howbeit thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou hast done right, but we have done wickedly. Neither have our kings, our princes, our priests, nor our fathers, kept thy law, nor hearkened unto thy commandments and thy testimonies, wherewith thou didst testify against them.

So we’re drawing roots back to the Davidic covenant, the time of the kings of Assyria, and we’re going back to Sinai, because God keeps covenant.

For they have not served thee in their kingdom, and in thy great goodness that thou gavest them, and in the large and fat land which thou gavest before them, [now we’re back in Joshua,] neither turned they from their wicked works.

Behold, we are servants this day, and for the land that thou gavest unto our fathers to eat the fruit thereof and the good thereof, behold, we are servants in it: And it yieldeth much increase unto the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins…

We’re under the jurisdiction of the Persians, and a lot of the blessings you give us go right to the Persian capital, Shushan.

Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we are in great distress.

And because of all this we make a sure covenant, and write it; and our princes, Levites, and priests, seal unto it.

Now, does that sound like they’re operating in the flesh and that they’re making up something God did not approve of? The whole argument is, “We’ve rebelled against you. You’ve kept covenant, we haven’t. You’ve been gracious to us. You’ve given us a new start, but we’re still under your discipline. This is not the way it’s supposed to be, and therefore we feel it incumbent upon us, we feel obligated by scriptural truth to write the covenant and to sign it and to seal it.”

Now those that sealed were, Nehemiah…

…and we go through a list of many of the leaders of the Levites and priests we’ve already seen.

Interestingly enough, there are a couple things they add that aren’t in God’s law, mostly having to do with maintenance of the temple, because times have changed and it’s got to be paid for, and the things they used to do aren’t enough anymore.

They don’t have the same economy.

Right. They don’t have the same tax collection. They need to pay for these things, so they add part of a shekel or something annually. They reinforce the Sabbath, and I believe the seventh-year Sabbath. They still manage to pull that one off, and their first fruits and their tithes. Again we’re going back to the law of Moses and we’re stylizing it for this. We’re doing the best we can with these historical circumstances.

They have no sense that, “We’re playing cheap with God. God really wanted this, but we can only do this, so it’s good enough.” No, they believe this is exactly what God wants them to do, and they are very conscious of their sins and their failures, and the failures of the past.

They do not see this as a failure. They see this as, “This is what God has set us up for. This is what he expects. We are under the rod. We have to kiss the rod.” Rebelling against this and saying, “No, we’re going to do it God’s way, and we’ll tear everything else down until we can,” is not the solution.

This is an era where God’s people learned to submit to Gentile pagan authority, and yet not surrender their gospel or their morality, but to live out the faith as best they can, both at home and in their churches or synagogues, and in the civil realm as best they can, little by little.

This is the administration that’s in place when Jesus comes, and it explains so much of how he interacts with the Roman empire and the Jewish authorities. That’s still 400 years off, but the clock is ticking now and they know the time is short – better than 4,000 years.

400 is a little bit better than 4,000. We’ve knocked off an order of magnitude.

Well, our time is ticking down.

There were some other things we could have talked about, but we’ll do it another time.

I’m sure we will come to those things in good time, but for now let’s have some recommendations. I’m supposed to go first.

In the spirit of very mundane and practical “pay the bills” type recommendations, I’m going to recommend the classic book, The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I am generally skeptical of books that are marketed with the author’s face on the cover, and also of gimmicky titles like The Total Money Makeover, but it’s really worth a read.

The fascinating thing about Dave Ramsey and this book and sort of the whole culture that surrounds Dave Ramsey is that the data backs up what the Bible says. You look at the book of Proverbs and it’s like, “The borrower is servant to the lender,” “Don’t strike hands to be surety for your neighbor,” and all these things.

It’s like, “Yeah, this seems like good advice,” and then it’s like, “Well, it’s from the Bible, so it’s also got authority to its advice.” And then he’s like, “Yeah, and it turns out that when we studied people who actually were successful, this is how they did it.” It shouldn’t surprise me, but I find it reassuring every time.

Okay. Up front I mentioned recommending the study of history. I got to see my tax guy the other night. We see each other once a year, but we are in some sense kindred souls, even though I’m a Christian and he’s Muslim. He greeted me with “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. . . Shaka when the walls fell,” when I asked him how he was doing. If you don’t know Star Trek, that will mean nothing to you.

I mentioned that my daughter was a medieval studies major and he asked me, “Are you interested in that – medieval history?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“So the continent–Germany, or England?…” and he must have seen something in my face. He was like, “Richard III and Bosworth Field?”

What are the odds of picking those particular elements out of the entire English Middle Ages? So we went ahead and had a discussion as to whether or not Richard III actually killed the two princes in the tower, and he had a new theory I’d never heard before.

So in the light and spirit of that, I recommended to him a book that I will now recommend. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but maybe I have. It’s called The Daughter of Time. It’s a mystery story, written by the British authoress Josephine Tey. That was her pen name. I can never remember what her real name was. She wrote a number of mystery stories in the typical cozy sort of English style, sort of like Agatha Christie but not as well-rigged and organized, perhaps.

She has a detective named Alan Grant, and for this particular book she throws Alan Grant into the hospital. He breaks a leg or something, chasing a crook, and he’s there bored to tears. A friend brings some pictures, because he likes to look at faces. He likes to try to read people’s character out of their faces, and one of the pictures is Richard III.

For Americans and other people who don’t know much about British history, Richard III in British tradition is the original wicked uncle who got to the throne by killing his two nephews – one the reigning prince or king, and the other the heir to the throne – and everybody knows that. That’s a given, like Benedict Arnold betraying West Point to the British. It’s the name that just sends shivers up your spine.

Well, as Alan Grant is laying in bed looking at the pictures, he says, “That’s not how I would read that face. Before I knew who it was I read something very different in that face,” so he begins to consult the histories and finds that there are things that don’t make sense.

“This man was incredibly loyal to his brother, and then killed this brother’s children? This man had a reputation for restraint and mercy, and yet he murdered these two little boys just to get the throne? The man had never seemed interested in power or anything, and yet he wanted the throne so badly? This is not working.”

So he begins to go do the thing that historians are supposed to do – look at original sources – and the more he does, the more the whole story begins to fall apart. This is not what these sources say happened. He can’t make that story fit with this. Something is going on here.

As a bit of studying history, it’s great for showing you how little you can trust historians. One of the most famous lines, if they’re famous, is “Forty million textbooks couldn’t possibly be wrong, could they?”

If you like mystery stories and you’re willing to struggle with a little bit of history you may not be familiar with, it’s a really great mystery story. It’s all the clues and the analysis and the sidekick and everything you’re expecting, so if you want to easily slip into reading and learning about British history – because Richard III gives way to Henry VII, Henry Tudor, and that begins the Tudor lines of kings that leads to Henry VIII, who we all know, and Elizabeth and Bloody Mary and Edward and all of that.

And Lady Jane Grey.

This is the doorway to all of that, so it’s worth your time. If you have not learned to love to read history yet, it’s probably easier to read even than Herodotus.

That’s great. I’m going to have to get that from my library. That sounds really fun.

You haven’t read it yet?

No. I’ve seen it alluded to in many things that you have written.

I think I’m going to buy a copy and give it to my tax guy, because he needs it more desperately than you do. We’ll see. If I have an extra copy, maybe I can throw you one.

Thank you so much for this conversation, Greg. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, who has, it sounds like, successfully put Gretchen to bed. I definitely heard some unsuccess, but now it seems to have been successful.

Thanks also to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, Listener, you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion, or you can become a patron at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.

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Thanks so much for joining us this time. Hope you will again next time. Peace.