Ezra 1:3 Commentary and Bible Study

So speaks Cyrus in the original edict, the original proclamation. This is staggering; it is quite amazing. If you had been an Israelite, and let's say you had been in the minority of Israelites who really believed in the Messianic promises; if you believed in the destiny of your nation: that through your nation Messiah would be born; that ancient prophecy had laid it all out that certain things would happen, and you would be in your own land, and the Messiah would come, following a forerunner – John the Baptist – and he would come and he would announce the kingdom of heaven, and ultimately he would bring the world into judgement. If you believed these things with all your heart, you would be almost in despair. Remember that the northern tribes of Israel have long since fallen and gone into captivity. Now Judah and Jerusalem have fallen. You would say, ‘We have been in captivity in Babylon for 70 years; we have not had our own jurisdiction. We have been pulled to pieces, we are all over the place, dispersed everywhere. We can no longer see how prophecy can be fulfilled. How we could ever return to our land and our nation? How we could ever be self-determining, bring forth the Saviour and continue temple worship? All that is essential: the types and the shadows which point forward to the Saviour: they must continue until the moment he comes and all is fulfilled. But it’s lost; it’s gone.’ They would be in despair. And now another emperor was taken over – Cyrus. He is surely going to follow the same policies. It is inconceivable that he would do anything other than that. Nobody had ever heard of a powerful ruler going back on deportations, sending people back to their homeland, restoring to them their self-determination. ‘That was the trouble!’, every emperor would say. ‘If we do that, then they become nationalistic and they revolt and the rebel and they refuse homage. They gather together nation upon nation, and they act against us, and the empire is overthrown.’ It’s the last thing an emperor will ever do. But God so powerfully deals with Cyrus, either to the point of conversion – we won’t debate that until later in the book – or whether just by a powerful overwhelming impression upon him, that he does the unthinkable, and he reverses the policy of all emperors forever, and sends the captives home, and grants self-determination. Israel never knew total autonomy again. That was a privilege that was gone forever. They would always be under a foreign ruler now, until the coming of Christ. (Simon Maccabeus, the first ruler of the Hasmonean period, negotiated semi-autonomy for the Jews under the Seleucid empire which lasted about eighty years.) But the Jews returning from Babylon did have self-determination and self-government and liberty, even though they had homage to pay, and they were in their own country and things were back on track; prophecy was back on track. What happened? Well, the overwhelming of Cyrus by the living God.