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Expositions of Holy Scripture - Second Kings Chapters VIII to End and Chronicles, Ezra, - and Nehemiah. Esther, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes by Alexander Maclaren
page 327 of 823 (39%)
from the king that would ensure their safety till they saw Jerusalem.
Artaxerxes' surname, 'the long-handed,' may have described a physical
peculiarity, but it also expressed the reach of his power; his arm
could reach these wandering plunderers, and if Ezra and his troop were
visibly under his protection, they could march secure. So it was not a
small exercise of trust in a higher Hand that is told us here so
simply. It took some strength of principle to abstain from asking what
it would have been so natural to ask, so easy to get, so comfortable
to have. But, as he says, he remembered how confidently he has spoken
of God's defence, and he feels that he must be true to his professed
creed, even if it deprives him of the king's guards. He halts his
followers for three days at the last station before the desert, and
there, with fasting and prayer, they put themselves in God's hand; and
then the band, with their wives and little ones, and their
substance,--a heavily-loaded and feeble caravan,--fling themselves
into the dangers of the long, dreary, robber-haunted march. Did not
the scribe's robe cover as brave a heart as ever beat beneath a
breastplate?

That symbolic phrase, 'the hand of our God,' as expressive of the
divine protection, occurs with remarkable frequency in the books of
Ezra and Nehemiah, and though not peculiar to them, is yet strikingly
characteristic of them. It has a certain beauty and force of its own.
The hand is of course the seat of active power. It is on or over a man
like some great shield held aloft above him, below which there is safe
hiding. So that great Hand bends itself over us, and we are secure
beneath its hollow. As a child sometimes carries a tender-winged
butterfly in the globe of its two hands that the bloom on the wings
may not be ruffled by fluttering, so He carries our feeble, unarmoured
souls enclosed in the covert of His Almighty hand. 'Who hath measured
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