[There were so many] people that had left everything behind to come to Jerusalem to actually make a new start and to rebuild as it were…, all these people had invested themselves, and now it looked like it was absolutely over, absolutely done. There was nothing that was going to happen that was going to be in their favour. It looked like the work of God was stopped dead in its tracks.
But that is never the rest of the story, ever. It is not the rest of the story. In fact, God always has more to the story than what it looks like to us...William Carey had been labouring in India for years and years, and then he had that fire and lost absolutely everything. He lost the dictionary he had been working on; he lost the Bible translation he had been working on; and he still did not even have a single convert. What do you think it seemed like? It seemed like the work of God was stopped. But that is not the rest of the story…
Maybe you are praying for an unconverted child, maybe you are praying for an unconverted parent. Maybe you have been labouring with a neighbour for years and years and you just think this is going absolutely nowhere. I want to remind you that God has not made the rest of the story known.
It seemed like it was over but it was not. Ezra 4:24 reads:
Brian BorgmanThen the work on the house of God in Jerusalem ceased.Sad! And it was stopped, until. Have you ever just noticed how a little tiny word changes everything? It stopped until... You want to put it in a different way? God said otherwise, that is what it really means. Until the second year of the reign of Darius, king of Persia... So why does Ezra recount all of this? Because he was going to be facing an opposition in his day as he tried to rebuild the walls, and he wants them to know, if you are going to do the work of God, there is always going to be opposition. Every day with Jesus is not always going to be sweeter than the day before. It is not going to be sunshine and roses every day. There are going to be days where it seems like God has not done anything. In fact, sometimes that continues for some time, and do you know what you do in those times? You keep on trusting. You keep on believing. It is God's Word that is sure, not the impotent decree of a puppet king.1
6 And in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.