It is hard to trust a promise that seems impossible to fulfill, like an exile that has already lasted decades with no sign of an end. That was exactly the wait the people of Judah were living through in Babylon: no king, no temple, no land. God, however, had already raised up a foreign king to open the door the Jews themselves could not open.
Cyrus was born in Persia around 600 BC and took the throne of the small kingdom of Anshan in 559 BC. Within a few decades he united the Medes and the Persians and conquered the neighboring kingdoms, until he took Babylon in 539 BC, the capital of the empire that had destroyed Jerusalem.
Most remarkable of all, the prophet Isaiah had spoken of Cyrus by name more than a hundred years before he was born. Isaiah called him the LORD’s shepherd and his anointed, one who would order the rebuilding of Jerusalem even without knowing the God of Israel.
In the first year of his reign over Babylon, Cyrus fulfilled that word exactly. He decreed that the exiled Jews could return to their land and rebuild the temple, and he even returned the sacred articles that Nebuchadnezzar had carried off.
Scripture does not present Cyrus as a convert to the LORD. He acknowledged, in his own decree, that the God of heaven had given him the kingdoms of the earth, but he remained a pagan king, surrounded by his own gods and by the political interests of stability across his vast empire.
Even so, God used him as an instrument of liberation. The story of Cyrus shows that no empire is a match for an ancient promise of God. If he moved the heart of a Persian king who never read the Scriptures to free an entire people, he can also open today the paths that seem permanently locked in the life of anyone who trusts him, and in the advance of the gospel among the nations.
