Ezra & Nehemiah: A need for fasting

It's hard to imagine what life was like for the people of Israel after they went into exile. Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonians with great violence and brutality, as recorded by Jeremiah in Lamentations. But empires come and empires go, and in 539 BC, the Persians defeated the Babylonians and absorbed the lands of Israel and Judah into their territory. The next year, Cyrus allowed the people of Judah to return home and rebuild the temple of the Lord. Around 458 BC, another group of Judean exiles returned under Ezra's leadership (ESV study Bible).

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah (often viewed as one book) give us a historical narrative about these returns to Palestine, but with important theological lessons about God's covenant faithfulness. The exile was not the end of the story for God's people, and the book of Ezra shows an amazing turnaround of these pagan rulers giving favour to God's people and actually commissioning them to re-start their religious community centred around the temple. The rebuilt temple was nowhere near as great in grandeur as the first, so it was a bittersweet reopening (see Ezra 3), but the fact remains that God had preserved for Himself a remnant. He had not wiped out the descendants of Abraham. He still had plans to prosper them (Jer 29).

It was a great challenge for this broken, battered community to live distinctively and faithfully to the Lord. They had been in exile for 70 years. As they come back to the Word of God and the Law of God, they have to come to terms with their own disobedience and figure out how to move forwards. Ezra's leadership is bold and strong as he urges the people to obey the commands of the Lord, even at great personal cost (such as the removal of foreign wives and children - see Ezra 9-10). What struck me looking at these narratives was the place of fasting in the post-exilic community, as an integral part of their repentance and turning back to the Lord.

Fasting is not something we talk about very often. It is not something we do very well, I'm guessing (if my own practise is anything to go by). In OT Law, it was only prescribed for the Day of Atonement (see Leviticus 16), which was fundamentally about purification from sin. The people were charged to 'afflict' themselves (v29) and 'do no work', which suggests that fasting and prayer was part of this holy day where their sins would be dealt with before God in the Holy of Holies. In the offerings and the goat sent into the wilderness, God gave His people a vivid picture of their sin being atoned for, which ultimately pointed to Jesus' death on the cross. So I'm not suggesting we should go back to OT Law and fast like we're trying to add something on to Christ's work- He said, 'It is finished'! (John 19:30) But it's interesting that during the exile and afterwards, fasting became something God's people did when they realised their need for God. You could look at Esther calling a fast before she was to appear before the King to try to stop the killing of the Jews (a situation of desperation, see Esther 4). You could look at the prayerful life of Daniel and how he fasted and prayed when he realised the 70 years of exile had passed and God had promised through Jeremiah that He would bring the people back (Daniel 9). In Ezra, he fasts and falls on his knees in intercessory prayer when he hears of the mixed marriages of the exiles (Ezra 9). Nehemiah fasts and prays over an extended time when he hears of the state of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1). Why did they fast? Because they were desperate. They were full of grief over sin (not always their own sin, but the sin of the nation, of their community). They wanted to humble themselves before God and pray, and abstaining from food was an important part of that. It showed repentance (you could also look at Nineveh in the book of Jonah for that).

Why don't we fast? Because we're not desperate. We want to see God move, but we're not desperate enough that we're willing to give up the things we rely on each day to get us through - this isn't just our three meals, but other things too like social media, our mobile phones. I read something on Revive our Hearts where the speaker made a point that you wouldn't congratulate someone on being very self-disciplined if they managed to eat three meals a day. Imagine it: 'Well done! You actually managed to eat breakfast, lunch AND dinner!' It's something we take for granted, unless we're ill. Well fasting is meant to show us that the same commitment we have towards feeding our bodies is the commitment we should have in prayer. We NEED God more than we need food to survive (Jesus told the devil 'Man shall not live by bread alone' in Matthew 4:4 when He was tempted to turn stones into bread during a 40-day fast).

I know it's easy with fasting to become legalistic. In fact, Jesus warned His disciples not to fast like the Pharisees, to make a song and dance about it, and do it for human praise and attention (Luke 18:12). But He did teach on fasting as though it was meant to be a regular part of life for His followers - 'when you fast...' (Matthew 6:17). He was questioned on why His disciples didn't fast, and He replied, 'But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.' (Mark 2:19) Until Jesus comes again, there is sin, there is suffering, there is wrong-doing in the world. There is desperation. So fasting is to be part of following Christ until that day when He puts everything right.

If we don't fast, it's like we're saying there's nothing to grieve over. Our culture doesn't do grief. We're told not to focus on the bad things. But biblically, we should! We should grieve over the sins of our nation. We should mourn the hypocrisies and failures of the Church. We should deeply feel the horror of our sin and in the midst of our gratitude to Christ for making our atonement, it's not always wrong to set aside special time to fast and pray for victory over habitual sin. I'm not saying 'fast and God will listen to you'. I'm just trying to recognise that Scripture tells us there IS a need for fasting, and I know I need to do it a lot more than I do at the moment.