So here you and I are in Nehemiah chapter 13, the very last chapter of the narrative part of the Old Testament before we get a big long narrative break. And then the next thing that happens after that is John the Baptist and Jesus getting born and all of that business. So it's a pretty big deal how we're going to leave off here. We're going to have to sit and think about it for a long time. It's like when you play a ball game and you don't have another one scheduled for a week or a month even. Whatever happens there, you just get to sit and think about that for all of that time until you get back on the field. So what we're staring down here, and it's kind of a bummer because chapter 13 of Nehemiah, the last narrative chapter of the Old Testament, it's not going very well because Nehemiah, the guy who's held everything together, from a human perspective at least, he left everything in great shape and went back to cup bear for his buddy and the king, Artaxerxes I of Persia. And then he came back to Jerusalem to discover that it was all screwed up and that it wasn't just randomly all screwed up, but that the guy who should have been most invested in making sure it didn't all get screwed up, Eliashib, the priest, instead let it get all screwed up. He was instrumental in letting the whole thing get screwed up. So Nehemiah comes back to town, and as we discussed yesterday, he was on a bit of a righteous rampage. And I have no problem with this. He went and did an eviction. He comes back to Jerusalem probably in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes. The text is a little ambiguous in terms of how to read the timeline here. But he comes back after a significant time away. Tobiah, one of the three bad guys who's been ruining everything, has moved into part of the temple. And what's been moved out to accommodate him? Well, all of the storerooms of all of the places where all of the tithes are supposed to go to fund all of the systems and all of the people who operate the systems that make the whole religious life of the Jewish people in Jerusalem go. The whole point of building a wall, the whole point of the book of Nehemiah was to get the wall built so that you could preserve the people and the culture and the religion and the chosen people of God inside the walls and not have them get destroyed by outsiders. And now instead they just immediately are wrecking themselves from the inside. And the guy who is at the helm of the disaster is the high priest. It's just awful. So Nehemiah comes back, he takes all the stuff out of the storeroom that Tobiah has in there, and he's like, get this stupid crap out of my storeroom. And he throws it all out. And it's probably a really big scene. And if we just stopped right there in that part of the story in Nehemiah 13, we might think that Nehemiah was being a little bit of a jerk. But if you look at what Tobiah's presence displaced, you realize this strikes at the heart of the entire thing. So let's pick it up from Nehemiah 13, 6. But while all of this is going on, I wasn't in Jerusalem. For in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I had returned to the king. Sometime later I asked permission and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Elieasheb had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah's household goods out of the room. I gave orders to purify the rooms, and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God with the grain offerings and the incense. I wonder who he had purify those rooms. I bet it wasn't Eliasheb. I bet he had some other priest, one of Eliasheb's underlings, do it. You know why? Because apparently Elie Asheib's purification doesn't mean much. This guy's the chief purifier. This is what he does, right? It's his job. He goes around, he purifies things. Remember? Okay, just a second. Nehemiah chapter three, you go all the way back here. Remember the build montage in Nehemiah 3 when they start building the walls and we get all the names of all the people and Chad and Daryl and Steve worked real hard on the dungate and all of that kind of stuff. Remember how it opens? Elie Asheb, the high priest and his fellow priests, went to work and rebuilt the sheep gate. They dedicated it and set its doors in place. So at the beginning of all of this stuff, he's the dedicator, he is the purifier. But then we turn a few pages over and we go back to Nehemiah chapter 12 and the rededication ceremony. And here he is again doing the purification rituals when the priests and Levites had purified themselves ceremonially. They purified the people, the gates and the walls. Elieashib's the guy who oversees all of that. Well now Nehemiah has to order up some purification of a thing that needs to be cleansed ceremonially because of stuff that Elieashib has screwed up in his weird, twisted up dealings with Tobiah. What exactly are those twisted up dealings once again? Well, back here in Nehemiah 6.8, we get a little hint as to how Tobiah of the three bad guys is the one who has the most staying power. It seems like it's going to be Sandbalot. He comes up the most, he's well positioned. It seems like he has the ethnic heritage and grudge needed to go right through the front door and cause problems. But his right through the front door attack on Nehemiah gets thwarted. Tobiah seems to be the most clever of the three enemies of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the wall because Tobiah ingratiates himself. He goes so far as to give his daughters, granddaughters, nieces whatever in marriage to create twisted, tangled-up alliances that will give him leverage over the descendants of Abraham, who are the inheritors and doers of all of this work. Okay, Nehemiah 6. Also in those days, the nobles of Judah were sending many letters to Tobiah, and replies from Tobiah kept coming to them. So he's a busybody, he's a little chatterbox. He's just, you know, keeping up with old friends. What? Why are you being so sensitive about it? I just check in from time to time. I like to know how people are doing. I like to know what the scuttle butt is. It's no problem. Here I'm just a social guy. Verse 18. Formini and Judah were under oath to him. Whoa. They've got obligations to this outsider, this Ammonite who has an ancient blood feud with them. Or to put it another way, they are, in political terms, compromised. For Mini and Judah, again, were under oath to him, since he was son-in-law to Shechaniah, son of Era, and his son, Jehohanan, had married the daughter of Meshulam, son of Barekiah. Now, when we were back in chapter six, those names, I don't think you'd heard them enough, probably. I hadn't heard them enough for those to fully hit. I mean, we've noticed that Meshulam seems to come up a lot. He was an influential guy who's at the hub or in the middle of several branches of the family tree, however you want to picture it. But now that we've been through it and we did that stupid song and we've got all the lists of names that happened in the second half of Nehemiah, you caught all of those, right? Shechaniah, Jehohanan, Meshulam, Barekiah. These are big time players. These are huge names. And Tobiah is right in the middle of all of them. But the difference is those four guys, theoretically, keep showing up and trying to do the right thing. It's not perfect. It seems like it's a little bit of a slog for them, but they are there, even if it was a bit reluctant. They are there when the crying happened. They are there when the celebration happened. They are there saying, read us the book of the law two different times. They are there at the dedication of the wall, specifically named as being there at these events. And they were there to roll up their sleeves and put their work on hold and rebuild the wall. Tobiah isn't there for any of that, but he has purchase with them. He can whisper things in their ear. They owe him favors. Their financial fate is tied to Tobiah's fate. And what a crazy thing that that is what seems to have derailed this whole deal with Nehemiah. How much work did it take to build these walls and to put all this together? How hard was it to get all these people on the same page to agree to do this thing? And one dude, one dude with an axe to grind who isn't pulling in the same direction, but is massively socially sophisticated and slick. Surely he must have been. That's all it takes. He gets in the mix and sows chaos, and no one else can match his sophistication and outwork him. And as a result, he gets what he wants from the inside working out. I guess a couple of observations about this. Number one, if you were thinking about it, and you probably weren't thinking about it, but if you were thinking about it, don't be that guy. This is the kind of person who ends up being reviled by all and whose legacy is one of shame. The most embarrassing moments in my life are moments where I have acted more like Tobiah and not like Nehemiah. My friends, we just got a covenant together, not to weasel. Don't weasel. I'm gonna try not to weasel. You try not to weasel. It might seem like you can get things that way or like we're being terribly shrewd, but this is dishonest negotiating. And this guy is a saboteur. All of it is happening behind this pearly white smile. Ick, we gotta renounce the ways of Tobiah. Observation number two. It's interesting how you read through Ezra and Nehemiah, and the quick overview could cause you to go through that and be like, man, it just seems like they're being really maybe fundamentalist about this whole we need to be a people unto ourselves. You know, like when Zerubbabel was all mad and he's like, you can't, you're not gonna get to help me build the wall. And you read that for the first time. You're like, dude, the people came and volunteered to help build the wall. Like, come on, man, be cool. Why are you freaking out? Well, I guess ultimately Zerubabal is vindicated there. He was able to read between the lines in the way you and I can't from across the ages. He knew this wasn't sincere. He kept at arm's length all the tobias, all the weaselers. And you can't argue with results. You got a temple built, he got it done in an era where that shouldn't have been achievable, yet somehow it was. Nehemiah did the same thing, and at times you're like, dang, dude, like why are you just going nuclear on these guys before they've done anything? A preemptive strike feels a little much. Maybe you could try to make nice with them and teach them about the Lord, and that would be better. But Nehemiah apparently could see more clearly than you and I can from across the ages that nope, Tobiah, Geshem, and Sanbalat were snakes. They were not what they held themselves out as being. He detected it. He did not put his pearls before swine, he kept them at arm's length, and the second he was gone, less sophisticated people got taken advantage of, and the whole thing that Nehemiah built started to unravel just that quickly. You gotta pay attention to some names that don't feel very familiar and you might not catch on the first try. But with even moderate effort, even you and I can look at the book of Nehemiah and be like, oh dang, this is ending on a note that kind of vindicates how overly cautious Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel all have been about this whole mingling thing. It doesn't make sense to give the keys to the city, the keys to the fate of your people to those who don't share your values and don't believe in your God and don't want to do this, at least in the fifth century BC, with this unique people group set apart for the glory of God. We could surely have a lively conversation about now and the merits of you know having the whole world be one community and all of that. It's a different time, it's a different thing. It theologically means something different. But back then, these guys are looking like they were right all along to be suspicious of these outsiders who did not love the same things and did not want the same outcomes that they wanted. As soon as Nehemiah turns his back, this Tobiah guy comes and causes massive problems. I was gonna get to the part where we saw the effects of what Tobaya did, but we didn't get there. So we'll just get there tomorrow because that's how this works. It's pretty cool that way. All right, I think that's plenty. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.