The Zeal for God’s Glory
Nehemiah 13 - 25 November 2007

Andrew Lim

I am glad there is a chapter 13 which serves as an epilogue

Chapter 12 naturally concludes the story of Nehemiah with a high note:
- the dedication of the walls / purification of the leaders
- thanksgiving sung by the choir / joy resounding for a great distance
- the people assembled before God in the courts of the temple

But because of this chapter / we get to see Jerusalem
years after the high point
this chapter is really an epilogue to the entire book

What has happened is this
After Nehemiah he had dealt with enemies / organized the people
rebuilt the wall / set in place a righteous government
celebrate the finishing of the rebuilding
and ruled there for twelve years as governor of the region
he returned to serve as a senior official
in the court of Artaxerxes in Persia

We do not know how long he stayed there
but it probably the case that after he had served in Artaxerxes' court
at the age of retirement / he came back to Jerusalem

But his heart is always in Jerusalem
It was the place he wanted to end his days / in Israel’s royal city
and so he makes this return trip

And to his surprise / he finds that while he been gone for awhile
things have fallen in bad ways
Its like the case that when the cat’s away / the mice will play

But what did he find?
He found that the people have compromised in some big ways

6 / But while all this was going on / I was not in Jerusalem
v.6 / “While all this was going on”
What had been going on / in the city / in his absence?

“For in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon
I had returned to the king
Some time later I asked his permission
7 / and came back to Jerusalem / Here I learned about the evil thing
Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room
in the courts of the house of God
8 / I was greatly displeased
and threw all Tobiah's household goods out of the room
9 / I gave orders to purify the rooms
and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God
with the grain offerings and the incense”

The first problem

Here we have Eliashib the high priest / the spiritual leader of the nation
He was the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the temple
He was responsible for the vessels
the rooms and the worship in the house of God

But he’s lost the plot had
He invited Tobiah / to move into the temple itself
to be used as his living quarter

You’ll recognize the name Tobiah
Tobiah was a dedicated enemy of God
He was a thorn on Nehemiah’s side
Remember he was one of those
who repeatedly tried to obstruct the rebuilding of the walls
He had personally criticized / attacked / and assaulted Nehemiah
He tried so many times to stop the rebuilding of Jerusalem
He was resolutely opposed everything that Nehemiah stood for
and everything that God intended for His people

And all through the 52 days of the rebuilding of the walls
Nehemiah made sure Tobiah never got inside the walls

And yet here you have a high priest / Eliashib
making room for Tobiah to live right in the temple courts of Jerisalem
and allowing him to set up his apartment there
But he had allowed Tobiah to sweet talk him into providing him
with a large room formerly used
to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles
and also the tithes of grain / new wine and oil
prescribed for the Levites / singers and gatekeepers
as well as the contributions for the priests

Here was a spiritual leadership of the nation
yet making alliances with her enemies

Its like allowing Osama ben Laden’s portrait
to hang on the foyer of the White house

Or as Swindoll puts it
its like having Martin Luther’s portrait hang in the Vatican

When you do this / you providing a small opening for them
and giving them a voice / to have an influence over you

When Nehemiah comes to hear of this / he took immediate action
He didn’t just say / “Tobiah / I think you're going to have to leave
You’ve got a month to get your things out of here”
He didn’t say / “We’ve got to note this issues on the agenda
for the next Committee meeting!”

No! None of that!

What did Nehemiah do
Read v 7 / I came to Jerusalem / and learned about the evil thing
Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room
in the courts of the house of God
v. 8 / I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah's household goods
out of the room
v. 9 / I gave orders to purify the rooms / and then I put back into them
the equipment of the house of God / with the grain offerings
and the incense”

Nehemiah might have been an older man at this point / perhaps 65
but listen to his words / in 13:8-9
“I was greatly displeased
and threw all Tobiah’s household goods out of the room
I gave orders to purify the rooms
and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God
with the grain offerings and the incense”

He threw Tobiah’s gears right out the door
- he fumigated the room
- then he returned the oil / grain / and incense to their proper place

Why? / Because having Tobiah in the house of God
is like having a possum in the chicken coop
- you’ll be having a demon in your midst!

BTW / I’d love to be there
when Tobiah comes home that night opens his front door
and found his room full of grain

We are in danger / of not knowing
how to be angry about the right thing anymore

We keep having this picture that God’s servants
should always be sweet and smiling and conforming

But this is incident has great similarity to the incident in the New Testament
when Jesus came into the temple and found it filled with moneychangers
- he reacted like Nehemiah
- he made a whip and went around the temple
upsetting tables and driving the moneychangers out

The Bible paints for us a picture of Jesus
who at several points in His life became very angry
He was angry with the narrow-mindedness of the Pharisees
He was incensed with the hypocrites
He called them broods of vipers
He told the unbelievers “You are of you father the devil”
He attacked the evils He saw around Him / with strong words
He criticised the Pharisees for their pretence
He called the religious people whitewashed tombs
He told who prayed long prayers what He thought of them
He criticised those who gave to the poor just for show

The Bible and the history of the church
tell us of godly men and women / who knew how to be very angry
at some things / that make the heart of God angry

Elijah told Ahab after the murder of Naboth that dogs will lick his blood
John the Baptist openly judged Herod and Herodias
for fooling around sexually
Amos told the wicked people to stop playing their worship songs
And he told Amaziah that his wife will die as a prostitute in a foreign land
and his children will die in the land of the heathen

Slavery became so deeply entrenched / people bought into the system
till men like Lincoln and Wilberforce & Garrison came along

Garrison came upon a slave market / and he saw
in the sorrowful face of the slave / the shadowed face of God
And when they said to him: "Be quite / Shut up and sit down
We are tired of hearing your speeches"
He said "I will not equivocate / I will not excuse
I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard"

Young Abraham Lincoln walking into a slave market
for the first time in his life got sick to his stomach
and a great passionate white-hot anger arose
and his fingernails bit into his hands
And he wispered so fiercely / the people around him heard him And it is recorded in his biography: “That is wrong / That is wrong
And if I ever get a chance to hit back I will hit it hard”
And hit it hard he did

If you are not getting anywhere in your spiritual life
it could well be / that you don’t get angry enough
not angry enough with your own sinful indulgences
not angry enough with the shoddiness of your discipline
not angry enough with sin you see all around you

Do we have the courage and wisdom
to express anger and outrage in our decadent culture?

Have we become soft by all that talk about tolerance
so that we can no longer sniff out what is clearly wrong in God’s sight

We live in a time when we have become soft towards evil
we do not get upset by the presence of evil
we think it strange that Nehemiah should act like he did
we have lost our ability to express outrage and indignation over evil

There are times when we must take a strong stand against the evils
that others have indifferently accepted

Because death is the consequence of inaction
When a child runs onto the road and a truck speeds right up the road
you don’t start discussing what you must do next
You do everything in your power to haul the child to safety

There are times when evil is so apparent / the only reaction is war!
And some things are so clear we don’t have to pray!


Second Problem

MARRIAGE

In Chapter 10 / the Israelites took a vow
that they would not intermarry with the members of these other races

And yet here / some ten years later / they broke the covenant
Many Ammonites and Moabites are found in the congregation of Israel
They got there because Israelite men
married the daughters of Ammonite and Moabite families
- something which God had strictly forbidden

Some of you might be asking
“What is wrong with marrying the Ammonites and Moabites?

This has nothing to do with pride of race

As a race of people / the Ammonites and the Moabites came into being
because of one of the most disturbing sins to be found in Scripture
the sin of incest

They were a people born out of the sin of incest
Remember after the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah
Lot and his two daughters took refuge in a cave
And the daughters decided that he was the only one
who was left to father their children / Gen. 19

Both the daughters of Lot were with child by their father
The first-born bore a son / and called his name Moab
He is the father of the Moabites to this day
The younger also bore a son / and called his name Ben-Ammi
He is the father of the sons of Ammonites to this day.

But even with that / God did not curse them for this immoral beginning
He was merciful to them / he allowed them to prosper

But it is when the Moabites and the Ammonites failed to bless Israel
when they came out of Egypt / and on top of that
hired the prophet Balaam to curse Israel / Num. 22-24
it was then / that they incurred the wrath of God
and were forbidden to enter the assembly of the congregation

And Ezra tells us that in Jerusalem the people were intermarrying
with these neighboring tribes / contrary to the Law of Moses
and he tells us that the land is now polluted
by the corruption of its peoples
that by their detestable practices they have filled it with their impurity
* And he tells the people
not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons
or take their daughters for your sons / Ezra 9:10-12

And this / is the reason why God forbade His people
from marrying the Ammonites and the Moabites

These people had degrading practices
If God’s children intermarry them they will become contaminated

And here in this passage / these people had earlier on made the vow
that they would not to give our daughters to sons of foreigners
or take their daughters for their sons” / 10:30

Now when Nehemiah returned
- he found that men of Judah
had married women from Ashdod / Ammon and Moab
- he also heard their children speaking foreign languages
which meant that they now can’t read the Law of God

Their sins were damaging their home and family life

Only a few years earlier the “Ammonites and the men of Ashdod”
had “plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem” / 4:7-8

Yesterday’s enemies had become today’s marriage partners

Here for the second time / we are faced with the issue of compromise

Nehemiah’s reaction again was swift and firm
V. 25: / “I rebuked them and called curses down on them
I beat some of the men and pulled out their hair
I made them take an oath in God’s name”

He was so mad / that he smacked some of the husbands
and yanked out their hair / and called down curses on them

Why such an intense reaction?
Because this very sin was the primary reason
they were taken into Babylonian captivity in the first place

Nehemiah remembered that it was pagan women
that led even their wisest king / King Solomon / into sin

Don’t forget Nehemiah himself
had personally suffered the results of Solomon’s sin
his own grandparents had been carried off to Babylon into exile

It was Solomon’s sins / that he was a servant to the Persian king

This is why Nehemiah reacted the way he did

He sees the absolute dangers of compromise

Third Problem

SABBATH

15-17 / “In those days I saw men in Judah treading winepresses
on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys
together with wine / grapes / figs and all other kinds of loads
And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath
Therefore I warned them against selling food on that day
Men from Tyre who lived in Jerusalem were bringing in fish
and all kinds of merchandise and selling them in Jerusalem
on the Sabbath to the people of Judah
I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them

“What is this wicked thing you are doing-desecrating the Sabbath day?”
Didn't your forefathers do the same things
so that our God brought all this calamity upon us and upon this city?
Now you are stirring up more wrath against Israel
by desecrating the Sabbath”

“When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath
I ordered the doors to be shut and not opened
until the Sabbath was over

Neehmiah didn’t just say / “Stop doing this”
He didn’t shake his head and say “Hey! We really need to talk about this”

No he did none of that
Instead / he slammed the doors in people’s faces

Reading from v.17 / “I rebuked the nobles of Judah and said to them
“What’s this wicked thing you are doing desecrating the Sabbath day?
18 / Didn’t your forefathers do the same things
so that our God brought all this calamity upon us
and upon this city?
Now you are stirring up more wrath against Israel
by desecrating the Sabbath”
19 / When evening shadows fell on the gates of Jerusalem
before the Sabbath / I ordered the doors to be shut
and not opened until the Sabbath was over
I stationed some of my own men at the gates
so that no load could be brought in on the Sabbath day”

20 / Once or twice the merchants and sellers of all kinds of goods
spent the night outside Jerusalem
But I warned them and said / “Why do you spend the night by the wall?
If you do this again / I will lay hands on you”

He not only slammed doors to their face / he got mad
He pulled the hair from some the men’s heads / he pulled off their beard
He told them he would punch the daylights out of them / if they persisted

And because they knew what was good for them / they heeded

v.21b / “From that time on they no longer came on the Sabbath”

Here for the third time / we are faced with the issue of compromise

The Jews were living among people who are not Jews
And these non-Jews do business on the Sabbath day

And perhaps/they reasoned to themselves that they weren’t doing business
the merchants of Tyre did most of the selling
we're just buying what they have to sell
now that’s not really breaking the Sabbath is it
and what we were buying is food anyway
food can’t keep / it spoils quickly

But Nehemiah under God / sees this as Sabbath-breaking

What is our attitude about the Sabbath?
Do we keep a day aside / to honor God
I spoke last week about the Chinese beggar
who was given six gold coins by a rich man
but he went and stole the seventh coin also

Its like God’s given us six days / and we steal the seventh from Him also

More and more I am seeing fewer and fewer Christians
who have a few personal non-negotiable convictions about Sunday
that Christians in the past used to have

We pride ourselves with freedom
We argue that we can’t be legalistic about such things
We argue for the place of personal convictions

With the result that we are seeing fewer and fewer Christians
form whom Sunday is specially set aside for the worship of God

We join with the activities out there that non-Christians do

The point is this
It is hard to have draw and keep certain firm lines
when we're surrounded by people who don't share our convictions
about what’s important.

We want to keep Sunday special for God
We want to read a little more of God’s Word
than we would normally read during the rest of the week
We want to come together for corporate worship
because coming to church is a message to your community
that Jesus is alive / and God relevant to our world
We want to spend more time in prayer
We want to spend time in telling people about God

We have some desires in our hearts about these matters
But living in a pluralistic society
where nobody else do these things
it is a growing struggle just to be a distinctive people

Aren’t the shops open on Sundays?
Surely it must be OK to shop on a Sunday then!
Aren’t the kids in school all five days of the week
Surely it is OK to make this a special day for the kids!

And so / one small step by another small step / we begin to spend Sunday
in no distinctive way different from all the rest of the six days

and we begin to buy on a Sunday / if we don’t sell
and we begin to allow other activities / to take the place
of giving God the cream of our Sunday to His worship
and we begin to rationalize that after all we are building up family bond
in whatever we are doing

Now / you do that for the for the first six months
and soon you’ll be doing that as the norm of how Sunday may be spent

And all those God-given convictions that you once held
is now gone with the drain-waters

And the worship of God is not MERELY
only one of the many options / open to you to pick as you like
and to leave it if you don’t fancy it

Some of you need to take a long hard look
at what God says about corporate worship on Sunday
He does not say “If you come together on the first day of the week”
He says “When you come together on the first day of the week”
He expects us to come together on the first day of the week
to worship

There is nothing to seek His will further on this matter

Many pastors today affirm that they can be having
as many as three different congregations on three consecutive Sundays
as families attend church once every three weeks

One pastor has termed this modern disease with the word “optionality”

Just as soccer on Sunday is a choice / or shopping / or family time
so is church / just another option

Be very careful
Compromise happens slowly and quietly
You don’t see it because you take only small steps in that direction
- one small step after another small step
- and you hardly notice it


I want to ask a larger question
Was Nehemiah ruthless
- he fumigated the apartment
- he warned the traders on pain of injury if they didn’t heed
- he pluck the beards of fathers

Why does he react like that?

No! / He wasn’t just crotchety in his old age
He knew the dangers of making small compromises

The frightening thing is this
Eliashib the high priest who allowed Tobiah to reside in the temple
wasn’t a wicked man / He did not have evil intention
He wasn’t a wolf in sheep's clothing
Eliashib was simply a practical man
who knows that he is going to have to be a neighbor
to the Horonites of Sanballat and the Ammonites of Tobiah

So it appeared to him that it was better for all
if they saw each other as friends instead of enemies
and not to have the tension in their back all the time

But when you do that
it is easy to forget that there are lines you should not cross

Evil invades us quietly / “sliver”
Before we are aware of it / we have compromised too much

And when we allow ourselves to compromise with evil
we soon come to lose the voice to speak against it
because we ourselves are guilty of it

Don’t make a room in the temple of your life for the things that trip you up

He knew that when you start making little decisions you know are wrong
little compromises / little alliances

When Judas began stealing from the money-bag
he probably stole only a little bit
but he stole more and more
till eventually he sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver

The story reveals the way evil worms its way into our lives
Evil infiltrates silently
Before we are aware of it we have compromised ourselves

A lot of Christians who are now far from God
have started going off the tangent
through making a compromise in something really small

But once a compromise is made / a real deviation has been made

We cannot afford to our shoulders
and think nothing about a compromise no matter how small

This story pictures the way evil can invade our lives
and take up rooms in the temple of our bodies
then polluting us / and ultimately destroying us

Like Nehemiah / we need to be ruthless
and with this matter of keeping Sunday for God
you need to be ruthless that nothing comes in the way

Husbands and wives need to help each other draw lines

Is there someone in your life / who is helping you make it easy
to think nothing of small dishonesties / little white lies
Is there someone you are flirting with?
Is your job taking over the place of God?
Is money becoming something you are running after more than God?
Are there sacrifices for God you are now less prepared to make
than you were happy to make a year ago?
Is time spent with God a drudgery to you?
Is the work of the church far from your mind?

Let me close with this note
Three times in this chapter / Nehemiah prays
Verse 14: / “Remember me for this / O my God
and do not blot out what I have so faithfully done
for the house of my God and its services
Verse 22: / “Remember me for this also / O my God
and show mercy to me according to your great love”

And then the very last sentence of the entire book, verse 30:
“Remember me with favor / O my God”

Nehemiah shows himself to be a humble man through these prayers
He could have become so enamored with his accomplishments
He could have demanded that a monument of him be erected
He could have arranged for a bronze plaque with his name on it
to be mounted on the wall to ensure his posterity

Or conversely
he could have been shattered by disillusion
in the face of his fickle-minded people
he could have been despaired over the unfaithfulness of the people
for surely he would have known that not very long after his death
the next generation would sink into compromise again

In short / Nehemiah could either be impressed with his past
or he could have been despaired about the future]

But he didn’t take any of these two roads
Instead he showed himself to have an acute understanding
of what really counts in the long haul

When he asked God to remember him / he is really saying:
“Lord / the day will come / sooner or later
when all of this will be over anyway
I want my life to be lived for your purpose
When all this is finally gone / may I not have lived to no avail
Instead / may all that I have done be found pleasing in your eyes”

He prays / “Remember me with favor / O my God / 13:31b
He’s not asking that God should see all the good he has done
He’s not even asking God to reward adequately

Instead / he is recognizing his own frailty
his own tendency to self-deception

He is saying / Lord / all these I have done
- but You have eyes to look deeper than I can
- You may see it differently than I
- You may see something a deceptive spirit in me heart
and if so all that I have done would be disqualified
and I would be blot out of your book
- If you see any deception in my heart / show it to me

Really the kind of prayer David prayed at the end of Psalm 139
“Search me / O God / and know my heart
Test me and know my anxious thoughts
See if there is any offensive way in me
and lead me in the way everlasting” / Ps139:23-24

We need to recognize that the heart can be desperately wicked
We don’t really know ourselves
This prayer says / “Lord / I do not know myself very well
I deceive myself easily
I think I am doing fine but You may see a dark spot there
So Lord will You please search me and know me
and see if there is any wicked way in me
and lead me to the point where I can see that too”

That was how David prayed
And this is now how Nehemiah prays
And it’s a pray we can pray every single day