In Your Hand

Several years ago, I received a daily devotional for my birthday. In the introduction, the author explained how she had come to write it. Once, while alone in nature, she had a strong sensation of what she believed to be the presence of God. Afterward she spent many years attending seminary and working as a Christian counselor. But, though she read her Bible and kept a prayer journal, she was dissatisfied.

“I knew that God communicated with me though the Bible, but I yearned for more. Increasingly, I wanted to hear what God had to say to me personally on a given day. I decided to listen to God with pen in hand, writing down whatever I believed He was saying. I felt awkward the first time I tried this, but I received a message.” She goes on to say, “This practice of listening to God has increased my intimacy with Him more than any other spiritual discipline” (emphasis mine).*

She wrote down the words she “believed” God spoke to her personally and eventually published them, making them available to those of us who might be likewise dissatisfied with the feelings we get from reading Scripture. Her words have haunted me all these years, and they came back to me again this week as I read the book of Ezra.

Ezra begins with the events following the Edict of Return in 538 BC, when Cyrus, king of Persia commanded a temple to be built for Yahweh in Judah and urged the exiled people of Judah to return home. Ezra himself does not show up in the narrative until Chapter 7, eighty years later. By then, the temple was in place and sacrifices had resumed, but things had begun to go wrong. The people were demoralized. They needed to hear from God. Ezra was the man he would send.

Ezra was still in Babylonia. His people had never returned to Judah. Nevertheless, “He was a scribe skilled in the Law of Moses that the LORD, the God of Israel, had given, and the king [of Persia] granted him all that he asked, for the hand of the LORD his God was on him” (Ezra 7:6). In fact, we are told three times in that single chapter that “the hand of the LORD his God was on him.” Verse 10 tells us exactly why:

“For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel” (7:10).

Ezra was far from dissatisfied with God’s word. On the contrary, his heart was so fully set on it that the king of Persia referred to him twice as the man with God’s Law “in [his] hand” (7:14, 25). That was Ezra’s reputation. That wisdom is what Ezra brought with him to the people in Judah; that word, taught and understood, is what brought repentance and revival once again to Judah; and, though he received no new revelation from God, and, so far as we know, God never spoke to him “personally”, the hand of God was on Ezra and his own life and words became part of Scripture.

Do you want to hear God’s voice? Do you want to know him “intimately”? My question is, how are you listening? The testimony of Ezra is that the hand of God is on the person who has God’s word in his hand. Are you dissatisfied with the voice of Scripture? If so, what do you have in your hand?

*Sarah Young, Jesus Calling (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2004), pp. XII—XIII.