Nehemiah: Epilogue
The wall has been completed, but it takes more than a wall to change the heart.
If Nehemiah was a Hollywood character, his story would probably end with him standing over the freshly completed walls of Jerusalem, having just defeated Sanballat and Tobiah in some epic battle. Their attack would have come just seconds after Nehemiah closed the city gates. I imagine at least one of the gates would manage to explode somehow. Maybe Sanballat would make it to the top of the wall, and Nehemiah could meet him face to face. There would be an epic fight scene in which at least once we would see Sanballat on the verge of pushing Nehemiah to his death by falling from a rampart, but Nehemiah would rally his strength and throw Sanballat back. In the end, it would be Sanballat who fell from the wall. The final scene would have Sanballat’s body lying broken before the gates of a newly restored Jerusalem while Nehemiah stood on the top of the wall looking epic. Maybe somehow his tunic would have been torn so we could see his bulging biceps and airbrushed abs.
I’m sorry to tell you that this is not how Nehemiah’s story ends. In fact, the story ends so anticlimactically that I thought about just letting the series stop last week with, “God’s people had come together and raised a wall to protect God’s temple.” I felt like that would have made a pretty decent ending.
The Same Stupid Sins
Even after the dedication of the temple and the restoration of the gates, all is not well in Jerusalem.
Nehemiah left Jerusalem to resume his job as the king’s cupbearer. His mission was complete. It was a success. But Nehemiah’s heart was in Jerusalem, and he sought and was granted the king’s permission to visit again. That journey must have been just as full of joy as his first journey had been full of mourning. He must have been looking forward to riding his donkey into Jerusalem and seeing the revitalized city protecting her temple, and God’s people streaming into the temple to worship.
Instead, Nehemiah found that Tobiah had somehow managed to stay in power, and while Nehemiah was gone, he had moved into the temple. He was literally using God’s restored temple as his own private lodging.
Nehemiah was filled with a righteous rage and, in a foreshadowing of Jesus’ later cleansing of the temple, threw all of Tobiah’s goods out into the street. “Clean this up,” he demanded of the priests that had let it happen. “Sanctify this chamber from Tobiah’s desecration and bring back the articles of worship that are supposed to be here.”
But where were the priests? There were still a couple standing around to hear his orders, but not nearly as many as there should have been.
“Where has everyone gone?” he asked.
“They are in the fields,” one priest ventured to respond. “We did not have enough to eat, so they are growing food to keep us from starving.”
In Nehemiah’s absence, the Jews had stopped tithing, so to avoid starvation, the Priests had let temple services had falling into neglect.
Nehemiah set up a new system to ensure that the priests received the offerings so that they could afford to do the work God had given them.
The following Saturday, Nehemiah sat at the door of his house, resting as God commanded. To his disgust,
I saw in Juday people treading winepresses on the Sabbath, and bringing in heaps of grain and loading them on donkeys, and also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of loads, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day.
If you remember way back in The Sun Rises over Jerusalem, the first issue in our reading of Nehemiah, despite all of Israel’s horrible sin over the generations, the one that was most emphasized before the final destruction of the city was that God’s people had ignored the Sabbath. The Chronicler says that God sent his people into exile until the land had caught up on the sabbath rest they had been denying it.
Now Nehemiah finds the people doing the same thing all over again.
Did not your fathers act in this way, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? Now you are bringing more wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath.
In other words, “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?”
Nehemiah orders the gates to be closed on the Sabbath, and he tells the merchants that if they try to stage a market day on the Sabbath again, he will “lay hands on you” (vs. 21). I laugh every time I read this verse. Winsome.
Finally, Nehemiah saw that the people were right back at their old games and intermarrying with the pagan people around them. Not only were they intermarrying with those people, but they were allowing their children to be raised as pagans. Nehemiah says,
I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. And half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah.
He follows up by saying, “I confronted them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair.”
And that’s how it ends. Nehemiah has dedicated his life to seeing the city restored, and he has succeeded in that task, but building the wall does not change the hearts of the people inside of it.
The Levites have resumed worship in the temple, the city is once again becoming prosperous, and everything seems to be going well, but the people are doing the same things they did to provoke God’s wrath in the first place. Nehemiah does the best he can, but the covenant that the people established with God when they dedicated the temple and completed the walls isn’t enough because their hearts aren’t any different than their parents’ hearts had been.
What is needed isn’t a repaired covenant with God established by the people who broke the original covenant in the first place. What Nehemiah does here is never going to work. The people who broke the covenant cannot restore it. But God has something to say to the issue:
Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
Only God can make a new covenant, and several hundred years later, he did. This Monday we celebrate the first words being set to vellum in that new covenant, the one written in the blood of God himself.
I hope that as you enter the Christmas weekend, you will enter with a state of joyous anticipation, remembering both the first coming and the mystery of the next.
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
Merry Christmas.