I think you have before you there
Nehemiah chapter 8. I've typed it all out so that
you could have it for your perusal for the next couple of weeks.
I thought we might just read the first section of it. The title of my message tonight
is When God Gathers His People to Worship. And we'll just look
briefly at the elements of it here because it's a A remarkable
scene. We have 43,600 people gathered
in this city that now has a wall of protection. And this is the
first, in a sense, public event And in a sense, it's the culmination
of all of those activities that we've been looking at through
the earlier chapters of Nehemiah. Nehemiah 8 verse 1. And all the
people gathered themselves together as one man into the street that
was before the water gate. And they spake unto Ezra the
scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord
had commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the
law before the congregation, both of men and women, and all
that could hear with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh
month. And he read therein before the
street, that was before the water gate, from the morning until
midday, before the men and the women and those that could understand,
and the ears of all the people were attentive. unto the Book
of the Law. And Ezra the scribe stood upon
a pulpit of wood, which they had made for the purpose. And
beside him stood Matatiah, and Shema, and Ananiah, and Uriah,
and Hilkiah, and Massiah on his right hand. And on his left hand,
Petahiah, Mishael, Malchiah, Hashem, Hashbadanah, Zechariah
and Mishalom. And Ezra opened the book in the
sight of all the people, for he was above all the people.
And when he opened it, all the people stood up. And Ezra blessed
the Lord, the great God. And all the people answered,
Amen, Amen, with lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads
and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also
Jeshur and Barney, and Sherabiah and Jamin, Akub, Shabbatiah,
Hodijah, Messiah, Keletar, Azariah, Josabad, Hanun, Pellaiah, and
the Levites caused the people to understand the law and the
people stood in their place. So they read in the book of the
law of God distinctly and gave the sense and caused them to
understand the reading. And Nehemiah, which is the Tersheter,
and Ezra the priest, the scribe, and the Levites that taught the
people, said unto all the people, This day is holy unto the Lord
your God. Mourn not, nor weep. For all
the people wept when they heard the words of the Lord. Then he
said unto them, go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet,
and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared. For
this day is holy unto our Lord. Neither be ye sorry, for the
joy of the Lord is your strength. So the Levites stilled all the
people saying, hold your peace, for the day is holy, neither
be ye grieved. Our God is a God who gathers
his people. And here we have this remarkable
culmination, in a sense, of all of this work. The temple had
been, these people had been back in Jerusalem for a long time
now. The decree of Cyrus was in about
537 BC, and the first Jews returned 536 BC, and they began building
the temple in 535 BC, and then it was stopped almost immediately.
In 520, the work was renewed under Haggai and Zechariah, and
in 516, the temple was completed. But here we are much, much later. Nehemiah rebuilt the wall in
444. It's remarkable, isn't it, how
long it was from the time that the temple was decreed to be
built. But God's time and God's ways
are not ours. And God's purpose in it all is
for His glory. And the time it's taken is for
His glory. And this day that we read about
here is holy unto our God. It's God's day of God's gathering
and His gathering of His people to worship. And here we have
this wonderful scene, don't we, with the people surrounded in
this city of Jerusalem which is still desolate and still very
largely uninhabited. But there is this temple and
these people with Ezra in front of the temple and the wall behind
them, this crowd of people there, are finally gathered in this
city. Ezekiel says the name of the
city from that day shall be the Lord is there. This is God's
place to declare God's glory and here are these people whose
hearts have been moved. Let's see what Nehemiah, what
the Holy Spirit through Nehemiah shows us that happens when God
moves men's hearts and when God moves people to worship Him. This is all to His glory. It was He who sent them away
in justice and judgment and love, and He has brought them back
in faithfulness and love. Let's read verse 1. And all the
people gathered themselves together as one man. You see, the worship
of God is a communal activity. We only worship God when we worship
Him as He gathers His people together and He gathers them
around Himself and what He has done and in His place. True worship
is communal. And all the gifts that God ever
bestows upon His people are for the communal good, for the congregation's
good. If God has gifted you, then your
gifts are for me and your brothers and sisters around you. How does
the Holy Spirit put it? In these ascension gifts that
the Lord Jesus has given to His people, He who descended is also
the one who ascended far above all the heavens, that he might
fill all things. And he himself gave some to be
apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and
teachers, for this reason, for the equipping of the saints,
for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,
till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge
of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature
of the fullness, of Christ. God's purpose in gathering us
together is that His Son be glorified. The gifts that He bestows on
us are gifts that He gives generously and purposefully. And we see
that as we gather together and as we deal with each other. We
see that what God has done in the lives of other people is
just flowing out at His appointed time into the lives of others
of His people. Worship is communal. Colossians says that whole body,
all the body nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments
grows with an increase that is from God. These people are gathered
together. They are gathered by God. They
are gathered as one man. The differences whether they
be family differences, wealth differences, social status, political
status, whether it was the differences
caused by the sins that we have read about, those sins of the
rich nobles enslaving their poor brethren, all of these differences
put aside they are as one man even the young if you go down
to verse 2 it talks about men and women and all that could
hear with understanding the gathering is to people like you Jack and
Angus, Colossians 3.12, we were just there a minute ago. Therefore
as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tenderness, tender
mercy, kindness, humility, meekness, long-suffering, bearing with
one another and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint
against another, even as Christ forgave you. So you must also
do. And above all these things, put
on love, which is the bond of perfection. They gathered this
crowd, this enormous crowd, from all of these different families
and all of these different circumstances. Some had been there for some
considerable time. Some had come back early on. Some had come later. Some had
come like Nehemiah with great political power and prestige. Some had come as an elevated
man of the priesthood like Ezra, but they gathered there as one
man. And they gathered in the place
established by God for His worship. Jerusalem now, with its temple
and its wall, is established again as a fit place. And as I said, the name of this
city is The Lord is There. There they are gathered at this
place where the temple, in every part of that temple, represents
the Lord Jesus, the meeting place between God and man. God will
not be worshipped or even approached by man except through his mediator. We can have no dealings with
God unless it's through the Lord Jesus. And that we have the temple
in the foreground, and behind them, protecting and separating
them, we have this wall. And we have in that wall these
gates that signify that there is a way, and it's only God's
way, into this place of gathering and worship. I am the way, the
truth, The life. No one comes to the Father except
through me. But here, these people that are
gathered by God, with their hearts moved, they are as one man, and
what do they want to hear? When God moves the hearts of
people, they spoke to Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the
law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded to Israel. They
have a longing, they have a desire for the word of God. And the
Holy Spirit doesn't record any prompting from Ezra and Nehemiah
to do this. This seems as if God is saying
He moved the hearts of His people that the Word of God would be
central. We speak so much about revival
and people long for revival. But when God restores worship
of Himself, when God institutes worship of Himself, the people's
hearts are going to be moved by the Word of God. They knew
that Ezra, as a scribe, had a copy of the Word of the Lord. And
this Word was read publicly in verse 3. He read therein before
the street that was before the water gate. He read there from
morning till noon. Ezra and those who stood beside
him read for six hours. And for all of that time, these
people were captivated by what God's Word said. They were gripped by a desire
and a hunger for the Word of God. It became to them a living
thing. It had gone from being something
that was in the hands of the priest to something that moved
their hearts. How many of you here can testify
about that being the way the Lord brought you to Himself and
brought you, in a sense, to restoration and revival? God's word becomes
powerful. It becomes something that God's
people hunger and thirst for. Even as if we will see in Nehemiah,
it is a word which brings conviction. It's the word that brings life. We are brought forth by the word
of truth. And it's that same word that
brings life, brings new life again and again. All of us go
through times where we are languishing in our faith and it seems as
if the things of heaven have lost any of their joy and their
glow and their luster for us. and worship and prayer and Bible
reading is just a chore, or if we're really honest, it just
doesn't happen. But where God has begun a good
work and he begins it through his word, through his word he
will bring that restoration, he'll bring that revival. We've
had a tough week in many ways this week. I've struggled more
than I let on, and it's a shame. But we all do, I think, in lots
of ways. But when I read these words in Joel this morning, just
looking around in God's Word without any particular purpose.
It says, the Lord will also roar from Zion and utter His voice
from Jerusalem. The heavens and the earth will
shake, but the Lord will be a shelter for His people and the strength
of the children of Israel. We keep looking in ourselves
and looking for things around that would give us evidence of
our strength. Jarl 3.16 says, the Lord is the
strength of the children of Israel. This is his word. This is his
work. And God's children will rest
delightedly in it. And this Word of God will be
in the hands of a God-gifted and God-appointed man. As Ephesians 4 says that God,
our Saviour, when He went on high, He gave gifts to men, didn't
he? He gave some to be apostles,
some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers. Jeremiah 3.15 says that God will
give his people pastors after his own heart, shepherds according
to my heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding. And here we have this scene.
Ezra the scribe stood on a pulpit of wood. Everything is simple. Everything is plain. There are
no adornments here. It is just a man sent from God
with God's Word being read aloud and being preached. Everything
is plain and simple. God's Word is sufficient to bring
new life. God's Word is sufficient to restore
dull life. And Ezra stood on this pulpit
that was made for the purpose and it was raised up so that
all could hear him and see him. And Ezra stood there with these
priests and these Levites together, and they stood there as one man. The people of God, those who
are born by God's Spirit, speak together. Your watchmen shall
lift up their voices. With their voices they shall
sing together, for they shall see eye to eye. When the Lord
brings back Zion, break forth into joy, sing together, you
waste places of Jerusalem. For the Lord has comforted his
people, he has redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord has made bare his holy
one. His holy arm in the eyes of all
the nation and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation
of our God. They will speak together as one
and there will be no dissension amongst them. And he wasn't just
there on his own, verse 7 says that there are others who caused
the people to understand the law and the people stood in their
place. And so this crowd that may be
numbered 50,000 had Ezra speaking from this platform with these
people who probably assisted him in the reading. So that was
the 13 of them, they probably read for about half an hour each
that morning. And then out on the periphery
of this community, this gathering of God's people, were these other
men who caused the people to understand the law. And when
Ezra gets up to speak, he does the things that our Lord Jesus
does for us as our great high priest. He spoke to God on behalf
of the people in other parts of the history, we read what
their blessing was. This is how they normally blessed
the people. Blessed art thou, O Lord our
God, King of the world, who has chosen us out of all people and
given us his law. Blessed art thou, O Lord, who
has given us the law. And all the people answer, Amen. You see, Ezra spoke to God on
behalf of the people and they all joined in worshipping him.
And then God spoke through Ezra to the people. And here in Nehemiah
we have a wonderful description in verse 8 of what preaching
is. So they read in the book of the
law of God They read it distinctly, gave the sense, and caused them
to understand the reading. Everything is focused on the
Word of God. They read in the Book of the
Law distinctly. We stand behind these wooden
platforms and we speak to immortal souls going to eternity in the
name of God. And to do that, and to be free
of the blood of the men before us, we must preach the book of
God. and we must preach and read the
book of God as we are assembled. The public reading of scripture
is vital to worship. It is to be read with clarity. is to be read with conviction,
and is to be read with care, and is to be read authoritatively. This is God's Word. They are
not my words, they are God's words. They have come from heaven
this day to you, and they will return to God, having achieved
His purpose. They read in the Book of the
Lord distinctly. They gave the sense. They expound
the text, giving the meaning of it as it stands in the Word
of God. To give the sense is to give
faithfully the message of God the Holy Spirit in the text. was probably an old man and he
had been trained and been training and preparing for this for many
years. He had been diligent, he had
prayed and he had studied. And they read the book of God
in such a way, and they expounded it in such a way, that people
saw how it fitted together. It's a book about Jesus Christ. It's a book about God and His
salvation. It's a book that declares the
character of God and the work of God. And all of that centers
on His Son. And he calls them to understand
the reading. We need, if God will allow us,
those of us who stand behind here, to be clear in what we
are saying. It's something I pray for as
much as anything else, that God would make the words that come
from this pulpit clear and simple. that they would glorify God,
that they would honor His Son, that they would be simple, they
would be plain, they would be bold, and people would go away
and say, that's what the book says, that's what God says. Not that's what man says. That's
not what man takes the verse of scripture and hangs a whole
bunch of his thoughts on it. You don't need to know my thoughts.
You need to know what God says about these things. God's word
and God's meaning of the text is really, really special and
important. So when God gathers his people
to worship, They come as one, they hear the Word of God from
a man appointed by God. And this Word becomes living
and active. It becomes living and active
in the hearts of these people who see, as these people did,
that place of sacrifice before them. and know that place of
protection and know that place of distinction. We saw in the
previous chapter that there were people included and people excluded. And the opposition to God's work
was an opposition that was raised and inflamed by God saying that
this is a boundary. This is a boundary that declares
who God is. and how he is to be worshipped,
and what is his truth, and inside is light, inside is security,
and outside is darkness, inside is grace, outside is works. It's all about God and his gathering. It's not about man. The thing
that's remarkable, of course, is that the people who just heard
a reading from the book of Moses may have been Deuteronomy. It
may have been other sections from Exodus. It may, over that
time that they were gathered here, they may have read all
of those five books of Moses. But look what happens. to these
people. When God gathers and God's word
comes with power, minds are moved to understand. Just look at the
number of times we have that word understand in just this
short passage of scripture. Verse 2, all that could hear
with understanding. Verse 3, those that could understand. Verse 7, caused the people to
understand the law. Verse 8, caused them to understand
the reading. Verse 12, because they had understood
the words. and verse 13, even to understand
the words of the law. When it's declared with simplicity,
God works in the hearts of his people through his word becoming
powerful and active. He starts with a word, and that
word moves the minds of people to understand what must these
people have understood as they had that book of the law read
to them. They would have understood about
the fact that they were a remarkably blessed people. Jerusalem was
destroyed a little over a hundred years before this, because of
the sin and the wickedness of people. These people are nearly
all descendants of a people who God picked up out of that terrible
scene of judgment and destruction and took them to Babylon. He
says, I will be a sanctuary for them in Babylon. He grew them
and nurtured them there. He brought them back to this
land and separated them from the people around them. They
are a remarkably privileged people. They are brought to see by the
grace of God that the power of God in saving them is incredibly
unique and special. that they, like their brothers
and sisters before them, had sinned and sinned grievously,
and yet they are in a place of God's protection and a place
of God's sacrifice. They are, by the word of God,
brought to a conviction of sin. You can read it there in verse
9. after having had the law read
distinctly, the meaning given, and understanding, for all the
people wept when they heard the words of the law. They heard
from God what their sin deserved. They were moved by God to see
how incredible forgiveness and restoration and redemption is. You see, not only did they weep
over their sin and over the sins that had caused this destruction
to come upon their brothers and sisters, They are told in the
Word of God and told by these men representing God, they're
told about the joy of forgiveness. That God delights in mercy. He delights in showing His glory
in the forgiveness of His people, in gathering them to Himself.
It's holy to the Lord. This day is holy to the Lord
your God. Mourn not, nor weep. Then he said to them, verse 10,
go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions
to them for whom nothing is prepared. For this day is holy unto our
Lord. Neither be ye sorry. They had so much to be sorrowful
for. Because the joy of the Lord. So whose joy is it? It's the
joy of the Lord is your strength, brothers and sisters. God delights
in His people because He delights in His Son. He delights in His
Son's righteousness. He delights in His Son's sacrifice. He delights in His Son's sovereignty,
and He delights in His Son's bride. The joy of the Lord is
your strength. For the joy set before Him, the
Lord Jesus endured the cross. Our God is a God who has great
delight, great delight in saving His people, great delight in
gathering His people to Himself, great delight in bringing a oneness
of spirit amongst His people, in honouring His word, in honouring
His law, in honouring His Son in the lives of His people. May
the joy of the Lord be your strength. Brothers and sisters, let's pray.