In Ezra, chapter ten, verse four, courage and decisive action in a leader are necessary to oppose worldly trends among God’s people, to issue an earnest call to sinners to turn away from sin and back to God, and to encourage obedience to His Word. Ezra demonstrated these qualities when he required that the chosen people of God must separate themselves “from the people of the land, and strange foreign wives, as in verse eleven.
Shechaniah owned the national guilt. The case is sad, but it is not desperate; the disease threatening but not incurable. Now that the people begin to lament, a spirit of repentance seems to be poured out. Now there is hope that God will forgive, and have mercy. The sin that rightly troubles us shall not ruin us.
In melancholy times we must observe what makes for us, as well as against us. And there may be good hopes through grace, even where there is a sense of guilt before God. The case is plain; what has been done amiss, must be undone again as far as possible. Nothing less than this is true repentance. Sin must be put away, with a resolution never to have anything more to do with it. What has been unjustly got, must be restored. Arise, be of good courage.
Weeping, in this case, is good, but reforming is better. As to being unequally yoked with unbelievers, such marriages, it is certain are sinful and ought not to be made but now they are not null, as they were before the gospel did away the separation between Jews and Gentiles.