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_00I might have been too harsh last time around. I've been thinking about that since yesterday. Maybe, maybe not. It's a bad situation. This is hard for me not to feel vicarious irritation on the part of Nehemiah. Toward, I mean, he had this beautiful thing. He built it. It was all set up. It was ready to go from chapter 8 to chapter 12 of Nehemiah. It's this beautiful story of this guy with a vision cashing in all of his chips with everybody there to make a bunch of people who didn't get along super well, to get them all on the same page, to have one vision, to have it all paid for and worked out. All the structures are there. Everything should just go. It should be on autopilot. And then he leaves for metaphorically like two seconds, and things come unraveled. So I it's weird because I do think he built something beautiful, and you become invested as you read through Nehemiah in this beautiful thing that Nehemiah is helping to build, and then to see it come undone so quickly here in the final chapter when you thought you were just maybe going to get a victory lap and then it would all be over, maybe one more list of names, and we'll just call it good and move on to the New Testament. No. Instead, the hits just keep coming foomp, foom, foom, like a tennis ball machine that's out of control and firing more quickly than any human could possibly feel the balls and put them in a basket. That's what he's dealing with. Well, whether my tone was a slight overreaction to an ancient text or not, the record on the page is what it is. At the end of the renewal of the covenant in Nehemiah chapter 10, everybody said, We will not neglect the house of our God. They all promised it. And then in Nehemiah 13, everybody seems to be neglecting the house of their God. And so Nehemiah asks them, Why is the house of God being neglected? And we don't really get an answer. Maybe it's a rhetorical question. Maybe they all just hung their heads and slumped again. But Nehemiah, to his credit, he doesn't linger long in the screw-ups, he just gets right to fixing things. He calls together all the people, he stations them back at their posts, put them back where they belong. Then all Judah brings in the tithes of grain and new wine and oil, puts them in the storerooms, the freshly purified and detobified storerooms, and he puts more responsible people in charge of that. So we can check one thing off the list. That's one tennis ball back in the bucket. We're making progress. Let's keep going and see how other things have played out in Nehemiah's absence. Verse 15 of Nehemiah 13. In those days I, Nehemiah, saw men in Judah treading wine presses on the Sabbath, and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys, together with wine, grapes, figs, and all other kinds of loads. And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Therefore I warned them against selling food on that day. Men from Tyre, who lived in Jerusalem, were bringing in fish and all kinds of merchandise and selling them in Jerusalem on the Sabbath to the people of Judah. I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them, What is this wicked thing you're doing, desecrating the Sabbath day? Didn't your forefathers do the same things so that our God brought all this calamity upon us and upon the city? Now you're stirring up more wrath against Israel by desecrating the Sabbath. Fump. Now you might recall, and at this point, probably not might, probably you definitely recall, that there are three things that were promised in the renewal of the covenant in Nehemiah chapter 10, with all the people. Their names are listed. All the people who were pals with Tobiah the Ammonite, all their names are in the list. I sang them to you one time. They're all there. They all agreed to this as part of not neglecting the house of God. They agreed to three things. They said they would not give our daughters in marriage to the peoples around us, nor take their daughters for our sons. They also said that they would take care of the house of God and that they would provide all of these things, and that the people that work there would be funded and all of that. They also agreed, here in verse 31 of Nehemiah 10, that when the neighboring peoples bring merchandise or grain to sell on the Sabbath, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath or on any holy day. Every seventh year we will forgo working the land and will cancel all debts. Why are they doing that? Because it's a command of God, and they were supposed to do it. I mean, it says that right back here. All these people now joined their brothers, the nobles, and bound themselves. They bind themselves with a curse and an oath to follow the law of God given through Moses, the servant of God, and to obey carefully all the commands, regulations, and decrees of the Lord our Lord. That was one of them. So they were supposed to do it. Now look, there's a whole conversation about how this works now. And we talked about it a whole bunch in the book of Matthew, because a lot of the intellectual descendants of the people who were really trying to get it right from this era of Nehemiah, they kind of won after a while, almost too much won. And they had made even more bonus rules about what it meant to honor the Sabbath. And Jesus' disciples didn't necessarily play by exactly their set of extra bonus rules that evolved in the ensuing four centuries. And so there's some standoffs between Jesus and the religious leaders, that is, the intellectual descendants of the people who were actually getting it right here in Nehemiah. And we covered all of that in the big long season we did on the book of Matthew. There are expressions of Christianity today who look at the whole corpus of scripture and they're like, we really should still have hardcore rules, like tight, serious rules about the Sabbath. In fact, the Sabbath, some Christians would say has been so neglected that we should even go over the top and make it like the central defining thing of our entire movement. Then there are other expressions of Christianity on the other end of the spectrum who would say, hey, the whole thing is fulfilled, and Sabbath is more of a concept than an actual thing to be observed, and we're going to do it this other way. In this conversation, we're not going to be settling any of that or solving any of that. I know that there are a bunch of you listening to this who probably land in very different places on that. And I know there are some of you listening to this who aren't even sure if there's a God at all. So my end game with this little chit-chat that we're having right now is not to solve what ultimately is the best way to honor the Old Testament concept of Sabbath or commands of Sabbath, rather to say, for these people in the fifth century BC in Jerusalem, they had a command from God. They were a unique people set apart from God, and they had covenanted with God very publicly. They'd put their names on paper, they sealed the covenant. Remember, those who sealed it were Nehemiah the governor and then all these other people. They sealed it. Their names are on it. They put their reputations next to it. They bound themselves to honoring these things about the Sabbath. And then Nehemiah goes away for a minute and they just immediately stop doing it. Why did they stop obeying the rules about the Sabbath? Well, because they were losing money. It's not really hard to figure out at all. Nobody else around them had Sabbath expectations. So they would want to come to the big city and do business, and basically you're taking away 16.7% of your business days for every week, every year by taking every seventh day off. That's a decent loss of revenue. And the deal was that they had all agreed to is that, hey, it's worth it. We're weird. We're different. We have a different set of rules. God provides for us. He's always provided for us. He provided for us in the desert. He provided for us just now by softening the hearts of the kings toward us to fund these walls that we just got done building that I'm leaning against right now as I make this observation. So we do things weird because God said to do things weird. And other people aren't going to understand it, and they're not going to really get why we would just forego money, but it might make them wonder a little bit and whether they ever really think about it or do anything with it or not. That's okay. We're going to obey God. And we pushed our chips to the middle of the table and our names and our reputations, and we said we would obey God and that this is what we would do. And then they turned around and they didn't do it. So understandably, Nehemiah is pretty irritated. Now I've said all along, Nehemiah's a guy who understands the big grand history of everything we get here in the Old Testament. He knows where he fits into it, and he's not just trying to build some walls. The walls are the easy part. He's trying to rebuild a people. But it's tough because there's a whole lot of balls in play. Boom, boom, boom. That's very difficult for him as like the one guy who gets it to field all of those and get things under control. But he's trying and listen to him plead with his people. For how many is the third time, the fourth time that he has rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them, Come on, you're the leaders. You're the ones who are supposed to get it. You're the ones who bear more responsibility of this. You're the heads of households. You're the ones that people look up to. You're the ones who are making this happen. Don't stand there and act like you don't know how it happened. It was you. So for the third or fourth time, he rebukes them in front of everybody. For the third or fourth time, they all just shuffle around with their heads down because we don't ever really get responses from them. They know they're wrong. They know they just violated their integrity and their word. But look at the way Nehemiah ties it into something so much bigger than just don't be hypocrites. Don't say you're going to do a thing and then not do a thing. I mean, that's bad. You don't want to do that. Nobody wants to be a hypocrite theoretically. I don't know. Some people like power more than not being a hypocrite, but theoretically, all basically moral people don't want to be a hypocrite. That would be a very bad thing to realize that you are. But his appeal to them is more than just don't be a fraud. His appeal to them is you're wrecking a thing. We have a covenant with God. This isn't just basic cultural morality. That's great. We want to do that. But this is bigger. We are in a relationship, a unique, set-apart relationship with the actual deity that made all things and sustains all existence. And he told us to do stuff, and he's demonstrated his might and his power. And he's made it very clear that when we obey him and honor him, he will bless us and sustain us. And when we don't, he will withdraw that blessing and even use people far worse than us to punish us, no matter how head-scratching that might seem. Guys, what are you doing? You are bringing calamity upon us by violating the covenant. That's the language he uses. Didn't your forefathers do the same things? So that our God brought all this calamity upon us and upon the city. Now you're stirring up more wrath against Israel by desecrating the Sabbath. He's pleading with them to see history and the grand story the way he sees it, but they just can't seem to do it. They see their moment and these nobles just can't seem to get out of their own way. And some of this is gonna stick, and some of this is gonna stick to even extreme levels, as I mentioned a minute ago. But it's just another one of those moments that's a reminder of what we've learned throughout the entire Old Testament. You see these exceptional people from time to time. I mean, it's very rare that we just get a straight up hero like Nehemiah, who just seems to keep getting it right. I mean, he's less compromised than just about any hero of the Old Testament. But for the most part, what we see are people in varying shades of gray, of goodness and consistency who sometimes get it right, sometimes don't, and everybody has a tough time getting out of their own way. And everybody gives into their selfishness and their darker impulses are just about everybody at one point or another. And even when the conditions are perfectly conducive for getting it right, the people who should most know how to get it right still don't get it right. But it's fun, kind of in a way, to get to strike the tone that I get to strike as we talk about this when we go through these sort of nightmare passages. But the truth of the matter is, I mean, there's a really solid chance I would have been one of the people getting yelled at here too. It's tough to get things right. It's tough not to be selfish. It's tough not to go along with what everybody is doing. It's tough not to weasel, it's tough not to be tricked by weasling and emotional manipulation and getting twisted in knots by thoughtless social promises that you've made. It's easy to get things wrong, but it's hard to get things right. I'm just reminded once again as Nehemiah's running around trying to pick up all these rapid-fire tennis balls and get them back in the basket and get everything back in place that the Old Testament really is a story meant to show us the frailty of humanity and our inability to solve our problem, even if we can muster something good for a little bit. We just cannot keep it. We'll look tomorrow at how the whole Sabbath controversy worked out and what Nehemiah did to solve it. And we will still get past this rough patch right here at the end of the book and look toward something much better to come later on. But for the time being, we're kind of in it with Nehemiah here. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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