A Taste of Freedom

Good morning. For our scripture reading, Psalm 145 verses 1 through 13 on page 524 of the

Black Pew Bible. And then we will be reading Revelation chapter 11 verses 15 through 19 on page 1034.

So Psalm 145, if you are able to, please stand for the reading of God's Word. Psalm 145 reading verses 1 through 13.

I will exalt you, my God the King. I will praise your name forever and ever.

Every day I will praise you and extol your name forever and ever. Great is the

Lord and most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. One generation commends your works to another.

They tell of your mighty acts. They speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty and I will meditate on your wonderful works.

They tell of the power of your awesome works and I will proclaim your great deeds.

They celebrate your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your righteousness. The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.

The Lord is good to all. He has compassion on all he has made. All your works praise you,

Lord. Your faithful people extol you. They tell of the glory of your kingdom and speak of your might so that all people may know of your mighty acts and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.

Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and your dominion endures through all generations.

Now, Revelation chapter 11, reading verses 15 through 19.

The seventh angel sounded his trumpet and there were loud voices in heaven which said the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our

Lord and of his Messiah and he will reign forever and ever. And the 24 elders who were seated on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped

God saying, we give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign.

The nations were angry and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and your people who revere your name both great and small and for destroying those who destroy the earth.

God's temple in heaven was opened and within his temple was seen the arc of his covenant and there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and a severe hailstorm.

Please be seated. And if you're anything like me, when he starts to preach,

I scramble to find Nehemiah and that's on page 398 of the Black Pew Bible.

But now let us pray. Heavenly Father, just as in the time of Jesus was a time before and after, a time of changes, and even so we are in a time of changes.

That you will come in glory, your kingdom is growing now and we are part of that kingdom.

But the judgment will come and we pray that your will be done in all things.

We pray though now this morning that we glorify you and worship you through thy Holy Spirit. Give us your spirit to open our ears and our heart.

Help us to understand the word that is preached. Give our pastor as he preaches this day the words to speak to us.

Help us go away glorifying you. And we pray in Christ's name, amen.

Well if you all scrambled there to Nehemiah chapter 2, verse 6 will be our text for this morning.

There's now a third message in just a small section of scripture of Nehemiah 2, 1 through 8.

And we've been basing these messages, these three messages this morning, the third of them, on the questions asked of Nehemiah by King Artaxerxes.

And my reason for that was that it is Artaxerxes, this king who moves things along with his questions.

If he hadn't asked the questions, then none of this would have happened in that sense. It is

Artaxerxes who is pushing things along and giving Nehemiah these opportunities. So this is the third question.

I'm going to read it in a moment to you. We divided the passage this way. Why is your face sad was the first question two weeks ago, seeing you are not sick.

Well, if he hadn't asked that, Nehemiah would not have been able to tell him why his face is sad because he wouldn't have had divine, or I should say, royal leave to do so.

As we spoke about why the face was sad, and the face was sad because after four months of prayer, Nehemiah had gained the mind of God.

He had gained the picture of Jerusalem that God would have in the condition it was in.

He wasn't just praying for a project. He wasn't trying just to get something done. He was going to minister

God to God's people. And before that, before anyone should presume to take upon themselves such a thing as to minister

God to God's people, they must have the mind of God. Nehemiah, as you recall from the first question, why is your face sad?

His face was sad because after four months of prayer, every fiber of his being showed forth the ministry that he was to take upon himself.

What are you requesting? What are you requesting? Was Artaxerxes' second question from last week.

Had he not asked, no requisition could have been given. And now this morning's message, we're going to finish this meeting with Nehemiah and the king, and as we will read in a moment, the queen is there too.

And God willing, we will soon proceed to Nehemiah's journey, his return to Jerusalem.

The verse before us this morning, verse 6, And the king said to me, the queen sitting beside him, how long will you be gone?

And when will you return? So pleased the king to send me when I'd given him a time.

He's going to be set free from the bonds of his servitude to his captor.

Remember that Artaxerxes is his captor. Israel had been conquered by God's decree, him having sent

Babylon almost a century before this to destroy the walls of Jerusalem, the very walls which

Nehemiah wants to go back and rebuild, and took that people captive. We'll speak about this more in a few moments.

Babylon there conquered by Persia, but that exile people that Babylon had now belongs to Persia, to Artaxerxes.

So when I say he's going to be set free from the bonds of his servitude to his captor, Artaxerxes, this is the situation

Nehemiah is in. He's going to have a limited freedom, but he's going to have freedom. Nehemiah is going to breathe the clean air of liberty.

He's going to serve the Lord in service to his people, and all that is yet to come. But here in this one verse, the terms of his leave of absence, absence of being set forth by this king who really owns him,

Artaxerxes. Now, Nehemiah is going to go and he's going to build, but he's going to wear a sort of a felon's ankle bracelet, the type that we put on people today, something like that, to ensure that he complies with the conditions of his release.

Today we're only going to spend a limited amount of time on this verse and Nehemiah's circumstance, what happened here.

And once we cover it, we're going to soar high above the original setting, and we're going to see where this incident stands in the flow of redemptive history itself.

This is simply what we call biblical theology. To take a verse, a paragraph, a passage, a book, a chapter, whatever it is, and place it within this flow of redemptive history, which is basically

Genesis 3, man's sin, God's curse upon the serpent who brought it, the man who gave into it, and the woman, from there to the end of Revelation, and Christ's return, and his remaking of all things.

Redemptive history simply says, what does this part that I'm interested in, this one unit of thought, have to do with that flow of God's working his redemption in history?

That's biblical theology. That's redemptive history. This morning, you see, there's a freedom awaiting

God's people, a freedom awaiting God's people. We were answered to none on this earth, but Jesus Christ himself.

There's a freedom awaiting us. There's a day we're going to be free to serve Jesus without constraint, without any interference.

There will be no Artaxerxes to answer to, nor far more importantly, will there be sin to impede our direct communion with our

Lord and our God. And that's what this record, this record of Nehemiah with the king,

Artaxerxes, tells us. This is where we gain, what we gain, if we look at it in terms of where it stands in this flow of redemptive history.

If we look at it with the eyes of a biblical theology, Nehemiah, you see,

Nehemiah is appealing to a ruler who knows nothing of the God of the universe. Nehemiah must reach out to him for permission to serve

God by serving his people. Think of the position he's in. He needs to ask this ungodly man for permission to go and do a godly service.

And so also, you entrap yourself in ways and authority of this world whenever you choose to follow their ways in favor of God's.

It's a matter of who is our king, who is our ruler. We need to think about this as we look at this incident, this final meeting of Nehemiah with his king.

Before we take this higher view, sort of like those drones with the four propellers that can come up and take a wider picture, the first thing we need to do, of course, is be faithful to the text that we have.

And once we understand that, which Lord willing will be fairly simple and quick, we can move to the higher perspective, to the larger picture.

Now, Artaxerxes has just asked Nehemiah to make his request known. Now, I said asked, but kings then didn't really ask for anything.

They gave orders. The Hebrew word for asked was readily available to Nehemiah as in chapter one, verse two, some weeks ago, when

Nehemiah asks about Jerusalem, those men came to him and he asked about Jerusalem. But here in chapter two, verse six, which

I just read, the king doesn't ask. He says, is more of a permission to speak than an invitation.

It's more of a, I require you to tell me this, than it is a casual, so Nehemiah, how might we work this thing out?

It's a demand from the royal sovereign. The queen's presence seems to have been an important detail.

Your Bible, as do most, have it in parentheses there. The queen also was sitting beside him.

We don't really quite know why she was there. One man says she represented an obstacle that Nehemiah had to overcome, that she was, as it were, against him.

Another man says that she was his ally and she had something to do with the positive outcome. We do know that in Artaxerxes' day,

Persian women had a lot of influence in things. The word used for queen, though, the word used for queen there is not the usual word for queen.

It's a word that also can mean consort or concubine. In its verbal form, it could mean to be ravished, even raped.

It could have that kind of a violent connotation. There's no mention of her other than this right here.

So it's not quite safe to say she was an enemy or a friend to Nehemiah. It seems to me her presence was a sort of sounding board for the king.

My wife can be much more discerning than me with subtleties, as most you men can attest to your own wives, voice inflections that reveal something that I would miss, something that shows that the words being spoken don't really quite mean what is being communicated, what's behind them.

Body language, steadiness of gaze, that sort of thing.

That could very well be why the queen was there, to whisper in the king's ear if she perceived anything to be amiss in what

Nehemiah was offering to the king. We also see here that Artaxerxes wants his cup bearer back.

Now, his cup bearer to the king, that's at the end of chapter one. After his four months of prayer, he tells us he was cup bearer to the king, and we spent quite a bit of time on what a cup bearer was, how close he would be, what a confidant he would be of the king.

But whether it's because of Nehemiah's friendship or his utility, we don't really know. But the king, this

Artaxerxes, the king has every right to approve or to deny the project, or even

Nehemiah's involvement. Now, the king could have said, I don't care about this wall, and we're just going to leave it in shambles.

It does not matter to me. I'm not going to invest a penny in it. He could have said, Nehemiah, that sounds like a great idea.

And while you're here handing me my cup of wine, serving me as I want you to serve me here as my exile, something

I actually own, I'll send my own work crew out there and we'll rebuild the wall to my specification.

He could have said that. Of course, he didn't do any of those things. But I'm trying to give you a picture of the authority this king had over not just Nehemiah, but the whole project.

He could have done that. He could have done anything else that served his purposes. But when

Nehemiah's proposal met his pleasure, he okayed everything, of course. And verse 8, of course, is the overriding, overarching, the real primary cause, the only cause for this, for the good hand of my

God was upon me. His question here, how long will you be gone?

And when will you return? It doesn't really matter why the king wanted

Nehemiah to come back. He owned Nehemiah. Nehemiah, he owned all the exiles.

God had given them into his hand. First Nebuchadnezzar, as I said a century before, now to the kings of Persia, the decision is his.

He has all the authority. Now verse 8 says, it's the good hand of my

God upon me that gave any positive outcome. It's God again being proved to work through ordinary mechanisms of life.

I'm trying to lift up in your perspective, in the way you look at this chapter, and this whole relationship of Nehemiah with this king, that everything rests in the human context on Artaxerxes, on this foreign, pagan, godless, ungodly king who has complete sway over everything

Nehemiah is presenting to him. As I said a moment ago, except these three questions had been asked by Artaxerxes to Nehemiah, this thing is done for.

You don't get to present it unless the king gives you the opening. It's God's good hand upon Nehemiah that is the cause of what is to follow, the positive response of the king to the project, and as we,

Lord willing, will find out as we go next week, Nehemiah actually gets to get to Jerusalem and get started.

What is God's good hand? God's good hand is something, he doesn't have a hand, he doesn't have a body like we do, it's something that is visible only to the faithful, something that is visible only if you see with eyes of faith and not of flesh.

You all know recently that I got a good report on my exams for becoming a certified counselor, and we'd ask, how could that happen?

And this would apply to anything else that any of us do. If we get a good result, how does that happen?

Does it happen by hard work? Yes, hard work. As Nehemiah worked hard, so us.

By doing it hardly as unto the Lord? Yes. For me and for you and for anyone else, this is how good results come about.

That brought success, but the first cause of any good in our lives, the first cause, the primary cause is just what

Nehemiah attributes it to, to God and his good and powerful and merciful and always working hand.

Now, it's a good spiritual exercise for us right here to slow down and think about this.

Here is a really good spiritual exercise. Go as far back as you want to go in your mind and look at the things that you've been through and all the places

God has taken you and see how it has been God's good hand that led you to that bride, that gave you those parents, that got you accepted to that school, hired at that job, brought you to that church, brought you to this church, 1

Corinthians 12, placed you just as it pleased Him. See how it was God's good hand.

I haven't close to enough time to tell you all the times that I fell into good fortune, and I look back and say,

I stumbled into it, and with the eyes of faith I can look and I can see clearly, with no contrivances at all, the one and only cause,

God's good hand. This is a really good exercise for you. I'll commend it to you any time, just to keep going back and going back and going back and saying, yes,

I survived that accident because of God's good hand, or I avoided it because of God's good hand, or I got to this place because of God's good hand, whatever it is, and rise from that time of prayer.

With this greater view of just how involved God is. Well, that's the upshot of this verse.

That's the upshot of this verse, and with the past two weeks, hopefully, you're all well instructed about Nehemiah's meeting with this king.

We've spoken about how prayer transforms, how by true and repentant prayer we assimilate the mind of God, so much so that it shows forth in everything that we do.

Our whole aspect becomes infused with this mind of God, with this prayer, with this thing that we want to do, and we step forth after prayers like Nehemiah.

Does it have to be four months? No such prescription. Four weeks?

No, we can't insist on that. Days? How many of us pray four hours for one thing?

God hears us, is the point, and in four months of prayer, Nehemiah had the mind of God, so he can no longer hide his sadness before the king.

That's what we learned before, three weeks ago. We learned about God, we learned about coming to God expectantly, like children, knowing that our

Heavenly Father, far more than being just able to do anything, does in fact do anything on behalf of his people to answer our petitions and our prayers.

And that's chapter two, verses one through eight, in its immediate context, in its historical meaning to us.

Now, let's widen our perspective a bit. Let's ask ourselves, what happened here?

I mean, Artaxerxes approves Nehemiah's project, he gives full financial and political royal support, he gives just this one condition, that Nehemiah return, but what really happened here?

Artaxerxes had just saved Persia. He just saved

Persia. Now you might be thinking, wait a second, no, he just saved Jerusalem and its wall.

Now they're going to have a defensive wall to keep the enemies out. That's too small.

Artaxerxes just saved Persia. Now the text does not say this, not directly, but our

Bibles do say this. To see this, and we need to place this meeting within this greater sweep of redemptive history, the biblical theology

I was speaking of earlier. I want us to get this, I want us to really understand just how critical this was to the survival of Persia.

Persia, well, Jerusalem too, yes. Turn your

Bibles, if you would, to Genesis chapter 12. We're going to take a very quick survey of a few passages that will support this point

I'm making. Genesis 12, look at verse 10. We have

Abraham and Sarah having gone to Egypt to escape famine. Actually, I don't have to give it to you in my own words.

Let's just read it. Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.

When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai, his wife, I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the

Egyptians see you, they will say this is his wife, then they will kill me, but they will let you live.

Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.

And when Abram entered Egypt, the Egyptians saw the woman was very beautiful. And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house, and for her sake he dealt well with Abram.

And he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male servants, female servants, female donkeys, and camels.

But the Lord, this is verse 17, but the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife.

So Pharaoh called Abram and said, what is this you've done to me? Why did you not tell me she was your wife?

Why did you say she was my sister, so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her and go.

And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him, and they sent him away with his wife and all that he had.

The Lord afflicted Pharaoh and all his house with great plagues. Now this, of course, is a forward ping of Israel, some 400 years later, is going to go back to Egypt because of a famine, and is going to be entrapped there, enslaved there.

And the Pharaoh is going to be given this warning, just as this Pharaoh was 400 years before him, to let this people go.

Well, of course, that Pharaoh is not going to. But back to Genesis 12, and this first Pharaoh, this precursor of the

Exodus Pharaoh. Imagine what would have happened if he had not released

Sarai. Of course, we mean Sarah, she hadn't had her name changed yet in this part of the history. The Lord afflicted

Pharaoh and all his house with great plagues. Egypt would have been destroyed.

When Pharaoh understood the source and the reason for the plagues and released

Sarah, he saved Egypt. Do you believe that?

If you don't believe that, read Exodus, and ask that Pharaoh what happened to his

Egypt. Ask that Pharaoh where his army could be found. Of course, it's lying at the bottom of the

Red Sea. This man just saved Egypt. A few years later,

Abraham goes to Gerar, that's the Philistia. And the same thing happens when the

Philistine king tries to do as the Pharaoh had done. So go forward, go to Genesis chapter 20.

Genesis 20, verse 3. Now, of course, this

Philistine king had taken Sarah just as the Egyptian Pharaoh had. Chapter 20, verse 3 of Exodus.

Listen to what the Lord says to him. Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman you have taken, for she is a man's wife.

Had he not repented, had he not made full restoration, had he not, in verse 14, look down just a little bit in verse 14, with sheep and oxen and male servants and female servants done what?

Made a public vindication of Sarah's innocence. Had he not done this, all of this, his nation was, as we would say today, toast.

They were done for. End of story. You see, when

God declares freedom, he brings it about. When God declares that his people are going to be free, he does all that is necessary to bring that freedom about.

When God's good hand determined to support and bless Nehemiah, he brought it about. When mere mortal men, puny men, who are so sovereign over a realm so inconsequential and so small as in Artaxerxes' day, the known world.

When someone so inconsequential as that stands between God's will and God, we know who's going to come out ahead, of course.

When they determined to withhold that which God has decreed shall be set free, their continued existence is put at risk.

Ask the Pharaoh who declined the release of Israel in the days of the

Exodus after the tenth plague. Perhaps more to the point for us today.

We can ask the strong man that Jesus speaks of in Matthew chapter 12 and verse 29.

I love this parable. It's buried in this discourse that he has. It doesn't come out as Jesus opened his mouth and told a parable, but it is a parable there.

We're not going to spend the time for the whole context of Matthew 12, 29, but this is the one where Jesus says about entering the strong man's house and binding him before you plunder his goods.

Well, the strong man, of course, is Satan. The strong man is Satan, and the house is his domain.

It's this world, and there he is keeping inside and away from Jesus his captives, the ones that he owns, the people of this world.

Those who are born by nature, children of wrath, those are his. And keeping them there because of Hebrews 2 .15

would tell us our fear of death. And Jesus, of course, he breaks in. He's like the burglar in the parable.

He breaks in, he binds the strong man, and he plunders his goods. And what are the goods that he plunders?

Souls. John chapter 10, those whom the Father gave to him.

He snatches them all away from him, takes them out of that captivity.

Every soul given to him by God the Father is plundered out of that realm.

So with all that we can move forward again to, or from there we can go back to Nehemiah's day.

Babylon had been sent a century earlier by God. They had conquered Judah. They destroyed the gates that Nehemiah is going to rebuild.

But then Babylon goes too far. Isaiah chapter 47 verse 6.

You don't have to turn there. I'm going quickly. I was angry with my people, says the Lord. I was angry with my people.

I profaned my heritage. I gave them into your hand. You showed them no mercy. On the age of you made your yoke exceedingly heavy.

And earlier in this prophecy, Isaiah 13, 17 comes their end.

Behold, I'm stirring up the meads against them. The very nation that Artaxerxes ruled over by submitting to the good hand of God on Nehemiah.

I would argue Nehemiah just saved, or Artaxerxes just saved his nation.

He just saved his nation. The Lord's good hand bound up the strong man so that he could only lay one condition all the while approving all else that Nehemiah needed.

As Israel plundered Egypt when they finally left, so now Persia, though less traumatically, because of God's good hand, is again plundered now of Nehemiah and the materials he needs.

This is God's provision. This is God in the ordinary way of human human events bringing his divine and predetermined will to come to pass.

You recall we were in Ezra some months ago, 13 years before Nehemiah.

Ezra came and he re -established proper worship in the temple that had been rebuilt. And do you remember how the temple was properly stocked with all the instruments that were needed for that worship?

Babylon got plundered when the Persian king, who then had taken over Babylon, returned all that back to the temple.

We serve a great God. We serve a great God working through ordinary means, or what seems to be ordinary means, but if we look beyond it, if we take this higher perspective, we see that there's nothing ordinary about it at all.

But he does work through means. He did tell a man, a king, empty your treasury and send it back to Jerusalem.

And so by oxen and by camels and whatever means to transport it ordinarily, they transported it.

How did it get there? Because God, in his own counsel, his predetermined will, said it would go there.

We can ask also, how did it come about? How did it come about that a man of God, having gained after four months of prayer the mind of God, now seeking to do the will of God by serving the people of God, why did he have to go groveling to this ungodly king for permission to carry out his appointed task?

Why should a man of God go to a man who is not of God and seek permission to serve

God? Again, to answer this, we need a much wider, much higher view of biblical history with its cycles and its revolving characters.

How did this come about? That Nehemiah, this great man, and I say he was a great man with a spirit like ours, yes, but few men, if any men in all history, had such an impact, such a positive impact on Israel at the time that they needed one such as him.

Sort of like in the book of Esther, for such a day as this I raised you up. How does it happen that he has to go to this king?

Who knows nothing of the God of the universe? In 1st

Samuel chapter 9, and again, you don't have to turn there, but 1st

Samuel chapter 9 and the surrounding verses and chapters, this is where Israel is demanding of Samuel, remember the prophet, the judge

Samuel, that before he dies he give them a king. He's getting old, it's obvious he's going to retire or die very soon, his sons are weak and wicked, they're not fit to rule, and if people come to Samuel and say we don't want them, so you give us a king like other nations have, that looks pretty good.

They wanted a king who would impress people. The Lord said, 1st

Samuel chapter 8 verse 7, the Lord said to Samuel, obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.

Not rejected Samuel, but God. It is interesting if you think about that, this rejection of God, that they ask for a king like the other nations have, they end up with Saul who's a head taller than everyone, he's handsome, he's charismatic, he's a great warrior, the only battle he lost was the last one because of God's judgment against him.

We couldn't even find it interesting that they asked for that. They didn't say Samuel, raise up another prophet like you, one who communes with God, one who brings that word and that judgment and that chastisement from God.

No, they say we'd have this whole other thing, and God says, what is that? It's rejection of himself.

He tells Samuel, they haven't rejected you, they've rejected me. They preferred a Saul to God, they wanted a king, they got a

Saul. But once they became a monarchy, it had to continue. God removed

Saul, he gave them David. David's grandson married David, Solomon, and then his grandson

Rehoboam. Rehoboam became king after Solomon died, and under Rehoboam's reign, this kingdom had a civil war, it split, and it never reunited.

But something else happened during this reign, this reign of Rehoboam, Solomon's son,

David's grandson, that bears on our question. Why did Nehemiah have to depend on the good favor of this pagan king?

Look at 2 Chronicles, in chapter 12. 2

Chronicles 12. I almost said there's something

I want you to see here, but it's pretty obvious there's something I want you to see here, because I asked you to turn there. So I didn't say there's something

I want you to see here. Look at verse 1. When the rule of Rehoboam was established, and he was strong, he abandoned the law of the

Lord, and all Israel with him. In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, because they had been unfaithful to the

Lord, Shishak, king of Egypt, came up against Jerusalem with 1 ,200 chariots and 60 ,000 horsemen.

And the people were without number who came with him from Egypt, Libyans, Sikkim, Ethiopians.

And he took the fortified cities of Judah and came as far as Jerusalem. Then Shemiah the prophet came to Rehoboam and to the princes of Judah, who gathered at Jerusalem because of Shishak, and said to them,

Thus says the Lord, you abandoned me, so I have abandoned you to the hand of Shishak. Then the princes of Israel and the king humbled themselves and said,

The Lord is righteous. When the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemiah. They have humbled themselves.

I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance, and my wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak.

Nevertheless, they shall be servants to him, that they may know my service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.

Jeremiah, almost 500 years later, he says to Judah, Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him and his people and live.

Why will you and your people die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence, as the Lord has spoken concerning any nation that will not serve the king of Babylon?

You know, to prefer to be ruled by men as opposed to being ruled by God, it's actually one of those things where the

Lord God gives you what you want. He gives you what you want. This is the idea behind Paul's command in 1st

Corinthians chapter 5, verse 5. The man who was having an affair with his father's wife, commonly thought to be, and I think it's correct, his stepmother, but still terribly wrong, something that even

Gentiles didn't do. And what does Paul tell the church? He says, Deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the

Lord. In other words, give him back to the world, so that he can see the difference between serving men and serving

God. Give him back to Satan, whom he wishes to follow, as proven by his behavior in this matter.

If he wants the world, let him have it. If they want to serve

Shishak, let him have it. They are warned what life would be like under a king like Saul.

They wanted him, and God, as it were, said, Let them have it.

This has only been the briefest survey, but it helps us answer this question. Why did

Nehemiah end up having to go to this man, this Artaxerxes, this idolatrous king of an idolatrous nation?

Do you see the disconnect here? That this man of God has to go to this man not of God to gain this favor, to find out, does it please him to send him to Jerusalem, the city where God has chosen for his name to dwell, and rebuild the walls there?

How did that happen? It happened because Israel rejected God. It happened because of Israel's rejection of God.

They were learning the difference between serving God or serving men. They were seeing the slavery it is to serve men versus the freedom that the

Lord brings. You know, this is a very sad trajectory, and this is one we really have to look at at ourselves personally.

This is one that would require of you some introspection. Whom am I serving? Who am

I following? Where did this word to this person, to this brother, sister, and the

Lord, to this husband or wife, to this employer, whoever it is, where did it come from? Whose purposes does it serve?

Whose sovereignty does it speak of? It's a very sad trajectory, and if we take this quick biblical history survey that I've gone through here, we'll see it's a trajectory that once started it's very hard to get off of.

Only by God's grace, and by God's grace, by the good hand of the Lord upon you, yes, we can come off of it, but how much better to stay off that so -called slippery slope in the beginning?

With Israel, that sad trajectory continued and continued. God's chosen people always choosing other kings, whether it was the

Asherah Poles or a man. Throughout it all, it was God's mercy showing them the difference between his service and what must be given to men.

It is his chastising hand that brings circumstances and forces to consider whose yoke we're under.

Understand there's a huge difference. There's a world of difference. There's an eternal difference between chastisement and judgment.

Chastisement is God teaching us a lesson to bring us back into the trajectory towards Jesus Christ.

Judgment is judgment. If you're in Christ Jesus, if you've repented of your sins and fled to his cross by faith in the work that he did, then

Christ Jesus was judged in your place, and God will not judge the same sin twice.

Christ was judged. When he said it was finished, it was finished indeed. That doesn't mean that chastisement is easy.

Chastisement is a mercy. Chastisement proves that you are really a child of God.

He's treating you as an adopted child. He's treating you as one he loves. That doesn't make it easy. It makes it good, and we arise from the difficulty of it better off.

Quicker to repent next time. Closer to the image of Christ this time. Now this chastising hand brings these circumstances so we can have a moment to consider and think of it this way in terms of Nehemiah chapter 2 verses 1 through 8.

Whose yoke are you under? Whose yoke does that thing that you did, that I did, prove is really the one who controls us?

The one we think we're answering to. The subtle slide began with Saul.

It moved on to a Shishak. It moved on to a Nebuchadnezzar, then an Artaxerxes. As harsh as those histories might read, it is

God, this good father, helping bring them back to their senses. In such times some prove their ultimate loyalty and their lineage by disregarding his gentle warnings, and they're turned over.

They're given back really to Satan or to the world, and others repent and seek restoration before God.

It's the prodigal son. He bears on this, wanting the outside world more than the safe and the loving confines of his father's house.

He's given what he wants. He's given the world, and when a shred of sanity finds a crease, he comes to his senses.

He returns. He's ashamed. He's repentant. He's hungry, and he's forgiven.

And he's forgiven. God's chastisement is for our good. It's for your good.

James chapter 1 verse 14 says it is our own evil desires that tempt us, that lure us away.

At any given moment, consider who are you serving? Is it a Shishak by whom God draws the distinction between himself and men, or is it your own evil desires?

Those that have drawn from the well of the old and the flesh -based man. Or is it

Christ and his word, illumined by his spirit? He's given us his spirit.

He's given us his word. 2nd Chronicles 36 15 says that God sent prophet after prophet after prophet to warn

Israel, just as Amos promised. The Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants, the prophets.

In the end, let this be a warning to us, in the end, Israel chose to set

God aside altogether. I speak of Jesus and his crucifixion and his suffering.

How even then, with their evil desire to crucify the

Lord of Peace, they had to go to a king and seek permission.

This king that they wanted to serve, this pilot who was representing King Rome to them.

In the end, Israel chose to set God aside altogether. John writes that Jesus came to his own, but his own did not receive him.

And later when Pilate presented him to them, he said, behold your king. And they cried back, we have no king but Caesar.

In Matthew's rendition, let his blood be upon us and on our children.

No king but Caesar. And when you choose that, as he did with Saul, Shishak, Nebuchadnezzar, with Artaxerxes, to whom

Nehemiah had to plead for his project. Beware that God often gives us what we want.

I want to close where we began. Let's wrap it up by closing where we began.

And next week, Lord willing, we move on to Nehemiah's move to Jerusalem. Why did

Nehemiah have to beg a foreign and pagan king for permission to serve God? Because the people he sought to serve had abandoned the

Lord and served other gods. Because the Lord gave them what they claimed to want.

First Corinthians 10 says that these things were written as an example to us. They teach us something. They teach us not to boast.

They teach us not to think too highly of ourselves because we're men with spirits like theirs. It teaches us to be mindful of how we stand, which is by the grace of our

Lord Jesus Christ. Mindful of how we stand, lest we fall, as they did.

So what does this history in Nehemiah chapter 2 tell us? It tells us how blessed we are to serve a king, a king

Jesus, who has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved

Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. While we must in this life submit to the authorities ordained by God around us, we have this freedom.

We have that we answer only to one, to Jesus Christ, our Lord and King. Amen. Our Father, we thank you for, again, this day of worship, this time in your

Word. We thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ, our King, our Sovereign, the one to whom we answer, and how we yearn for that ultimate and final and complete freedom we will have when he returns to us and draws us away from this dark and fading world.

In the meantime, Father, may we be your true and faithful people and look to you in all things and submit to your yoke, which is easy and light according to your