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Nehemiah 3 Grace Emmanuel Church 11/05/17 ______Nehemiah in the OT… Nehemiah 3 Grace Emmanuel Church 11/05/17 _____________________________________________________________ Nehemiah in the OT…. Is famous for rebuilding the broken down walls of Jerusalem in 52 days. I’ve been purposely trying to make Nehemiah come alive for you the last two weeks. But in order to really understand him we have to grasp the unfolding story of God’s revelation. Nehemiah, an Israelite… and all of his Jewish family…. and all of his Jewish friends are born and live 1000 miles away from their beloved… Jerusalem. Why? Because God’s chosen people were carted off into captivity by the vicious awful godless Babylonians. Why? In fact Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar had brutally executed most of the people living in Israel… had completely destroyed Jerusalem…. Flattened the temple where God had flooded his dear children with his divine presence. Why? What happened? _______________________________________________________________________ We dug through this Wed eve in our new study on Ezra…. But if you WED studyers will humor the rest of us…. Everybody here needs to mentally log in a least the three following OT passages…They are crucial to understanding Nehemiah….and Daniel and Ezekiel, and Esther, and Zechariah, and Ezra, and Malachi. All these book names from your Old Testament, were real people, who really lived… and wrote ( and lived out) their books in your Bible…. from Persia. If you were here on Wed eve…. grab the side of your face and act surprised for the next few minutes…because it is so important for everybody here to be able to fit all these, seemingly disconnected OT books, into one flowing unfolding story! It starts clear back with Moses…He tells God’s chosen people just as they are forming into a nation…. Just as he is promising that God will be their God and will shower them with his power, presence and protection… . He then adds: Deuteronomy 28:64 For the LORD will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other… 65 There among those nations you will find no peace or place to rest. And the LORD will cause your heart to tremble, 1 your eyesight to fail, and your soul to despair. ( Say what??) 66 Your life will constantly hang in the balance. You will live night and day in fear, unsure if you will survive. I thought the whole forming of Israel as a nation was God loving them and wanting to bless them. It was…it is…. That’s what the first part of Deuteronomy 28 says…I’m going to bless your socks off! I preached a whole series on that a couple of years ago…(it is the one playing on WSTU right now as we are sitting here) God did promise to pour every conceivable blessing out on the Israelites…. With a condition: “If you obey the voice of the Lord your God.” But Deuteronomy chapter 28 goes on to say…if you choose not to obey me…then we have a problem. I’m laying out a pattern of life for you…. that is not for my benefit…but for yours… If you chose to reject my love and go worship the idols of your pagan neighbors … indulge in their perverted sexual worship practices, offer your children as human sacrifices to their worthless stone idols…. You will have chosen to walk out from under my blessing and back under the curse of sin. It’s not what I want for you… but you will have made that decision for yourself… _______________________________________________________________________. And that is exactly what Israel did… the top ten tribes were dispersed to the ends of the earth…. The bottom two tribes carted off into exile to Babylon. Here’s Jeremiah: Jeremiah 2:15 “Why has Israel become a slave? Why have they been carried away as plunder?... The towns are now in ruins, and no one lives in them anymore. 17 And you have brought this upon yourselves by rebelling against the LORD your God, even though he was leading you in the way!... Even though Israel chose those results by their own actions…their loving God pursued them wooing them back into a relationship with him. Watch this: Jeremiah 29:10 This is what the LORD says: “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. 12 In those days when you pray, I will listen. 13 If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. 14 I will be found by you,” says the LORD. “I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and will bring you home again to your own land.” 2 Is that a God of anger and judgment and justice? Or is that a God of love and compassion? Let me apply that point for a second… I’ve had people tell me, here, that they have been such bad sinners that they don’t somehow qualify for God’s forgiveness. Not a chance! 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. God says that to the worst sinners on the planet!…in this case, his own chosen people! ________________________________________________________________________ Let’s pinpoint this: The Babylonians are the ones who destroyed Jerusalem and hauled off Gods children including Daniel…. and Shadrach Meshach and Abednego. ________________________________________________________________________ But they came to a sudden end. You remember the story of God’s hand-writing on the wall. Prince Belshazzar was using the gold bowls stolen from God’s temple in Jerusalem in a pagan party ritual and God declared an end to Babylon…forever. You’re done….finished…caput! That very night the Medes and Persian swept in and destroyed the Babylonians. Prince Belshazzar was killed. 3 ________________________________________________________________________ Here’s the thing… The Medo-Peraians inherited a whole bunch of Hebrews. Some of them, like Daniel, were so God-focused and so God-blessed…that when the new Medo King Darius set up his kingdom… he formed 120 provinces with 120 governors, appointed three guys over them all…and then one of those three was so filled with wisdom that he rose to the very top under Darius, himself, and his name was…. Daniel. Yes…it was the other guy’s jealousy over it all that led Daniel to the lions den. (Daniel 6) This is where this whole amazing story of Ezra and Nehemiah begins to unfold. Darius the Mede and Cyrus the Persian seem to be ruling as what history called Co-regents… Darius dies (or is helped to die) And Cyrus the Persian takes full command. (Stunningly 175 years earlier…) Isaiah 44:26 I carry out the predictions of my prophets! By them I say to Jerusalem, ‘People will live here again,’ and to the towns of Judah, ‘You will be rebuilt; I will restore all your ruins!..28 ’When I say of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd,’ he will certainly do as I say. He will command, ‘Rebuild Jerusalem’; he will say, ‘Restore the Temple.’” _____________________________________________________________ Ezra 1:1 In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, the LORD fulfilled the prophecy he had given through Jeremiah. He stirred the heart of Cyrus to put this proclamation in writing and to send it throughout his kingdom: “This is what King Cyrus of Persia says: “The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. He has appointed me to build him a Temple at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. (<<<<< I doubt it…) Can’t you instead see Daniel the prophet sitting with his pagan boss Cyrus (remember he has outlasted Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius the Mede and now Cyrus the Persian) Daniel, all fortified with the prophesies of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, knowing that God is not done with the Jews or Jerusalem yet…. “Says Hey King Cyrus: I have a Idea!!!” Why don’t you send some those foreign Israelites back to their homeland and let them rebuild their temple… think how much they will appreciate the kind gesture. 4 ________________________________________________________________________ God began to do a God sized thing. He was bringing his people back from captivity just as he promised. He was going to bless them and restore all that they had lost just as he promised . He was going to restore Jerusalem until it was ready to be the place (Daniel himself prophesied) where God would one day send his blessed Messiah who would in fact be God incarnated onto this earth …. Daniel would prophesy that in that rebuilt city the coming Messiah would die…and that his death would fulfill the prophesies of Isaiah 150 years…. That the Messiah’s suffering sacrifice…. would be him taking the wretched sins of the world on himself … bearing our iniquities… and by his wounds we would be healed!! But before any of that “Messiah coming to redeem humanity can happen,”. Jerusalem must be restored and the people returned…. The Messiah was surely not going to return to a pile of ruins with inhabitants. In fact remember the prophesy of Daniel that we looked at last week…. Daniel 9:25 ….Seven sets of seven plus sixty-two sets of seven will pass from the time the command is given to rebuild Jerusalem until a ruler—the Anointed One—comes.
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