Nehemiah 10: Restored by God, Part Two

Introduction

[[HAPPY VETERAN’S DAY]] <<CONGRATS TO HELEN MCCLAIN, HOMECOMING QUEEN>>

<<THANKS on behalf of Gary and Pam Kessler>>

Q. What should our commitment to the LORD look like?

I. A Devotion to God’s Word (10:28-29)

Look in verses 28-29 with me. Last week, I called this the “statement” of the Covenant. <<READ 28-29>>

Explain:

Everyone - leaders, priests, Levites, men, women, and even children who have reached the age where they can understand

“and all who have separated themselves from the peoples of the lands to the Law of God”

Includes non-Jews who are covenanting with God. Cf. Exodus 12:38 - “A mixed multitude also went up with them”

Joshua 2 - Rahab confesses that the LORD is the God of heaven, covenants with the LORD and with His people, joins them

Ruth - a Moabite - covenanted with the LORD and with her Jewish mother-in-law, Naomi, joined with God’s people

Leviticus 19:34 ESV

34 You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Commitment is to the Word of God - here “the Law”

Last week, discussed in more detail

Today: the FRUIT of repentance - a devotion to God’s Word

APPLY:

Psalm 119:24–25 ESV

24 Your testimonies are my delight; they are my counselors. 25 My soul clings to the dust; give me life according to your word!

If we are going to walk in His ways, we have to know His Word.

ILLUST: A devotion to God’s Word is not really like watching football, or movies, or reading novels, because it’s not primarily for your entertainment.

New Christians often worry that something’s wrong if they come to God’s Word and it doesn’t grip their attention non-stop. Consider the story of a young man who became a Christian in middle school. He was so blown away by God’s mercy that he started reading God’s Word voraciously. Six months after he became a Christian, he had read the Bible, cover-to-cover. He stayed up late into the night, reading the Bible. You might recognize this as the story of our new Associate Pastor.

But consider another story of another young man who became a Christian in middle school. But this young man was a slow reader. He loved the LORD, but when he sat down to read the Bible, he struggled to remember what he’d read the day before. It was years before he’d read the whole Bible.

He often felt guilty, because he thought reading the Bible should give him some kind of spiritual high, but so often, it just felt like a chore.

He wondered: If studying the Bible just feels like work, am I a bad Christian? Am I ever going to know the Bible well enough to understand what it’s about?

This is the story of your Senior Pastor.

And do you know what I’ve learned in the three decades since I became a Christian? It hasn’t usually been through my emotions or goosebumps or “Eureka!” moments that God has worked in His Word. The most important and spiritually formative and transformational times I’ve had in Scripture have been measured in years, not days.

God has taught me to love His Word and to love the long view. Certain pages in my Bible have collected layer upon layer of notes, reminders of earlier days and insights.

The majority of the time, when I sit down with my Bible, I will probably not get goosebumps. But God has shown up.

So to kindle a new devotion to His Word, I want to give you an encouragement and a challenge:

Some of you want to know God more, but you don’t have a clue where to begin. Begin with me in the Gospel of John, starting this week.

Read one chapter a day. I know you can read more than one chapter per day. But if you read one chapter per day starting today, you’ll finish on November 29th, the first Sunday of our Advent series, and it will get you ready.

Every time Jesus says something about Himself, put an exclamation mark in the margin next to it. Every time the Gospel writer says something about Jesus, put a star in the margin. Every time the Gospel says something about humanity, write the word “us” in the margin.

So if you take me up on this project, at the end of the month, you can go back and look at the Gospel and ask the question: What does this Gospel tell me about Jesus, and what does it tell me about myself?

And a devotion to God’s Word will yield another result:

II. A Dedication to God’s Holiness (10:30-31)

"Holiness” is at the very center of the covenant. Lev 19:2 - “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” - They were to be set apart from all other people, to be uniquely His, to perfectly reflect His perfections.

So holiness is by its very nature counter-cultural. As long as the human heart is deceitful above all things, it will never be cool to be holy. Their covenant is going to affect every area of their lives. Verses 30-31 show that it will impact their families and their work.

Verse 30 says: <<READ v30>>

Now, this verse has been twisted in the past to argue against inter-racial marriages, and I don’t want to spend much time on this except to say that it is indisputable that the issue here is not race. Again, not only did a mixed multitude come out of Egypt with the Jews, not only did Rahab and Ruth and the Gibeonites and many others covenant with the people of God, but remember that verse 28 tells us that a mixed multitude is making this covenant. All who have separated themselves from the peoples to follow the LORD are included.

So if the issue is not ancestry, what is it? The issue is idolatry.

Deuteronomy 7:3–4 ESV

3 You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, 4 for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.

And when Israel disobeyed this command, they did exactly what the LORD had warned them would happen. Consider how different things had been for Ruth: When she went to Israel with her mother-in-law, Naomi, she said to her, “Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.”

But consider what happened when Solomon, a man overflowing with God-given wisdom, chose to disobey God’s Law on this point.

1 Kings 11:4 ESV

4 For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father.

In verse 31, we see that the people’s dedication to God’s holiness also affects their work. <<READ v31>>

It is also counter-cultural to keep the Sabbath. God instituted the Sabbath in Creation, when He rested on the seventh day. The word “Sabbath” means rest, and it called Israel to step back and say, “Work is not all there is. In fact, work is meant to serve my devotion to God.” Even more than that, keeping the Sabbath is an act of faith -

When the people came in to sell on the Sabbath, when the Israelites said “No, we will keep the Sabbath, we won’t work today,” they were saying that no matter what it looked like they were missing out on, they weren’t.

APPLY:

In both the problem of marrying non-believers and the problem of violating the Sabbath, fear was the biggest enemy.

How often do we rush after the things of the world because we’re afraid to trust that what God provides is better?

If a merchant wheeled his cart into the market on the Sabbath and put out the finest silk from an exotic nation far to the east, and purple cloth from Greece, with a great sign that said, “ONE DAY ONLY,” the fear of missing out was just as real to them as it is to us today.

When a non-believing neighbor came into town with a handsome son, and a believing daughter got stars in her eyes, and the two began to fall for one another, the fear that God can’t possibly have a better plan becomes a great stumbling block.

Things aren’t so different today.

The issue of marrying non-believers is just as applicable to Christians today - marriage is a covenant designed by God to reflect the relationship of Christ and His Church. When a believer marries a non-believer, their marriage is real and God intends it to be permanent. If you’re a Christian married to a non-Christian, pray fervently that God would keep your heart from going astray after idols.

But if you are not yet married, decide now, in advance, that you will trust God rather than marry a non-Christian.

The Sabbath pointed forward to Jesus, actually.

Matthew 11:28–30 ESV

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Hebrews 3-4 tell us that those who believe in Jesus enter His rest, and Colossians 2:16-17 explicitly tells us that the Sabbath is a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

We are no longer required to stop working at sundown specifically on Friday and allowed to start working at sundown again on Saturday.

But we are called to set apart Christ as holy, to be holy as He is holy, and to depend and rely upon Him alone as our Provider and our rest.

This is very relevant for the hard-working among us, who pour themselves into their business, always connected and never resting, because they are afraid that God will not provide if they let up for a moment.

So here’s an encouragement and a challenge: Whatever you’re afraid to miss, if you can’t rest in the LORD, He wants you to let it go for a bit.

You need to miss every midnight text and learn to actually rest again.

And whatever you’re afraid to miss, if you can’t rest in the LORD, let it go for a bit. By His grace, I am His, and He will provide.

Some of us don’t know how to rest, because we’re always afraid of the things that will go undone. But never stopping is worse than resting in Christ and letting some things go undone. Have you ever noticed that even when you never stop working, some things still don’t get done? Shouldn’t that be a clue?

The rhythm of work and rest is built into creation. That’s why verse 31 ends with “we will forego the crops of the seventh year.” Israel was supposed to let the entire land rest every seventh year, eating off the produce of the other 6. It was a matter of faith that God would provide enough for the 7th year.

And our third point in verses 32-39:

III. A Devotion to God’s House (10:32-39)

Here, the people recommit to the Temple and the sacrificial system.

The only way the system worked was if the people were involved - they gave a third of a shekel to pay for all the offerings that were made on their behalf by the priests.

The wood offering in verse 34 was to make sure that the fire on the altar of burnt offerings never went out according to Leviticus 6.

And in verses 35-37, they say they’re going to bring all the firstfruits to the LORD - in Exodus 22-23 and Deuteronomy 18 and 26, God commanded Israel to take a portion at the beginning of the harvest season to the LORD, and the firstborn of the herds and flocks were to be given as offerings as well.

Verses 37-38 are a commitment to bring the tithes. Tithe is a word that means “tenth,” and the tithe was intimately connected to God’s covenant to bring them to a land and provide for them.

They promise to bring the tithes to the Levites. The Levites then paid a tenth of the tithe to the priests. The priests were the division of the Levites who were descended from Aaron the brother of Moses, through Eleazar and later Zadok, and they were the only ones permitted to present the people’s offerings before the LORD.

All of these promises in verses 32-38 get summed up at the end of verse 39: <<READ 39>>

And so the content of their commitment is a devotion to:

God’s Word

God’s holiness

and God’s house

You can see the focus the people had. "The house of our God” occurs 9 times here.

The House of the LORD was originally a tent called the Tabernacle, built while the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years after the Exodus from Egypt. When they settled in the Land, the LORD told them to come to Jerusalem to make their offerings, and King Solomon built the first permanent Temple there.

When the Jews began to return in the days before Ezra and Nehemiah, they began work on a new temple, the Second Temple, that would stand from the 400s BC until it was destroyed by Rome in 70 AD.

The House of the Lord is where He promised to meet with the people.

APPLY:

So what should we do with these verses?

Where is the House of God today?

Last week, I said that we didn’t need a new commitment to the Old Covenant; we need a New Covenant. We need the new birth in Christ.

And right after Jesus talks with Nicodemus, he leaves for Galilee, traveling through Samaria, in John 4. He encounters a woman outside the town of Sychar, by a well.

You remember our good friend Sanballat, the Samaritan? The guy who tried to raise an army against Nehemiah’s people? This woman was a descendant of those Samaritans. The hatred and division between the Jews and the Samaritans never got better, so this woman was not expecting him to speak to her. But he did. And he offered her eternal life, just as He did to Nicodemus.

The Samaritans had built their own temple on Mount Gerazim, and claimed that the Jews were the impostors, and when Jesus demonstrates that He knows the woman’s heart and her sin, she says,

John 4:19–20 ESV

19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

And Jesus responds to her,

John 4:21–24 ESV

21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

And Jesus doesn’t tell her that the day was coming when she could worship the Father either on this mountain or in Jerusalem; he said neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

In the New Covenant, the House of God is not wherever you want it to be. It is not this building, it is not in Jerusalem, it is not some cathedral.

When Jesus cried, “It is finished!” in John 19, we’re told that the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom. The Temple’s purpose was complete.

Hebrews 10:19–20 ESV

19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh,

Because the TEMPLE was a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

He is the Temple. By taking on human nature, John 1 says the Word became flesh and pitched His tent with us so that we could behold His glory.

And when Christ returns and we enter His presence for eternity,

Revelation 21:22 ESV

22 And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.

He is God with us.

And while we wait for His return, He is making US His dwelling place.

Ephesians 2:18–22 ESV

18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

The Body of Christ is the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

And this means that if we are dedicated to the House of God, then we must be dedicated to one another.

Our tithes, our offerings, our service, these are gifts to God’s house, to one another. Instead of bringing our tithes to the Levites, we give them to Christ, our great high priest. I’m no priest, even though my name is Aaron. And you are not under the Law’s demand to bring oxen and goats to Jerusalem. You are under grace, called to serve one another with all that you have.

The New Testament counterpart for Nehemiah 10 is Romans 12.

Romans 12:1–2 ESV

1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And

Romans 12:6–10 ESV

6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. 9 Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. 10 Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.

and

Romans 12:11–13 ESV

11 Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

Love for the brethren fulfills our calling.

Last week, I invited you to declare with me: By His grace, I am His.

Now take His own example as yours. Nehemiah’s people said, “We will not neglect the house of our God.”

How do we see the building up of God’s House in the New Covenant?

By building up one another in the likeness of Christ. Where are your gifts building up your brothers and sisters?

“By His grace, I am His. By His Spirit, I will build up His people.”