God is an Opportunist
At the heart of every crisis is the seed of an opportunity.
The Jews have been exiled from their homeland, the temple destroyed, and now after 70 years away from their homeland, some of the Israelites are returning home under the watch of the Persian King Cyrus. Â The year is approximately 516 BCE, and the Temple of the LORD is slowly being reconstructed under the watch of Nehemiah. Â We’re also seeing a proliferation of other prophetic voices now in the land of Judea (as its now called), with the ministries of Haggai and Zechariah.
These were heavily transitional times – and it was a critical time for Jewish identity.
What is a Jew if it is not about the land one lives on? The exile squashed their initial interpretation of God’s promise to give them a permanent home here on earth, and now a vast majority of the Jews lived abroad.
What is a Jew if the Temple is not the center of worship? While they were rebuilding a “temple” it had nothing of the splendor of Solomon’s first construction hundreds of years ago.
This is when the Jews truly became “People of the Book” – a book religion, as we know them today. Â The Law became central to the Jewish religion, and with a Diaspora covering the Persian…then Roman Empire… it paved the way for a Christian revolution to spread across the land like wildfire.
But first God had something to say to the nations. Even in this time of fragile rebuilding, with the walls of Jerusalem still in shambles, God sees this as his moment to turn the self-obsessed ship of the Jews around, and re-center them on his initial mission – to be a blessing to all nations.
56:3 “Don’t let foreigners who commit themselves to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will never let me be part of his people.’
And don’t let the eunuchs say,
7 I will bring them to my holy mountain of Jerusalem
and will fill them with joy in my house of prayer.
I will accept their burnt offerings and sacrifices,
because my Temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations.
‘I’m a dried-up tree with no children and no future.’
8 For the Sovereign Lord,
who brings back the outcasts of Israel, says:
I will bring others, too,
besides my people Israel.â€
God finds a way to use what the Jews see as a setback, and reorients it into the greatest advance in his ultimate mission he’s gone for in several hundred years!  There is no one on earth that Yahweh is not desperately trying to connect with and adopt into his family.  It is not about the calamity of the Jewish identity – for God, it is about the restoration of Creation under his fatherhood, and everyone has the grace-filled privilege of becoming a son or daughter of God.

