The book of Ezra opens with the people of the Lord in captivity to the Persian, dwelling in the provinces once controlled by the kings of Babylon. God’s centre, Jerusalem, where He had set His name, was a blackened ruin. The walls of the Holy City had been thrown down, and the very stones buried beneath piles of rubbish. All this may well be looked upon as a picture of the subjection of the Church of God to human systems of error and superstition. For long centuries the truth as to simply gathering to the name of the Lord Jesus had been lost. The place of the name, we may say, was at Jerusalem destroyed by her enemies. The walls, speaking of that godly separation from the world that should have kept the Church as “a garden enclosed,” had been completely demolished, and ecclesiastical rubbish of all descriptions had so buried the truth that it seemed as though it was lost beyond all recovery. Separation from evil, then, is ever God’s principle for His people.