Nehemiah’s Relief Efforts

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All right, so we’ll go to our study of the Bible first tonight, and then we’ll take care of our prayer requests at the end. So we’re going to be in Nehemiah chapter 5 tonight. Nehemiah chapter 5, I’ll give you just a second to turn there.

If you’ve not been with us, it’s about halfway through your Bible. Nehemiah chapter 5. And I’m just going to start by reading the passage to you tonight.

It’s fairly short, even for a full chapter. It’s 19 verses. And it says, starting in verse 1, And there was a great outcry of the people and their wives against their Jewish brethren.

For there were those who said, We, our sons and our daughters, are many. Therefore, let us get grain that we may eat and live. There were also some who said, We have mortgaged our lands and vineyards and houses that we might buy grain because of the famine.

There were also those who said, We have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our lands and vineyards. Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children. and indeed we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves and some of our daughters have been brought into slavery.

It is not in our power to redeem them for other men have our lands and vineyards. Now, I’ll come back and talk about this a little bit more in just a few minutes, but I want to make sure we understand what’s going on up to this point. These are the people who are there in Israel, there in Jerusalem, around Jerusalem.

When Nehemiah came back, if you recall, he was part of that group that was carried off into Babylon, into captivity. And then when the Babylonians were taken over by the Persians, he was serving the Persian court. And it was the Persians who allowed some of these to come back to Israel.

And what they had taken, what the Babylonians had taken, were basically the best and brightest of Israel. So it was the leaders, it was the educated people that were coming back to help. And they find that the people who were living there were in really a dire situation.

There was evidently a famine. There was a shortage of grain. And we know that when something is in short supply, one of two things happens.

Either we run out or the price skyrockets. And I could go into a whole tirade about why our price gouging laws are the reason we had shortages back during COVID, but I’ll spare you that tonight. either they were going to run out of grain altogether or the price of it was going to skyrocket either way you were going to be limited in what you could get your hands on and a lot of these people you know they were poor farmers and if their crops had failed and they’re having to buy grain from others or or they’re just they’re tradesmen they’re not growing their own food they’ve got big families to support and they’re having to come up with a way to buy grain if you can get it.

It’s at an exorbitant cost. And so some of them were mortgaging their homes, mortgaging their vineyards in order to buy food. Some of them, because even with this financial hardship, the king off in Persia had not lowered his taxes on the people. They were still being forced to pay these heavy taxes to support the king in Persia, even though they were barely able to scrape by.

And so what they were having to do was sell themselves and their children into servitude, into slavery, in order to pay the king’s taxes. I mean, imagine a situation like that. There weren’t bankruptcy laws.

There was no social safety net. There was, you had to mortgage everything you owned in order to buy food. And when tax time came due, I mean, there was no payment plan with the IRS.

We think we’ve got it bad with the tax situation here. There was no payment plan. There was no forbearance.

There was no any of this. They were having to sell themselves into slavery in order to pay their taxes. It wasn’t quite the slavery that we think of from the American South.

But still, I can’t think of any form of slavery that I would enjoy being part of. You either. And so they were in this dire situation.

And really what the problem is, and we’re going to see this here starting in verse 6, What makes Nehemiah so angry is that the creditors these people were mortgaging their land to, and the masters that they were selling themselves and their children into slavery to, were their fellow Jews. There were fellow Israelites. This wasn’t foreigners coming in taking advantage of the situation.

These were their brothers and sisters in the community who were taking advantage of the situation, who had the means to help out financially, and decided to take advantage of the situation and profiteer from it. So he says, And I became very angry when I heard their outcry and these words. After serious thought, I rebuked the nobles and rulers and said to them, Each of you is exacting ushery from his.

. . And you know, I haven’t figured out if it’s usury or ushery.

So I may say both pronunciations tonight. Each of you is exacting ushery from his brother. So I called a great assembly against them.

And I said to them, According to our ability, we have redeemed our Jewish brethren who were sold to the nations. Now indeed will you even sell your brethren, or should they be sold to us? Then they were silenced and found nothing to say.

Then I said, What you are doing is not good. Should you not walk in the fear of our God because of the reproach of the nations, our enemies? I also with my brethren and my servants am lending them money and grain.

Please let us stop this ushery. Restore now to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive groves, and their houses, also a hundredth of the money and grain and the new wine and the oil that you have charged them. So what Nehemiah says here is, isn’t this wrong?

Haven’t we for 70 years been wanting our nation out of bondage? And now that some of them are coming back, we’re finding opportunities to put our countrymen back into bondage. And for what?

Because of our personal gain? He says, does this seem right? Stop doing this.

He says, I’m lending money. And by the way, Nehemiah is not saying I’m doing the same thing. He was lending people money.

He was evidently though lending them money at no interest because it’s the interest that he came out against. And by the way, as we read this, I’m not even sure that he’s condemning them for the interest, but the fact that he was charging them, that they were charging their brethren predatory rates and that they were enforcing that they pay back on this schedule even though it was causing a hardship. And I know you may say, well, they agreed to it. And I get that.

We need to be responsible with our finances. But the issue here was there was a severe hardship, and these people were looking at it just as a business transaction. Instead of looking at it through the lens of, these are my brothers and sisters, and I had the opportunity to help, they were saying, hey, I have the opportunity to make a quick buck here and take everything that they own.

It was actually considered, from what I’ve read, it was considered charitable to lend money to the poor. To give money to the poor? Yes, certainly.

But even to lend to the poor was considered charitable in that time. But it’s the way that they were doing it and they were praying on these people. And the Bible deals with this elsewhere when they would lend money and then they would use those loans to swindle widows out of their houses.

And the Bible condemns that. So they were silenced. They found nothing to say.

I mean, how do you defend yourself when you’re using people’s difficulties to enrich yourself? So he says, give back what you’ve taken. Pay them back the principal and the interest is what he tells them.

Verse 12 says, So they said, we will restore it and will require nothing from them. We will do as you say. Then I called the priests and required an oath from them that they would do according to this promise.

Then I shook the fold out of my garment and said, So may God shake out each man from his house and from his property who does not perform this promise. Even thus may he be shaken out and emptied. And all the assembly said, Amen, and praised the Lord.

Then the people did according to this promise. So they did what Nehemiah commanded them to do. And then Nehemiah sets the example here.

Verse 14 says, Moreover, from the time that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year until the thirty-second year of King Artaxerxes, twelve years, neither I nor my brothers ate the governor’s provisions. But the former governors who were before me laid burdens on the people and took from them bread and wine besides forty shekels of silver. Yes, even their servants bore rule over the people, but I did not do so because of the fear of God.

Indeed, I also continued the work on this wall, and we did not buy any land. All my servants were gathered there for the work. And at my table were one hundred and fifty Jews and rulers, besides those who came to us from the nations around us.

Now that which was prepared daily was one ox and six choice sheep. All so foul were prepared for me, and once every ten days an abundance of all kinds of wine. Yet in spite of this, I did not demand the governor’s provisions, because the bondage was heavy on this people.

Remember me, my God, for good, according to all that I have done for this people. All right. And I want to be very clear in this, because I hear more and more churches, more and more preachers being accused of promoting Marxist theology.

You will never hear that from me. OK, I believe in the free markets. I’m not opposed to them entering into contracts and all that.

I believe in I’m not I’m not preaching that. I’m just telling you what the what the Bible says. But I want you to understand where I’m not coming from.

OK, I believe in free markets, but I also believe in being gracious toward people when you’re when you’re able to. You know, for example, I was talking to a lady today that rents a house from me in Norman. And the, the, what I charge her is what, is what I pay on the house payment.

And so it’s tied and it, it fluctuates a little bit, but I don’t, I don’t make a profit off of it. She’s also a relative, but I texted her today and I said, we need to talk about this because I went to make the house payment again and realized that that account is running low of funds. Evidently there was an issue there and I didn’t notice and didn’t tell you.

In all the moving around the last couple months and all the mail forwarding, evidently I didn’t get my statement on the escrow shortage. So the payment went up, and I’ve just been covering it for the last few months and didn’t notice. So if you’ll just start paying this extra however much in November, we’ll call it good.

She and I are now in an argument over who’s going to pay for it because she thinks she ought to, and I think I ought to. I said it’s my not paying attention fee. And she tells me, there’s no way I’m letting you cover this.

It’s my fault for not paying. You know, I’m not going to try to, and I’m not trying to set myself up to be a wonder, you know, say I’m a wonderful person here. I’m telling you, this is how I think we as Christians ought to be.

Yes, I’m involved in this business transaction with her. But if I can be gracious here, you know, why not? And so that’s just kind of the way, that’s just kind of the way I look at it.

So he was dealing with this strife that was arising because of some financial issues. He says there was a great outcry in verse 1 of the people and their wives against their Jewish brethren. I’ve already kind of explained this.

Grain was scarce and it was expensive, so a lot of people had trouble feeding their large families. They had mortgaged their homes to buy the food. They were forced to continue paying heavy taxes to the Persians on the land they had mortgaged.

So it’s not even theirs anymore, technically. It belongs to some landowner that they’ve mortgaged it to, but they’re still having to pay the taxes on it. They were selling themselves and their children into bondage in order to pay these obligations.

And I told you what made this so bad, what made this so galling, what made this so objectionable to Nehemiah is that it was their Jewish brethren, according to verse 1, who were doing this. And I noticed, too, as I was reading through this again, I mean, I noticed this the other day, but the thought occurred to me, too. He goes and has a special conversation with the priests.

Their religious leaders were involved in this, fleecing the flock. And I get outraged over that kind of thing. And these were people who could have afforded to help them.

I mean, if you had the money to pay cash for somebody’s house or give them a portion of it so they could mortgage the property, you weren’t hurting. So they could have afforded this, but they were charging this exorbitant interest. They were being sticklers about the payments when it was causing people to make some hard decisions about freedom and starvation and all these things. This made Nehemiah very angry where he rebuked the rulers and the nobles.

That was the cause of the strife among them. And if you’re wondering, well, why does he go to talking about this? I thought the book of Nehemiah was about the wall.

It was hard to get them together to continue doing anything productive on building that wall when the people are now fighting against each other. When you’ve got one group of people exploiting another group of people and the other side about to revolt, that’s not a recipe for stability and getting anything done. And this tells us there’s something wrong when God rescues someone from bondage, but God’s people, when anybody puts them back in chains, but especially when it’s God’s people who put them back in chains after God has just pulled them out of bondage.

So I pointed this out earlier that the Jewish nation had been struggling to be free from foreign oppression for 70 years. And God was finally opening that door for them. He says in verse 8, I said to them, according to our ability, we have redeemed our Jewish brethren who were sold to the nations.

Don’t think that that’s Nehemiah taking credit for the captivity starting to come to an end and people coming back. He says we’ve redeemed them. They might have helped in this sense of redeeming.

They may have helped foot some of the bill. But it was God opening all the doors and orchestrating everything for the Jewish people to be able to come home. He’s just saying, we’ve been working toward this.

We’ve been participating in it. This has been the goal. This has been the dream for all this time. For them to be able to come home.

For us to be able to come home. He says, but now you’re putting your own countrymen back in bondage for your own profit. That’s why he asked him in verse 8.

Now indeed will you even sell your brethren or should they be sold to us? He said, the very thing we’ve been working to undo, you’re now diving right back into doing to them again. And their condition of these people who were still there in Israel wasn’t that far off from those who were still bound by the Persians, those who still were technically in service of the Persians back there because they said in verse 5, our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, and our children as their children.

And what they were doing is just flat out wrong. Nehemiah said in verse 9, what you were doing is not good. I think that’s a little bit of an understatement, But he said it was not good.

This is not a good thing to be doing. What they were doing was not honoring God. He said, should you not walk in the fear of our God because of the reproach of the nations, our enemies.

And that word nations, a lot of times when you see it in the Old Testament, that Hebrew word in a lot of cases is a word that means Gentiles. So it’s not just other countries. It’s talking about the pagan countries around them.

And if you’ll recall back, I think it was last week, I talked about how there was this history that anytime something went wrong with Israel, the other countries around them would say, oh, see, their God’s not that powerful after all. And so there was this sense that you wanted to walk with God as Israel. You wanted to walk with God so that things would go well, not only so that they’d go well for you, but because that way God wasn’t dishonored.

When God sent you to be chastised, the other countries wouldn’t look at it and say, well, their God’s not even strong enough to protect them. What they were doing was not honoring God because the countries around them would look and see, God’s not even protecting his own people from his other own people. The problem was not in their lending, as I’ve already said, but in the predatory way they went about it.

Because Nehemiah even said, I’m lending money. I’m lending money, but under the circumstances. There are some things more important here than profit.

Think about the people. These are your brothers and sisters, he says. So give them back, not only the interest you’ve charged, Give them back the principle that you’ve taken from them.

Those are words that are swirling around in my head right now as I’m about to make my first mortgage payment. Most of you know those words, but principle is the amount you’ve borrowed that you’re having to pay back and interest is the extra you’re paying back for the privilege of having borrowed it. And he said, give it all back.

And he said, give what they’ve mortgaged and give back the hundredth. He’s talking about that percentage, that interest. Give it all back. Restore it now to them.

And they agreed. Verse 12, they agreed. Now, Nehemiah did not come to them with guns.

They didn’t have guns back then. But he didn’t come to them at bayonet point and say, give it back or else. This is not Chairman Mao with land reform.

Do this because it’s right. And they voluntarily agreed. And I think that means God had to have gotten hold of their hearts and made them realize that what he said was true.

Because a lot of times it’s hard to get people to do the right thing with money even when they know it’s the right thing. God had done something in their hearts for them to agree. And the priests in particular, you know, it irritates me to see what religious leaders were doing.

But the way he deals with it, I think is kind of funny. They were profiteering from their neighbor’s misfortune. So he goes to the rulers and nobles and says, do this because it’s right.

And he goes to the priests and he threatens them with a curse. Did you pick up on that in verse 13? He curses them.

He threatens them. He shook out the fold of his garment. So he takes his robe and he shakes out the fold of it.

And he says, if you don’t do what’s right here, that’s what God’s going to do to you with your property and your lands. He’s going to shake you right out of everything you own. You’re more concerned about money than about the souls of the people you’ve been put here to take care of.

He said, God is going to throw you out of all this stuff that you love and you own. You’re going to end up destitute like they are. I don’t know why it was that the priests were so hard to get in line, But where the secular leaders said, yeah, we’ll do the right thing, Nehemiah had to look at the priests and say, put a curse on you, basically.

Now, don’t take from that that you can go put a curse on somebody. Nehemiah was being led directly by the Spirit of the Lord. So Nehemiah set the example here, too, of this charitable behavior toward his neighbors.

For 12 years, he was entitled to a salary and provisions as the governor of Judea, the Persian governor of Judea. He did not take that salary because it came from the taxes of the people. Now, he was entitled to that.

It wouldn’t have been wrong for him to take that, but under the circumstances, he looked at their poverty and said, I’m not going to add to this. And instead, for 12 years, he supported himself and dozens of workmen for 12 years out of his own pocket. And I saw where one commentator said this week that his job as the cupbearer to the king must have been very lucrative because he’d been able to collect quite a bit of money over the years for him to be able to do that.

So he declined to tax the people. When it says in verse 16, we did not buy any land. Well, there’s nothing wrong with buying land.

What he’s talking about was when there’s these times of economic upheaval, sometimes, especially if you have some insider knowledge, you can get some sweetheart deals on some property real cheap. But he didn’t take advantage of any of these situations. He supported the people.

He paid his way because of the hardship they were facing. Like I said, it’s not wrong to take a salary. It’s not wrong to buy land.

But he said, under the circumstances, because they are in such dire poverty, I am not about to add any to their burden. He supported the work from the wealth he had collected while he was working for the king. And I love this story because it’s a reminder to us as God’s people that we need to be gracious.

Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we have to. It doesn’t mean we should. You know, I have found this to be true in business dealings.

I was talking to this lady today and I told her, I am not a good businessman, but that’s not what God put me here to be. Now, some of you might be good businessmen. Some of you might, God might have put you here to earn money and then use it in His service.

You know, more power to you. But I’m just not a good businessman because I look at people and think, oh, well, she’s struggling to get by. And, you know, maybe I’m too soft hearted.

I don’t know. But it’s a reminder, you know, there are some things more important than the profit we can make. There’s some things more important than what we can amass here.

God put us here not to store up all the possessions we can, but to take care of one another. And yes, we need possessions to be able to do that. So I’m not against working and earning a living.

I like what Margaret Thatcher said about the Good Samaritan, that if he just had good intentions instead of money, we wouldn’t know the story at all. But he had earned some money, he had some money, and he used it to take care of that man. But it’s a reminder to us to be gracious to one another, especially as God’s people.

And you know, there are these parallels all throughout Scripture where God pulled His people out of bondage. And the idea is then that we would stay out of bondage. God doesn’t free us from bondage just so we can go right back into it.

It’s the same thing with the bondage to sin. It’s a terrible shame when God goes to the lengths He has gone through to set us free from bondage to sin, and we put ourselves right back in it. Or our fellow Christians put us right back in it.

Now, for us to put ourselves in bondage to sin means to go out and work for sin again. You know, the Apostle Paul talked about that. He talked about, I’m dead to sin.

I should not be out there serving sin. And yet sometimes we’ll put ourselves right back into bondage to sin. We’ll put ourselves right back into that old way of doing things.

Other times, believers will look at somebody, and even though Jesus has set them free from bondage to that sin, we’ll look at who they were, and that’s how we continue to define them, and we continue in our minds to keep them under bondage. to that sin. We try to put them back under those chains.

As believers, we ought to be gracious to each other. And as I’m telling you this, please understand. Please understand.

I’m telling you this tonight because we’re going through the book of Nehemiah. This is not a come to Jesus meeting because somebody’s done something wrong. You all are an incredibly gracious group of people from what I’ve seen.

Incredibly generous to one another. Incredibly generous to us. As a matter of fact, I argued with Stella about putting anything on Facebook about pastor appreciation.

She said, oh, I was told to put something on there. I said, they have done enough. So that was not me.

Yeah, I know. She said, no. I said, don’t put that on there. She said, nobody asked you.

I said, if you think I’m going to wait until I’m asked to give my opinion about something, you’ve misjudged the situation. But you all are an incredibly gracious group of people. So I don’t say this to you to say straighten up, but it’s just a reminder to us because there are times that we don’t always feel so gracious.

And we need to be reminded that if we have the opportunity to help one another, if we see somebody and we have the opportunity to help them, I’ll admit it’s not always my first instinct, but that’s what He put us here to do. He put us here to take care of one another. He put us here not to put each other back in bondage, but to care for one another.