Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezra 3-5.

There are two topics I am tempted to write about in today’s passage.  I may write about both, but we shall see.  As soon as the Returned Exiles, who started calling themselves Jews at about this time, got settled into their new homes they gathered in Jerusalem.  There they built an altar to God and began offering sacrifices on it.  Then, once they had the system of sacrifices down, they began work on laying a foundation for rebuilding the temple.  The key being that they started offering sacrifices and keeping the festivals of God even before they began work on building the temple.  They could have justified beginning offering sacrifices until hey had rebuilt the temple, but they did not even consider doing so.  They did all of this despite fearing the peoples around them.  Which brings us to the second piece of today’s passage.  The passage tells us that once the people surrounding them learned that they were rebuilding the temple those people came and asked to be allowed to help with the rebuilding.  The passage says that those who offered to help were the enemies of Judah and Benjamin.  I am not clear if they were enemies before their help was rejected or not.  However, the passage tells us that as soon as their help was rejected those who had offered to help began to try to discourage the Jews from building the temple.  Which seems to suggest that the Jews were right to reject the offered “help”.  Since those who offered to “help” so quickly tried to discourage the work, one might suspect that they would have used their position on the inside, if their offer had been accepted, to do so to an even greater degree.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.