God's Word, Our Story: Learning from the Book of Nehemiah
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God's Word, Our Story: Learning from the Book of Nehemiah
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Overview
"You have kept your promise, for you are righteous." —Nehemiah 9:8
The book of Nehemiah powerfully illustrates God's faithfulness as it chronicles Israel's return from exile. In this collection of biblical expositions, nine prominent Bible teachers lead readers on a gospel-centered survey of this Old Testament book, connecting the story of Nehemiah to God's overarching story of redemption. Chapters include:
Kathy Keller - Taking Action in Light of God's Word (Nehemiah 1-2)
Tim Keller - Laboring for a God Who Fights for Us (Nehemiah 3-4)
Paige Brown - Fearing God in a Fallen World (Nehemiah 5-6)
Nancy Guthrie - Coming Together around God's Word (Nehemiah 7-8)
John Piper - Responding to God according to His Word (Nehemiah 9-10)
Carrie Sandom, Jenny Salt, & Kathleen Nielson - Celebrating! A Moment of Joy in Jerusalem (Nehemiah 11-12)
D. A. Carson - Leaning Forward in the Dark: A Failed Reformation (Nehemiah 13)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433549724 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2016 |
| Series: | The Gospel Coalition (Women's Initiatives) |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
D. A. Carson (PhD, Cambridge University) is research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He is president of the Gospel Coalition and has written or edited nearly 60 books, including Scandalous, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor, and The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.
Kathleen B. Nielson (PhD, Vanderbilt University) serves as the director of women’s initiatives for the Gospel Coalition. She is a popular conference speaker and the author or editor of numerous books, including Here Is Our God, His Mission, Word-Filled Women’s Ministry, and Ruth and Esther: A 12-Week Study.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Taking Action in Light of God's Word
Nehemiah 1–2
Kathy Keller
As we begin the study of Nehemiah, will you take a minute to find this book in your Bible? Take a look at its location in the Old Testament. Did you find it right in the middle, just before you get to Psalms?
No, Nehemiah is not right in the middle. It's at the end. Now you're puzzled, because it looks like it's in the middle of your Old Testament. But Nehemiah is chronologically at the end of the Old Testament books recording the history of Israel. There's a lot more Scripture that follows it: the Wisdom Literature, the Psalms, the prophetic utterances. But in Nehemiah, we get the last glimpse of Old Testament history before the curtain comes down and the silence of four hundred years begins, only to be broken by the angels singing about the birth of the Messiah.
Nehemiah is an Old Testament narrative that shows God's people mercifully returning from exile in accordance with God's promises, but at a very great point of need. Israel is no longer a magnificent kingdom, but a weak, conquered remnant. The people are rebuilding a broken-down city under the leadership of a man whose only visible qualification is that he follows God.
Let's jump right into the text: Nehemiah 1 and 2. There is much to learn here for twenty-first-century believers who want to be faithful to God's Word. As we'll see, this narrative tells a story of understanding and trusting God's Word.
Setting the Scene
Living in New York City, you tend to meet people who know people who know people. So over the past year or so, especially around the season of summer blockbuster action movies, I've had an occasional thought of trying to connect with someone in the film industry and selling Nehemiah as the next action movie — although, given what Hollywood recently did to Noah, maybe not.
If we try to imagine Nehemiah as an action movie, here's how it might open: a dark, brooding shot pans the destroyed walls surrounding Jerusalem. The stones have tumbled down. The gates are just piles of firewood, still smoking. The inhabitants, a small and hardy collection of returned exiles, are weeping and grieving.
Quick cut to Susa, the location of King Artaxerxes's citadel. Kislev, the month, is flashed on the bottom of the screen. Hanani, whom Nehemiah refers to as a brother, rides up with several others on tired and weary mounts. Gasping for breath, swallowing much-needed water, Hanani reports to Nehemiah this fresh disaster.
This is not the destruction of the walls of Jerusalem that took place under King Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, when the Jews were first taken into exile. That's old news. That had happened seventy years before, as the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah had foretold. The southern kingdom of Judah had fallen to pagan invaders, just as the northern kingdom of Israel had much earlier. Nebuchadnezzar, at the head of the Babylonian army, had invaded and taken Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, broken the walls, and taken the people into captivity.
But through all the years of exile, God's people had held on to the prophets' promises that there would be an eventual restoration. Isaiah 44:28 gives God's words specifically about King Cyrus ("He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose"), about Jerusalem ("She shall be built"), and about the temple ("Your foundation shall be laid"). In time, against all probability, pagan kings had begun to allow the captive exiles to return to their homeland. God was fulfilling his Word. We read in 2 Chronicles 36:22, "In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing" (NIV).
Remember that part, the writing. That's important.
Verse 23 continues: "This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: 'The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of his people among you may go up, and may the LORD their God be with them'" (NIV).
There are commentators who hypothesize that Cyrus was not merely showing compassion to his enslaved people by letting them go home and reestablish their own temples and worship, but he was also hedging his bets. He figured if they were all praying to their own gods for him, somebody was sure to be paying attention somewhere, and he would be in good order with some god or other.
But whatever Cyrus's motives were, God had promised through Isaiah and Jeremiah that Cyrus would be his shepherd — Isaiah actually uses that word, shepherd — to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple.
So here we see the first of many examples of the Word of the Lord finding its fulfillment in the mixed motives of a pagan king. One of my favorite proverbs says that the heart of the king is like a stream of water in the hand of the Lord (Prov. 21:1). We see it here.
Back to Hanani's news to Nehemiah. This destruction of the wall and the gates is new destruction on top of old; it is destruction of the rebuilding that had commenced, sanctioned by Cyrus, king of Persia, when he began allowing the conquered people to return to their homelands and reestablish their worship and their cultures.
If we look in the book of Ezra, which is essentially a companion piece to Nehemiah, we see that the first wave of exiles had returned under the leadership of Zerubbabel, whose first priority was to rebuild the temple so that worship could recommence. The return had started and the rebuilding had begun, but then disaster had struck — the pressure of surrounding adversaries brought the work to a halt, and it was not to be resumed until about fifteen years later, when Zerubbabel's temple was finally completed with the encouragement of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah.
Again, during the return under Ezra half a century later, pressure from surrounding enemies halted the rebuilding — this time of the city and its walls. In a fast-forward section of Ezra 4, we learn that the officials of the Trans-Euphrates region reported to King Artaxerxes — that's Nehemiah's king, remember — concerning the progress in Jerusalem. Artaxerxes stopped the rebuilding of the wall lest Jerusalem become secure again and perhaps stop paying tribute and taxes. The king decided the work should stop until he had a chance to think it over and determine whether it was in his own best interest to let it continue.
This was an unmitigated disaster. It was actually worse in some ways than the original destruction and exile. The return of the exiles had been promised and had begun, but now it seemed as though God's Word, in the process of being fulfilled, had been stopped by evil men who had axes to grind and didn't want to see Jerusalem reconstituted.
Without a secure wall to defend the people from predators, raiders, and the surrounding powerful nations, there would be no permanent restoration of Israelite culture. Their heritage, their way of life, would cease. They would be assimilated into the surrounding cultures. The law and the Word of God would be forgotten as the remnant intermarried, and they all would just go away. There would be no more Israelite nation to bring forth God's promised Messiah.
So the return of the exiles and the rebuilding of Jerusalem were not just part of the normal longing for a national homeland; they were key ingredients in God's redemptive plan for the world, because the Messiah was to come out of the Israelite nation. But there wasn't an Israelite nation anymore, and there was never going to be one unless this rebuilding took place.
With the king's permission temporarily suspended, the surrounding peoples had lost no time in destroying the work that had been done on the walls. Now it looked as if the return of the exiles and the resumption of their lives as a distinct Jewish people were in jeopardy. This was Hanani's news.
Let's return to our action movie. Pan to Nehemiah's face. Something has to be done. Something will be done. He will be the one to do it. He leaps into action and ... sits down to weep and pray to God for four months.
This is where I might lose the interest of any potential moviemaker I might have had hooked to this point.
Nehemiah leaps into action and prays for four months. In our short- attention-span world, it does not look like it, but Nehemiah is actually hard at work. We would focus on the presenting problem — the walls are broken, the gates are burned, the remnant's at risk — and come up with a plan of action, address the circumstance, and fix the problem.
Let me say, as an aside, that circumstances can often be very painful, but they are rarely our biggest problem. Our sickness, our money problems, our singleness, our marriage problems, our kids, or our infertility — these are hard, but they are not our deepest, truest needs.
Nehemiah has a much broader perspective than we typically do. He knows how God has been working in history since the creation and fall, and that the restoration of Jerusalem is but one part of the great story arc of redemption, which one day will climax with the coming of the messianic King prophesied for so many years, actually beginning with God's words to Eve in Genesis 3. So the action he takes is in light of God's Word.
The rest of what I want to say falls under two headings: (1) Nehemiah understood God's Word and (2) Nehemiah's actions were based in confidence in God's Word.
Nehemiah Understood God's Word
Follow me here. The Bible is made up of many individual stories like Nehemiah's, but in truth it is only one story: the story of God redeeming his people and restoring his world.
Some theologians break this into four parts: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Those are all helpful categories, but the overarching narrative is about the true Adam, the Redeemer of the world, coming to redeem a people from every tongue, tribe, and nation, and usher in the new heavens and the new earth.
The Bible is about Jesus, from before the foundation of the earth. He himself taught this truth to his disciples on the road to Emmaus: "Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself" (Luke 24:27 NIV). Earlier, Jesus rebuked the Pharisees by saying: "You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life" (John 5:39–40 NIV).
The Bible is not primarily about wisdom for living, promises for comfort, or guidance for the perplexed. All those things can be found within the Bible, it's true, but they are as shiny pebbles that distract our attention from the great highway running from ruin to renewal. If we read the Scripture stories, the Psalms, the prophets, or the law disconnected from the primary narrative arc of redemption, we will find them distracting or confusing, and hard to apply properly to life today.
Unfortunately, many of us are barely literate when it comes to the flow of redemptive history. We go to our Bibles for something to help us deal with our circumstances rather than to see how God is dealing with the world. But the Bible is not about us; it's about God and his plan to redeem his fallen, miserable world, and restore it to the glory he first sang into being at creation.
Nehemiah knows there is infinitely more at stake here than just the restoration of one people's national sovereignty. He's interpreting the present problem in light of the whole Word of God. He actually alludes to this in his prayer, which we'll consider just below. (The prayer in Nehemiah 9 will more fully reveal the large scriptural perspective on the people's present situation.)
We can't read the book rightly unless we understand all of this. We know through hindsight that the promise is going to be fulfilled through an individual, a Messiah. Nehemiah's whole work is to prepare the way for him, to have a rebuilt nation, city, temple, priesthood, and sacrifices, a place where Jesus can grow up Jewish and be the true Israel, the final temple, the high priest, the ultimate sacrifice. Nehemiah doesn't precisely know how what he is doing will bring this about. But he knows he has to be faithful to God's promises and his Word.
With far less excuse than Nehemiah, many of us are a bit fuzzy on how to read our Bibles and how to find direction for our actions in light of the whole Word of God. For many of us, this is because we have been existing on a diet of artificial inspiration and devotionals rather than taking the time to sort out the Bible as a whole.
How many of you are label readers when you go grocery shopping, checking the amount of fat, sugar, salt, and preservatives in various products? Here's another question: What would be your response if you took something off the shelf and discovered the ingredients were, in this order: sugar, salt, wood ester alcohol, benzochromium hydroxate, artificial flavor, artificial color, and preservatives? I suspect that many of us would quickly place that item on the shelf next to the bug poison, back away slowly, and then run for the organic food section.
Yet we think little about feeding our souls with equally toxic, nonfood substances instead of the milk and the meat of God's Word. People can find the Word of God mysterious if not completely mystifying when they neglect the work required to unearth its meaning, so they turn to preprocessed soul junk food.
I am not saying that we have to sign up for a seminary education, although I recommend that women be as theologically educated as possible; this can only be good for the church. It can be as simple as reading Jen Wilkin's excellent book Women of the Word.
In light of God's purpose to redeem his people from sin, as expressed through his promises to Abraham, it is clear to see that Nehemiah is not upset just because the restoration effort seems to have stalled indefinitely; he's upset because God's people are still in disgrace. That's clear from Nehemiah 1:3. God's promises look as if they have been frustrated by the designs of evil men.
Nehemiah is interpreting the present events and his own situation and gifts in light of God's Word and in light of the main themes of the Word. He doesn't need to ask for a sign, lay out a fleece, request an angelic visitor, or even read a particularly appropriate devotional, like a Christian version of a horoscope. Nehemiah understands the Word and he sees where his people are in the progression of redemptive history, so he seeks to enable them to be the people of God so the Lord will continue his plan to save the world through them.
Only when we can do the same thing can we read the Bible without falling into a kind of "If I do this, God will bless me" moralism. Yes, we will see lots of lessons on how to pray or how to handle worry and face opposition, but those lessons will be tied to the gospel of salvation through Christ.
The connector between Nehemiah's understanding of God's Word and his subsequent action is his prayer in chapter 1. This is the bridge between "in light of God's Word" and "taking action." Nehemiah says he prays night and day, and he mentions Kislev in the beginning and Nisan at the end (Neh. 1:1; 2:1). That indicates he is probably praying this prayer night and day for sixteen weeks. Of course, the prayer itself (1:5–11) has to be a summary of that long, long prayer time, but it shows the trajectory of his weeks of prayer.
First, in verse 5, Nehemiah spends time just looking at God: he is heavenly, great, awesome. And while, yes, he keeps his covenant of love, it's with those who love him and obey his commands. Nehemiah begins in a remarkably God-centered way, recognizing God's complete freedom. He actually owes us nothing. Derek Kidner says Nehemiah begins by putting us in our place.
That's not the way we modern people usually pray, is it? We start with our own feelings or needs. Or if we start with God, we want to hear warm, fuzzy reassurances from him, speaking to our hearts. Nehemiah, it seems, starts by getting his heart reoriented. Even the most godly people tend to lose perspective under the stress of a crisis, and Nehemiah doesn't want to let that happen to him.
When we don't realize how infinitely great God is, all kinds of distortions creep into our thinking. We panic or obsess because we forget that our God is infinitely great. Ironically, admitting he owes us nothing and that he is majestic, high, and lofty brings more peace than lots of crying out with desperate petitions.
After adoration comes confession (vv. 6–7). This, too, comes before any petition. In this, Nehemiah is actually following the model that Jesus put into the Lord's Prayer. Nehemiah confesses both his individual sin and the corporate sin of his people. According to Kidner, after adoring God's infinite highness and confessing our smallness, we realize God owes us nothing, and therefore we come empty-handed. That's the only way we can come into his presence. There's no way we can put a claim on God.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "God's Word, Our Story"
by .
Copyright © 2016 The Gospel Coalition.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Sandy Willson 7
Introduction: On Exposition Kathleen Nielson 9
1 Taking Action in Light of God's Word Nehemiah 1-2 Kathy Keller 23
2 Laboring for a God Who Fights for Us Nehemiah 3-4 Tim Keller 45
3 Fearing God in a Fallen World Nehemiah 5-6 Paige Brown 65
4 Coming Together around God's Word Nehemiah 7-8 Nancy Guthrie 89
5 Responding to God according to His Word Nehemiah 9-10 John Piper 111
6 Celebrating! A Moment of Joy in Jerusalem 125
Part I Nehemiah 11:1-12:26 Carrie Sandom
Part II Nehemiah 12:27-43 Jenny Salt
Part III Nehemiah 12:44-47 Kathleen Nielson
7 Leaning Forward in the Dark: A Failed Reformation Nehemiah D. A. Carson 13 159
Conclusion: On Old Testament Narrative Kathleen Hielson 181
Contributors 196
General Index 198
Scripture Index 204