Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi
Welp. Best laid plans gan aft aglee...for a number of reasons, I haven't gotten to sit back down with the heart study (not the least of which was that I damaged myself again and am having difficulty typing). And, to be perfectly honest, the Psalms are looming and I'm really intimidated by the sheer volume of 'heart' verses that I have listed from that book. It's almost as many as I will have covered in the study to date. I think that is subconsciously messing with my motivation.
Maybe like some of the Hebrews returning to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple, once the local opposition kicked in?
Hmmmmm...
But Ezra only has three verses that the NIV 84 renders with the word 'heart', so I'm taking a deep breath, using the backspace button a LOT to correct those errors due to only having 9 functional fingers at the moment, and diving in.
The first two references are in Ezra 1:1 and 1:5
In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing
Then the family heads of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and Levites -- everyone whose heart God had moved -- prepared to go up and build the house of the LORD in Jerusalem.
Both of those verses use the same structure we saw in 2 Chron. 36:22 - 'Heart' here is actually ruah -- Strong's H7307 'Wind, breath, mind, spirit'. As noted in that post, the NIV '84 renders the Hebrew as 'moved the heart', but the phrase is literally 'stirred up the spirit'. I'm wondering if the scribes writing the postscript in 2 Chronicles actually used Ezra as the source, because it's nearly word-for word.
God moved the heart/ stirred the spirit of the king to make the decree to rebuild the temple, and He moved the hear/stirred the spirit of the leaders of the people to leave the place they had been for 70 years and return to the land of destruction and begin rebuilding...starting with the temple.
Of course, the folks in the area were not at all happy that the temple was being rebuilt and began a campaign to get it stopped. They began harassing the Jews and hindered their progress, and construction on the temple ceased until the 2nd year of Darius. There is an anachronistic parenthetical insert about a petition to Artaxerxes to forbid the Jews from rebuilding the city of Jerusalem, but the kings mentioned there follow Darius, so the inclusion of that passage here is rather confusing. But the sources I found seemed to agree that this is out-of-chronological-order, and it doesn't really affect the actual narrative we're looking at, so.... Anyway, the Jews resumed the work on the temple in the 2nd year of Darius, and the folks around them began the harassment again. The Jews maintained that they had been authorized to build the temple by none other than Cyrus, so their enemies asked for an investigation, thinking, I'm sure, that nothing would be found supporting the Jews' claim. However, king Darius did find the proclamation issued by Cyrus and affirmed it, telling those folks who had been resisting the Jews to not only leave them alone, but to provide anything they needed to proceed with the construction (see Ezra 6:6-10)
Had to be kinda humiliating, doncha think?
The temple was rebuilt, and the folks celebrated the Passover.
In the seventh year of the reign of Artaxerxes (Ezra. 7:8, after the events recorded in Esther, who was married to Xerxes), Artaxerxes sent Ezra and a delegation of retuning Jews back to Jerusalem with treasure intended to be used for the temple (Ez. 7:22-23), which brings us to Ezra's declaration of thanksgiving
Praise be to the LORD, the God of our fathers, who has put it into the king's heart to bring honor to the house of the LORD in Jerusalem in this way and who has extended his good favor to me before the king and his advisers and all the king's powerful officials. Because the hand of the LORD my God was on me, I took courage and gathered leading men from Israel to go up with me. -- Ezra 7:27-28; 'heart' is the familiar leb, Strong's H3820, which we have seen often... the innermost part, the seat of emotions, decisions, thoughts, etc.
There is much more narrative in Ezra about the people repenting of intermarrying with the pagans, recognizing that it was that error that began the decline into the captivity, and they renounced the practice for good, but there is not another mention of 'heart'.
The thing that struck me from these verses is that...God is the one who instigates. Even amongst those who don't necessarily fear him. When the set time for the exile was up, God stirred the pagan rulers to allow the people to return home. God stirred the people to leave what had to be a stable and prosperous home to return to the land of broken walls and burnt stones.
The actions followed because God moved in the heart/spirit of people. At the time he chose.
Just ask the stone that was rolled in the garden what happens when God says, 'Move!'....Elevation Church, 'Rattle!'
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