Nothing but precious vessels for the Lord’s house! It’s the same now. Are you a vessel of honor? (2 Tim 2:20-21).
It was time to pack up and head back to Israel. Jerusalem lay in ruins. The temple had been trashed and torched. It was with faith, mingling with hope, that Cyrus said to the returnees, “You’ll need these.” What did they need? The treasures to furnish the rebuilt temple—long before the first chunk of rubble was moved. So, along with all their luggage, they received from “Mithredath the treasurer” (Ezra 1:8) the following items: “thirty gold platters, one thousand silver platters, twenty-nine knives, thirty gold basins, four hundred and ten silver basins of a similar kind, and one thousand other articles. All the articles of gold and silver were five thousand four hundred” (vv 9-11). Let’s see—thirty platters. Check. Thirty gold basins. Check. Twenty-nine knives. Wait a minute. Count those again. Twenty-nine is right. What happened to that other knife? It’s a mystery! But at the same time, it’s so true to life, isn’t it? How it symbolizes the fact that Israel lost something in going down to Babylon. Yes, the Lord restores what has been lost to the enemy, but we’re still the poorer for the detours we make into captivity. Time out of fellowship with God can never be reclaimed. Nonetheless, it was a miracle that they were heading back to the promised land, enriched in spite of their failures. A better mathematician than I will have to reconcile the numbers, but clearly Cyrus was careful to return what had been taken by someone else. So it could be prophetically stated by our Lord, “Though I have stolen nothing, I still must restore it” (Ps 69:4). And somehow, the math always comes out in our favor even through our failure, because “where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (Rom 5:20). Yes, “Grace to you…be multiplied” (1 Pet 1:2).