“January
23
Genesis
24; Matthew 23; Nehemiah 13; Acts 23
One of
the most striking evidences of sinful human nature lies in the universal
propensity for downward drift. In other words, it takes thought, resolve,
energy, and effort to bring about reform. In the grace of God, sometimes human
beings display such virtues. But where such virtues are absent, the drift is
invariably toward compromise, comfort, indiscipline, sliding disobedience, and
decay that advances, sometimes at a crawl and sometimes at a gallop, across
generations.
People
do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not
gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight
in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward
disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it
faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation;
we drift toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have
escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have
been liberated.
That
is the sort of situation Nehemiah faces toward the end of his leadership in
Jerusalem (Neh. 13). He has been away for a time, required by his responsibilities
toward the Emperor Artaxerxes to return to the capital. When he comes back to
Jerusalem for a second term as governor, he finds that commercial interests
have superseded Sabbath discipline, that compromise with the surrounding pagans
has displaced covenantal faithfulness, that greed has withheld some of the
stipend of the clergy, and therefore their numbers and usefulness have been
reduced, and that some combination of indiscipline and sheer stupidity has
admitted to the temple and to the highest councils of power men like Tobiah and
Sanballat, who have no interest in faithfulness toward God and his Word.
By an
extraordinary combination of exhortation, command, and executive action,
Nehemiah restores covenantal discipline. Doubtless many of the godly breathe a
sigh of relief and thank God for him; no less certainly, many others grumble
that he is a busybody, a killjoy, a narrow-minded legalist. Our permissive and
relativizing culture fits more comfortably into the latter group than the former—but
that says more about our culture than about Nehemiah.
Genuine
reformation and revival have never occurred in the church apart from leaders
for whom devotion to God is of paramount importance. If, absorbing the values
of the ambient culture, the Western church becomes suspicious of such leaders,
or else reacts with knee-jerk cultural conservatism that is as devoid of
biblical integrity as the compromise opposes, we are undone. May God have mercy
on us and send us prophetic leaders.”
-From,
For the Love of God; Volume Two, D.A. Carson
