Remembering And Confessing (Nehemiah 9:1-38)
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
A. Preliminaries
A. Preliminaries
Good Morning.
I know that many of you were probably expecting a series on Advent to begin today. Which is what I usually do. But I decided this year that while elements of the sermon will tie in with the themes of Advent, we are going to continue walking through the Book of Nehemiah.
So we continue this morning in Chapter 9. The sermon this morning will be on the entirety of Chapter 9, which begins on Page 475 of the Bibles in your pews, and keeps going into Page 476.
This is after the people have celebrated the Feast of Booths, and the Festival has concluded. People are assembled once more in Jerusalem, and this time, the mood is very different. Please join me at verse 1. This is a very long passage. We are going to read a lot of Bible this morning. And I’m going to read through it as we move through the Sermon. But we will start with the introductory six verses.
If you will stand please.
B. Sermon Text
B. Sermon Text
Hear now, God’s own Holy Words
Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads. And the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. And they stood up in their place and read from the Book of the Law of the Lord their God for a quarter of the day; for another quarter of it they made confession and worshiped the Lord their God. On the stairs of the Levites stood Jeshua, Bani, Kadmiel, Shebaniah, Bunni, Sherebiah, Bani, and Chenani; and they cried with a loud voice to the Lord their God. Then the Levites, Jeshua, Kadmiel, Bani, Hashabneiah, Sherebiah, Hodiah, Shebaniah, and Pethahiah, said, “Stand up and bless the Lord your God from everlasting to everlasting. Blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise. “You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God!
Please be seated.
C. Transition to Sermon
C. Transition to Sermon
What is before us this morning is what I like to call “A Prayer with Receipts.” Basically, the entire Chapter is a prayer, and the prayer is something like a historical recounting of the story of Israel right up to the present day with these people gathered in Jerusalem.
And I know many of you have heard of the ACTS Model of Prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. The prayer we will look at this morning in Nehemiah 9 is pretty similar to that model, but it adds some things. So I wanted to offer a similar acronym this morning to summarize our text. And it’s not as memorable as ACTS, but I think it will still be helpful as we make our way through. The Prayer has Six Parts, followed by the making of a Covenant, so I am going to use the word PRAYER because that has six letters. So this will be something of a fast-paced six point sermon with a conclusion.
This is, mainly meant to be a Prayer of Repentance. We know that because of verse 1:
Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads.
In the Old Testament, sackcloth is a fashion statement against yourself. It is the clothing of repentance. And Repentance is not feeling gloomy; it is telling the truth before God. The people have come to confess their guilt. Not their guilty feelings but their actual guilt. We live in a culture that thinks guilt can only be a psychological problem. Nehemiah 9 shows that guilt is often simply accurate. But we must do something with it.
D. Sermon Points
D. Sermon Points
So there is:
P – Praise to the Creator (v.6)
R – Remembrance of His works (7-15)
A – Affirmation of His mercy (16-25)
Y – Yielding in confession (26-31)
E – Extolling Covenant Faithfulness (32-35)
R – Request concerning their distress (36-37)
So with that, let us begin.
I. Praise to the Creator (6)
I. Praise to the Creator (6)
“You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you.
The prayer begins by focusing on God. And this is really important for us to know and to imitate.
Professor of Church History David F. Wells has observed that our age is one that is sadly persuaded of the “weightlessness of God.”
What we see in this prayer is the opposite. This prayer starts with the might, glory, and power of the Creator. Which is always a good place to start in your prayers. Start with adoration. A good place to go for this is Psalm 8:1 “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
II. Remembrance of His Works (7-15)
II. Remembrance of His Works (7-15)
This is where we divert a bit from the ACTS model. It is a historical journey from Abraham to the Exodus out of Egypt, to Mt. Sinai, to bread and water in the wilderness.
So we begin with Father Abraham
You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham. You found his heart faithful before you, and made with him the covenant to give to his offspring the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Girgashite. And you have kept your promise, for you are righteous.
You begin to see here, how the prayer will go. There will be two characters in the prayer. Sinful men, and a holy God. There are men who sin and God who keeps his promises.
“And you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt and heard their cry at the Red Sea, and performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of his land, for you knew that they acted arrogantly against our fathers. And you made a name for yourself, as it is to this day. And you divided the sea before them, so that they went through the midst of the sea on dry land, and you cast their pursuers into the depths, as a stone into mighty waters.
And it would be difficult to overstate how important that moment was for Israel’s history. When we use the word “salvation,” we are almost always talking about a Cross. When Old Testament Israel used the word “salvation,” they were almost always talking about Egypt, Plagues, and a Red Sea split in two.
We are then taken to Sinai:
By a pillar of cloud you led them in the day, and by a pillar of fire in the night to light for them the way in which they should go. You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your holy Sabbath and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses your servant. You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst, and you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give them.
The presence of God in the wilderness was frightfully real. A cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He gave them
...right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments,
This is how we speak of God’s Laws and indeed all God’s words. Right, true, and good.
But you also see here something that is really important and that is the power of historical storytelling in prayer.
Now this is not something we do a lot. But I want to give credit to our Pastor Emeritus—Bob Vincent. He is very good at this. If you’ve heard Bob pray, he’ll just start telling God about God’s own work in the past, God’s own stories.
He’ll say “Lord we pray for your mercy to this couple that is trying to make their marriage work, and Lord, I remember when you brought Betty and Jimmy back from the brink of divorce, and restored their love for each other.”
It sounds strange to our ears (to start telling stories in the middle of a prayer), but it really does have biblical precedent.
Sometimes our prayers are really just lists of our worries, with no way to look up or affirm our faith in God’s promises. Narrating God’s own faithfulness in history is a big help to this. Let me commend it to you. Remember God’s own acts of faithfulness in history. Both your history and broader biblical history, and church history (a great reason to study Church History!)
III. Affirmation of His Mercy (16-25)
III. Affirmation of His Mercy (16-25)
This is the Thanksgiving portion of the prayer. What follows after the recollection of history is more history: that is, a recollection of the sins of their fathers. But what is most remarkable about this is that they are not yet asking for forgiveness. The story moves back and forth between “We sinned” and “You gave mercy.”
“But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments. They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt. But you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.
You see the pattern. They sinned. They refused to obey. They were not mindful. They stiffened their neck. They picked a leader to return them to slavery.
BUT you are a God ready to forgive, gracious, merciful, slow to anger. God has a history of giving mercy to stiff necked people. That is people who God has invited to turn and they have repeatedly said “No.” It’s like they’ve turned the steering wheel of their heart into a mere decorative feature.
And so it continues with the same pendulum swing.
Even when they had made for themselves a golden calf and said, ‘This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt,’ and had committed great blasphemies, you in your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness. The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not depart from them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go.
God gave them his presence and his provision
You gave your good Spirit to instruct them and did not withhold your manna from their mouth and gave them water for their thirst. Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness, and they lacked nothing. Their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell.
He continued to lead them all the way to the promised land.
“And you gave them kingdoms and peoples and allotted to them every corner. So they took possession of the land of Sihon king of Heshbon and the land of Og king of Bashan. You multiplied their children as the stars of heaven, and you brought them into the land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess. So the descendants went in and possessed the land, and you subdued before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and gave them into their hand, with their kings and the peoples of the land, that they might do with them as they would.
This is the story of God’s faithfulness to the promises he made to Father Abraham. And his provision for his people.
...So they ate and were filled and became fat and delighted themselves in your great goodness.
So the point is that God’s mercy and blessing and faithfulness is narrated against the backdrop, not of Israel’s good behavior, but of their failure.
Israel’s history is one long proof that grace is not God’s backup plan. It is the only plan that ever existed. When we call ourselves Grace Presbyterian Church, we are not pointing only to a New Testament Concept. The grace of God has been on display from the moment we fell dead in the garden.
IV. Yielding in Confession (26-31)
IV. Yielding in Confession (26-31)
“Nevertheless...
Oh that word. Grace upon grace. Kindness upon kindness. Blessing upon blessing. Mercy upon mercy. Nevertheless.
Do you feel a bit called out, brothers and sisters? Is this not part of your own testimony, right up to the present?
“Nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against you and cast your law behind their back and killed your prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies.
And it goes on to narrate the book of Judges
Therefore you gave them into the hand of their enemies, who made them suffer. And in the time of their suffering they cried out to you and you heard them from heaven, and according to your great mercies you gave them saviors who saved them from the hand of their enemies.
So then they finally lived right, correct? Not exactly.
But after they had rest they did evil again before you, and you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies, so that they had dominion over them. Yet when they turned and cried to you, you heard from heaven, and many times you delivered them according to your mercies. And you warned them in order to turn them back to your law. Yet they acted presumptuously and did not obey your commandments, but sinned against your rules, which if a person does them, he shall live by them, and they turned a stubborn shoulder and stiffened their neck and would not obey.
This is like the anti-prosperity gospel. This is not “We did everything right and God blessed us.” It is “God blessed us, and yet we did everything wrong with the blessing.”
You see this cycle in play: God acts graciously. Israel sins. God disciplines. Israel cries out. God delivers—again and again.
This cycle repeats on purpose. Scripture is rubbing our noses in the fact that we are not saved by our faithfulness but by God’s faithfulness.
And then we hear of the exile. Yes, Ezra and Nehemiah, are about returning from exile. But they have not forgotten what put them into exile in the first place.
Many years you bore with them and warned them by your Spirit through your prophets. Yet they would not give ear. Therefore you gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands. Nevertheless, in your great mercies you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and merciful God.
The pattern established here is that God gave warnings. Many warnings. Many rescues. And many more warnings.
Because God’s warnings are not just scare tactics. They are gifts. They are meant to keep us from destroying ourselves. They are precious gifts. And Israel treated them like junk mail.
But always remember that the exile was not God throwing a tantrum. It was God keeping his promises.
God’s judgements are not random lightning bolts. They are Covenantal Consequences. I mean, if God were quick to anger, the Bible would be one or two books long. We’d be done, by Exodus for sure. We’re in Nehemiah 9. Generations of divine patience.
And Israel kept going to their idols again and again, so God eventually let them.
Exile is God saying, “Fine, if you want Baal’s so badly, go live in Baal’s neighborhood.”
Reminding us that the ultimate judgement is when God gives us the sin we want most.
But there’s another Nevertheless. We started this point with a Nevertheless. We end with another one.
Nevertheless, in your great mercies you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and merciful God.
Because the exile was not the end of the story. Because God’s mercy is does not quit. It chastens, yes. But it does not abandon. If you still have breath, you still have hope.
V. Extolling Covenant Faithfulness (32-35)
V. Extolling Covenant Faithfulness (32-35)
There’s a transition in verse 32 and it’s a transition of worship
“Now, therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love, let not all the hardship seem little to you that has come upon us, upon our kings, our princes, our priests, our prophets, our fathers, and all your people, since the time of the kings of Assyria until this day.
The appeal—let not all the hardship seem little. They are appealing to the love and grace of God. Lord, we know you love us. Remind us again. Give us another testimony of it.
But notice that here, they do something we almost never do. Which is when they cry out to God, they acknowledge that whatever he has given them is still righteous.
Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly.
Can you say that?
This is the difference between unbelief and repentance.
Unbelieving grumbling says, "This is not fair.” Which is how our flesh wants to approach most of our problems. This is not fair, and it’s probably someone else’s fault.
Repentance says, “Lord, You were right, and I feel the weight of it.”
Israel in this prayer takes the full weight of their sin both historically and presently.
Look at verse 34
Our kings, our princes, our priests, and our fathers have not kept your law or paid attention to your commandments and your warnings that you gave them. Even in their own kingdom, and amid your great goodness that you gave them, and in the large and rich land that you set before them, they did not serve you or turn from their wicked works.
God had surrounded them with blessing on all sides, and in response, they still turned to their idols. Israel didn’t just sin in the wilderness. They sinned in the palace of God’s good gifts.
This is a good reminder that Prosperity is not sinful, but prosperity without gratitude always becomes idolatry.
To quote Voddie Baucham: God does not have a problem with you having things. God has a problem with things having you. Because sin is not a resource problem, it’s a lordship problem.
VI. Request Concerning Their Distress (36-37)
VI. Request Concerning Their Distress (36-37)
And now they finally bring their supplication before God. Their distress. Here is how they summarize their distress:
Behold, we are slaves this day; in the land that you gave to our fathers to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts, behold, we are slaves.
This is quite the bold thing to say. They are still under the rule of Persia. And so they say we are slaves. We are still in Egypt. Even though we are in Jerusalem, with a Temple and a Wall.
Exile was over, but the Dominion God had promised them was still very far away.
They are physically restored, but still politically subdued.
And its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins. They rule over our bodies and over our livestock as they please, and we are in great distress.
What they are narrating here is the reversal of Deuteronomic Blessing.
In Deuteronomy, Israel was supposed to:
Eat from vineyards they didn’t plant, enjoy cities they didn’t build, and experience abundant blessing in the land. But how do they narrate their story now?
We plant, but foreign kings eat. We labor, but foreigners profit. We live in God’s land, but God’s judgments dominates our experience.
They are still waiting for a full deliverance. And so they are asking for it. Not demanding it, because real repentance does not negotiate terms. It simply tells the truth. The people have repented but they know they still need a Redeemer.
And this lines up well with the time of Advent that we begin today.
Advent is not a cozy nostalgia. It is about a longing. An ache. The sense that we are not there yet. Not home yet.
Before you get angels singing in Bethlehem, you get centuries of silence, foreign rule, and longing.
Advent is the moment when all that language of longing rises up into the courts of Heaven. And God says “I hear you. I see you. And I will answer you. With a child.” And the government shall be on his shoulders. Not on Persia’s. And so we wait.
Conclusion: A Covenant Made (38)
Conclusion: A Covenant Made (38)
Before we wrap this up with the last verse, I want to recall where we’ve been this morning. We’ve seen a prayer of repentance rooted in history. We’ve seen remembering and confessing. We’ve seen repentance with receipts.
And the last note I want to make on this is that the repentance was corporate. It was not just me and my sin, it was us and our sin.
We like to limit our religious talk to the terminology of personal relationship. We love personal relationship with Jesus but we dislike personal responsibility for the sins of our people.
I am not advocating for guilt for ancestral sin the way that is weaponized politically today. But I am saying that individuals are not the only ones who sin.
Cities sin. Nations sin. Churches sin. Cultures of people sin. And God calls groups—as groups—to repent.
And so I want to tell you with that in mind, we will be using a Nehemiah 9 model tonight at 5:00 for our prayer meeting. Let’s use the shape of prayer the Lord has given us.
With that, let’s continue to the last verse:
“Because of all this we make a firm covenant in writing; on the sealed document are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests.
Don’t miss the point here: When we face our sins and our trials, and we cry out to God, covenant renewal is what we do.
Because repentance is not a mood. And it is not mere self-hatred or misery magnification. It is Covenant Renewal. Repentance always has a forward looking, future looking element.
Q 87. What is repentance unto life?
A. Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience.
If your repentance doesn’t lead to new obedience, all you did was feel bad with biblical vocabulary.
So they renew their Covenant with God. Next week’s sermon will be the terms of that Covenant Renewal. But for our purposes today, I want to remind you that Covenant Renewal is the bedrock and the fruit of our gathering every Lord’s Day.
It is a new beginning
It is a solemn promise
It is recognition of—as we say in that prayer of confession—my sin, my own sin, my own most grievous sin. And then it looks up, and says let us return to who we are. Not by our own strength, because obedience is always gratitude for grace recieved, not a mission to earn grace.
And we remember that the sounds of a man, a woman, and a baby in a manger signal the arrival of our Great Covenant Keeper. Whose life fulfills the law. Whose death seals the covenant. Whose resurrection confirms the covenant. Whose Spirit applies the covenant. Whose return completes the covenant.
At the end of Nehemiah 9, they draw up a document, and it will bear all their signatures. But it points forward to a day of a New Covenant. Not made with ink and paper, but with thorns, nails, and blood.
That is the Covenant that is renewed every Sunday. And the promises therein, will carry us all the way home.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
