These particular individuals who are coming to the people of God, are compromised. They worship the true God and they worship false gods. They are syncretistic. They have syncretized both true worship and false worship. But notice, their statement is,
we worship God just like you do.So they are not discerning of the difference between themselves and the people of God. And we must remember that these returnees have returned after seventy years of exile because of that exact sin of compromise, of syncretizing the true worship of God with the Canaanite pagan worship of God. It took Israel seventy years to learn their lesson. And now a test comes and now these others that are compromised, come and say,let us join, for we worship God like you do. Look at what we can do to help you in the work.In other words, truth compromised is more dangerous than a complete denial of the truth…Here in our text, the people of God are very aware of compromise. Even though those that had come to them may not have been aware of their compromised state. Again, notice what they said,
Michael Voytekwe worship God like you do.No, you do not! You are misunderstanding who we are and what we do. So there was a necessity to stand for the truth. They learned this lesson well. It was a painful, 70-year lesson. The destruction of the city, the destruction of the temple. As a matter of fact, what they are building now, this temple, means they are restoring something that was destroyed because of this specific sin. Praise God that they learned their lesson. They were willing to stand.1
1 Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles were building a temple to the LORD, the God of Israel,