This Book: Stories Out of Exile (Esther 4:13-17)

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Daniel, Esther, Nehemiah, and Ezra. These four books detail the experiences of four people who loved God with their everything, in exile. Their stories are very different. Most of them never met each other.  

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Daniel was born in Israel, and began his education and career there. He may have fought in battle against the invaders trying to take Jerusalem. He definitely would have lived with the fear and hunger of a city under siege. He would have seen the walls breached. Watched the gates burn.

When the invaders started looking for people to take away and put to work, Daniel was chosen. When he and his friends had been in Babylon for a few years (waiting for God to take down Babylon and say, ‘Okay, Israel, you’ve learned your lesson. Let's start again and get it right.’) one day a message arrived in the city from the prophet Jeremiah, back in Israel. They must have been really excited: ‘This is it! He’ll tell us what signs to watch for, when to pack our bags. This is gonna be good!’  

They gathered together, in their synagogues and in their homes, and someone read Jeremiah’s message: 

This is what the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel, says to all the exiles who were carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down. Plant orchards and eat their produce. Get married, have children... Pray to the LORD for [Babylon’s prosperity], for if it prospers, so will you..." For this is what the LORD says: “When Babylon’s seventy years are complete, I will attend to you...  For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a future and a hope." Jeremiah 29:4-11  

70 years. That would be like 2096. You're going to be doing whatever you're doing that you don't want to do until 2096.  

How must that have hit them? They were where they were because they’d lost one battle. Now they would begin fighting another. They had lost one siege. Now another siege was beginning. This time not for the walls of a city, but for their hearts. For their identity.

Daniel and his generation were up against a campaign waged, not with swords, not with bloodshed, but just with time. And pressure. And friendship. And paycheques. Talk like us, dress like us, eat like us, marry like us, worship our Gods, become one of us. The goal of that campaign was to blot out their identity, their memory, their faith.  

But Daniel and his friends fought back.  

Yes, they learned the language, and yes, they did good work for the king who had colonized them, but they refused to eat his food. They refused to worship his Gods.  

Daniel served through the lifetimes of three kings of Babylon, through a regime change, through the lives of two Persian kings. When the time came for Israel's people to be released to return to Jerusalem, Daniel stayed. I picture him standing on the walls of the city where he had been captive, and waving them goodbye. Praying for them as they went.  

How did Daniel love God with his everything?  

• By seizing every opportunity to learn, to do his job well.  
• By understanding his privilege, and how to employ it to influence the nation where he was not even a citizen. 
• By knowing before and beyond anything else who he was: a son of Yahweh God. He spent decades working, not just for the king who had made him captive, but for the King he loved.  

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Like Daniel, Esther's family chose to stay in exile. These folks had built communities and houses, families and careers. They'd planted those orchards and eaten their fruit. They had prayed for their city.  

In that world, women were property. Either an asset or a liability. The Persian Queen Vashti lost her usefulness to King Xerxes, so Esther was plucked from her life and deposited in the palace to become an asset: something for the king to use for pleasure, to make him look good.  

How did Esther serve God with her everything? 

• With her gift for reading people. She knew her uncle Mordecai: that she could trust him, respect his wisdom, follow his advice. She got to know Haman: that she needed to keep an eye on him because he was arrogant and hated the Jewish people. Fortunately, he was not all that smart. King Xerxes: again, really not all that smart, but powerful, with a history of a fragile ego. Vashti had been dumped for refusing to come when the king called her. So Esther didn't wait to be called, she took the initiative. Vashti would not come to the king's banquet, so Esther invited him to hers.  
• With her coincidences. All the things that just happened to happen. 
• With her community. When it was time to fast and pray, asking for God's wisdom and protection, she did not do that alone. She brought in her maids in the palace. She brought in Mordecai, and told him to bring in all the Jews in the city—fasting and praying together.  
• With her courage in taking a stand. 

If I die, I die. Esther 4:16 

But she would die having done the right thing.  

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Esther's family had chosen to stay in Persia; others chose to return to Jerusalem at different times for different reasons. One of those is Nehemiah. 

Probably born in Babylon, he survived the transition to the Persian empire and now served in the court of King Artaxerxes (the next after Esther's Xerxes).  

Nehemiah was visited by some folks who had gone back to Jerusalem, but now had come back to Susa for some reason.  

Nehemiah met with them and asked how things were going in Jerusalem. The answer? Really, really not good.  

They said to me, “Things are not going well for those who returned to the province of Judah. They are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem has been torn down, and the gates have been destroyed by fire.”  When I heard this, I sat down and wept. Nehemiah 1 v3-4 

How did Nehemiah serve God with his everything?  

• He prayed. Nehemiah was not a priest or a scholar. Nehemiah was a man who prayed—for his people, for himself, for the king to show mercy 
• He worked. After receiving permission from the king, he travelled to Jerusalem, with his practical skills. He organised materials, engineered plans, led people, stayed focussed. He got things done.  
• He acted in faith. The tremendous amount of work that went into those walls, knowing that the king could just change his mind. 'You did all that? Interesting. We're going to tear it all down again.’ They were still subject to the Persian empire, but he had faith in God. 
• He got God's people working together to accomplish something that nobody thought they would be able to accomplish. 

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One of those people working was Ezra, a priest from the tribe of Levi. All he wanted to do was return to Jerusalem and 

...to study the Law of the LORD, to practice it, and to teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel. Ezra 7:10 

His reason for getting out of bed in the morning was God’s recorded words of the Law. While Nehemiah focused on building the walls around the city, Ezra focused on rebuilding its heart: the Temple.  

When he arrived, they had begun some of that work. So far, they’d just rebuilt the altar. An important start, but barely a start. There were no walls or roof. Standing at the altar, you would see all around the city, and the people working on those walls. 

So Ezra lit a fire under the people and got them working to rebuild the heart of the Temple. 

Nehemiah writes about Ezra: 

At that time all the people gathered together in the square before the Water Gate, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses, which the LORD had commanded for Israel. ... So Ezra read it aloud from daybreak until noon... And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law. ... Then Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and with their hands uplifted, all the people said, “Amen, Amen!” Nehemiah 8:1-6 

How did Ezra serve God with his everything?  

• With his love for God's people, and for God's word—and for bringing them together. He had for long enough made the most of being a priest in Persia with no Temple. Now he was back in Jerusalem, with his intellect, his faithful study, his learning. All of his years of experience, teaching, and preaching.  
• By giving his people the vocabulary they needed to confess their failings and to say yes to faithfulness. To turn back to covenant life with God: if you follow me, then just wait and see what I will do.  

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Four lives of people in very different circumstances, much of which they would not have chosen for themselves. Four lives of people who served God—loved God—with their everything. 

They are examples for their people (and for us) of how to live with wisdom in exile. How to live when you're trying to rebuild your home, when you’re living far from home, when you’re living in a home that is not home.  

God gives us examples in the Bible. Sometimes the examples are good ones. Sometimes really, really bad ones. It's up to us to discern the difference. 

These stories are biographies. These are, as we understand it, actual people who lived actual lives in actual places. They struggled. They went hungry. They worked. They succeeded. They failed. They prayed. They rejoiced. They sat down and wept. They raised their hands and said, ‘Yes!’ 

But they were people, human beings like us, doing their best to follow God. To love him with all of their hearts, all of their souls, and all of their everything, whatever God placed in their hands.