at the end of verse 8, himself separated from the congregation of those that had been carried
away.
So basically what they did, they call out, or I'm back in the story, they bring all the
Jews from the captivity, they bring them all to Jerusalem, and they basically separate
them.
Okay, who here married the foreign wives?
We're going to split you up over here.
Okay.
And then who didn't?
Okay.
So not everybody's guilty of this, right?
The people that have been guilty, they put them in a certain group.
Then all the men of Judah and Benjamin gathered themselves together under Jerusalem.
Within three days, it was the ninth month on the twentieth day of the month, and all the
people sat in the street of the house of God, trembling because of this matter.
I mean, this is a very serious issue.
And for the great rain.
And Ezra the priest says, "Raining hard, they're all standing out in the rain."
So the Bible's painting a vivid picture here.
Everybody's gloomy and scared and trembling and just drenched in the rain.
And Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, "You have transgressed and have taken strange
wives."
Kids, strange doesn't mean weird.
Now truly you shouldn't marry a weirdo, okay, but strange means foreign or so forth.
"And have taken strange wives to increase the trespass of Israel.
Now therefore make confession unto the Lord God of your fathers and do His pleasure and
separate yourselves from the people of the land and from the strange wives."
Now some people would say, "Oh, we'll see right here.
This is God putting up a stamp."
Look, just because I got up and just said, "Hey guys, do what God wants you to do and
divorce your wife."
Does that make it so?
This is not God talking.
You know, God wants you to divorce your wife.
Really?
Chapter and verse on that?
"Then all the congregation answered and said with a loud voice, 'As Thou hast said, so
must we do, but the people are many and it is a time of much rain and we're not able
to stand without.'"
Meaning we can't stand outside.
This is going to take a long time.
Can we get out of the rain for crying out loud?
"Neither is this a work of one day or two, for we are many that have transgressed this
thing."
So it ends up taking approximately like almost 80 days to do this.
All the divorces.
Okay.
"Let now our rulers of all the congregations stand and let all them which have taken strange
wives in our cities come at appointed times."
He's saying, "Look, we need to go home.
We're not just going to hang out here like taking a number and waiting in line so that
75 days from now we can get divorced."
Okay.
So what we need to do is we need to go home.
It's raining, we're outside, this isn't going to take a day or two.
I got to get back to work on Monday morning.
So what they're saying is, you know, we're going to have to arrange times where people
come in shifts.
Like, "All right, this time, all right, you're going to come on this day."
So they had to break this down to where they're on a schedule where the mass divorces are
happening for different reasons at different times.
So he said, "You know, let's go to our cities and at appointed times with them, the elders
of every city, the judges thereof, until the fierce wrath of our God for this matter be
turned from us. Only Jonathan the son of Azahel and Jehaziah the son of Tikvah were employed
about this matter, and Meshulam and Shabbathai the Levite helped them, and the children of
the captivity did so."
And again, some people would say, "Well, the fact that it's raining."
That's the proof that God is demanding this.
That's an interesting way to derive doctrine.
That's what you're going to base your doctrine on?
The weather?
Oh, you know, I went to go soul hunting and it started raining.
That's when I knew it wasn't God's will, you know.
I've never been soul hunting since.
Shabbatai the Levite helped them, the children of the captivity did so, and Ezra the priest
with certain chief of the fathers after the house of their fathers, and all of them by
their names were separated and sat down in the first day of the tenth month to examine
the matter.
First day of the tenth month they start out, so you can think of it as October 10th, okay,
in our vernacular.
And they made an end with all the men that had taken strange wives by the first day of
the first month.
So again, over two and a half months later.
And among the sons of the priests that were found that had taken strange wives, and they
just lists all these people that had the strange wives, I'm not going to read that whole list
for you.
Look at the final, the final verse is so telling.
Verse 44, "All these had taken strange wives, and some of them had wives by whom they had
children."
That's an interesting place to end the Book of Ezra.
That's it.
Book's over.
Flip the page, right?
New book.
Nehemiah.
Interesting end to the book.
Folks, is that a jubilant end to a book?
Is that a triumphant end?
Where's the end they live happily ever after?
It's a negative ending to a negative fiasco of a situation.
So there's no way that you would take this and overturn Christ's clear teaching because
of this doomed story.