“Know Your History!” – FBC Morning Light (9/16/2024)

Faith Baptist Church

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Well good Monday morning to you, hope your weekend was a good one and that you enjoyed gathering with God's people yesterday and learned something from God's Word, challenged you, encouraged you in some way.

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Well today as we get off to a new start this week we're reading in our Bible reading plan in Ezra chapters 5 and 6, and of course the book of Ezra is written regarding the

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Jews that had come back to the land after the exile and particularly emphasizing the rebuilding of the temple.

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But I want to focus on chapter 5 here in a minute, but when I was reading this passage and the thought struck me about this very important element of some videos

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I've seen, these YouTube things, where this guy will go out on the streets of New York City and he'll just randomly call people and ask them some questions that should be pretty simple, pretty straightforward questions that you would think any, you know, young adult would have the knowledge of.

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So for example, I saw him one time ask this young adult, what year was the

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War of 1812 fought? Now that's kind of a duh question, right?

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And the person's like, the what? The War of 1812. What year was the

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War of 1812 fought? I don't know, 1932?

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It's like he didn't have a clue. You say, how can that, how can anybody be so dumb?

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Well, I would suggest that that person just simply does not have a good sense of history. I've seen other questions that go like, a question like, what year, in what year was the

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United States founded? And they puzzle, they pause, and they think, and I'm serious, more than one of these young adults came back with an answer in the early 1900s or the late 1800s.

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Not a one of them, not a one of them could say 1776. Now I'm sure that,

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I mean, those are just the videos the guy showed, the people who answered, and answered in a really stupid way.

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But my point is that here are some, here are some young people who are woefully ignorant of their history, and you know, when we're ignorant of our history, that does not bode well for the future.

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Well, the reason I bring that out is because in the book of Ezra, if you remember, the task of rebuilding the temple was undertaken, and they got so far, but then some, you know, opposition to the building of the temple came, and the opposers, they sent a letter off to the king, and said, you know, this is a nation, these are people who will just cause you trouble, make them stop doing this, and the king at the time investigated, and he decided, yeah, those are going to be troublemakers, and so he sent a letter back, said, make them stop.

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And then they did for a while. But then under the preaching of Haggai and Zechariah, the building of the temple resumed, and the opposition came again, and said, what do you think you're doing?

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On what basis are you doing this? And then the builders were able to reply, and here's what they said.

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The question was asked, you know, basically, who do you think you are? Who commanded you to do this?

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Why are you doing this? And they, in chapter 5, verse 11, they replied and said, we are the servants of the

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God of heaven and earth, we are rebuilding the temple that was built many years ago, and this would have been many, many years ago, because it would have been

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Solomon's temple, and now it's, you know, 70 -plus years past the exile.

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The exile was in 586, the final stage of the exile, 586, so this is early 530s

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BC, so it's been hundreds of years since the original temple was built. So they said, we are rebuilding the temple that was built many years ago, which a great king of Israel built and completed.

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But, now here they go on in the recounting of their history, but because our fathers provoked the

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God of heaven to wrath, he gave them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, the Chaldean. So, because they know their history, they know why they were thrown, why they were sent into exile, what king of Babylon was responsible for that exile, and this was all before their lifetime, for most of them anyway, and they knew the cause of it, the cause of it, because our fathers provoked the

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God of heaven to wrath. And then they go on to say in verse 13, because they know their history, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Babylon, King Cyrus issued a decree to build this house of God.

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Also, he said, the gold and silver articles of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple that was in Jerusalem, carried to the temple of Babylon, those

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King Cyrus took from the temple of Babylon, and they were given to one named

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Shushpazar, whom he had made governor. And he said, take these articles, go carry them to the temple site that's in Jerusalem, let the house of God be rebuilt on its former site.

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Again, they know their history, and they know it in pretty good detail. In verse 16, this is exactly what they did.

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So, why are we building this temple? Because of our history. We know our history, and we know that our history included the temple on this site.

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We know that our history brought about the destruction of the temple, and our exile, our captivity by the

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Babylonians, and because we know our history, we know that we were given permission to rebuild this temple.

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They know their history. I think it's important that we have a pretty decent awareness of our history.

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Not only of our national history, but our spiritual history. I think it's very helpful for us to know that.

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You don't know when that will prove helpful in your life, in the life in our society, and so forth.

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Let's learn our history. I don't know if you've done any reading of church history. I would commend it to you.

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Just know where we came from. If you know where you came from, you got a good sense of why you're on the track you're on, and where that path is headed.

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So Father, our Father and our God, we do thank you for our history. We realize that in the course of events gone by, you have been at work for a variety of reasons.

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In some cases, you brought great blessing. Other cases, you brought great chastening. But it's important that we know that history.

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May we seek to do so, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Alright, well listen,