WWUTT 729 Less Than Our Iniquities Deserved?

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The people of Israel were to be faithful to God, not practicing all of the pagan ways of the people around them.

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And we likewise need to be united with Christ and not conformed any longer to the pattern of this world when we understand the text.

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This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the

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Word. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday and our

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Q &A on Friday. Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. So I wanted to apologize for yesterday.

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The podcast didn't get posted until later in the day, and I'm not really sure what happened there. I had uploaded it the night before, and maybe

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I just didn't hit the right button, and I didn't notice the error until later in the day on Wednesday.

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So it's there now. I hope that didn't mess up anybody's morning. I like starting my mornings with the briefing with Albert Muller, who takes the month of July off, so I haven't had the briefing this month and won't get it back into my morning routine again until he starts the new season in August.

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Today being Thursday, we're doing our Old Testament study, and we'll actually finish up the book of Ezra today.

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We have only chapters 9 and 10 left. So last week, looking at chapters 7 and 8, Ezra was making preparation to return to Judah, and Ataxerxes, the king of Persia, was very generous to him, provided all kinds of treasures for him for his journey to finish up the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, to provide for the holy things and the furnishings and all of that.

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It was a lot, over 25 tons of silver, and yet the text seems to indicate that that wasn't excessive.

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It was very generous, just not an excessive amount. And then in chapter 8, Ezra lists the genealogy of those people that returned with him.

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He sent for the Levitical priests that would come back with him, and then he realized that he forgot to ask

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Ataxerxes for a company of soldiers that would protect them on their journey because the people were still kind of hostile, and they could come against this traveling band of Jews going back to Jerusalem and rob them of all of these treasures that they had.

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But Ezra had told Ataxerxes, the hand of our God is for good on all who seek him, and the power of his wrath is against all who forsake him.

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And after telling Ataxerxes that, he felt like if he asked Ataxerxes for soldiers, it would be like saying, well,

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I don't really believe what I just said. So instead, Ezra and the people with him fasted and prayed that the

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Lord would protect them on their journey, and indeed, he did. They returned to Jerusalem safely.

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All of this is the hand of God. The providence of God that was upon Ezra and the people that were with him and the

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Jews that were already there in Judah and in Jerusalem, the way that God influenced

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Ataxerxes to provide all of these treasures for Ezra, all of this, the hand of God was upon.

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And once they got back to Jerusalem, they were there for a few days, and they started counting out all of the precious metals that they had brought back with them, all of the treasures of the temple.

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Verse 34 of chapter eight, the whole was counted and weighed and the weight of everything was recorded.

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At that time, those who had come from captivity, the returned exiles, offered burnt offerings to the

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God of Israel, twelve bulls for all Israel, ninety -six rams, seventy -seven lambs, and as a sin offering, twelve male goats.

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All this was a burnt offering to the Lord. They also delivered the king's commissions to the king's satraps and to the governors of the province beyond the river, and they aided the people and the house of God.

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So now we get to chapter nine. After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, the people of Israel and the priests and the

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Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the

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Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the

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Egyptians, and the Amorites, for they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands.

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And in this faithlessness, the hand of the officials and chief men has been foremost.

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As soon as I heard this, Ezra writing here, I tore my garment and my cloak, and I pulled hair from my head and beard and sat appalled.

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Then all who trembled at the words of the God of Israel because of the faithlessness of the returned exiles gathered around me while I sat appalled until the evening sacrifice.

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And at the evening sacrifice, I rose from my fasting with my garment and my cloak torn and fell upon my knees and spread out my hands to the

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Lord my God saying, Oh my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift my face to you, my

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God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens.

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From the days of our fathers to this day, we have been in great guilt.

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And for our iniquities, we, our kings and our priests have been given into the hand of the kings of the lands to the sword, to captivity, to plundering and to utter shame as it is today.

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But now for a brief moment, favor has been shown by the

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Lord our God to leave us a remnant and to give us a secure hold within his holy place that our

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God may brighten our eyes and grant us a little reviving in our slavery.

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For we are slaves, yet our God has not forsaken us in our slavery, but has extended to us his steadfast love before the kings of Persia to grant us some reviving to set up the house of our

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God, to repair its ruins and to give us protection in Judea and in Jerusalem.

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And now, oh our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken your commandments, which you commanded by your servants, the prophets saying, the land that you are entering to take possession of it is a land impure with the impurity of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations that have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness.

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Therefore do not give your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons and never seek their peace or prosperity, that you may be strong and eat the good of the land and leave it for an inheritance to your children forever.

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And after all that has come upon us for our evil deeds and for our great guilt, seeing that you, our

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God, have punished us less than our iniquities deserved and have given us such a remnant as this, shall we break your commandments again and intermarry with the peoples who practice these abominations?

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Would you not be angry with us until you consumed us so that there should be no remnant nor any to escape?

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O Lord, the God of Israel, you are just, for we are left a remnant that has escaped as it is today.

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Behold, we are before you in our guilt, for none can stand before you because of this.

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And that's all of chapter 9. So here, here is what we have. Ezra has returned.

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He has counted out the treasures. He has made the necessary sacrifices. And then the officials come to Ezra and tell him what is going on in Jerusalem and in Judah.

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Because there's still a lot of things that Ezra has not been acquainted with yet. He's been there doing work.

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He has labored. He's attended to all of the specific law -keeping things that needed to be done.

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And so the officials tell him, here's what's been going on. In Israel, the priests, even the

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Levites, they've not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations.

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From the Canaanites, everybody that's mentioned there, they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons so that the holy race has mixed itself with the people of the lands.

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And in this faithlessness, the hand of the officials and the chief men has been foremost.

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So here, Ezra is doing everything that needs to be done to purify the people, to cleanse them from their sin.

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And what he finds out is that even though God exiled them because of the rebellion that they had done against God, when they had mixed themselves with the peoples of the lands, and they had practiced all of their uncleannesses, and had worshipped their gods instead of the one true

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God, God punished them by exiling them into the hands of their enemies. And yet, even though that happened, they still had not learned, for they were still making themselves impure by mixing with all of these pagan peoples and all of their pagan practices.

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You have heard it said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And that seems to be what is going on here.

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The people of Israel have not learned even after being punished for the sins that they have committed against God.

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Yet consider what it is that Ezra says in verse 13, and after all that has come upon us for our evil deeds and for our great guilt, seeing that you, our

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God, have punished us less than our iniquities deserved.

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And my friends, that's you and me. We have been punished for our sins, because there are consequences for the sins that we have committed against God.

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As Paul said to the Galatians, Galatians 6, 7, do not be deceived, God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.

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So there are indeed consequences for sins, but even though we have faced those consequences, we have not been punished to the degree that we deserve.

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What we deserve is death. Romans 6, 23, the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus, our

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Lord. So for our rebellion against God, we deserve to be destroyed, but he has not done that.

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In fact, he has given us so much more. He has spared us the death that we deserve, and he has given us his son.

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And by faith in Jesus Christ, we are forgiven those sins that we've committed against God, and we are given eternal life.

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If you repent of your sin, and you worship Jesus, you will be delivered from the wrath of God, and you will receive his eternal kingdom as a fellow heir of the kingdom of God.

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What a great, loving, gracious God that we serve. And Ezra here, as he's mourning over his people, he sees and acknowledges and knows the glory and the justice and the majesty of God.

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There is nothing of God's character that is lost on Ezra. And he says,

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O Lord, the God of Israel, you are just, for we are left a remnant that has escaped as it is today.

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Behold, we are before you in our guilt, for none can stand before you because of this.

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This is the prayer of confession that Ezra raises up on behalf of the people of Israel.

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So how will the people respond when Ezra comes to them to confront them in their guilt that they have committed against God and broken the law of God?

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Well, here we get to it in chapter 10. Ezra chapter 10, verse 1, while Ezra prayed and made confession, weeping and casting himself down before the house of God, a very great assembly of men, women and children gathered to him out of Israel for the people wept bitterly.

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And this honestly, this is God hearing Ezra's prayer and giving the people a heart, a spirit of repentance.

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Verse 2, and Shekinah, the son of Jehil of the sons of Elam, addressed

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Ezra. We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land.

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But even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. Therefore, let us make a covenant with our

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God to put away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my

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Lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God and let it be done according to the law.

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Arise for it is your task and we are with you. Be strong and do it. Then Ezra arose and made the leading priests and Levites and all

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Israel take an oath that they would do as had been said. So they took the oath.

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I want to clarify a couple of things here before we continue. First of all, it appears as if these men who have taken pagan wives are going to divorce these women in order to be in obedience to God's law.

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But doesn't God say in his law that he hates divorce? Well, the text here in the book of Ezra is actually treating these marriages as though they aren't real marriages.

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Look at verse three again. Therefore, let us make a covenant with our God to put away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my

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Lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God. That's different than than divorce language.

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Divorce isn't even mentioned because these marriages aren't being treated as genuine marriages. Instead, they're going to put away all of their wives, these women who they were not genuinely married to.

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They were probably committed to them and they had children with them, as we're going to see later on in chapter 10.

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But but it's not as though these marriages were according to God's law.

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So they're not being treated as genuine marriages. Therefore, there is not divorce. So that's the first thing

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I want to clarify. Second thing is that this is about spiritual purity, not ethnic purity.

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So it has this appearance of put away these foreign wives so that we can protect the purity of our race.

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But that that is the purity is not in the flesh. The purity is according to the spirit.

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They are more concerned with spiritual purity. And this goes all the way back to Solomon when

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Solomon was king over Israel and he married all of those pagan wives. And the text said that his marriage to those women caused his heart to go away from God.

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And he sympathized with his wives and the gods that they worshipped rather than worshipping the

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Lord God only. And so and so that same sort of of spirit of disobedience against God has come in here to the people of Jerusalem.

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They have married these pagan women. And so their hearts are going to sympathize with all of their pagan practices and the pagan gods that those women worshipped.

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And likewise, the sons that they're bringing up, according to or with those pagan women, they have been raised to worship their pagan gods.

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Hence why those children are even going to be put out of Judah with this oath that is being made with God.

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Now, this is very dark. It's certainly not celebratory that, oh, yeah, they're getting rid of their wives and their children that they had with these wives.

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It's rather showing the consequence of sin and how it tears people apart, how it breaks up people.

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But these women are going to go back to their gods, whereas the men here in Judah are going to remain faithful to the

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Lord God and follow his law and his statutes. There's still going to be ramifications for their sin, what they've done against God.

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But it would be further sin and disobedience for them to continue in the sin that they have have already committed.

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And what we're going to get to in Chapter 10 is there will be lists of names of those people who had married foreign wives.

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And it's only about 100 names. So it's not like this was widespread, like there was going to be an exodus of thousands of women and children going out from Jerusalem because of the sins of these men.

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It wasn't like that. It was actually a very isolated case. They were isolated cases.

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But it was it was still significant enough that the sins of Judah will not have been thoroughly repented of.

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Should this practice, this union with these pagan women continue. So now we we go to verse six here of Chapter 10.

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Then Ezra withdrew from before the house of God and went to the chamber of Jehoan and the son of Eliashib, where he spent the night neither eating bread nor drinking water, for he was mourning over the faithlessness of the exiles.

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And a proclamation was made throughout Judah and Jerusalem to all the returned exiles that they should assemble at Jerusalem and that if anyone did not come within three days by order of the officials and the elders, all his property should be forfeited.

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And he himself banned from the congregation of the exiles. Then all the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days.

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It was the ninth month on the 20th day of the month. And all the people sat in the open square before the house of God trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain.

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So it was a combination of trembling with fear before God and also were cold and wet and miserable.

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And Ezra, the priest, stood up and said to them, you have broken faith and married foreign women and so increase the guilt of Israel.

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Now, then make confession to the Lord, the God of your fathers, and do his will separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives.

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So there again, we've got language that that's not like divorce language. These are not being considered genuine marriages, but rather they have disobeyed

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God by making themselves sexually impure, uniting themselves with women who were pagan and did not honor the

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Lord God. So separate yourselves from these foreign wives, not the same as divorce yourselves.

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Then all the assembly answered with a loud voice. It is so we must do as you have said, but the people are many and it is a time of heavy rain.

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We cannot stand in the open, nor is this a task for one day or for two, for we have greatly transgressed in this matter.

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Let our officials stand for the whole assembly. Let all in our cities who have taken foreign wives come at appointed times and with them, the elders and judges of every city until the fierce wrath of our

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God over this matter is turned away from us. Only Jonathan, the son of Asahel and Yahaziah, the son of Tikva, opposed this and Meshulam and Shabbatai, the

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Levite, supported them. Then the returned exiles did so. Ezra, the priest, selected men, heads of father's houses, according to their father's houses, each of them designated by name.

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On the first day of the 10th month, they sat down to examine the matter. And by the first day of the first month, they had come to the end of all the men who had married foreign women.

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And then the rest of what we have here versus 18 through 44 is the list of those men who had married the foreign women.

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And again, it's about 100 names. And I want to clarify once again, this is not about being ethnically pure.

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These passages should not be used to say that a white man cannot marry a black woman because that's not what's going on here.

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The concern is spiritual purity, not an ethnic purity. And all of us must consider this of ourselves as well as we are in this world.

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We must keep ourselves spiritually pure. We must not unite ourselves with the ways of this world, but instead, we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

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That's Romans 12 to do not conform any longer with the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

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And then you will be able to test and see what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will.

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So we ourselves, likewise, we need to be circumcised of heart, meaning that we are cut off from the world and we are united with God, obeying his rules and his statutes that he has laid down for us in the scriptures.

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For even Jesus said to his disciples, you will show me that you love me when you obey my commandments.

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May it be so. Repent of your sin before God. Ask for his forgiveness and he will give it to you.

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And now in the words of Christ, go and sin no more. Amen. When we understand the text at gmail .com

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and let your friends know about our ministry. Join us again tomorrow as we grow together in the study of God's word when we understand the text.