Intolerance

We're continuing our series that was sort of paused for a little while while I was away on Nehemiah. And we're looking at Nehemiah chapter 13, the last chapter of the book over the next few weeks. So we're actually dividing the chapter into three because the book itself, or the chapter itself rather, is divided very neatly into three sections. So we're going to be looking at it, looking at the first section of Nehemiah chapter 13 this morning. You can open up to Nehemiah 13 if you want.

But as a way of introducing the topic we find in the passage this morning, I wanted to just reflect with you a little bit on the timeliness of the message this morning. We're going to be dealing with the topic of tolerance or intolerance or another word for tolerance is permissiveness. Now for people like myself and I'm guessing many of you, raised in a post modern, western philosophy or world view, this topic is always going to be one of immediate relevance. You see from the time we've been born, we've been hearing a message taught from prep all the way through our schools, taught on our TVs, preached by our politicians, debated by social commentators on TV shows like the project or blogs or whatever, that tolerance of other people's opinions and beliefs are to be accepted. Maybe questioned, but never too harshly.

In fact, it is a greater sin to speak against a particular belief than what that belief may be doing to society. But there are some serious potholes to this philosophy which sounds very nice and I'm talking about the last fifty years that this has sort of been growing and percolating. And these potholes, these flaws have been highlighted so strongly, so vividly in the last few years. This tolerance has worked very well in peaceful times in the prosperity of the nineties and the early two thousands, of the eighties even. And this philosophy wasn't really derailed even when tragedy like September 11 happened.

We had a little blip on the radar of conflicting world views. But we know now, like I've said in the last few years, that a conflict of worldviews, a war has mutated and has transformed from those early rumblings in those early two thousands, and a much bigger, scarier, in your face beast has been discovered, and we may call it ISIS, or we may call it Daesh, or we may call it just terrorism. And this is just an example, it's not a sermon on terrorism at all. But this example highlights a threat that couldn't be isolated anymore, and some serious, deeply problematic philosophical questions on the ideology of tolerance and permissiveness are forced or are being forced on us to be asked. In fact, it hasn't simply been asked, it's been shoved in our face.

The question we hear our social commentators now saying is, can we accept or can we tolerate all world views? Are all religions of equal value? Specifically, if you don't call what is happening in the Middle East now and the rest of the world really, if you don't call that Islam, what do you call it? If you don't call that a religion, what do you call it? Are all views?

Are all actions? Are all beliefs equal? Like we've been trying to claim for so long. And if not, if they aren't equal, how long will we tolerate it? Now these are very confronting questions and I definitely don't have all the answers.

And I'll never claim to have them either, but I see the rise of the opposite happening of people that I consider dangerous like your Donald Trumps and your Pauline Hansons as individuals grabbing power by playing on their opposite insecurities of people looking for answers. In their extreme intolerance, they're on the other side of the spectrum, they are providing an avenue for very angry and oppressed people even who have become jaded by our previous mindset of tolerance. Now our question as Christians, our question as citizens of another kingdom, is to ask the question, how do we respond to this? What do we as Christians, when we also hold to certain values that are incongruent with what is currently happening out there, what do we as Christians do about them? Aren't we called to tolerate and to love all?

And the short answer is no. We aren't commanded to love and tolerate everything. We are certainly called to love people, but we are also called to sometimes gravely disagree with them. We are not called to tolerate sin. We never have and we never will.

And again, as I've admitted already, I'm a child of the eighties and the nineties, a typical gen Y kid brought up on Sesame Street's love and tolerance songs. Now there was never a difference between Groucho or whatever, the guy in the rubbish can and little cute Elmo. There was never a difference. We're all the same. Now this is sometimes a hard truth for me to swallow, but the reality is sometimes God calls me to be very angry with sin.

God calls me to be angry with sin. And that is the sin in my life, and that is the tolerance that I may have for sin in my life, but also the tolerance of sin in other people, and particularly the sin of the tolerance of sin in the church of God. And this morning, by this long introduction, I want to open to Nehemiah chapter 13 and we look at a man who so committedly and so zealously pursued the holiness of God, pursued God's standards. And so we're going to read from chapter 13 verses 1 to 14, the first of these three passages in chapter 13. Let's have a read.

Nehemiah 13:1. On that day, the book of Moses was read aloud in the hearing of the people, and there it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever be admitted into this assembly of God because they had not met the Israelites with food and water, but had hired Balaam to call a curse down on them. Our God, however, turned the curse into a blessing. When the people heard this law, they excluded from Israel all who were of foreign descent. Before this, Eliashib, the priest, had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God.

He was closely associated with Tobiah, and he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain, new wine, and oil prescribed for the Levites, the singers, and the gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests. But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem. For in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I had returned to the king. Sometime later, I asked his permission and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God.

I was greatly displeased and threw all of Tobiah's household goods out of the room. I gave orders to purify the rooms and then I put back into them the equipment of the house of God with the grain offerings and the incense. I also learned that the portions assigned to the Levites had not been given to them and that all the Levites and singers responsible for the service had gone back to their own fields. So I rebuked the officials and asked them, why is the house of God neglected? Then I called them together and stationed them at their posts.

All Judah brought the tithes of grain, new wine, and oil into the storerooms. I put Shelemiah the priest, Zadok the scribe, and a Levite named Pedaiah in charge of the storerooms, and made Hanan son of Zaccur, the son of Mattaniah their assistant, because these men were considered trustworthy. They were made responsible for distributing the supplies to their brothers. Remember me for this, O my God, and do not blot out what I have so faithfully done for the house of my God and its services. So far the reading.

What we find out here in chapter 13 is that Nehemiah is now well and truly an old man and that he has retired. He hung up his trowel and his sword and the job was done. The wall was built. There was reform in the people of God in Jerusalem. He got given the key to the city of Jerusalem by the mayor.

He got given his gold-plated watch and his pension cheque, and he moved back to Persia, back to his job as the cup bearer to the king perhaps, or at least that's what he thought. Remember that Nehemiah had come on his own volition, had asked permission from the king to come back and lead a renewal and a reformation, a rebuild of the city of God and the people of God. And we've traced through this process of trial and tribulation as the walls were built, as the people read and saw and experienced the truth of God's word again, how they were moved to repent and believe and trust and follow God obediently for the first time in perhaps hundreds of years. And the great climax of the book we find is written in the dedication celebration of chapter 12, just the previous chapter, where the people rejoiced. It says in verse 43, the people rejoiced because God had given them great joy.

Things were going well. God's people were happy. God was happy. His temple and the worship of God was going well. And wouldn't it have been brilliant and so satisfying if the story ended there and we read the words, and they all lived happily ever after.

But life isn't like that, is it? God's people often don't allow that to happen, don't we? For twelve years, Nehemiah acted as the governor of Jerusalem and he had led them to a good place and now he had stepped down. And according to our reading, we're not quite sure how long Nehemiah was back in Persia. Some scholars say maybe up to a year, others say maybe up to seven years that Nehemiah was back in his old stomping grounds and yet the word comes to him that something is amiss, that he needs to come back.

And we realize it as we read this story that during his absence, a spiritual permissiveness, a spiritual decline had set in. And again, the time references in chapter 13 are a bit ambiguous, so we're not really sure whether the reading of the law, we find in verses 1 to 3, took place on the day of the dedication in chapter 12, whether it belongs really to that chapter 12 passage or whether it happened subsequently. But the reforms we see, the realization of the Ammonite Moabites casting them aside or or separating them from the rest of God's people, that reform was short-lived. Just like today, God's people were being tempted to compromise. And in fact, in our reading, see spiritual compromise had snuck in all the way up to the spiritual leadership of God's people.

When Nehemiah returns, he finds that this permissiveness was rampant in the very areas that people had covenanted to be faithful to God with. And what I am challenged by in this story is that a lesser man may have said, I give up. Twelve years, so much hassle, so much work, enemies constantly on my case, stubborn, hard, stiff-necked Christians not wanting to change. Now this happens. I'm hundreds of miles away.

Just let them carry on. Let them mess up the way that they deserve. A lesser man like me would have been tempted to quit. But Nehemiah, even in his old age, confronts the problem of this tolerance, of this permissiveness of sin head on, and we see that he does something about it. Now the first thing we see in this passage is that it is useful for us to consider when we deal with the challenging issues of our softness to sin.

It is a very important point firstly of understanding what sin is. This is the important thing. We have to identify it. The greatest abuses within the Church of God is when it comes to the problems of hypocrisy, hardheartedness, of ungrace, is actually to not understand the real issue of the sin. So in verses 1 to 3, we see that during Nehemiah's absence, the people discovered that God had declared that no Ammonite or no Moabite was to be part of God's worship.

That they were not to be part of God's temple or the assembly of Israel because of the way those nations, that people group had treated Israel when they were in the wilderness. These people on this day where they read the book of Moses as it's called, probably open to Deuteronomy 23:3-5 where they see the story of why the unbelieving nations of the Ammonites and the Moabites could not participate in the worship of God. Now as we read this, there's something maybe in us again, my gen Y nature that says, KJ, just hang on a second, isn't this racism? Isn't this advocating that there is one nation lower than another nation, one more worthy than another one? The issue here is not racial though, it's religious.

The Ammonites and the Moabites did not believe in Yahweh God. They did not know God. They worshipped other gods. They worshipped the gods that they eventually led the Israelites to worship, the Baals and so forth. And God made the point as clearly as possible, don't let these guys come in and influence your faith.

But what do we see? Am I okay? Sorry, we just have a bit of a buzz here. In verses 4 to 9, we see an Ammonite by the name of Tobiah. Not only entering the people of God, not only entering the place of worship of God's people, but he is living in the temple.

What we see in verses 4 to 9 is that there isn't just this Ammonite participating in the worship of God. He is actually living in the temple itself. And you might remember the name Tobiah as well. Who remembers Tobiah? He's been in the story all throughout.

And we see that the temple that had storage space built in. That story, those storage rooms were used for the practice of worship and stored worship offerings. So grain offerings, the utensils for the worship of God and the tithes of the people in verse 5. And while Nehemiah was gone, Eliashib the priest, or some people believe he was the high priest, had cleared out one of the large rooms with all the utensils and with all the offerings and he cleared out another smaller room according to verse 5 and verse 9 so that Tobiah, the Ammonite, could set up an apartment there. Now we've heard of Tobiah before. If you've been with us the last few months, you'll remember that Tobiah was one of the chief opposition members who strongly resisted Nehemiah's earlier efforts to rebuild the wall.

Somehow, with a nice smile perhaps or with a good bit of political connection, he had persuaded the Jews that he was a good guy. And meanwhile, everyone had forgotten that he had sent those threatening letters to Nehemiah, that he had worked very, very hard to charge Nehemiah with treason before the Persian king, which would have certainly led to Nehemiah's death. And here he is refurbishing the temple storage rooms into some swanky little apartment for the Better Homes and Gardens cover page. What's going on here? Why would Eliashib the priest allow such a thing?

And verse 4 in our NIV bible says that Tobiah was closely related to Eliashib. It says there, Eliashib the priest had been put in charge. He was closely associated with Tobiah. Now again, that translation is probably a little vague because closely related probably means that Tobiah was somehow a family member. Now already that is starting to put up a little red flag because God said don't intermarry.

Don't marry unbelievers. And here we see start things starting to get a little grey, and we love that word little grey. Things are starting to get a little blurry. But we see from Nehemiah and for God, it's always been very clear. But put yourself in Eliashib's shoes. It's tough to be on the side of a strict commandment of God's word such as excluding all Ammonites from the assembly of Israel when your relative is an Ammonite.

Especially when he may have been part Jewish as some people suggest. Tobiah was a Hebrew name. So let me put it into modern terms. It is tough to insist that the Roman Catholic way of salvation is not God's way when you have Catholic relatives or friends. After all, we have so much in common.

Why not focus on the areas we agree rather than the areas we disagree? Maybe let's take that a step further. Why not say that Judaism and Islam and Christianity all call on the same God, the God of Abraham and find some unity there. I saw this morning on the ABC news site that in France, in the wake of the murder of the Catholic priest, that Muslim and Catholic individuals, 400 of them are marching together for a vigil. And they carry banners around saying this is not a religious war and that we are all brothers and sisters.

And the very unpolitically correct thing to say this morning is that no, Christians are not brothers and sisters with Muslims. We serve a very different God. That is not a comfortable thing to say. That is not a popular thing to say. And I want to be very careful here because I think there are elements of God's common grace of God's grace that he has given to all of humanity, not his specific grace, his common grace to all, that means that we are sharing in a common humanity that should keep us open, that should keep us gracious in how we interact with our neighbours.

But here in Nehemiah 13, we see how easily we can be accepting of tolerant of sinful behaviour. We see here where theological permissiveness creeps in through the door of relationships, of intermarriage, of family with those who may be partly right but are also partly very wrong. And so we have to know our bibles. We have to know our God. We have to know God's will.

We have to study God's word to know what He says. We have to know the very heart of every issue that we agree with or that we disagree with. Christians must know their politicians. I'm sorry to say this, but you need to know who you vote for and why. You need to understand what is going on in society in general and how that is reflected in God's word, what God has to say about that.

That is why Christians need to be very switched on people. If we lose sight of God's revealed will for our lives, we lose sight of what is right and what is wrong and the church and our family becomes terribly sick. And we'll see how this is spelled out in this passage. Because this is not a simply a theological problem. This is not something of look I'm walking the line here.

I'm keeping myself holy. I'm keeping myself separate. This is not simply a theological problem. Not only is this a sin in God's sight which is true, it has some real practical implication because sin always has real life consequences. Always.

No matter how secret your sin is, no matter how minor you think that sin might be, spiritual problems seldom occur in isolation. Because Eliashib, the priest, had moved Tobiah into the temple, there wasn't enough storeroom for all the offerings that needed to be brought, all the tithes that were used to fund the worship of God. Verses 10 to 11 show that because people hadn't brought their offerings or it wasn't stored in the temple to support the ministry of the church, all the pastors of the church, the Levites, and all the worship leaders, the singers that were meant to be supported by these offerings, they had to go and work in the fields to support themselves. They had to go and produce their own food. The pastors had to start a business.

They had to take up a part-time job to supplement their income. And what happens? The worship of God is neglected. Instead of worshipping being the priority for God's people, survival becomes the priority and everyone would have been affected by that. Can you see how this influences things?

And I think there's a truth here. While we are not under the law of the Old Testament tithe anymore, the strict ten per cent, but rather as Paul the Apostle says in 1 Corinthians 16:2, we are to give as the Lord has prospered us. This principle holds true. Softness on sin invariably has an effect on our worship of God. And invariably, believe it or not, that is seen in our offering.

Why do we donate to the church? Why do we do it? Because we believe in the mission of the church. We desire for God's work to be done and we want to support that. Sin easily takes our thoughts from that. And so we don't give.

You may have heard the famous verse on giving that certain churches love to quote when they take up their collections. Malachi 3:8-10. You may have heard this, I certainly have. Bring the whole tithe, God says, into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. And test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have enough room for it. But guess what?

Malachi was preaching to these same people. He was a prophet to these people. And very practically, there was not enough room and there was not enough offerings to God's people because an Ammonite was living in the storeroom. People's hearts were being moved further away from God, and it was reflected in their love of God's church. But what we see here, the principle of what we see here, is that we have to be careful of tolerating sin, even sin that seems partly based on good reasons, because it corrupts and it can corrupt even our worship of God.

So we are to recognise the sin for what it is. So we have to do our homework. We have to know God's will, but then we have to respond to it as well. Simply knowing that something is not right doesn't solve the problem. We have to make it right.

We have to correct the problem. So firstly, see Nehemiah comes back. He's heard that things aren't right. He sees and he hears about these things. And like I said, there are three issues that he deals with in chapter 13.

We're dealing with the first one. He sees the issue. He knows that this is not right. But then we see how he responds to it, and that's our second point. We are to be motivated.

How does Nehemiah respond when he hears about this? Verse 8. I was greatly displeased and threw all of Tobiah's household goods out of the room. Man, sometimes us pastors need to read this. This can become our life verse.

Just start chucking people out and you'll see. To Nehemiah, he doesn't act in a very partial way at all. He's towards the end of the chapter, he's pulling people's hair out. He's punching people. So, you know, for all the pastors out there, we'll keep this one bookmarked. No, we won't.

The verse actually in verse 8 says, he was greatly displeased in our NIV translations, but again, that's a softer translation. The Hebrew says, he got very angry. He got angry. Verse 11, he says, he rebukes the officials. It doesn't take much imagination to picture him asking in a raised voice, why is the house of God forsaken?

In the following weeks, we'll see in verses 17 to 18, he again reprimands the leaders of the church for their violations against the Sabbath, and it's clear again that he is upset. And then like I said in verse 25, he is so upset. He beats some of them up. He calls down curses on them, and he pulls out their hair. Now, why would he do that?

Why would he get so angry? Because he knows God is angry. Now we have to be, and again this is why I said this shouldn't be a pastor's verse, we should be very careful to understand what righteous anger is and what unrighteous anger is. We need to be careful with anger in that we can easily excuse sinful anger as being righteous, as being self-righteous, as being hypocritical. But when we see sin, when we see false teaching that is damaging to God's people, it may well be also that we are wrong not to become angry.

To be complacent in the face of evil is to give a helping hand to Satan. So Nehemiah gets angry and he doesn't just get angry, he gets very angry and he personally goes and overrules all the sinful decisions that have been made. He personally goes into Tobiah's house and starts chucking out the couch and starts throwing out all the nice collection of vinyls and CDs that he's brought with him and the nice lampshades and all that sort of stuff. And he gives orders for the temple equipment and the worship offerings to be brought back into the storage rooms. He reinstates all the Levites and the worship leaders back into their positions within the temple.

But Nehemiah gets angry with sin. So the question for us is, are we allowed to get angry? Very often we hear that no, we are not supposed to be angry. We are supposed to be happy and smile, to be accepting. But the truth is that the world is not nice enough and not perfect enough to smile and be happy.

There's too much wrong with this world. There's too much wrong with people to smile and be happy. When Nehemiah got angry and he chucked out that furniture, it reminds us of another time someone made a ruckus in the temple. Doesn't it? And he got so angry with the thieves and the charlatans commercialising God's worship that he also beat people and this time with a whip.

And he chucked around tables and he chucked around chairs of the money changers and that man was Jesus. And we have to remember as Christians, as people who believe in Jesus Christ, the incarnate God, that this was God, the sinless God who became angry. And so friend, if we are very aware of ungodly soul-destroying sin in or around us, we cannot, we simply cannot remain neutral to it. We have to let it move us. We have to not simply feel bad about it, not simply click our tongue at it or write a blog about it.

We have to get up and do something about it. If it's a sin in your life, we have to repent and we have to change our lifestyle. If it's sinful beliefs or actions in those around you, we have to confront it. We have to work with them to change it. But don't remain neutral.

Don't remain unmoved by it, be moved by it. And then lastly, how did Nehemiah know he was angry for the right reasons and not angry for unholy reasons? That's a very important question to ask as well. And I think we see that in verse 14. Four times, Nehemiah utters brief prayers, and this is how we break up chapter 13.

In verse 14, Nehemiah prays, in verse 22, Nehemiah prays, and then in verse 29, he prays, and then there's sort of a summary prayer in verse 31, but three times specifically related to actions that he had done. Nehemiah wasn't taking this strong action against permissiveness for his own sake. He was doing it for God's sake. This is the difference. Derek Kidner, a commentator on Nehemiah says of these prayers, Nehemiah's private life, his private self is completely at peace with his public one.

Single-minded, utterly frank, and godly through and through. He says his plea to be remembered in verse 14, and I'll read that for us. Remember me for this, O my God, and do not blot out what I have so faithfully done for the house of my God and its services. This prayer, Derek Kidner says, to be remembered springs from love, but not self-love. He says, further, the plea springs from humility, not self-importance, for it is an appeal for God's help.

Nehemiah is committing himself and his cause to God's safe hands. So what we see is that Nehemiah's God-word focus is essential if we want to confront the permissiveness of our times with the right spirit. If we lose it, if we lose this focus on God, if we act without understanding what God would want us to do in that situation, we can easily become self-righteous. We can easily become moral crusaders. We can easily become the other social commentators that we see on our Facebook pages, on the project, on the blogs, who look down on those who are blinded by sin and are actually very, very unhelpful too.

But living with an awareness of God's presence and knowing that we must answer to Him one day will give us the courage to stand even if it is standing alone and to confront sin and confront it out of love. It's easy to see the faults of others but to be blind to our own permissiveness as well. And so we have to be encouraged this morning to begin with ourself. As you read God's word, look at yourself where you may have slipped, where you may be falling short, where you may be tolerating sin in your own life. And after you deal with yourself, I encourage you in every sphere of our existence, husbands and wives, mums and dads, boys and girls to give God the first pick, to live for Him firstly.

So husbands and wives, that's going to mean you give godly leadership. Mums and dads, it means that you raise your kids with correction according to God's principles and laws. For all of us, we have to be warned, and we have to be humbled, and we have to be gracious enough to accept godly counsel, godly warning of the spiritual dangers in our lives. Rather than getting angry and leaving the church, stop and carefully and prayerfully consider whether what has been said to you is in line with God's word. Because tolerance of sin is a perpetual problem.

And so this morning, we are encouraged like Nehemiah to detect it by God's word and to strongly confront it and be moved by it to do something. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word that once again cuts dividing the soul and the spirit that reaches into our hearts and our minds, that confronts us with the urgency, with the truth which is of eternal value and effectiveness. That we are called, Lord, to live a life that will not always reflect the life we have here. The life that is encouraged around us.

And Lord, for some of us with softer personalities, with lots of grace sewn into our fabric. Those of us who are more patient, those of us who are more merciful, Father, we pray that you will also at times put steel in our spines to stand up and to say, friend, family member, my own soul, this is wrong. You cannot keep doing this. There is a God who has commanded a different way. And then for some of us Lord that are prone to be angry and prone to be combative and love a good scuffle, Father I pray that you'll give us the grace and also the great perspective of our great sinfulness and our great need of you.

And Father that we have absolutely no leg to stand on in moral one-upmanship, in moral superiority to those around us. That we are simply one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. And so Father, we pray that you will move us according to your intimate knowledge of our hearts, of who we are, of our weaknesses and flaws, that you will bring glory to yourself in us and through us, that you will refine and purify your church, that you will refine and purify this society, Father, faced with grave and significant challenges. And we pray, Lord, that your kingdom may come on earth through us as it already is in heaven. We pray for this to be true.

We pray for it to be done quickly, Father, according to your good pleasure and grace. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.