SHUTTING THE GATES
Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on March 6, 2024 under AM Bible Study |
AM Bible Study Group: March 6, 2024 from Nehemiah 13:15-22
Theme: We must be on guard against a sinful tendency to profane the holy things of God.
(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).
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In our study of the last chapter of the Book of Nehemiah, we’ve been looking at how a restoration of the wall of separation around the city—which led to a revival of the spirit—then required a reformation of behavior among God’s people. A true revival of the heart will show itself in a true reformation of conduct before God. And very often, the work of reformation is hard and painful.
We’ve already seen some of that reforming work in the first portion of Chapter 13. Nehemiah had to call the people of Jerusalem—particularly the priest—to make a clear and distinct separation of themselves from the ungodly people around them. They had formed compromising alliances with them; and those alliances had to be put aside before the blessings of restoration to God could be enjoyed. We’re told the story of the severing of those ungodly alliances in verses 4-14.
And now comes another stage of that reforming work. It was made necessary because the Jewish people had allowed themselves—over time—to compromise with the pagan world in marketing and in the trading of goods and services. They had become indifferent to God’s Sabbath commandment; and had allowed the violation of God’s holy day to become integrated into their daily lives.
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Now; before we dig into this passage, let’s take a moment to remember what this important day—the Sabbath day—was about. It had its beginning point in the creation story. We’re told in Genesis 2 that—on the seventh day—God rested from His work. Genesis 2:2-3 says;
And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made (Genesis 2:2-3).
It was because of God’s own example in His work of creation that He established the day of rest in His moral law to His people. God had gathered the Jewish people together at Mount Sinai; and told them, in Exodus 20:8-11,
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it (Exodus 20:8-11).
For the Jewish people, the Sabbath Day—the seventh day that was set aside for rest unto the Lord—had a very specific significance. It was a covenant sign of their unique relationship to God as His people. In that sense, it had a similar significance to the command of circumcision. As God said in Ezekiel 20;
Moreover I also gave them My Sabbaths, to be a sign between them and Me, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them (Ezekiel 20:12).
And so; it was a very significant sin when the Jewish people disregarded the Sabbath commandment. It was an act of rebellion against God. In Ezekiel 20, God went on to say;
Yet the house of Israel rebelled against Me in the wilderness; they did not walk in My statutes; they despised My judgments, ‘which, if a man does, he shall live by them’; and they greatly defiled My Sabbaths (v. 13a).
There were indications in the Old Testament that the Jewish people had a sinful inclination toward treating the Sabbath day in an unhallowed way. In Amos 8:5-6, the Lord quotes His people as saying;
“When will the New Moon be past,
That we may sell grain?
And the Sabbath,
That we may trade wheat?
Making the ephah small and the shekel large,
Falsifying the scales by deceit,
That we may buy the poor for silver,
And the needy for a pair of sandals—
Even sell the bad wheat?” (Amos 8:5-6).
God had graciously given His people this day of rest, so that they could follow His example of rest and turn their hearts to Him for refreshment. It was for their good—not for their hardship. But it was as if they were eager for the Sabbath day to end so that they could go back to buying, selling, trading, and cheating in a selfish and materialistic manner. What God was looking for was not a slavish conformity to the Sabbath day, but rather a sincere attitude of heart that reverenced the day for God’s honor. As God told His people in Isaiah 58:13-14;
“If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath,
From doing your pleasure on My holy day,
And call the Sabbath a delight,
The holy day of the Lord honorable,
And shall honor Him, not doing your own ways,
Nor finding your own pleasure,
Nor speaking your own words,
Then you shall delight yourself in the Lord;
And I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth,
And feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father.
The mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Isaiah 58:13-14).
And this points to a sinful tendency in us as well. It’s a tendency to ignore the reasons for the good things that God gives us, to focus on the ways that His good gifts inconvenience our own selfish plans and purposes, and to thus treat those holy things of God in a ‘profane’ or ‘common’ way. It’s a tendency toward losing our sense of the hallowed nature of the things of God. And when the things of God are thus treated in an unhallowed way, it’s not long before they cease to be considered by us at all.
The story that we find in Nehemiah 13:15-22, then, is a call to ‘shut the gates’ on that tendency. It’s a call to be on guard against a sinful tendency to profane the holy things of God; and to strive instead to treat them with the holy reverence they deserve.
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Notice how this is shown to us. First, we see …
1. THE PROFANING OF GOD’S DAY (vv. 15-16).
The story takes place at about the same time in Nehemiah’s history in which he observed the compromises among the spiritual leaders with ungodly people. It’s remarkable how such compromise in one area often leads to compromise in another. Nehemiah wrote;
In those days I saw people in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and loading donkeys with wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day (Nehemiah 13:15a).
Nehemiah was making this observation among those who lived “in Judah”—that is, in the regions surrounding the city of Jerusalem. Perhaps as the governor of the city, he was also making his rounds of inspection among the Jewish people in general. And apparently, he observed a pattern of secular business being carried on in those surrounding regions. It was impacting the people in Jerusalem directly; because all of the goods that were being transported on the Sabbath were also being brought into the city itself on the Sabbath.
Now; this was a very serious compromise on the part of the Jewish people—not only in the fact that they were violating the commandment of God, but in that they were also breaking the covenant that they had earlier entered into as a restored people before Him. In Nehemiah 10:31—at the time when the leaders of the people signed a covenant before God in response to the revival that He gave—we’re told that they pledged themselves to obedience to the Sabbath commandment; saying that
if the peoples of the land brought wares or any grain to sell on the Sabbath day, we would not buy it from them on the Sabbath, or on a holy day; and we would forego the seventh year’s produce and the exacting of every debt (10:31).
It had only been twelve years or so since that covenant had been entered into; but the people were already sliding down into compromise. In verse 15, Nehemiah wrote.
And I warned them about the day on which they were selling provisions (v. 15b).
It must have been a heartbreaking thing for Nehemiah to see this serious compromise of the Sabbath happening. It revealed an attitude of irreverence toward God and an unhallowed treatment of the things of God. It was placing ‘business’ and selfish purposes over devotion to God. And what’s more, the unbelieving world was watching … and was quickly accommodating the people’s compromise. We’re told,
Men of Tyre dwelt there also, who brought in fish and all kinds of goods, and sold them on the Sabbath to the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem (v. 16).
When we allow ourselves to slide into an irreverent treatment of the sacred things of God, the world watches … and assesses our devotion to God accordingly.
This needed to change immediately. The ‘gates’ that allowed this compromise to enter in had to be ‘shut and locked’. And so; as we read on we see …
2. THE RESTORATION OF THE COMMANDMENT (vv. 17-19).
Nehemiah first confronted the leaders of the people on this matter. After all, it had been them who had entered into a solemn covenant before God not to break the Sabbath. And so, verses 17-18 tell us;
Then I contended with the nobles of Judah, and said to them, “What evil thing is this that you do, by which you profane the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers do thus, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? Yet you bring added wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath” (vv. 17-18).
The wording that is used in this passage suggests that Nehemiah convened a formal court of accusation against the leaders. Perhaps he even pulled out the copy of the solemn covenant that they entered into and showed them what they had done. And what’s more, he appealed to the history of the Jewish people themselves. He reminded them how God had promised—long ago, in the Book of Leviticus—that if the people didn’t honor His Sabbath, He would drive them out of the land and cause the land to enjoy its Sabbaths in their absence. In Leviticus 26:33-35, God said;
“I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a sword after you; your land shall be desolate and your cities waste. Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest and enjoy its sabbaths. As long as it lies desolate it shall rest—for the time it did not rest on your sabbaths when you dwelt in it” (Leviticus 26:33-35).
And that’s exactly what God did. God promised through His prophet Jeremiah—in Jeremiah 25—that the people would go into captivity for 70 years; and in 2 Chronicles 36:21, we’re told that the people were indeed carried away into captivity
to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths. As long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years (2 Chronicles 36:21).
No wonder Nehemiah was so urgent in his warning to these leaders! They were drifting backward into the very irreverence that had caused the people to be taken out of the land in the first place! And so, as governor, he took decisive action.
So it was, at the gates of Jerusalem, as it began to be dark before the Sabbath, that I commanded the gates to be shut, and charged that they must not be opened till after the Sabbath. Then I posted some of my servants at the gates, so that no burdens would be brought in on the Sabbath day (v. 19).
This gives us a very vivid picture. Action sometimes needs to be taken to ‘shut the gates’—as it were—against that downward tendency to treat the holy things of God in an unhallowed way.
But there was more. This irreverence on the part of God’s people led to the unbelieving people around them to take advantage of and capitalize on that irreverence. And so, Nehemiah took decisive action in this matter as well. In verses 20-22, we see
3. THE NOTIFICATION TO THE WORLD (vv. 20-22).
Verses 20-21 say;
Now the merchants and sellers of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice. Then I warned them, and said to them, “Why do you spend the night around the wall? If you do so again, I will lay hands on you!” From that time on they came no more on the Sabbath (vv. 20-21).
This would have taken courageous action on Nehemiah’s part. Unbelieving people are willing to put up with the religious inclinations of the faithful up to a point. But when it starts to impact their pocketbook, they fight against it fiercely. They kept on pushing the edge as far as they could—hoping that the doors would open and they could profit from the people’s disobedience. They may have even become threatening to Nehemiah a time or two. But apparently, Nehemiah’s zeal for the holiness of God prevailed. Soon, they gave up.
But Nehemiah took no chances. This irreverent unhallowing of the things of God could not be allowed to happen again. The risk of suffering the judgment of God was too great. And so; he set those to the task who were charged by God to protect His holy ordinances. Verse 22 says;
And I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse themselves, and that they should go and guard the gates, to sanctify the Sabbath day (v. 22a).
It had been their responsibility all along; but apparently, they too fell into compromise. And so, they had to repent, be cleansed, and put back to the task of ‘guarding the gates’.
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Now all of this would have been very difficult for Nehemiah to do. He would have—no doubt—met with resistance on the part of some. But it’s apparent that Nehemiah’s motivation was a love for God and a yearning for the holiness of God’s people. In his closing prayer in verse 22, he says,
Remember me, O my God, concerning this also, and spare me according to the greatness of Your mercy! (v. 22b).
To the degree we love God’s holiness, to that degree we will be zealous to hallow the holy things He gives us. And to the degree we reverence those holy things of God, to that degree, we will be on guard against any sinful tendency to profane them. We’ll ‘shut the gates’ against any tendency in us to treat them as common.
And so—as a part of the reformation of our own ways before God—in our worship, in our giving, in our fellowship, in our obedience, in our service, and in all that we do—may it be that we truly do all to the glory of God.
AE
