September 28–October 4

This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.

Introduction and Lesson 1—Making sense of history: Zerubbabel and Ezra

 

Comments on the Introduction: “The gospel According to Ezra and Nehemia”

This study of Ezra and Nehemiah is full of promise and possibilities—the promise of God’s fulfillment of His prophecies of the future and the possibilities of seeing God’s hand in His word and acted out in the progression of events.

All of the developments in the restoration of Jerusalem and the temple were fulfillments of prophecies given long before. In that, we are encouraged as we see that God knows beforehand what will happen and how He brings it to pass. This strengthens our faith in the God who knows all.

Half way through the introduction, the author’s works-oriented theme is made apparent by this: 

As Ezra correctly understood, the only power to change comes through diligently searching, comprehending, and internalizing the Scriptures.

By that statement, we are being told that the power of the mind, if applied with sufficient force, is enough to change us from the inside out. And apparently absorbing the Bible is the way this is to be accomplished.

How hopeless and discouraging that is! Whether or not we ever admit it to ourselves, we know we are powerless to truly change ourselves into any good “lasting change” or “vibrant spiritual life”. Those are possible only by the work of the Holy Spirit, not by ourselves by “internalizing the Scripture”. It is God who changes (transforms) us, not our hard work (2 Cor 3:17, 18 and Phil 3:21).

Setting that aside and getting back to the rest of the introduction, it started out well by pointing out that these two books of the Bible model how much God can do through “dedicated, faithful servant leaders”. 

I would point out that although this is true, it isn’t the main purpose of these books. Rather, it is the amazing, at times astonishing, accuracy of prophecy and its fulfillment by a living God who knows all and cares deeply for His people. He told them what would happen and then had Ezra and Nehemiah document the fulfillment of the promise of restoration.

Just as the punishment for their sins and apostasy were promised, He also assured them that after their punishment was completed, He would restore them to the Promised Land and to fellowship with Him.

But this mighty power of God is sadly limited by this:

In order to fulfill the starting point of the prophecies of the 70 weeks and the 2,300 evenings and mornings (which both began in 457 b.c.), God graciously intervened and influenced King Artaxerxes I to allow Ezra along with a group of Israelites to return to Jerusalem, to ensure the safety of their journey, and even to supply needed physical and financial provisions for the temple services (Ezra 7:11–28).

The way it is stated in the introduction, God is under the influence of something outside of Himself and He had to “graciously intervene” to make it come out correctly. 

This is completely backwards as it limits God to a mere reactionary force that has to act to make things happen or risk being wrong! We already know from Daniel 9 that God knew beforehand what would happen, and at the right time, He led King Artaxerxes to act. God knew, and He was the powerful force behind all that happened.

But the real problem, one that sets the tone for the whole lesson, is in the first part of that paragraph:

In order to fulfill the starting point of the prophecies of the 70 weeks and the 2,300 evenings and mornings (which both began in 457 b.c.)

That sentence is there simply to prop up the Adventist twisting of the prophecies of Daniel 9, which is done in an attempt to apply the fulfillment of them to the Adventist Church. Their claim is that the decree that started the 490 year prophecy was given in 457 BC, but there is no historical basis for that. 

All of the quarter’s lesson is based on that assumption, so it would be good to start out with a correct understanding of the timeline of the three decrees for the return to Jerusalem.

The decrees to return to Jerusalem

1. The first decree

The first decree was issued by Cyrus, King of Babylon. History tells us that Cyrus started his reign in either 539 or 538 BC. And in Ezra 1, we see that it was in the first year of his reign that the first decree was given.

In verses 2-4, three times the house of the Lord is specified. From this, we know that the decree was for rebuilding the temple; but there is no mention given to rebuilding the city or the walls.

In Ezra 3, the priest Jeshua, helped by Zerubbabel and others, rebuilt the altar and sacrificed to the Lord.

In the second year they were there, they started work on the temple (Ezra 3:8). Again, there is no mention of the walls or the rest of the city, only the temple itself.

As described in Ezra 4, the surrounding people tried to discourage the building of the temple and even wrote letters of complaint to the king. They claimed that the Jews were building the wall and the city itself but there is no indication that that was the truth. The only construction listed in Ezra is the altar (Ezra 3:2, 3) at first, and then the foundation of the temple (Ezra 3:10).

King Artaxerxes apparently believed the letters, and he replied with an order to stop the building, which continued until the second year of the reign of Darius (Ezra 4:24).

Again, we look to history to find that Darius started his reign in 522 BC.

2. The second decree

Darius issued the second decree in the second year of his reign which would be in 521 BC (Ezra 6:1).

This second decree was again specifically to rebuild the temple with no reference made to the city or the walls. With this decree, including the order to leave them alone to build the temple (Ezra 6:6), the temple was finally completed 4 years later. (Ezra 6:15)

A careful reading of the first 6 chapters of Ezra show very clearly that the first two decrees were for the building of the temple, not the city or the walls. That was the subject of the third decree. 

3. The third decree.

This story starts in Nehemiah 1 where men came from Jerusalem and gave Nehemiah the sad news that the wall and city were in disrepair. For several months, Nehemiah wept and prayed about the condition of Jerusalem. 

In Nehemiah 2, he presented his sorrow to king Artaxerxes, who issued letters for him to take that granted him permission to rebuild the city and the walls (Neh. 2:5-8).

An important fact to notice here is in verses 7 & 8. 

7 And I said to the king, “If it please the king, let letters be given me for the governors of the provinces beyond the River, that they may allow me to pass through until I come to Judah, 8 and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the fortress which is by the temple, for the wall of the city and for the house to which I will go.” 

And the king granted them to me because the good hand of my God was on me.

These specific words referring to the walls, gates, and houses mark this decree as different from the first two which mentioned only the temple.

This may seem to be a minor point, but it is crucial to the correct placement of the beginning of the time prophecy of Daniel 9. 

Let’s read that prophecy

24 Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place. 

25 So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress.

We see from this that the starting of the 70 “weeks” (groups of 7 years) is from the decree to rebuild Jerusalem, not the decrees to rebuild the temple. 

And by the way, history is remarkably specific about the date of this decree. It was issued on the date that would be on our calendar, March 14, 445 BC. From that, we have the exact day of the beginning of the 490 year prophecy of Daniel 9.

 

Lesson 1—Making sense of history: Zerubbabel and Ezra

In week one we jump right into the book of Ezra and his account of the first group to return to the land of Israel. As the author quotes Isaiah 44:28, we read that:

“It is I who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd! And he will perform all My desire.’

And he declares of Jerusalem, ’She will be built,’ And of the temple, ’Your foundation will be laid.’ ”

When you separate the three parts of that verse, it makes more sense. It is not, as the author of the lesson claims, all one lump prophecy, all talking about the same event to occur at the same time. 

What it does is three separate things:

1. It mentions Cyrus by name several hundred years before he was born.
2. It promises that Jerusalem will be rebuilt.
3. It promises that the foundation of the temple will be laid. 

Adventist theology, in an effort to insert themselves into prophecy and to cover up the errors of their misguided attempts at date-setting, lumps this all together and says that Cyrus’ decree covers all three parts of the larger promise. But that does not line up with the Bible.

There were three decrees for the return to Jerusalem that were distinct from each other. As those were outlined in comments on the Introduction to the quarter, I won’t list them again.

In order to get the timing of the prophecy of Daniel 9 right, you have to get the correct starting date and the best, most concise explanation I have ever read is in a wonderful, very old book which has been reprinted several times. It was written in the early 1900’s by Sir Robert Anderson and is titled “The Coming Prince”. It is a very careful, precise study of the prophecy and uses historical records to pinpoint the beginning of the 490 years. 

Making Sense of History and The First Return of the Exiles

These sections do a fair job of summing up the first return to Jerusalem and nicely emphasize the goodness and might of God who alone controls the unfolding of history and its events according to His will.

Overview of Kings and Events

This section seems largely useless in its insistence that to understand the story we have to know the list of kings and the fact that they are not listed chronologically. This is followed by two odd questions in the lesson:

How often have you found things in the Bible that have perplexed you?

and

How can you learn to trust God, and His Word, even when you come across things that don’t seem to make sense?

The usefulness of those two questions doesn’t make much sense to me now, but long ago when I was an Adventist, it would have been quite relevant. The solution to the problems brought up by those questions would have been to proof-text, a process which lifts verses or parts of verses out of context to support a pre-existing idea or doctrine with no consideration for the context or the original meaning. 

And the only way to make it work is to keep the resulting conflicting verses separate from each other. When you see only one at a time, without comparing one to the other, then there is no conflict. 

Unfortunately that is a very poor way to read the Bible. It inserts your own ideas into the text (eisegesis) rather than taking the message of the Bible out of what the text or whole passage actually says (exegesis). When you do that, (eisegesis) you can make it say anything you want. 

Sadly, for many people, the result of apparent conflicts is to lose all faith in the whole Bible and even in God. If He disagrees with Himself–lies–clearly He can’t be who He says He is and therefore can’t be trusted.

My answer now to those two questions is to believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and it is from a God who does not ever lie. This means that all of it is true and if I don’t understand something, it’s usually because I don’t understand the context and not because there is any internal conflict within the Bible.

At the end of the day’s lesson we see this question:

Notice, Ezra prepared his heart to seek “the law of the Lord” (Ezra 7:10). How would we apply that principle to our own lives now?

This question is a not-so-subtle attempt to emphasize The Law (meaning the 10 Commandments) and their central importance to Adventist theology. But when the Bible says ‘the law’ in this context it is talking about the first 5 books of the Bible. It was all of the “Law of the Lord” that Ezra was seeking to understand. 

Artaxerxes’s Decree

From the lesson:

The king directed most of his comments to the treasurers of the Trans-Euphrates territory. The treasurers were to provide Ezra with whatever he needed to restore the city and “to beautify the house of the Lord” (Ezra 7:27, NKJV).

The highlighted phrase restore the city is inserted here completely contrary to the texts.  What Ezra 7:27 actually says is this:

“Blessed be the Lord, the God of our fathers, who has put such a thing as this in the king’s heart, to adorn the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem”

In the decree in Ezra 7, four times the king mentioned “the house of the Lord” but nowhere does he ever mention anything about the city or the walls. This is a serious distortion of the Bible whose sole purpose would seem to be that of using this decree as the starting point of the 70 week prophecy of Daniel 9. 

This distortion is further emphasized by the seemingly innocuous question that follows:

Does the king’s concern for the rebuilding of the city and the temple indicate that he had become a believer in Ezra’s God? 

This question is then followed by an irrelevant discussion of whether or not the king was a believer in the God of Israel. 

This is a good case of misinformation and misdirection just to prop up an important theological error in Adventist theology. Apparently the author believes that if he repeats something enough times, the reader will just assume it is true.

Look at the two questions at the end of the day:

Question #1. Even amid so much pain and suffering, how can we learn to trust in God’s sovereignty over the world, as seen here?

How can you ever trust in God’s sovereignty when you think that His created, flawed beings have to prove by their perfect keeping of ‘the law’ that God even has the right to be sovereign? 

Whenever God needs our efforts (or behavior or perfection or lawkeeping or—anything else) to justify or validate His sovereignty, we have summarily removed Him from His position of sovereignty and made Him dependent on us. And knowing our own faults, it is very hard to then trust a God who we have made dependent on us for validation. 

Question #2. In what ways, even today, might we need to unlearn a lot of what we have been taught from the world?

Speaking for myself, the majority of what I have had to ‘unlearn’ is the error I was taught by the Adventist Church, not that from ‘the world’, (which to an Adventist is anyone else who is not an Adventist).

On the contrary, after I left the Adventist Church and sought out teachings of the true gospel, it was from what was considered “the world” that I found good, sound Biblical teaching.

Along with that sound Bible teaching, it is also necessary to have a good grounding in history in general if you are going to place the events in the Bible in their correct time. †