Nehemiah 13

General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, once said to a group of new officers, “I want you young men always to bear in mind that it is the nature of a fire to go out; you must keep it stirred and fed and the ashes removed.”

Nehemiah discovered that the fires of devotion had gone out in Jerusalem. His first term as governor lasted for twelve years (5:14), after which he returned to the palace to report to the king (13:6). He was gone perhaps a year, but when he returned to Jerusalem, he discovered that the situation had deteriorated dramatically, for the people were not living up to the vows they had made (chap. 10). Nehemiah immediately began to act decisively to change the situation.

Without spiritual leadership, God’s people are prone to stray like sheep. One successful pastor told me, “If we didn’t keep our eyes on this work twentyfour hours a day, seven days a week, it would be invaded and soon fall apart.” Moses was away from the people of Israel only a short time, and they became idolaters (Ex. 32). Paul would establish a church and leave it in the hands of the elders, only to have trouble begin soon after his departure. Then he would have to write them a letter or pay them a visit to straighten things out. (No wonder Paul exhorted the Ephesian church leaders as he did in Acts 20:28–32!) After Nehemiah was gone from Jerusalem only a short time, he came home to find the people defiled by compromise.

If you compare this chapter with chapter 10, you will see that the people failed to keep several of the promises that they had made to the Lord.

The mixed multitude (vv. 1–3). According to 10:28–29, the Jews had willingly separated themselves from the people of the land and united with their Jewish brothers and sisters to obey the law and walk in the way of the Lord. But apparently their separation was incomplete, or some of the people formed new alliances, for they discovered that there were Ammonites and Moabites in their congregation, and this was contrary to the law of Moses (Deut. 23:3–4).

Ammon and Moab were born from the incestuous union of Lot and two of his daughters (Gen. 19:30–38), and their descendants were the avowed enemies of the Jews. Somehow this “mixed multitude” had infiltrated the people of Israel in spite of previous purgings (9:2; 10:28). It was the “mixed multitude” that gave Moses so much trouble (Ex. 12:38; Num. 11:4–6), and it gives the church trouble today. The “mixed multitude” is composed of unsaved people who want to belong to the fellowship of God’s people without trusting the Lord or submitting to His will. They want the blessings but not the obligations, and their appetite is still for the things of the world.

Balaam was a hireling prophet who tried to curse Israel but each time saw the curse turned into a blessing (Num. 22—24). Finally, however, he hit upon a scheme to defeat Israel: He encouraged the Moabites to be “neighborly” and invite the Jews to share in their religious feasts, which involved immorality and idolatry (Num. 25). Balaam knew that human nature would respond to the opportunity for sin and the Jews would disobey God. As a result of their sin, Israel was disciplined by God, and 24,000 people died.

The “mixed multitude” in the church today urges us to follow the philosophy of Balaam and do what the world wants us to do. I was told about a dedicated youth pastor whose ministry was bringing many teens to Christ and building them up in the faith. He didn’t entice them with entertainment; he simply taught the Word, kept the young people busy witnessing, and met with them regularly for prayer. The church was being greatly helped by this group of dedicated teenagers.

But the enemy went to work. The youth pastor was called before the elders and asked, “What is your program for ministering to the carnal young people in the church?” He said that he had no special program for carnal teenagers, but that they were welcome to join in the Bible studies, prayer meetings, and witnessing trips. The elders dismissed the youth pastor because he was not catering to the carnal teens in the church!

When I was ministering over “Back to the Bible Broadcast,” the manager of a Christian radio station phoned me to complain about my messages about Lot and worldliness among professing Christians. He felt I was being too hard on the carnal Christians. “If you keep that up,” he said, “we’re going to drop your program!”

The old Youth for Christ slogan is still true: In ministry, we must be “geared to the times and anchored to the Rock.” If we understand the times (1 Chron. 12:32), we can relate to people more easily and apply the Word with greater skill, but we must not imitate the world in order to try to witness to the world. Years ago, Oswald Chambers wrote, “Today the world has taken so many things out of the church, and the church has taken so many things out of the world, that it is difficult to know where you are” (The Servant As His Lord, 17). “Today the world has so infiltrated the church,” said Vance Havner, “that we are more beset by traitors within than by foes without. Satan is not fighting churches—he is joining them.”

An enemy intruder (vv. 4–9). Not only were some of the Jews married to Ammonites or Moabites, but also an Ammonite was living in the Jewish temple! Tobiah the Ammonite (4:3) had been given a room in the temple by Eliashib the high priest (13:28). Eliashib is the first one named in the list of workers (3:1), and yet he had become a traitor. Why? Because one of his relatives was married to Sanballat’s daughter (13:28), and Sanballat and Tobiah were friends. They were all a part of the secret faction in Jerusalem that was fraternizing with the enemy (6:17–19).

Just because a family has been active in the church a long time and has helped to build the work, it is no sign that each generation will be spiritual, or that any generation will remain spiritual. Children and grandchildren can drift from the faith and try to bluff their way on the testimony of their ancestors, and fathers and mothers can depart from the faith just to please their children. Eliashib’s relative was privileged to be born into the priestly family, yet he threw away his future ministry by marrying the wrong woman (Lev. 21:14; Deut. 23:3), and Eliashib apparently approved of it.

All this happened while Nehemiah was away at the palace, which suggests that those he appointed to lead in his absence had failed in their oversight. It doesn’t take long for the enemy to capture leadership, and too often the people will blindly follow their leaders in the path of compromise and disobedience.

It was bad enough that an Ammonite was living in the temple, and that a Jewish high priest had let him in, but this intruder was using a room dedicated to God for the storing of the offerings used by the Levites. He defiled the temple by his presence and robbed the servants of God at the same time. Nehemiah lost no time throwing out both the man and his furniture, rededicating the room to the Lord, and using it again for its intended purpose. Like our Lord, Nehemiah had to cleanse the temple, and it appears that he had to do it alone.

But this is not an easy thing to do. A new pastor may discover officers or leaders in the church who are not spiritual people but who are entrenched in their offices. What does he do? He knows that these leaders have relatives in the church who, like Eliashib, will cooperate with their family rather than contend for the faith. Should the pastor try to “clean house” and possibly split the church? Or should he bide his time, lovingly preach the Word, and pray for God to work? With either approach, the pastor will need courage and faith, because eventually the blessing of the Lord on the Word will arouse the opposition of the “mixed multitude.”

Mixed marriages (vv. 23–31). “We would not give our daughters as wives to the peoples of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons!” was the promise the Jews had made to the Lord (see 10: nkjv), but they did not keep it. In his survey of Jerusalem, Nehemiah saw women from Ashdod (see 4:7), Ammon, and Moab married to Jewish men, and he heard their children speaking foreign languages. (A child is more likely to learn how to speak from his mother, with whom he spends more time, than from his father who is away from home each day working.) If these children did not know the language of Israel, how could they read the law or participate in the holy services? If a generation was lost to the faith, what was the future of the nation?

God’s people and the people of the world can be identified by their speech. “They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood” (1 John 4:5–6 niv).

While ministering at a summer Bible conference, I had dinner one evening in the home of the daughter of a well-known Christian musician and her husband. Both of them were able to talk about her father, now deceased, or about music and musicians, but when the conversation turned to the Word and the Lord, they were silent. I wondered if either of them really knew the Lord, or, if they did, if they were on speaking terms with Him. They had no problem talking about the things of the world, but they did not know “the language of Zion.”

Nehemiah dealt with the problem by first expressing his horror that such a thing should be done in Israel (Neh. 13:25). In a similar situation, Ezra had plucked his own hair and beard (Ezra 9:3), but Nehemiah plucked the hair of some of the offenders! Ezra had dissolved the mixed marriages (Ezra 10), but Nehemiah only rebuked the offenders and made the people promise that they would not do it again.

Nehemiah also delivered a sermon, reminding the people that Solomon, one of Israel’s greatest kings, was ruined by marrying foreign women (Neh. 13:26; 1 Kings 11:4–8). In Solomon’s case, his mixed marriages were a threat to the throne and the kingdom, and in Nehemiah’s day, mixed marriages even threatened the priesthood. The law of Moses was clear, but both the priests and the common people had deliberately disobeyed it. Nehemiah then purified the priests and made certain that only those who were qualified served (Neh. 13:30). However, the problem with the priests was not completely settled, for the prophet Malachi had to deal with disobedient priests in his day (Mal. 1—2).

How important it is that we take a stand for separation from sin “and having done all, to stand” (Eph. 6:13).

“We will not forsake the house of our God,” was the final statement the Jews made in their covenant with the Lord (10:39). This meant paying the temple tax, providing wood for the altar, and bringing the required tithes and offerings to the priests and Levites (vv. 32–39). Without the faithful support of the people, the ministry at the temple would languish, and the Levites would then scatter to the villages, where they could work the land and survive (13:10).

When Nehemiah returned to the city, he discovered that the people had failed to keep their promise. (This helps to explain why one of the storage rooms was available for Tobiah.) The priests and Levites were without support and were deserting their work in order to survive. The people ignored the warnings of Moses, “Take heed to yourself that you do not forsake the Levite as long as you live in your land” (Deut. 12: nkjv) and “You shall not forsake the Levite who is within your gates, for he has no part nor inheritance with you” (14: nkjv; and 18:1–8).

Nehemiah “contended” with them, which means he rebuked the leaders for breaking their promise and disobeying the law. Before his survey of the city was completed, he also rebuked the nobles of Judah (Neh. 13:17) and the men married to foreign women (v. 25). While the Hebrew word can refer to arguing or even physical combat, it also carries the judicial meaning of “to plead a case.” Since Nehemiah presented God’s case and defended it from the law, the offenders had to admit that he was right.

The temple officers in charge of the gifts had forsaken their posts because there was nothing coming in or going out, so Nehemiah “set them in their place” (v. 11; “stationed them at their posts,” niv). He then saw to it that the people brought to God the offerings that rightfully belonged to Him (Mal. 3:7–12). He appointed four men to supervise the treasury and distribute the tithes and offerings. Note that these men represented the priests, Levites, scribes, and laymen, but they all had one thing in common: They were faithful to the Lord. “Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:2).

When God’s people start to decline spiritually, one of the first places it shows up is in their giving. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:21). The believer who is happy in the Lord and walking in His will has a generous heart and wants to share with others. Giving is both the “thermostat” and the “thermometer” of the Christian life: It measures our spiritual “temperature” and also helps set it at the right level.

The prayer in Nehemiah 13: is the first one recorded since 6: and is the seventh of Nehemiah’s “telegraph” prayers found in the book. You find three more such prayers in 13:22, 29, and 31. He was in the habit of talking to God as he served Him, a good example for us to follow. He reminded God of his faithfulness and prayed that what he had done would not be blotted out. Nehemiah was not pleading for blessings on the basis of personal merit, because he knew that God’s blessings come only because of God’s mercy (v. 22). This prayer is similar to the one recorded in 5: where Nehemiah merely asked God to remember him and what he had done. He wanted his reward from God, not from men.

Someone asked the American Episcopal bishop Phillips Brooks what he would do to resurrect a dead church, and he replied, “I would take up a missionary offering.” Giving to others is one secret of staying alive and fresh in the Christian life. If all we do is receive, then we become reservoirs, and the water can become stale and polluted. But if we both receive and give, we become like channels, and in blessing others, we bless ourselves. American psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger said, “Money-giving is a good criterion of a person’s mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.” Someone wrote in Modern Maturity magazine, “The world is full of two kinds of people, the givers and the takers. The takers eat well—but the givers sleep well.”

When they signed the covenant, the Jews promised not to do business with the Gentiles on the Sabbath Day (10:31), but Nehemiah found the people not only doing business on the Sabbath, but also doing their daily work and carrying unnecessary burdens. The Jewish merchants didn’t want to lose the opportunity to make money from the Gentiles, and the Gentiles were quick to make a profit from their Jewish neighbors.

The child of God must choose spiritual wealth rather than material wealth and claim the promise of Matthew 6:33, “But seek first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you” (nasb). Whoever wrote Psalm 119 made it clear that he chose God’s Word rather than money (vv. 14, 72, 127, 162). King Saul made the wrong choice (1 Sam. 15), and so did Achan (Josh. 7) and Demas (2 Tim. 4:10).

In one of the churches I pastored, a lovely young couple began to attend with their little boy. Then I noticed that only the mother and son were attending, so I stopped at the home to see what had happened to the father. I learned that he had taken a second job on weekends so he could save enough money to get a better house. The wife confided that they really didn’t need the extra money or a new house, but it was her husband’s idea, and she couldn’t stop him. The tragedy is, the extra money didn’t go to a new house; it went to doctors and hospitals. The little boy contracted an unusual disease that required special medicine and care, and the father’s extra income helped pay the bill.

I’m not suggesting that every family with a sick child is unfaithful in their stewardship, or that God makes children suffer for the sins of their parents. But I am suggesting that nobody can rob God and profit from it. If our priorities become confused and we start putting money ahead of God, then we must expect to be the losers.

Nehemiah took three steps toward changing the situation. First, he rebuked the Jews who were working and selling on the Sabbath and made them stop (Neh. 13:15). Then, he rebuked the nobles for allowing business on the Sabbath Day, reminding them that the nation’s violation of the Sabbath was one cause for their captivity (vv. 16–18; Jer. 17:21–27). Did they want to have more wrath come on the people?

His third step was a very practical one: He ordered the city gates shut on the Sabbath Day. The guards had been willing to open the gates to the Gentile merchants, possibly because they were bribed, so Nehemiah put some of his own servants on duty. He also ordered the Levites to set a good example on the Sabbath and minister to the people.

The Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, is not a “Christian Sabbath,” because the Sabbath is the seventh day of the week and belonged especially to the Jews. Therefore, the Old Testament laws governing the Jewish Sabbath don’t apply to the Lord’s Day. But Sunday is a special day to God’s people because it commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as well as the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We ought to use the Lord’s Day to the glory of the Lord.

More and more, especially in our cities, Sunday has become a day for shopping, sports, and chores around the house. The shopping center parking lot is as full on Sunday afternoons as it is on Saturdays. I once interviewed the manager of a shopping mall and asked him how he felt about being open on Sundays.

“The employees and I would rather stay home,” he replied, “but it’s a big day for business, especially from people on their way home from church.”

In our family, my wife and I tried to follow the simple principle of not doing on Sundays whatever could be done on any other day of the week, things like mowing the lawn, washing the car, shopping, and so on. The home didn’t become a prison, but neither did it turn into a circus, and the children didn’t seem to suffer for it.

The French agnostic, Voltaire, is supposed to have said, “If you want to kill Christianity, you must abolish Sunday.” I’m not sure I agree with him, but I do know that many Christians have killed their joy, witness, and spiritual power by turning Sunday into an ordinary day and not putting Christ first in their week.

Nehemiah closes with two prayers (Neh. 13:29, 31) that God would remember him for his faithful service. His conscience was clear, for he knew he had done everything for the good of the people and the glory of God. There would probably be little appreciation from the people, in spite of his sacrifices, but he knew that God would reward him accordingly.

May those who come behind us find us faithful!