The Wall is Finished
Having finished the wall in 52 days, Nehemiah and the returned exiles gathered to praise God, celebrate his provision, and repent of their sin.
It took 52 days to finish rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. Considering the size of the city, the amount of destruction it had experienced, and the resistance Nehemiah encountered, it’s incredible that they got it done at all. To do it in less than two months was nothing less than miraculous.
When the wall was complete, Nehemiah wrote,
When all our enemies heard of it, all the nations around us were afraid and fell greatly in their own esteem, for they perceived that this work had been accomplish with the help of our God.
This is profoundly different from where he started. In the very first paragraph of his diary, Nehemiah tells us about Jerusalem:
The remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.
In the space of 52 days1, God’s people had gone from great trouble and shame, to having a newly completed wall, and it was now the nations around them who were ashamed, all because of the work that Nehemiah and the Men of Israel accomplished with God’s help in the face of their enemies.
The city had been rebuilt, but it had not yet been dedicated or repopulated. It was “wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been rebuilt” (7:4). Nehemiah took a count of everyone who had survived the exile, and it wasn’t many. From the teeming masses of Israel, just over 43,000 people had come home, and even they were living in the towns around Jerusalem, not in Jerusalem itself.
The Dedication
Nehemiah ordered a celebration; the people gathered, and, Ezra, the scribe who had been involved in the reconstruction of the temple, read God’s law to them.
As Ezra read, they heard the law of the Lord began to weep as they thought of the judgement their sin had brought onto the city.
Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Levites told them to stop weeping.
There is a time for weeping and repentance, but there is also a time for celebration.
God’s word is meant to draw us to repentance. There very much is a time for weeping and repentance, but there is also a time for celebration. Christianity is not a joyless religion2. God had done a great work for his people, and the proper response in that moment was not continued weeping but exaltation at God’s gracious forgiveness and restoration.
Nehemiah gave the order:
This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep…Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.
God’s word is meant to reprove us and convict us and correct us. But it is also meant to encourage and uplift us when we are walking within God’s purpose. The above paragraph ends with, “And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them” (vs. 12). When you really understand the promises from God’s word, and you’re living within that covenant, you cannot help but rejoice!
Feast of Booths
I think there’s a tendency when we see God move to want to hold what we’ve got. The band Petra3 had a line in their 1990 song “Beyond Belief” that always stuck with me. They said, “We’re content to pitch our tent when the glory’s evident. Seldom do we know the glory came and went.” Later in the same song, Petra says, “from faith to faith we grow, toward the center of the flow.” The Jews who celebrated the dedication of the wall resisted the temptation to hold squat after the first day of feasting. Instead, they came back together the following morning to continue, and they started by studying more, trying to understand God better through his word.
During the study, they found something they had missed before. They realized that they were dedicating the wall during the month that Moses had commanded them to celebrate the feast of booths in Leviticus 23.
Rather than despair because they had already messed up by forgetting about the celebration or saying, “this year we dedicate the wall; next year we will do the feast of booths,” they immediately responded to this new understanding of God’s word.
“Go out to the hills and bring branches of olive,” they proclaimed throughout all the towns in the region around Jerusalem. “Get wild olive, myrtle, palm, and other leafy trees to make booths” (Neh. 8:15).
The people joyfully fulfilled the festival requirements, starting that very day, “and there was very great rejoicing. And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the book of the law of God” (vs. 18).
This continued for seven days, and then on the eighth day the people convened to confess their sin, fast, and repent before God.
Repentance and celebration. They happen over and over. During their confession, as we hear over and over again during prayers and sermons throughout the Bible, they rehashed the entire scope of what God had already done for them.
God made heaven and earth (10:6).
God chose Abram and gave him the name Abraham (vs. 7).
God made a covenant with Abraham to give his descendants the land of Canaan (vs. 8).
God rescued his people at the Red Sea (vs. 9).
God defeated Pharoah and Egypt (vs. 10).
God led them by a pillar of fire and cloud to Sinai and spoke with them from heaven (vs. 12).
God gave them his commandments (vs. 13).
God have them the sabbath (vs. 14).
God gave them bread from heaven (vs. 15).
God sustained them even when they sinned and worshipped a false god and tried to return to Egypt (vs. 16-21).
God gave them Canaan (vs. 22-25).
God rescued them again and again when their sins placed them under his judgement (vs. 26-31).
During this whole time, as God’s word was read, and the people celebrated, the priests moved throughout the crowd, explaining the words of the book so that each person would understand God’s gracious preservation of them.
That is, told each other the reason for this celebration. It was not just about the wall. It was about the God who had brought them home.
They were obeying the commands from Deuteronomy 6.
Coda
I never intended to write this week’s newsletter. Originally, the last paragraph in I Am doing a Great Work was all I said about the completion of the wall besides some fanciful theatrics in the epilogue, which will come out next week. After all, in my mind, the work is the thing; accomplishing the task was what mattered. And how do you tell about a dedication service and make it exciting4? But over the last couple weeks since I finished drafting this series on Nehemiah, I’ve come more and more to realize that the work isn’t the whole story. In fact, by just saying “and then they finished the wall,” I was forgetting the whole point of the Deuteronomy Six Project, which is to encourage you to make sure that when your kids leave your house, they will do so with a strong sense of who God is and what he has done for his people.
Deuteronomy Six commands a multi-generation commitment to the project of being God’s people. It comes with a set of instructions for how to succeed at this project and includes promises of what the outcome will be if you are obedient. The promise is “that your days may be long” (Deut 6:2) and “that you may multiply greatly” (vs. 3). Here’s the program:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (vs. 5).
These words that I command you today shall be on your heart (vs. 6).
You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (vs. 7).
You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes (vs 8).
You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates (vs 9).
My whole reason for writing the Deuteronomy Six Project is to keep God’s word on my heart, so that can be faithful to teach them diligently to my children. I publish them in the hope that they can help someone else do the same thing for his kids.
I have the sense that the last several generations of Christians in America have done a particularly bad job at this. If you grew up in a Christian home, think of your senior year of high school. How many of the teens you went to youth group with are still serving the Lord? Statistically, it’s not that many. If you grew up in the church and you are still following Christ, your parents succeeded where other parents failed.
Now it’s our turn, and my prayer is that a greater percentage of us will succeed in this wicked generation than the generation before us. My prayer every day for my children is “Lord don’t let a single one of these precious treasures you have put in my care be lost to the world.”
I pray for their health, long life, success, etc. But I also pray that if any of those things will prevent them from loving Christ, that God will keep it from them. I would rather go from a hard life into God’s kingdom than from a “blessed” life into eternity away from his presence.
For this to happen, we must take the time to tell them:
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
Not counting travel and outfitting.
Yes, I know this happened before Christianity came on the scene. But true Judaism before Christ was Christianity. They just didn’t know it yet.
One of the few Christian bands from that era I’m aware of that had a lifetime of faithful ministry and never fell into scandal or brought disrepute to Christ.
The dedication of Solomon’s temple being an obvious exception.