Reverence and Response
When we are exposed to the message
of the Word of God, we should always
respond with a worshipful attitude
followed by obedience.
Here now is Gene Getz:
At this stage, Ezra walks on stage.
Now keep in mind that Ezra went back
to Jerusalem with a contingency,
about 14 years before Nehemiah.
But at this point in time,
Ezra and Nehemiah are working together,
are ministering together.
And we see here a very, very important
Principle that Nehemiah was committed
to actually practicing.
So let me just share with you from
Ezra chapter 7, verse 10. We read this:
Now Ezra had determined in his heart
to study the law of the Lord, obey it,
and teach its statues and ordinances in Israel.
In other words, this now is taking us
back before Nehemiah came to rebuild the walls
to the time that Ezra was on his way.
And he knew he had this tremendous challenge.
And this verse actually tells us what
he was committed to:
studying the Word, obeying it
and teaching it.
And at that point, we looked at a Principle that
grew out of this passage in the book of Ezra.
And it's called Faithful Leadership.
And the Principle simply reads:
To experience God's blessings on our
ministry to others, we must faithfully
study the Holy Scriptures,
consistently practice God's principles,
and diligently teach these truths to others.
Now as we come to this passage in Nehemiah,
Ezra enters the scene.
He's there but now we see the people
acknowledging who Ezra is. And his authority,
and his presence, and his desire to make sure
they understand the Word of God.
So that's what we read here in what
I've called "The People's Request."
The people initiated this,
which must have thrilled and must have certainly
encouraged Nehemiah.
We read: "They," that is the people.
...They asked Ezra the scribe to bring the
book of the law of Moses that the
Lord had given Israel.
Now we're not sure what the
book of the law is.
First of all, it wasn't a book as we open a book.
It was a scroll.
We're not sure if this was all of the Pentateuch,
which is the first five books of Moses:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
That would have been a huge task.
A huge scroll if it were in one scroll--
probably wasn't.
This may have been just the book of Deuteronomy.
The book of Deuteronomy was a review of the law.
And even if they just had a scroll of Deuteronomy,
they would have a huge exposure to
God's law because, as I said,
Deuteronomy means second law.
It's a review of the law.
And so they asked Ezra the scribe to
bring this book of the law that
Moses had given to Israel.
Now notice Ezra's response.
This is beautiful.
It's a great model:
Ezra opened the book
[that is the scroll]
in full view of all the people,
since he was elevated above everyone.
As he opened it, all the people stood up.
[And] Ezra praised the Lord, the great God,
and with their hands uplifted all the people said,
"Amen, Amen!" [And] then they bowed down
and worshiped the Lord with their
faces to the ground.
What a scene that must have been.
I remember when Elaine and I were in
Moscow in one of the big churches there.
A very significant custom and ritual.
And that is that when the Word of God
was opened and read, everybody stood up.
It just was just a response.
And it just dawned on me as I was
working on this, where did that come from?
Well it came from this example.
When Ezra opened the scroll,
opened the book, everybody stood up.
And that's not an absolute
obviously, but it's a nice tradition.
In fact I was speaking today in
a Christian university.
And when one of the students got up
to read the Scripture, all the students stood.
Just in honor of the fact that this is
the Word of God.
In this particular case, they not only stood up--
praise the Lord--but then they got
down on their faces. They got down on their knees.
And so we see here that they were worshiping.
Now they weren't worshiping the scroll.
They weren't worshiping God's book.
And we have to be careful of that.
I love God's book but it's what's in that book.
It's who that book speaks about that we worship.
I mean, there are times when I've been
worshiping the Lord. Even in singing,
I love to take the Bible and just lay it on my chest.
I'm not worshiping the book but I'm
recognizing this is God's Word to me.
And so consequently we see them really
worshiping the Lord as a result of this experience.
They had the book of God.
God was speaking to them through His Word.
You know, centuries later--
and we try to affirm all these Principles
with a New Testament passage.
And the apostle Paul, when he was
writing to Timothy, really affirmed
how important it is that we really use
the Word of God and expose people
to the Word of God.
In 1st Timothy chapter 4, verse 13,
he wrote to Timothy and said:
Until I come, give your attention
to public reading, exhortation, and teaching.
That's a New Testament illustration of an Ezra.
In this case it was Timothy.
And by the way, the reason it was so important
to give attention to public reading is
that they didn't have Bibles like we have Bibles.
They only had basically one document
in some of these churches.
Like Paul is writing to Timothy
and Timothy's in Ephesus.
And Paul had written a letter to the Ephesians.
It was probably a circular letter
to also the churches in Asia.
But when the apostle Paul said to Timothy:
Give your attention to reading.
What was he referring to?
Probably the letter that he wrote to the Ephesians.
He simply said:
Take that letter.
Now remember when it got there,
they didn't run it through a Xerox machine
or a duplicating process.
It was safely tucked away somewhere.
And so Timothy would have taken that
scroll from wherever it was hidden or protected
and unrolled that scroll.
And gave attention to reading that passage,
or a passage from that letter.
Now later of course, the letters were accumulated.
And we have it all right in front of us in
the Word of God, which is absolutely incredible.
Later on, Paul underscored the authority of Scripture.
The authority of the Word of God.
And what should happen when
we're exposed to it.
And this was his second letter to Timothy.
Paul's now in a dungeon when he wrote this one.
And death is just around the corner.
He knew it was coming.
And that's why he said:
I've fought the good fight.
I've finished the course.
He knew he was going to be martyred
for the cause of Christ.
And notice what he wrote to Timothy:
All Scripture is inspired by God and is
profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting,
for training in righteousness,
so that the man of God [the woman of God]
may be complete, equipped for
every good work.
Powerful statement in relationship to
the Word of God.
Now let me state the Principle once again:
When we are exposed to the message
of the Word of God, we should always
respond with a worshipful attitude
followed by obedience.
And you see this illustrated here in this
passage of Scripture.
So here's the question for Reflection and Response:
How can we keep the ready availability
of the Scriptures from causing us to take
its divine message for granted?
Here we have the Bible.
We have versions of the Bible.
We have all these different translations
of the Bible.
In fact you can take out your iPhone,
and you can actually download an app
that can give you over 400 translations
of the Bible in 200 or 300 different languages.
It is so available.
How do we keep this from becoming
something that we take for granted?
And I asked myself that.
And as I reflected on that, my mind
went back to the 16th century. To a man in England.
His name was William Tyndale.
And William Tyndale had an incredible
passion to get the Bible into English--
our language, my language.
I was raised in a German-speaking community.
But my native tongue is English.
And I have the Bible in English.
And why do I have the Bible in English?
William Tyndale had a passion to translate it.
He was a very scholarly guy--
spoke about seven different languages fluently.
Including being fluent in Hebrew and Greek.
And so he devoted himself,
back there in the 16th century,
to translating the Bible into English.
But that was a no-no.
Henry the VIII hated that.
You know why?
Because it would expose his sin.
He didn't want the people to have the
Bible in English. And neither did the
religious hierarchy in the church.
They knew that if the Bible was in English
and people could read the Bible,
it would expose their sins.
And so in the process Tyndale
had to leave England.
And he worked in other locations,
faithfully translating the Scriptures.
The whole Bible.
And a friend (so-called) after the project
was finished said:
William you can come back to England.
You're okay.
But it was like a Sanballat, a Tobiah.
The moment he got back,
they began to look for him.
They found him.
They strangled him and burned him at the stake
for translating the Bible into English.
Think about that.
You know what his last words were
as he was dying?
Lord, open the eyes of the king of England.
Four years later, Henry the VIII
authorized the translation.
There were four translations that he authorized.
One was the Great Bible--
called the Great Bible.
And of course, most of that Bible was
the translation that Tyndale had done himself.
Which gave birth to the
King James version in 1611.
Seventy-five percent, at least,
of the Old and New Testament--
that work was done by William Tyndale.
Translating the Bible into English.
The reason I share that story is that
when we think about that:
That somebody died, that we might
have the Bible in our own language.
I don't know about you but it's impactful.
So how can we keep the ready
availability of the Scriptures from
causing us to take its divine message for granted?
Well think about that story.
And think how privileged we are to have
the Bible so readily available in our hearts,
in our minds--to grow and become
more mature in Jesus Christ.