You're listening to the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. It's fast, fun, free daily deep dive Bible. And right now we're working on the book of Nehemiah. If you're new, welcome. You can jump in right here, or you can always go back and start at the beginning of any season. The whole podcast is available in an easy-to-use format at thmbh.com.
SPEAKER_02Hey my friends, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And if you want to know the difference between somebody who watched and really enjoyed uh, what was the guy's name? Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and someone who read repeatedly and really enjoyed J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy of books, there are a couple things that'll give it away. Your book readers are going to want to talk about a character named Tom Bombadil. We're not going to talk about Tom Bombadil, but it's just, it's a thing. It's one of the cues. And your book readers are also going to want to talk about a whole scene that got left out of the movies. The scene is called, some of you are already yelling it, it happens there at the end. It's called the Scouring of the Shire. And what happens is the adventurers, they go on this grand quest and they change and they defeat a great evil and they come back and they discover that in their absence, their hometown has gone to rot, that goons and thugs have taken over, and the beloved Shire, which is a metaphor for the ideal world in which Tolkien lived, one untouched by the horrors of World War I, it got overrun and turned bleak and dark and bad. And so they went out to defeat this great darkness. But then the one thing that had been good got out of control and it was ugly. And so the heroes come back, and now with all of their newfound strength and ability and battle-hardened testedness, they come back and easily dispatch with the jerks who were ruining the idyllic Shired. Likewise, in Nehemiah 13, we have the scouring of Jerusalem. Nehemiah has gone to deal with grand affairs of state, and he left Jerusalem in a good state to go and deal with big things concerning the Persian Empire, bigger, more pressing matters on the mind of his buddy and king Artaxerxes I, and he makes his way back to Jerusalem in Nehemiah 13 and finds out that goons and thugs have taken things over and they've made a mess of everything. And so he scours it. He purifies the mess and it is a bit violent. Yesterday we speculated a little bit about what that violence looked like and how exactly he carried it out, and is an interesting thing to think about. But today, I want to talk about once the violence is over and we get to the very last part of Nehemiah 13 where he pours out his heart to the people he's yelling at. He is trying to explain to them why he is scouring, why he is disciplining Jerusalem and the people who are getting it wrong in the way he is. And it comes down to a contrast between the people who get it right and the people who get it wrong that has been present for all of Nehemiah and the prequel to Nehemiah, which is called Ezra. The contrast is this: the people who get it right in Ezra and Nehemiah see the whole grand story of the Bible. They understand that all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrews, the Israelites, the Jews, they're all part of a big grand story. They're all part of a deal made with God a thousand plus years earlier, where God said, I'm gonna be your God, you're gonna be my people, and everybody's gonna know that that's true. And if you obey these things I'm telling you, everybody's gonna know I'm your God because I'm gonna bless you so much. And if you disobey these things that I'm telling you, everybody's still gonna know that I'm the one true God because I'm gonna punish you so much. And that is what sets up the whole narrative flow of the entire Old Testament. Ezra got that, Nehemiah got that. I think Zerubabel, a character from early on in the book of Ezra who helped rebuild the temple in the 530s BC. I think he got that. But nobody seems to get it as clearly as Nehemiah. Nobody seems to feel it as deeply as Nehemiah. So the people who are the good guys in these books, they get the story. The people who are the dolts in these books, they don't get the story. They think they're a part of nothing. They think it's just about them. They're just doing something or whatever feels good in the moment. And Nehemiah has been both metaphorically and now literally grabbing them by the shoulders and shaking and being like, see the story.
SPEAKER_01It's a story. If you look at all of it, you'll figure out what it takes to be the good guy, and you'll figure out what it looks like to be the bad guy. Yes, I am still shaking with both of my hands right here in real life, alone in my basement. This is just how the things are right now. He doesn't just want them to do the right behavior when he's there to supervise them and pull their hair out if they disobey.
SPEAKER_02He wants them to get the story. He wants them to internalize it for themselves. He wants them to become vested. He wants them to feel the importance of their role and their standing in this whole thing. He wants them to feel custody and ownership of this story, not just of the well-being of their own people, but of the whole of God's redemptive plan. Nehemiah gets it. These people don't get it. And so now we get to the part where Nehemiah makes his heartfelt plea. With clumps of hair and maybe a bit of bloody scalp laying around on the ground, and people rubbing their heads in disappointment, and maybe some Persian guards who had had spears leveled at these people, with Nehemiah now walking over and putting two fingers on the tip of that brandish spear, making eye contact with his men to say, Settle down, we're not going to run anybody through. Now he talks to these people. Now he makes one last plea before the book is out for them to get what they need to get to get this right. Here's how it goes, Nehemiah 13, 25. You're not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons, nor are you to take their daughters in marriage for your sons or for yourselves. Wasn't it because of marriages like these that Solomon, king of Israel, sinned? Among the many nations there was no king like him. He was loved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel. But even he was led into sin by foreign women. Must we hear now that you two are doing this terrible wickedness and are being unfaithful to our God by marrying foreign women? Quickly, let's just address the elephant in the room. This is your first time here, you're probably like, dang, so he's a great big misogynist. Uh we've covered it a whole bunch in previous conversations. Different time, different situation, and also completely different social order. You're talking, I mean, the reason that we're using this language about marrying foreign women is going to have a ton to do with the system of dowries and the transitions of wealth and the blending of households. The Israelite people were the ones who were settled. They had walled cities, they had money, they had to pay out that money and enter into business arrangements through arranged marriages with foreign wives. So if you think of it in terms of Disney modern love, it's going to sound kind of weird and kind of jerky, but very different time, very different set of socioeconomic standards for how life was done. Again, we've covered a whole lot of that before. If you're interested in that, go back and catch the rest of the conversation on EMI. It'll make more sense. So acknowledging that this language was written in a different time in a different place than the moment and time in which we live, you can still get to the heart of what he's saying, right? This is our Achilles' heel. This is how we keep screwing up. I referenced yesterday the Obi-Wan and Anakin conversation. You were the chosen one. You had a role to play here. Obi-Wan is appealing to the story with Anakin. Nehemiah is appealing to the story with these guys. You're chosen by God. We're a unique people. We play a unique and redemptive role for all of humanity. And you guys are screwing around with it for stupid reasons. Don't do that. And I love the way he makes the point. It's almost as though he's saying, like, do you think you're above it? Do you think this doesn't apply to you? Guys, if it applied to Solomon, the dude who was the wisest of anybody ever, and who represents the height of our wealth and the height of our ancestral territory and imperial dominance, if it could take him down, guys, it can take you down. If it could take his robust kingdom down, it can take our fledgling baby not even kingdom down, that is just a little tiny province and a little tiny blip on the map in the larger Persian Empire where we're still subservient to a foreign king. We're fragile here. We don't have anywhere near the solid footing of Solomon, and it broke him. The kingdom split in two one generation after Solomon because of this. You think we're better than that? You think we can afford that? Have we learned nothing? There's obviously a deep disappointment, but there is a deep sincerity to his pleading here. He clearly still believes that this narrative can be understood by other people. He still believes that his fellow countrymen, the heads of these households, can stop thinking in the moment and can start thinking of the grand story. And he believes that if they will just do that, their behavior will fall into line. Their lives will fall into line. They will obey and honor the covenants they've agreed to. They'll obey the commands of God, and God's blessing will be upon these people. So I think it's kind of interesting that he didn't really come in and give them the speech about you want to do this the easy way or the hard way. He came in and was basically, I'm not even going to ask you, we're going to do this the easy way and the hard way. So we're going to start with beatings and pulling your hair out. And now we're going to do the part where it's the grandfatherly, sincere, heartfelt talk and challenge to please, please, please, please understand what is going on here. Understand your role. Understand your custody of the situation. And get this right when I'm not around. Get it right because you're vested. Get it right because you own it and you get it. There's a tiny bit more of Nehemiah's scouring of Jerusalem here at the end of the chapter, just a couple verses left. But that's pretty much it. The pattern is pretty straightforward. He sees the violation of the three points of the covenant vows that everybody had made, all these people had agreed to in Nehemiah 10. He goes and with his own hands addresses the problem, not with paperwork. He fixes it physically, and then he repairs the part of the covenant that was broken. He does that in relationship to Tobiah's presence in the temple. He does that in relationship to the violations of the Sabbath and how business was being conducted improperly. And then he does that in relation to these new marriages that are in violation of the covenant standards for marriage. What's unique is that in this third one, we get that little speech that we looked at today that is a plea for an understanding of what the story is and what their place is in it. All told, I don't know what else Nehemiah can do. He can't be alive forever. He can't be there forever. The very thing that gives him the political credibility to show up and do this with the authority of the king is the very thing that demands he not be in Jerusalem all the time. He has to go back and actually serve the king and actually do his actual job. So this last play on the part of Nehemiah is really all he has left to offer the situation. And I think we're going to see as we get into the epilogue of this season and of this book that it kind of worked. Sort of, he does end up winning. But only sort of. It's maybe a bit of a pyrrhic victory. The results are certainly mixed, and the results certainly evolve. But Nehemiah and Ezra do succeed in ushering in a whole new era of Judaism, a whole new chapter of this story. But even though they achieve that, they don't ultimately solve the heart of the problem. And obviously, we'll talk about that a lot more as we get into epilogue zone here after we cover the last few verses next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.