How Shall We Then Live? | CultureWatch

How Shall We Then Live?

On getting the heart of God for our predicament:

Many will recognise the words found in my title. Actually, they might have one of two different books and authors in mind. Both in their own ways were Christian apologists and culture warriors. They both had a very clear understanding of where we as believers are at in the post-Christian West. The two books are these:

How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer (Fleming H. Revell, 1976)

How Now Shall We Live? by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey (Tyndale House Publishers, 1999)

Both men had God’s heart and mind on the sad situation the Christian Church finds itself in. Both knew that we were in dire straits, and believers needed to snap out of their daydreaming and lethargy and gird themselves for action. Both were deeply concerned for what was happening all around them.

And what is happening to us today is not unlike what happened to ancient Israel. Because of sin and disobedience, both the northern and southern kingdoms were judged by God. In the south, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed and many Jews were taken into captivity. Those who loved God deeply could only grieve and weep. Consider seven key passages on this:

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by
   Look around and see. Lamentations 1:12

My eyes will flow without ceasing,
    without respite,
until the Lord from heaven
    looks down and sees;
my eyes cause me grief
    at the fate of all the daughters of my city. Lamentations 3:49-51

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land? Psalm 137:1-4

O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
    they have defiled your holy temple;
    they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.…
How long, O Lord? Psalm 79:1, 5

The Spirit then lifted me up and took me away, and I went in bitterness and in the anger of my spirit, with the strong hand of the LORD upon me. I came to the exiles who lived at Tel Abib near the Kebar River. And there, where they were living, I sat among them for seven days, overwhelmed. Ezekiel 3:14-15

They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.” When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. Nehemiah 1:3-4

So the king asked me, “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my ancestors are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” Nehemiah 2:2-3

These texts make clear the sort of heart attitude we need to have in our own similar situation. And it should be fairly obvious how Israel’s Babylonian captivity is not unlike where the church in the West today is at. As I wrote in an earlier piece:

To see his relevance for believers today, consider these parallels. As to the Babylonian captivity:

-The Israelites found themselves in a hostile culture, whose values, worldviews and language was quite different.
-They went from being the predominant culture to a counterculture.
-They went from being cultural leaders to cultural captives.

So too the church today:

-The church has moved from the mainstream to the sidelines.
-The church has moved from being a world leader to a world follower.
-The church has moved from being a light on a hill to a light hidden under a bowl. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2024/09/13/exilic-witness-lessons-from-daniel/

How should we then live? I have often spoken and written about this matter. And I always say we need to get God’s heart on all this. We should grieve over what he grieves over. We should be broken-hearted over what breaks his heart. We should be greatly concerned about what he is concerned about.

It is NOT business as usual. We are in dire straits, and we need to get the mind and heart of God on all this. Here I want to simply share some commentary from other Christian writers on the two Nehemiah passages. Wallace Benn says this about the Neh. 1 passage:

Nehemiah was expressing a deep concern for the welfare of the people of God, the church of his day. The state of the church then caused him to weep, mourn, and above all, pray (1:4).

How concerned are you about the welfare of your church? We should be first concerned about the health and well-being of the congregation we are part of. In this day of a growing lack of commitment, when regular attendance at church can mean twice a month rather than twice a week, how committed are you to your church and how prayerful are you about its well-being? As a church warden (lay elder) once said to me, “If we prayed as often for our ministers as we are willing to criticize them, the church would be a much healthier place!”

Nehemiah was not only concerned about the well-being of his own congregation in Susa; he had a wider vision, and so should we. How concerned are you about the health of the church in your city or area? In your country? While we cannot meet the needs of Christians everywhere, we should have a concern to pray and support suffering believers in some particular part of God’s world. Nehemiah wasn’t parochial in vision or concern; he had wide horizons, and that concern drove him not to depression or a fatalistic attitude but to God in prayer.

Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther: Restoring the Church (Preaching the Word) by Benn, Wallace P. (Author), Hughes, R. Kent (Series Editor)

And on the Neh. 2 text he says this:

How does the work of God get done? It gets done by a person with a concern for the glory of God and the well-being of his people, a prayerful heart that engages in persistent prayer with others, claiming God’s promises, a dedicated and involved person who is ready and willing to be used by God. In every generation, these are the kind of people God raises up and uses to get his work done. Nehemiah was certainly like that.

James Hamilton Jr. speaks of Nehemiah’s great concern for God’s people, and asks us about our chief concerns:

If you care more about how your favorite college football team does on Saturday than you do about how the gospel is advancing, that’s probably because your identity is more shaped by the time you’ve spent watching and talking about football than the time you’ve spent studying the Bible. Which do you know better: the roster, stats, and prospects of your team, or the contents of the Scriptures? Who do you feel more passionate about: the players on your favorite team, or pastors and missionaries and co-laborers in the gospel? Which would grieve you more: seeing your favorite team lose the national championship, or hearing that Christians are being persecuted in a faraway place?

Nehemiah is in exile in Persia, but though he is in the world he is not of it. He doesn’t mourn like those who have no hope. He mourns because the enemies of God’s kingdom have prevailed, and he mourns because he loves God’s kingdom more than life. He also doesn’t stop with prayer. Nehemiah intends to go into action, and in verse 11 he asks that God will prosper what he sets out to do:

Please, Lord, let Your ear be attentive to the prayer of Your servant and to that of Your servants who delight to revere Your name. Give Your servant success today, and have compassion on him in the presence of this man.

And lastly, these comments from Mark Roberts:

Let me clarify that in commending a vulnerability that allows for sadness, I do not intend to sanctify unhappiness. Many Christians walk around with dour faces, not because they feel the broken heart of God, but because they are mired in self-pity. The fact that someone cries for days at a time does not guarantee his or her fitness for ministry! My intent is rather to challenge popular Christianity, which emphasizes joy to such an extent that a genuine, Spirit-filled sadness has no place in the Christian life. For all Christians, and especially for leaders open to the heart of God, there is indeed “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Eccl. 3:4).

Notice in this passage what Nehemiah did with his grief. He did not try to forget it, nor did he simply pine away; rather, he fasted and prayed. He took his grief before God. Prayer is the place to process God’s work in our hearts; it is where we discover and clarify God’s call upon our lives. Prayer provides the only sure foundation for our lives and our leadership.

These are all helpful reminders of how we must deal with what we find happening all around us. The world is certainly in a mess, but all too often that is because the church is in a mess. We need to get God’s heart on this, we need to pray about this, and we need to act on this.

[1614 words]

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February 7 | A PRAYER BURDEN

SCRIPTURE READING:
Nehemiah 1
KEY VERSE:
Colossians 1:3

We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you.

Nehemiah was a tremendous example of how God uses burden praying to unleash His power in others’ lives. A prayer burden must come from God. Nehemiah wasn’t out looking for a burden; God placed it on his heart after Nehemiah conversed with his fellow Jews from Jerusalem.
A good start is to ask God to burden your heart with His concerns. You may be surprised at His response. God may bring to your mind an individual or a circumstance you never would have chosen.
Such a burden is usually one that forces you into a new sense of dependence on God. Nehemiah wept, prayed, and fasted for God’s intervention. You must know that only the power of God can bring a solution.
You must be willing to persist in burden praying. Four months passed before Nehemiah mentioned his burden to the king. The burden that God places on your heart for an unsaved mate, a crumbling marriage, or a bitter friend may last for years—even a lifetime.
Are you willing to pay the price for the burden that God puts on your heart? Will you persevere until God acts?

Burden my heart with Your concerns, Father, then help me persevere until victory comes. Make me willing to pay the price.

Stanley, C. F. (1998). Enter His gates: a daily devotional. Thomas Nelson Publishers.

JANUARY 17 | Genesis 18; Matthew 17; Nehemiah 7; Acts 17

ONE OF THE GREAT FAILURES into which even believers sometimes fall is the tendency to underestimate Jesus (Matt. 17:1–8).
Jesus takes the inner three of his twelve disciples—Peter, James, and John—to a high mountain, just the four of them. “There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light” (17:2). Suddenly Moses and Elijah appeared, “talking with Jesus” (17:3). It is as if the ultimate identity of the eternal Son is allowed to peep through; the three disciples become “eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16). It is hard not to see here also a foretaste of the glory of the exalted Son (cf. Rev. 1:12–16), of the Jesus before whom every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, every tongue confessing “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10–11).
But Peter misunderstands. He rightly recognizes that it is an enormous privilege to be present on this occasion: “Lord,” he says, “it is good for us to be here” (17:4). Then he puts his foot in his mouth: “If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” He entirely misunderstands the significance of the presence of Moses and Elijah. He thinks that Jesus is being elevated to their great stature, the stature of the mediator of the Sinai covenant and of the first of the great biblical prophets.
He is utterly mistaken. Their presence signified, rather, that the law and the prophets bore witness to him (cf. 5:17–18; 11:13). God himself sets the record straight. In a terrifying display, God thunders from an enveloping cloud, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” (17:5). By the time the three disciples recover from their prostrate terror, it is all over: “When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus” (17:8)—a pregnant conclusion to the account.
Jesus brooks no rivals. There have been, there are, many religious leaders. In an age of postmodern sensibilities and a deep cultural commitment to philosophical pluralism, it is desperately easy to relativize Jesus in countless ways. But there is only one Person of whom it can be said that he made us, and then became one of us; that he is the Lord of glory, and a human being; that he died in ignominy and shame on the odious cross, yet is now seated on the right hand of the Majesty on high, having returned to the glory he shared with the Father before the world began.

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 1, p. 43). Crossway Books.

WHEN A LARGE BUILDING PROJECT IS FINISHED, or when an important goal has been reached, often there is a tendency to slack off. Many a congregation has devoted considerable energy to building a new facility, only to retreat into lethargy for months or even years afterward.
Nehemiah perceives that the building of the wall is not the climax of the return, after which relaxation should be the order of the day. The rest of the book makes this point clearly enough. The rebuilding of the wall is scarcely more than preparation for a number of more far-reaching political and religious reforms. In ministry, it is vital always to distinguish means and ends.
With the wall finished, Nehemiah stays on for a while as governor of the entire region of Judah, but appoints two men to be in charge of Jerusalem—his brother Hanani (apparently a man he could trust), and a military man, Hananiah, chosen “because he was a man of integrity and feared God more than most men do” (Neh. 7:2—compare meditation for January 6). There is something refreshing and fundamental about such leaders. They are not sycophants or mercenaries; they are not trying to “find themselves” or prove their manhood; they are not scrambling up the mobile ladder to success. They are men of integrity, who fear God more than most.
Nehemiah then gives instructions regarding the opening and closing of the gates—instructions designed to avoid any traps set between the dangerous hours of dusk and dawn (7:3). Thus the administration and defense of Jerusalem are settled.
The sheer emptiness of the city is what now confronts Nehemiah (7:4). The walls have been rebuilt more or less along their original lines. Jerusalem is a substantial city, and yet the vast majority of the returned Jews are living in the countryside. What takes place in the following chapters, then, is something that can only be called a revival, followed by the determination of the people to send one-tenth of their number into Jerusalem to become the fledgling kernel of a new generation of Jerusalemites. As a first step, Nehemiah digs out the now aging records of those exiles who had first returned from exile in order to determine whose genealogical records demonstrated them to be part of the covenant people, and especially those who could legitimately serve as priests. The steps Nehemiah pursues seem to be part of a careful plan, one which, as Nehemiah himself insists, “my God put … into my heart” (7:5).

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 2, p. 43). Crossway Books.

JANUARY 15 | Genesis 16; Matthew 15; Nehemiah 5; Acts 15

IN ALL OF ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN LITERATURE, so far as I am aware, Hagar is the only woman whom Deity directly addresses by name (Gen. 16:8; 21:17). The woman in question is not one of the great matriarchs of the Old Testament—Sarah, perhaps, or Rachel, or Rebekah—but a slave who resents her mistress and flees. Yet God addresses her, tells her to submit to Sarai (16:9), promises that the child she is carrying in her womb will be a son, and later tells her that that son will be the progenitor of a great nation (21:18).
The account has many interwoven layers to think about. Placed after God’s covenant with Abram in Genesis 15, this incident reflects well on neither Abram nor Sarai. Desperate for children, they think they have the right to bring God’s purposes—and their own desires!—to pass by legal but shady means. The result is not only tension in their household for years to come—tension that spills over into the next generation (Gen. 21, 25), but the beginnings of the Arab peoples, who frequently find themselves locked in hostility with Israel to this day. One of the great features of the Bible is its sheer honesty: great men and women are portrayed with all their warts. This remains a broken world, and the very best are fallen. This should warn us against untamed hero-worship.
Yet there is another connection with the previous chapters. God had promised Abram that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him (12:3). The election of Abram is a means to that end. However focused on Abram’s offspring his purposes will be, God remains the sovereign Lord of all. In the book of Genesis, the account of Abram is nestled into the broader account of the creation of all, and the Fall of all. And so here, at the very beginning of the history of the nation of Israel, God displays his concern for the despised and the outcast, people who are not organically connected with the promised line.
We may detect the same concern in the Lord Jesus. In Matthew 15:21–28, Jesus well knows that during the days of his flesh his mission is in the first instance directed to “the lost sheep of Israel” (15:24). There is a redemptive-historical primacy to the ancient covenant people of God. But this does not prevent him from acknowledging the remarkable faith of yet another woman, a Canaanite, who wisely changes her plea. She no longer addresses Christ as “Son of David” (15:22), on whom she can make no direct claim, and simply pleads for mercy (15:27). Another “Hagar” finds that mercy abundant, as countless people do today.

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 1, p. 41). Crossway Books.

WHEN I WAS A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT IN CANADA, I heard a story told by our history teacher. He related it with deadly anger. He had just returned from the battle-fields of World War II, where he had seen many of his friends killed. Furloughed home because of a war wound, he was riding a bus in a major Canadian city. Seated behind two prosperous-looking women, he overheard one of them say to the other, “I hope this war doesn’t end soon. We’ve never had it so good.”
There are almost always people who profit from the disasters of others, not least from war. So it was in Nehemiah’s day (Neh. 5). Even while there was a disciplined effort to rebuild the city, in the surrounding countryside the fiscal pressures of the times, coupled with famine conditions, made the rich richer and the poor poorer. In an effort to keep going, the poor mortgaged their land and then lost it; they sold themselves or their families into slavery. From Nehemiah’s perspective, slavery was slavery; to be a slave to a fellow Jew was still to be a slave. In some ways it was worse: Nehemiah was concerned not only with the slavery itself, but with the moral hardness of the rich who were profiting from the bankruptcy of others—the want of compassion, the failure to obey the Mosaic code that forbade usury, the sheer covetousness and greed. Transparently they did not need more. Nor was this a question of buying off the lazy. What conceivable justification could they offer for such profiteering?
Yet, mercifully, the consciences of these rich people were tender enough that they did not rebel when they were rebuked. “They kept quiet, because they could find nothing to say” (5:8). Indeed, in due course they repented, returned what had been taken, and stopped charging interest to their brothers.
Clearly one of the factors that enhanced Nehemiah’s credibility as he labored to bring about these reforms was his own conduct. Doubtless the vast majority of governors at the time used their positions of power to accumulate considerable wealth for themselves. Nehemiah refused to do so. He received, presumably from the central treasury, an ample stipend and sufficient support for himself and his staff, and he therefore declined to use his power to demand additional material support from the local population. Indeed, he ended up supporting many of them (5:14–18).
Obedience to God, compassion toward one’s fellows, consistency in the leadership, covenantal faithfulness that extends to one’s pocketbook, repentance and restoration where there has been either corruption or rapacity—these were values more important than the building of the wall. If the wall had been rebuilt without rebuilding the people, the triumph would have been small.

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 2, p. 41). Crossway Books.

JANUARY 11 | Genesis 12; Matthew 11; Nehemiah 1; Acts 11

THIS PASSAGE, Genesis 12, marks a turning point in God’s unfolding plan of redemption. From now on, the focus of God’s dealings is not scattered individuals, but a race, a nation. This is the turning point that makes the Old Testament documents so profoundly Jewish. And ultimately, out of this race come law, priests, wisdom, patterns of relationships between God and his covenant people, oracles, prophecies, laments, psalms—a rich array of institutions and texts that point forward, in ways that become increasingly clear, to a new covenant foretold by Israel’s prophets.
Even in this initial covenant with Abram, God includes a promise that already expands the horizons beyond Israel, a promise that repeatedly surfaces in the Bible. God tells Abraham, “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (12:3). Lest we miss its importance, the book of Genesis repeats it (18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14). A millennium later, the same promise is refocused not on the nation as a whole, but on one of Israel’s great kings: “May his name endure forever; may it continue as long as the sun. All nations will be blessed through him, and they will call him blessed” (Ps. 72:17). The “evangelical prophet” often articulates the same breadth of vision (e.g., Isa. 19:23–25). The earliest preaching in the church, after the resurrection of Jesus, understood that the salvation Jesus had introduced was a fulfillment of this promise to Abraham (Acts 3:25). The apostle Paul makes the same connection (Gal. 3:8).
Even when the passage in Genesis is not explicitly cited, the same stance—that God’s ultimate intentions were from the beginning to bring men and women from every race into the new humanity he was forming—surfaces in a hundred ways. In fact, quite apart from this passage, two of the three remaining passages in today’s readings point in the same direction. In Matthew 11:20–24, Jesus makes it clear, in disturbing language, that on the last day pagan cities, though punished, may be punished less severely than the cities of Israel who enjoyed the unfathomable privilege of hearing Jesus for themselves, and seeing his miracles, but who made nothing of it. His own invitation is broad: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). And in Acts 11, Peter recounts his experiences with Cornelius and his household to the church in Jerusalem, leading them to conclude, “So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18).
Christ receives the unrestrained praise of heaven, because with his blood he purchased people for God “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9; see meditation for December 15).

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 1, p. 37). Crossway Books.

IN THE COMPLEX HISTORY OF THE postexilic community in Judah, Nehemiah plays a singular role. He was not part of the original party that returned to Judah, but before long he was sent there by the emperor himself. In two separate expeditions, Nehemiah served as de facto governor of the remnant community and was largely responsible for rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls, not to mention other reforms. His work overlapped that of Ezra.
The book of Nehemiah is often treated as a manual on godly leadership. I wonder if this does justice to the book. Did Nehemiah intend to write a manual on leadership? Is the book included in the canon for that purpose—as if we turn, say, to Acts to discover the history of the early church and to Nehemiah to discover the principles of leadership?
This is not to say that there is nothing about leadership to be learned from Nehemiah—or, for that matter, from Moses, David, Peter, and Paul. Yet a reading of this book that focuses on the theme of leadership is bound to be skewed; it is in line neither with authorial intent nor with canonical priorities.
Nehemiah is a book about God’s faithfulness and about the agents God used in reestablishing his covenant people in the Promised Land at the end of the exile—about the first steps taken to secure their protection and identity as God’s people and to assure their covenantal faithfulness. Canonically, this part of the Bible’s story-line establishes chunks of postexilic history that take us on to the Lord Jesus himself.
But perhaps we can profitably focus on one or two elements of Nehemiah 1, trailing on to Nehemiah 2.
Early reports of the sorry condition of the returned remnant community in Judah (1:3) elicit from Nehemiah profound grief and fervent intercession (1:4). The substance of his prayer occupies most of the first chapter (1:5–11). Nehemiah addresses the “great and awesome God” in terms of the covenant. God had promised to send his people into exile if they were persistent in their disobedience; but he had also promised, if they repented and returned to him, to gather them again to the place he had chosen as a dwelling for his name (1:8–9; see Deut. 30:4–5). Yet Nehemiah is not praying for others while avoiding any role for himself. He prays that he might find favor in the eyes of the emperor, whom he serves as cupbearer (1:11), when he approaches him about this great burden. Even Nehemiah’s “bullet prayer” in the next chapter (2:4) is the outcropping of sustained intercessory prayer in secret.

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 2, p. 37). Crossway Books.

JANUARY 9 | Genesis 9–10; Matthew 9; Ezra 9; Acts 9

DESPITE THE COMPREHENSIVENESS of the punishment it meted out, the Flood did not change human nature. God well knows that murder, first committed by Cain, will happen again. Now he prescribes capital punishment (Gen. 9:6), not as a deterrent—deterrence is not discussed—but as a signal that murder is in a class by itself, in that it kills a being made in the image of God. But there are other signs that sin continues. The promise God makes, sealed by the rainbow, not to destroy the race in this fashion again (9:12–17), is relevant not because the race has somehow been shocked into compliance, but precisely because God recognizes that the same degradation will occur again and again. And Noah himself, who with reference to his pre-Flood days can rightly be called a “preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5), is now depicted as a drunk, with family relationships already breaking down.
But there is another parallel between these chapters of Genesis and what took place before the Flood. Before the Flood, despite the grip of sin, there are individuals like Abel, whose sacrifice pleases God (Gen. 4); there are people who recognize their great need of God, and call upon the name of the Lord (4:26); there is Enoch, the seventh from Adam, who walked with God (5:22). In other words, there is a race within the race, a smaller race, not intrinsically superior to the other, but so relating to the living God that it heads in a quite different direction. Writing at the beginning of the fifth century A.D., Augustine of Hippo in North Africa traces back to these earliest chapters the beginning of two humanities, two cities—the city of God and the city of man. (See also the meditation for December 27.) That contrast develops and grows in various ways throughout the Bible, until the book of Revelation contrasts “Babylon” and the “new Jerusalem.” Empirically, believers find they are citizens of both; in terms of allegiance, they belong to one or the other.
The same distinctions re-form after the Flood. The race soon demonstrates that the problems of rebellion and sin are deep-seated; they constitute part of our nature. Yet distinctions also begin to appear. While this covenant that God makes not to destroy the earth the same way again is between God and all living things (9:16), Noah’s sons divide, much as Adam’s had. The wearisome cycle begins again, but it is not without hope: the city of God never falls into utter abeyance, but anticipates the more explicit covenantal distinctions to come, now just around the corner, and the glorious climax to come at the end of redemptive history.

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 1, p. 35). Crossway Books.

IT MAY BE DIFFICULT FOR SOME CHRISTIANS, immersed in the heritage of individualism and influenced by postmodern relativism, to find much sympathy for Ezra and his prayer (Ezra 9). A hundred or so of the returned Israelites, out of a population that by this time would have been at least fifty or sixty thousand, have married pagan women from the surrounding tribes. Ezra treats this as an unmitigated disaster and weeps before the Lord as if really grievous harm has been done. Has religion descended to the level where it tells its adherents whom they may marry? Moreover, the aftermath of this prayer (on which we shall reflect tomorrow) is pretty heartless, isn’t it?
In reality, Ezra’s prayer discloses a man who has thought long and hard about Israel’s history.
First, he understands what brought about the exile, the formal destruction of the nation, the scattering of the people. It was nothing other than the sins of the people—and terribly often these sins had been fostered by links, not least marital links, between the people of the covenant and the surrounding tribes. “Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today” (9:7).
Second, he understands that if this community has been permitted to return to Judah, it is because “for a brief moment, the LORD our God has been gracious in leaving us a remnant and giving us a firm place in his sanctuary, and so our God gives light to our eyes and a little relief in our bondage” (9:8).
Third, he understands that in the light of the first two points, and in the light of Scripture’s explicit prohibition against intermarriage, what has taken place is not only singular ingratitude but concrete defiance of the God who has come to Israel’s relief not only in the Exodus but also in the exile.
Fourth, he understands the complex, corrosive, corporate nature of sin. Like Isaiah before him (Isa. 6:5), Ezra aligns himself with the people in their sin (9:6). He grasps the stubborn fact that these are not individual failures and nothing more; these are means by which raw paganism, and finally the relativizing of Almighty God, are smuggled into the entire community through the back door. How could such marriages, even among some priests, have been arranged unless many, many others had given their approval, or at least winked at the exercise? Above all, Ezra understands that the sins of the people of God are far worse than the punishment they have received (9:13–15).
How should these lines of thought shape our thinking about the sins of the people of God today?

Carson, D. A. (1998). For the love of God: a daily companion for discovering the riches of God’s Word. (Vol. 2, p. 35). Crossway Books.

October 19 | Order

scripture reading:	Nehemiah 1
key verse:	Matthew 14:23

When He had sent the multitudes away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray. Now when evening came, He was alone there.

Sociological studies show that despite increased leisure time, Americans feel more pressured than ever. With increased freedoms and opportunities come more choices; with more choices, more decisions are required.

The key to living an orderly life in the midst of such frenzy is an established prayer life in which you can present your needs and agenda to the all–wise God. Nehemiah understood this foundational principle.

When he heard the news of Jerusalem’s plight, he did not immediately organize a rescue squad or launch a new organization. Nehemiah’s response was to pray: “I sat down and wept and mourned for days; and I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven” (Neh. 1:4 nasb).

For four long months, Nehemiah interceded on Jerusalem’s behalf, asking God for direction and wisdom. Then when the time came to petition King Artaxerxes, Nehemiah’s request was granted miraculously (Neh. 2:1–6).

Order in your life begins with the rule of the Holy Spirit and the outworking of God’s plan. The discernment to implement His plan comes as you spend time in fervent prayer, seeking His mind and purposes.

Dear heavenly Father, I realize that order in my life begins with the rule of Your Holy Spirit—so please, come and rule and reign in my life. Implement Your plan and purposes. Bring order out of chaos.¹

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¹  Stanley, C. F. (1998). Enter His gates: a daily devotional. Thomas Nelson Publishers.