Friday, September 25, 2026
Scripture Readings
- Primary Reading: 2 Chronicles 36, Ezra 1-5
- Secondary Reading: Psalms 111
Key Verse
Ezra 1:3 — “Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem.”
Devotional Thought
The last chapter of Chronicles is one of the bleakest pages in Scripture, and it ends with a door opening. Zedekiah hardened his heart and would not humble himself before the word of the LORD; the priests and the people polluted the house of God; and the messengers were mocked until, the text says, “there was no remedy.” The city fell, the temple burned, the vessels were carried to Babylon, and the land lay desolate for threescore and ten years. Chronicles does not soften any of it. It tells the truth about what happens when a people keeps refusing the voice that keeps calling them back.
But read the very next line, and then read Ezra. “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus.” A pagan emperor, of a kingdom that had not existed when Jeremiah wrote, issues a proclamation and sends the exiles home with the temple vessels restored and counted out one by one. God’s word did not expire during the seventy years of silence. It was working the whole time, in a court far from Jerusalem, in a decree no one in Judah could have arranged.
And then notice what the returning exiles actually did. Ezra 3 tells us the altar was set up before the foundation of the temple was laid — worship first, construction second. When the foundation was finally laid, the young men shouted for joy and the old men wept aloud, so that the sound could not be distinguished from afar. That is what homecoming looks like in a fallen world: tears and shouting in the same breath, gladness and grief in the same noise.
There is something here for the week we are living in now. This week the world has again watched thousands of displaced families make their way back toward homes they left years ago, toward communities they will have to rebuild from rubble — aid agencies have described families returning to damaged houses and slowly repairing them piece by piece. And this same week, reports have come out of India and other places of believers harassed and attacked for gathering to pray, their meeting places demolished, their pastors imprisoned. Neither story is new. Exile and return, opposition and rebuilding, have been the shape of the people of God since Babylon. What the passage gives us is not a prediction but a posture: God can stir up a spirit in a king nobody expected, and He can keep His covenant with a people who have almost forgotten how to hope. Our part is not to engineer the return. Our part is to set up the altar first — to worship before we build, to keep the covenant even in a strange land, and to believe that the word spoken over us is still being accomplished, whether or not we can see the decree yet.
Reflection
- The exiles set up the altar before they laid the foundation. What would it look like in your own life this week to establish worship first — before the plans, the rebuilding, the fixing — rather than fitting it in afterward?
- Ezra’s generation knew both tears and shouts at the same moment. Where are you carrying grief and gratitude together right now, and how might naming both of them honestly before God be an act of faith rather than doubt?
Psalm Verse
Psalm 111:9 — “He sent redemption unto his people: he hath commanded his covenant for ever: holy and reverend is his name.”