This makes you think again of worldliness in churches. What is the modern equivalent of the idolatry of the Jews in the time of Ezra? It is churches choosing the world rather than the Scripture, and the Scriptural manner of worship and seeking after God; wanting entertainment, wanting the pop groups, even the hairstyles, the leather jackets, the behaviour, the applause, and the wealth, and all the trappings of secular entertainment in church. All over the country, there are churches that are supposed to be Bible churches and you would never know from their worship. There can't possibly be any sense of God. It's all rhythm and pleasure, and it's adopting the very fashion and music styles that are designed by the world to promote illicit sex and drugs, and every disobedience to God. It is just amazing that in Ezra’s time the judges and the princes and the elders and the priests would not act on the idolatrous taking of pagan wives. The state of affairs we see in churches that claim to be Bible believing churches today is amazing. The world is in, wealth is in, ease is in, entertainment is in. There is no distinction between the church and the world any more in so many places.
I was talking to a pastor about 30 years ago who was beginning to adopt some contemporary songs in his worship. He has a very large congregation, and I was warning him. He thought this was just a matter of taste and of generation. ‘We’ve got appeal to the young’, he said. I said, ‘Within 20 years you’ll go the whole way. You will be completely contemporary in your worship.’ He was offended. ‘I didn't know him’, he said, ‘he would never allow that to happen.’ Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t 20 years; it was 10, and that church was completely contemporary, and pretty extreme. Same with the pagan wives. If Ezra under God hadn't been able to move the nation, within a generation that would have been everywhere and the distinctive of Israel would have been utterly lost. So let's be faithful to him. Hold our communion with the Lord. Pray in our weakness to be able to hold the standards and to guard them.
In the United States in the 1730s and the 1740s, there was a great awakening, just as there was here. One of the instruments was the same in both cases: George Whitfield. Another of course, exclusive to the United States, was Jonathan Edwards, and there were others. Mighty crowds listened to the preaching, and people in their thousands were moved. Churches were planted and existing churches were swollen in membership, and there was worship and praise and true conversion. But as time went on, and the revival subsided, and faded away, the next thing in was worldliness. You read that some of the divines of the 1750s are complaining that in church after church everywhere, people are much more interested in dancing and balls and pretty dresses, and doing as society does. They are more interested in being wealthy, and being at ease than they are in sincere worship or gaining any sense of God. Sometimes good friends of yours will slip, and go to something much more expensive than they need. It is a show; it's an imitation of the world around us. We are fallible, we are weak; we pray, and we watch, and if we don't, it's in in no time.
Consider the mercy and the kindness of God. Though this sin is so great and accommodated and allowed, yet God is ready to forgive, and the instructions are there. You find that a pledge has to be given, repentance, and a ram offered. A Leviticus 6 offering has to be made because there is going to need to be atonement and forgiveness. It's another wrong which Christ, when he comes, will suffer and die for. Covered by the symbolic sacrifice of an animal in the meantime: a ram without blemish, and it shall burn upon the altar all night, and the offeror will observe it, watching that sacrificial carcass burn and the cinders blaze, all night long. That is the punishment symbolised for this crime, which God has removed from you. The mercy of God! The kindness of God! They will after all be blessed, but it requires real consciousness of sin. So Ezra was a model of the godly pastor, used in his day to instruct the people and bring them to turn away from sin that threatened to carry away the nation.