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Nehemiah 13 Grace Emmanuel Church 02/04/17 ______ Nehemiah 13 Grace Emmanuel Church 02/04/17 _______________________________________________________________________ Nehemiah 7:1 After the wall was finished… That’s the part that everybody focuses on in the book of Nehemiah…and for good reason. It’s an amazing story of what happens when a person single-mindedly follows the plan of God for their life, and completely submits to the sovereign reason God placed them on this planet! (That’s a sobering thought for all of us…isn’t it? Am I accomplishing… through my life… what God intended for me to do when he implanted me in my mother’s womb? That’s what Jesus said in his John 17 prayer to the Father… John 17:4 I glorified you on earth by completing down to the last detail what you assigned me to do! (MSG) Man…I want to be able to say that! Don’t you? <<< ________________________________________________________________________ Let me recap the “completing down to the last detail” work that God gave Nehemiah and Ezra the scribe to do…and I’ll do this review in the form of a story. God called Nehemiah, the Jewish Cupbearer, the personal advisor to the Persian King Artexerxes and asked him to return to the Jewish homeland and rebuild the ruined walls around Jerusalem. Nehemiah struggled with God’s call… but finally agrees to take a team and travel 1000 miles west to Jerusalem…to lead a scattered and demoralized Jewish remnant to attempt the impossible! In just ______ days Nehemiah and a band of untrained, former exiles rebuilt 2.5 miles of walls… 8 feet thick, 36 feet high! It was a stunning example of God doing what seemed impossible, through one of his submitted, obedient children… It’s not one drop different than what he has promised, and is willing to accomplish, through each one of us in this room. Same God, same empowerment…just different tasks he has called each of us to do! Nehemiah faced massive opposition from the surrounding pagan people. It was, all, in fact, satan’s attempts to stop the rebuilding of the very place where God’s prophesied Messiah, the 1 Savior of the World, Jesus Christ… would live, and die, and then rise again from the dead…victorious over sin and satan and death , and hell! ______________________________________________________________________ But before Jesus could even arrive…the city had to be rebuilt. The temple where he would preach had to be constructed. The stones on the roads where he would drag his cross had to be laid down. All the construction would have to be built around a barren hill outside the city…where three crosses would one day be planted. Imagine how many times Nehemiah and his buddy Ezra the scribe walked around that hill… never imagining that on that hill would one day hang the Suffering Savior Isaiah had described in chapter 53. These heroes (of this series of sermons)…may very well have climbed onto that hill and prayed that God would hurry and sent the long awaited Messiah… the one Isaiah had described as Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace. Nehemiah might have knelt and prayed at the very place the hole would be dug for the middle cross. _______________________________________________________________________ Nehemiah and Ezra never met Jesus…(not in this life.) They were born 480 years too early. But in God’s great plan they were born just on time to “complete down to the last detail what God had called them to do!” Ezra came first to try to instill in the former exiles the truths of God’s Word…to lead them to levels of worship that years of exile had robbed them of. But when he got there, 13 years before Nehemiah, he walked into an absolute sin sewer! … He found out that hundreds of them had married their pagan neighbors and brought the idols of their new spouse right into their homes…something they were absolutely forbidden to do in Moses Law in the inspired Word of God. Worse yet, 111 of the priest and Levites (are listed at the end of the Book of Ezra)…their spiritual leaders… had led the way in doing the very thing that had caused God to allow them to be taken into exile… in the first place. Let me shift the story and fill in some blanks. The way Ezra handled this seems almost brutal. He got them altogether and said: “You guys have so flagrantly disobeyed God’s Word’….that the only way out of this mess is to first repent…and second…send your idol worshipping spouses back home to their fathers households. Think with me here… God could see over the hill of time… and see what has to happen today to prepare for a righteous “tomorrow.” (Same with us!) 2 It wasn’t just that God was preparing a city for Jesus arrival…he was preparing a people for Jesus arrival! What wasn’t supposed to happen… was that Jesus would arrive in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, as the Savior of the world…… to find that all of God’s followers… were following pagan idols and sacrificing their children to Molech. It’s bad enough that the God-following Jews crucified the prophesied, long- awaited Messiah when he arrived. But at least…when the Early Church was born… it spread like wildfire through people who already believed in YAHWEH…the Creator God of Bible. _______________________________________________________________________ Now you are not going to find this in the Bible…but Jewish Rabbinical literature (not inspired Scripture but probably accurate) tells us.. that when all those idol worshipping spouses went home to daddy…it seriously ticked off their daddies. They began (for the next twelve years to raid… pillage, terrorize Jerusalem and the Jewish people. By the time Nehemiah shows up to rebuild the walls, the people are just ravaged! Every moment of every day…they and their families were in danger of death. Their farms, where they were trying to grow food… to feed their families and communities… were constantly being pillaged… their food stolen. These people had to feel like… when they had finally tried to follow God’s law…and it had thrown them out of the frying pan into the fire. Following God… instead of making their lives better…. had made them into a hell on earth! ________________________________________________________________________ You’ve got to put all of those facts in the old “noggin” when you think about Nehemiah arriving and in 52 days, miraculously… 2 ½ miles of 36 foot high walls are re- built… in spite of the terrorizing neighbors! Their city is protected. Their houses and families are safe. God has come through…the God they thought had deserted them… As the reality that the wall is finally done sinks into their “noggins”… They come en mass…as many as 75,000 of them squeeze inside the Jerusalem walls …and demand that Ezra read, and teach them, the Bible. It is starting to sink in that the God they had rejected…had not rejected them! His “rules for living” (Laws) were not to harm them but to bring his power, presence, and protection into their lives. (There is a modern day application there… Following God’s plan for our lives is not designed to restrictive) It is designed to bring God’s power, presence, and protection… Nehemiah 8:1 all the people assembled with a unified purpose at the square just inside the Water Gate. They asked Ezra the scribe to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses, which the LORD had given for Israel to obey. 3 ________________________________________________________________________ Ezra gladly did! Finally he gets to fulfill the real reason God had sent him to Jerusalem! בָּרַ ך) Nehemiah 8:6 Then Ezra praised - blessed) the LORD, the great God, and all the people chanted, “Amen! Amen!” as they lifted their hands. Then they bowed down and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground. We got to look in on the beginnings of a genuine revival…. A repenting before God like most of those people had never done, or even heard of, in their whole life. When the Word of God dug into their souls… it not only exposed their sin…it drove them to want to repent of their sin. I’m going to show you something here in a minute that I have never noticed before, in forty years of preaching: But first let me finish the story… ________________________________________________________________________ Remember how the move of God intensifies as we move into Nehemiah chapter 9 … Nehemiah 9:1 On October 31 the people assembled again, and this time they fasted and dressed in burlap and sprinkled dust on their heads…. 3 They remained standing in place for three hours while the Book of the Law of the LORD their God was read aloud to them. Then for three more hours they confessed their sins and worshiped the LORD their God One group of Levites stood on the stairs on one side of the raised platform and another group stood on the other. As the Word of God was read Group One, perhaps led by Ezra, would cry out to God in repentance for all the areas where they had broken God’s law…and then they would stop and the Levites on the other side, Perhaps Nehemiah himself … or maybe Ezra would yell out: 5 “Stand up and praise the LORD your God, for he lives from everlasting to everlasting!” Then they prayed: “May your glorious name be praised! May it be exalted above all blessing and praise! 6 “You alone are the LORD (YAHWEH) ! This went on for three hours….
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