The other day I went up to the tennis center here in town. We have one of those. It's a really cool place. I like all the people there. And I decided that I was going to hit on the ball machine. They got these robots, and you throw like 200 balls in the hopper, and it's just boom, boom, boom with that really satisfying tennis ball sound, and it moves them around kind of at random and you work on your swing, and it's a good workout. You get all sweaty, listen to an audio book or whatever. And I don't remember how many buckets in I was, but I kind of felt like, ah, I'm a little bit sore. I should shut it down before this bucket's done. So I could run all the way over there and turn off the machine on the other side of the court, or I thought I could just be a baseball player again, because baseball's my native sport. So I'm like, I'll just play some defense over here. I love playing the field and baseball. And so I set my racket down and I get my hands all loose, and the ball comes over and boom, you know, catch it real clean, and I flip it over into the cart where the balls are held on my side of the court. Here comes another one over to my left. Boom! No problem. Flagged that, tossed it into the cart. I'm making little tosses like I'm turning double plays. It was so fun. I mean, there's nobody there. It's just me having fun, like a little kid. Boom. Here comes another one. Got it. Boom. Got it. And they're coming pretty fast at high speed and a pretty quick rate of fire. And I tell you what, this worked for like the first 10 balls, and I was feeling really good about myself. And then maybe around ball 11, I got one. I fielded it. I flipped it over to the cart, but I missed. It kind of bounced out, rattled around, and rolled back at me. And so now I got a ball under my feet. I'm like, uh, I better pick that up. Foom. Oh, that's right. They keep coming. I don't get a break. So I reached up. I tried to field it with my left, but it kind of bounced off my hand, and now it's rolling around at my feet. I'm like, oh, I gotta get both of these real quick. I'm gonna trip on the boom. Okay. And then it was out of control. Now we got three balls in play, four balls in play, and they're hitting me, and just nothing's gonna work. There's no way to recover. I've lost control of the situation. I cannot clean things up faster than the rate of things being messed up. I think that's how Nehemiah is probably feeling here in Nehemiah 13. It's not just one problem. It's not just Tobiah the Ammonite being a weasel and Elie Asheib the rube falling for it. It is so much more than that. And we've only started to address one of the problems. But what can Nehemiah do after his time away, cupbearing for the king again, now that he's returned to Jerusalem? What can he do other than just try to get ahead of the thing and clean up the mess that has been made? So he discovers that Elyashib the high priest has moved in an enemy of the people, Tobiah, someone to whom many of the Jewish people in Jerusalem at this time were indebted because of business and marital alliances are all tangled up. Well, Tobiah moved into the temple complex, and all the stuff that was needed to fund the temple got kicked out of the storerooms, and now things are breaking down from the inside out. Nehemiah comes back, he throws all of Tobiah's stuff out, get this stupid stuff out of here. And then he has probably better priests than El Yasheib purify the rooms. He literally has like an exorcism. That's how disgusted he is by Tobiah's presence there. He has a religious ritual after he gets Tobiah out of the room. That's a severe rejection. And what he discovers after all of this is that the damage is really pretty great. Nehemiah 13, 10. I, Nehemiah, also learned that the portions assigned to the Levites had not been given to them, and that all the Levites and singers responsible for the service had gone back to their own fields. Dang it! We put so much work into organizing all of this up in Nehemiah chapter 10. That's one, two, three lousy pages ago. There were, I mean, literally only three things in this whole responsibilities of the covenant that everyone agreed to. I mean, they were crying and singing. Everybody was in on this, remember? The thing number one, we're not going to give our daughters in marriage to the peoples around us or take their daughters for our sons. Okay, well, I mean, I guess we see why now. Here's a wonderful case study and why that's a bad idea with this whole to buy a fiasco. And then the second thing that was in the covenant that they all agreed to in Nehemiah 10, just three pages earlier, was when the neighboring peoples bring merchandise or grain to sell on the Sabbath, we're not going to buy from them on the Sabbath or on any holy day. Every seventh year we'll forgo working the lands and we will cancel all debts. Well, so far so good in Nehemiah 13. But spoiler alert, we're going to move forward in like four more sentences. They're going to get that one wrong, too. But then the other thing, the third big point of the responsibilities of the covenant they all agreed to was we assume the responsibility. We will not neglect the house of our God. That is in quotes. They all said, we will not neglect the house of our God. It's the last verse of Nehemiah chapter 10. And now I'm over here in Nehemiah chapter 13. And everybody who said that has now totally neglected the house of their God. Dang it. So remember, we talked about this. You got to have people who are descended from certain people in this culture. You got to have people with certain skill sets and talent. It takes a ton of training to do this kind of work, right? It's very important work. It means that somebody's got to pay for them to do this professionally. And now they're out working their own fields because all of the whole financial system that was built on the generosity and the agreement of the people to fund all of this has just been wrecked by the weaseling and selfishness of Tobiah and by the ineptitude and cowardice of Eliasheeb and the big prominent families into which Tobiah has ingratiated himself through weaselly marriages and business dealings. So I guess the whole deal's off. Because somebody married somebody and we don't want to be mean to Tobiah or make anybody feel bad. So we're just going to scrap our entire way of life and everything we stand for because we just really need to support Tobiah right now. Because he's having a really emotional time and this is very difficult for him. So all of our principles and everything we've agreed to and everything we believe and our entire way of life is just going to be thrown entirely out the window to accommodate whatever manipulative emotional nonsense Tobiah has going. I guess that's how it's going to be. What's Nehemiah going to do about that? Well, Nehemiah does not suffer this kind of thing, and he doesn't suffer this. Nehemiah 13, 11. So I, Nehemiah, rebuked the officials and asked them, why is the house of God neglected? Then I called them together and stationed them at their post. Did you catch that quote? Why is the house of God neglected? It's a direct corollary to what they all promised in the last verse of Nehemiah 10. We will not neglect the house of our God. Nehemiah 13, Nehemiah's question to them, why is the house of God neglected? Because remember you said, We will not neglect the house of our God, but now the house of God is neglected. Anybody want to clear up what's going on here? This is not the first time Nehemiah has had to call out these prominent family members and these leaders in front of everybody. Remember, when they were battling Tobiah and Sanbalat and Geshem, who were posing an overt threat, like with swords and spears and stuff, as he's trying to contend with all of that, there were problems on the inside with a bunch of these rich families, it seems like most of whom were entangled with Tobiah. They were exploiting the poor people and ruining their lives, and the poor people were having to sell their own kids into slavery in order to continue to exist. And you'll recall, Nehemiah got all of the big fancy people together and in front of everybody, he called them out and made them own it, and they all hung their heads. I mean, that's my reading between the lines, but their words make it sound like they hung their heads, and they just said very succinctly, yeah, okay, we're not going to do that. We will we will do what we're supposed to do. And then he leaves for a little bit and they go right back to the same kind of nonsense they were doing before. It's like me trying to field all of those tennis balls. They're just coming so fast. I can't watch every single tennis ball. It's just too many tennis balls. And it's the same with Nehemiah. He can't watch every single household, he can't be there all the time watching all of this stuff, and it had to be super discouraging for him, feeling like if he's not right there, slowing everything down and managing everybody's behavior, it's all gonna fall apart. So Nehemiah has massive gravitas, massive credibility, right? So he's gonna use it here to get things back on track. So in verse 12, all Judah brought the tithes of grain, new wine, and oil into the storerooms. Okay, so you got a problem. This is Nehemiah's style. Just fix it, just unbreak it. So he takes the thing and he puts it right back where it was a minute ago. Okay, we're not gonna make a bunch of new rules. We're just gonna do exactly the thing we said we were going to do, remember? So bring in the things that are now gone because of Tobiah and Eliasheb's shenanigans and put them back in the room where they go. And now we're gonna need somebody to be in charge of making sure they are distributed and managed properly because this is what we agreed to do. We all said we will not neglect the house of our God. Here's the practical way we're gonna pull that off. Verse 13. I put Shalemiah the priest, Zadok the scribe, and a Levite named Padiah in charge of the storerooms, and made Hanan, son of Zakur, the son of Mataniah, their assistant, because these men were considered trustworthy. They were made responsible for distributing the supplies to their brothers. What a humiliating repudiation for the high priest and his family this must have been. I mean, I guess maybe you're still the high priest for the moment, but though I guess by title you're qualified to nurture the souls of the people and lead them, you unfortunately are not trustworthy enough to oversee the finances. So we're going to put a buffer between you and that, and we're going to put people of lesser prominence, but far greater trustworthiness in charge of these things. And then Nehemiah says something that he said a few other times, and I don't think I'm going to go all the way down the rabbit hole on this right now, because this is also kind of the last line of the book of Nehemiah. So we're just going to remember this. It's going to get said a couple more times before this book is over. But he says, verse 14, Remember me for this, O my God, and do not blot out what I have so faithfully done for the house of my God and its services. He sounds a little exasperated, and I don't blame him. He had everything where it needed to be, and some combination of the ineptitude and lack of character of the people with power to see that plan through wrecked the whole thing unbelievably quickly. So now he has painstakingly walked for 55 days to go and straighten this thing out so he can turn around and walk fifty-five more days back to his actual job. But everything isn't fixed yet. We still got to get to the rest of what needs to be straightened out, and we will get to that next time around.