Numbers 16:1-3
1 Now Korah the son of Izhar, son of Kohath, son of Levi, and Dathan and Abiram the sons of Eliab, and On the son of Peleth, sons of Reuben, took men. 2 And they rose up before Moses, with a number of the people of Israel, 250 chiefs of the congregation, chosen from the assembly, well-known men. 3 They assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron and said to them, “You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?”
“It’s just not fair.” This complaint comes out quite often in our world. Children who notice one child with a nicer or newer toy than they have declare it not to be fair. Teens who do not have the freedom of others among their peer groups declare it not to be fair. Maybe even adults will clamor for fairness if they feel that someone has an advantage over them in some arena.
In Numbers 16, the cry of “It’s not fair” could be heard in the Israelite camp. A group of disgruntled men come before Moses with the approval of many others, and they declare that it is simply not fair that Moses is acting as the leader and the authority of the people. If you look at the logic used, Korah declares that all of Israel is equally holy to God, so how dare Moses act as though God has given him anything special.
Now, in our modern, fairness-worshipping culture, the argument of the rebels in Numbers 16 rings true. It’s not fair that God would select Moses for a special cause and not someone else who is just as good. Our culture would say that Moses should only be allowed his special position if he were somehow head and shoulders above the rest in his righteousness and fitness for his task. But this was not true. Moses was a murderer who was raised in an Egyptian’s home and lived as an Egyptian until age 40. Moses was a runaway who lived in the desert for 40 more years, and even married a non-Israelite wife. Now, by age 80, Moses was a much more faithful follower of God, but if one watches Moses’ life, one will see the feet of clay that mark many of our own lives.
So, if God chose to use Moses, it was not because of anything particularly special in Moses. No, if you look at the story of Moses’ life, what it appears is simply that God set Moses apart from birth (perhaps before) for a special calling. Could God have chosen Korah to follow Moses’ path? Certainly God could have. God could have even molded Korah’s heart to be even better than the heart of Moses.
Here, however is the point, God did not choose Korah for Moses’ task. God chose Moses. God was with Moses. God anointed Moses. Moses was the leader. The question of fairness was irrelevant to God. God created all the people of the world. If God wants to choose one for a special task while not allowing others access to that task, that is God’s prerogative.
It would be good for us to lose our fairness arguments and stop sounding like the rebellious Israelites who followed Korah in his rebellion. We dare not ask God for fairness, for fairness means we all get exactly the same thing. If we all get the same thing, we all get hell just like Jesus who suffered the perfect wrath of God on the cross. You want fair, you go to hell; it’s just that simple. No, we do not want fairness in salvation, and we ought not clamor for fairness in other avenues of life. God will do what is right.
If, by the way, you feel that this appears to be written by a highly privileged person who wants to protect his privilege with a call to avoid fairness talk, let me say to you two things. First, I am privileged. I was born in the US, and so I am part of the wealthiest people in the world. I’m not at all rich by American standards, but I have more than enough by the standards of the rest of the world. Yes, I have been granted a safe existence, a lovely wife, and two darling children. I had access to an education, and God has granted me the joy of serving him in a variety of places and positions.
I have also been legally blind since birth. I have a wonderful wife and children into whose eyes I cannot gaze. I have lacked many of the opportunities that many people around me have received. I love baseball, but have never been able to play it. I love football, but have never been able to enjoy it as many have. I love to read and to study, but cannot utilize so much material. I love to preach the word of God and minister to the people of God, yet I am limited in my ability to interact visually with others.
Is my life fair? Of course not. But then, why would I expect it to be. I have some privilege and some hardship. So what? God has made me for himself. God has designed me for his glory. God has chosen me to serve him and to know him. I have earned nothing from God but wrath. God has chosen to give me grace. For me to complain that anything is not fair would be for me to call into question the character of the one who is always perfect, always holy, always right. God is not fair according to sinful human reckoning, but God is holier and higher than our reckoning. God is good, and his name is worthy of our praise. His decisions are worthy of our approval. His commands are worthy of our obedience.
Beauty in Wrath (Romans 5:9)
Romans 5:9
Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.
“People don’t want to hear about the wrath of God. They want to hear positive things, not negative talk.” I’ve heard things like this coming from the mouths of well-meaning folks who think they have good advice for church growth. In fact, their advice might not be pragmatically bad. Certainly, focusing only on the positive will likely draw a crowd to a church building, as people are always eager to hear what their itching ears want to hear.
The sad thing is, we miss, in our neglect of the wrath of God, the beauty of his grace. When we do not know how we are saved or from what consequences we are saved, we will not grasp the true beauty of what it means to be saved.
In many circles, Christianity is presented as simply the best life to live. People tout the faith as a way to live happy, fulfilled, and prosperous lives. Some focus on following Jesus as a way to have stronger marriages and better ethics which will lead to more satisfying lives in many regards. In truth, all of these things can be a part of Christianity; however, none of them are the central focus of the Scripture.
When we see the word of God talking to us about what it means to live as the followers of God, we see it focus us on the glory of God and on the joy that glory brings. We see our part in doing that which will ultimately fulfill us, namely honoring our Lord. And we see, without any blushing whatsoever, our glorious salvation from utter destruction.
Looking at the verse above, notice from what we are saved. We are not saved from Satan. We are not saved from “sin” as if sin had in itself the power to punish us. We are not saved from an unfulfilled life. We do not see the thought that hell is living on earth in sin. No, we see that if we are saved, we are saved from the wrath of God.
Get this glorious truth. We are not only saved by God, and for God, and to the glory of God, we are also saved from God. God is the one offended by our sin. God is the one who rightly must punish our sin in order to continue to be perfectly just. So, what did God do? God chose to allow his Son to bear the punishment for our sins so that he could both punish our sins and rescue us from his own wrath.
You know, when you get how horrifying is the wrath of God, you will begin to embrace your salvation. Sure, it is all well and good to be thankful to God for a happy life, a sweet family, and meaningful existence. But, it is also an amazing thing to remember that this God who gives us all this joy is the very God who was wrathful enough against us to send
us to hell forever for what we had done against him.
Christians can benefit greatly from remembering the wrath of God. It is the wrath of God that reminds us of how great a Savior we have. It is the wrath of God that reminds us that our sin was indeed a big deal, not shrugged off by our Lord. It is the wrath of God toward our sins, our specific sins, that Jesus bore on the tree. It was the wrath of God that has now been satisfied in the blood of Jesus the removal of which enables us to live forever in the glorious, soul-satisfying presence of God.
If you want to see the beauty of a diamond or pearl, you set it against a backdrop that will contrast with the jewel. This is why you often see these treasures placed against black velvet in a jewelry store. Think of the wrath of God as the black background that brings out the shimmering brilliance of the amazing grace of Jesus. No, you would not want a faith that is all black all the time. But do not lose the darkness of wrath, or you will miss the brilliance of grace.
Eisenhower, Peace, and the Kingdom of Christ
While reading a biography of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, I was struck by the words of his “Chance for Peace” speech delivered in 1953. Eisenhower grasped that the necessity for nations to spend money and resources on arms necessarily deprives citizens of the world of the things that would improve life for all people. Eisenhower was not an unrealistic pacifist. He understood that militaries were required for the safety of the nation and the world. But he rightly recognized that we should, as a race, long for peace and its benefits.
As a believer, I find Eisenhower’s words as an interesting secular spur toward praying for the coming of the kingdom of the Lord in full. Only when Christ reigns without opposition will we truly see a world at peace that will reap the benefits of peace for all. Of course, this is a conquest of the world which must come without military means. This is a conquest of the world that must happen as the Lord turns the hearts of men to himself as his servants take the gospel to the nations.
Eisenhower spoke of the chance for peace. I can speak of the certain hope of future peace. Jesus will reign. The Lord’s kingdom will be consummated. May we, the people of God, be about taking the gospel of Christ to the nations and giving our all to this cause until that glorious Day when Christ is hailed as Lord by all to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:10-11).
The following is from Eisenhower’s speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point to the hope that comes with this spring of 1953.
. . .
The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and by timber and by rice. These are words that translate into every language on earth. These are needs that challenge this world in arms.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953 (Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission) [on-line]; accessed 5 Mar 2010; available from http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/speeches/19530416%20Chance%20for%20Peace.htm; Internet.
Apathy & Atheism Both lead to Destruction (Matthew 22:1-9)
Matthew 22:1-9 (ESV)
1 And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, 2 “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, 3 and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come. 4 Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.’ 5 But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, 6 while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them. 7 The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. 8 Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy.
If you are a student of the Bible, the above text is fairly familiar to you. In a parable about the kingdom of God, Jesus illustrates by using a feast. A feast is prepared, but the invited guests fail to come at the summons. IN the context, the Jews were the original invited guests who rejected their invitation to the feast by rejecting Christ.
What catches my attention this morning is the two ways in which people made themselves unworthy to attend the banquet, making themselves unworthy to enter into the kingdom of God. One group fought against and mistreated and murdered the servants of the king. Obviously, those evil guys were wiped out by the king’s army and made unable to attend the feast.
It is the other group, however, that has my attention. There is a group of people who were invited to the feast who simply ignored their invitation. There were those who, upon hearing the summons to the banquet, just turned and went back to their lives. Do not miss that ,just like the violent persecutors, these too eventually found themselves outside of the kingdom.
In our modern mindset, we do not have a great deal of trouble saying that those who are cruel and violent might not find themselves in God’s kingdom when all is said and done. However, we have trouble realizing that the apathetic, the folks who just don’t care about religious things, will also find themselves out of the kingdom. God is just as insulted by those who ignore him as he is by those who actively oppose him. In fact, one might argue that apathy toward God is more of an offense than is aggressive atheism. At least the aggressive atheist acknowledges that God is a concept to be dealt with. The apathetic person simply shrugs his or her shoulders and acts as though God is totally irrelevant.
Let’s be clear about this: God will not leave the apathetic unpunished. He will not allow himself to be dishonored by being ignored. Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord (Phil 2:10-11), even those who want to pretend that God does not matter at all. If those knees do not bow in life, they will bow in death before suffering God’s wrath for eternity. Make no mistake, that wrath will be well earned by those who constantly reject God and pretend he is a non-factor.
I do not write this from a position of superiority. I would do the very same thing, ignoring or battling against God, had God not done a miracle in my heart. God, by God’s own sovereign power, made me alive together with Christ so that I might have his gift of salvation by grace alone through faith alone (cf. Eph 2:1-10). I write this post, however, as a way to encourage readers and the friends of readers to take seriously the fact that God will not ignore the apathetic. Jesus made this fact plain, and it cannot be ignored.
Are you living in a battle against God? Are you pretending that God does not matter at all? Hear the truth that God commands all men everywhere to repent and to turn to Jesus before it is too late. Stop fighting. Stop ignoring. Be reconciled to God.
God’s Word on Courthouse Walls? (Psalm 50:16-17)
Psalm 50:16-17
16 But to the wicked God says:
“What right have you to recite my statutes
or take my covenant on your lips?
17 For you hate discipline,
and you cast my words behind you.
Should Christians fight to have the Ten Commandments posted in public places such as schools, courthouses, and other such locations? As you know, many Christians have gone to great lengths to battle for the display of God’s covenant rules in prominent places in our nation. However, I wonder if these verses of Psalm 50 might make us look at this topic from another angle.
God, in Psalm 50, tells the wicked, those who live in opposition to his laws, that they have no right to recite the words of his covenant. If the people who would speak the words of God’s law are at the same time those who have no interest in following God’s law, God wants them to keep the words of his law off of their lips. It is highly presumptuous to place the laws of God on the walls of buildings where men and women have no concern for such laws and who break those laws every day.
Of course, I recognize that many Christians who want the commandments displayed wish to do so as a convicting testimony. There are those who would say that the law of God needs to be on public display so that the wicked will recognize that they are living and adjudicating in direct opposition to the commands of the Lord. To such a group I have no objection. But let’s be sure that we are honest about why we want the word of God on the courthouse wall. IF we want that word there as a witness against the evil of the godless courts, let’s say so.
Perhaps some want the law of God displayed on the walls of buildings in order to battle for a continued religious freedom in the US. It is possible that, allowing the courts to sanitize their walls of Scripture could be a step in allowing the government to violate our constitutional freedom to worship. Again, if this is the motivation of those wanting the words on the walls, let’s be sure that this is made plain in our demands.
It is also possible, to a point , that the law of God made public will help to hold the nation back from sinning to the fullest degree it is capable. In Galatians 3, Paul talks of the law being given because of transgressions (Gal 3:19). It is possible that this verse means that God gave Israel the law to prevent them from sinning to a point of destruction until the promised one came. It is possible then, that putting the law on the courthouse walls can have a governing influence on our sinful behavior in the nation. But again, let’s be sure that we know what we are doing when we fight for that outcome.
With those possibilities mentioned, let’s be sure that we recognize that God is in no way honored when lost people who neither know him nor love him recite his word. He does not speak well of this action in Psalm 50. This is because, as Hebrews 11:6 reminds us, it is impossible to please God without first having faith in God. Thus, we should be very careful wanting to put the words of God in the lips of faithless individuals.
Adding to the mix and stirring the pot, why are Christians so eager to put in writing laws that many of us are unwilling to follow? Let’s face it, many in our churches are not the most upstanding folks when it comes to keeping God’s top ten list. ?What kind of testimony to Christ do we give when we put up words about lying, adultery, coveting, and putting nothing before our God when we are not the best at keeping those rules ourselves? Yes, we have grace in Christ; but that grace is not license to dishonor and disobey God. So, if you are going to fight for the commandments being posted, you’d better be under the grace of Christ and still obeying the clear commands of God.
Should Christians fight to have the Ten Commandments or other religious displays in public places? Maybe and maybe not. For sure, however, Christians need to know exactly why they want such things in the public eye, and be honest with the world as to why it is that they are wanting what they want. Christians’ let’s be thoughtful about what we demand and be sure that we are well reasoned in our petitioning.
Money and Time Given to God (Nehemiah 10:32-39)
Nehemiah 10:32-39
32 “We also take on ourselves the obligation to give yearly a third part of a shekel for the service of the house of our God: 33 for the showbread, the regular grain offering, the regular burnt offering, the Sabbaths, the new moons, the appointed feasts, the holy things, and the sin offerings to make atonement for Israel, and for all the work of the house of our God. 34 We, the priests, the Levites, and the people, have likewise cast lots for the wood offering, to bring it into the house of our God, according to our fathers’ houses, at times appointed, year by year, to burn on the altar of the Lord our God, as it is written in the Law. 35 We obligate ourselves to bring the firstfruits of our ground and the firstfruits of all fruit of every tree, year by year, to the house of the Lord; 36 also to bring to the house of our God, to the priests who minister in the house of our God, the firstborn of our sons and of our cattle, as it is written in the Law, and the firstborn of our herds and of our flocks; 37 and to bring the first of our dough, and our contributions, the fruit of every tree, the wine and the oil, to the priests, to the chambers of the house of our God; and to bring to the Levites the tithes from our ground, for it is the Levites who collect the tithes in all our towns where we labor. 38 And the priest, the son of Aaron, shall be with the Levites when the Levites receive the tithes. And the Levites shall bring up the tithe of the tithes to the house of our God, to the chambers of the storehouse. 39 For the people of Israel and the sons of Levi shall bring the contribution of grain, wine, and oil to the chambers, where the vessels of the sanctuary are, as well as the priests who minister, and the gatekeepers and the singers. We will not neglect the house of our God.”
To summarize this section, we can say that the people, along with their other commitments from verses 30-31, also committed themselves to give of their time and their money for the ministry of God’s temple. This is not complicated. They committed themselves to tithe, and then to give even more in order to keep the ministry going. They also committed themselves to take a turn gathering wood for the ceremonial fires, to work for the sake of the ministry. This was, of course, in line with God’s commands that the people give at least a tenth of their income to him and to provide for the needs of those who would teach his law.
Recently, a major report was released by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. I want to share with you a couple of lines from page 26 of this report:
Regarding personal biblical stewardship, I stand amazed at research released in 2009 that informs us that the average church member gives only 2.56% of their income away… Christians need to repent of the sin of not honoring God with at least the first-tenth of their income. Can you imagine the spiritual revival that would consume our churches if God’s people would obey God in giving? Can you imagine the opportunities of advancing the Gospel regionally, nationally, and globally if God’s people would obey God in giving? The greatest amount of money that exists for the causes of Christ and the advancement of the Gospel is in the pockets and financial portfolios of our church members.*
Can you believe those stats? God commands us to give freely, generously, systematically, and sacrificially. I think most Christians would agree that God wants you to give at least the first tenth of your income. Yet Christians on average give only two-and-a-half percent away. No wonder churches are struggling to meet budget. No wonder the Spirit of God is so seldom felt in our congregations. If you are walking into the sanctuary fully planning to disobey God’s call to give rightly, how dare you expect that God will bless you or grow his church?
And the people did not only give money. They gave time and service. The people had to commit themselves to go and gather wood for the sacrificial fires. They knew that ministry would not do itself. They knew, if the fires were going to stay lit, they had to go get the wood. The people committed themselves to obey God’s call to serve.
How about you? How are you serving? Do you think that all you need to do is sit in a pew once a week to do what God wants? I assure you that this is not enough. God wants you to make yourself available to him and to his service. There are jobs that need to be done in your church if only people will step forward and express a willingness to do them. We need people to help us to think and plan for missions involvement. We need people to help us think and plan for evangelistic outreaches in the community. We need people to help take care of the property that god has placed in our care. We need people to teach children and serve in the nursery. Lost people need someone to tell them about Jesus. The fact is, God has gifted you to serve him in some way. Are you doing what you are capable of doing to expand the ministry of your church? Christians, there needs to be repentance in our midst.
*Ronnie W. Floyd et al, “Progress Report of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force of the Southern Baptist Convention” (February 22, 2010), 26 [on-line]; accessed 26 Feb 2010; available from http://www.pray4gcr.com/downloads/GCRTF_Progress_Report.pdf; Internet.
Why Guard the Tabernacle? (Numbers 3:38)
Those who were to camp before the tabernacle on the east, before the tent of meeting toward the sunrise, were Moses and Aaron and his sons, guarding the sanctuary itself, to protect the people of Israel. And any outsider who came near was to be put to death.
In the Book of Numbers, as God lays out the way that the Israelite camp was to be set up, he placed guards around the sanctuary. Now, generally, when you place guards around the sanctuary, you would assume that the purpose would be to protect the sanctuary. Perhaps these guards were placed to prevent intruders from stealing some of the gold or silver that was used in the construction of the tabernacle? Perhaps the guards were posted simply to keep curious tourists from getting too close to the precious equipment?
But a look at the verse above tells us that the guard around the sanctuary was for a different reason than you might have thought. God placed guards around the sanctuary in order to protect the people. “Protect the people from what,” you ask. God placed guards to protect the people from, get this, God.
It might sound ridiculous to you to think that people would need God to post guards to protect them from God, but it is not. if you think that people, in their natural state need no protection from God, you do not have a grasp of the holiness of God and the consequences of his holiness.
God is holy. Part of what that means is that God is absolutely, without exception, perfectly pure, right, clean, faultless. Add to this fact that God is just, and you end up with a holiness that is deadly. If we, in our sinful state, were to trespass into the concentrated presence of God, his perfect holiness would consume us in an instant and we would die on the spot. Why? We would be consumed because God’s perfection cannot be tainted by our sinfulness. Since none of us are holy as God is holy, none of us could survive exposure to his glory.
The fact of the deadliness of God’s holiness is why he posted guards around the tabernacle to protect the people. Those guards kept foolish men and women from traipsing into the presence of God and losing their lives. Like a sign that warns people to keep away from high voltage wires, the guards warned the people that, in the tabernacle was the holy. The guards warned the people that they must not, under any circumstances, foolishly walk into the holiness of God, for to do so would mean immediate and certain death.
The concept of guarding the people against the holiness of God does much to open for us an understanding of the glorious kindness of Christ. Jesus Christ, the Holy God himself, came to earth to make a way for us to enter into God’s presence. He came to receive the punishment for our sin. HE also came to purify us, to make us holy, so that we might be able to stand in the presence of the divine without being consumed. Ponder the glory of this statement: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). In Christ, God makes sinners clean, so clean that we might stand before him without being destroyed.
It is certain to me that Christians today have lost much of our grasp of the danger and deadliness of divine holiness. We have believed the false teaching of the world that depicts God as willing to tolerate anything, any sin. But we have forgotten that the only way that God can accept us into his presence is through the shed blood and imputed righteousness of his Son. Were we to attempt to enter his presence in any other way, we would rightly be destroyed, burned up like dross by the utter purity of God. It would be right for us to think this issue through, and to give Jesus Christ thanks for doing for us what we could never have done on our own. Jesus, God in flesh, came to, like the guard around the tabernacle, protect us from the deadliness of God’s holiness. What a wonderful and amazing Savior!
Schedules Devoted to God
Nehemiah 10:31
And if the peoples of the land bring in goods or any grain on the Sabbath day to sell, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath or on a holy day. And we will forego the crops of the seventh year and the exaction of every debt.
God commanded in the Ten Commandments that his people would honor the Sabbath day. Later in the law, he gave laws about Sabbath years for the land and years of release of debts and slaves. Behind all this was a test of faith. God wanted the people to trust him enough to know that he would provide for them if they chose to obey him and to not work one day a week, to not plant crops one year out of seven, and to release slaves and debts according to his schedule.
The fact that the people are saying that they will follow this law tells you that they in fact had not been following it before. God’s people did not trust him enough to hold off of work, to give up crops, or to release their slaves. They said that they trusted God, but their trust had not yet gotten into the real areas of their lives.
Can you see how you might need to follow this command? We are not under the same sort of Sabbath system as were the people of Israel, but you know what, God still wants our lives to be marked by the same sorts of things. How committed are you to giving one full day of your week to not working, not fulfilling worldly pursuits, but instead to resting and to worshipping your God? Does your schedule reflect a commitment to worship?
Test yourself with one simple issue. Do you make weekly worship a priority? If you were out-of-town, on vacation or business, would you make it a priority to find a place to gather with like-minded believers to worship your Lord? It might actually cause you to have to take an extra 20 minutes to look at the Internet to find a church near where you are staying and to see if that church’s doctrine is biblical. It might actually cause you to have to give up a couple of hours to worship when you could be in the hotel swimming pool.
Let me ask you, what shows God as more glorious? Does it show God as more glorious when you sleep in, or when you come and sing his praise? Does it show God as more glorious when you arrange your schedule to be in worship, or when you say that you are too busy this week? Christians, it is time for many to repent.
Families Devoted to God (Nehemiah 10:30)
We will not give our daughters to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons.
In Nehemiah 10, we see a set of commitments on the part of the people of God. They had not been following the laws of God, but now they are committing themselves to obey the commands of the Lord. In the first clear declaration of repentance, the people of God declare that they will obey God by not intermarrying with the people of the land any longer. In Deuteronomy 7:3-4, God said, “You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.”
You can’t get much more simple than this command. God told the people never to allow their children to be married to the pagan people of the land. If this happened, God warned that the pagans would lead the believers astray, and this would bring the judgment of God down on the people. This was not a command about color of skin, but rather about hearts devoted to or twisted against the Lord. Thus, you would think this to be an easy command to get people to obey. But, the people did not obey this command, and they suffered for it. So, here in Nehemiah 10, they agree that they will start doing what God has said.
We have a parallel command in the New Testament that applies to all Christians. God said in 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” Thus, God strictly and clearly forbids Christians from marrying lost people. There is no exception listed, no excuse allowed. Christians are not to intermarry with the lost.
Now, I’m guessing that you are not deeply troubled by that command. Either you are a Christian who is already married, and thus you can’t change anything, or you are a Christian who is not married but is not really thinking about marrying a non-believer anyway. So, let’s take a step back at the larger principle at stake here.
God forbade the intermarriage of his people with pagans because he did not want his families to be led astray into idolatry and worldliness and pagan religion. So, even if your marriage is not the question today, what about your family life? Are you doing what you need to do in your family life to see to it that your household is a house of faith?
Dads and moms, grandmas and grandpas, are you directing the affairs of your homes in such a way that the children in the home are taught the ways of the Lord? Are you preventing your sons and daughters, perhaps even your grandchildren, from being corrupted by the influences of evil forms of music, books, TV, web sites, and video games? Are you protecting your children and grandchildren from the false beliefs of a world that does not know God, that declares it does not believe in God, yet which shows that it hates God? Are you making it plain that, in your home, there is no fellowship between light and darkness, between God and evil?
Christians, if we are going to repent of our sin just like Nehemiah’s people repented of theirs, we are going to have to make a move to show that our homes are places where God is honored. This may require you to make actual changes in what you do, how you schedule your lives, how you are entertained, what you allow, etc. Do what is necessary to have a household devoted to God.
Something is Missing in this Logic
A recent article reports that Nebraska lawmakers are considering a law banning certain types of abortions on the grounds that the fetus may feel pain during the procedure. As one might imagine, this is sparking a great deal of noise on both sides of the debate.
While I am certainly in favor of laws that will put an end to the willing murder of unborn children, can I simply say that the logic of this law is missing. Pain is not the primary factor here; death is. Killing a baby in a humane way verses killing a baby in an inhumane way still ends up with the same result. Whether the fetus feels pain or not, a human life, a child made in God’s image, has been dismembered by another human being.
Again, I’d probably vote for the law if I had it before me as a means of curbing the abortion industry’s reign of death. However, this kind of law will not ultimately make the difference in our society. Until our people grasp that taking the lives of babies for the sake of the mother’s convenience is a horrible sin, we will not get this issue right.
No, by the way, I am not a graceless, merciless, abortion Dr. murderer. Christ’s grace is big enough to cover the sins of all who will come to him. But this does not change the fact that abortion is pure evil, and we must pray that God will bring this practice to an end.
Pastor Travis Peterson 