What is God like? What will it
be like when you meet Him? You'll meet Him on your own. You will meet Him as He really
is in glory. You will meet Him and it will
be a meeting of either the most extraordinary joy and delight,
the culmination of all your hopes, the end of all of your fears,
the beginning, in a sense, of an endless time of being in His
sight and in His presence. The Bible is full of pictures
of idolatry and full of pictures of people who come to that day
with a presumption. If you did a survey of the people
walking out of the churches in this town today, in this land
and in this world, what would they say about that meeting? Some of them, if they had a moment
of honesty, would be fearful. There's a whole bunch of them
that would have a presumption. One of the most challenging passages
in the scriptures is in Matthew 7. You don't need to turn there,
you can if you wish. But the Lord Jesus talks about
a group of people, a large group of people, many, many. Not everyone who says to me,
Matthew 7.21, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven,
but he who does the will of my Father in heaven. Many will say
to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your
name, cast out demons in your name, done many wonders in your
name, See, he doesn't deny any of the things that have happened.
He doesn't deny prophecy. He doesn't deny exorcism. He doesn't deny wonders. And
then I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice
lawlessness. And I've been thinking a lot
about those people It's lasted a while as I've been looking
through Nehemiah and particularly the great gathering of God's
people. So they had two problems, didn't
they? They had a big problem about
themselves, but the biggest problem that those people had was the
problem of idolatry, was it not? Their God, to them, was a God
who looked upon the things that they came with their hands to
bring to God, thinking that God, the true and living God, the
one they call Lord, Lord, emphatically declaring Him to be Lord. They
actually thought that God would be pleased with those things,
and God would reward them because of those things that they had
done. Aren't they like countless multitudes
around us today? They actually think God benefits
from the things that they do. They actually think that God
not only benefits from the things they do, they actually have told
us, and they will tell you if you get an opportunity, that
God is actually placed under an obligation to reward them
with extra crowns, extra prizes in heaven, a seat, as it were,
closer to the throne. But just as we might look up
to them here on earth because of their good deeds, we might
look up to them in heaven because of their good deeds. See the
problem, the problem of humanity isn't it, the problem for all
of us is that in our hearts we actually love idols. We love to create an idol. An idol that makes us comfortable
with who we are. An idol who will reward us. You see, the problem as we come
to Nehemiah chapter nine, the problem for the people of Israel
is why had they gone away? Why had they been cast out of
this land? Why are they being cast away
into Babylon? They were cast away into Babylon
because of idolatry. They actually had for a God,
a God who is not the God of Scripture anymore. And this city, this
city of Jerusalem, And this temple, where the place where he was
to be declared, his name was to be declared, his character
was to be declared. And the people created idolatry
in their hearts. They actually had a God. One
of the things they claim about their God is that their God doesn't
see. That's what they said. God doesn't
see. in fact you can read about it
in Ezekiel chapter 8. They talk about a God who doesn't
see and yet Jerusalem was the place where the God who does
see and does see all lives. They also created an idol of
God who allowed them to say peace, peace to each other. The priests
said peace and the people said peace, peace to each other. In
fact, they were under the judgment of God. In Nehemiah, we have a remarkable
restoration. in response to God's promise.
He promised to cast them out. He promised in that casting out
that he would be as a little sanctuary for a group of them.
And in a sense, he took them to Babylon and he nurtured them
and he cared for them in Babylon. And at the time of his choosing,
he brought them back. And over a long period of time,
he sent Cyrus He calls Cyrus to send those men back, Sheol
to El and Zerubbabel, to build the temple of God again, to build
the place of sacrifice, the place for God to have his name. And remarkably, generations went
on, generations and generations went on. And the temple of God
was a place where there was open access, a wall was down, and
the enemies on the outside could come and go from Jerusalem. But
in the book of Nehemiah, we have God raising up a people, God
raising up a man, and God coming and rebuilding a wall. You see, God is only going to
be worshipped in a place that bears his name, in a place that
honours his character, in a place where there's a gathered people
of God as these are in Nehemiah. They are gathered together, they
are separated from the people around them, they have God's
Word delivered to them. And the purpose of it all, as
we see in chapter 9, is that God's true character will be
revealed. All things about revealing God
are done in a sacred assembly. according to the manner. So if you turn in your Bibles
we'll read a section of chapter 8 and then I'd like you to come
with me to chapter 9 and really we just want to look at one verse
in chapter nine, but we need to set a context for it. And
so this is the culmination, isn't it? God has gathered his people
together. God has revealed his covenant
faithfulness to them. And they have this day, the law
read to them, and they wept as the law convicted them of their
sin. the sins of themselves and the
sins of their fathers. And in chapter 8 verse 9 we have
a Nehemiah who was the governor and Ezra the priest and the 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 of the Lord. And 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 the Lord,
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 to drink and to send portions
and rejoice greatly, because they understood the words that
were declared to them. They had felt the sting of the
law, and they had experienced the promise of the gospel. And in the last part of chapter
8, the people gather together in booths. That feast which was
a feast at the end of the harvest, the in-gathering, a feast that
symbolized the resurrection of the Lord and the gathering of
all His people. And it hadn't, according to verse
17, the whole assembly of those who had returned from captivity
made booths and sat under the booths, for not since the days
of Joshua the son of Nun until that day the children of Israel
had not done so. I hadn't done it, I hadn't celebrated
this celebration for nearly 800 years. There it was, written
in the book of God, and there was very great gladness. also day by day from the first
day until the last 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 manner according to the prescribed
manner chapter 9 now on the 24th day of this month the children
of israel were assembled with fasting and sackcloth and with
dust on their heads. And those of the Israelite lineage
separated themselves from all foreigners. and they stood and
confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers.
They stood up in their place and read from the book of the
law of the Lord their God for one fourth of the day. For another
fourth they confessed and worshipped the Lord their God. Then Jeshua,
Barney, Cadmiel, Shebaniah, Buni, Sherebiah, Barney, and Chennai,
stood on the stairs of the Levites, and cried out with a lower voice
to the Lord their God, and the Levites, Jeshua, Kadmi, Urbani,
Hashbaniah, Cherubiah, Hodejah, Shebaniah, and Pethetiah said,
And here we have the culmination of all this, 800 years of waiting,
70 years of exile, another 100 plus years of this city being
a desolate wasteland, a temple finished, but no worship of God. Why does God gather his people
together? Why has God done all of this? He's done it to reveal his true
character. And his true character is often
one that shocks us. And it shocks the religious world
enormously. One of the things I like about
travelling is that you get to meet people in the most extraordinary
circumstances. I was travelling on a bus. in
America from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. I don't even know
where they are, but they're on the map somewhere. But on this
bus, there was a spare seat next to me, and on the bus was a trainee
bus driver. He was an African-American guy,
and so as a trainee bus driver, he wasn't allocated a seat, and
he had to sit on the steps. downstairs and sort of learn
how to do things. But after he'd been sitting on
the steps for a little while, it was a long bus trip, it was
about eight hours, anyway, he was feeling very uncomfortable
and he looked around on the bus for a seat. And there was only
one seat on the bus. So this man came up and asked
whether he could have the seat next to me and I was very happy
and we sat down and we talked. We talked and this guy was a
pastor. He was a pastor and now he was
an evangelist. And he was hoping when his four
children got a little bit more independent, he was going back
to being a pastor. And so we had the Bible open
and we started talking about God. started talking about the true
and living God, a God who's absolutely sovereign, the God who is. And the longer we went on, I'm
pleased to say, the longer we went on, the more distressed
this man was. A couple of times he buried his
head in his lap and wept because he realized that the God that
he believed was the true and living God was not the God of
this book. It was a different God altogether. And we talked about the seriousness
of it. When I was in India, I was providentially caused to read,
to teach Mark's Gospel for five years. And in Mark chapter 9,
there's a verse that says, if you leave one of these little
ones astray, It may mean you, Noah, but in the Lord's eyes,
all of us are little ones. It's better for you to be a rotting
corpse with a millstone around your neck at the bottom of the
Sea of Galilee than to lead one of these little ones astray.
I used to have sleepless nights. We had 25 little ones in our
dorm and I was teaching another 60 or 70 or 80 little ones out
there. If I misrepresent God to them,
if I tell lies to them about the character of God, God says,
I'm better to have been, I'm better to be a rotting corpse
in the Sea of Galilee than to be on the shore living and telling
people about a God who is not the God of the Scripture. Anyway, this man's name, believe
it or not, was Christian. and he's got our website and
maybe Christians listening to this sermon today and I do pray
that Christian would take the things that brought him such
deep and serious conviction and he would go to the real God and
he would pray that the real God would come and meet with him
and graciously forgive the idolatry that he has been involved in.
All of us, brothers and sisters, have been involved in idolatry,
and we have polluted ourselves and polluted others by it. What
a gracious God we have. What a gracious God. As you read
chapter 9, go home and read it, and you'll find over and over
again that he's gracious and merciful, ready to pardon, abundant
in kindness. He has manifold mercies, abundant
mercies, according to your mercies. What an amazing mercy from God
we have today to be able to come to his word and to seek him. as these men did. Here they are,
this first, in a sense, worship service of God for all these
hundreds of years, according to the prescribed manner. And
these men, led by God the Holy Spirit, speak. And this is their
prayer. They say, stand up and bless
the Lord your God forever and ever. The word bless means to
speak well of. The closest English word we have
to it is eulogy. At anyone's funeral, everyone
speaks well, except for one funeral I've been at where no one could
manage to find anything nice to say about a certain cousin
of mine. But stand up, stand up, people,
and bless the Lord your God forever and ever. Blessed be your glorious
name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You made heaven, the heaven of
heavens with all their hosts, the earth and everything in it,
the seas and all that is in them. You preserve them all. The host of heaven worships you. You are the Lord God who chose
Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave
him the name Abraham. You found His heart faithful
before You and made a covenant with Him to give the land of
the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites,
the Jebusites and the Gergesites, to give it to His descendants.
You have performed Your words, for You are righteous. What a great and awesome and
amazing God we have. But let's just look at this verse.
Stand up and speak well of the Lord your God forever and ever. That's what heaven's about, isn't
it? That's what heaven on earth is about. Standing up and speaking
well of the Lord your God. And then the Holy Spirit leads
these men to say, Blessed be your glorious name. which is
exalted above all blessing and honour. It's one of the remarkable characteristics
of our God, is the singularity of Him. The fact that He creates
all and sustains all and is above all. The greatest words of grace
in the scriptures, greatest words in all the scriptures in a sense,
are in those ones that begin our scriptures. Simple words,
aren't they? In the beginning, God. In the beginning, God. There
was no heaven. There were no angels, there was
no earth, there was no universe to be upheld by the word of His
power. From everlasting to everlasting. The Bible speaks in terms of
time, so that we will get some understanding of it. Just like
God says that he holds the waters of the world in the palm of his
hand. About a dessert spoonful. It's
really just a picture so that we can get an idea of how big
God is. There was in a sense a time everlasting,
as he calls it, from before the foundation of the world. where there was just God, God
in perfect unity, God in perfect community, self-contained, self-sufficient,
self-satisfied, in need of absolutely nothing. In fact, if he'd needed
creation, it would have existed forever. As an old hymn writer
said, if thou had needest anything, nothing could you have made. The creation comes out of God's
self-sufficiency. You see, when creation came into
existence, when God said those remarkable words... Is that someone? We've left the door open, sorry. So when he called creation into existence,
my point is, and the point of the scriptures is, that it added nothing to God essentially. He said those remarkable words,
Light be, and then light was. But God was above all of it. He changes not. He doesn't change. He is God. He is the great I am God. in his essential being and in
his glory, nothing is ever added to him and nothing is diminished
by the things that happen in creation. He was not constrained
to create anything. He was not obliged to create
anything. He didn't need to create. But why did he create? He works all things after the
counsel of His will. He did these things for His sovereign
pleasure. He created these things and He's
ruled every tiny bit of history to display His manifest glory. Stand up and speak well of the
Lord your God forever and ever Blessed be that glorious name
which is exalted above all blessing and praise. You see what the
words are saying? God doesn't gain even from our
worship. Blessedly true. He's glorious
enough in Himself without the external glory of His grace which
comes from His redeemed. So why? Why this redeemed assembly? Why this assembly gathered within
the walls that He builds at His temple? the place where His sacrifice,
His Son, is revealed, under His Word, with hearts moved by His
grace, with hearts moved by the revelation of His goodness and
His joy. Ephesians 1 verse 5 says, to
the praise of the glory of His grace according to the good pleasure
of His will. Our God is unchanged and our
God is unchanging. It's impossible for man to bring
the Almighty under any obligations to the creature. It's delightfully
true that God in His essential being gains nothing from us. He gains great glory through
His manifest grace in saving and redeeming. That the glory
is His and the glory is His Son, and the glory that He gives His
Son is shared with us as a gift, not as a reward for works. When Paul finishes that great
exposition of salvation by free and sovereign grace, in Romans
11 he comes in a sense to the culmination of that passage. And he says in verse 33, O the
depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments
and his ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of
the Lord? Or who has become his counsellor? or who has first given to him
that it should be repaid to him? And then he says, the reason
for this is because of him and through him and to him are all
things. To whom? To him be the glory
forever and ever. It's impossible to bring the
Almighty under obligations to the creature. As Job says, if
thou be righteous, what givest thou him? Or what receiveth he
of thine hands? What does he receive from you? Thy wickedness may hurt a man
as thou art. and thy righteousness may profit
the Son of Man, but it certainly cannot affect God, who is all
blessed in himself. In Luke 17, we are reminded that
when we've done all that we should have done, what sort of servants
are we? Unprofitable servants. It's a
delightful place. for us to be humbled before an
almighty sovereign God. The Creator is unaffected in
His essential being and glory by His creatures. The Lord Jesus
revealed the glory of God to us. But Psalm 16 says that His
goodness reached to the sons of man. It reached to us. My goodness extendeth not to
you, says the Lord Jesus. God is essential and complete
in himself in the Trinity. The nations are but a drop in
the bucket. The United States is a mighty
superpower, and they have a lot that is worthy of bragging about
from a human perspective. God says they are as nothing. A little bit of dust on the scales
is China. America, Australia. You blow it away so that it doesn't
get caught up when you're weighing your potatoes. Just nothing. All of these exalted works of
man. but the only potentate, says
1 Timothy 16, King of kings and Lord of lords, who only hath
immortality, dwelling in light which no man can approach unto,
whom no man has seen nor can see, to him to whom be honour
and power everlasting. See, God has a counsel. My counsel shall stand, I will
do all my pleasure. See, such a God is to be revered. His purpose in bringing these
people back here was to show himself as covenantally faithful. His word stands sure forever. But he's to be revered as awesome,
as holy and separate. He's solitary in his majesty. He's peerless in his perfections. He sustains all. He holds, upholds
this universe by the word of his power. He sustains everything,
but he's independent of all. He gives to all, but is enriched
by none. And this God is a God who is
only known by revelation. Revelation to the heart by the
Holy Spirit through His Word. He takes this Word that reveals
the character of God. You see, in verse 6 of Nehemiah
9, He says, You alone are the Lord. There are no other lords. They are the figments of man's
imagination. You made heaven, the heaven of
heavens, the earth and everything in it, the seas and all that
is in them. You alone are the Lord. You make everything. You preserve them all. And the hosts of heaven worship
you. And you are the Lord God who
chose Abraham and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans. You see, God in His sovereignty,
He makes, He preserves, and He chooses. And He does it all according
to the pleasure of His own will. It's this sovereign grace. Why
are these people back there? Why this group? Forty-something
thousand. Why are they back there? When
you think of that nation, two million across the Red Sea, they
were planted in a land flowing with milk and honey, preserved
by God. And here they are a thousand
years later. reduced to just 43,000. Just a picture, isn't it? A picture
of the fact that God, in His choosing, chooses remnants. He chooses particular people. He chose Abraham. Why? Was Abraham better than any other
idolatess in Ur of the Chaldees? Were you any better? Have we
done anything? Have we done anything? Have we
anything in our hands which we can say to God, You must reward
me because of this? Sovereign grace reveals God in
His true character to us. as sovereign, predestinating,
choosing, redeeming particularly, preserving and keeping and carrying
His little ones close to His heart and taking them to heaven
all for the praise of the glory of His grace. We are but the
recipients of it. And God's children delight, they
are made to delight in God as He really is revealed in His
true character. So I don't know what's going
to happen to my friend on the bus, but we spent three or four
hours and we read this book, bits of this book from Genesis
to Revelation, looking at the character of God. the absolute
sovereignty of God, the fact that God chooses a particular
people, that those particular people were given to the Lord
Jesus before the foundation of the world, that the Lord Jesus
and God the Father and the Holy Spirit entered into that covenant
and He, He, our great Redeemer and our great Saviour, took absolute
Complete responsibility for all of them. He said, they are mine. In fact, he says, they are my
jewels. They are all my delight. He says of them, that particular
group, you have ravished my heart. And in Nehemiah, he gathers a
group together to symbolize his elect. And on the outside are
nations. Just think of how big those nations
were. Egypt just down the road to the
south, all of Africa just down the road, all of Assyria, Babylon,
India just across, Greece, Rome, Russia, China, nations of the
world, and he gathered that particular group. to symbolise the gathering
of His elect from all the nations of the world. So sovereign grace
creates, sovereign grace sustains and sovereign grace produces
fruit and sovereign grace reveals the character of God and God's
children are made to delight in his character. Nicodemus was
a bright, bright man. He was the teacher of Israel. He was the head of the best Bible
college in all of Israel. He knew this book. He could start
at Genesis 1-1 and he could quote almost all of it. And he didn't
have a clue about who God was. And God was standing in his midst,
and he didn't know who he was. God was standing in the midst
of those people for three and a half years and said, I am God. And yet, out of all that nation,
all those people who heard, all those people who witnessed. It
was, in a sense, but a remnant again, wasn't it? We read with
rejoicing the 3,000 on the day of Pentecost and the thousands
that were added afterwards. We're talking about thousands
out of millions. Thousands out of millions. The
natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to them.
Our God is a God who gathers His people and He sustains them. You see, the Lord God, the true
God, makes His worshippers. You know, know ye that the Lord,
He is God, and that He made us, not we ourselves, we are His
people, the sheep of His pasture, of His own will begatting us
by the word of truth. So the worshippers of idols are
making their own gods and they keep making them and they have
to keep propping them up and sustaining them. The true God
is known by self-revelation, only by the revelation of truth
and grace in Christ. Paul is a pattern. In Galatians
1 he says, but when it pleased God, who separated me from my
mother's womb and called me by His grace to reveal His Son in
me. All the idols are dependent upon
human teachers. The true God reveals himself
in his true character and he causes his people to delight
in him. He who is truly God prompts the
work of all his servants. You can read it in Nehemiah and
in Ezra. The people whose heart the Lord
had moved came back. And God moved their hearts. And
when the work is done, everyone sees that God has done it, not
clever and wise people. He inspires worship. He sends
labourers into his vineyard. He gives pastors after his own
heart. He sends his people. all the
idols must be prompted by their worshippers. They are in need
of something. Our God is a giver. He's not someone who's put into
debt. The true God commands His position
by the power, by the might of His power and grace. The true God performs His mighty
deeds and commands his worshippers to be still. God that made the
world and all things therein, seeing that he is the Lord of
heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither
is worship with man's hands as though he needed anything, seeing
he giveth life to all and breath to all things. You see, the very essence of
the covenant of grace is God giving to us what He requires
of us. It honors Him and it exalts His
grace. And God's people find their peace. They find their rest in Him. as he is revealed. It pleased
God. That's why things happen, don't
they? It pleased God. It pleased God to make you who
believe his people. to put all the fullness of the
Godhead's grace and glory in His dear and precious Son. It
pleased God to bruise His Son in the place of His people. It pleased God to reveal Christ
in us. It pleases God to save sinners
by the foolishness of preaching. Sinners will be saved by the
revelation of who God is in the gospel. And sinners can't be
saved, can't be saved eternally by a God who is but an idol. My prayer is that God would make
us to be in awe of Him He would, Hezebekuk 2.20 says, God, our
holy God is in His temple, His holy temple. Let all the earth
keep silent before Him. Let all the earth hush. I'll finish with these words
from Isaiah 25.9, Lo, this is our God. We have waited for
Him and He will save us. This is the Lord. We have waited
for Him. We will be glad and rejoice in
His salvation. May the true and living God be
your God. May He be my God. May He be our God.