This morning ...

This morning I was reading from Ezra. He wrote at a time when the people of Israel had once again gone through national disaster. They had been defeated by the Babylonian army who was using new tactics of battle.

And they had also destroyed the central place of the Jewish worship of God ... the Temple where animal, fruit, vegetable, oil and whatever else was sacrificed to God as a visible reminder to love God.

Their rich had been hauled away in slavery to Babylon. And then decades later Persia that had conquered Babylon allowed the Israelites to return home. OK, they have returned, and the Temple had been replaced with a new one that was not as 'glorious'. And even at that scene, Ezra (their religious leader) said:

Blessed be the Lord, the God of our ancestors,

who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king to

glorify the house of the Lord in Jerusalem,

and who extended to me steadfast love before the king and his counsellors,

and before all the king’s mighty officers.

I took courage, for the hand of the Lord my God was upon me,

and I gathered leaders from Israel to go up with me.

(Ezra 7:27-28)