BABYLONIAN EXILE ENDS
LESSON FOR THE JUNIOR CLASSES
STUDY SCRIPTURE: EZRA 1:1-8,11: 2:64-70
KEY VERSE
“Some of the heads of fathers’ households, when they arrived at the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem, offered willingly for the house of God to erect it on site”.
Ezra 2:68
INTRODUCTION AND STUDY
The Lesson adds to our knowledge about who God is. It tells us God has wisdom without any limit, power without any limit, total understanding of every thing that has ever happened and is happening now, and will happen in the future. God is so powerful because He has always lived and God has no beginning and no end so He will always be living. We are different for we have a birth and we will grow up as babies, become young people, then young adults, then grown adults, and then older men and women. We change and grow older but God does not change. He remains the same and so He makes plans to bring salvation to all those people who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour and the person who took out from being trapped in sinning all the time. Jesus made us become part of His family.
ItItI is God who created time and space so that we have minutes, hours, weeks, months and years so that we can make plans and have a good life and enjoy life. All human beings therefore live in time. But God is so powerful and without any limits that He looks over and governs everything that happens. God has made plans to direct everything that happens to animals, plants, people, and nations.God also has done great things for usG
All God wanted was that the people of Israel that He chose would obey Him and live happy lives. But they did not. They did a lot of wrong things when they lived in the land God gave them for them to live in and enjoy. So God made their enemies capture them and take them away from their beloved country. The Babylonians who captured them took the people and the leaders to Babylon, destroyed their homes and their capital city Jerusalem. They destroyed the beautiful Temple king Solomon had built and they destroyed the land of Israel. It was a terrible punishment for disobedience.
But God promised the punishment and exile or the taking away from their home would last 70 years. At the end Israel would repent and not be bad and worship idols anymore. At the end of that time the King of Persia who have captured the Babylonian empire had come to know about Jehovah. Jehovah stirred up his spirit and he thanked God for allowinghim to capture the Babylonian empire and rule over them. He therefore allowed the people of Israel to go back to their own country to live in it and to rebuilt the Temple that the Babylonians had destroyed.
.He gave Zerubbabel, the leader of the Jews and later Ezra the Scribe who was skilled in knowing and teaching the Laws of Moses to return with as many people as wanted to go back home out of Exile. This king whose name was Cyrus gave the Jews back all the precious items the Babylonians had taken out of the Temple in Jerusalem so that they again use them in the new Temple. He gave them a lot of money to help them rebuild the Temple and encouraged all the Jews living in Babylon to make donations to the Jews returning to Jerusalem. A great deal of money was collected and the party of 50,000 left Babylon for Jerusalem. Most of the Jews however remained behind in Babylon for they had become comfortable and well off there.
So the faithful group went back home and started to rebuild the Temple. Their leaders and the heads of the household, and the priests, the Levites, and the Temple workers, and the singers who led the worship service in the Temple worked together to rebuild.
The Exile and the captivity away from their home had ended because God had stirred up the heart of king Cyrus, the hearts of these 50,000 Jews, and the hearts of the people who contributed a lot of money to help rebuild the Temple.If God had not stirred up the hearts of all these people so that God’s plan to have the people of Israel end their Exile and return home nobody would go back to rebuild the Temple.
God had made the prophet Jeremiah prophesy that the exile in Babylon would last 70 years. God arranged it so that that was the exact time of the Exile.
So we thank God that He had this great power, and that He uses it to change and correct the bad behaviour of His people, and then comfort them and bring them home to the place He had given them.
So we learn we can trust God to always do what is best. He loves His people. When God makes plans to help His people nobody is strong enough to change these plans of God. So trust Him all the time. Pray to Him often. If we do something that is not right just pray and He will forgive you. He is a great, loving, kind, merciful, all wise, all powerful, all knowing and beautiful God.