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 full podcast is available in an easy to use format at thmbh.com.
SPEAKER_01Well, my friends, we are in a bleak portion of the book of Nehemiah. We're in the part where it seems like everything's figured out, everything is crisp and in order and reformed. But then very quickly, between chapters basically 12 and early on in chapter 13, there's an unfortunate pivot. A little bit of time passes and the reforms quickly pass into memory and people go back to doing what they were doing in newly rebuilt Jerusalem. And when Nehemiah comes back, it's a pretty tough pill to swallow for him because it seemed like this whole thing was on lockdown. It seemed like we had a city on a hill here. We had an example to the nations of how things could be, an example to the generations that would come in the future of what your ancestors did and how this could all be right. But as has been the cycle throughout the entire Old Testament, it apparently didn't take. Once again. And so Nehemiah, rather than just yanking out his hair and calling it quits, he comes back and he takes bold action once again, as is his style. And he throws out physically the interlopers who've set up shop in the temple grounds, the temple complex inappropriately. And using the power of his personality and leadership, he puts back in place all of the tithes and the offerings to fund all of the stuff that needs to be funded for the house of God not to be neglected. And then he figures out there are Sabbath violations happening. And he metaphorically puts a lock on the ball cage. That is, he physically puts dudes at his command at the gate to do the job the gatekeeper should have been doing, and literally threatens to quote, lay hands on any merchants who linger around the walls trying to violate the Sabbath rules for how they're going to do business. At the end of each of these re-reforms, we've been here in Nehemiah say the same thing. Remember me, my God, for trying to do the right thing. Paraphrases mine. That's basically what he's saying. But it's been kind of a bleak view conversations for you and I here in the home stretch of Nehemiah because it's all cleanup duty. I mean, it's disappointing. We thought we had this thing whipped. Nehemiah thought he had this thing whipped. And he's basically having to go back through point by point. And instead of depending on the goodwill of the people and their voluntarism in choosing to honor the vows that they made in the renewal of the covenant in chapter 10 of just this book, three pages earlier, instead, he's having to depend on the force of his personality, the gravity of his leadership, and even the physical force of soldiers at his command to make the thing happen. That's not what he wanted. He wanted this to just happen because people wanted to do it. He might still be able to achieve these ends temporarily, but surely Nehemiah had to know if I have to keep doing this with force and it reverts back to whatever people were going to do the second I leave, then this might not stick. And if it does, it might be a mutated version of the thing that does ultimately stick. I don't know. It's a tough deal, and the series of events of Nehemiah having to go and re-reform each of the points of that covenant agreement continues. So he's already re-reformed provisions for maintaining the house of the Lord. They all swore in Nehemiah 10, we will not neglect the house of our God. Nehemiah came back and said, Why is the house of God neglected? And then he fixed it. He's re-reformed the Sabbath stuff, as I just talked about. Everybody said, We're not going to do business on the Sabbath. We're not going to let people in who want to do business on the Sabbath. Well, he had to come back and fix that. And the third big thing that was in that Nehemiah chapter 10, covenant renewal, was the whole deal about marriage, and now he's going to have to tackle that one as well, reminding them of their vows. Nehemiah 13, verse 23. Moreover, in those days I saw men of Judah who had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. Well, given my modern sensibilities and the stuff that I have been taught and raised on my whole life about living in a melting pot global society, I got to admit, that verse feels weird to me. I read that through my modern lenses and I think, well, hold on a second. Before we go on to anything about what Nehemiah is going to do, what's wrong with Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab? Are you saying that somehow Judah is better than these people? And look, no matter what I say next, it's not going to square with modern sensibilities. It's not going to square with the values that we have in a post-Jesus era of the church world. The ground rules are totally different for people who follow Jesus and for how we think about society. But here in the fifth century BC and throughout the whole Old Testament, it is a different deal. God supernaturally verified again and again and again, that's what the text holds it out as being, that his people were to be set apart and different from their neighbors. Over the centuries, God's chosen people said, No, I think we can still be different enough while intermarrying and making the kinds of entangling marriage alliances and dowry payments like what Tobiah had made with a whole bunch of people. And I think we'll still more or less worship God. I think we'll be fine. Well, that never happened. Every time they intermingled their ideas and their families because of the customs and the lifestyles and how the households worked back then and how loyalty worked back then, and how tribes worked back then, it never worked. They were not integratable. That is, mild compatibility or partial integration of these various religions was not possible. And we have a huge sample size to show that. And Nehemiah is hearkening back to that huge sample size and saying, we cannot do this intermarriage thing. That isn't what we as a unique people group in a unique time are called to do. It isn't going to work, it's never worked, it's not going to work this time. And look at what happened when Tobiah did that, and you all tolerated it. It was a complete and total disaster. The first thing to go is our unique dedication to God as a people group. We just can't do it. Again, feels real weird to us. Makes a ton of sense in this context if you read the entire Old Testament. Plus, we still got all this stuff about the outstanding grievances, the blood rivalry grievances between Judah and Ashdod, Ammon and Moab. And that was spoken to at the beginning of chapter 13. Remember, all of these people, in part of the same, you know, few weeks of ceremonies that involved the ratification of the covenant in Nehemiah 10, in Nehemiah 13, all of those same people, we have all their names. They're all written down, they're repeated again and again and again. All of those same people read through the law of Moses and were like, oh yeah, the Ammonites and the Moabites, remember what they did? They're a huge problem. And God himself specifically said through Moses, Yeah, don't let them into the assembly. You cannot mingle what they're doing with what you're doing. Now that said, there's still language throughout the Old Testament that all the nations are going to be brought into a knowledge of God and blessed through the descendants of Abraham. So these two things are still to happen, even though they seem like they're in conflict. It's just that Ammon and Ashdod and Moab are not going to be the ones to lead the nations. They're not going to participate with Judah in doing that. They rather are numbered among all the nations that aren't the descendants of Abraham, who are going to be ministered to and somehow blessed through God's work with his chosen people. Nehemiah is clear on that. The nobles and the leaders in Jerusalem here are not clear on that, or maybe they are clear on that, and they just don't care at all. It kind of seems like not caring is more where they're at. Verse 24 of Nehemiah 13. Half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod or the language of one of the other peoples, the Ammonites or the Moabites, and did not know how to speak the language of Judah. Do you remember learning how to write in cursive back in the day when you were a kid? I did. It was just automatic. It was weird. I don't really know why we do it, but I thought it was lovely. I had fun learning to do all the curves and joined up writing stuff. I still like writing in cursive. I think it's pretty. But when it came time to teach our kids, I was like, do we really need to do that? It seems like schools are kind of going away from it. And I heard somebody make the case that, like, well, a lot of the foundational documents, at least of my country, the sort of the social contract that is kind of binding for everyone is written in cursive. It might be worth it to have kids know how to write and read cursive, just so that when they look at the founding documents of our country and the social contract to which they are bound, they can read it in its original form and know what it says. That seems like it's important. I thought, okay, good enough. Yeah, we'll teach them how to do the cursive thing. And look, I mean, what I'm talking about there, that's just government stuff. I mean, it's not like the stakes, it's not the kind of gravity of stuff that we're talking about in the Old Testament. The Old Testament stuff is much bigger. So I totally get where Nehemiah is coming from. He's like, they can't understand the scriptures. They can't understand the law of Moses. Remember all of that language in Nehemiah about the people who were gathered to hear the reading of the law of Moses? And it was like, you know, all the women and children and heads of households and anyone who could understand. Well, what does that mean? Does that mean competence level? That they just weren't dumb and so they could get what was being described? Or is what he's talking about there that they could understand the language in which it was written, in which it was being read. It's probably a little bit of the prior, but I think it's mostly the latter. That is there were a bunch of people in Jerusalem at this time who were descendants of Abraham and kind of heirs to this whole thing, who couldn't even speak the language, and as a result, they couldn't understand what was being said. Ehemiah views that as very regrettable, and he pins that on more of this intermarriage, which I mean it just makes sense. If you're a somebody from Judah in the ancient world and you go and marry someone who's an Ammonite, like come on, fair is fair. The kids should learn both of our languages. I totally get how they would reason to that. Nehemiah is saying, well, just don't make the mistake in the first place. You're a unique people who has a unique calling. And he views it as very regrettable that this has happened. I'm gonna pause there because we're all eager to see what Nehemiah is gonna do about it. It's probably gonna be dramatic, maybe even a little bit violent. He's a man of action, that's what he's done in the face of all the other problems. We'll see what he does. But I want to come back to this thing I keep pointing out. It's just that this passage clangs for me, and it probably does for you as well. It just doesn't feel like how we think about the world. And I think that's okay. But if this is uncomfortable for you, as it is for me, kind of the exclusivity and forbidding foreign marriage and all of that stuff, then I think you're really gonna like Jesus and the New Testament and the next season of this podcast. Because this isn't sustainable. It wasn't working. Even when it seems like it's working, one chapter later, it stops working. All of the solutions of the Old Testament that were contingent on human discipline and good behavior and really getting your crap together ultimately are found to be wanting by the time we get to the Old Testament. But when we get to the New Testament, Jesus is building out this whole new family of faith. And he doesn't wad up and dispose of this family of faith. But rather he says, you know, who are my mother, my brothers, my sisters, it's the people who do the will of my father. And he takes what was promised and hinted at through the whole Old Testament, that this was going to be for everybody, and he realizes that Jesus is the mechanism that makes that work and makes that possible. And that's a big concept, and it's a little bit confusing. Don't worry, we're gonna get to it in the next season. It's gonna really spell itself out, or go back and listen to some of the Matthew stuff. It really spells itself out there in the book of Matthew as well. So if this feels weird and uncomfortable and unsustainable, and like this wouldn't be the way that you think it would make sense for things to be for all of time, well, all right. Then it sounds like you agree with the Bible because where it goes next is a resolution to all of this, a completion to all of this, in a way that makes sense and is for everybody. How that blessing from the descendants of Abraham gets handed off to all of these people groups that in the Old Testament God was saying, don't intermarry with, is going to get spelled out in the stuff that we get into coming up next. But in the meantime, I sense that Nehemiah is real grumpy about it, and probably we're gonna get some very interesting action sequences. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt, this is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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