Chapter four gives us an account of the frustration to the rebuilding of the house of God.
The adversaries of Judah and Benjamin, people brought from Babylon and Assyria by the king of Assyria to inhabit Samaria (2 Kings 17:24), who imitated Israel in seeking God and sacrificing to God, pretended to help the rebuilding of the house of Jehovah, but they were rejected by Zerubbabel, Joshua, and the rest of the heads of the fathers’ houses. The enemies hired counselors to frustrate the rebuilding throughout all the days of Cyrus king of Persia until the reign of Darius king of Persia, and in the beginning of the reign of Ahasuerus they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem (Ezra 4:1-6). This typifies that today when we come back to the recovery to build the house of God, some nearby ones would make proposals that are mostly frustrations. This is Satan’s subtlety. In his time, Zerubbabel saw through these proposals and rejected them.
In the days of Artaxerxes, a party of the inhabitants of Samaria and the rest of the lands beyond the River (maybe of the same adversaries in verse 1) wrote to Artaxerxes against Jerusalem. Artaxerxes decreed to stop the rebuilding of the house of God by force and power; and the work of the house of God ceased until the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia (vv. 7-24).
The rebuilding work continued through the encouragement and help of the prophecies of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah (5:1-2).
Ezra 5:3—6:12 tells us of the confirmation of the decree of Darius king of Persia. After the people stopped the work, they were encouraged by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah to continue the rebuilding work. At the same time this work was confirmed by the decree of Darius king of Persia.
The rebuilding was questioned and referred to Darius king of Persia by Tattenai, the governor beyond the River (that is, west of the Jordan) and his companions (vv. 3-17).
In 6:1-12 we have Darius’s checking of the decree of Cyrus and his confirmation to encourage and speed up the rebuilding. After being questioned about the rebuilding, Darius checked and confirmed the decree of Cyrus, finding out that Cyrus had issued a decree to release Israel from captivity so that they could go back to Jerusalem to rebuild the house of God. Darius confirmed that there was such a record, and his confirmation encouraged and sped up the rebuilding.
Verses 13 through 15 describe the completion of the rebuilding of the house of God.
The rebuilding was completed in prosperity through the prophesying of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah (vv. 13-14).
The work of rebuilding the house of Jehovah was completed on the third day of the month Adar, in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king (v. 15).