Nehemiah 11–13

0:00 So, all three of my children attended, and two of them graduated from, and the third one is working on graduating from, Highlands Latin School here in the city. Highlands is a classical Christian education from start to finish. I didn't have a classical Christian education. I just went to a public school in East Texas, fairly small town. But I feel like over the last 15 years or so of helping my kids through Highlands Latin School that I have gotten a classical Christian education.

0:30 I know about the famous men of Rome. I know about the famous men of the Middle Ages. I could tell you a whole lot about the Western literary canon. And I can tell you a lot about Greek mythology. One of the most famous stories in Greek mythology is the story of Sisyphus, which you probably know the story, Sisyphus, you may not know this, was an ancient, at least legendary, king of the city of Corinth, the same Corinth that Paul wrote to many, many years later.

1:01 He was a famous king of that city, and in various ways through his life, he offended, so the legend goes, the gods on Mount Olympus, and so they decided to afflict him with a particular punishment. He was condemned for all of eternity to roll a giant boulder up a mountain, only at the very last second to have the boulder slip and fall down to the bottom again, where Sisyphus would have to start all over again. Now that's, in the Western literary canon, a parable of futility.

1:32 That's what it's trying to teach you. It's trying to teach you the frustration and despair of just having to do the same thing over and over again with no rewards. And as far as it goes, that's what it is. That's what it communicates. There was, though, in the middle of the 20th century, a French writer named Albert Camus who put a new spin on the Sisyphus story. He called Sisyphus an absurd hero. Listen to what he said about him. He said, no matter what you do, one always finds one's burden again.

2:05 You end up at the bottom of the mountain again is what he means. But, he says, Sisyphus teaches us the higher contentment that negates the gods and raises rocks. Sisyphus looks at the rock and concludes that all is well. And this universe, all of a sudden, seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world.

2:40 And the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill his heart with meaning. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. You see what he's saying there? he's saying in other words because futility is all there is you've got to figure out how to find happiness in futility because you're not going to find it anywhere else the daily grind the back and forth the in and out the struggle all of it ending in death you have to find a way to be happy in it because there is nothing more. Now what do you think about that? Is that true? I mean my guess is that some of you as I was reading Camus and explaining it you know if I didn't give you too many verbal clues you were kind of thinking yeah yeah that makes sense. That makes sense. I don't want to feel like my life is futile so I have to find happiness in the futility. But is that really

3:42 true is that all that's left to us as human beings just to find some meaning into nothing well today we're concluding our series through the book of nehemiah this book if you'll take a bible and turn over to page uh well if you're using one of these red ones like this you can find our text today starting on page 406 it's in the book of nehemiah we're going to be looking at chapters 11 12 and 13 this book just to give you a running start was written about 2500 years ago largely, though not entirely, by a man named Nehemiah, who was a high official in the court of King Artaxerxes II of the great Persian Empire. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie 300, right? But that fearsome king is representing someone who would have been, you know, in a comic book sort of fashion, King Artaxerxes. Immensely powerful, immensely cruel, and this is the guy that Nehemiah was serving. Well, in about the mid-5th century BC, so 440 years before Jesus was born or so, Nehemiah was sent to take on the governorship of Judea, one of the provinces

4:45 that the Persian Empire had conquered, and he had a specific charge from the emperor to rebuild the already ancient city of Jerusalem. So Nehemiah goes across the desert from Susa, which was one of the capitals of the Persian Empire, all the way across the desert to Jerusalem. He whips the people into shape, and he leads them to rebuild the city wall. Now, that in itself is kind of a heroic story, and just the fact that Nehemiah was able to pull that off. It's pretty incredible. I mean, it took courage for Nehemiah to ask King Artaxerxes if he could go and do that in the first place. And even once the work starts, he's opposed from every angle by all of these provincial governors who have zero interest in having a strong Jerusalem right in the midst of them, because it'll affect their power. But in spite of it all, despite the opposition, all of it, Nehemiah manages to get it done. And so by the middle of chapter six, it said in the story really flatly, so the wall was finished. But what you start to realize, in part because the story goes on after the wall is finished, what you start to see through the story

5:48 is that Nehemiah and the people aren't interested just in rebuilding the city walls. What they're about is rebuilding a nation. They're trying to re-establish a dynasty. In other words, they're trying quite literally to re-found the covenant nation of Israel. So that's what we saw two weeks ago the last time we were in this book in chapters 8 through 10. You've got lists that are pulled out to organize the people into their royal clans and priestly clans to give them the job that they're supposed to do in society. The law of God is read publicly and the people tearfully repent and they promise to obey the law and they even hold a festival to show how serious they are about obeying the law of God. And then in chapter 10, we saw last time, they dramatically offer to re-establish the covenant with God that their forefathers had broken, the covenant of Moses. They offer it back to God and say, here, we are making a firm covenant with you. They promise to keep the law of Moses.

6:48 They promise to not intermarry with foreign pagans. They promise to tend well to the temple worship and the priests who do the temple worship. And at the end of chapter 10, it all looks great. until you realize that at the end of it all, nothing happens. There's no lightning like there was at Sinai. There's no thunder. There's no glory filling the temple. There's no voice from heaven. Nothing. And why? Well, because the covenant of Moses that they're offering to God is irrevocably broken.

7:23 It's not coming back. And the simple fact is that heaven simply doesn't accept the offer to reestablish it. They broke it. The curses fell on it. And that was that. You know, I wonder sometimes as I'm reading these stories and they sort of play through my mind like a movie sometimes. And you got to wonder how the people reacted to the silence. And the Bible doesn't tell us anything. But I wonder sometimes if they offer this covenant up to God and they wait and they look at the clouds and they're waiting on the glory.

7:55 And then one of them just kind of clears his throat and goes, okay, everybody off to your homes now. We don't know how they reacted. What we do know is that in chapters 11 and 12, they continue to make a go of it. They act as if they are under this covenant. And that's what we're looking at today. Not just chapters 11 and 12, but also 13, which is going to bring us to the end of the story. Now, here's the thing about 13. No matter what you have thought of this book so far, there is no denying that chapter 13 brings this whole thing to a really puzzling end.

8:32 I mean, it's just not at all the end you would expect from a kind of run-of-the-mill hero story where the great leader comes in and he gathers together the well-meaning people and they do some good religious stuff together. And then the story ends with, well done, you good and faithful people. It doesn't have that end at all. Because if the question is, did this project work? This project of reestablishing the nation, of refounding the dynasty, of putting the nation back into covenant with God, did this work?

9:04 Then the answer has got to be a thunderous, doesn't look like it. Let's look at it. In chapter 11, what you've got there is a long list of families. who moved into the city of Jerusalem, and then starting in verse 25, a list right at the very end there of chapter 11, a list of towns that the people lived in outside of and around the capital city, Jerusalem. So it's giving you the people that moved into the center, and then the people that lived outside, or at least the places where they lived. Then for the first third or so, maybe half third of chapter 12, you've got there a list of priestly families that actually begins back a hundred years earlier when Jerusalem was first resettled by Zerubbabel. That's the first guy that does it. And then it stretches from that time a hundred years ago all the way up to Nehemiah's own time, just naming off the various priestly families. That's what the first part of chapter 12 is doing.

10:03 In the second part of 12, so starting in 27 there, you can see the heading, dedication of the wall. That's exactly what you've got there. You've got a recounting of a celebration that was had to dedicate this new wall that they had just finished building. And the whole thing is filled with just great rejoicing it's a huge party that they have and it ends with the people singing and giving thanks to the Lord and we'll see it a little bit later rejoicing and with great joy as they rejoiced with great joy I mean it's just it just piles up words to show you how happy they are but then you've got 13 and 13 gives you just a jarring and and honestly stunning and unexpected ending to the book. I mean, as you read along in this, 11 and 12 have this unmistakable air of confidence and joy, right? I mean, Nehemiah's pouring it on. We are confident about this. We are joy. We're full of joy. We're doing it right. We're reestablishing the covenant, refounding the nation. And yet, even in the way Nehemiah writes it, there's this nagging question. Yeah, but all

11:04 this, all the vows and the resolutions and the promises that you're making, the dedications and the purifications, is it all just ultimately futile? Is it just Sisyphus pushing the rock halfway up the mountain just for it to roll down again? And then you've got the question, well, if so, I mean, if that's like the best that they could do, then maybe the best thing to do is just embrace it all after all. I mean, maybe that's what all human effort is, and maybe there's good, Maybe God honors just the effort.

11:41 Maybe that's what God wants. Just for us to try our best and find joy in the trying. I don't think so. I don't think that's what it's teaching. I think the message of Nehemiah is teaching something altogether different and better than that. It's not that futility is all there is and we got to just embrace the futility and learn to enjoy it. It's not just that God wants us to try our best and find joy in the trying. It is that all of our human efforts to win God's approval are in fact futile.

12:18 But there is something more and better coming. Here's the main idea that I want to try to get across to you today from this passage. Your deepest resolve will fail. Your most determined vows will buckle. They will all prove futile. And what then? Your deepest resolve will fail. Your most determined vows to God will buckle and prove futile.

12:54 And what then? I want to unfold this story in two points. First looking at chapters 11 and 12 all at once, and then chapter 13. The two points are these. Number one, great hope, and number two, crushing disappointment. Number one, great hope, and number two, crushing disappointment. Now, I know normally in a sermon you would want to do those the opposite direction. First you start with crushing disappointment, and then you move on to great hope so everybody can leave happy. That is not where this story goes. It goes exactly the opposite direction.

13:25 And in fact, if you didn't have the rest of the story ending in Jesus, Nehemiah just kind of leaves you hanging there with what's going to happen next. Now, I'm not going to do that to you entirely today, but I want you to know that that's what Nehemiah does. Anyway, let's start looking at it. Chapters 11 and 12, great hope. That's what you've got in chapters 11 and 12. Great, great hope. So when we left off last time at the end of chapter 10, the people had finished the city wall. They were turning now toward the much more kind of internal heart work of rebuilding not just the city walls and the palace and the temple and all the rest of it.

13:58 But they're going to rebuild a nation. So they'd had Ezra come and read the law of Moses. They celebrated a feast. And then chapter 10 ended with them offering this new covenant of Moses with God, reestablished covenant. And they make a long list of promises about what they're going to do this time around if only God will accept them. The most conspicuous thing about that story, of course, is that given the rest of the Bible, every time there's sort of covenant between God and the people or that kind of thing is talked about, you're primed from the whole rest of the Bible to, at that moment, expect some kind of spectacular answer from God.

14:32 Lord, we make this firm covenant with you today. Boom! That's what you're primed for. And you get nothing. You just get silence. Now, the unease from that, as you read the story, I think lingers just a bit. It's kind of like a bad taste in the back of your mouth. But the story doesn't linger on it at all. It presses on really quickly. And the first place it goes is to this list of people who settled in Jerusalem. It runs from chapter 11, verse 1, all the way down through verse 24.

15:03 If you look at verses 1 and 2, you can see the back story to all of this. This idea of moving into Jerusalem. Look with me there, 11-1. Now, the leaders of the people lived in Jerusalem. It means they moved into Jerusalem. They moved to Jerusalem. And the rest of the people cast lots to bring one out of ten to live in Jerusalem, the holy city, while nine out of the ten remained in the other towns surrounding. And the people blessed all the men who willingly offered to live in Jerusalem. So here's the situation. Back in chapter 7, Nehemiah had noticed that there weren't enough people in Jerusalem.

15:36 It had a wall. It had ramparts. It had everything it would need for defense except defenders. And so Nehemiah realized that we're going to have to have some people that move into the precincts of the city in order to defend it from external threats. And so this is the plan that they come up with. The leaders of the people move into the city. They've got houses there. And then they literally cast lots or throw dice among their clans to figure out which one out of ten is going to have to go live in the cesspool of Jerusalem.

16:06 Keep in mind, this thing is not totally rebuilt. It's got a wall, but it had been razed to the absolute ground. And they're still in the process of rebuilding it. So it's not a thriving metropolis, and one out of ten are chosen to go live in it. And this list in chapter 11 tells us who. Now, the list itself is pretty straightforward. There aren't really, I think, as far as I can tell, any great aha moments that I can point you to. I know that when we come to these lists in the Bible, a lot of you kind of lean forward because you're hoping I'll give you the one little detail that unlocks the whole thing.

16:38 I don't think there is one here. But I do want you to just let your eyes roam over those names for a second. I mean, just kind of try to read some of the names off. You can, you know, Shabbatai and Jazabad, you know, and just read off some of the names. It's kind of fascinating, I think, to let your imagination put a face to each one of those people. It's interesting because for the vast majority, these people, all of them that are listed here, for the most part, are unknown to history other than right here. They're just people who did a kind of courageous, kind of inconvenient, and yet really humble but difficult thing by moving into this crumbling city from their ancestral homes and farms.

17:20 And their names are here because they did that, and we're looking at them 2,500 years later. Now, I don't know what that says to you, but to me it says something really important. It says that God honors and remembers faithful service to him even when that service is unseen by others. God honors faithful service to him even when that service is unseen by others. These are not the great heroes of the Bible. My guess is that you are not telling your kids and grandkids about the great Athia who courageously moved into Jerusalem.

17:58 In fact, if I just walked up to you out in the hallway and said the word, hey, do you know who Athia is in the Bible? You would have absolutely no idea who I was talking about. I wouldn't have had any idea until I ran across him just in the last few days. But God knows, and he honors that man's service even just by recording his name in this book to be read thousands of years later. I think that's important to remember because the fact is most of the service that we do in God's name and for the honor of God will be unseen by others. And the work that many of you do, the work that most of you do probably is mostly unseen, at least by other people.

18:40 And there are moms sitting in here who spend day after day after day raising your kids and nobody sees the work that you're doing and yet it is done in God's name. There are men sitting in here who go to work day after day after day for eight to ten hours and do the same thing over and over and over again in order to provide for your family and love your family, and nobody sees it or cares, but God does. Friends, the prayers you pray, the discipleship you do, it's all seen by God. We don't have a sort of, you know, out in the hallway or something, some board of heroes here at Third Avenue where we track all of that and put it in front of everyone, But God sees it.

19:22 Friends, be encouraged in that and just keep going. God sees and God remembers. I want you to notice another thing here. But this time in that second list, chapter 12, verses 1 to 26. You got the list of the villages there outside of Jerusalem. There's nothing super interesting in the details there, though we're going to return to it a little bit later in the sermon. But look at that next list of people. chapter 12, verses 1 to 26, it's a list of priests and Levites. But what's interesting about it is that it reaches back through time, a century earlier, to the very first resettlers of Jerusalem.

20:00 So let me show you that. Look at verse 1 of chapter 12. First you've got, these are the priests and the Levites who came up with Zerubbabel. That's the famous governor that came at the very beginning, resettled Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, right? That's who that is. And these are the priests and Levites that came with him. Then you look down in verse 12, and you've got another name that may be unfamiliar to you, but he's in the Bible, in the days of Joachim. Now that's the priest that came in the generation after the generation of Zerubbabel. So we've moved forward in time, about 20 or 30 years, something like that. And then if you look down at 22, you can see it brings it all the way up to the present. In the days of Eliashiv, who is the priest who's leading the temple worship under Nehemiah himself. Now what's the point of that? Why do you have lists of Levites back then, list of Levites halfway through, and then list of Levites in the present. What is that doing?

20:52 Well, the point of that is that by making this list through time, Nehemiah wants to show that the worship of God is a generational reality. It's a charge that is passed down from one generation to the next, from father to son to grandson to great-grandson, until the father is forgotten, but God is not. That's how the whole thing is supposed to work. Look, as you get older and as you make your way through the decades, I think you start to realize, I think you start to realize that one of the strongest incentives for steadfastness in the faith of Jesus is realizing that you are just one in what you hope and pray will be a long chain of people who have held fast the faith of Christ.

21:45 I mean, I'm at the point now where imagination starts to go in both directions. And so I'm at the point, 48 years old, where I can kind of look both backward and forward and see in both of those directions six or seven generations of those who came before me and those who I pray will come after me. And my deep prayer, and it gets deeper every day that I live, is that I will take the faith that my father and grandfathers gave to me and see it blaze far into the future in my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

22:21 That's a beautiful thing, isn't it? It's a beautiful thing to hope for that. It's something to pray for and to hope for and even to strive for. I ran across a story when I was studying this in one of the commentaries. about a man named, he's just known to me anyway as Dr. Wang in China about the turn of the 20th century, so 1900. And the boxers came into China, this pagan group. And Dr. Wang was a Christian. He was one of the very first Christians that had graduated from Beijing Medical School. At any rate, this Christian doctor got arrested along with his young son. I don't know how old the son was, but it's his little son. Let me read to you what happened and the significance of it.

23:08 They told Dr. Wang they didn't want to kill him, but that if he didn't burn incense to the gods, they would have no choice but to do so. He refused. We'll make it easy for you. Just get someone to burn incense in your place. He still refused. They offered to find him a substitute, and he'd only have to go along to the temple. His answer? No, I will not. You may kill me, but I will not worship your gods in any way. There are four generations of Christians in my family.

23:41 Do you think for a moment that I would let my child see his father deny his Savior? They ran him through with a sword. And in his final words, he implied, there is a continuity of devotion in my family, one generation to the next. And that continuity has such a claim on me that I dare not betray it. Well, the story continues in verse 27 of chapter 12.

24:20 Nehemiah gathers the people together on top of the walls to dedicate them to God. I want to read a little bit more of this just so you can see how all of this played out. Look with me at 1227. Here's what Nehemiah writes. At the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, they sought the Levites in all their places to bring them to Jerusalem to celebrate the dedication with gladness, with thanksgivings, and with singing, with cymbals, harps, and lyres. And the sons of the singers gathered together from the districts surrounding Jerusalem and from the villages of the Netaphethites, also from Beth Gilgal and from the region of Geba and Asmaveth, for the singers had built for themselves villages around Jerusalem.

24:59 And the priests and the Levites purified themselves, And they purified the people and the gates and the wall. And I brought the leaders of Judah up onto the wall and appointed two great choirs that gave thanks. That's actually just, it's literally just, I appointed two thanksgivings. I appointed two thanksgivings, but choirs to give thanks. One of them went to the south on the wall to the dung gate. And after them went Hoshiah and half the leaders of Judah and Azariah, Ezra, Meshulam, Judah, Benjamin, Shemiah, and Jeremiah. Certain of the priests, sons with trumpets, Zechariah of Jonathan, Son of Shemaiah, son of Mataniah, son of Micaiah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

25:36 End of 36. And Ezra the scribe went before them. 37. At the fountain gate, they went up straight before them by the stairs of the city of David, at the ascent of the wall above the house of David, to the water gate on the east. The other choir of those who gave thanks went to the north, and I followed them with half the people on the wall, above the tower of the ovens, to the broad wall, and above the gate of Ephraim, and by the gate of Yeshaniah, and by the fish gate, and the tower of Hananel, and the tower of the hundred, to the sheep gate. So they came to a halt at the gate of the guard. So both choirs of those who gave thanks stood in the house of God. And I and half the officials with me.

26:09 And the priest Eliakim, Maasaiim, and all the rest. Look at 43. And they offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced. For God had made them rejoice with great joy. The women and children also rejoiced. And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away. Now it may be a little confusing to you. But let me show you what they did. So Nehemiah pulled all the people together and he divided them into two choirs to give thanksgiving. They were standing, if you can kind of picture it, you know, think about Jerusalem like this with its wall around it, right?

26:40 They're standing sort of right here on the western wall of the city, the sort of left wall. And they split there, the two choirs split. One of them goes north, one of them goes south. And then all of those different places that get named, it's just naming stuff going around this way and then going around this way until they meet in this northeastern corner up here where the temple is. And they gather finally, having gone all the way around the city, in the temple itself. And they sing these great praises to God and there is great rejoicing all around. So that's what they do. Now, there are a few things to notice here, particularly, I think, about the public worship of God and how they approached it.

27:18 And I think there's a lot that they get right here and that will be useful and instructive for us. So let's look at a couple of things. For one thing, I want you to notice that in doing this, the people approach the worship of God with reverence and preparation. They approach the worship of God with reverence and preparation. You can see that in the first three verses, three or four verses that I read, 27 to 30. They go out, they summon the Levites, they get their instruments and gather together and they organize them.

27:49 And in 30, the Levites do these rites of purification on the various pieces of the wall in the city. You see the point of all that? The organization, the preparation, the purification rites, every little piece of it is pointing to the fact that they do not take the worship of God lightly. They treat it with reverence, not just as another social event. They had other social events. They had other festivals. This was worship of God, and so they treat it with reverence. They've come together for a purpose, and they treat that purpose seriously.

28:20 Brothers and sisters, I hope you do the same thing when it comes to the public services of worship here at 3rd Avenue. We've talked about this before, but it's important, and it's come up again in the text, so the Lord himself seems to think it's important. Take some time before you come here on Sunday mornings to prepare. And when you get here, remind yourself that you are not here just for fellowship. though that's part of it. You're not here just to have a good time. You're certainly not here to make people think you're righteous for being here.

28:54 You are here for a reason, to worship your king. So take it seriously, just like they did. Notice also here that the people approach the worship of God with great joy. And Nehemiah seems to be falling all over himself to make sure that you don't miss that. I mean, it kind of suffuses the whole thing with the lyres and the tambourines and the instruments and the shouting and the rejoicing and all the rest, but you can obviously see it best in verse 43. I mean, look how many times the word rejoice or joy is said there. They offered great sacrifices and rejoiced for God had made them rejoice with great joy.

29:28 The women and children rejoiced and the joy was heard far away. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. You're supposed to be happy, joyful in the Lord when you gather together. I know sometimes church gets a reputation for being a downer, right? We all come together and it's all very somber and quiet and dark. I don't think that's how our gatherings here at Third Avenue are. And I hope it's always like that. I hope that this is a place where joy is palpable. And no matter what burdens you're bringing in, you can still, when you come in this place and sing the songs of the kingdom, you can feel your heart lift because you're with God's people and you're gonna be reminded about the great salvation that God has won for you in Jesus.

30:10 I hope that's what kind of place this is. where hearts, again, are full and arms are strong because we've been together. One more thing to notice here. The people approach the worship of God, it turns out, with organized liturgy. They approach the worship of God with organized liturgy. This group of people is supposed to go there, and this group of people is supposed to go there, and we're going to meet here, and then we're going to do this, and you guys need to get your instruments and do the purification.

30:44 It's all very organized. It's a liturgy. Modern churches in America, especially for whatever reason, are so entranced by casualness, by the idea that the Spirit of God really only works in the breezy freedom of, we didn't give any thought to this at all. But friends, I think there is some value, and I think you see it in the Bible. I think you see it right here. in slowing down, in doing things sometimes with some formality and order. I mean, we don't do a true liturgy here at Third Avenue, but, you know, if you pay enough attention, you can see that our service has a definite order to it, and there's value in it. It disciplines our minds. It curtails our freedom, which may sound like a bad thing, but is actually a good thing. It focuses our thoughts.

31:39 So, friend, don't fool yourself into thinking that it is formality that quenches the Spirit. It's not. Oftentimes, what quenches the Spirit is a heart that spends its entire time grumbling about the formality rather than leaning into it and learning from it. Well, by the end of chapter 12, it turns out, with all the rejoicing and everything, everything's looking great. I mean, you know, we already saw in verse 43, the people are ecstatic. the whole atmosphere of the chapter is marked by just rejoicing, rejoicing, rejoicing with great joy. Everyone is greatly happy. But even for all that, it's a little hard to shake the feeling that it is all just still kind of, I don't know, fragile. I mean, think about some of the clues that are in there. You know, I don't know if Nehemiah is just telling you what happened or if he's putting these clues in deliberately, but think about it. Even the people moving into Jerusalem. They're all celebrated, right? Yay, you know, we bless you who are going to move into

32:42 Jerusalem to defend the city. But it's not like they had this thriving metropolis of a capital city that was drawing them into the city. They literally had to kind of be forced to live there, appointed by throwing dice. You think about the purification rites that the Levites did at the dedication of the temple. Sounds great, right? Got to purify the temple, purify the gate, purify the wall sounds great but how long does the purification last in the old testament not long ever the sin always piles up and even the purification right is supposed to remind you of that and on top of it for all the celebration there's still no palace there's still no king there's still no high priest who has urim and tumim so so the high priests that they thought they had couldn't speak for God and even all this celebration about this reforged covenant of Moses is completely one-sided.

33:47 The people are shouting like crazy but heaven is just not and the whole thing leaves you thinking that maybe all this is more fragile than you at first thought. It turns out that's exactly what comes to light in chapter 13 when it all falls apart. Number two, looking at chapter 13, crushing disappointment. So in the first few verses of chapter 13, if you look at those, it looks like the celebration of chapter 12 is just going to continue on.

34:21 It looks like the people are just going to keep, you know, racking up W's. because in the first three verses, what happens there is that they read the law of Moses. Again, this is a pattern in the book. They read the law of Moses and realize that it has a command that no Ammonite or Moabite, those are two countries, two cultures, right, in the ancient world, no Ammonite and no Moabite could be a part of the assembly of God. Now, that's not an absolute prohibition, and Nehemiah explains it in those three verses. It's not an absolute prohibition. You could have somebody like Ruth the Moabitess who would convert to the worship of Yahweh and she would be welcomed into the assembly.

34:57 But your average Ammonite or your average Moabite who continues to worship the Ammonite and Moabite gods is not welcome in the assembly because they had done certain things against the people of Israel in the past. And so the law said no. So having read this prohibition, the people then in those three verses moved to get rid of them all. They moved to separate all the foreign pagans from among them. We have to be separate from the false god-worshipping pagans. So far, so good. But then, verse 4, comes like a car crash.

35:33 And the first phrase of it signals to you what a just kind of unexpected disaster this is. So in verse 4, it says, now before this. That doesn't mean chronologically. That's not what that means. It means now before the face of this, or in the face of this, or in spite of all this, or can you believe that in the light of all this, all this is about to happen, right? That's what that, now before this, in the face of all this, here's what happens. Look at verse 4. Now before the face of all this, Eliashiv, the priest, who was appointed over the chambers of the house of our God and who was related to Tobiah, prepared for Tobiah a large chamber.

36:15 where they had previously put the grain offering, the frankincense, the vessels, and the tithes of grain, wine, and oil, which were given by commandment to the Levite singers and gatekeepers and the contributions for the priests. While this was taking place, I wasn't in Jerusalem. For the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I went to the king. And after some time I asked leave of the king and came to Jerusalem, and I then discovered the evil that Eliashiv had done for Tobiah, preparing for him a chamber in the courts of the house of God. Okay, so here's what happens. So Nehemiah decides to go back to Susa, back to the king, right?

36:47 He leaves Jerusalem for a little while. After some time, he doesn't tell us how long, he comes back and he finds that the guy who's sort of acting as high priest has taken Tobiah and given him a huge room inside the precincts of the temple of God. Now, what's the problem with that? Well, if you've been here for this whole series, you know that Tobiah is one of the main guys who has been an adversary of everything Nehemiah has been trying to do. He's sort of the toady of this other guy, Sanballat, right? But he's one of the main enemies of Nehemiah, and yet here he is now ensconced in the middle of the temple, in the middle of Israelite life.

37:27 And to make it worse, if you look back at chapter 2, verse 10, you see that Tobiah is an Ammonite. So right on the heels of the people reading in the law No Ammonite is to be in the assembly of God and taking all the Ammonites and throwing them out. This guy who's acting as high priest pulls Tobiah, the enemy, the Ammonite, and sticks him right in the center of it. And Nehemiah is furious. Look at eight. And I was very angry.

38:01 And I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber. And then I gave orders and they cleansed the chambers. and I brought back there the vessels of the house of God with the grain offering and the frankincense. But it gets worse. Look at 10 to 14. I'm not going to read that, but if you let your eyes kind of roll over it, Nehemiah looks around after throwing this guy out on the street. He looks around and sees that not only has Tobiah been given a room in the temple, but all the Levites who were supposed to be in the temple have gone home because nobody's providing for them.

38:35 They're supposed to get food from the surrounding villages and nobody's doing that anymore. So in 11, he says, the house of God is forsaken. You can imagine him just looking around, dumbfounded, like, where is everybody? And Tobiah's in the temple. He's just dumbfounded at what's happening. Then look at that whole long section from 15 to 22. What's going on there? Well, look over it real quick. Basically, the people are just profaning the Sabbath. And on the Sabbath, they are letting even foreigners, like people from Tyre, the Tyrians, trample the city.

39:07 You can see that in 16. And all of this is a profaning of the law of God. Bad enough. But the worst of it actually comes in 23 to 29. So almost to the very end of the book. When Nehemiah realizes that the people are again marrying pagans. It's so bad that if you look at verse 24, you can see how bad it's gotten. So bad that half of their children spoke the language of pagan Ashdod.

39:43 And they couldn't speak the language of Judah. But only the language of each people. And I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. And I made them take an oath in the name of God saying, You shall not give your daughters to their sons, etc. You see the problem, right? Within a generation, within a generation, the whole nation is unraveling. Even to the point that the children can't even speak the language of Scripture anymore.

40:14 All they can speak is the language of the pagan nations. It's a disaster. Just incidentally, some people, I heard some of you giggle, but some people are just aghast at Nehemiah's behavior in verse 25. He sees sin and his response is to curse them and beat them and pull out their hair. now there's some cultural meaning in that pulling out the hair was a sign of shame to have your beard pulled out of your hair pulled out was a sign of shame but still that is very different isn't it than Ezra's response to this very same sin of marrying pagans they're looking at the same sin and listen to what Ezra says he did when he saw that sin as soon as I heard this I tore my garment and my cloak and pulled hair from my head and beard and sat appalled.

41:14 Nehemiah, I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. Ezra, I tore my garment and my cloak and pulled hair from my head and beard and sat appalled. Okay, so here's my question. Which of those reactions to the very same sin was wrong? Sadness or anger? Let me give you two more responses to sin. First this one. When he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, would that you, even you, Jerusalem, had known on this day the things that make for peace. And he went. Now this one.

42:10 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and oxen, and he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. Again, which of those two responses to sin was wrong? And the truth is, as much as our modern sensibilities may try to tell us this and convince us of it, sadness and gentleness is not always the right response to sin and evil.

42:45 Sometimes the right response is anger, even physical righteous anger. Now, I can't tell you exactly when each of those responses is called for, but it's worth, brothers and sisters, checking our modern impulse that, you know, the thing they say in articles and all the rest, I say this more in sadness than in anger. It's worth checking our impulse to say that that is always correct. Sometimes it's right to look evil in the face and say, I say this to you more in anger than in sadness. Sometimes that's right.

43:20 And here it's anger that Nehemiah shows, and that's a right response. It's a right response to what he's seeing when he gets back from Susa, because what's happening here is basically that everything he has worked for is just unraveling. It's just coming apart. And think about it. Think about how deep this goes. In reestablishing a nation, the people of Israel basically needed three things to be in place. They needed three things to kind of be working. They needed a city, they needed some land around it, and they needed a temple. And up until the time Nehemiah left, they had it.

43:52 They had people in the city, they had people in the villages surrounding the land, they had a functioning temple with a functioning priesthood, And now when Nehemiah gets back, all of those things are gone. Foreigners are trampling Jerusalem on the Sabbath and just turning it into one more marketplace to sell things in. The children of the surrounding land are so thoroughly paganized that they don't even speak the Hebrew language that the scriptures are written in anymore. And the temple has stopped functioning entirely and has got an Ammonite sitting at the very center of it.

44:29 I mean, yeah, Nehemiah comes in and he takes some steps to fix all of this. But at this point, it's clear he is just holding this whole thing together with spit and duct tape. And as soon as he takes his eyes off of it, it all crumbles down again. And just not only the depth, but think about the speed with which this happened. Think about how fast it happened after the people made all those promises. I mean, it was just in verses 1 to 3 of chapter 13 that they promised to separate pagan Ammonites from the assembly of God, and then immediately they've got Tobiah the Ammonite living in the temple.

45:05 And think back to chapter 10. Remember what they promised? Remember those things that they promised? Lord, this time we're going to do it. This time we're going to get it right. Remember what they said? We will not neglect the temple of our God. We will not profane the Sabbath. We will not give our daughters and sons to marry the pagan daughters and sons of the nations around us. And now the temple is forsaken. The Sabbath is all but forgotten and profaned. And they've intermarried so thoroughly that the entire nation is quickly becoming pagan itself.

45:40 What does that tell us? Well, it tells us. It tells us that all our vows and promises to God, all our resolutions to do better. are worthless and futile. Again and again and again, we make vows, we make promises, we push the rock up the mountain and it comes tumbling right back down over and over and over and over. And that is not, friends, something to be embraced. It's something to be rejected in favor of something better.

46:15 We reject our own vows, our own promises, our own works, and what we embrace are the works of somebody else who did it right, Jesus Christ. He's the one who pushed the rock all the way up the mountain. He lived a perfect life, no sin whatsoever. He got the rock to the top of the mountain and it stuck. And now in his grace and mercy, he says, if you'll just come to me in faith, if you'll just come to me in trust, in reliance, I'll let my rock up at the top of the mountain stand for you, and I'll take the punishment for yours.

46:54 That's the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not that you get a second chance, not that you can try again just harder this time, not that you can make a new vow to God and he'll accept it, but that you can come to Jesus and be saved. Look at the very last line of the whole book. This is another one of those little prayers that Nehemiah shoots up to heaven throughout this book he says there at the very end remember me oh my God for good he says similar things a couple other times in this chapter but what is he praying there what is he saying remember me oh my God for good is he being proud there he's done some good stuff he's tried to put an end to some of these sins and is he saying oh Lord remember me because of the good that

47:55 I've done look at 14 can kind of sound like that remember me oh my God concerning what I've done here and don't wipe out my good deeds that I've done for the house of my God and for his service kind of proud of those remember me oh my God for good is it pride or is it maybe more kind of a resigned despair remember me oh my god because i have done everything i know to do i mean honestly i don't know i think it's complex i think it's meant to be complex and every time i read it some other layer of meaning or emotion comes through those words i mean on the one hand, I think there's a commendable faith in it, actually. Nehemiah really did do everything he could. He built the wall. He wept. He fought. He re-established the temple worship. He repopulated the city. And it's actually a good thing. It's actually a very good thing to desire to do good

48:57 in this life and hear the Lord's well done at the end. I think that's in there. But it also seems to me there's a note of longing in it, too, of incompleteness, of maybe. I mean, it's a prayer, Lord, remember me, but the fact is he has no idea if God is actually going to remember him or not. In fact, to look around to see what's going on, Nehemiah must have been pretty sure that everything he had done up until that point could very well be gone in a couple of years.

49:31 Remember me, oh my God, for good, but it's just uncertain. But you know, there's somebody else in the Bible who says something very, very similar. 500 years later, another man turned his head and said, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. and the response from the Savior was immediate. I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.

50:09 In some ways, those are two very different prayers, aren't they? In other ways, they're not. But in some ways, they're very different. Nehemiah's was a noble prayer. I mean, this guy had fought and wept and rebuilt and reformed, but at the end of it all, all he could kind of do was look around and cry out several times, in fact, Lord, please remember me. Don't wipe away what good I have done. It was noble. But it was all he had. The thief actually had less. He didn't have a life of service to God.

50:43 He hadn't led the nation in worship and reform. He didn't have anything, no good works, no life, nothing. All he had was guilt and need. And yet Jesus didn't hesitate for a minute. Today, you will be with me. See, it's right there. It's right there at the foot of the cross where the futility ends. When you find the mercy that Nehemiah prayed for and that the thief found. Not because of anything you have done.

51:17 But because Jesus pushed the rock for you. Let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you and we praise you that you are the great Savior and Redeemer who gave your life so that sinners like each and every one of us might not die. But having faith in you and turning from our sins, we might have everlasting life. Our God, we pray that there would be the work of your Spirit happening even here this morning to convince somebody to stop pushing the rock up the mountain and come to the foot of the cross.

51:58 Our God, we pray that you would do the work of salvation here this morning. We pray that you would do the work of sanctification this morning. Taking our eyes off of our own vows, our own decisions, our own promises and embracing the life and death and resurrection of our Savior. We pray all of this in the name of Jesus, always to his honor and glory. Amen. Thank you.