Year 2, Day 60: Nehemiah 13

Rebellion Is Quick to Come

It inspires me to know that even after all Nehemiah had done for the people of Israel {and really, for God} that the Hebrew people still rebelled against God’s ways and still didn’t get it.  Even after all the work that God did through Nehemiah, the people went back to their old ways.  Nehemiah 13 is all about the difficulty of maintaining spiritual integrity within a system.  It’s inspiring because I can relate.  And, well, I guess misery loves company!

The first thing we hear about is Nehemiah’s absence.  He goes away to visit the Persian king.  Likely, he goes away because the king summoned him to give a report on all that Nehemiah had been sent to accomplish.  Furthermore, the king probably sent for Nehemiah just to make sure that Nehemiah was still loyal now that he had the walls of Jerusalem built.  The king would have many good reasons for asking Nehemiah to journey away from Jerusalem.

Yet, while Nehemiah is away we see that the holy space of God is disfigured.  The holy space of God begins to serve other purposes than being holy for God.   It becomes a dwelling place for one of Nehemiah’s biggest opponents, even!  How soon it is that when those who are truly focused on maintaining God’s ways leave then the rest of the people revert back to doing whatever they want to do?

I think this part of the chapter points us to an inherent problem with humanity.  Our default position when it comes to making a decision is: does it make sense to me? 

For example, I can’t say with any certainty that Tobiah was given space in the Temple to intentionally defile it and to intentionally go against Nehemiah’s instruction.  While that is certainly possible, I can actually see a completely different pattern of behavior come about.  I can see Tobiah coming in and reminding people that Nehemiah is gone and they really need someone to watch over and manage the space in his absence.  Tobiah weasels himself into the room, and the rest of the people around him are shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Well, it makes sense to me.  It’s logical that we have someone to govern us while Nehemiah is gone and that person does need a place to stay.”  Then before you know it, God’s holy Temple is being used for something other than promoting the holiness of God.

This is quite often how human beings sin.  We do things that make sense.  We do things that we can rationalize.  And our own logic and rationality lead us directly away from God and into sin.

Defacing the Sabbath

So let’s take the next big example.  The people begin to sell goods on the Sabbath.  Again, I doubt they did it because they knew it would make Nehemiah angry.  I would guess they did it because someone came along and said, “You know, if we can make X amount of money in six days, then we can make Y amount of money in seven days.  I’m interested in making Y amount of money, and I could really use the money.”*  Again we can see our own logic and reasoning work against us.  The logic is irrefutable, but the logic leads us away from God.

The error here is forgetting that God asks us to set aside a day in our week where we do the work of the Lord.  The human logic is irrefutable, but it inherently ignores the desires of the Lord.  Yes, if we work 7 days instead of 6 we can make more money.  But if we work 7 days instead of 6 when will we do the work of the Lord?  Because we are hard-wired to depend on our own logic and our own ability to have things make sense to us, we are also hard-wired forget about depending upon God’s logic and God’s desires over our own.  We fall into sin because we place a higher priority on our own understanding rather than on God’s understanding.

The Influence of Foreigners

Then we have the third big story in this concluding chapter: the return of the sin of Solomon.  The Hebrew people begin marrying foreign women.  Again, I can see the human logic.  Someone says, “The women of those people are really something.  Wouldn’t you like to have one of them as your wife?”  And then someone else says, “You know, I think that makes sense.  I would like to have her as my wife.”  {For the record, I think it could also have worked under the women thinking the men of the other nation were really something, too.}  But again, we see sound human logic at work.

Furthermore, let’s assume that I’m not even talking about this in a dirty, lusty, sexual kind of way.  Let’s say that there is a man out there who sees a woman who is really skilled with raising kids, cooking,** who seems very level headed, and has some serious potential at managing a household.  And this woman happens to not believe in God.  I could see that person saying, “Wow, they’d make a great wife.”  And then they’d marry the woman because she appeared to fulfill all the qualities for which he was looking.

But in that we see the inherent problem.  The man has forgotten about the spiritual angle.  This is a huge problem in our society today.  Even man and every woman have a list of qualifications that they are looking for in a mate.  When a person comes along who meets our qualifications and we meet their qualifications, it makes sense to marry them.  But if spirituality is not high {or the highest, even!} on the list of qualifications, we end up marrying someone who is worldly.  While we might be able to have a great marriage with respect to the things of the world, we are likely to find that we are slowly pulled away from having an important relationship with God.  Our logic defeats us because we forget to humble our logic by choosing God’s ways over what makes sense to us.

The reality is that the more we depend on things making sense to us, the more likely we are to find ourselves drifting away from spirituality.  God does not call us to practice what makes sense.  {For proof of this, remember that as Christians we believe in life after death and the fact that Jesus was raised after being dead for 3 days.  That does not make sense, yet God asks us to believe it anyway!}  God does not call us to fathom His depths.  Yes, God does want us to think and He does want us to try and understand His ways.  But what God calls us to more than anything else is to trust His ways and simply obey them whether we can comprehend them or not.

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*For the record, in this scenario Y would equal 7/6 times X.  Just saying.

**Not intending this to be sexist.  I don’t genuinely believe that raising kids and cooking are a “woman’s job.”  I actually enjoy cooking quite a lot and I look forward to the day when I can devote as much time raising my child as my dad devoted to raising me.  I wasn’t intending to be sexist, but let’s face it.  In those days and in that culture … that is likely how the men would have seen their potential mates.  So if anyone got offended and thought I was being sexist, I apologize for speaking in a way that would be relevant to an ancient mindset instead of speaking in a way that is relevant to a modern mindset.