Edward’s QT, Ezra 1:5-11, April 14, 2026.
The heads of Judah and Benjamin tribes, the Levites, and priests as well as those whose hearts God had moved got ready to go back to Jerusalem after seventy years of exile and rebuild the temple. Babylonian neighbors gave them money and goods. King Cyrus returned all the gold and silver temple articles that Nebuchadnezzar had taken when he destroyed the temple and Jerusalem.
Judah and Benjamin were the two tribes that made up the southern kingdom of Judah when Israel was split into two kingdoms after the death of Solomon and the refusal of his son Rehoboam to lower taxes and relieve the burden of servitude to the king’s projects. With the other ten tribes, Jeroboam established the northern kingdom of Israel, its capital in Shechem. He made Dan and Bethel the religious centers in which he put golden calves. Thus began the long and unhappy history of Israel’s two kingdoms and their destruction by Assyria and Babylon.
Question: How did God prepare my heart to build the house of the Lord?
After I married the woman I committed adultery with, we lived a life of hardship as a consequence. We added two more children to the daughter my wife bore in her first marriage. I returned to college to complete my first degree and then entered graduate school with the hope of earning a PhD and becoming a professor. Raising a family on scholarships, bursaries, and student loans was hard. Among other efforts to earn money, I sold my blood each week to buy groceries. During the initial stages of this hardship time, we did not go to church. Then God started preparing my heart for a return.
For months, he put in my mind the Lord’s prayer, praise songs Bible stories from my years in Sunday school. Bible passages unaccountably popped up in my mind. Whenever I turned on the TV, it was on a religious channel. I kept bumping into the university chaplain who had married us. God was calling me, but I didn’t want to go. Then, on a cold January night, God’s pursuit of me ended with my feeling of being trapped. I reluctantly accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I contacted the university chaplain for his church recommendation. We had our children baptized. I was at last where the Lord wanted me, in his church and helping to build it by becoming an active and serving community member.
Our first church was like spiritual elementary and middle school. Our training and building came to an end. We moved to a new church, our spiritual high school and college time. It was wonderful and exciting and our children loved it. But church politics intervened and the bishop closed the church, sold the land, and sent the pastor far away. A time of semi-wilderness followed from which my children have yet to recover. My wife’s alcoholism had taken a greater hold on her and she stopped going to church.
When we moved to the US, I founda church community but it lacked the dynamism of our nurturing church. My wife wouldn’t join. She was a chronic alcoholic by now and in the final stages of her life. My adultery did nothing to help her. She died. I lost my job and my work visa. The woman I had an affair with rejected my marriage proposal. She kept the child we had made. I returned to Canada under a cloud of despair.
In Canada, I joined a church but it felt like being a part-time student taking night courses instead of being enrolled full time. Life was hard and after two years, I became unemployed again and wrestled with God, who sent me to Korea to meet the woman who would become my wife.
I found no church, though, and went to India for a good job.
On my return, I married my wife and joined Wooridle, jumping suddenly from a basic college degree to a spiritual PhD program. I was given temple articles to help build the church and restore the temple in me: twice weekly worship, QT, mokjang, confessing, repenting, tithing, turning a gymnasium into a Sunday worship hall, and cleaning up afterwords.
When Cyrus gave the Jews their gold temple articles, he did not give them the two great pillars from Solomon’s temple, ten meters tall and two meters wide, bronze works of art, their capitals adorned with pomegranates. They even had names: Jachin and Boaz.
They were free-standing pillars, not supporting anything architecturally, symbolizing God’s strength and sufficiency to his chosen people, who walked between them into the temple. Cyrus couldn’t give them back because Nebuchadnezzar had melted them down. But Jesus’ death and resurrection are the twin pillars of God’s supporting love for me that I walk between in my daily life.
Application: Remember that my temple is always being restored because my sin keeps breaking it. Never slack from my worship and QT.
Prayer: Thank you, Lord of Creation, for never abandoning me in the depth of my sin but forever calling me to restoration with the articles for your temple.
