Read Time: 8 minutesEzra 10
Ezra 10 is the hard chapter of the return — the costly putting-away of the foreign wives — and its lesson is that separation from what defiles is real, painful, and sometimes tears at the household itself. As Ezra weeps and confesses before the house of God, a great congregation gathers, weeping with him, and Shechaniah voices the people’s resolve: yet now there is hope in Israel concerning this thing. Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives. Hope is born in the willingness to cut off the entanglement, not in pretending it can be kept.
There is a figure for it that lifts the chapter out of mere severity: this is a pruning (Jn 15:2). The husbandman’s knife is not against the branch; it is for the fruit. And the law stands behind it — thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together (Deut 22:10), the unequal yoke that Paul lifts straight into 2 Corinthians 6:14. Two natures under one yoke pull against each other until something tears. The whole month of Chronicles was the demonstration: Jehoshaphat married into Ahab’s house and the throne of David ran with blood for three generations. Ezra is cutting the yoke Jehoshaphat put on.
The reform runs on a rhythm of threes, which is not nothing in a chapter this bleak. The people are summoned to Jerusalem within three days (10:8-9); the commission of enquiry sits for three months (10:16-17). Three is the number of life out of death — and this is a nation being put through a death in order to live. The reform is done in the cold and the rain, the people trembling because of this matter, and for the great rain. It is not triumphant; it is grim, deliberate, and sorrowful. The men who had married foreign wives — priests among them — are named, one by one, in a register as honest as the register of those who came up. The list of the fallen is kept as carefully as the list of the faithful — the chapter will not airbrush the sin out of the record.
The cost is heavy, and the text does not hide it. Households are broken, children are involved, the separation is wrenching. Faithfulness here looks like loss — the people gain a purified community only by surrendering what they had wrongly bound themselves to. There is no painless way to undo a sinful union; the undoing is itself a kind of grief.
And it is worth being careful about what the offence actually was, because the chapter is easy to misread as a blood-purity code. Rahab of Jericho and Ruth of Moab are both in the line of the Christ; Boaz married a Moabitess and was praised for it. The problem in Ezra 9 is named exactly: they took the daughters of the peoples doing according to their abominations — foreign wives who never came into the covenant, bringing their gods with them into the household. It was not the blood; it was the altar in the back room. And so the principle stands at the foundation of the restored people: the holy seed cannot be mingled with the abominations of the land and still be holy. The literal separation of Ezra 10 is the shadow of a deeper cutting-off that the New Testament will name — the outward separation points to an inward circumcision that no covenant of the assembly can perform, only the operation of God in the heart. The chapter ends abruptly, almost bleakly, on the list — a sober witness that the flesh’s entanglements are cut off only at real cost.
Separation from what defiles is real and costly — the holy seed cannot be mingled and stay holy, and the outward cutting-off points to an inward one no assembly can perform.
Hosea 11
Hosea 11 is the tenderest chapter in the prophet — the Father remembering the child he carried, his heart turning within him even as judgment is pronounced. When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. The words look back to the exodus and forward, in Matthew’s hands, to the child Jesus brought up out of Egypt — the son called out of Egypt is both the nation and the greater Son, first the natural, then the spiritual: Israel the type, Christ the substance, the true Son who perfectly answers the calling Israel failed. One verse welds the two together: thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified (Isa 49:3) — the Servant of Isaiah is given the nation’s own name, and then in the next breath is sent to bring Jacob again to him. One is called Israel because he is what Israel was supposed to be.
The love is the love of a father teaching a toddler to walk. I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms… I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love… I was to them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat unto them. The Father stooped to teach the child its first steps — bent down, lifted the yoke from the jaw, set food before it. And the child, grown, knew not that I healed them, and turned away to Baal.
The judgment is real — Assyria shall be their king because they refused to return — and then comes the most astonishing turn in the book, the heart of Yahweh laid open. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboim?… mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together. Those two cities have to be named or the verse loses its weight. Admah and Zeboim burned with Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 14:2; Deut 29:23) — the sister-cities of the plain, overthrown in the same fire. Yahweh is asking himself, out loud, whether to do to Ephraim what he did to Sodom’s neighbors. And he cannot. The Father cannot bring himself to let the child go — the love that taught it to walk recoils from its destruction, and the recoil is named.
And notice what he still calls them while he is deciding. My people are bent to backsliding from me — my people. After Lo-ammi, after ye are not my people and I will not be your God, the possessive has not left his mouth. He says my people about a people whose whole bent is away from him.
And the ground of the relenting is what he is. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger… for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee. He spares because he is God and not man — his mercy is not human fickleness but divine constancy; the Holy One in the midst does not give up his own as a man would give up an enemy. The chapter that began I loved him ends with a love that judgment cannot finally extinguish.
The Father who called his son out of Egypt cannot bring himself to give the child up — he spares because he is God and not man, the Holy One in the midst.
Colossians 2
Colossians 2 is the answer to Ezra’s literal separation: the true cutting-off of the flesh is the circumcision made without hands, done in Christ, in baptism into his death. Paul warns against being spoiled through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and grounds everything in the Son: for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The whole fulness of Deity dwelt in him bodily — not a second God, but the Father manifesting the entirety of himself in a real human body, the image of chapter 1 made flesh. And ye are complete in him — nothing to be added by the traditions of men.
Then the circumcision that Ezra’s reform could only shadow. In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. The flesh is cut off without hands — not the literal foreskin, not the literal foreign wife, but the body of the sins of the flesh put off in union with Christ. This is the eighth-day circumcision fulfilled: the cutting-off of the flesh that the knife only pictured.
And the place where the cutting happens is the water. Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. Baptism is the burial and the reckoned rising — the believer is counted dead and raised with Christ, the old life buried, the new begun. The rising here is by faith and reckoning, the pledge of the actual resurrection that comes when Christ appears; the saint walks now as one raised, awaiting the glory still to be revealed.
The bond against us is cancelled at the tree. Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his crucifixion. The handwriting against us is nailed to the tree — the law’s record of debt, the ordinances that condemned, cancelled in Christ’s death, taken out of the way. The believer is no longer under the bond that stood against him.
And the powers are stripped and shamed. Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it. And the chapter’s last word is the sting. All the ordinances the false teachers pressed — touch not; taste not; handle not — have a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body, and are worth exactly nothing: they end, as the sentence really runs, in no honourable way, unto a satisfying of the flesh. The asceticism that looks like war on the flesh is the flesh feeding itself — pride in the rulebook, the old man in a hair shirt. Only a death cuts the flesh off, and it has already happened. Sin in the flesh and every power that held it are disarmed at the crucifixion — the dominion that ruled through the law of sin and death is publicly defeated, led in triumph by the One who condemned sin in his own flesh and rose. The completeness Paul urges is not a thing to be earned by tradition but a victory already won in the Head.
The true circumcision cuts off the flesh without hands; buried and reckoned-risen with Christ, the bond against you nailed to the tree, the powers that held you led in open triumph.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The day is one long meditation on the cutting-off of the flesh — by outward separation, by the Father’s relenting love, by the circumcision made without hands. Ezra’s people put away the foreign wives at real and grievous cost; Hosea’s Father, his heart turning within him, will not give the child up; and Colossians 2 names the substance both were reaching for — the circumcision made without hands, putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, the bond against us nailed to the tree. The literal separation is the shadow; the inward circumcision in Christ is the reality; and the love that grounds it all is the Father who is El, and not man.
Ezra’s reform shows how costly the cutting is, and why it cannot finally be done by an assembly’s covenant alone. The men trembled in the rain; households were torn; and still the holy seed could only be kept holy by separation. But the literal knife and the literal divorce could never reach the body of the sins of the flesh itself — that requires the circumcision of Christ, the flesh cut off in union with his death, the old man buried in the water. What Ezra’s people did outwardly and at great cost, the believer receives inwardly in baptism into the One who condemned sin in his own flesh.
And the whole costly business rests on the love laid open in Hosea 11. The Father who taught Ephraim to walk, who drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love, and whose heart is turned within him at the thought of giving the child up, is the same Father whose good pleasure it was that all fulness should dwell in the Son, and who through that Son blotted out the handwriting against us. The cutting-off is severe, but its root is mercy — I am El, and not man. The separation that looks like loss is the love that will not let the child go.
So submit to the circumcision made without hands. Do not try to keep the entanglement and the holiness both; do not imagine the flesh can be managed by the traditions of men. You are complete in him — buried with him, reckoned risen with him, the bond against you nailed to the tree, the powers that held you led in open triumph. Walk now as one raised, putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, and wait for the glory that appears when he appears — kept by the Father who is El and not man, the Holy One in the midst of you.
Let the flesh be cut off without hands in the One who condemned it; the separation that looks like loss is the love of El who will not give his child up — buried and reckoned-risen, walk as one already his.