The God Who Keeps Covenant... Ezra, Nehemiah, God's Law and God's Faithfulness

This video is going to be about the God who keeps covenant and mercy with those who love him and keep his commandments.

Sounds Federal Vision, I know. Alright, so if you watch my

YouTube channel for any amount of time, you know that I'm moderately obsessed with the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.

I love those two books. It talks about a period of Israel's history that I think is so important to know today.

And it's not just because, you know, I've got some influences that are Christian Reconstructionists, and Ezra and Nehemiah are all about Reconstruction.

It's not just that. It's just that the two characters of Ezra and Nehemiah, they're so faithful and they're so different.

They've got different styles, different missions, different, you know, different details, but they're active at the same time.

They complement each other very well, and I think God very clearly blesses both of their approaches in the scripture.

Now, I even named my son after Ezra, which should tell you all you need to know about how

I feel about Ezra's and how I feel about Nehemiah. Maybe if I have another son, I'll name him Nehemiah, although I'm not so sure.

That's not as cool of a name in my opinion. But anyway, I've talked a lot about these two men and imagine how happy I was when on Sunday morning yesterday,

I walked into Sunday school. I was a little bit late because of some travel issues and some illnesses, and I see on the screen

Dr. R .C. Sproul, and he is teaching about the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. I was super pumped when

I saw this, and the teaching was really great. I don't really want to talk about that. As we were having our conversation, though, the elders were leading a conversation about the book of Ezra and Nehemiah.

I actually noticed two things that I had never noticed before, and this is just amazing, absolutely amazing.

The first thing is that Ezra and Nehemiah, they are active around the same time.

They encounter a lot of the same issues and problems and things like that, but they had actually two different missions.

Ezra, if you remember, was in charge of rebuilding the temple, and a lot of what he was doing was focused around the worship of God.

And nothing could be more important than how we worship God and that we do it in a way that he's prescribed, in a way that he's commanded.

Because we don't want to be guilty of idolatry. We don't want to end up trying to worship

God, but doing it the way the Israelites did, you know, in the desert when they built up a golden calf.

And they said, well, this is Yahweh. And it's like, well, you know, some people might say, well, their heart was in the right place.

Well, it's actually it wasn't. Their heart wasn't in the right place, and they were worshiping God in an unauthorized kind of way.

And yeah, they said it was Yahweh, but it obviously wasn't. It was an idol, and God was not pleased with them worshiping an idol, even if they called it

Yahweh. And so in our churches, we need to make sure that we're worshiping God according to what he's commanded.

And Ezra was laser -focused on that. He was a very pious guy, and that was his mission, and he prayed a lot and all of that kind of stuff.

And that was what he was all about. Nehemiah, what I noticed, is that his mission is similar, but it's very different.

Now, he was the governor of Israel at the time, and his focus was very civil -oriented.

So he was building the walls. Yes, you can have a society that has one law for the sojourner, that cares about the sojourner and the fatherless, but yet still has walls and defenses and scrutinizes people and stuff like that.

You can still do that. It's possible. His responsibility was to build the wall. And of course, he famously gets angry when he sees that they're intermarrying and stuff.

He pulls people's beards out, beats them. I mean, he was like the sword, essentially. So the civil government has the authority of the sword.

That's what Nehemiah was in charge of. And of course, the church has the keys to the kingdom, and that's what

Ezra was in charge of. And I think it's just really cool how they work in tandem, and I think necessarily so.

We need to have a Christian civil magistrate, an overtly Christian civil magistrate.

And when you see what Nehemiah does, whenever he has a problem, almost every single time, the

Bible records that he prays to the Lord, and he thanks God, and he's so in awe of the

Lord and how God keeps his covenant with those who love him, with those who keep his commandments.

And then he acts. He's a man of faith, but he's always a man of action as well. It's not like,

God, take care of me, and then I'm just going to sit in the closet and just hope that something happens. No. He prays to God, and then he goes to the king.

He goes to the king and says, hey, I want to go back to Israel. My homeland is laid waste, and see what

I mean? So God works through his action, and Nehemiah is a great, great character. I love that.

We need to have civil governing authorities that do the same thing. Just the other day, Mike Pence was being mocked because he was praying about what to do about the coronavirus thing and stuff like that.

Mocking that is what a pagan should do because they hate God, they hate his people. But that's exactly what a civil magistrate should do.

Should worship God and pray to God and praise God for his provision, praise God that he's a God that has steadfast love for his people.

All of those things whose ways are good and righteous and just, and then to be a man of action.

So you don't just pray, you also act. And so, I don't know, Nehemiah is awesome, and I didn't notice that before.

I should have noticed it before, but Ezra being focused on the temple, Nehemiah being focused on essentially the civil matters and being the magistrate and doing it according to God's standards.

See, that's the point. Yes, there's a separation between church and state. Church has a different responsibility than the state, but both are under God.

Both must do things according to God's plan. Now, the other thing that I noticed, and this is extremely important, and I think is a demonstration of God's covenant love for his people and God loves you and your generation.

So what you do now has impact on your children and your children's children and all of that.

Let me just note this to you. When you get to know who Ezra is, Ezra chapter 7, this is how it starts.

It says, Now after this in the region of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, Ezra, the son of Saraiah, the son of Azariah, the son of Hilkiah.

And so Ezra, he's introduced as the son of all these people. It has his lineage and it goes back a little bit more, but you should see his grandfather or his great -grandfather is the priest

Hilkiah. Now, you might not recognize that name, but it's an important person in Israel's history.

If you know about the kings and the book of Chronicles and all of that, then you know one of the best kings that Israel had, one of the best reformers was

King Josiah. He became king when he was eight years old. He reigned in Jerusalem 31 years and it looks like, here's what it says about him.

This is, I mean, imagine if you were a king and this is how you were described in the Bible. It says, So one of the things that he does, you know, kind of right off the, he's going to, you know, repair the temple of the

Lord. And so he asks one of his secretaries, one of his officials to go to the, you know, the priests, the high priest.

And the high priest is named Hilkiah. This is Hilkiah. He's the high priest at the time of Josiah's reign and he goes, you know, get the money together.

We're going to start to repair the temple and all that kind of stuff. That's one of the things he does. He wants to, you know, make sure that the worship of God is going off well, which is actually one of the responsibilities of the civil magistrate, by the way.

It says so in the Westminster Confession, all of you non -theonomists out there. But anyway, this is what it says in chapter 22, verse 8.

He says, You see,

Hilkiah was, the Bible doesn't say this, but Hilkiah clearly loved the law of God.

Hilkiah clearly loved the law of God. And he finds this book and he knows that what has gone on in Israel has not been authorized.

It's been against what this book has read. He finds this book and the king sends a secretary to him for some other reasons.

And he says, okay, I'll do what the king asks, but look what I found. And he gives it to Josiah. And Josiah, when he hears it, he's beside himself.

He's beside himself. And he tears his clothes. He sits probably in sackcloth and ashes.

And he's mourning, in a state of mourning. And Josiah, this is one of the great reformers of the nation of Israel.

He was a great king. And so Hilkiah was, you know, integral in that.

Because he loved the word of God. He found the word of God. And he said, you know, the king needs to hear this. And then two, three generations later, that's

Ezra. And so Ezra got probably his love for the law of God, his love to study it and to practice it and to teach it.

That's what it says about Ezra. He studied the word of God. He practiced the law of God. And he taught the law of God.

I don't think that we have to, you know, I don't think we have to go out on too much of a limb to know that he got that probably from his father.

And his father got it from his father. And his father got it from the high priest Hilkiah. God is faithful to keep covenant with his people, those who love him and keep his commandments.

God is faithful to keep covenant and have mercy on his people. And so, men, what you do today, you have a love for the law of God, the word of God.

Teach that to your kids. Teach that to your kids. I'm always amazed when my sons say something that I've taught them.

And I didn't think they were paying attention. I didn't think that they really understood. But they clearly did because then I see them practicing it and talking with it about each other.

I just heard my kids yesterday. This is so funny. This morning, I heard my older son tell my middle son that we're not supposed to grumble when things don't go our way because that's what

Jesus said. He said, don't grumble because we've been in John 6. And it's just awesome. It's just awesome to hear my sons talking with each other about those things.

And I didn't think they were paying attention, but they so clearly are. And you can see this is a great example of God's faithfulness to your generations, covenant faithfulness.

Praise God. Praise the God of heaven, the God who keeps covenant and has mercy on those who love him and keep his commandments.