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

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Every time I read this passage and read where the returned exiles rejected the request from the people of the land to build with them I wonder why they did so.  Was it God’s will that they reject working with these people?  Or would things have turned out better if they had accepted the offer?  The passage says that the people of the land were adversaries of Judah and Benjamin and after this they were indeed adversaries, but could that opposition been avoided?  I can imagine reasons why working with the people who had been living in the land might have been a mistake, but the passage does not tell us that any of those reasons were true.  Perhaps if the returned exiles had accepted to offered assistance they could have rebuilt the temple and Jerusalem without further interruption and Israel could have risen to its former glory.  On the other hand, perhaps if they had accepted the offered assistance, the people of the land would have insisted that they incorporate some of their practices into their faith, practices which ran counter to God’s commands.  Neither this passage, nor the others which reference this time period answer this question.  However, the degree to which the people of the land opposed the efforts of the returned exiles suggest the latter to be the case.

Here is my thinking on this type of situation.  We should accept the assistance of anyone who wants to help us do the work of the Lord.  However, we should only allow those who share our understanding of who God is and what He expects of us to have any say in how the work is done.  For example, in this situation the returned exiles could have allowed the people of the land to join in building the temple as long as they understood that they would have no say in how worship would be conducted in the completed temple.  Nothing we have read tells us that such an option was available to the returned exiles. We also do not know that the dynamics of the situation at that time would have allowed the returned exiles to enforce that condition if they had accepted the offered assistance.

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