Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of The Triumph and Failure of Reformation from Nehemiah 7-8.
Male: Gracious Father, we thank you for your grace and mercy. We thank you for that grace in our lives that when we were dead in sin and under your wrath, that grace, because of your love, made us alive with Christ and raised us with him and seated us with him in the heavenly realms. Thank you that in the coming ages we will be that demonstration of your kindness, and that now, as we live, we’re a manifestation of your wisdom to those in the heavenly realms.
We pray, heavenly Father, that as the Word is opened, you would open our hearts and our minds. Please give us that knowledge of truth that leads to godliness. Please enable us to be better handlers of your Word. Please help us to be godly as ministers, godly as your people. Help us to set an example to the believers in life, in speech, in purity.
Gracious Father, we know that none of this is possible on our own, and we ask again for that grace. We ask especially this morning for that grace for Don. We thank you so much, heavenly Father, for him, for his ministry, both in speaking and writing, and how many, all of us included, have benefited from the obedience of your servant.
Father, help him this morning again to be obedient to your Word. Give him clarity in word and speech and mind as he seeks to open it to us. We pray for a work of your Spirit. We ask, heavenly Father, that you would teach us and that you would correct us, that you would rebuke us, that you would train us. We pray this, heavenly Father, that we might be equipped to do every good work in your service to the glory of your name, amen.
If you could sit down, please. The passage for today will be read, and then Don is going to speak.
Male: This is Nehemiah, chapter 7, verses 1–3, and then picking up the narrative at verse 73b of chapter 7, and we’ll read to the end of chapter 8.
“After the wall had been rebuilt and I had set the doors in place, the gatekeepers and the singers and the Levites were appointed. I put in charge of Jerusalem my brother Hanani, along with Hananiah, the commander of the citadel, because he was a man of integrity and feared God more than most men do. I said to them, ‘The gates of Jerusalem are not to be opened until the sun is hot. While the gatekeepers are still on duty, make them shut the doors and bar them. Also appoint residents of Jerusalem as guards, some at their posts and some near their own houses.’
When the seventh month came and the Israelites had settled in their towns, all the people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring out the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded for Israel. So on the first day of the seven month, Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand.
He read it aloud from daybreak till noon as he faced the square before the Water Gate in the presence of the men, women, and others who could understand. And all the people listened attentively to the book of the law. Ezra the scribe stood on a high wooden platform built for the occasion. Beside him on his right stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah, and on his left were Pedaiah, Mishael, Malkijah, Hashum, Hashbaddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam.
Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them, and as he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the Lord, the great God, and all the people lifted their hands and responded, ‘Amen! Amen!’ Then they bowed down and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.
The Levites—Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, and Pelaiah—instructed the people in the Law while the people were standing there. They read from the book of the law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read.
Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, ‘This day is sacred to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.’ For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law. Nehemiah said, ‘Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.’
The Levites calmed all the people, saying, ‘Be still, for this is a sacred day. Do not grieve.’ Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food, and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been known to them. On the second day of the month, the heads of all the families, along with the priests and the Levites, gathered around Ezra the scribe to give attention to the words of the Law.
They found written in the Law, which the Lord had commanded through Moses, that the Israelites were to live in booths during the feast of the seventh month and that they should proclaim this word and spread it throughout their towns and in Jerusalem. ‘Go out into the hill country and bring back branches from olive and wild olive trees, and from myrtles, palms, and shade trees to make booths,’ as it is written.
So the people went out and brought back branches and built themselves booths on their own roofs, in their courtyards, in the courts of the house of God, and in the square of the Water Gate, the one by the Gate of Ephraim. The whole company that had returned from exile built booths and lived in them.
From the days of Joshua son of Nun until that day, the Israelites had not celebrated it like this. And their joy was very great. Day after day, from the first day to the last, Ezra read from the book of the law of God. They celebrated the feast for seven days, and on the eighth day, in accordance with the regulation, there was an assembly.”
Don Carson: One might almost be excused for thinking that the book of Nehemiah is primarily about the rebuilding of the wall. Certainly, this book has been preached by many people who are leading building programs in local churches. Then you get popular expositions with titles like Hand Me Another Brick and such things. (I didn’t make that up.)
But it was never that simple, of course. All the way back in chapter 1, when the first report comes in to Nehemiah, when he asks questions of those who have returned from Jerusalem to Susa what is going on, he questions them about the Jewish remnant that survived the exile and also about Jerusalem. In other words, his concerns were for the people first.
Even in chapter 2, verse 5, when he says to the king that what he wants to do is to return to the city of Judah and rebuild it, what is so fascinating is that the word used there for rebuilding is very commonly used in the Old Testament for rebuilding community. Not just rebuilding a wall, but rebuilding Jerusalem, rebuilding the city, and that means far more than simply bricks and mortar.
What becomes clear in the rest of the book of Nehemiah is that Nehemiah, now having gotten the wall in place, sees that merely as a first, more or less mechanical step, and the rebuilding of the covenant community is at the heart of everything. The first steps of fostering this larger vision are worked out in chapters 7 and 8.
In chapter 7, the physical protection of the pilgrim people is emphasized, and then in chapter 8, the spiritual nourishment of the pilgrim people receives its stress. That ultimately leads, as we shall see this afternoon, to massive confession and covenantal renewal, which we shall then examine in a few hours’ time.
So we come to chapter 7. “After the wall had been rebuilt and I had set the doors in place …” That picks up what is said in chapter 6, verses 1 and 15. Now the place is secure in the sense that it is physically complete. There are no gaps. Everything is at the appropriate height. The doors have been hung, and so forth.
That immediately raises the question of who the gatekeepers should be; that is, the security personnel. Some of those now listed are clearly religious people, because the temple, the second temple, had been built since about 520, so there were some people who were trained to guard those doors and already had that kind of duty, and some of them are conscripted.
One would not think automatically that singers would be the best security personnel. You think of the Metropolitan Opera or something, and you wouldn’t say, “Yes, I would like you to be a bodybuilder and a gate guarder.” You wouldn’t expect that, except that in the tradition of Israel, the gatekeepers and the singers often overlapped in duties, and perhaps, too, if you remember that Welsh coal miners often had choirs, then the notion of singers being gatekeepers may not be too far away.
In any case, that, in turn, raises the question of who the leaders of this group will be. For the leadership, Nehemiah chooses his brother Hanani, first mentioned in chapter 1, verse 2, and Hananiah, the military officer responsible for the citadel near the temple, first introduced in chapter 2, verse 8. Now why did he choose them? Was it a simple instance of nepotism? Promote my own brother; he can have a salary then too? No, there are two qualities he looks for. First, trustworthiness, integrity. Second, the fear of the Lord. The two are related.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to think about what integrity means, what trustworthiness looks like. This past summer, the pastor of our church in Illinois was dismissed. He had been stealing sermons from the Internet. The pattern was so habitual some of us suspected there was more going on, and it turned out he was also involved in adultery websites and had gotten involved in addictive gambling on the Internet, such that he had cashed in his retirement and had stolen about $60,000 from the church through various obscure channels. But on the outside, he was just as smooth as smooth can be.
What constitutes integrity? One does not have to think very far in this country to remember some major, major failures, where, on the one hand, one thought one had something, and on the other hand, one had something else. If one spends much time at all in dealing with people today at a personal level, one discovers pretty rapidly how many Christian men, for instance, are pretty well hooked on Internet pornography.
They say in North America the pornography trade now brings in more money each year than hard drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes together, but, of course, you wouldn’t know it when they show up for church on Sunday morning, would you? Where is the integrity? What does integrity look like? I’m convinced that integrity is nothing more than being in public what you are in private. That’s all it is.
Now in some sense, of course, we all struggle with it. How many of you would like absolutely everyone in your church to know absolutely everything you think about and imagine? We all struggle with being one person, but isn’t that what Jesus demands, to be single-eyed? That’s what is at stake. It’s integrity. Isn’t that what James wants? After all, a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.
But if you are a Christian, a genuine Christian, surely you want those two worlds to line up, and you agonize over the fact that they don’t line up better, and you cry, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus,” because you want someday the perfection of the new heaven and the new earth, where what you are on the inside and what you are on the outside is one thing, all happily bowed to the lordship of Christ.
If you let those two things run in separate paths, sooner or later you have almost a schizophrenic personality. You maintain the pieties and the civilities and the public religiosities of the external, and inside you can be a seething mass of bitterness or consumed by ministerial jealousy or rewarding yourself for having done a good job on the sermon by spending a few more minutes on the porn sites of the Internet. Yes, I know ministers like that.
People are trustworthy in proportion as they are one person. As long as they are double-minded, you don’t know which part you’re dealing with. Whatever else Hanani was, brother or not, he was trustworthy. He wasn’t going to accept bribes, for example, to let some people through when they shouldn’t be, or to breach the security. He wasn’t going to be snookered by smooth talk. He was principled.
Beyond that, of course, he feared God more than most men do. Isn’t that a lovely expression? For if one truly does fear God, one needs to fear no one else. As long as one lives in the fear of other people, the fear of God is relativized. Then our courage is compromised and our mission is domesticated. If we truly do fear God … maybe not perfectly, but more than most men do … we’re far more likely to be one person. You’re back to trustworthiness, integrity.
So they were told to keep the gates of Jerusalem shut until the sun is hot. That is to say, until the sun is fully up. It’s clearly day. It’s not in that ghostly period. Open up a little earlier so people can sneak in through the dark crevices. All of this was especially important when the city still had so few residents.
Hence, verses 4–5: “Now the city was large and spacious, but there were few people in it, and the houses had not yet been rebuilt. So my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles, the officials, and the common people for registration by families. I found the genealogical record of those who had been the first to return. This is what I found written there.”
Obviously, the city at this point in its history is a long way from Jerusalem’s historic past when the streets were full. In the words of Jeremiah, “Full of the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of bride and bridegroom.” Jeremiah 33. It’s a long way from Jerusalem’s anticipated future. According to the prophecy of Zechariah, “The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing.” At this juncture, it’s not much more than a ghost town.
After all, as we saw earlier, many of the builders of the wall had actually come from other towns in Judea, and they had to go home and keep their own plots going and bring in their own harvest and so forth. Eventually, of course, this will lead to a repopulation program. That’s where this book is heading. In chapter 11 we read, “Now the leaders of the people settled in Jerusalem, and the rest of the people cast lots to bring one out of every ten to live in Jerusalem.”
So there’s a whole active repopulation program for Jerusalem now that the actual physical walls are in place. Part of the preparation for this is Nehemiah 7:5; that is, finding out who is a bona fide Jew, who is genuinely of the Judean heritage, according to the genealogical records. Then other parts of this preparation have to do with spiritual commitment and Bible instruction and being reformed by the Word of God, which brings us to chapter 8. All of this is part of preparation for building the city in more than a physical sense.
Nehemiah recognizes this is a crucial turning point and assigns, rightly, his understanding of what to do yet again to God. God put all of this into Nehemiah’s heart. “Call the people together. Get the records straight. Find out who’s available.” The record that follows is 75 years old. It’s first used in Ezra 2 with small differences. Nehemiah uses it for his purposes and then incorporates it into his own memoirs. I won’t go through the whole list. Let me draw your attention to just a few details.
Verses 64–65: “Certain people searched for their family records but could not find them and so were excluded from the priesthood as unclean.” They were determined, in other words, to preserve biblical standards of stipulated descent. Even if these people were genuinely Jews, if they couldn’t prove it, if they could not prove that they were priests, if they could not prove that they were in the priestly line, then they were excluded.
“The governor, therefore, ordered them not to eat any of the most sacred food until there should be a priest ministering with the Urim and Thummim.” (That breastplate device that determined yes/no answers before the face of God when questions were put.) Note verse 66: “The whole company numbered 42,360,” besides another 7,000 servants and an array of singers and the like. Even the lists of horses and mules and camels and donkeys are carefully noted. Here is a born administrator.
So you have, give or take, 50,000 people. If in due course, then, you take 1 in 10 of them and bring them into the city, you’re bringing in something like 5,000 people. This is very, very small potatoes. And, of course, there has to be some money even for such building as there is. That’s carefully recorded in verses 70–73. Money used for rebuilding, including, no doubt, more houses and preservation and beautification of the temple, which really was a very pale reflection of the Solomonic temple.
Nevertheless, these are the first steps that are taken, the physical protection of a pilgrim people, a people in pilgrimage heading toward a more glorious future. What you cannot avoid as you read this is that the physical arrangements are for the good of the whole community that is still being built. The wall is for the people. The genealogical records are for the people. The collection of the money is for the people. Everything is for the community, the people.
I suggest that in genuine reformation, that really becomes an essential vision. Sometimes we begin to act as if the people are for our programs rather than the other way around. In fact, that can happen (may God forgive us) with our sermons, so that sermons become an art form to be admired. In fact, it is even one of the dangers of our workshops.
We sit together as fellow preachers and criticize one another, and our criticisms, if we’re not careful, can focus on this sort of ideal sermon that is faithful to the text and that brings in Jesus appropriately and is clever at the front end and telling at the back end and is clever enough to be memorable but not so clever as to be “show-offy,” and all this sort of thing. We work through it all, and now we give high brownie points because this is aesthetically pleasing and biblically faithful.
Of course, there are some things to learn in all of these domains. Not for a moment do I want to criticize our workshops. Yet at the end of the day, we just have to keep remembering there are people out there. There are some amongst us, let it be said (I could name a few; I restrain myself just barely), who break almost every homiletical rule in the book and are master communicators. I don’t know what it is, whether it’s personality or what.
You’re not supposed to lounge on a pulpit and sort of talk like that, but I know preachers who do that and who are spellbinding. What can I say? Am I going to go up to them and say, “Don’t lounge; it’s not a good form”? Somehow in our sermon preparation, in our administration, in our envisaging the future, in our programs, in our imagination of what could be, in our intercessory prayers, we have to keep remembering there are people out there.
Biblical exposition is not an end in itself. It is a primary, God-ordained means to the end. Moreover, biblical exposition is only one form of the larger ministry of the Word of God, the chief form in many contexts, but one-on-one Bible studies, counseling with an open Bible, small group training, evangelism in a small group that is using the Bible but is not heraldic quite; it’s not preaching in any classical mode.… This is all part of the ministry of the Word.
Someone mentioned last night Peter Adam’s book, Hearing God’s Words. If you haven’t read it, read his earlier one as well, Speaking God’s Words. If I were returning to pastoral ministry today, I would require all leaders in the church to read the first 75 pages or so to have a large vision of what the ministry of the Word looks like as something more comprehensive than preaching, even though the book is full of valuable insight on preaching.
It’s the larger ministry of the Word of God, the truth of God, that is being communicated. It’s not an end in itself. It’s for the sake of the upbuilding of the people. It’s for the display of God’s glory. It’s for the announcing of God’s Word. It’s for evangelism. It’s for rebuke. It’s for exhortation. It’s for correction in righteousness, and so on. It’s not merely an art form.
Some of us are in churches where traditionalism is triumphant. Free churches tend to think that traditionalism is particularly a problem in Anglicanism. Boy, do I have news for them. Very often, those traditions have solid reasons. Traditions happen for good reasons, and yet they may become dated, dull. At some point, must you not ask the question, “Are the traditions getting in the way of communicating the Scripture when the traditions themselves are not grounded in Scripture?”
Bill Hybels is not my favorite pastoral model, but the fundamental question he teaches his leaders to ask is surely right, even though I don’t agree with all of his answers. The question is, “What are we doing that is not demanded by Scripture and that is nevertheless getting in the way of communicating the gospel to people who have never heard?” Isn’t that a good question to ask? I may not agree with all of his answers. I don’t, in fact. But surely it is a right question if we bow to the authority of Scripture. There are people out there.
Now once you’ve raised the question, of course, you have to be very, very biblically rooted so you don’t give flip answers to this and somehow merely become pragmatic. That’s why I disagree with so many of his answers. I don’t think he’s biblically enough grounded. Nevertheless, the question has to be asked, doesn’t it?
At this juncture, these folks are a pilgrim people still, in transition, and we await the actual repopulation program of chapter 11, verse 1, and the dedication of the city of God in chapter 12, which we’ll look at, God willing, tomorrow. Now the question is how to get there. Before we get there, things more central than stones and masonry intervene. Let me make another small aside here.
Many of you will be familiar with the book by Mark Dever, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church. Normally, books with titles like that make me nervous. You know, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, “16 Ways to Be Happy Though Married,” and all books of that sort make me very nervous. But, in fact, that is really quite a profound book. It’s genuinely driven by biblical theology, and I’ve given it away by the cartload. It’s a very, very important book.
He has now written, with a Trinity graduate who worked with him for a while, a follow-up manuscript not yet published. Basically, it is a kind of godly manual for ministers who get into churches that are either tradition-bound or really quite liberal or just bland, and they want to bring this church to a healthy church. What are the steps for getting there without breaking the whole thing up and calling it faithfulness, or without taking 45 years until everybody dies off? What are the steps for bringing it there?
That’s practical wisdom too, isn’t it? That’s really what Nehemiah is doing in his own setting. He knows where he’s going for the building of the whole city, and there are various steps for getting there. There is a certain kind of godly wisdom that you can pass on in this respect. When the book comes out (it’s only 140 pages or so), get it. It’s the sort of thing that may not be transferrable exactly, but it gives a lot of godly wisdom and biblical insight and reflection on biblical texts to show how you get from here to there. Many of us are in churches like that, aren’t we?
That’s what’s going on here. It takes more than walls to make a city. It takes more than Marines to establish the security of the US. It takes more than money and building programs to safeguard the local church. That brings us, then, to the second point: the spiritual nourishment of this pilgrim people. Chapter 8. More precisely, the second half of 7:73 to the end of chapter 8. This chapter provides the first two of a series of Bible readings.
In one sense, this too is related to Nehemiah’s opening chapter. In his prayer he prayed (chapter 1, verse 7), “We have acted very wickedly towards you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees, and laws you gave your servant Moses.” It is crucial to remember that you cannot have reformation without the centrality of the Word of God. You cannot do it, which means not only knowing this Word but conforming to it. All the entrepreneurial spirit in the world is insufficient if this is lacking.
So chapter 11 must wait. The repopulation program must be put in abeyance until you get some of these fundamentals reestablished in the mind of what population you do have. The failure to see this is precisely why there is sometimes focus on mere entrepreneurial activity. What happens is that without denying the gospel, the gospel merely becomes that which is assumed, whereas all of the excitement is in the technique.
Most of the great quasi-Christian entrepreneurial activities in the Western world don’t begin by doubting the gospel or denying the gospel. They merely assume the gospel. What becomes the passion is the particular structure or method or technique or approach or radio ministry or whatever it is until finally it is the technique and the method that becomes god, and all along, nothing has ever been formally denied.
Whereas, in fact, the right ordering is just the opposite. We must be absolutely passionate about the gospel all the time, and then within that framework thank God for the diversity of gifts that provides us with administrators and fund-raisers and people with how-to smarts of administration and distribution of materials and the like, but never, ever, ever allow those people to control the direction of things.
There have been several major books written in the last 20 years on what has gone wrong with North American seminaries over the last two and a half centuries. After all, many of our great academic centers of theological learning were founded on deeply confessional lines: Harvard, Yale, Andover Newton, and so on. It’s only relatively more recent ones, such as Chicago, that were founded on frankly liberal lines. But of course, most have gone the way of all flesh.
It lends to a certain perception that somehow schools inevitably go bad. They just become more sophisticated and leave the simplistic fundamentalism of the fathers behind. But the books that have studied this pattern have begun to pick up certain kinds of trends that happen again and again and again. Almost always, these schools are begun by pastor theologians, visionaries who are deeply committed to making God known through his Most Holy Word and, therefore, they want schools founded that will teach people Scripture.
But somewhere along the line, success breeds the need to have administrators who are competent in accounting and organization and academic structures and meeting the needs of accrediting agencies and on and on, so eventually you get a president or a principal who is appointed who is personally orthodox but not particularly theologically alert or himself too experienced in handling the Word of God, but very, very gifted in academic administration.
Because his antennae are not so acutely tuned, he will let in some faculty, and so on, who are very nice, pious blokes, and they’re not committing any of the errors of yesteryear, but they might be smuggling in some new ones, and the chap doesn’t see it. In most of the contemporary evangelical seminaries in North America, we are not in the slightest in danger of hiring classic liberals.
We’re far more in danger of snookering in some kind of postmodernist who can sign the confession of faith with a clear conscience and yet relativize it at the same time, all in the name of fidelity. We’re far more in danger of being snookered by someone with slightly skewed views on justification, because the new perspective on Paul is still so endemic to many, many academic circles.
Many, many is the senior seminary vice president or principal who, at the end of the day, is very godly and personally as orthodox as the apostle Paul but just doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in the contemporary world. Suddenly you have a small shift, which, in a couple of generations, means the whole thing is gone. So with all due respect to the wonderful gifts of administration and entrepreneurial spirit and all the rest, God help us, don’t let them take over. They must serve the larger vision, the more central vision, of being faithful to the Word of God and making God’s Word known.
What we now find, then, are two days of Bible reading and teaching. Both days are characterized by remarkable seriousness before the Word and by joy. Day one: Nehemiah 7:73b to 8:12. “When the seventh month came and the Israelites had settled in their towns, all the people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring out the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded for Israel.
So on the first day of the seventh month, Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. He read it aloud from daybreak till noon, as he faced the square before the Water Gate in the presence of the men, women, and others who could understand. All the people listened attentively to the book of the law.”
The date, that is, the first day of the seventh month, precipitated the request. This is the time of the Feast of Trumpets. It became, therefore, an occasion to invite Ezra the scribe, elsewhere called Ezra the priest (verse 2), an appropriate term, because the priests were not only charged with temple duties; they were repeatedly charged in the Old Testament with teaching people the Law. See, for example, Malachi, chapter 2.
So this became a major event. In this open square people gathered, not men only, but men and women, and not men and women only, but even relatively young people, provided that they are old enough to understand. This is remarkable enough that Nehemiah repeats the expression. In fact, it shows up not only twice in this paragraph, but it shows up a couple of times later in the book, almost as if he wants to make sure this is not some hierarchical thing in which only men can hear and understand the Word of God. Men, women, and, in fact, anybody who is old enough to understand.
You’ve been in the ministry long enough to have received your share of both commendations and rebukes. After a while, most of them brush off your shoulders. You don’t take the rebukes too seriously, and you don’t take the commendations too seriously. But there’s one that gets me every time. If there’s some dad who comes up to me with tears in his eyes at the end of a sermon and says, “My 14-year-old listened to that sermon right through and was gripped,” it’s very hard for me not to cry, because I too am a parent. Isn’t that what we want? The Word of God gripping a whole new generation?
Verses 4–8 give the details of what happened. There’s a high wooden platform built for the occasion, and then in a show of public display.… This is not merely the priestly duty of one man but the corporate leadership of the community coming together, saying, “This we approve. This we want.” They stand with him as the Word is read. Ezra opens the book. All the people could see him because he’s on this platform. When the book is read, all the people stand up in reverence. Ezra praises the Lord, the great God, and all the people lift their hands and respond, “Amen! Amen!” and bow and worship.
Then we read these two remarkable verses, 7 and 8: “The Levites—Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, and Pelaiah—instructed the people in the Law while the people were standing there. They read from the book of the law, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read.”
Now you know as well as I do that this trilogy of steps is crucial. They read the text. They make it clear. Almost certainly, that expression means they interpreted it, that is, they translated it, because at this juncture, the people are primarily Aramaic speakers. So they read the text, they translate it, and then they expound it.
Exactly how this worked out mechanically from Ezra’s reading to the subunits is not clear. Almost certainly, these people had had some instruction from Ezra so that the thing is all running off in one direction. What they do is they read the text, they translate it, and then they expound it. To what purpose? Verse 8: “So that the people could understand what was being read.”
Some of us have been in parts of the world where there is such a hunger for the Word of God that if you stop explaining the Word of God in under an hour and a half or two hours, people will be really quite ticked with you. Such a hunger for the Word of God. I know it’s another culture and a different set of expectations; nevertheless, there is something flaccid about a community that feels it is being robbed of its precious time if they are given more than “sermonettes for Christianettes.” Ten minutes, tops.
It’s not just a question of time, of course. Some people can rabbit on for an hour and a half and say what could have been more decently said in about 25 minutes. That’s not a strength. But what should be the case in all of our communities, regardless of the time, is taking whatever steps are necessary in our respective communities to read the Word of God and so teach it that people understand it.
So if you’re in a community of blue-collar workers who hardly ever crack a book but watch a lot of TV and have no taste or hunger for a whole lot of reading, at least initially, then your approach to making the Word of God known and explained and understood might be a bit different than if you’re in Cambridge at a church with 500 CICCU students.
Although the steps for getting there may be different; nevertheless, isn’t that what you must still struggle with? How do you teach the Word of God so as to help people understand it? What this generates in this instance (verses 9–12) is a tension between, on the one hand, tears and lamentations as people see how far away they are from this Word, and on the other, the command to rejoice.
“Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe …” Both titles now together. “… and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, ‘This day is sacred to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.’ For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.”
Three times we are told, “This day is sacred to the Lord; therefore, do not weep.” Verses 8, 10, and 11. This, of course, is grounded in Scripture itself. The new moons and the major festivals were supposed to be times of rejoicing. That’s what the Law itself mandated. Numbers 10:10; Deuteronomy 12, Deuteronomy 14, Deuteronomy 16.
Yet here, it has to be said, there is also something admirable about the tears, for transparently they spring from shocked recognition about how these covenant people are so distanced from what the covenant itself stipulates. What to do? Rejoice or lament? Now of course, if you belong to a certain camp, it’s already determined for you, isn’t it? First the tears, then the rejoicing. First the repentance, and then the joy. It has to be that way, doesn’t it? It’s the logical order.
But the leaders are in no doubt that it is the other order that is here required. Why? Well, there are at least three reasons that I can see emerging from the text. There may be others. First, as the feasts are stipulated by Scripture, they are to be festivals of rejoicing. So if the people are lamenting over their failure to observe Scripture, then should not they observe Scripture, including Scripture’s injunctions about observing the feasts, in the fashion in which Scripture exhorts the feasts to be observed?
How do you start lamenting over the failure to observe the feasts and then observe them in a way that is diametrically opposed to the way Scripture commands them to be observed? If you’re going to get biblical fidelity, it had better be pretty holistic, not piecemeal. Moreover, built into this is the notion that there is a connection between sacredness and joy. That’s quite wonderful, isn’t it? We have sometimes made our vision of holiness so dour it becomes repugnant except to those who are essentially masochistic.
I know there’s a danger of flippancy in handling the Word of God, but I love the response of C.H. Spurgeon when he was accused of having too many one-liners and jokes in the pulpit. He was rebuked by a woman for being frivolous before the Word of God and eternity that yawned before the souls of men and women. He replied, “Madam, if you knew how much humor I had cut out of the sermon, you would bless me for my restraint.”
There is a personality element in all of this too, isn’t there? For some people, the humor just sort of bubbles up as part of the joie de vivre before the Lord. So long as it’s not self-serving or self-aggrandizing or self-promoting, this too is part of the communication of God’s truth through human personality to other human personalities.
Doubtless, in the second place, the leaders are now also very aware there will be time for tears and lament, and as we shall see this afternoon, as the unfolding account demonstrates, the leaders, these same Levites, prepare the way for lament. In other words, both the rejoicing and the lament are actually led. They’re not merely waiting for these things to happen and then the emotions take over and then you ascribe the whole thing to the Spirit.
You don’t want to somehow domesticate the Spirit. The Spirit is free to do what he likes. That’s also true. Yet nevertheless, the Spirit works through means, and the means here, above all, is the Word of God. So we will obey the Word and in the feast rejoice, because the Word commands us to, and if there’s a place for public confession.… As we shall see, it is a remarkably well-prepared and structured confession that the Levites lead the people into.
Then there’s a third element. Verse 10: “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” Or perhaps you could render it, “The joy of the Lord is your stronghold” or “The joy of the Lord is your security.”
Although repentance and lamentation may lead to righteousness and integrity, they can merely be self-indulgent expressions of emotional catharsis and not lead to any strength at all, but there is a profound spiritual strength in people who really do delight in the Lord. Even when they’re going through really difficult times, they are irrepressible. Isn’t that what James says? “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice.”
Such people, I think, rejoice not because they have certain ebullient personalities, and not because they have no tears, but because they are so grounded in the love of God, so grounded in the grace of God, so grounded in the truth of God that everything else becomes relativized in the light of these absolutes. It produces an apostle who can suffer all of the things Paul suffered and then refer to them as “these light and momentary afflictions, which are not to be compared with the glory yet to be revealed.”
Let me tell you about Mike Wheeler. Almost 20 years ago, Mike went out as a single missionary to Bolivia. He learned the language, Spanish, fluently and was involved in theological education. He loved the people. In his late 30s, he met another single missionary out there, a woman who was sent by another mission, and the two were married.
Rather later than most, they had their first child, a little girl. When the girl was about 2, the mission sent Mike back to Trinity to do a PhD. They liked his work a great deal, and meanwhile theological educational standards were rising in Bolivia, and they needed some people with advanced training to teach a new generation of pastors, exegesis and this sort of thing, so they sent him back to Trinity.
He barely arrived and got into the program when his wife came down with breast cancer, a rather advanced form of it. She went through all the usual: one mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy, the whole bit. She suffered a great deal but was coming out of it on the other side and had good hopes for a happy prognosis when he came down with cancer, a severe stomach cancer, so bad, in fact, that the hospitals in Chicago (some of which, like Lutheran General, that are world famous for their treatment of cancer patients) wouldn’t touch him. They told him he was past hope.
The mission wanted him badly enough that they tried one more place. They took him up to Mayo Clinic. There Mayo promised nothing but removed 90 percent of his stomach and gave him experimental drugs that are never used for stomach cancer, that are used at the front end of bowel and intestinal cancer. With 90 percent of his stomach removed, he had to eat every two or three hours in little amounts because, of course, his stomach couldn’t hold anything.
He’s about six-three or six-four and was always thin, now skinny as a rake, but gradually began to pull out of it and resumed his program. His wife’s cancer came back, and she died. Six months ago, Mike Wheeler was in our church, because ours is one of the strong supporting churches for him. He was back, about to leave for Bolivia with his daughter, now 7-1/2. All he talked about for half an hour was the love and goodness and grace of God in his life, because the joy of the Lord was his strength.
I want to suggest to you that’s merely normal Christianity. It may not be average, but it’s normal. When you start weighing the cancer against the forgiveness of sins.… A wife, yes, a terrible loss, but she has left the land of the dying and is now in the land of the living, at least one parent still preserved for that little girl, relatives who loved them and supported them and cherished them in all of this, a vast community of brothers and sisters in Christ who picked up any extraneous medical bills and nurtured them through all of this, prayed for them.
Then you measure it all against 50 billion trillion years in eternity, and suddenly you start speaking with the apostle Paul about this “light and momentary affliction, which cannot be compared with the weight of glory yet to be revealed.” The joy of the Lord, then, does not seem so strange, does it? We badly need to rediscover the Puritan ideal of knowing how to die well. No, these leaders under Nehemiah were not foolish when they demanded rejoicing.
Day two: Verses 13–18. Apparently most went home at the end of day one. Here the heads of families and other leaders engage in further Bible study. A point worth noting is that the leaders and heads must do more Bible study than the rest. When somebody tells me today that he is interested in gospel ministry, one of the first questions I ask is, “Do you enjoy studying? Because if you don’t, stay out of the ministry.”
The ministry of the Word of God, precisely because it is the ministry of the Word of God, demands not only the ability to communicate it but to study it, learn it, digest it, and incorporate it into your life and thought and obedience before you teach it. The leaders must engage in further study.
What they were studying at this point were the texts regarding the Feast of Booths or the Feast of Tabernacles. When Ezra, somewhat earlier, led the people in a celebration of this feast, the emphasis was on the appropriate sacrifices for the feast. So Ezra 3:4, following the stipulations of the feast given to us in Numbers 29.
But there’s another emphasis on the feast that you find in Leviticus 23, verses 39 and following, and that is the passage that is being followed here. There there is the stipulation on the Feast of Booths of going out into the hill country and picking up olive branches and myrtle branches and the like, and building some kind of little shanty, some kind of little booth, in commemoration of the pilgrim journey in the wilderness before entry into the Promised Land.
It becomes a way of looking back, of remembering corporately, as a whole community, the transitional passage through the wilderness when God protected and blessed in those hard, lean years before entrance into the Promised Land. That feast began on the fifteenth of the seventh month. This instruction is on day two of the seventh month, so that allowed time for the leaders to instruct their respective groups. That takes place transparently in verses 14b and 15, all following what was written (verse 15).
Moreover, Deuteronomy 31 stipulates that every seven years at this festival the Torah is to be read. That’s what the Law stipulates. After all, people didn’t all own Bibles in those days, so there was to be public reading at the Feast of Tabernacles at least every seven years, a major Bible conference. We read that this is exactly what happened. Verse 18: “Day after day, from the first day to the last, Ezra read from the book of the law of God. They celebrated the feast for seven days, and on the eighth day, in accordance with the regulation, there was an assembly.”
The reference to Joshua draws a more complex comparison than mere comparing of how well this feast had been observed compared with how well Joshua’s feast had been observed. Joshua led the people from the desert into the Promised Land. Now Ezra and Nehemiah lead the people from exile into the Promised Land, as it were.
Exactly the same imagery is picked up, for example, in Revelation, chapter 12, in which with Christ, the Son who is born of the woman, now removed to the heavenlies.… This woman, this messianic community, and all of her children, those who give testimony to Jesus.… She too is being pursued into the wilderness, where she will face trial and difficulty.
The language is reminiscent not only of Joshua’s day and of Ezra’s day, but also of Hosea. Do you remember what Hosea says when he finds that his bride is abandoning him, when God Almighty becomes God Almighty the cuckold? He says, “I will take her into the wilderness, and I will woo her.” The wilderness was not only the place of severe trial and preparation before entering the Promised Land. It was the place where God Almighty wooed his bride.
It happens again in the church today. We are going through the period now of wilderness before our entry into the Promised Land. The same typological structures are picked up. Thus, day two kicks off this celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, and once again God’s people are thoroughly nourished by the Word of God along their pilgrim journey. Here, then, is the face of this reformation.
The people of God, now in some measure physically protected and spiritually nourished by Scripture, with leaders learning yet more of Scripture and leading the people into covenantal faithfulness, gather in joyful celebration of the festivals of God that remember God’s saving work in the past, and all of it brought about, in the first instance, according to Nehemiah, because of what God put in Nehemiah’s heart.
Brothers, I know that in the West today it feels as if we’re in the day of small things, but two or three times I have been on the edge of genuine movements of the Spirit of God, and I have observed some things very much in line with these chapters. In another session I’ll say a little bit more about the church in Korea, for example.
I was serving a church in Canada during the 18 months or so of what came to be called the Canadian Revival which began in Saskatchewan in 1970 under the ministry of the Sutera twins. It was just a series of Bible meetings. In this instance, the church began to pray with confession of sin and demanding more Bible teaching and turning from public wickedness.
Over the next months, that church was packed out every night, often until 12:00 and 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning, with people coming to hear the Word of God taught and to confess their sins. The crime rate in Regina, Saskatchewan, actually dropped. People would start showing up in shops and returning stuff they had pilfered. More and more of the confessional churches were brought along with this as people listened with reverence to the Word of God. Then it began to spread outside of Regina.
At that time, I was pastor of a church in Vancouver, but part of my responsibilities concerned what was called the French Ward in Quebec, so I would fly back and forth across the country and stop down sometimes and see what was going on, watch, listen. Eventually, the movement spread to Vancouver, where I was. By the time it was there, it was another animal. People were now talking of flying in and catching the revival.
At one time, you would sometimes find in a public meeting some newly converted person standing up and giving a wonderful testimony to the grace of God in candor and humility and almost childish, certainly childlike, excitement. Then once they had done it, the leaders would be trying to say, “Would you like to give it over here, brother?” The whole thing was becoming domesticated. It just felt like a $3 bill or a three-pound note.
On the other hand, I was also in Quebec during a rather similar and rather different period. In French Canada, a population of 6-1/2 million, as recently as 1972 there was a total of 35 French-speaking evangelical churches with an average congregation, I suppose, of about 30, none with more than 40 or 45. None. Between 1972 and 1980, our churches grew from 35 to about 500.
I went to England in ‘72, came back in ‘75, and was back in Vancouver. I started visiting some of these churches, and they were just not the same thing. These little fledgling churches with very little leadership and no growth.… Suddenly I was down giving some courses in Sherbrooke on a Wednesday night at prayer meeting in this church, which had never had more than 40 people on a Sunday morning. On this particular Wednesday night, they had 85 or 90, almost all of whom had been converted in the previous 18 months.
I asked the pastor how long I was supposed to speak, and he said, “Well, I never speak for less than an hour. You can certainly go an hour and a half.” And I did. At the end of it, the pastor said, “We’re so glad Don Carson is here. If you have some questions about the Bible, this would be a great time to ask them.” I answered questions, intense questions, about the Bible, for another hour.
Then the pastor said, “Now it’s time to pray. What’s on your mind? What’s on your heart? What is of concern to you?” Not a single person mentioned Great-Aunt Maude, age 96, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. “Could we pray for her, please, that the Lord will heal her?” Not one person mentioned an ingrown toenail or a mortgage payment.
They were all talking about neighbors they were talking to about the Lord, and how they would learn to communicate the gospel to people at work, and how wonderful it would be if some of their own relatives came to faith, just person after person after person. They talked about this for about half an hour to 40 minutes.
Then they got down on their knees to pray. Closer to 1:00 than midnight, no one had yet left. I left first. I was supposed to be lecturing the next morning at 7:30. And that was just typical. It wasn’t even an exceptional Wednesday night. It was just about average. This was going on all over the province.
Now I worry about certain kinds of revival stories. They can almost sound magical, and you can get into a mode of thinking, “Well, there’s not much we can do until God comes in revival.” You don’t want to get into the mode of despising the day of small things. But let me tell you, that reforming time in French Canada, unlike the ministry in English Canada, was deeply grounded in Bible teaching. In many ways, we were saved by the language.
You see, in the English part of Canada, the experts all flew in. It hit the media. All of these church growth experts, trying to catch the revival and analyze it sociologically and explain it away, and endless meetings and rallies and conferences on studying the revival, as if you can sort of package what God is going to do. In French Canada, well, nobody understood what was going on in any case. We didn’t have any experts, so they just got on with their prayer meetings and things, taught some more Bible.
I resolved then that if, in the mercy of God, he ever put me in a place where there was some sign of a singular movement of the Spirit of God, certain things would prevail so far as I have any control of them whatsoever. Firstly, use all of that energy, that God-given spiritual dynamic, that movement of the Spirit, to support Bible teaching, serious Bible teaching, so that people focus on the Word of God and learn what Scripture itself says. “To this man will I look: he who is of a contrite spirit and who trembles at my Word.”
Secondly, so far as it is possible, keep the press out. Don’t talk about what you’re doing. Dream big, but start small. Be faithful. Don’t worry about what others think. Keep the press out. Get on with the ministry itself. Thirdly, keep a check on all human arrogance or pride or a sense of control or manipulation. Let it be the Word of God doing its transforming work in our churches, in our lives, in our communities.
I have no idea what God will do in England or the British Isles, on the continent, in America. God knows we’re ripe for judgment. But maybe the day of small things through which we’re passing will signal far, far, far greater things, and should, please God, that day ever come, may the men who have been trained to preach never, ever cast their vision higher than being preachers of the Word of God. Let us pray.
Have mercy upon us, merciful God. We hear of singular blessing in other parts of the world. We see something of it, and we rejoice, because the church is not European or Anglo-Saxon or English, yet, Lord God, we are deeply ashamed of our faults, of our failures, of our wickedness. We do not know what to do, and our eyes are upon you. While blessing others, merciful God, we beg of you, do not pass us by.
Keep us fixed, we beg of you, both on the Word, which discloses the glories of the gospel, the glories of your dear Son, the gift of eternal life secured by his death on our behalf, which mediates your very presence to us, that Word for which Jesus prayed on the night he was betrayed, “Sanctify them through your truth; your Word is truth,” and keep our eyes fixed, Lord God, on men and women, so that we learn how, so far as it is given to us, to read and teach this Word so that men and women understand it. This for your glory and your people’s good. In Jesus’ name, amen.
