Book of Nehemiah Pt 12 and Ezra Pt 1

We're going to pray and we are going to get started. Lord Jesus, again, as we open your word, we confess that apart from you, we are nothing, and it is your word that makes us complete.

We are not complete apart from your word. So we ask you, your Holy Spirit, to help us to rightly understand what you have revealed there so that we may believe, confess, and walk in our lives according to your holy word.

We ask in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. When we left off last week, we were looking at kind of the census portion of the book of Nehemiah.

It's actually pronounced Nehemiah. And last week, I left off with kind of this last point that when it lists out the names of these villages, more proof we're dealing with legitimate, real, historical narrative.

Legends and things like this don't have these types of things. And I'm not going to now read the names of the priests and the

Levites. If you would like to do that, you can. You can scan the list quickly as I'm scrolling through if you want to, but I'm not going to list out all the names of the

Levites. Again, this is all historical data of the people who were there and who they did.

And now that the wall is finished, we're going to read about the dedication of the wall that was built.

It says, at the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, they sought the Levites in all their places to bring them to Jerusalem to celebrate the dedication with gladness, with thanksgivings, and with singing, with cymbals, harps, and lyres.

Glad there was no smoke machine mentioned. Okay, I just had to say that. Are you guys awake?

Just checking, all right. And the sons and the singers, they gathered together from the district surrounding Jerusalem from the villages of the

Nepophathites, also from Beth -Gilgal, and from the region of Geba, and Asmaveth, for the singers had built for themselves villages around Jerusalem.

So you'll note then that these singers were the original village people. What? This is just a historical fact.

I don't get what's wrong with you people. All right. So these singers, they built for themselves villages around Jerusalem, and the priests and Levites purified themselves, and they purified the people, and the gates, and the wall.

And then I brought the leaders of Judah up onto the wall and appointed two great choirs that gave thanks.

One went to the south on the wall to the Dung Gate. That sounds like a fun gate to visit.

And after them went Hoshia and half of the leaders of Judah and Azariah, Ezra, note the name

Ezra, that's an important name we're gonna be hearing more of in the weeks ahead. Meshulam, Judah, Benjamin, Shemaiah, Jeremiah, not the

Jeremiah that we read about, obviously somebody named similarly, and certain priests of the sons with the trumpets,

Zechariah, the son of Jonathan, the son of Shemaiah, the son of Mattaniah, son of Micaiah, the son of Zachor, the son of Asaph, and his relatives,

Shemaiah, Azrael, Melalei, Melalei, Galilee, Ma 'ai,

Nathanael, Judah, and Hanani, with the musical instruments of David, the man of God.

And Ezra the scribe went before them at the fountain gate. They went up straight before them by the stairs of the city of David, at the ascent of the wall above the house of David, to the water gate on the east.

Again, Ezra the scribe plays such a critical role in this time in history of Israel.

He is the fellow who legitimately God used to help bring about that renewal of interest in the word of God, and faithful in bringing it forth.

Now the other choir of those who gave thanks went to the north, and I followed them with half of the people.

Now, I'm gonna point this out. I followed them with half of the people. When you see in a biblical narrative language like this, what does it tell you about who's talking when they talk like this?

The author, right? Now, are you guys aware of, there are similar sections in the book of Acts.

Have you ever heard of the we portions of the book of Acts, right? Luke is the author of the

Gospel of Luke and of the Acts of the Apostles, and it's notable that there are several places in the book of Acts where he switches to first person plural.

He says, we, we did this, we did that. Pay attention to those little details because it's telling you something, not only about the authorship, but it's also telling you that the person giving the account of what's being written is an eyewitness and a participant in those things.

So, I followed them with half of the people on the wall above the tower of the ovens to the broad wall above the gate of Ephraim and the gate of Yeshanna and by the gate, by the fish gate, the tower of Hananel, the tower of the hundred to the sheep gate that came to a halt at the gate of the guard.

All of these details pan out archeologically, by the way. We know where these gates are from the old city.

So, both, both choirs of those who gave thanks stood in the house of God, and I and half of the officials with me and the priests,

Eliakim, Maasaiah, Mini Aamin, Micaiah, I can't even pronounce this one,

Eli -o -nai, Zechariah, Hananiah, and with trumpets, and Maasaiah, Shemaiah, Eliezer, Uzi, Jeho -hanan,

Malkijah, Elam, and Ezer, and the singers sang with Jezrahiah as their leader, and they offered great sacrifices that day, and they rejoiced, for God had made them rejoice with great joy.

The women and children also rejoiced, and the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

What a great, what a great thing to kind of record in there, because you'll note that when

Jerusalem was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar, so many people died.

The wailing and the lament of the people who had lost people, you know, their friends and family and relatives.

Instead of, instead of joy going up from Jerusalem, you heard the great lament and the suffering and the sorrow over what had happened when they were, when they were sacked.

Here, we see the exact opposite. God turns their sorrow into joy, and this reminds me of kind of that great theme in Scripture, talking about the new earth.

Have any of you, I'm sure some of you have seen this, because we live in a rural area, but I grew up in Southern California, okay?

Did you know that calves skip? Did you guys know that? Okay, I was like,

I've read that text, and kind of describing what the new earth is like. And it describes it like a calf, you know, having been let out into the field, skipping and jumping and all this kind of stuff.

And I had no idea that that was really a thing. And one of the families we serve in the

United Kingdom, and they live in Somerset, in the town of Somerset, and the woman, the mother of that family, they keep cows.

They keep dairy cows and things like this. And during the winter, they can't let them out in the pasture.

They have to keep them inside of a very large kind of barn facility with cement floors, and it's just not that fun for the cows.

But this is what happens when you live in a climate like the United Kingdom. The winters there are just wet and cold and miserable, and you can't let the cows out into the field during that time.

So when spring comes around, when spring comes around, and they let the cows out of their barn for the first time since they were locked up for the winter, she took a video of that last year and posted it on Facebook.

I have never seen dancing, skipping cows before. Okay, I thought

I was watching a Disney movie. I mean, these were the happiest cows I've ever seen in my life.

And yet the Scripture describes that. That's the metaphor that is used in Scripture, one of them to describe the joy that we will feel, that we will experience.

We're all going to look like a bunch of blithering idiots when we get to the New Earth. We're going to be, Oh, this is the best thing

I've ever had. It's going to be nuts. But that's kind of the idea. God in Christ is going to turn all of our sorrow and misery into joy.

And so you can see a theme of that here, having come out of the exile, now back in Jerusalem.

Think God has protected them. The wall has been finished. They're praising God. And rather than lament and sorrow and pain, instead people in the adjacent villages are going,

What's that noise coming from Jerusalem? I don't know. Is there a war going on?

No. They sound happy. That's the sound of joy, right? Just kind of think of it that way.

It really fits in the context. So on that day, men were appointed over the storerooms, the contributions, the firstfruits, and the tithes, to gather into them the portions required by the law for the priests.

And I'm going to translate that as Torah, because that's actually the word Torah, required by the Torah for the priests and for the

Levites, according to the fields of the towns. For Judah rejoiced over the priests and the Levites who ministered, and they performed the service of their

God, and the service of purification, as did the singers and the gatekeepers, according to the command of David and his son

Solomon. For long ago in the days of David and Asaph, there were directors of the singers, and there were songs of praise and thanksgiving to God.

And all of Israel in the days of Zerubbabel, and in the days of Nehemiah, gave the daily portions for the singers and the gatekeepers, and they set apart that which was for the

Levites, and Levites set apart that which was for the sons of Aaron. This was like a paid standing choir.

I guess in the days before they had radios and MP3 players, and iPhones and stuff like that, you can't just say, hey

Alexa, play some praise songs to God, back in the day, so you have to actually do it yourself. I'm sorry if I set off Alexa for any of you watching.

I've got to be careful when I say things like that. I see somebody sitting there going, no, don't say that. Okay. Yeah, I was really annoyed.

I was watching a baseball game earlier this year, and a commercial came on, and in the commercial, the stupid guy says, hey

Alexa. And it's like, no, don't do that. And it's like, oh, now she's talking to me. It's like, stop this.

I don't want my commercials to set off Alexa. It's so annoying. Anyway.

All right. Chapter 13, final reforms. On that day, they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people, and it was found written that no

Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God, for they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired

Balaam against them to curse them. Yet our God turned the curse into a blessing.

And as soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent.

Now, here's where it's this, okay, I have to say this because there's a bunch of guys who are like legitimately influenced by Nazi, racist, eugenic policies nowadays.

They see this as a command from God that we all must separate racially, okay? In other words,

Norwegians are not allowed to marry Swedes, and Germans can't marry Polish people, and Jews, they're anathema, and if you're from Africa and you have dark skin, you can't possibly marry anybody who has white skin and all this kind of stuff.

Total misreading of this text. Why did God forbid intermarriage? Because of unbelief.

Last week, I mentioned notable people who were not

Jewish, not Israeli, who married into the family.

Rahab the prostitute, who's a Canaanite, and also Ruth, who is a

Moabitess. But in both cases, both of those women believed in Yahweh, trusted in him, and those marriages were not forbidden because at that point, they are believers in the one true

God. They're not going to be snares for their husband and lead them into idolatry the way that Solomon's wives did.

And so now we got this issue, and that is that one of the things that we've seen coming out of the exile is you have people who, when they went into exile, they married foreign pagan chicks.

Es no bueno. Okay, this is not a good thing. And now that the law has been read to them, how many times has it been read?

Have we got to like three or four times at this point? And so now this is registered, oh, we're not supposed to be doing that.

So they separated Israel from all those of foreign descent. Now before this, Eliashib, the priest, who was appointed over the chambers of the house of our

God, and who is related to Tobiah, prepared for Tobiah a large chamber where they had previously put the grain offering and the frankincense and the vessels and the tithes of the grain, the wine, and the oil, which were given by commandment to the

Levites, singers, and gatekeepers with the contributions for the priests. And while this was taking place,

I was not in Jerusalem, for in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, the king of Babylon, I went to the king, and after some time,

I asked leave of the king and came to Jerusalem, and then I discovered the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah, preparing for him a chamber in the courts of the house of God.

And I was very angry, and I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber.

Wow, that's... So remember, Tobiah was one of these guys who was trying to stop the wall from being built.

And so when he found out that Tobiah has his own little private home inside the house of God, he goes in and takes all of his furniture and throws it out of the house and says, time for a yard sale.

And he does this in his anger. I like the way he's talking, because you get to note that Nehemiah here legitimately is being transparent.

This is a moment of anger, and righteous anger at that. And he's not condemning or justifying what he did.

He's just laying it out what he did. And I was very angry. I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber, and then

I gave orders, and they cleansed the chambers. Get the Lysol. This guy's a sick person.

We need to cleanse the walls of his ick. And I brought back there the vessels of the house of God with the grain offering and the frankincense.

I also found out that the portions of the Levites had not been given to them, so that the Levites and the singers who did the work had fled each to his field.

That's a problem. It's a real problem. And so you've got the Levites doing their work, their priestly duty in the temple, but they're not getting their share of the sacrifices.

They're not being able to eat. And when that's the case, they've got to find a way to feed their family, so they're heading back to their own fields rather than staying and working.

And so that's contrary to what the scriptures say for the Levites, because they are to get their contributions from the work that they're doing.

So Nehemiah says, I confronted the officials and said, Why is the house of God forsaken?

And I gathered them together and set them in their stations. Then all Judah brought the tithe of the grain, the wine, the oil into the storehouses.

I appointed as treasurers over the storehouses Shalamiah, the priest, Zadok, the scribe,

Petahiah of the Levites, and as their assistant, Hanan, the son of Zachor, the son of Mataniah, for they were considered reliable and their duty was to distribute to their brothers.

Remember me, O my God, concerning this, and do not wipe out my good deeds that I have done for the house of my

God and for his service. And in those days I saw in Judah people treading wine presses on the

Sabbath. You're a pagan? No problem. You're a Jew? Es no bueno.

Actually, I should do this in Hebrew. Loko kaktov. Okay, this is not good. People treading wine presses on the

Sabbath and bringing in heaps of grain and loading them on donkeys and also wine, grape figs, and all kinds of loaves.

It sounds like they're setting up a veritable farmer's market on the Sabbath, right? Which they brought into Jerusalem on the

Sabbath day. And I warned them on the day when they sold food. Tyrians also who lived in the city brought in fish and all kinds of goods and sold them on the

Sabbath to the people of Judah in Jerusalem itself. Okay? The fish gate was used for bringing in fish.

And my question is, how do you keep fish fresh from that trip from the Mediterranean into Jerusalem without ice?

How does one do that? I bet the sushi there would have killed you back in the day. Just saying, all right?

So then I confronted the nobles of Judah and said to them, what is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the

Sabbath day? Did not your fathers act in this way and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city?

That's a pretty good argument, by the way. Now you are bringing more wrath on Israel by profaning the

Sabbath. Hey, we just got back from exile in Babylon. We were there for 70 years.

And part of the problem was we were disobeying God's commandments like left, right, and center, including the Sabbath.

What are you guys thinking? Right? Do you think God is not going to take this serious?

Of course he's going to take it seriously. So as soon as it began to grow dark at the gates of Jerusalem before the

Sabbath, I commanded that the doors should be shut and gave orders that they should not be open until after the

Sabbath. Now he had the authority to do this. Basically, he's the Jewish governor of this region under the

King Artaxerxes of the Persian Empire. And so he has the authority to do this. Simple solution.

I'm just going to keep you guys out. You're going to break the Sabbath? Shutting the doors?

You won't even be able to bring your carts in here. You won't be able to, you know. So this is going to be bad for business, at least on the one day.

So I stationed some of my servants at the gates so that no load might be brought in on the Sabbath day.

And then the merchants and the sellers of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice.

Fine, we're going to set up our farmer's market outside the wall. Okay. Stubborn, obstinate people.

All right. But I warned them and said to them, why do you lodge outside the wall? If you do so again,

I will lay hands on you. That's violence. We're going to mess you up.

So if you do that, you'll be messed up. From that time on, they did not come on the

Sabbath. And then I commanded the Levites that they should purify themselves and come in guard at the gates to keep the

Sabbath day holy. Remember this also in my favor, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love.

This is the second time we see a little prayer like that within a chapter.

Those are good little prayers, right? And so you're going to note here, remember this also in my favor, remember my good works,

Lord, but preserve me according to your steadfast love, according to your greatness. This is a prayer of faith.

In those days also I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab.

These are Philistine chicks, the Ashdodians. Ammonites and the Moabites. And half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah, but only the language of each people.

Again, these are pagan, unbelieving chicks. They should not have had these marriages.

So I confronted them, and I cursed them, and I beat some of them and pulled out their hair.

That had to be a spectacle. Could you imagine if TikTok was around back then, right? Nehemiah loses it.

He's in this guy's face, and he's ripping out his hair. Why? Because he's married that Ashdodian chick, right?

I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, you shall not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves.

Did not Solomon, the king of Israel, sin on account of such women? Yeah. Among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was beloved by his

God, and God made him king over all of Israel. Nevertheless, foreign women made even him to sin.

Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act treacherously against our

God by marrying foreign women? Again, the issue isn't the foreignness of their skin.

The issue is the foreignness of their religion, right? So one of the sons of Jehoiada, the sons of Elisha, the high priest, was the son -in -law of Sambalot, the

Horonite. Therefore, I chased him from me. Nehemiah, what on earth?

This guy's just on a rampage, ripping people's hair out, chasing.

Oh, it's Sambalot. And so all pretenses are gone at this point since the wall is built and everything like that, and he chases this sucker.

So therefore, I chased him from me. Remember them, oh my God, because they've desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the

Levites. Remember my good deeds, but remember their evil ones. That's an interesting prayer.

So thus, I cleansed them from everything for him, and I established the duties of the priests and the

Levites each in his work, and I provided for the wood offering at appointed times and for the firstfruits.

Remember me, oh my God, for good. Those little aside prayers are good little prayers for us too.

Yes, Marilyn. Okay, all right, so Marilyn says, just so you know,

Don and Marilyn have taken it upon themselves to translate the early church council meeting minutes from Kongsvinger back in the day where the folks here spoke

Norwegian. So you're saying that this sounds exactly like the old church council meetings.

They were a little more colorful back then? I can honestly say,

I hope we never have anything like that ever again. Yes, it has, yes.

So yeah, but I love the fact that you look at Nehemiah and you sit there and go, this guy legitimately sounds like he needs to go to anger management class, right?

Yeah, right. That he does have the burden, and you're gonna note, he's doing the right things.

He may not be totally doing them correctly, right? But you're gonna note, are we not all the same?

How many of us can say that our good works are not tainted with sin? You can see this man's sinfulness in his good words.

And so he even has to pray that God remembers him for good and then still has mercy on him, right? We are all the same in that way.

In this particular case, I must think so. As Christians, we don't shy away from recognizing good works when they are done, even when we do them.

The issue is we put no, yeah, we put no trust in them. Where the self -righteous go wrong is not in, actually, they do go wrong because they incorrectly identify good works.

But where they go wrong is their trust is in their good works. So I always like to point out that our good works are done in our vocations.

And I cannot begin to tell you how many people have sent me emails thanking me when they've heard that the

Scriptures teach that our good works are done in our vocation as husband, as wife, as father and mother, as child, as employer and employee.

You know, we live in a day where a person is made to feel in church that they don't have any good works, despite the fact that you have a young father who's got, you know, two small children and a wife.

And what does he do? He wakes up at the crack of dawn, five in the morning, he gets up, takes his shower, shaves his face, puts on that horrible thing called a tie.

Man, I don't miss those. Okay, are those supposed to invoke a noose?

What are those things? And I know that this thing invokes a slave shackle, which

I'm okay with, but when I had to wear ties every day, what is that? You know, because it's just inviting somebody to grab it and yank you and then hang you up by a tree until your legs stop moving.

Ties are just bibs for men. Right, okay. It started off as something to keep the food off their shirt.

Got it, okay. But they put the tie on, they get into their very unsexy

Kia, you know, vehicle that's reliable, but not expensive.

And then they get on the highway and they drive and they're in traffic for 35, 40, 50 minutes.

They get to the office just in time. They top off their coffee, sit in their cubicle, turn on their computer, answer the emails, go to the meetings, do all the stuff that they're paid to do.

And then when they're exhausted after a long day of work, they get in the car, make the commute home, go home, play with the kids.

The wife is cooking and all that kind of stuff. And their existence day to day is just that.

It's the toil and grind of life. And when you go to churches that don't recognize that this is a good work, they basically say that they're trying to teach you that your good works are something different than this.

But these are where your good works are. I assure you that when you stand before Christ and the books are opened, sacrificially toiling to provide for your family, day after day after day, it's all recorded.

And God remembers those good works. Every diaper that you changed. And me,

I get double points for every diaper that I changed, by the way, just because it's me.

Changing diapers, I had to come up with a strategy how to work around that. I gotta tell this story.

I never liked changing diapers, and I would always make sure that if I was changing a number two diaper,

I always had my T -shirt over my nose, and I would be holding my breath as long as humanly possible.

One time, Barbara and I were on our first family vacation, and Josh was still an infant. He was still in diapers.

And we had this minivan that we were driving. We drove it through Utah and up into Montana. And we're in Idaho.

We're in a part of Idaho. And it's cold outside, and Barb's driving, and Joshua soils his diaper, right?

And so she says, it's your turn. So we're driving down the highway, and I'm changing a diaper, thinking, we're gonna get in trouble if we get caught for this.

But I kid you not, I said, Barb, it smells so bad. I need you to roll down the windows. So she rolled down the windows, so we were getting some fresh air coming through there.

As soon as I opened that diaper, she closed the windows on me, and I was gagging.

So that one's recorded in my book. Still is a good work, okay? My married life is colorful.

And Barb was giggling the whole time. Oh, yeah. She did it on purpose. I'm all, roll that window down.

She's all, no, I'm cold. But all of our good works are recorded, and we recognize them for what they are.

And so you'll note that Nehemiah knew his works were good works, and he asked God to remember them.

And we recognize, too, but we want God to remember our good works, but we don't want God to remember our sin.

And those are prayers that we as Christians pray. All right. Despite the cynicism and skepticism of Clevin, I finished

Nehemiah today. Thank you. I'll be here all week. That's right.

We did it. It's a miracle. Now, we are going to then read the book of Ezra.

That's our next book. And where we go from here, since we're kind of hanging out in the exile history of Israel, we're going to read

Ezra. You can see it's a good companion to the book of Nehemiah. But I think what we're going to end up doing is we're going to end up, when we're done here, is we're going to read

Ezekiel. And I want to do Ezekiel first, and then we'll probably get into the

Minor Prophets. I'm just trying to give you a roadmap here. I've been teaching Ezekiel to the First Elythia service, and it's so good.

It's crazy, though. It's a crazy book. But it's so good that I think we'll jump to Ezekiel, then we'll do the

Minor Prophets, and then we might go back through Isaiah. But the longer

I'm here, the more books of the Bible we're able to tally up and say we've worked our way through. All right. Let's take a look at the book of Ezra.

So in the first year of Cyrus, the king of Persia, that the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled,

Yahweh stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, the king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all of his kingdom and also put it in writing.

So Ezra the scribe is the guy who writes this book, and he recognizes full well something vital, and that is that Jeremiah is vindicated.

You remember when we worked our way through Jeremiah, he was poorly treated. No one liked to hear him.

He was the last prophet that God sent before they were sent into exile and God acted in judgment. And yet his prophecy has been preserved, and certain details have also panned out at this time so that he's basically saying that God is the one who spoke through Jeremiah, and as Jeremiah said this regarding Cyrus, it came about.

But there was another prophet who also mentioned Cyrus by name hundreds of years before he was even born.

Y 'all know who that prophet was? It was Isaiah, right? Now a little bit of a note here.

I have to say this because of the goofiness of our times, and that is that the prophecies regarding Cyrus have nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Hannah's looking at me like, what? So if you did not run into this, you are blessed.

Unfortunately, my other job makes it so that I have to take in copious amounts of stupidity all in the name of God.

But while Trump was president, there were notable false prophets who were claiming that God raised him up and that he was the

Cyrus of our age. Huh? Yeah, they did.

They minted the Trump -Cyrus coin. I actually covered that on Fighting for the

Faith. I assure you, Cyrus and Trump have nothing to do with each other.

And I have no idea what this upcoming political season is going to look like. I'm just already convinced it's going to be a circus.

Anyway, moving on. So thus says Cyrus, the king of Persia. That is interesting.

Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. This is a letter that was written by Cyrus.

And note what Cyrus is saying. Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth.

Cyrus is a what? He's a believer. So you'll note that when the

Jews were in exile, God did mighty acts to save and deliver them. And the word that Yahweh was the true

God was really strongly reinforced through men like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, as well as Esther and her uncle, as well as Ezekiel and Daniel.

So all of that being said, you'll note that this is an interesting opening for the book of Ezra, that the king of Persia recognizes that he's the king of all the kingdoms of the earth by the hand of Yahweh.

Wow. He has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.

And Cyrus said, okay. God's charged me to do this. I'm going to do it.

Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of Yahweh, the

God of Israel. He is the God who is in Jerusalem, and let each survivor in whatever place he sojourns be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, besides freewill offerings, for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.

That's quite the letter. A little unexpected. It gives you pause and makes you think.

So Nehemiah, the big thing was the rebuilding of the wall. But when the exiles from Judah get back to Jerusalem, the temple is completely in shambles.

It's a burned out hulk. All of its glory that was built by Solomon has long disappeared.

And you're going to note one of the things we're going to see here is that despite the fact that they are going to build a new temple there, this new temple isn't even going to have a shadow of the glory of the temple that Solomon built.

And there will be some survivors who will be able to remember what the temple was like before Nebuchadnezzar in the exile and compare what they're going to be building to that.

And it's going to lead to weeping. It's going to lead to crying. So then rose up the heads of the fathers, the houses of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the

Levites, everyone whose spirit God had stirred to go up to rebuild the house of Yahweh that is in Jerusalem.

Now, here's where we Lutherans have to take a close look at this.

We recognize that God does stir up the hearts of people.

However, it's not in the way that the Charismatics talk. So when

I was a Charismatic, someone would come up to me, oh, the Lord told me to tell you that you're going to have five kids.

Well, you lied. That's not true. We only had three. And the Lord laid it on my heart to come up here and tell you, bless your heart, and that's how they talk.

And so God's having full -on conversations with them. That's not what's going on here.

The best way is you'll know that God stirs up people's heart to the point where they are going to be doing the things that God has called them to do.

Let me give you an example that is a little closer to home for me. I am a pastor.

How does one become one? I can tell you decades ago, when

I used to attend Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Hacienda Heights, California, I remember very, very strongly thinking, you know,

I can't shake this thing. It's like a feeling. It's like having an itch in your brain, and you can't touch it.

It's just there, and it's annoying that I believe that God's calling me into the pastoral office.

So I went and talked to my pastor. I said, Pastor Swirler, I think I'm being called into pastoral ministry.

He said, I'll just knock that off. That feeling will go away. Okay. Which is kind of weird advice, right?

For me, that was probably really good advice. Because here's the thing. There's nothing easy about being a pastor, and no man should seek this office.

This office will seek men, is the best way I can put it. The men who seek this office generally get the church in a lot of trouble.

So I just listened to him. And about a year and a half later, I met with him again and said, this isn't going away.

If anything, it's getting worse. And we started kind of coming up with some kind of plans to kind of work that out.

And eventually, you know, the story ends up with Don and Marilyn Matheson sitting with me in a diner in Indiana, telling me that their pastor was thinking about retiring.

Did they know anybody who would be interested in taking the call to Pastor Kongsvinger? And I think the words that came out of my mouth were,

I am. It might have been that exuberant. I don't know if Don knew what to do with that.

It was on the way to the airport in Grand Forks. Oh, it was on the way to the airport in Grand Forks. Okay, so it was here in town.

We were, got it. I'm glad your memory is better than mine. Things are falling apart there. Yeah, and that resulted in me eventually receiving a call to Pastor Kongsvinger, being properly installed and ordained as the pastor of Kongsvinger.

There's a process to this. And so you'll note that we recognize that God does stir up men to call them into pastoral ministry.

And I would note that in my case, I probably disobeyed God a little too long, but it all worked out.

And at the end of the day, God does stir you up to do things. I cannot begin to tell you how many times in the course of my life as a

Christian I've had somebody say, you know, I just had the strongest compulsion that I felt like I needed to support your ministry or whatever, and they've given us money at the exact time we needed it.

Or you ever have anything like that? You just know that you know that you've got to do this thing.

And you don't know why you know that you know that you've got to do it, but you know that you know that you've got to do the thing. Oftentimes that will turn out to be

God pushing you. And sometimes when God has to resort to that, that's not a bonus.

That's more of an indictment. I would note that many of the good works that we're called to do, Scripture is so clear that we need to do this.

If God the Holy Spirit who dwells on the inside of you is screaming at you, help your neighbor, you should have been listening to his voice and the word.

And so when he pulls out the spurs and kicks you in the side like that, that's not generally a good thing.

That's more of an indictment against you. But you'll note that having the Holy Spirit inside of us, we do recognize that God does stir up people to do particular good works.

Yes? That's a common theme, actually. It's like they find themselves there literally kicking and screaming.

Yes. Or they just ultimately hear. Yeah. Let me kind of put it this way.

God left me no choice. Okay. God blew up parts of my life so that the only thing left was this path.

And it's like, I guess I'm going to be a pastor. This is how this goes. But, yeah,

I'm glad that that's a common theme among the seminarians for the American Lutheran Theological Seminary. Again, I'm always leery of the guy who pursues the office.

I have much more confidence in the guy where the office pursues him. So ambitious fellows are dangerous is the best way

I can put it. All right. So we as Lutherans, we have no problem saying that God, the Holy Spirit, does legitimately stir up people's hearts to do things like this.

And another text that is supportive of this idea, if you go into the Torah itself, like in the book of Leviticus and in the book of Numbers, where God gives the command to build the tabernacle, and God is the one who stirs up the hearts of the people to contribute for the purpose of building the tabernacle and even stirs up and gifts the people who are the craftsmen who do the work of putting together the tabernacle and all of its implements.

And so you'll note that we have other biblical texts that kind of tease this out. But you're going to note this.

This is a minor theme in Scripture, whereas charismatics try to make this like the major focus of everything.

All right. We recognize that God can speak and does speak and God does prompt. But at the end of the day, that's just a small, small, small part of Christianity.

God prompts us primarily through his word. This sounds a lot like the same details when they were building the tabernacle.

What names, man? These Persian names. The Prince of Judah. And this was the number of them.

30 basins of gold. 1 ,000 basins of silver. 29 censers.

30 bowls of gold. Four calling birds. Three French hens. You get the idea.

410 bowls of silver. 1 ,000 other vessels. And all the vessels of gold and silver were 5 ,400.

All these did Shesh Bazar bring up when the exiles were brought up from Babylonia to Jerusalem.

Now, these were the people of the province who came up out of the captivity of the exiles, whom

Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, had carried captive to Babylonia. They returned to Jerusalem and Judah, each to his own town.

They came with Zerubbabel. That's a name we just heard in the book of Nehemiah. Joshua, Nehemiah.

Note, he gets mentioned here. Sariah, Realiah, Mordecai. Ah!

Nah, I'm waiting on Mordecai. That's the uncle of Esther. Bilshan, Mispar, Bigvi, Rahum, and Ba 'ana.

And a pastor on the prairie. That's right. I'm a pirate and a pastor on the prairie,

John. I'm a landlocked pastor. It's weird. Hang on a second here.

Let me just run through the questions or comments online real quick. All right. It's been doing okay.

Okay, thanks. Okay. Cows on the grass after winter. Ah! There's a YouTube. Somebody posted a

YouTube video of cows on the grass after winter. Hang on a second here. Let's see if I can find this. Daniel. All right.

So you guys can at least experience this. Yeah, here we go. Okay. So let me just play this and you guys can see it.

Look at this. Dancing cows. Oh, look, grass. Okay. That's us when we get to the new earth, right?

This is ridiculous. Okay. You guys are no self -respecting cow should be doing that.

Anyway. Thank you, Daniel, for finding that for us. It helped make the visual point.

I've seen you dance, too. Listen, when I dance like that, it isn't nearly as moving.

What? That was utterly terrible. I know. Yeah, all right.

John's in pain. All right. That's good to know. Thank you. We've covered all the comments.

Let's continue here. Now, the number of the men of the people of Israel, the sons of Parosh.

And so you're going to note here we got a census of the different little mini clans of Judah after the returning from exile.

And you're going to note, I'm not going to read all the names, but these are not big numbers. These are not big numbers.

And so it lists all of them. And you get the feeling that just not that many people survived, and that's exactly the point.

So I'm going to skip this particular part. But then we get on. So the temple servants are listed.

The whole assembly together. Here's the sum. At the end of the spreadsheet, this is the total number here.

The whole assembly together was only 42 ,360. That is not a lot.

Now, I would note that according to the book of Jeremiah, the number of people who went into exile was somewhere south of 5 ,000.

So they've multiplied over the 70 years. They went from 5 ,000 people to 42 ,000.

And then it lists, besides their male and female servants, of whom there were 7 ,337.

They had 200 male and female singers. I don't know why the singers are listed differently. Apparently you don't get included in the census if you know how to sing.

Who knew? So their horses were 736. Their mules were 245.

Their camels were 435. Their donkeys were 6 ,720. And so you get the idea of what's going on here.

And so that's the census bit. Not a huge number of people coming out. It's really, really thin pickings.

So when the seventh month came and the children of Israel were in the towns, the people gathered as one man to Jerusalem.

Then arose Joshua, the son of Jehozak, Jehozadak, sorry, and his fellow priests, and Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, with his kinsmen, and they built the altar of the

God of Israel to offer burnt offerings on it as it is written in the Law of Moses, the man of God.

So before they rebuild the temple, they at least reestablish the altar for the purpose of the sacrifices being reinstituted.

So they've set back up the daily requirement of God. Evening sacrifice, morning sacrifice.

And it really should be in that order because the evening sacrifice is kind of closer to the end of the day.

And they order days according to night first and then morning.

So burnt offerings, so daily. So 9 a .m., morning sacrifice.

3 p .m., evening sacrifice. Is it any wonder that when you read the writings of the church fathers that Christians, when they were catechized into the

Christian faith, were taught that, in fact, it was actually said this strongly, they had suspicions that you weren't even a

Christian if you didn't minimally pray 3 times a day. And those 3 times for prayer were at 9 in the morning, noon, and then 3 in the afternoon.

Stopping what you're doing and praying. And what they tied it to was

Christ on the cross. 9 in the morning, he was nailed to the cross. Noon, the sun stopped shining.

And 3 p .m. is when he died. And you'll note that this is all bracketed by the Mosaic Covenant, which teaches the morning and evening sacrifice isn't exactly when they are to take place.

So it's always fascinating when you know your Old Testament history and you know the requirements of the Torah, how they end up pointing to Christ and connecting directly to him.

While Jesus is being nailed to the cross, you have the morning sacrifice being offered.

When Jesus dies, you have several things taking place all at once. One thing that's taking place is that you have the evening sacrifice, but because of the

Sabbath, Christ celebrated the Passover. He celebrated it a day early.

Because of that, while Christ died at 3 in the afternoon that day, all of the Passover lambs were being sacrificed at the same time that he died.

There's so many things happening that if you know your biblical history in the Old Testament, it all hooks right back into Jesus, and it's mind -blowing.

So they kept the Feast of Booths, we read about that in the book of Nehemiah, as it is written, and offered the daily burnt offerings by number according to the rule as each day required.

And after that, regular burnt offerings, the offerings at the new moon, and at all the appointed feasts of Yahweh, and the offerings of everyone who made a freewill offering to Yahweh.

Now a little bit of a note here. We do not have a proper understanding of how months worked back then because we've had our calendar tampered with.

Let me give you an example. September, October, November.

They're coming up. Right now we're in August. Who is this month named after?

Caesar Augustus, right? Okay, October.

How many sides are in an octagon? Eight. Shouldn't October be the 8th month of the year?

Shouldn't September be the 7th? Shouldn't November be the 9th month?

Deca. How many is a deca? Ten. Shouldn't December be the 10th month of the year?

You see my point here? Our calendar has been tampered with, and have you noticed these calendars make no logical sense.

I had to learn a stupid rhyme when I was a kid. 30 days, half September, April, June, and November.

All the rest have 31, except for February which has 28. Unless it's a leap year and has 29. That really rhymes at the end there, right?

You still don't remember that? You didn't get a beating if you didn't do your memory work.

I still have a twitch from that. All that being said, according to God, what is the first month of the year?

According to scriptures. And roughly where would that fall in our calendar? It does move with the moon, right?

But what month would that be? Know your

Hebrew here. The month of Nisan.

The month of Nisan, that's the first month. And Nisan usually falls around April. Beginning part of April.

If we had followed, if we had kind of kept this, New Year's for us would be

Easter. I just want you to think that out. New Year's for us would be

Easter. Even before Christ was born, God had set it up so that the

Passover and the first day of the year were concurrent with each other.

Christ dies on the Passover, which means that God had really set it up in such a way that the very first month of the entire year, we would have started

New Year's with the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. At least death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

That all would have been New Year's stuff for us. And I would note that the scripture kind of invites us to kind of sort that all out.

When I first became a Lutheran, I was a little bit obnoxious when I first became a Lutheran. They say the worst kind of smoker is a former smoker.

The worst kind of Lutheran is a former Nazarene. Oh, man. When I was in the cage stage, I was really annoying.

I went through a whole phase where I didn't even like using the calendar year that I had inherited as an American. And I would say, what day is it?

Oh, it's the fourth Monday after Easter. And my wife's like, okay, it just was too much, right?

But I like the idea of kind of church time. But all that being said, you'll note that Israel legitimately,

God had set it up that they had a calendar. Days were ordered accordingly.

Months went according to the new moon. And oddly enough, I've seen somebody kind of sort some of this stuff out.

Our months would all be the same length if they had just kept this, okay?

And days would fall on like the same thing, like the third day of the month would always be a

Tuesday, okay? But no, we've kind of messed everything up. Yeah, Hannah. Yeah, so the pagan beliefs have something to do with this.

So June, July, August are kind of like pagan Roman interventions and changings of everything.

Kind of messes everything up. But you'll note according to God's law, they had a calendar.

They had new moon festivals every single month. And you're going to note that the

Torah legitimately had Israel partying many times a year, at least once a month.

They had all these kinds of things. And every Sabbath was kind of a joyous kind of thing. Have any of you ever been in Israel on a

Friday evening? When the sun goes down and it's now time for the Sabbath. That place parties.

Holy smokes. There's singing and dancing and all this kind of stuff. It's a joyous thing. And these are practices that go way back into antiquity.

Way, way back. I think the Norwegians made everything stuffy, but that's a whole other thing.

All right. So from the first... We don't smile. Huh? We don't smile. I've noticed that. You don't have to tell me.

Okay. From the first day of the seventh month, they began to offer burnt offerings to Yahweh.

And by the way, seventh month would be the time for the Day of Atonement. Okay. But the foundation...

Oh, by the way, this is another point I wanted to make about this. And I'll make this my last point as we talk about the calendar, and then we'll pick up from here next week.

And that is that if you understand how the biblical months and years and different feast days work out, you'll note then that the day we live in, as we get closer to November and December, that today's

Jews, they don't follow the Mosaic months properly. And so Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur is the

Day of Atonement, but then you got Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year. Rosh Hashanah is always toward the end of the year for us.

It's a little before that. And as a result of it, when we get into the fall months, you're going to hear people claiming to be prophets, and they'll say, it is now the

Jewish New Year, and we're going to give a prophecy for the upcoming year of 5774, or whatever, and all this kind of stuff.

And the problem is that all these false prophets, they're not actually following true biblical months and stuff like this.

The Jewish New Year is in April, according to the scriptures, and modern

Judaism has moved it all the way into the fall. So pay attention to the fact that Satan hates order, and he's even disordered the months and the weeks on all of these things, and as a result of it, certain things that we would be more cognitive of had we kept these things, are kind of lost and shrouded in mystery and confusion.

So this is where I'm going to end up. I'm going to head over to Immanuel now. So, all right. Peace to you, brothers and sisters.