Week 6 – Nehemiah 8:1-12

This week is the final step in kicking off our Abound Initiative. We’ve spent almost two years preparing, the past four months meeting with leaders like you, and the past six weeks going through the Abound series as a church. Now Commitment Sunday marks the end of the beginning, and after this week we’ll enter into the two years of the Abound Initiative proper. Hopefully Commitment Sunday was a time for you and your group members to freely celebrate what God has done in you and our church family through all of this preparation.

In our text for this week the wall around Jerusalem has been finished and Nehemiah and the other leaders of the community call an assembly of the people. Interestingly, this isn’t just a ribbon cutting on the wall but, in a sense, on the rebuilt community itself. That’s why Ezra reads from the law, and why later in chapter 9 the people sign a covenant renewal—like we saw in week three, the wall was only incidental to God’s real work of rebuilding his people. Also, verse 2 mentions the specific day for a reason: this is Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the High Holy Days (Lev. 23:23). And how did this rebuilt people respond on this joyous occasion? They wept.

What brought them to tears most immediately, according to the passage, was the reading of the law itself. Most likely Ezra was reading out of Deuteronomy, which is set at the end of Israel’s wilderness wanderings right when they were about to cross over into the promised land (Deut. 1:8). In Deuteronomy, Moses both recounts some of Israel’s history and reiterates both God’s law and the penalty for disobeying his law. Just four chapters in we come across what must’ve been painful for the resettlers to hear, “If you act corruptly…so as to provoke [the LORD your God] to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish…and the Lord will scatter you among the peoples.”(Deut. 4:25-27)

There, plain before them, was the reason for all their work, the reason for a broken down wall and an exiled people: Israel had abandoned their God and his covenant. If the folks listening to Ezra had thought themselves better than their forebears perhaps they would’ve jeered like the exiles did in Ezekiel’s time, merely blaming the problem of the city on their parents generation (Eze. 18:1-4). But instead I think we see humility here from responsive hearts who know they’re equally capable, even equally guilty, of such disobedience. And, having gone through the effort of rebuilding the wall, perhaps they’re wondering how long they’ll make it until God will kick them out too.

But in such a grief-filled moment we see excellent leadership from Nehemiah, Ezra, and the Levites—they stop in the middle of everything and quite literally command folks to celebrate. And they did this not because they were trying to save their own party but in full spirit of how the law called the people to respond. Continuing in Deuteronomy 4 we read, “When you are in tribulation…you will return to the LORD your God and obey his voice. For the LORD your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you of forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.” Though they had abandoned their God and his covenant, God would never do the same to them, and this was a cause for celebration.