Another Great Celebration - ANB W4, D5 - 3.29.13

Friday, March 29                                                        Another Great Celebration

Nehemiah 8.1-12

After Nehemiah is shown to be faithful unto God in yesterday’s reading, the wall is completed and the gates and doors are hung. It is a great day for the people of Israel. Nehemiah spends much time in chapter seven listing out the exiles who returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, now that the wall was complete. Jerusalem was so much more than a city. Jerusalem was a symbol of the covenant that God had made with Israel. You get some people who just love their city for whatever reason. Whether it be the love of the commotion, the love of the attractions, or just the pride of life being lived in that area, people love their cities. But for Israel it was not just that they loved the city of Jerusalem. They basked in the security of God, who was their covenantal God and resided with them in Jerusalem. So much importance is placed in the Scripture on Jerusalem as the city of God. The symbolism extends to our future glory as God recreates the entire world including Jerusalem. We do not have time to go into details about it, but there is a beautiful depiction of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21.9-27. Most noticeable in the city of Jerusalem is the temple, built on the highest mount in the city’s center as the dwelling place of the God Most High. John points out in Rev. 21.22 that the New Jerusalem has no temple because God is physically there and a temple, or dwelling, is not necessary. See, this is not just a city rebuilt. This is the city of God.

So, Israel comes together to rejoice and worship. What is easily missed is that the worship of God was not due to ritual or to priestly order. Israel comes together and they have to ask Ezra, the priest, to bring the Law of Moses to them to be read. It was not a called meeting at the church, but it was a celebration of the goodness of God incited by the people and the joy of the Lord that resided within them and overflowed their souls. They wanted to worship God through the reading of His Word and the celebration of His goodness to them. Their city had been restored, symbolizing the restoration of their souls to God Almighty. They were back to where they could worship Him rightly. Even more, it was explained to them. Verse 8 says that “they read from the book, from the Law of God, translating to give the sense, so that they understood the reading.” The literal interpretation of the Hebrew word rendered “translating” in the NASB could be rendered “paragraph by paragraph” or “with interpretation”. This was the expositional preaching of the Scripture so that its truth could be applied to the lives of the people of Israel. These people had been in Babylon for generations and the true teaching and explanation of Scripture had not been a vital part of their lives for some time.

The declaration of the holiness of the day before God was made and a great celebration broke out among the people. This was a time of great jubilee in the land as the people ate the meat and drank the wine. No one was left out of the great celebration. Concerning the meat and the wine, Ezra instructs the people to make sure that even those who had none were sent portions. The celebration was to be for everyone. Verse 12 gives us so much insight to what the fuss was all about: “And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them” (ESV). It was because of the preaching of the Word. The people understood the promise and provision of God and the Word transformed their lives. Mervin Breneman in the New American Commentary says it this way: “What a difference it makes when God’s people ‘understand’ God’s Word and apply it to their particular situations. Allowing the use of the bible to become routine and ritualistic is a violation of its nature and message” (vol. 10, p. 228). The Word of God is not meant to be a burden and when we relegate its reading to a checklist of religious things to do each day we do not allow it to transform us the way God intended for it to. The reading and preaching of the Word should be a time of joy for us that will cause us to break out into a great party celebrating His goodness.

There is such great eschatological significance to this passage as well. Eschatology is just a big word for the end times when Christ raptures His church and comes to reign on the earth. The great celebration that we see here in Nehemiah 8 is a foretelling of the marriage fest of the Lamb, which we read about in Revelation 19. In that passage the celebration is over the joining of Christ’s church with Him in eternity. There is a unity of being that is celebrated because of who we are in Christ and the fulfillment of His promise. There we will be in communion with the Word and will have our cosmic understanding of what everything was about and how God pieced our lives together in Christ. After the supper we will be celebrating life in the New Jerusalem, the City of God. It is such a beautiful picture of the bride of Christ, the church, fully prepared for her Groom, the Lord Jesus as He enters on a white horse to be united with her. How beautiful that celebration will be. And this is just a mini celebration that Nehemiah experiences with the people of Israel. For a time they are fully reunited with their God and because of His Word, they celebrate their unity. Their celebration was to be a message to the world around them that their God was the Living God and the Judge of all humanity.

We have a similar task before us. A New Beginning is coming. This beginning is the great cosmic new beginning that we will experience in life everlasting with Christ. We will be seated at the marriage table, awaiting Him when the celebration commences. This New Beginning will culminate in the defeat of Satan (Rev. 20) and the full recreation of the world. What a shame it would be for us to miss out because we did not prepare ourselves here. What an even greater shame it would be for those who are around us in our community miss out on the great celebration because we did not share with them the message of Christ and His redemption. How pitiful will we be if we remain comfortable with ourselves and where we are and do not expand our borders so that the multitudes can come and hear the Word preached and celebrate with us the new life they could have in Him. A New Beginning at Hopewell is about our taking our message to our community and to the world. It is staring evil in the eye and claiming the power of the Cross on our lives and on the lives of those around us. Let us make a great celebration in our community.

Prayer:

God I thank You for giving us a church where Your Word is preached. Forgive us for not basking in the proclamation of Your truth on a day to day basis. Lord, we want our community to celebrate with us as we let Your Gospel transform our lives and use it through us to transform our community. We want to be dynamic. We want to reach the lost in our world.