Well, my friends, we've arrived. Today is the final day of the season of the podcast you and I have just done on the Book of Nehemiah. Congratulations, you got a book of the Bible in your hip pocket. I do as well. I know so much more about this than I did before we started. I learned so much along the way, and that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't hung out with me. So thanks a ton for doing it. Because if you weren't there, I might tell myself that I would sit around and get out the Bible and work on Nehemiah a whole bunch every single day. But here's my dirty secret. No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have done that. I would have thought of something else to do. I would have got bored or distracted. So, no, really seriously, I owe you a great debt of gratitude. Thanks for by your interest, holding my feet to the fire and making this an experience that I just got to have as well. So cool. High five. There's a sound. We've accomplished Nehemiah. I mean mostly, because I got a couple things that I want to say to wrap stuff up right here. First, the legacy of Nehemiah as a dude and as a book, it feels like the one big, great, let's muster all of our resources and all of our leadership and try just one time to get it right, big swing at the end of the Old Testament. It's a really sincere, all hands on deck, all resources applied, attempt to get it right. And it doesn't really work. It has flashes of brilliance, but you come away from it feeling like, nah, that's not going to hold. There's got to be another solution to this thing. My takeaway on the guy is I continue to really like him. This is somebody who understood his place in history and he tried really hard and he made other people's problems his own, and he owned other people's mistakes as though they were his own, and he owned his own mistakes. And in the end, we get this really human moment with him where he's like, I don't know if I actually solved anything or if I got this right. Please remember me, O God. There's this intonation that God remembers motives, and please, even if the results weren't perfect, remember that. And I think that's something that I maybe haven't touched on quite enough in thinking through the legacy of the book and the guy, Nehemiah. It's just that ultimately he ends up in a place where the Bible ends up, the whole New Testament ends up as well. The place of just being like, dang, I don't think I can fix this. And ultimately, I am completely at the mercy of God. I am not a powerful enough or significant enough character to make all the things be the way I want them to be. And if Nehemiah felt like that, with the scope and the scale of what he's doing here, remember he was in the Oval Office. He was in Windsor Palace. He's in the seat of power, right? He's an unbelievably powerful man and he couldn't even fix this, even with the most powerful government in the world behind him and total political control. I mean, how many times do we say, if I were king, I would do this or I would do that? Like he almost was. He had that kind of blessing and that kind of authority, and even he couldn't fix it. Okay, so if he couldn't fix it being that well positioned, probably you and I aren't going to be able to fix it. We aren't going to be able to exert the same amount of force, the same amount of political power, the same amount of money, resources, influence, whatever that Nehemiah could on our day and age and on our circumstances. I don't know, maybe like the president of a country and you're listening to this. Okay, maybe you can exert close to that much power. But it's just it's a reminder that even a guy that well positioned and that potent ultimately had to shrug and say, dang, I tried really hard. I put in place good policy, I put my own neck on the line, I put my money where my mouth is, but some things are just bigger than me. And ultimately, I'm not even totally sure enough of everything to know if I got every decision right. God have mercy on me. God have mercy on me, someone who tried and who wants to get it right, but who is limited. God have mercy on me, a man who does not know all the things. God have mercy on me, a man who does not know what I don't know. I just really relate to where Nehemiah ends up at the end of this thing. And if there was no more Bible after that, it'd be kind of sad and defeatist. But instead there is a bunch more Bible after that, and that next chunk of the Bible is what we've spent this epilogue period trying to connect the dots between. How do we go from the emotional and political, historical leaving off point of Nehemiah and get to the picking up point of Jesus and maybe more specifically the early church? Because our next series is going to be on Galatians, which is written in a moment that's right after or shortly after Jesus' death and resurrection and the establishment of the beginning of communities of Christians, both within Judaism, Jewish areas, and also among non-Jews, Gentiles. They get roped into this thing. I wonder if Nehemiah would turn over in his grave over that one, or if he was such a student of history that he could see it coming that eventually this was going to go beyond the walls that he helped put up. The lightning version of the historical connecting of the dots is, I mean, this is just a super fast summary of what we talked about. Persia runs for another hundred years after the end of Ezra and Nehemiah, ultimately a very weak shadow of a king compared to Xerxes and Artaxerxes and Darius and the great kings of Persia. A guy named Darius III loses humiliatingly to a Macedonian, which is kind of Greek. He's a guy who's into Greek culture named Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great becomes king of Persia and Babylon and everything, but he dies at a young age. He doesn't appoint an heir. And Alexander's Greekish generals take over the whole world, everything that Persia used to own, and everything that Alexander briefly owned. And they divide it up into basically four little chunks. The Jews in Jerusalem end up under the custody of the Ptolemies at first. Those are the Egyptian leaders, but then eventually they end up under the authority of the Syrian Greekish leaders, the Seleucids, and the Seleucids are mean and they keep getting meaner to the Jews. They don't like that the Jews are trying to be like Nehemiah and Ezra wanted them to be. They find them to be standoffish. They don't like that they refuse to assimilate. So they start initiating policies that are really culturally oppressive, and the Jews fight back. The Maccabees family leads a revolution in the 160s B.C. and they create an independent Jewish kingdom. But the independent Jewish kingdom that runs for almost exactly 100 years from the 160s B.C. to the 60s BC was fraught with all the same problems that the Jewish kingdoms of the Old Testament were fraught with bad leadership and screwed up relationships with their neighbors, particularly with very powerful neighbors. Ultimately, they make the same mistake that the previous kingdom made. Instead of depending on God, they try to buddy up to a powerful king of a powerful empire. This time it's Rome, and it doesn't go well. A Roman emissary shows up, and instead of helping them get back on their feet, he just takes over the kingdom, ends it, and makes it a Roman province. Shortly after that, the Romans go through their own little scuffle with the assassination of Julius Caesar and a civil war, and then Caesar Augustus emerges as the first emperor of the Roman Empire. He calls for a bunch of censuses, and this is what sets in motion the historical events that send a very odd couple, Mary and Joseph, who are in a very odd moment in life dealing with a very unusual thing. This is what sends them down the road where Jesus was born, which is such a significant deal that history will forever be divided on the night of that birth or the best approximation of it we had at the time we made the decision between counting backwards in years and counting forwards in years. The Jesus thing is a huge deal, and he is opposed by people who are more or less the intellectual descendants of Nehemiah and Ezra, but they're just a mutated version of it, a weird version of it, a less get-it version of what Ezra and Nehemiah were. I'd like to think Ezra and Nehemiah themselves would have recognized Jesus as the Messiah and they would have got it right. But definitely the Pharisees did not get it right. Jesus preaches the message of the kingdom, a kingdom that is made of more than just Jewish people, a kingdom that ultimately turns out to be for everyone. And people are made right in it, not by perfect adherence to a law that we got a 2,000-year sample size to say nobody can get that right, not by participation in a physical, worldly kingdom with a physical worldly king. We got a 2,000 sample size of stuff from the Old Testament that says that doesn't work. But instead, they become a part of this family of faith by the work of Christ on the cross. Jesus gets nothing wrong, no sin, no shortcoming, but then he goes to the cross as the perfect, ultimate, final sacrifice for the sins of anybody who believes. And this new family of faith is created. You would think that if he were just some upstart guy with a Messiah complex, it would all go away when he died. But he didn't stay dead. He came back to life. And a whole ton of people saw it and it became uncontrollable. It grew like crazy. People from all social classes started to become followers of Jesus. People from all different languages start to become followers of Jesus. The Jews are followers of Jesus. Fundamentalist Jews are followers of Jesus. Liberal Jews are followers of Jesus. Loyal Romanists are followers of Jesus. Rebels against the Romans are followers of Jesus. Weirdos from the desert who tried to run away from all of it, become followers of Jesus. And it's not just the Jews. People who aren't Jewish become followers of Jesus. And it's not just free people. Slaves become followers of Jesus. Former enemies and political rivals become followers of Jesus and they go to the same church and it has this incredible leveling effect on society practically overnight. And as you would expect, when something this amazing, this dramatic happens that transcends culture and geography and language, it's going to manifest in different ways as it goes out. People are going to struggle with different elements of adjusting to this thing and understanding what this new family of faith is really about, what following Jesus is really about. And so many of those struggles are unashamedly documented in the New Testament after the first four books. The first four books are the gospels. Those tell the story of Jesus' life and all the stuff I'm talking about there. After that, though, unashamedly, the New Testament is like, yep, these were the speed bumps. This is what happened. You've got a whole upside-down set of values and hope for life and future and eternity that is being laid over the top of ugly kingdom values that have been found wanting. Yeah, it's going to be an adventure. And the book you and I are going to look at in our next series, Galatians, is one of those adventures. It's about the tension felt between the intellectual and spiritual descendants of the age of Nehemiah and Ezra, even if they were imperfect and even if they had wandered from the values of Ezra and Nehemiah. It's about the tension between people from that school of thought who responded to the message of Jesus, but had a tough time fully embracing the grace and the forgiveness and the ground rules of this new kingdom while they were going to church with people for whom all of this was brand new. They weren't Jewish at all. And I'm grateful that that tension that's recorded in Galatians exists. Because one, just in terms of my belief, it would be weird for me if that tension weren't documented. How could that tension not happen? Have you read the Old Testament? Did you read Ezra and Nehemiah? There's gonna be tension here. Oh, okay, that's accounted for in the New Testament. Good, that checks out for me. So that's one reason I'm glad it's there. The other reason I'm glad it is there is because we get this whole book of the Bible that we're about to go and look at that theologically works through this question that I think everybody's gonna have when they start thinking about the Jesus thing. And that is, what is the relationship between the stuff I do, the things I might do that are in keeping with the values and the mindset of the law of the Old Testament? What's the relationship between that and what Jesus did on the cross and what he gives freely to his followers now? Maybe there are a few of you who listen through this series and you're like, that was really fun. That was a lot of history. I really liked Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, all of that stuff. But it didn't feel like it connected with my life quite as much as the book of Matthew, where everything Jesus said felt practical in a way. And to you, I would say, yeah, fair point. I mean, it makes sense because what we're dealing with in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, the Persian era of the Old Testament, is futility is too strong a word, but we're dealing with a struggle. It does feel distant. It does feel like another era, another moment. I don't think that the things that were on the table being offered by God to Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther is a rubbable, all the characters there. I don't think those things are still on the table in the same way for you and me. This is just like some guy, some lady listening to this thing, reading the Bible and thinking about it now. But the stuff that's on the table in the New Testament with Jesus and what we're gonna get in Galatians, that is still on the table. We're gonna understand it better, I hope, because of the time that we just invested, getting Nehemiah in our hip pocket. But the New Testament and Galatians, yeah, it's a little different animal. And I think it gets into our business a little more, no matter how clinical we try to be about it in our approach. And I think that practical things cannot help but be ahead of us as we go and pick up the book of Galatians starting next time around. High five, once again, Nehemiah in your hip pocket, Persian era of the Bible in your hip pocket, mine too. Great job. Thank you again. I hope you will join me for the next season as we go and look at Galatians next. I'm so grateful to all of you. Thanks for doing this with me. I'm Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.