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SPEAKER_01I once knew a guy who rented out a little house and he used to get real mad at his tenants, and then he'd just evict them by throwing all of their stuff on the curb. I got you have no judgment as to whether that's what he should have done or not. The situation, as I understand it, was pretty bad over there. He wasn't very attentive to things. He would go away for long periods of time, and then when he would come back, stuff was way out of control with lots and lots of people living in his tiny little house, and there'd be a yelling match, and then he'd throw everything on the curb. This was just the cycle, not ideal on anybody's part, but it's what it was. And I kind of got a chuckle at it, but I was like, oh, there's a pile on the curb. Okay, that makes sense. The cycle continues. Well, here in Nehemiah chapter 13, we get a similar situation where a much better governor, a much better master of the house than the gentleman I'm talking about, in this case, Nehemiah, the guy who got the wall rebuilt in 50 some days and is just a great leader in every way. Nehemiah has left things in wonderful condition, everything in order, all set to go, and he's gone away for a period of time. He goes away at the end of Nehemiah 13.3, but then immediately in Nehemiah 13.4, we discover that all kinds of problems have cropped up while he's gone. And when Nehemiah gets back, he's gonna go into full on, throw your crap on the curb eviction mode to try to rectify the situation. Here's how it goes Nehemiah 13.4. Before this, Elieashib, the priest, had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. Everything's going great here. Elashib seems like a decent fellow from the things that we've seen earlier, but now it goes off the rails. He was closely associated with Tobiah, who, as we talked about yesterday, is the main weasel of the whole story of Nehemiah. His two associates, Sanbalat and Geshem, you would expect them to be turds, but Tobiah, he's the guy in your organization who curries favor with everybody and makes strategic office alliances and is in on all of the gossip and strategically passes along, you know, positive compliments that you would want to hear. But also is very heavy-hearted to have to tell you about some things that he heard that might concern you. It's troubling. I would want you to know, you know, I'm just worried about them. You know, the office weasel. That's who Tobiah is. And as soon as Nehemiah left, we discover he started weaseling again. And Elieasheb, the priest, this is a very important guy. He was a sucker for it. He fell for the whole thing. Verse 5. And Elieasheb had provided Tobiah with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain, new wine, and oil prescribed for the Levites, singers, and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests. This is a huge problem. As soon as Nehemiah was gone, Elyashib apparently got suckered into letting Tobiah move into sacred space set apart to sustain, to provide for all of these things that have been put in place. Tobiah moving into this space in the temple complex effectively kicked to the curb the Levites, the singers, and the gatekeepers. Well, the Levites are the ones who make the whole temple system work. The singers are the ones who communicate the message and use art to keep people understanding the narrative and the story and how they fit into the story. And the gatekeepers are the ones who make the walls that were super expensive to build actually work because you can build all the walls you want, but if you don't have gates and they aren't managed, it's like you have no walls at all. So this Tobia guy, without firing a single shot, used weaseling and manipulation to undermine so much of what had been accomplished during Nehemiah's reforms. And it all happened right under the leadership of the guy who was supposed to preserve Nehemiah's reforms. This is an utter disaster on the surface. It might seem like, okay, whatever, he rented him a room. Who cares? But that renting of a room or just giving of a room flies directly in the face of what everybody decided. Tobiah was an Ammonite, there's an old blood feud with the Ammonites, they don't like the Jews. Everybody had decided at the beginning of Nehemiah 13, we're not giving any of this space to the Ammonites or the Moabites per the instructions of God dating back all the way to Deuteronomy 23, and even that gets violated by giving Tobiah this space. Well, now we get to the eviction part, verse 6. But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem. For in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon I, I'd return to the king. Couple questions there. As I mentioned yesterday, there's ambiguity here in terms of the original language and how different translations translate it as to when exactly Nehemiah had left his temporary governorship in the province of Yehud, that's what they called it, or beyond the river, Jerusalem, that is, and gone back to serve in the court of Artaxerxes. Maybe he'd made a few trips over the years here, but effectively, during some point in the twelve years that had elapsed between Nehemiah 13, three and Nehemiah 13. Nehemiah was back serving with Artaxerxes, presumably in one of the many Persian capitals, in this case, Babylon. It would not be unusual to refer to a Persian Achaemenid king as the king of Babylon, especially if they were governing for a period of time from the city of Babylon. So I would assume this is Nehemiah's way of saying that he wasn't in Susa during this time, at Artaxerxes' preferred court. He was at Artaxerxes' other court in Babylon. And apparently Nehemiah gets wind of something again, just like he did back in Nehemiah chapter one, and he asks the king's permission to come back. So it's weird, like one little phrase here in Nehemiah 13, 6. Sometime later I asked the king's permission and came back to Jerusalem. That one little sentence is almost like a repeat of all of Nehemiah chapter one. We just don't get all the drama of it. And so it goes on to say in verse 7 Here I, Nehemiah, learned about the evil thing Elieasheb had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. Nehemiah is a hundred percent unambiguous here. This isn't an oversight. This isn't a mistake that my friend Elieasheeb made. This isn't something where he got tricked or fooled. And, you know, we all make errors here. This is just an it's a clerical error, it's a mistake, it's an oversight. No, no, no. Nehemiah is not one to suffer fools. He is not one to suffer manipulation and nonsense. He is one to call out crap when he sees crap, and here he is calling this exactly what it is. No, no, no. There was no question about what the ground rules were going to be, Eliasheb, when I left. We all covenanted to a certain thing. This is binding. You're supposed to be the one who leads us in getting it right, and instead, you're the one leading the charge in getting it wrong. Maybe Nehemiah before wasn't quite sure what he had in this Eliasheb guy, but you learn a lot about people when you're not there and you see what they do when they imagine there's no accountability or they are in charge. And I imagine that someone like Nehemiah felt like, huh. Okay, I see who you are now. There is no longer any question about who you are and what your character is, and whether this is born out of weakness or guile and malice, either way, Elieasheb, the result is the same. Your actions are evil. And here we sort of get a temple cleansing, if you will. It kind of feels like Jesus busting into this same temple complex 400 years and change later and flipping over tables because of the compromising nonsense that had been allowed to go on there. The echoes are very crisp with this one. So sometime later, I, Nehemiah, asked his Artaxerxes' 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 here comes the eviction, and threw all Tobiah's household goods out of the room. Now you've probably heard about the whole squatter's rights controversy that has become an issue since the housing market got destroyed, at least in my country. I think globally it's pretty bad as well. In my country, there's some, I think, dumb, archaic laws whereby if you can break into a house and set up shop there and change the locks, the actual owner of the property has a real tough time legally getting you out. And it's nonsense. And you hear these stories about these squatters just basically trying to steal people's houses. And what happens is people go to their house and they're like, oh no, there's a guy in there. You have to get out. And the squatters are like, uh, if I was bold enough to do this, I'm not going to leave because you yelled at me. And they just dig in and create a civil legal process because it's not treated as a criminal legal process in most states. And then it takes forever and effectively they wear down the financial reserves of the property owner and try to steal the house for themselves. It's really, really dirty. And so you have these good law-abiding citizens who try to get back their houses from squatters using these conventional means, and it oftentimes doesn't work, and it takes forever. It's very, very expensive. But then you have a few other people who are like, yeah, here's what we're going to do. We're not going to call the authorities. We're going to round up about 15 dudes and we're going to go in there with sticks, and maybe we'll beat people or break things. But we are going to throw out the illegal occupants of our space and we're going to take back what was stolen. And they did a violent thing in taking it. We're going to do a violent thing and getting them out. And maybe some of you are like, I don't like that at all. Cool. All right. That's cool. Maybe others of you are like, that's what needs to be done. That's how you solve it. Cool. I can also see that perspective. What I am saying here is that the latter approach is the one that, given the current state of laws, seems to get results. Nehemiah goes with the latter approach here. He's not a guy who does the red tape bureaucracy thing. He's a guy who sees a problem, solves a problem. Thinker and doer. What is happening here? Who are the players? What are you trying to pull? What is this scam? Cool. I'm cutting through everything. I'm not going to write impotent letters back to Arta Xerxes or some other governor asking permission for certain legal protocols to be implemented so that maybe someday after a lengthy 10-year process of filing tons of paperwork, we could get Tobaya out of there. Uh-uh. Nehemiah himself walks into the room, grabs the stuff, and decisively throws it on the curb. Now again, you might hear that and you might be thinking, dang, dude, that seems like a little bit of an overreaction. I mean, we can at least be nice about this, but as the chapter unfolds and we discover what Tobiah's actions have wrought, I think you'll understand it better. And as we dig back into Nehemiah further and look at really who Tobiah is and how he pulled this off and exactly what he was trying to do with all of this, I think we'll just respect Nehemiah's decisive actions that much more. Quite the eviction, and it's an eviction that has some of the undertones, some of the echoes of Jesus flipping over tables of the money changers and cleansing, purifying the temple as well. Indeed, even that language of purifying is going to get used in the next verse here in Nehemiah 13. So we got a conundrum. Things were good. Nehemiah wasn't there to watch things. Stuff went to garbage pretty quickly with a weasley agitator getting the cooperation of somebody who was supposed to be the leader, Ely Ashib the priest. And nobody had the positioning or the leadership or the courage to do anything about it until Nehemiah walked back in and immediately dealt with the problem. But all of this tells a bigger story of things looking like maybe these reforms aren't going to stick after all. This had to be a bitter pill for Nehemiah to swallow. We'll unpack at the final chapter of this book more next time around. All right, I'm Matt. This is a 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.