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155: The Return Home
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We've come to a pivotal point in "The Story." The Hebrew people have been released from the Babylonian exile and given a chance to return to their homeland and rebuild the destroyed temple in Jerusalem. Finally, the people are turning back to the God who never left them! But despite the backing of a king, the project is slow going. Both internal and external obstacles stall the rebuilding, though God's plan ultimately prevails. What parallels does this story have with Messiah's people in 2025? Listen to this week’s episode as Pastor Jim Mueller explains.
If you’d like to dig deeper, check out these discussion questions. You can complete them on your own, with your Community Group, or with family and friends.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Normal Goes a Long Way'
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine Media production.
00:00:19
Speaker
Welcome to Normal Goes a Long Way. I'm your host, Jill Devine. And Chapter 19, The Return Home, is featured in this week's episode.
Exploring the Old Testament's Final Chapters
00:00:28
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This spring, we have been walking through the Old Testament as told by the book, the story. And in fact, the next two weeks after this are gonna be our last ah two chapters in the story. And then we'll take a break over the summer. We have a series that we've been working on, Ryan, Pastor Chuck, and myself, called The Old Testament. like summer book club and then the the idea was what are the books that your pastors are reading uh non-theological edition so like you don't want to know the theology books what we read but like what do we actually read what what other kinds of books and and what are those things so each week we'll take a different book and and uh we'll share with you something that that we've learned from that book and how it applies and then we'll kind of look at the biblical reaction to that or biblical implications of that so that'll be coming up in the summer
00:01:19
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And then we'll be hitting the story, the New Testament, at the beginning of August for the fall semester. So that should be a lot of fun.
Understanding Exile: Historical and Modern Perspectives
00:01:27
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Well, over the last few weeks, ah We have looked at the story of the Jewish people after they disobeyed God and they were given over into exile. Moses and Joshua led them into the promised land, but now they've lost the promised land.
00:01:42
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And so 722, Assyria invades and conquers the northern kingdom, which is called Israel. And in 586 BC, Babylon invades and conquers the southern kingdom, which is called Judah.
00:01:56
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And in many ways, i like to think about this period of time ah like a second Egypt. Like a second Egypt. Again, they are foreigners in an enemy territory.
00:02:09
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Some are slaves. Most are not free to practice their religion. They're all tempted by foreign culture and foreign gods and foreign idols.
00:02:21
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And last week, we looked at the story of Daniel and how he resisted worshiping idols, even if that meant the death penalty. And the death penalty for him was literally a lion's den.
00:02:33
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But he resisted. God rescued him. And so this is a lot like their second Egypt, their second slavery. And the question at the end of the Hebrew Bible, as you get to the very end of the Old Testament, it asks whether, is God gonna do something about this?
00:02:53
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Like God already gave them one exodus out of Egypt. Is God gonna give them a second exodus out of exile? um And that's what today is about.
00:03:03
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ah Let me add. We have our own versions of exile today. What does it look like? When you feel abandoned, when you feel lost, when you feel alone, when you feel scared,
00:03:19
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um when you've been condemned by somebody else or from a group. ah It's not the same as slavery, don't get me wrong, and I'm and i'm not comparing it there, but but it is an exile.
00:03:31
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It is an exile that we go through. it's It's moving from a small town where you know everybody to a big city where you don't know ah anybody. Like no family around, no friends around, no support, ah no one to lean on.
00:03:46
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and so... At its like very core, to be in exile is to be far from home, far from your security, far from what you know.
Living Faithfully in Exile
00:03:57
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When the prophet Jeremiah writes from exile, this is how the Hebrew people feel. This is what they're going through.
00:04:07
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They are far from home, far from friends, far from their family. And the prophet is speaking to a people who don't want to hear it from God anymore. they they like they're sir largely done.
00:04:20
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um They feel abandoned by God. And a lot of times when we go through exile, that's the way we feel too. We feel abandoned. ah And they might even admit, hey, sure, Jeremiah, we sinned, but the foreign countries who are conquering us, aren't they bigger sinners than we are?
00:04:42
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which is something we like to do. i know I like to do. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I did the crime. But instead of punishing me, look over there. Look at his sin.
00:04:53
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It's so much worse um As if like sin is a comparison game that we get to play, like we're graded on a curve and yeah, I failed the test, but I didn't do as poorly as all of them, so I pass.
00:05:06
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i mean, that's the game we play with sin in our heads. Instead of looking at God and going to our knees, instead of repenting, what we do is we stare and we point at everybody else's faults.
00:05:21
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Like, as long as I'm not as bad as Hitler, My sin maybe isn't that big a deal. um Or how could I be punished? I mean, literally, like like that guy robbed a bank or had multiple affairs or cheated his way through school. Like, I didn't do any of that.
00:05:41
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Instead facing the consequences of of my sin, of your sin, what we do is we like to focus on the depravity of everybody else.
00:05:55
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Well, exile has a way of combating that. Exile has a way of humbling people. It has a way of bringing you to your knees.
00:06:07
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Because when you're hurting enough, when you're desperate enough, um suddenly being an atheist isn't an option.
00:06:20
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i mean, even if you've never prayed before, at some point when stuff gets so bad, prayer is all you have left. And that's where Jeremiah finds the Jewish people when he's their prophet.
00:06:34
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His message, after all the stuff about their need to repent of their sins, this is it. His message ultimately is, despite all that, this isn't the end of your story.
00:06:45
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This isn't the end. God is not done with you yet. God is using this time to mold you and refine you and But it's not the end.
00:06:59
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It's not the end. So while you're here and while you're waiting for your second exodus, here are some things you could do. And he tells them, you are God's chosen people. You are a light to the world. And right now you're in exile.
00:07:13
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However, and and this is such a big however, just because you're in exile, just because you're suffering, does not mean you're not chosen anymore.
00:07:27
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or that you don't have to be a light to the world anymore. You do, from exile, from your suffering. God still chooses you and calls you to be a light, even from exile.
00:07:45
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And then he tells them this. This is chapter 29 of Jeremiah's ah prophecy, right kind of in the middle of the Old Testament. Jeremiah tells them, build houses and settle down.
00:07:56
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Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there. Do not decrease.
00:08:14
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Like, this is a prophecy of hope. The people are wondering, do I have a future? and God's like, of course you do. I'm not done with you yet. You need to build, you need to plant, and you need to marry.
00:08:28
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If you believe my promises, God tells them, if you believe my promises, then start now. Build, plant, and marry. It's about faith. It's about trust. It's about ah salvation. You build when you're gonna be somewhere for a while.
00:08:44
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put in a deck or a pool or fence or whatever it is. Sometimes you replace carpets because you want to sell a home. But no, no, no. This is when you put in the floors you really want because you're rooting yourself there.
00:09:00
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Same thing with planting. ah Nothing takes more faith than planting. I would never want to be a farmer. I don't have that kind of faith. You take a seed and you
Jeremiah's Guidance and Community Prayer
00:09:10
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put it in the soil and you wait.
00:09:12
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And by the time you see a sprout or no sprout, it's too late to plant again. The season's over. You're kind of stuck. You build, you plant.
00:09:24
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Third thing, you marry. See, I can build a plan for myself. Um, I can build things, I can plant things for myself selfishly.
00:09:38
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But marriage is different. Marriage is different. This is about starting a family, a legacy. I like to say, parents, you are the most hopeful people in the entire world. And I have five kids, so I'm really hopeful too.
00:09:57
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You're really hopeful people, and this is why. We live in a broken, depraved, and often nasty world, and yet you and i chose and are choosing to bring new life into this place.
00:10:14
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And as a Christian, you know like evil exists and sin exists and it gets all of us. And and in some cases, like it's so terrible. You don't have to watch the news. You know it's out there.
00:10:27
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um And then you have your kids and you love your kids, but you know that they're gonna be who they wanna be. Yeah, yeah, you train up a child in the way they will go. However, you also know that you don't get to control them for very long.
00:10:45
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You don't ultimately get to decide who they become. They take your lessons and your molding, and then they are in charge.
00:10:56
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And then you trust God's spirit to guide them. And then when they're willing to call you, yeah you give the advice that they're willing to take. It takes a lot of faith. It takes a lot of hope to be a parent.
00:11:09
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And God is like, in this passage, God's like, Don't fear, don't be afraid. Increase in number. Don't decrease.
00:11:20
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Keep going. Have babies. Build, plant, marry. It's all about faith that God is working on your future, but he's not done there either. Verse seven is one of the most important verses in all of Jeremiah.
00:11:34
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He says, also seek the peace and the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers, you too will prosper.
00:11:50
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I thought about this this week, that God has placed me in Missouri in St. Charles County. Now, I know some people say Missouri a different way. I can't bring myself to do it.
00:12:03
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This wasn't my home.
00:12:06
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And now it has become my home. Now some of us chose to move here.
00:12:14
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And others of us, we were born here and we just stuck around.
00:12:22
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some of us, we were born here and we stuck around, but if we're being honest, every week we like to look up homes in Florida and think about a new place to live. This is the question for the faithful.
00:12:35
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What are you gonna do while you are here? Whether you feel like this is home or you feel like this is an exile or new home or whatever whatever it is you're going through, will you pray for it?
00:12:48
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Will you help it prosper? Will you pray for your neighbors to prosper? And by the way, I mean the neighbors that are not like you. The neighbors who don't look like you, the neighbors who don't pray like you do, the neighbors who don't believe the same things you do,
00:13:08
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The neighbors who don't vote like you. Wait, wait, wait. Pause for a minute, Pastor. don't Don't go there.
00:13:18
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like don't Don't talk about voting. Not at church. Are you saying, Pastor, you want me to pray for the prosperity of my neighbors who voted for?
00:13:30
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Obama? Or Bush? Or Clinton? Or Nixon? Notice how I didn't bring up the latest elections.
00:13:43
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I'm gonna push this point, but I'm not stupid. not stupid. Do I actually have to pray for their prosperity, the people on the other side of the aisle?
00:13:54
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Yes.
00:13:57
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You pray to the Lord for it and for them. Jeremiah says, because if they prosper, you too will prosper. Even in exile, God has a purpose for you. Even in exile, God
Return from Exile and God's Promises
00:14:10
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wants to bless you. Even in exile, you can be a light to the world. Even in exile, you can make a difference. So build, plant, marry, and prosper.
00:14:20
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And over time, this is the beautiful thing. Over time, many of the Jewish people did exactly that. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they did that.
00:14:32
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They supported the king of Assyria, but they would not compromise their faith. Daniel did that. He served the king of Persia, but he'd rather face lions than not pray to his God, the one true God.
00:14:48
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Back in Egypt, earlier in the story, earlier, or earlier, earlier, Joseph, the one with the amazing technicolor dream coat, he served Pharaoh faithfully.
00:15:00
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And he helped Egypt prosper. Yes, you are in exile, but God still has a purpose for your life. And here's God's promise if they do that. This is verses 13 and 14. God says, you will seek me and you will find me when you seek me with all your heart.
00:15:18
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i will be found I will be found by you and will bring you back from captivity. And that's what happened. Prophets like Haggai and Zechariah, they have books in the Old Testament. That's what their books are about.
00:15:31
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They were faithful to God and faithful to their foreign kings. They were good citizens. They sought out peace and prosperity for the city.
00:15:42
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And the king noticed. And so those kings started to want to do right by these Jewish people. The 2 Chronicles says it this way. It says, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus, king of Persia, to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing. This is what Cyrus, king of Persia, says.
00:16:09
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The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. He has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah, and any of his people among you may go up, and may the Lord their God Be with them.
00:16:26
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Now that's in the Bible. How about from history? Josephus. Josephus, the great first century Roman historian, he actually read a copy of Cyrus' actual proclamation.
00:16:40
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And he records it. And he said that the letter included a detailed account of the dimensions and the composition of what the Jewish temple was gonna be like. So not just from the Bible, but from history, this happened.
00:16:56
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And, Josephus continues, and all of this were to be covered by the king's, the foreign king, by the king's revenue. And in return, Cyrus asked for one thing.
00:17:11
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that God's people pray for him, his family, and his kingdom.
00:17:21
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The oppressive foreign king ruling over God's people is now helping them return home,
00:17:30
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and he's paying for the journey, and he's paying for their temple to be rebuilt with his own money. And he's asking these people who won't worship his idols to pray for him.
00:17:44
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Now, I don't know what most Jewish people prayed for when they were in exile, but I bet it went like this. God, help me get away from these people.
00:17:58
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I wanna go home. And it'd be a lot easier if you helped me find a donkey or a camel to steal, because it's a long walk, and oh yeah, a little travel money, God, because I get hungry on road trips.
00:18:11
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And while you're ah at it, God, like, smite all my enemies and the king of Persia. Amen. i I guess most of the prayers were not kind to the Persians.
00:18:24
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um I bet most of them kind of went like that. Like, it's divine intervention that you're praying for, it's not exactly a very good miracle. i mean, all that could happen, and it could just be dumb luck.
00:18:41
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I don't think anybody had the audacity audacity to pray for what actually happened. This is what happened. This is that prayer.
00:18:52
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God, may Cyrus, the oppressive king, come to favor our people because of our faithfulness, because we want to be good citizens for him.
00:19:04
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Help us bless him and bless his kingdom so Persia can prosper. May our faithfulness be so evident that he will begin to learn of our faith and our God.
00:19:18
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May he be so moved by our faith that he not only set us free, but he paid for the whole thing out of his own wallet. And while you're at it, drive back anybody that gets in our way. And finally, may Cyrus, the oppressive and foreign king, may he build and pay for the restoration of the Jewish temple so we may prosper as well.
00:19:37
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Amen. I don't think anybody... had the guts to pray that prayer. But that's what happened. I think they would have told themselves, it's impossible.
00:19:49
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That's impossible. Here's the thing about impossible prayers.
00:19:55
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They're the only ones worth praying.
00:19:59
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Think about what Ephesians 3 says. God can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.
00:20:10
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Christians, we need to get impossible out of our vocabulary. Cyrus is doing immeasurably more than any of those people could have asked or imagined or dreamed of.
00:20:23
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It's not just that the Jewish people are free. It's not just that they could get to return home. It's it's not about getting a new temple. It's the fact that God got Cyrus to do it. Their enemy.
00:20:37
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he took care of the whole thing. That's immeasurably more. Impossible prayers are the only prayers worth praying because they have no room for luck.
00:20:50
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They solely depend on God. Now, as an aside, pray for whatever you want, by the way. i'm not I'm not saying not don't pray for the trivial things.
00:21:01
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Do it. God wants to hear from you. God wants to talk to you all the time. um What I'm trying to say is this. There comes a time where you have to pray for the impossible as well. Like, pray for the kind of miracles that when they happen, they'll knock the breath out of you.
00:21:20
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ah Pray for the kind of miracles where luck and fortune never could get the credit.
00:21:27
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um Pray as if God shut the mouths of the lions
00:21:34
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or protected his faithful in the fiery furnace. Pray as if Peter really did teach a crippled man to walk. And most certainly, pray as if that Easter stone was rolled away because he's not here, because he's risen.
00:21:53
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Christians need to pray impossible prayers. And by the way, Lutherans, you got a lot to learn in this way. Lutherans, you need to pray impossible prayers. Stop always praying for God to guide the doctor's hands, pray for God to do it.
00:22:13
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Pray as if you believe, pray boldly, and trust God's will along the way. We have the scripture, we've been going through the story, we have the scripture where God wants to intervene for his people.
00:22:27
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And I worry too much that in the West, in America, in the Lutheran church too, we have a church that is not bold, who won't pray impossible prayers anymore.
00:22:40
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And here's the thing about the Jewish people in our story today. There were challenges along the way. There were neighbors in the area who got jealous because fortune was coming to the Jewish people.
Perseverance and Triumph: From Exile to Exodus
00:22:53
Speaker
And so they like sought out ways to discourage them. They used fear tactics against them. They even bribed officials to try to halt the work. Later on, they convinced King Xerxes of Persia to put a stop to the rebuilding, and it did for a time.
00:23:12
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Later on, when Darius was king of Persia, officials contacted him, and they they said that the Jews claimed that King Cyrus was the one who gave them permission to do this, but the officials said, oh, we don't have any record of this.
00:23:26
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Perhaps you could check the royal archives. Maybe they're lying.
00:23:31
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And besides, if they rebuild Jerusalem, don't you think that's a threat, Darius?
00:23:37
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um And this is how he responded to them. He said, well, I found a decree.
00:23:44
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Cyrus said that. So I want you to stop meddling.
00:23:50
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In fact, don't even go back there. We're gonna pay for all of this out of the royal treasury. And if there's anything else they need, cattle or sheep or olive oil, whatever their priests need, whatever the priests say they need, you make sure that their neighbors and your countries and your people give it to them for free.
00:24:11
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In fact, make sure they get it daily. And if anyone, he continues, tries to interfere, may ah a beam,
00:24:24
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be pulled from the corner of their house and may that person be impaled on it and destroy the house. Ezra 6.11, look it up, it's great verse.
00:24:40
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And then he says, Darius, have decreed it carry it out now.
00:24:48
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And why? Because this is their second exodus. Now, later on in the Bible, there's gonna be a third exodus, but it's in the New Testament. It's the new exodus.
00:25:00
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Jesus came to bring an end to Israel's exile.
00:25:07
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But in so doing, he also brought an end to this cosmic exile that all of humanity finds itself on. And that's why the new exodus that's to come is the most important one.
00:25:19
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Because all of creation has been experiencing this broken humanity since the Garden of Eden.
00:25:27
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God led his people out of Egypt, across a desert, and through a sea. God has led his people out of exile in Babylon and back to their promised land. That same Old Testament, the same Old Testament prophets who spoke about exile, they also talk about the most important exodus, which is to come.
00:25:47
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an act of sacrifice that's gonna save the world. And of course, they're referring to the cross.
00:25:55
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They're referring to the Messiah, Jesus, which by the way, is where Messiah Lutheran Church, this is where we get our name.
00:26:04
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Our name refers to the one who proclaims good news to the poor, the one who sets prisoners free, the one who gives sight to the blind,
00:26:18
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To know the Messiah is to know that no matter what you're going through today, and I know a lot of you are going through a lot of stuff, and a lot of you are going through a lot of stuff right now.
00:26:33
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But when you feel alone, to know the Messiah is to know that he is with you, he will set you free, and he will do it for eternal life.
00:26:44
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Thanks for listening this week. And I encourage you to come back on Thursday for the kids version of this episode. Ms. Hannah and Ms. April will present to you chapter 19 in a way that will make more sense to the kiddos.
00:26:58
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So please come back for Normal Goes a Long Way for Kids this Thursday.