The Devil's Memorandum Text: Ezra 4:6
Introduction: The Unchanging Tactics of Envy
Whenever God's people set their hand to the plow, whenever they begin to build, you can set your watch by the fact that the enemy will begin to file his paperwork. The work of reformation and restoration is never unopposed. The world, the flesh, and the devil are not neutral observers. They are not agnostic about the establishment of God's kingdom. They hate it. And their hatred is not a passive, quiet affair. It is an active, litigious, and slanderous hatred. It is a hatred that writes letters.
We see this pattern established from the very beginning. When Abel brought a pleasing sacrifice, Cain's response was not to try harder. His response was murder, born of envy. When God sets His favor upon a people, the world's immediate reaction is a sour and malevolent envy. And when that envy cannot get its way with stones and clubs, it resorts to ink and parchment. It writes accusations. It sends memoranda to the king. It seeks to use the power of the state, the sword of Caesar, to halt the work of God.
The book of Ezra is a case study in this reality. It is a story of rebuilding, yes, but it is therefore also a story of opposition. You cannot have one without the other. The moment the foundation of the temple is laid, the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin show up. First, they try to co-opt the project with a disingenuous offer of help. "Let us build with you," they say, "for we seek your God as you do" (Ezra 4:2). This is the tactic of infiltration, of syncretism. But when Zerubbabel and Jeshua rightly discern that you cannot build God's house with the devil's bricks, and reject the offer, the enemy's mask comes off. The feigned friendship immediately turns to open hostility. And the primary weapon in their arsenal is the formal, legal accusation.
This is the great antithesis, promised in the Garden, playing out in the nitty-gritty of history. "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed" (Gen. 3:15). This enmity is not a passing mood. It is a permanent, structural reality of the world until Christ returns. The seed of the serpent will always hate the seed of the woman. And one of the chief ways this hatred is expressed is through legal and political harassment. The enemy is a slanderer by nature. The word "devil" is from the Greek diabolos, which means accuser or slanderer. He is the original prosecuting attorney, and he has deputized a world of lesser prosecutors to carry on his work.
The Text
"Now in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem."
(Ezra 4:6 LSB)
The Royal Mailbag (v. 6)
Let us look closely at the verse before us.
"Now in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem." (Ezra 4:6)
The first thing we must do is get our bearings with these Persian kings. The timeline here can be confusing, and modern commentators often create more confusion by trying to make the Bible conform to their reading of secular histories, instead of the other way around. My operating assumption, which I believe makes the most sense of the biblical text itself, is that the kings mentioned here, Ahasuerus and Artaxerxes, are titles or throne names for the same man, who is also called Darius in this book. This view telescopes the timeline and makes Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther contemporaries, which best explains how they interact in the text. So, the Ahasuerus here is the same king we meet in the book of Esther. This is not some minor chronological quibble; it is essential. It means that while the enemies of God are writing their slanderous letters in Ezra 4, God is positioning His own agent, Esther, in the king's bedroom. While the devil is composing his memorandum, God is writing a far more intricate and glorious plot twist.
Notice the nature of the opposition. "They wrote an accusation." The word for accusation here is sitnah, which is related to the word Satan. It means hostility, accusation. They are doing the work of their father, the devil. This is not a principled disagreement over zoning laws. This is spiritual warfare conducted through bureaucratic channels. The enemies of God are adept at using the machinery of the state. They know how to fill out the forms. They know which levers to pull. They present themselves as concerned citizens, loyal subjects of the king, who are merely pointing out a potential threat to the stability of the empire.
Look at the letter they write just a few verses later, in the reign of this same king under the name Artaxerxes. They say, "let it be known to the king that if this city is rebuilt and the walls are finished, they will not pay tribute, custom, or toll, and it will damage the revenue of the kings" (Ezra 4:13). This is a brilliant tactic. It is a lie wrapped in a kernel of truth. Did the people of God have a higher loyalty than their loyalty to the king? Yes, of course. But the slanderous twist is to present this ultimate loyalty to God as an imminent threat of political rebellion and tax evasion. They are accusing God's people of being bad citizens precisely because they are trying to be good saints.
This is the unchanging strategy of the enemy. He will always seek to frame faithfulness to God as faithlessness to the state. He will paint obedience to the law of God as lawlessness in the civil realm. He will accuse the most loyal subjects of the King of Heaven of being the most disloyal subjects of whatever king is on earth. This was the accusation against Jeremiah, against Daniel, against the apostles, and supremely, against the Lord Jesus Himself. "We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that He Himself is Christ, a King" (Luke 23:2). It was a lie, but it was a politically potent lie. And it is the same lie being written here to Ahasuerus.
The City of God and the City of Man
This verse lays bare the fundamental conflict of history. It is the conflict between two cities: the city of God, Jerusalem, and the city of man, which in this case has its temporary capital in Persia. The inhabitants of the city of man, represented by these adversaries, cannot stand to see the walls of Jerusalem go up. Why? Because the city of God is a rebuke to their entire way of life. A people whose life is centered on the worship of the one true God is a standing condemnation of a people whose life is centered on power, or wealth, or pleasure, or the state.
The accusation is written "against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem." It is an attack on the people, the covenant community. The enemy knows that if you can demoralize, distract, and legally entangle the people, the work will stop. And for a time, it does. The letter works. The king issues a decree, and the work on the house of God is forcibly stopped. This is a sobering reminder. Sometimes the devil's memoranda get results. Sometimes the slanders stick. Sometimes the state is successfully co-opted by the enemies of God to persecute the church. We should not be surprised when this happens. Our Lord told us it would. "If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they call those of his household?" (Matthew 10:25).
But the story does not end there. The letter-writers have their temporary victory. But God has prophets like Haggai and Zechariah. He has a queen like Esther. He has a cupbearer like Nehemiah. And He has sovereignty over the heart of the king. The same royal authority that stops the work will later be used to command that the work be restarted and funded from the royal treasury. The same king who receives the accusation will later hang the chief accuser of the Jews, Haman, on his own gallows.
Application for the Accused
So what does this ancient piece of Persian mail have to do with us? Everything. The tactics of the enemy have not been updated. The diabolos is still a slanderer, and he still uses ink, both literal and digital, to write his accusations against the inhabitants of the new Jerusalem, the Church.
First, we must not be surprised by opposition. When we set out to build, whether it is a church, a Christian school, a godly family, or a faithful business, we should expect the letters to start arriving. We should expect the accusations, the slanders, the hit pieces, the online mobs. To be surprised by this is to be naive about the nature of the war we are in. Opposition is not a sign that you are doing something wrong; often, it is a sign that you are doing something right. It is an indicator that your work has been noticed by the enemy's watchmen.
Second, we must understand the nature of the accusations. They will almost always be framed in political and civic terms. You will be called a threat to the public good. You will be accused of being hateful, bigoted, seditious, a danger to women and children. Your fidelity to biblical truth will be painted as a danger to the prevailing secular order. They will not attack you for believing in the Trinity; they will attack you for believing in the biblical definition of marriage and then call you a public nuisance. We must be prepared to answer these charges, but we must not be fooled by them. At its root, the conflict is not about politics. It is about worship. It is about whose name will be hallowed, God's or man's.
Finally, we must not be intimidated into silence or inaction. The goal of the devil's memorandum is to make you stop building. It is to discourage you, to tie you up in legal knots, to make the cost of faithfulness seem too high. For a time, the Jews in Ezra's day were stopped. But God sent prophets to them to stiffen their spines and call them back to the work. And He calls us to the same. We must not let the slanders of our enemies have the final say. We must answer them, where appropriate. We must fight them, when necessary. But above all, we must out-build them. We must keep our hand to the plow. We must continue laying stone on stone, building the house of God.
Our confidence is not in our ability to win the argument in the court of public opinion or even in the court of the king. Our confidence is in the fact that our God reigns. He is the one who holds the king's heart in His hand. He is the one who turns the curses of our enemies into blessings. He is the one who is building His church, and the gates of Hell, with all their lawyers and scribes and accusers, shall not prevail against it.