When the Going Gets Tough

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Legendary football coach Knute Rockne used these words to focus his team when their backs were against the wall. We’re all pretty good when things are easy. We’re all winners when life is going our way. We’re all superstars when the Big Mo is wearing our team’s jersey. But what happens when opposition rears its ugly head? What happens when things get hard? When the going gets tough, does the tough get going…in the opposite direction? That’s because resistance reveals resolve. Do I cut and run when I hit hostility? Do I allow the enemy to get me off my game plan? 

That’s exactly what happened to the children of God just when they were getting started rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. Ezra 4:1-5 takes us to the Promised Land to witness Israelite enthusiasm turn to apathy. One minute they’re throwing the loudest party the land has ever seen (Ez 3:11, 13). They worship God for His goodness as they lay the foundation for Temple 2.0. The very next minute they’re discouraged, afraid, and frustrated thanks to Samaritan sabotage. 

The big worship shindig was so loud that “the sound was heard far away” (Ez 3:11, 13). It apparently got the attention of “the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin” (v1). The author makes it clear from the get-go that these folks are bad news. They are the enemy. They are the opposition. So who are these guys? They’re Samaritans. Let’s crank up the WABAC machine for a little history lesson. In 722 BC, the Assyrian superpower steamrolled the ten tribes of Jewish northern kingdom and hauled them off into captivity. They did just take them as slaves back to places like Nineveh but also shipped folks from other parts of their kingdom. Flip over to 2 Kings for a list of the folks the Assyrians sent to dilute those still in the land. “And the king of Assyria brought people form Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of of Samaria instead of the people of Israel” (2Ki 17:24). Eventually this stew of cultures and religions cook up some goofy pagan hybrid of worship that incorporates a little bit of this, a little bit of that, including a smidge of Jewish burnt offerings.

Almost 3,000 years later, this garbage is still going on. No, most of us aren’t building Asherah poles in our backyards or worshiping Baal in the basement. Folks who say they follow Jesus also sprinkle in a little bit New Age stuff here and little bit of Oprah over there. And we also worship such 21st century idols as cash, careers, cars, and kids while squeezing in just a little bit of time for Christ if we don’t feel like sleeping in on Sunday morning. Let’s be careful not to become modern day Samaritans.

After hearing the big throw-down on the temple mount, the Samaritans knew they had to do something to shut down this Jewish comeback. As Barney Fife would say, “Nip it. Nip it in the bud!” That’s when “they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers’ houses and said to them, ‘Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to Him ever since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria who brought us here’” (v2). While this might sound all well and good, remember how Ezra describes them as “adversaries” in the previous verse (v1). Had they worshiped the same God as the Israelites? Well, if sort of. If you squint hard enough you could kinda, sorta come to that conclusion. But they also worshiped every other god and goddess like they were in some sort of Golden Corral buffet of dieties. Let’s face it, they were simply pretending to be all nicey-nice in order to execute the Samaritan sabotage.

The Z man and the rest of the Jewish leaders see right through their smarmy, Eddie Haskel-like approach. They shut the Samaritans down before they can say another word. “You have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God; but we alone will build to the LORD, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus the king of Persia has commanded us” (v3). Do you think Zerubbabel was being more than just a little bit rude to turn down the Samaritan offer to help? On top of not trusting their motives, he knew full well that it was because of idolatry that God sent His people into captivity in the first place (2Ki 17:18; 23:26-27). If Zerubbabel had anything to do with it, he would do everything in his power to keep it from happening again. Good leaders learn from history. 

But the Samaritans didn’t just shrug their shoulders and walk away to bother somebody else. “Then the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah and made them afraid to build and bribed counselors against them to frustrate their purpose” (v4). If they weren’t able to infiltrate the construction project from the inside, they had a few other tricks up their sleeve. They demoralized and deflated the Jews. They put fear in their hearts to put down their tools and stop building. They even greased the palms of the foremen and engineers on the job site to keep the project from ever getting off the ground. When the going got tough, the people got going…home.

And the Samaritan sabotage was successful. It lasted “all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia” (v5). Remember, this whole send-the-Jews-back-to-Jerusalem-to-rebuild-the-temple-so-they-can-worship-God thing started with King Cyrus. God stirred his heart to get behind this project (Ez 1:1-4). But after local opposition bullied and bribed the reconstruction to a halt, nobody lifted a hammer or pushed a wheelbarrow for 16 years. It wasn’t until God used the prophet Haggai to remind His people that He was backing their effort that they got back to work (Hag 1:12-15).

So is this some sort of hang-in-there-you-can-do-it pep talk using the Jewish people as the bad example? Let’s face it, we’ve all heard messages from the Old Testament like that before. But we need to keep in mind that the entire Bible is about Jesus. He said so Himself (Jn 5:39, 46). We find encouragement here in the fact that our Savior didn’t waver in the face of satanic sabotage. Christ never wavered when His Father set the cross before Him (Lk 22:42). He saw His mission through to the end until it was absolutely and completely finished (Jn 19:30). We can be very thankful that when the going got tough, Jesus got going. 

When the going got tough, the Tough got going.