Do you all ever do the thing where you write up for yourself a little narrative turn of a phrase, a little kind of plot summary thing for a chapter of your life that's just closing or an episode that you went through and you're trying to make sense of it, you're trying to be at peace with it, you've been grappling with it, you're kind of looking for that language that you can use when you talk to yourself or even others about that particular chapter. And then maybe eventually you find the language and you're like, all right, that's pretty much how I feel about that. For example, let's say you get to the end of a difficult time where you're very involved, but you don't totally control the outcome of the situation, and the whole thing's done, you're not totally satisfied with how it went, but you feel like you gave it your best shot. You might say something like this. Well, I think I did everything I could there. See? Those kind of things. Do you have those? I've got a bunch of those in my life. I feel like in the end of Nehemiah here, we're seeing a guy who is getting to that point and who is developing his language for how to make sense of the rebuild Jerusalem, both the walls and the people chapter of his life. He didn't totally control the outcome. I mean, he had probably more say in the outcome of this than pretty much anybody else in the world, save maybe Artaxerxes himself. He's clearly not at peace with everything about how it worked out. And so as we get to the very end of the book of Nehemiah, we can both figuratively and literally hear Nehemiah trying on language to make sense of what this was. And I do think it's something to the effect of, well, I did my best, and hopefully good things come out of it. Or, well, I conducted myself with integrity. I made the best choices I possibly could. It's beyond my control now. It's kind of funny as we're sitting here talking about it. I'm running back through the chapters of my book that I keep mentally that I don't think anybody else has. And I realize, dang, I've got a lot of these little chapter summaries that I lean into. If you brought up this part of my life or that part of my life, I'd be like, oh no, I know what my chapter summary is of that, my little blurb for that part that makes it all work for me. And I think some of them make me look good, especially when I'm younger. A lot of those chapter blurbs are framed to try to make me look good. I think the older I get, the more the percentage of those chapter blurbs that I write for myself. I think more and more those are more just trying to make sense of what happened, what passed there. And maybe there's a little more room for even honesty in the blurb, maybe just a hint of honesty, not too much. Settle down now about me being a multidimensional character who had positive, but maybe even also negative contributions to a given chapter. That's interesting. I've never really gone down this road before. I'm just doing it with you now. But we got to talk about the end of Nehemiah. That's the point. Okay, business, discipline. Come on, Whitman. We got this thing. We got the end of Nehemiah here. There's a little bit of squaring things up that still needs to be done. It goes like this Nehemiah 13, 28. One of the sons of Joiada, son of Eliasheb the high priest, was son-in-law to Sanbalat the Horonite, and I drove him away from me. Even here at the end of all things, we're seeing that these three purges that Nehemiah has put in place, that being the provisions of the temple by throwing Tobiah's stuff out, the reforms of the Sabbath by going and threatening to lay hands on the people who were violating it, and then the reforms related to marriage by yanking out dudes' hair and beating them and making them repeat the oath that they took earlier. If he wants these three things to stick, he knows that he also needs to fix whatever is wrong with the oversight of these things, and ultimately the buck stops with the high priest and his family, and Nehemiah's discovered that the high priest is not terribly competent or maybe not morally competent for the role. It looks like maybe he wasn't in a position to depose Eliashib, the high priest. Instead, it looks like he's trying to cut around the problem to make sure that it doesn't metastasize and spread. And so he goes and looks at the family tree of Eliashib and he's like, okay, well, one of Eliashib's grandsons is also related to one of the great enemies of us as a people and the enemies of the wall project and everything, Sanbalat. No, we're not doing that. We're not bringing Sanbalot into ownership of our people and our religious temple system by marriage. No, Tobiah isn't going to get in using squatter's rights, and Sanbalat, our other enemy here, is not going to get in through some tricky backdoor marital inheritance thing where a few people die, and with a heavy heart he'll have to assume leadership of the temple and the religious system, or where he could have a puppet high priest where if Sanbalot can't get in through the gates, he'll just sneak in metaphorically through the backdoor and control everything that's going on inside of newly fortified Jerusalem by using a puppet son-in-law to screw everything up. What Nehemiah is doing here is he's trying to secure the ground he has retaken in the scourging of Jerusalem and these reforms, these reforms of reforms that we're seeing here in Nehemiah chapter 13. Does this make you tired? It makes me a little tired. If I'm him, I would feel a little tired because I mean it's like whack-a-mole. He's just chasing down the same stuff again and again. I mean, the tennis ball example. Boom, boom, boom. The balls are coming faster than a person with two hands can pick up the balls and put them back in the cart. He's trying to cut the problem off at the source. I see what he's doing. And now we come back to this language that I was talking about at the beginning of our conversation here, this life chapter blurb, if you will, that Nehemiah seems to be workshopping throughout the whole book of Nehemiah. It always starts with the word remember. In this case, it goes like this remember them, oh my God, because they defiled the priestly office and the covenant of the priesthood and of the Levites. Now, the majority of the remember statements in Nehemiah have been remember me. I'm trying to get this thing right. I tried so hard and I got so far, but in the end, is it really gonna matter? I mean, that's what the kind of stuff that he's grappling with. But there's also some remember me language that is more judgmental in tone. So the remember me language is gracious in tone. Show grace to me. I'm trying. You can see my heart, God, I'm trying. Even if it isn't all working, I'm giving this everything I've got. The remember them language is calling for judgment, justice, punish them for willfully, wantonly, and unrepentantly getting this stuff wrong. Verse 30. So I purified the priests and the Levites of everything foreign and assigned them duties each to his own task. I also made provisions for contributions of wood at designated times and for the first fruits. So there's a real clear pattern here in chapter 13, really in the last third of the book. The pattern is this everybody makes a covenant to say they're going to do basically three categories of things. Nehemiah leaves, a whole bunch of people, including the people in highest authority, the people who should be caretakers of those promises, violate all three of those big categories of things. Then Nehemiah comes in and using his own hands and goon squad, I assume, he corrects physically what is going wrong with those violations. Then he puts better systems in place. Then he has basically an Old Testament exorcism. He purifies the whole place, physically purifies the whole setting and tries to put it back into this state of ritual purity. So it's all reset, and now maybe we can move forward again. So one, two, three. We see that same pattern cycling here. And maybe you could even count this as a fourth pattern, or maybe this is an overarching pattern to say, okay, we fixed these three practical things. Now I'm going to fix the people in charge of the oversight of these things, and I'm going to purify their office as well. And you get to the end of all of that with only one sentence still remaining to us in Nehemiah. Well, what can you say? If you were Nehemiah, what would be your chapter blurb here? I mean, really, think about that. If you were Nehemiah, given everything you know, given everything about the contents of the whole Old Testament, what would be your chapter blurb for this chapter in your life? I mean, this is a pretty big deal. You kind of marry yourself to this kind of language, and so I'd want to take several more passes at it. But my initial thought is back to what I said earlier. Well, the situation was largely under my control, but not totally under my control. And I did my very best, and I think I acted faithfully. I don't think I was afraid of anyone. I don't think I let fear dictate to me what I would and wouldn't do. I simply tried to do the right thing without consideration of winning everybody's approval or being popular at every single turn, but ultimately I'm not going to control the results. Down to my last day in that town, I was doing my very best to do what I thought was right with my position to set this thing up for long-term success in the context of this grand story that we're a part of. But now I'm old and my time leading this thing and being the caretaker of it is passing into shadow. And somebody else is going to have to step up if they want to keep these reforms. And I wouldn't be surprised if at least at some point that was Nehemiah's chapter blurb. But his forward-facing language, his outward-facing language, the language that he uses with other people and immortalizes in this book, focuses instead around the word remember. And I've been teasing that for several days. And tomorrow we're going to unpack those remember statements and read the final verse of Nehemiah together. Also, final thought: I'm really intrigued by this idea of how we, I think all of us, maybe maybe not you, but I think most people write chapter blurbs for these moments in their lives to make sense of things. And I've only been thinking about this concept for whatever the 13 minutes that I've been recording here, but I'm running through a bunch of those in my brain as kind of a background process while we're chatting here. Like, dang, I have a lot of chapters and a lot of chapter blurbs. Maybe I need to revisit some of those. Maybe they're not as well written or as honest as I would like. Huh, food for thought. All right, I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.