Sacrifice

<p>SACRIFICE After seventy years in Babylon God’s people Israel had been in bondage in a strange land. Everything had come to a standstill for them – an enforced seventy year Sabbath to give the land its rest. The Persian King Cyrus sends the exiles, fifty thousand of them, back to Jerusalem in 538 b.c. There are parallels in this story, in Israel’s experiencing of a return and reset of their place as God’s people in the Earth, and the Church’s experiencing of a coming return and reset of taking its place as a witness for God in the Earth today. A man by the name of Zerubbabel was chosen then to lead the exiles back, and he was announced on their return to the Holy Land as the governor of Judah and sometimes referred to as ‘Prince of Judah’, as he was from the lineage of David. Ezra 1:1 In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation… The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord.</p> <p>The seventy year standstill experience of the judgment upon Israel had led to a sense of disorientation and discontinuity, and a radical break with the past. In Babylon they were in virtual lockdown and they had lost all sense of a ‘future’, and now they were heading home - but there was no home. Their temple and their city had been left in ruins.</p> <p>They couldn’t pick up from where they left off. There had to be a reset. Prior to their exile they were organized as the tribes of Israel, but now they were to be gathered in families and clans, and remnants of Benjamin and Judah, with the only full tribe left being the Levites, for the priesthood. This became the transition from the religion of Israel to that of Judaism.