Ezra and Nehemiah [Cassettes]

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Excerpt- God had given a sample of His kingdom upon the earth, in partial measure, either in David or in Solomon. Still, it was only the type of that which is yet to be, when the kingdom of God shall be established in its power, with its great central seat in Jerusalem, but also a most powerful system of blessing for the earth. We know there will be more than this, but this is not given us in the early books. In the prophets we find the Holy Ghost shows us a universal kingdom-a kingdom of all under the whole heaven.

And this touches the glory of God in a very special way, for in point of fact, it is to this that all Scripture turns. Whatever has been, points onward to the future, for God has never yet had, except in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ—never yet had His full glory in the earth. And even in the Lord Jesus Christ, although there is nothing that ever will be so deep, nothing in which God's eye sees such perfection, nothing in which we who know Him and love Him may also have such communion with God in the delight of His own Son, still it was not His kingdom: it was the King, but not the kingdom. It was a kingdom given in His person, but not the kingdom given in power.

It was not yet the establishment of it; there was a display of the power in His person, that will cast out the devil, and that is the reason why so much scope and importance is attached in the Gospels to the expulsion of demons from men, and why it is the very first sample of power put forth in that Gospel which, the most deeply of all, shows us what the power of Satan is now, and what the kingdom of God will be by and by, namely, the Gospel of Luke. It does not begin there with other works, but with that particularly. So also, in another way, Mark shows us similarly the power of Satan met and overcome by the superior power of God in the person of the Lord Jesus. It was a demoniac that is first healed in both cases. But we find, further, the painful history of the decline and fall of what God once established in Israel.

We now come to a fresh point in God's history—the intervention of grace towards a remnant whom He brings back from captivity into the land; and we have here in two books—Ezra and Nehemiah—both sides of the mighty work of God in His goodness; not power, but grace—not the establishment of anything according to the mind of God, but the grace of God intervening to sustain a remnant where there was. not the authority of, God establishing things according to His own mind—where the things were very far from it, but, nevertheless, where God's grace led those who enjoyed His secret—those that had faith—to confide, in God under any circumstances, and, therefore, full of instruction to us who find ourselves now in a state of things remarkably analogous to that of the remnant that returned from Babylon. We shall find abundant proofs of this in the slight sketch that I may be enabled to give at this time.

Table of Contents

1. Ezra 1-2, Lecture on

2. Ezra 3-5, Lecture on

3. Ezra 6-10, Lecture on

4. Nehemiah 1, Lecture on

5. Nehemiah 2, Lecture on

6. Nehemiah 3-4, Lecture on

7. Nehemiah 2-12, Lecture on

8. Nehemiah 13, Lecture on