I have often countered Lee’s claims concerning the “recovery” and return from captivity by looking at Nehemiah. He was the cupbearer of the King of Persia. He was granted a period of time away from his duties to help build the wall. But he was expected to return. And there is no indication that this is not what ultimately happened.
The first six verses of Nehemiah 2 read:
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In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before, so the king asked me, “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.”
I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my ancestors are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?”
The king said to me, “What is it you want?”
Then I prayed to the God of heaven, and I answered the king, “If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my ancestors are buried so that I can rebuild it.”
Then the king, with the queen sitting beside him, asked me, “How long will your journey take, and when will you get back?” It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time.
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Then, on top of that, the Jews who returned were not freed from slavery. They were simply allowed to possess the land they had been captured from, but as servants of Persia. And as Nigel points out, then of Greece, Syria, and finally Rome. I believe that there is a period of less than 100 years in which they are not entirely under someone else’s thumb. And it is probable that this is because their original ruler had been vanquished by another that had not yet turned to the tiny nation to officially exert their rule. (I am not saying that this is definitely true. But given the state of world affairs during this time, even if they were essentially released by , say, Syria, it would probably have been for the purpose of collecting their army together to fend off a larger foe. So any freedom from captivity was fleeting at best.
And those that remained in Babylon/Persia were no more or less slaves of Persia than those who returned. They just lived in a different place.
I like the way Nigel puts it (a couple of paragraphs before “LSM’s Dogmatic Assertions vs. the Evidence”):
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A similar chord is struck in Nehemiah, the Levites’ prayer is poignant: “Here we are, slaves today; as for the land that You gave to our fathers . . . Here we are slaves upon it.” (Neh. 9:36, RcV) Slaves in their own land — does that sound like a glorious recovery?
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To me, the real problem is the whole idea of "recovery." It is a thought that is relevant only to the recovery of mankind through redemption, not through the act of man's will to move to a different location. We refer to the revelation of God as progressive. Not like the Koran which is written in stages of harder and harder rules, the last of which overrides all that came before. No. God has slowly revealed himself until he finally came to earth as a man and fulfilled the righteous requirement of God's wrath for us.
Then came the church. It was not something fantastic on day one and then slowly degraded. It was a mess from day one. Long before Paul came on the scene and had to write letters to some of the messed-up churches. The church is always a collection of saved sinners. So we always start in a messy state. We don't know the requirements of God's righteousness. We just know that we have passed form darkness to light. That will always look like a mess.
But recovery? Of what? The first church fully observed all of the Jewish traditions as they met and worshiped. Since it was first, then it must be the only thing to recover back to.
"Recovery" is just another shallow remnant theology. One that segregates God's people into two groups — one that is correctly following God and the other that would like to think they are, but is essentially questionable as to salvation.
Lee did it with the LRC. Evangelicals do it with respect to the "liberals" and Catholics who are busy doing it with respect to the others.
We should make sure we don't have a 2x4 shoved through our eyes before we try to help others with their splinter.