Some Scripture-Digging Tips

Outline the backstory.

Read the introduction to Ezra in your Bible and do any additional research to form an outline of the book’s author, its audience, and the time of its writing.

Consider the context.

Don’t just read the text immediately before and after your passage, you also want to dig into the cross-references!

Identify the key verse.

Hint: Find the author’s emphasis by looking for repeated words and ideas throughout the text.

The Technicalities

If you flip back a page in your Bible and read a couple of chapters before Ezra begins, you will see that 2 Chronicles ends with Jerusalem’s fall. When that happened, the Babylonians removed everything from the house of God and took it all to Babylon. They burned the temple, broke down the wall of Jerusalem, burned all its palaces, and destroyed all its possessions. The Jews who weren’t killed in the process were unwillingly and violently forced from their homes and taken captive to Babylon, along with the entire collection of treasures in God’s temple, the treasures of the king, and the treasures of his leaders (2 Chronicles 36:18).

The man after which this book is named won’t step onto the scene until chapter seven. Instead, Ezra begins with another man—Cyrus, the reigning king of Persia in the 6th Century bc and a formidable military leader bent on universal conquest.

Cyrus was also a man who had been prophesied about. Isaiah spoke of him by name a full 100 years before Jerusalem’s fall (seventy before he would come on the scene to change everything for the Jews).

“Thus says the Lord to His anointed,” Isaiah said in Isaiah 45:1, “to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held.” Even then, four generations before he was born, God had already chosen him and called him by name to conquer many lands and crush the strength of countless mighty kings (Babylon included).

The book of Ezra picks up shortly after Babylon fell to Cyrus’ army—a story recorded in Daniel 5 on the night of Belshazzar’s feast. That night, the same hand that promised to hold Cyrus’ wrote on a wall announcing that the Babylonian kingdom would be given to the Medes and Persians. That very night, Cyrus added the Chaldean kingdom to his 127-province rule that stretched from India to Ethiopia and entrusted the land to Darius to oversee and run (Daniel 5:30 and 9:1).

This detail from the book of Daniel is highly important because of the Persian meaning of Cyrus’ name, “possess thou the furnace.” But, to understand that, you need to go back even further in Daniel, to chapter three (which is actually forward in history, since Daniel flip-flops back-and-forth in the timeline of its storytelling). The furnace, in the ancient, mid-East, held wild and terrifying implications of wrath, punishment, and revenge. It’s everything that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego experienced under Nebuchadnezzar’s reign (who took over the throne after Cyrus’ reign ended).

Story short, the three men disobeyed the order to fall down and worship the king’s golden statue the moment the king’s band began playing his symphony. The penalty? Being cast into a fiery furnace.

“Who is the god who will deliver you from my yād-hands?” Nebuchadnezzar demanded in rage and fury.

“Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace,” the men replied. “And He will deliver us from your yād-hand, O king.” There it is, the first use of yād (the Hebrew word for “hand” and the theme after which this book is named). And He did, too. God not only delivered those men from that furnace, but He He also delivered His people from Babylonian rule, and it all began with the fingers of that yād-hand, writing on the wall.

The point is that Cyrus received control of that furnace when I took over the kingdom that night. But he didn’t use it.

That said, I want to go back to that Isaiah prophecy one more time because there is one last detail that you need to see. It’s in Isaiah 45:5-6 when God says, “I am the Lord, and there is no other; there is no God besides Me. I will gird you, though you have not known Me, that they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting that there is none besides Me. I am the Lord. There is no other.”

God wasn’t just being hyperbolic there because Cyrus’ name was also the same word that the Persians used for the sun. So, throughout his reign, from its rise to its end, the man whose name means “sun” would show that there is no “what god will” but “the God.” And that, right there, is where the book of Ezra picks up, with the rising of the Cyrus-sun, inside of his very first year as king of Babylon.

Why? So that a promise that God spoke to Jeremiah (who wrote it in a letter to the remainder of the priests, prophets, and all the rest of the Jewish people who weren’t killed in the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem and were taken captive to Babylon) would be fulfilled. The promise?

“After seventy years are completed at Babylon,” God said in Jeremiah 29:10, “I will visit you and perform My good word toward you. And I’ll bring you home.”

So, to fulfill that word, God stirred up the sun.

The Hebrew word for that stirring, ur, describes opening the eyes or waking up, but it also means to be hot, alert, and watchful. It’s the opposite of sleep and idleness, and it whispers to the effect of thermoregulation. Science tells us that a person’s body temperature typically decreases by one to two degrees when sleeping, with evidence suggesting that the decrease in temperature helps the body conserve energy. Your body temperature rises when you awake. And, here, God, quite literally, awakened the sun.

Once stirred, the Persian king made a three-part proclamation concerning the Jewish people, delivering it both audibly and in a written royal edict to ensure that his spoken words could not be twisted, misinterpreted, or misquoted.

“God has commanded me to build Him a house,” Cyrus said. “Any Jew throughout the kingdom is now free to return to Jerusalem to build this temple. Anyone who prefers to stay should contribute toward the expenses of those who go and also supply them with clothing, transportation, supplies for the journey, and a freewill offering for the Temple (Ezra 1:4 tlb).”

Then, verse five reads, God nudged the spirits of the priests, Levites, and leaders to go the same way He did Cyrus—the text uses the same waking-up-hot Hebrew “stirred” word. Every Jewish exile who chose to remain assisted the ones leaving in any way they could. And it wasn’t just the Jews, either. Cyrus contributed, too, fulfilling another piece of that Isaiah 45 prophecy that God would give him the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places. Because all of those 2 Chronicles 36:18 treasures that were taken? Cyrus inherited and gave them all back—5,400 articles of gold and silver, vessels, utensils, and furniture, goods (2 Chronicles 20:25, 21:14-17), spoil (the Hebrew word describes giving back what was taken, gathered up, and collected), and cattle (for pulling wagons and horses for riding).

And any additional, spontaneous, and voluntary giving? It was all just the icing on the long-awaited, heavily anticipated, much-prayed-for freedom cake.

Let’s Get Personal

As we look on in awe at the way that God rolled out the red carpet to welcome His people back home, freeing them in such a wildly generous and undeniably Him way, it’s also important to remember why the Israelites went into captivity in the first place. You can see that reason in black and white right there in 2 Chronicles 36:15-17—they waved off His warnings, mocked His messengers, despised His words, and scoffed at His prophets. God’s people were so wrapped up in their own lives, their own worship, their own sin that they completely disregarded God’s blatant warnings about how things were about to go for them if they didn’t get their hearts right.

They didn’t, and God (being the faithful and dependable Parent that He is) followed through on the warned-about consequences. But inside that discipline, He whispered a tender promise as part of Jeremiah’s prophecy, which Cyrus is fulfilling here in Ezra 1.

“After 70 years, I will visit you,” God said in Jeremiah 29:10 (and, for what it’s worth, the Hebrew word He uses for “visit” is the same word Cyrus used in Ezra 1:2 when he said that God “commanded” him to build Him a house). “I will visit you at home.”

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,” God continued in Jeremiah 29:11—thoughts that, Isaiah 55:8-9 says, are not at all like ours. God’s thoughts? They are always with peace (and not evil) in mind—to ultimately give you a future and a hope (and, as The Message reads, the future you hope for). The King James Version says that God’s plans for you are to give you an expected end or, as the Hebrew describes, the after-part (and it’s the same language and verb that you see in Job 42:12).

The after-part, God promised, will be better because they will have been corrected by the discipline (oh, hello, Hebrews 12:11).

“Then,” God said, “in that after-part, after the captivity, after the punishing consequence, then I will listen when you call to Me. Then you will find Me because you are actually looking for Me, searching with all your heart.”

He just had to get their attention again first.

Speaking of getting their attention, the Spirit of God grabbed mine in a completely different way as I read this first chapter of Ezra. One small detail has sat with me since I saw them—the words seared in my mind in a way that I can’t shake off. It’s the part in verse eleven with all of those wildly valuable pieces of gold and silver that the captives who returned home brought with them from Babylon to Jerusalem.

When I first dug into this, I had (and still have) a big dream of something I want to do for God that I wasn’t exactly quiet about. I shared my idea all over social media, bringing the public along for the entire process, from initial color selections to hiring an overseas manufacturer to make a prototype. Once the prototype was in hand, I created a Kickstarter campaign to get my dream off of the ground. That Kickstarter failed to meet its goal, and the entire project stalled. My big dream was laid out there for all the world to see and anyone to pick up, copy, and carry away to produce themselves.

As the anxiety sat with me, this fear of a stolen dream, God quietly pointed back to that one simple verse of Ezra 1:11. The most basic truth of it? It’s that those exiles carried those treasures out in the open for 500 vulnerable miles from Babylon back to Jerusalem. And they weren’t chintzy pieces, either. A quick glance over at Ezra 8:26 gives you the weight of everything that went back into the temple (in addition to those 5,400 gold and silver pieces). If you take that weight and tally up its market value today, you’ll find it a whopping $217 million. There were no armored trucks, no protected convoys. Anyone could have ambushed the returning caravan and stolen them. Instead, a whole lot of recently freed captives safely journeyed with their divinely-protected riches for 500 miles. Nobody stole even a piece of it.

When I saw it, I breathed deeply, making that detail my prayer as I waited (and continue to wait) for God’s perfect timing to launch my dream product. Friend, that’s the beauty of Spirit-driven Scripture-digging. It’s that God can use any detail of any story to speak into your own—if you’re still enough to listen.