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- [Don Carson] Nehemiah 9–10 can be divided into two parts.
The first is extensive corporate confession of sin, and the second is the
renewal of the covenant. Let's begin with the former.
Here, the priests and leaders under the leadership of Ezra still are leading the
people in corporate confession of sin. There is time for hearing the word of God
and studying it together, and then in this magnificent prayer,
the leaders bring together a combination of endless biblical illusions and real
freshness in prayer. You know how it is. Sometimes you find people who have
memorized a lot of Scripture and who pray in scriptural clichés and other people
sound very fresh, but not very biblical. Here, these people managed to do both.
That is, there is scarcely a verse that does not make allusion to antecedent
Scripture to earlier Scripture, often picking up the prayers of David,
or Moses, or Hezekiah, those who have come in the past, picking
up their language and yet the whole thing sounds spectacularly fresh. But perhaps,
the two most remarkable features of this prayer of confession are first,
it's focus on the history of what God has done. You see, any people, any culture,
any country can look back on its own history in quite different ways.
We could do it here in the U.S. Canadians can do it in Canada.
The Chinese can do it in China. You can look back at your own cultural
history and be very proud of it. Think of all the kinds of things for which
you are renowned, which are your cultural strengths and so forth, and treat them all
with a great deal of pride, nationalism, patriotism. But it's also possible in any
country to look back at the things for which we ought to be ashamed,
where we've been wrong, or sinful, or greedy, or made mistakes,
and then we should ask for forgiveness. Now, there are quite a lot of these sort
of historical surveys in the Bible that try to draw the people of God to admit
their sins. You might read Psalm 78, for example, at your own leisure and
discover that as Psalm 78 goes through the years of the wilderness wanderings,
in part, the purpose of Psalm 78 is to lead the people of God
to genuine repentance. In the New Testament,
when Stephen gives his speech to defend what he's doing in Acts 7,
he gives a kind of plotted history of Israel in which he points out that again,
and again, and again, the Israelites killed the prophets or
rejected the revelation that came to the people of God and so forth.
And his point is, in the line of that history is it's not too surprising if when
the Messiah comes, he's pretty broadly rejected too. In other words,
there is a kind of set of theological lessons to learn about our own culpability
and complicity in sin by reviewing history with a certain kind of humility of mind.
That's what this corporate confession does. It focuses on God's kindness again,
and again, again, and again, not only in creation,
but in the call of Abraham, and in the giving of the law,
and the rising of the people to become a nation. The giving of the kingdom,
the establishment of the Davidic dynasty, but again, and again,
the move of the people as a whole is toward idolatry and as a result,
the people have ended up in exile and crushed and they're still under the sway
of regional superpowers even if some of them at least are back in the land.
And it is within that matrix of perennial, persistent idolatrous folly that the
people are led to corporate confession of sin. But there's a second element in this
corporate confession of sin that is worth reflecting on. "The chief thing of which
they repent is idolatry." It's not that they repent a whole lot
about how many times they've shacked up with people they shouldn't have shacked
up with, or how much greed there has been in the marketplace, or how often they've
told lies, although all of that sort of thing is embraced. But all of those things
view sin primarily in terms of horizontal deformations, horizontal abuse.
Whereas in Scripture, the sin above all sins,
the sin that lies behind all the other sins is idolatry. It's the rejection
of God and His way. That's why Jesus insists that the first commandment that is
first in importance, is the commandment to love God with heart, and soul, and mind,
and strength. If we were to keep that commandment perfectly,
there would be no other sin. And when we commit any other sin,
that one has already been committed. That fundamental rejection of God and His
ways is the very heart of idolatry, making something else more important
than God. Whether ourselves or our desires, or our daydreams,
our fantasies, whatever. Somehow, God is de-godded. He's debunked.
He's overturned, maybe not according to what we say, but according to how we act.
We can, in fact, begin to act like practical atheists even though with our
mouths we're still Christians. Now, it's that sort of thing that is at the
heart of the confession that you find in Nehemiah 9. The leaders of the people lead
the people in a kind of confession of sin whose heart is idolatry and they recognize
the punishment that they are currently enduring is something that they deserve,
but they ask God for mercy and for grace to overcome their terrible straights.
Then from 9:38 to 10:39, you find the renewing of the covenant.
This is quite remarkable. There are some verses in this chapter that
acknowledge that in the renewal of the covenant, there must be a recommitment
to obey all the Law of Moses. Here, for example, in Chapter 10:28-29,
"Not only the leaders, but all the people gather together for the
sake of the law," we're told, "for the sake of the law of God joining
together with their wives, and all their sons and daughters who are
able to understand. All these now join their
fellow Israelites, the nobles, and bind themselves with a curse and
an oath to follow the law of God given through Moses, the Servant of God,
and to obey carefully all the commands, regulations, and the decrees of the Lord
our God." So, that's the sweep of this covenantal renewal. And yet,
as you read the rest of the chapter, you discover that almost all of the space
is devoted to the temple. To providing adequate supplies and support
for the staff, and the animals for the sacrifice, and making sure that the thing
is organized so the right families bring in the needed wood for the burning and
so forth. That's the whole focus on this covenantal renewal. And from our
vantage point, we might start to ask ourselves, "Why the emphasis here?
Why not on praise? Or, why not on the demand for personal
integrity or honesty in business relationships or sexual purity?
Why is the covenant renewal focused on the temple and maintaining the
sacrificial system?" But when you look at things from the sweep
of the Old Testament, it's obvious why the focus is here.
If sin is first of all idolatry, then our problem is alienation from God.
Of course, sin brings with it all of the horizontal machinations, and corruptions,
and to deformities, the war, and the hate, and the lust, and the killing,
and the greed, and the racism, and all the rest. Yes, that's true,
but at the heart of all of it is, the de-godding of God.
So, what we need most in salvation then, is to be reconciled to this God.
It's not just a question of getting our social relationships right,
it's how do you get reconciled to this God? How is sin forgiven?
What enables us to stand before this holy God in His presence?
And in terms of the old covenant, it's through the sacrificial system that
God Himself has ordained and provided through the law of Moses,
the Tabernacle and then the temple and so forth. Nehemiah is astute enough
to understand that if these people are not reconciled to God, then even if there are
social reformations and they have a wall built and they have sentries posted
around the gates and so forth, they don't really have all that much.
They must be a people in covenant faithfulness with the Living God.
And that means that at the heart of their lives must be the temple with the
sacrifices that God has ordained, where they confess their sins,
the priest offers the sacrifices, for example, on the Day of Atonement both
for his own sins and for the sins of the people and people confess their sins
before him and are reconciled to Him. The temple was the great meeting place
between God and sinful human beings. And this was provided by God's own
great design. So, that's what this covenantal renewal is about.
Now then, it's worth making a jump to the New Testament. How does the New Testament
pick up on these things? And I'm going to suggest three ways.
There are lots of them, but I'll mention only three.
First, in the New Testament, Jesus is presented as the ultimate temple
of God. So, if the temple of God in the Old Testament is the meeting place
between God and sinners, there is a sense in which if Jesus is now
presented as the temple of God, he's the meeting place between God
and sinners. So, in John 2 when Jesus says, "Destroy this temple and in three
days I'll raise it up again," nobody understood what he was talking about,
but John comments, "After he is risen from the dead, then the disciples understand
the Scriptures and believe what he's saying and see that he's actually talking
about himself as the temple." He is constituted the temple precisely
by his own death, by the destruction of his body and rising again three
days later. Now, in the New Testament, there's a derivative sense in which the
church is the temple of God. That is, the meeting place between God and
the world. Where does the world meet God? In the context of the church,
which becomes the temple of God, the meeting place between God and sinners.
And in one passage, even the individual Christian's body is considered the temple
of God. That is, it's the meeting place between God and other people. That is,
this is the temple of God. It is to be holy and this is where others
come face-to-face with God as He has disclosed Himself through Christians
as through the church, but supremely through Jesus,
the Great Temple of God. In the New Testament,
Jesus is the ultimate priest, he's the ultimate sacrifice,
he's the ultimate king, but he's also the ultimate temple,
the meeting place between God and human beings. That's one of the connections.
But there's another connection. This great feast of Covenant Renewal
following corporate repentance takes place at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles,
one of the great stipulated Old Testament feasts. In the gospel of John,
Jesus says some very interesting things at one of the feasts of the Tabernacles that
take place during the time of his ministry. You can find the account
in John 7. There he says, "On the last great day of the feast,
that is the Feast of Tabernacles, that if people come to him,
he will pour out the Holy Spirit on them." And if you look at all of the
surrounding language, Feast of Tabernacles,
manna in the previous chapter, the promise of the Holy Spirit,
and array of other things, all of them are found in Nehemiah:9-10.
It's as if John, in putting all of this together is saying,
"Do you want to see not only the ultimate feast of Passover in Jesus' death,
but the ultimate Feast of Tabernacles and the ultimate manna,
and the ultimate giving of the Spirit, and the ultimate pouring out of the water
of God? Do you want to see the fulfillment of these things? See what Jesus is doing.
See what he is promising. And then you can go one further through a
complex argument that shows the role of Melchizedek in the sweep of the
biblical history. The writer to the Hebrews shows that if you change the
nature of the priesthood in the Old Testament, the entire law covenant
must be changed. That's Hebrews 7:11-12. In other words, the law covenant is so
tightly tied to the priesthood, and the temple structure,
and all of the sacrificial system that goes with it, that if you change
the priesthood, you change the entire structure of the old covenant.
You are required to adopt a new covenant. And then Christians can't forget that
on the night that he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and broke it and said,
"This is the new covenant in my blood" as he takes the cup in his hand.
In other words, there is a new covenant that is introduced by Jesus himself that
is built out of the structures of the old covenant with many lines of continuity and
some lines of discontinuity as Jesus comes to fulfill the structures of the
Old Testament that are reaching their climax now under the ministries,
first of Abraham, and then of Moses, and then of David. And now at the end
of the exile, restored under Ezra and Nehemiah waiting for the climax to come
to its fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
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