Hey, my name's Matt, and this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And if this is your first time ever here, I want to say two things to you. One, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you for checking this thing out. It's nice to meet you. Podcast meet you. I don't know exactly what you say. Two, this is gonna be a weird one, but I'm still glad you're jumping in here because when you're meeting somebody, it's almost best just to meet them on a weird day. So you can be like, okay, that's how they are. That's what this thing is, that's what this podcast is. And now I know, for better or for worse, what I'm getting. So welcome. You are joining us right at the tail end of season four of this podcast. Each season of this podcast is a book of the Bible. So this book of the Bible is Nehemiah. It's the last narrative portion of the Old Testament, and it's been a pretty positive book. Really, it's been a win. The Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, these are the main human characters of the Old Testament. They've been down and out for a long time by the time we get to the beginning of Nehemiah, but things are starting to look better, and then there's a problem, and Nehemiah makes that problem his own problem, and he swings into action and he leaves the comfy courtroom of King Artaxerxes of Persia. He was the right-hand man, he was a cupbearer to the king, like pals with the king, the most powerful person in the world. But he hears of trouble back in his ancestral hometown of Jerusalem, which is a 55-day walk away. And he's like, I gotta go fix that. And the king gives him permission and some money, and he goes back to Jerusalem, and it is a mess. The people are in disarray, the walls are torn down, the enemies are at what's left of the gates, and the whole, the whole people group, his entire people group is set to be overrun by enemies, both through violence and through political intrigue and paperwork and just being outmaneuvered politically in that way. And he cleans it all up, he fixes it, he cuts through all the red tape and he gets the walls rebuilt. The walls uh they signify to everybody this is a real town. You can't mess with us. We're real people again. The walls get built, and after the walls get built and the enemies are pushed back, there's no violence or anything with that. They just defend the walls and the enemies ultimately chicken out and they never attack. But the walls get built, and then there's this big religious revival that occurs, and Nehemiah is there for that. It's very positive. All the people are like, remind us again of what we used to believe about God. Read us all the stuff from what we now call the Bible. And they read it. Ezra the priest is there too. And Ezra and Nehemiah, they lead this big religious reform. It's just great. And there's all this economic oppression that had been going on. All of that gets cleaned up. There's a bunch of violations of the old laws of God and the covenant that God had made uniquely with the descendants of Abraham, the Jewish people. Everybody says, our bad. We shouldn't have done all that bad stuff. We're going to obey you from here on out. And they're very specific about how they're going to obey God during Nehemiah's reform. So they say, number one, we're not going to neglect the house of God any longer. We're going to provide money and resources to make sure that this robust religious system that we have is funded and that we have people to man it and be trained in this. That's awesome. They also say, number two, we're going to honor the Sabbath. That is a unique thing about our people group that God has put in place. It makes us weird. It costs us money because we don't work one day of the week, but we're going to do it. And number three, we're not going to marry people from other tribes and other kingdoms and things like that anymore. We're going to be a unique people that is set apart in a unique way. And this is going to be weird. We know people aren't going to like it. This is kind of a way that in the ancient Near East you make deals with other families to mutually enrich yourselves. But they realize this is what we always get wrong. This is our Achilles heel. And what they're effectively admitting is every time we intermarry with somebody from another people group, we don't just marry that person. We marry their gods. We marry their language. We marry their traditions. We marry their values. We marry their wars and their blood feuds. And it doesn't work. Every time we do that in mass, we wreck things. And God, who said very clearly, hey, if you obey me, I'm going to bless you as a people. And if you disobey me, I'm going to punish you as a people. Everybody agreed to those deals back in the day. God was holding up his end of the bargain. And it seems like every time they got into trouble, it was because they tried to mingle other religions and other stuff with this. So if you are new to this podcast here at the end of season four in the book of Nehemiah, what you will get if you go back and listen to most of this season is a really positive, fun story of a people group who had trouble getting to their feet throughout the whole Old Testament. Like they just couldn't quite get traction. They couldn't quite bring themselves to ever really obey their God who kept proving himself to be the one true God by breaking the laws of time and space and demonstrating that he knows the future and his power over everything. They just couldn't ever quite do it. And it feels like what you get in Nehemiah is the best run ever that they ever put together, their best attempt at nailing it all. And you get to the last chapter of this book, which is chapter 13. And it feels like uh maybe we've got it and we're going to close out the Old Testament on a win. But then unfortunately, as you get into 13, you discover that all three of those things they said they were going to do, they are not doing because Nehemiah went away for a little while, and as soon as he wasn't looking anymore, a whole bunch of people started to neglect the house of God. They started to dishonor the Sabbath and they started to intermarry with their neighbors all over again, and everything started to fall apart. So where we're at right now is I've been sitting here thinking about this sheriff comes back to town kind of moment that we get in Nehemiah 13, where Nehemiah comes back and just, I mean, the same impulse he had early on in the book, he's a guy who takes matters into his own hands, literally into his own hands, because he physically is putting hands on the people who are the problem here. And it's kind of weird with modern sensibilities to see him doing that, but that's what he's doing, and that's what it says. And I mean, the Bible is holding this out as like it's a win and a good thing. And we should like that he's coming back and punching people and pulling hair and throwing their crap out of the temple and onto the curb. And so I've just been picturing what it this purge has looked like, right? Because purge part one is Nehemiah came back and found out that a bunch of the temple real estate that was supposed to be used to store the riches needed to provide for all the people who worked at the temple was given to an enemy and that somehow he weasel his way into getting that space. Well, what does Nehemiah do? He comes in, he grabs his stuff, and he throws this outsider's stuff to the curb and evicts him and then does a ritual purification of the place that he was in. And then the next physical purge is there are people who are coming to do business on the Sabbath, and he goes out to all of these people who are lingering and looming around to violate this rule. And he's like, Hey, if you do this, like he confronts them physically and makes it clear if you keep showing up to violate our Sabbath and to try to do business on this day, I will put hands on you. And they're like, Okay, my bad, and they go away. And then finally he finds out that a bunch of these families are marrying people, not just random neighbors, but like ancient blood feud enemies of the plans of God, the people of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab kind of people. And this third part of the purge of Nehemiah has him rebuking people, it has him beating people, it has him pulling out their hair. It's pretty intimidating stuff. We processed through some of that yesterday, but physically, practically, I've been sitting here thinking, what did this look like? Because there have been some other angry reactions to blasphemous stuff in the Bible. I mean, think about Moses coming down the mountain with the Ten Commandments, and he comes down, and what does he see? He's got, I mean, the Ten Commandments, he met with God and he's like, Hey, this is great news. We heard from God, we know what to do, we have rules now, and he comes down and they're worshiping a golden calf. And Moses is like, I was up there, I like I went camping for like a day, and you made a fake God and you're worshiping it. What are you doing? And you know, the Ten Commandments get broken in anger, not like the rules get broken, but like the tablets get broken. Or you think about Jesus purging the temple of the money changers in the New Testament, and you know, in that situation, I don't think Jesus had any muscle with him. Like, I think it was just him. He knew he was gonna get killed by his enemies here in the near future. So I don't know. Uh he just went and did it and went for it. But it wasn't like he brought in a bunch of dudes with sticks who all came in in a cloud of dust at once and thumped all of the money changers. I think it was just Jesus. I don't think like Judas was in there flipping over tables pretending to not like dirty money dealing to keep up his facade of being on Jesus' team. I think it was just Jesus. But here, how'd Nehemiah pull this off? Had he garnered so much credibility with his accomplishments that he could walk up to a guy and be like, hey, hey, hey, you know, right there. Chad, come here. Hey, did you marry somebody from Ashdod? Yeah, sorry. Put your head over here. What? Why? Because I'm gonna yank your hair out. Yes, sir. Oh, uh, okay, here's my hair. All right, I'm gonna take this chunk out right here. Ah, I deserved it. Could I please have more, sir? Yeah, you can, Chad, because you did the thing that you swore you wouldn't do in front of everybody. Do you remember swearing it? Yeah, I remember, I'm sorry. Well, this is what you deserve. Or did Nehemiah show up with muscle? And I kind of think maybe he, it's a little bit of both. Like, I do think he had tremendous credibility, but I think he showed up with Persian muscle. And I think Nehemiah, as a symbolic gesture, probably did all of these things with his hands. But he had the king's guard, no doubt, on his side. And so when he showed up, he had the political credibility, he had the religious credibility, he had the ethnic credibility, he had the character credibility to be like, this is happening, and I cannot believe that we have to do this all again. Now, as we talked about yesterday, on this marriage thing, he comes in, he yanks out people's hair and beats them, and then he makes them take the same oath that they already took. And I guess he's just hoping that this time around it'll stick. Or maybe Nehemiah is kind of at wit's end. And other than this sort of desperate gesture of force to impart to them, hey, this matters. You are wrecking our entire thing. Maybe there's nothing more to it. So I kind of imagine the goon squad rolling around and enforcing all of this and making it happen. And I also kind of get a little bit of that Anakin's Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi on the volcano planet kind of vibe, where Obi-Wan is like, what are you doing? You're supposed to defeat the Sith, not join them. Come on, you were my brother. Like, there's this personal expression of hurt and disappointment. Like the guard is even kind of coming down a little bit here. And maybe I'll have to read you this part tomorrow. I guess I'm looking over here. We're a little ways into it. Yeah, I'm gonna do the thing where I hit pause, and then tomorrow we're just gonna pick it up, right? With really Nehemiah's last emotional plea. Here's your beating, here's me throwing out your crap, here's the purge, here's all the muscle that I brought with me. But guys, all of that aside, listen to these words I am telling you. And that's what we're gonna get is Nehemiah pleading with people. So I say once again, if this is your first time here, it is so nice to meet you, and I am so glad that you came by to check out this really weird little corner of the internet where we pick a book of the Bible and we go straight through it one little bit at a time, and we don't even know how long it's gonna take to go through a whole season. We just talk about it and uh we learn things and think about it and try to understand what these books are and get them, as we like to say, in our hip pocket. So if this is your first day, thank you for jumping in with this and for catching it on kind of a weird day. If you see somebody on a weird day, you kind of have a sense of who they are. So I think this is all great. Tomorrow we'll pick it up right where we left off, and I'll actually read parts of the Bible. Usually we read parts of the Bible. I don't know, I just didn't get to that today. So, all right, more Nehemiah 13 next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.