My guess is that not many people cry when they read Ezra chapter 3. I did.  And then I kept crying right along with the old men who wept in verse 12.

Ezra chapter 3 is about rebuilding. After living in captivity in Babylonia for 70 years, a remnant of the Israelites were allowed to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple that had been destroyed. After these Jewish exiles had been “home” for exactly one year and two months, the Bible says, everyone who had come home from captivity was making “a beginning together“.  
Foundations and beginnings go together.

“And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the LORD, the priests dressed in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites with cymbals to praise the LORD…And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the LORD because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid.” Ezra 3:10,11

The foundation of the house of the Lord was being laid! It was an immense celebration especially for these who had never known the enormity of what had been the temple of the LORD. Filled with loud music and singing and loud shouting, the enthusiastic gala in Jerusalem must have been epic. This was a party! “Most” of the people were giving thanks to the LORD. In the midst of much thanksgiving there was also  ….weeping.

The Bible says that the ones weeping were the older men who had seen the first house, the first temple of the LORD. These elderly ones were watching as a foundation was being not laid, but rather, re-laid.  As the foundation of the temple was being laid for a second time, the response of these seasoned sojourners was not happy dancing.  They were the ones who “wept with a loud voice”.

According to several Bible commentaries that I consulted, including Matthew Henry’s, those old men who remembered the glory of the first temple, were considering how inferior this remade temple would be in comparison.  And because of this, they were mourning on this day of small beginnings.
After 70 years of remembering something better, what they were now seeing must have been a gut-wrenching disappointment.  I think these men were grieving what had been, mourning what was, and weeping in guttural expression over the devastating loss of something tremendously precious to them.

Truth be told, I was crying before I found out the old guys were crying.  Maybe like me, you know well this hard business of starting again and maybe you too recognize that these builders weren’t “just” laying a foundation, they were re-laying it. They were having to start over.  

Profoundly beautiful to me is the vivid picture that sometimes at the same party, there is room for both rejoicing over what lies ahead and grieving over what has been lost.

The truth is, even though the remaking of the foundation might not have looked perhaps as glorious in some eyes as the first,  things were being made right again in Jerusalem. It’s that process of “being made right” that stirs inside of me an eager anticipation for the day when all things will be made new.  Once and for all made right. Forever restored.

No matter how things appear today, that day of restoration when God will make all things perfect? It’s coming.

All body joints and parts will function perfectly and without pain. No migraines. No sorrow. No more conflict, cancer, or Covid-19.   No more disappointment or death. No more weeping.
And best of all? We will be experiencing and sharing in the holiness of God forever and ever.  Beauty. Remade, restored, perfected, glorious beauty. Pass a tambourine, please! What an eternal party that will be!!