The return

For seventy years, Jerusalem sat in ruins. The temple Solomon had built was ash. The walls that once made the city safe were rubble. The people who had once worshiped there were living far away in Babylon, longing for home. That long absence is the backdrop for one of Scripture's most encouraging stories: the return.

God had promised it in advance. Through the prophet Jeremiah he said that after seventy years he would visit his people and bring them back to Jerusalem (Jeremiah 29:10). The promise was not vague. It had a number attached to it, and it came true on schedule. When the seventy years were up, God moved the heart of a pagan Persian king, Cyrus, to let the exiles go home and rebuild the temple of the LORD (2 Chronicles 36:22; Ezra 1:1). A king who did not worship Israel's God still became the instrument of Israel's return.

The return did not happen all at once. A first group came back under Zerubbabel to lay the temple's foundation. When that foundation was set, the people made a sound so loud it could be heard far off: the older generation weeping as they remembered the first temple, the younger generation shouting for joy at seeing the new one begin (Ezra 3:11-13). Joy and grief were tangled together in the same moment, and Scripture does not try to separate them.

Decades later, a second wave of concern reached a man named Nehemiah, serving far away as a king's cupbearer. He heard that the wall of Jerusalem still lay broken and the gates still lay burned (Nehemiah 1:3), and it undid him. He wept, fasted, and prayed for days. Then he asked the king for permission to go and rebuild it himself (Nehemiah 2:17). What followed was one of history's fastest building projects: a wall around an entire city, finished in fifty-two days, in the face of mockery and outright threats from Jerusalem's neighbors (Nehemiah 6:15).

Ezra the priest had already returned before Nehemiah, and once the wall stood, the two of them stood the people before the book of the Law and read it to them for hours. The people wept when they heard it; they had forgotten how far they had drifted. But Nehemiah and Ezra told them not to mourn. This was a day for joy, for the joy of the LORD was their strength (Nehemiah 8:10). Rebuilding the walls was only the outer work; rebuilding the people's relationship to God's word was the real return.

The return from Babylon was real, but it was also a shadow of something larger. The prophets who foresaw it also spoke of a further return still to come: the ransomed of the LORD coming home to Zion with everlasting joy (Isaiah 35:10), and a scattered people gathered out of every nation into their own land (Ezekiel 36:24). Israel's homecoming under Ezra and Nehemiah was real, but it did not exhaust the promise.

Every return in Scripture points toward the greater one Christ makes possible: a way home for anyone who was once far off, brought near by his blood (Ephesians 2:13). What Cyrus, Ezra, and Nehemiah did for Jerusalem's walls, Christ does for the wall between God and man; he tears it down and builds something new.