Ezra’s Reading of the Law

Message Info:

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

⟦Transcript⟧ All right, so we’re now in chapter 8 of our journey through the book of Nehemiah. And this is not one of those extraordinarily long chapters that is a list of names that we’re going to have to skip through part of it and encourage you to read later. We’re going to go through the whole chapter tonight and then talk about what we see there.

We’re going to start in chapter 8, verse 1. It says, Now all the people gathered together as one man in the open square that was in front of the water gate. And that’s not in Washington.

That’s outside the temple here in Jerusalem. In the open square that was in front of the water gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded Israel.

So Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men and women and all who could hear with understanding on the first day of the seventh month. Then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the water gate from morning until midday before the men and women and those who could understand. And all the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

So Ezra the scribe stood on a platform of wood which they had made for the purpose. And beside him at his right hand stood Mattathiah, Shammah, Anniah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Masaiah. And at his left hand, Hediah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashem, Hashbidana, Zechariah, and Meshulam.

Charlie, we were talking baby names the other day, and I forgot. We’re not expecting, but anyway. Hashbidana.

Forgot to throw that one into consideration. Verse 5. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people.

For he was standing above all the people. And when he opened it, all the people stood up. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God.

Then all the people answered, Amen, Amen, while lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Benai, Sherebiah, Jemim, Akub, Shabbatai, Hedijah, Masaiah, Kalita, Azariah, Jehozabad, Hanun, Paliah, and the Levites helped the people to understand the law and the people stood in their place.

So they read distinctly from the book in the law of God. And they gave the sense and helped them to understand the reading. And Nehemiah, who was the governor, Ezra, the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, This day is holy to the Lord your God.

Do not mourn nor weep, for all the people wept when they heard the words from the law. Then he said to them, Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared. For this day is holy to our Lord.

Do not sorrow for the joy of the Lord is your strength. So the Levites quieted all the people saying, be still for the day is holy. Do not be grieved.

And all the people went their way to eat and drink, to send portions and rejoice greatly because they understood the words that were declared to them. Now on the second day, the heads of the father’s houses, this is verse 13, the heads of the father’s houses of all the people with the priests and Levites were gathered to Ezra the scribe in order to understand the words of the law. And they found written in the law, which the Lord had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths during the feast of the seventh month, and that they should announce and proclaim in all their cities and in Jerusalem, saying, go out to the mountain and bring olive branches, branches of oil trees, myrtle branches, palm branches, and branches of leafy trees to make booths as it is written.

Then the people went out and brought them and made themselves booths, each one on the roof of his house or in the courtyards were the courts of the house of God and in the open square of the water gate and in the open square of the gate of Ephraim. So the whole assembly of those who had returned from captivity made booths and sat under the booths. For since the days of Joshua, the son of Nun, until that day, the children of Israel had not done so.

And there was very great gladness. Also day by day from the first day until the last day, he read from the book of the law of God and they kept the feast seven days. And on the eighth day, there was a sacred assembly according to the prescribed man.

So I know that’s a big chunk of text to look at. Let’s talk about what’s taking place here. Now that we’ve gotten to this point that a lot of the work, a lot of the work on Jerusalem is now done.

At least big chunks of the work are done. The wall’s built. The gates are built.

The doors are hung in the gates. We know from last week that not all of the houses are rebuilt because they don’t have accommodation for all the people that need to return to Jerusalem. That’s why the city was under defendant.

They didn’t have enough soldiers to defend the city with the gates open. There was still possibly work left to be done on the temple. But now they’re taking a moment to stop and have a time of worship.

And that’s what we talked about last week. That the focus of chapter 7 is not necessarily on all the counting and all the logistics, But the fact that they did that to prepare themselves for worship. And the lesson to us there is that we need to prepare ourselves when we come to worship God.

So Ezra, now that they’ve prepared as best they can, Ezra is working with Nehemiah. Nehemiah is sort of the political leader, the military leader at that point. Ezra is the religious leader.

He’s one of the priests. He’s a scribe. And Ezra and Nehemiah get together and they led this service to read the law to the people.

and we think oh that sounds exciting the law okay we’re talking the word of god okay it’s it’s not just here are the rules we have for you they’re reading the word of god when they say the law they’re talking specifically about genesis exodus leviticus numbers and deuteronomy okay those five books of the law I don’t think they read all five of them at one setting it says uh later on in the chapter that that they continued reading for for days but they started somewhere in the law and they to read to the people. So they gathered the people in this open square outside the temple. And Brother Jeff and I were talking Sunday about some of the possible reasons why they met out there instead of right close to the temple.

And there’s a few possibilities. He suggested, as I have assumed, that they met out in this open square rather than closer into the temple for the sake of room, because there were so many people and not enough room, and maybe if part of the courtyard was still in ruins, there may not have been enough room for everybody. That’s one possibility.

Some historians have suggested that Nehemiah was at odds with some of those who were among the leadership of the priests, and we know from earlier chapters that there were a lot of the powers that be that sided with Tobiah and Sanballat and some of the others. Remember, they wanted their power intact. They didn’t want Nehemiah necessarily to succeed.

They were kind of the establishment types. And here was Nehemiah, this insurgent coming and upsetting the apple cart that they had, upsetting things that they had set up for themselves over the last 70 years. And so either one of those is possible.

It may be a combination of those things that maybe he wasn’t necessarily made to feel welcome in the temple. Either way, they gathered the people outside the temple. And Ezra, we see in verse 4, he stood on a platform that had been built for this specific purpose.

They wanted him up where not really, I guess, necessarily where everybody could see him, but where everybody could hear him. And there’s just something, there’s something psychological with us that you raise somebody up on a platform, even a foot higher. And suddenly it’s like there’s an air of authority there.

It’s not so much a conversation anymore as it is a monologue. That’s why street preachers will go out and take a milk crate. Even that gives them a psychological authority.

So they built this platform where all the people could see Ezra, but more importantly, so they could hear him. And so there was no question as to where the focus of this meeting was. And he was up there surrounded by some of the elders.

We have this list, and they’re not necessarily identified as why they were up there. It’s possible they were priests. It’s also possible that they were elders, that they were heads of families.

I sort of picture when a candidate is having a rally, and they’ve got all these dignitaries behind them, and somebody’s running for president, and you’ve got state senator so-and-so and mayor so-and-so behind them, kind of lending credibility. That could have been what’s going on here. But he gets out there with the word, and it says he opened the book.

Now, that’s our best explanation in our terms of what happened. He opened the book. But what they’re really describing there is he pulled open a scroll.

They didn’t have books like this. Their book was a scroll. He opened the scroll, and the people stood up in anticipation.

And this might be where the tradition has come from to stand when we read the word of God. Many churches do that. This is the first one I’ve been part of that that does it, but it’s not a bad tradition.

And it may have its roots in this right here, but they stood up in anticipation. It wasn’t just, okay, we’re going to stand up because this is the part of the service where we do that now. They were eager.

They were on the edge of their seats. There were some of the preachers yesterday we listened to at the convention that I was kind of on the edge of my seat, ready to stand up and clap as they just laid it out. But these people were so excited about the word, as soon as he opened it, they’re on their feet.

And we see in verse 6 that together they praised God and they worshiped him. They’re shouting amen. Now, that word, we think of amen as being a word that we use to end prayers.

But the word amen signifies agreement. You’re saying, let it be. I think of, you remember the movie, The Ten Commandments?

And Pharaoh keeps saying, so let it be written, so let it be done. That’s sort of what amen means. So when they’re shouting amen, he’s opening God’s word.

And they’re already shouting amen, amen, and they’re praising the Lord. They’re saying that’s his word. Let it be as he says it’s going to be.

You know, they’re getting into a place of agreement with God. And then they fell on their faces. I don’t know if you’ve ever had those times where you’ve prayed on your face.

I don’t know that. I shouldn’t say I don’t know that. I know that it doesn’t mean God can hear us better or that suddenly we have God’s attention more.

but there’s something, there’s just something about praying on your face before the Lord. I think more than anything it does for God, it reminds us that we are in submission to him. So they praised God, they fell down and worshipped him, and verse 3, sort of out of order, but verse 3 is a summary of what happened.

He began to read, and he read to them from morning to midday. So it may have been as much as six hours here. We don’t know that he started first thing in the morning, but a three to six hour time period.

This wasn’t a deal where he starts preaching and 25 minutes in, everybody’s checking their watch and wondering if the food’s burning and getting up and leaving. Y’all haven’t done that to me yet, and I appreciate that, so I’m not complaining. But I will say I’ve been in the pews before and thought, okay, this guy’s gone on for 25 minutes and haven’t said anything.

Are we close to a landing here? Okay, it wasn’t anything like that. He’s reading and they are hungry to hear more.

In some of the preaching yesterday, one of the men said, am I at 30 minutes already? And I think I shut it out. Keep going.

They had a time. They had reports to get through. I didn’t care.

Keep going. That’s where they were. They wanted to hear more of God’s word.

And so there was a group of men that verse seven tells us help the people to understand the law. They sort of went through the crowd and they began to help people. Now, there’s verse eight tells us there’s there’s three things that they did.

And I when I saw this, I thought this is incredible because this is what I in discipleship training. This is what I teach people to do with the scriptures. This is what I’ve been taught to do with the scriptures, but I’ve never seen it spelled out in one verse like this before.

He said, they read distinctly from the book, they gave the sense, and they helped them to understand. Now, this idea of reading distinctly from the book, there’s a Hebrew word that’s translated there, reading distinctly, that gives the idea of translating something, as best I can understand it. Gives the idea of translating something.

And so we know from history that a lot of the Jewish people at this time spoke Aramaic. But the law was written in Hebrew. They’re related languages, but I don’t know that they’re mutually intelligible.

They’re not similar languages like English and Oki. We can kind of figure out what each other means. They’re related languages like English and German.

You might figure out a word here or there, but it’s mostly gibberish as far as we’re concerned. Well, Stella’s not here, but. .

. She had a phone call a couple weeks ago to somebody here in town. They start speaking German to each other.

I picked up like one word out of the conversation. The rest of it meant nothing. So they were translating.

They were putting it in language that the people could understand. Now, to give the sense means to explain what does it mean. And to help them with understanding, when he’s talking about, okay, how do I understand this as it applies to my life?

What do I do with this? And this is some of what I go through every text that I get up to teach or preach to you. I ask myself, what does it say?

What does it mean? And what do I do with it? Evaluation, interpretation, and application.

And so they, this translation, this reading distinctly from the book, they were helping the people know what does this text say? What does God say? Giving the sense, what does it mean?

What is God trying to communicate here through this? And help them to understand the reading. Okay, so how does this fit into, what am I supposed to do?

What does God expect from me as a result of this? And I saw that and I thought, that’s incredible. That’s what I was taught to do.

That’s what I’ve taught others to do. and there it is right there. So I guess I’m on the right track.

I hope so. But it’s right there. That’s what they were doing in the book of Nehemiah.

And so Nehemiah, Ezra, and the other leaders, they encouraged the people as the law was read, they encouraged them to rejoice rather than to mourn over what was read, which I thought was an unusual thing to do. You know, a lot of times people preach a message and they want you to feel bad when they preach about sin. Here he’s saying, This is a time to rejoice.

And we see through this that the people’s hearts were changed by God’s word. They weren’t just listening to the word. They were being changed by it.

And we see this because the people, I mean, it appears that they were inclined to mourn over their sins. That’s why they were being encouraged to rejoice. It says they wept.

They cried. And that’s where Ezra and Nehemiah and the priests, all the ones who taught the people, start telling them in verse 9, this day is holy to the Lord your God. Don’t mourn or weep.

It says, for they wept when they heard the words of the law. Have you ever felt convicted as you read God’s word or you heard God’s word preached? I think it’s important that we have those moments of conviction where God says, no, you’re wrong here.

And there are times that we need to weep over our sin. But at the same time, they had apparently been 70 years without God’s word. I think God was pleased by the fact that they were repentant in that moment.

He says, okay, there’s something more important here for this moment. But he told them to rejoice. Go, he says, go your way, eat the fat, which apparently is something they did when they celebrated.

I know the thought of eating fat doesn’t appeal to me or sound like a celebration, but for them it was. It may be like when Charla and I say, you know what, we’re celebrating our anniversary or somebody’s birthday. We’re not counting points today.

We’re just going to eat what we want. That’s the sense I get there. Eat the fat.

Drink the sweet. They would have a wine mixed with honey that you would drink during celebrations. You know, this is not a time to sit there and sack cloth and ashes and mourn.

He said, go out and celebrate. Take things to people who don’t have anything to celebrate with. He said, this day is holy to our Lord.

Do not sorrow for the joy of the Lord is your strength. And the Levites went out and told people, be still for the day is holy. Do not be grieved.

And they went out and did what they were what they were told to do. Now, like I said, I know that this is kind of counterintuitive. We think you’re supposed to mourn over your sins and you should.

I mean, there is a time for that. There’s a time for repentance. And we’re going to see more of that later on in the book.

We’ll see that especially in the next chapter. There’s a time for repentance. Even the book of Ecclesiastes tells us there’s a time to mourn and a time to rejoice.

What the priests were saying was not, oh, your sin is okay. We want you to feel better about it. This was a time to rejoice because the law of God was once again there and open to them.

They once again had the opportunity to hear from God. And yes, I mean, just in that brief moment, they’ve been broken over their sins already. The word is having its desired effect.

There’s the repentance there. But they didn’t need to dwell on the morning because they could hear from God again. It was time to rejoice now that they’ve already mourned.

But the fact that they realized their shortcomings, the fact that they heard the word and they began to weep because of what they had done and where they had been, who they had become. The fact that they were there and ready to weep tells us that the word of God was at work in their hearts already. They weren’t just hearing it.

It was taking up residence and it was changing them. The New Testament tells us that the word of God is quick. It’s living.

It’s sharper than a two-edged sword. The word of God is powerful. And in that moment, we see the power that as soon as they heard it, it began to change them.

It began to soften their hearts toward God. It began to show them the holiness of God. That’s one thing.

I know sometimes we as New Testament believers, we may think, why should I go back and read the Old Testament law if I’m not under it, if I’m not held to those restrictions? Well, there’s a lot we can learn from it, but one thing we can learn from it is the holiness of God, because those are not laws that God made up just for fun, just to mess with people. There’s the moral law that reflects who God is.

He promotes honesty because he is God of truth. It’s who he is. He promotes faithfulness in marriage because he is faithful.

He promotes holiness because he is holy. But even in some of the civil laws that don’t apply anymore, some of the things that were fulfilled in Jesus Christ, even the things like mixing the fabrics and not eating certain things, were designed to show the Israelites that they were different because they were set apart to a God who was holy and was different from all the other gods in somebody else’s imagination. And so you read through these and you see these exacting standards throughout the Old Testament law, and it gives us a glimpse of just how holy God is.

And we sort of take that for granted because we can come boldly before the throne of grace. I think sometimes we get it in our mind that God’s just okay with whatever we want to do and however we want to be. We need to be reminded that the God we serve, even though he invites us to come boldly before the throne of grace because of Jesus, the God we serve is absolutely holy and absolutely unwilling to compromise with sin.

And so they were reading the word, they were hearing the word, it was giving them a glimpse of who God is. And in the brightness of that light, they saw who they were. I like sometimes walking into the kid’s bathroom upstairs when the little lamp is on, and kind of that gentle glow of that lamp, I look pretty good.

Then I turn on the big light and I see all of the, I see all the large pores. I see the scars from where I make myself shaving. I see the beginnings of crow’s feet.

And I just think that just means we laugh a lot. That’s what my wife tells me. I’m starting to see those things.

I don’t like that under the bright light, but it’s the bright light that shows me exactly what I look like. And in the bright light of God’s holiness, they saw exactly what their sin looked like. So they were seeing not only the holiness of God, but they were seeing the stain of sin.

And all the while, the word of God was changing them as it was revealing these things to them. And so the next step is really important. As they were changed by the word of God, they began to put into practice the things that they learned, the things that they were taught.

And I know this is not the only change that was made, but one significant change that the scripture records here is that they went out and they began to observe the Feast of Tabernacles. Now, the Feast of Tabernacles, also called Sukkot, and to look it up, and to look up how to pronounce it. But it’s something that they would observe as kind of a harvest festival, a time of thanksgiving to thank God for the harvest. But also God had told them in the book of Leviticus that this festival reminded them of the time that God had sustained them while they were living in these tents, these tabernacles, these booths, sometimes it’s translated, as they were wandering in the wilderness.

And I was looking at some things today, and really, I was reading some secular sources about the Feast of Tabernacles, just to kind of understand what they do with it today. And somebody said, well, you know, modern scholars, we recognize that the scriptures, the Old Testament never says that they traveled in, that they lived in booths while they were traveling. And so that’s something that was made up later.

And I thought, just because it doesn’t say in there that they did, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. God said it in Leviticus. I mean, he might have said it after the fact.

I assume they changed their socks while they were walking too at some point in 40 years you know somebody’s got to change their did they wear socks okay I’m sure I’m sure they changed their clothes sometime in 40 years it doesn’t say they did but if god came in and said later hey you remember all those clothes I provided for you for you to change into it’s not a contradiction in the bible god said it in leviticus he said it after the fact they dwelt in so I take it as that they dwelt in booths they dwelt in these these tents these tabernacles, these temporary dwellings. And so God had told them to build these dwellings out of branches and to live in them for seven, eight days.

I’m still a little unclear on, I guess, depending on where you were, you celebrated it for different lengths of time, but they would live in these, they would eat in these, they would sleep in these for about a week. And all the while, it was a time of worship and a time of thanksgiving, not just for what God had provided through that year, but the way God had sustained the nation of Israel. It says here that they had not done this since the days of Joshua.

That does not mean that the Feast of Tabernacles did not ever happen during that time. It’s describing the fact that they went back and celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles the right way and for the right reasons, which had not been done since the days of Joshua. You know, sort of how we’ve turned Thanksgiving from what our ancestors celebrated as a time of giving thanks to God for the fact that they survived to a time to engorge ourselves.

I suspect that a lot of us have not celebrated Thanksgiving correctly for a long time. Same thing happens with Easter and Christmas. For 930 plus years, they had not celebrated this Feast of Tabernacles correctly.

Had they gone, I have no doubt they had gone out and built some shelters out of branches, and they might have had parties, but they hadn’t celebrated it for the right reasons. in almost a thousand years. From the death of Joshua to this time was a little over 900 years.

And they had not done it correctly in all that time. And suddenly, they hear the word of God read to them and it changes them. And it changes their whole perspective on things that they decide, you know what?

The Feast of Tabernacles is coming up. What if we do it right this year? What if we change our focus to what this is?

What if we, instead of focusing on our partying and our celebration of the harvest, What if we take this and let it be a time to do what God told us to do and for the reasons God told us to do it? They were determined because of what they heard in God’s word. They were determined to change course and obey.

And think about that. Think about that. We see things written in God’s word and we say, I know that’s what it says, but I’ve done this for this number of years.

Do you have a habit that you’ve developed over 900 years? Do you have something you’ve been doing wrong for 900 years? No.

If God’s word called them to change and they could change the practices of 900 years, we can change our lives in accordance with God’s word. Now, obviously, through the power of the Holy Spirit. But we don’t get to sit back and say, no, I’m too old to change.

I’m in some, I don’t mean that sound like sinful habits. I’m setting my ways, right? I warned her when we got married.

I have a career. I have a home. You’re not getting some young buck fresh out of the frat house, all right?

I’m old and setting my ways already. We don’t get to sit back and say, well, I’m too old to change, or I’ve done this too long to change. 900 years of doing it wrong.

They said it doesn’t matter because God’s word says this. I think the same principle applies to us because this same word has power today. Jesus said his word could never be broken.

In a passage we looked at last week on Sunday morning, Jesus said the scripture cannot be broken. Or it might have been the Sunday before that. The scripture cannot be broken.

He said to them in Matthew chapter 5, For surely I say unto you, until heaven and earth pass away, One jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law until it is all fulfilled. He said, I’m going to fulfill God’s word, But it’s not going to be broken. He was going to fulfill the law for us, But it doesn’t mean it’s broken.

He says, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will by no means pass away. And we know that Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, said that the word of God is alive and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword. So the same word of God that changed them is still able to change us today if we come to it looking for God to change us.

If we come to it in the right way, and I’m about to wrap this up, I’m going to give you these final thoughts. We need to engage with the scriptures the same way they do. We come to God’s word.

We may read at it through the week. We may come sit and listen to it on Sundays. And we wonder, why does nothing ever change in my life?

Why do I never grow any closer to God? I think a lot of it depends on the posture we take toward the scriptures. And if we want to see this kind of thing happen, if we want to see God do this kind of change in us, We need to engage with the scriptures in the way we see them engage.

Because it’s the same scriptures and the same God. So let’s look at what they did. They came hungry for the word.

It says in verse 3, the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. They came expecting to hear something. They were hungry for God’s word.

Talks about in verse 8, them going through the people and helping them understand. The people came seeking to understand the word. They came hungry to hear it.

They came seeking to understand it, and they went striving to apply it. As we see in the last verse of the chapter, they kept the feast seven days, and on the eighth day there was a sacred assembly according to the prescribed manner. Meaning they went and they did what God’s word told them to do.

They came hungry to hear it, they came seeking to understand it, and they went striving to apply it. We wonder why God’s word isn’t changing us. We do well to follow the example of the Israelites here in the book of Nehemiah.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Powered by atecplugins.com