Profaning the Sabbath - Part 1

Very good singing. If you remain standing, I'll read Exodus chapter 20, verses 8 through 11. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. on it you shall not do any work you or your son or your daughter your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day therefore Yahweh blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy you may be seated we have been reviewing the ten commandments and we've got through three commandments and now we've been speaking about the Sabbath command for I think two weeks now all of the commandments were prefaced by the fact that they are all part of the perpetuity of God's law though that they all still apply and so I have a temptation when I get to the fourth commandment in our series that I need to somehow reprove what we've already proven which is that the ten commandments are binding on all men of all ages and so I'm going to try to avoid doing so and I want you to keep that in your mind though that we live in a culture where even most Christians will tell you that this is not a command that you have been commanded to obey.

So we have ten commandments, and every one of them is hated by godless pagans, and every one of them is hated by all of us in our flesh in Adam before we're regenerated. but for some reason God has seen fit for the Sabbath command to be one that his people have chosen to explicitly deny in our current dispensation if you'll allow me to use that word and if you won't allow me to use it we can talk about the fact that they can have more than one meaning so when we talk about the Sabbath day we have a few questions that we will naturally come up. And so the command is that you're not to work on the Sabbath day. So there's a few questions that come up, some of which I'm going to try to answer today, some of which I'm reminding you I understand are open questions that we should answer.

One of them is, when is the Sabbath? There was most clearly a Sabbath on the seventh day of creation. Most of us, I think, understand that to be the last day of the week or Saturday, And that was when the Sabbath was observed throughout all the time until Jesus came. And even while Jesus walked this earth, there was the Saturday Sabbath. And most people believe that the Saturday Sabbath no longer exists.

And now that we are in the New Testament, there is a group of people called Seventh Day Adventists. And you can look them up if you dare to online. but Seventh-day Adventists, or sometimes abbreviated the SDA Church, one of the most famous members of it being Ben Carson, the former presidential candidate for the Republican Party, is a group of heretics. They're a group of people that preach a works-based salvation, in particular denying what we now know to be the Sunday Sabbath.

So one of the questions that we'll have to answer is, Why do we call it the Sunday Sabbath now and rather than continue to celebrate it on Saturday? Another question people will ask, which is a very common question, and I want to get into some text here. But the problem with trying to go verse by verse through the Ten Commandments is you get to the verses in Exodus and you just have to go to other sections of Scripture to teach and prove what it says.

So one of the questions that people will ask will be, well, what can I do on the Sabbath? So let's say we've all agreed that we're New Testament Christians. We believe in the perpetuity of God's law, that the perpetual universal nature of it. So the fourth commandment, you shall not work on the seventh day, is applicable to us as Christians. The question is, well, what can we do and what can't we do? if you've watched Little House on the Prairie they had their own version of how they observed the Sabbath if you read in the Old Testament there were ways that you can see that people observed the Sabbath and so we want to open some texts today to try to get some ideas for how to observe the Sabbath if you make the Sabbath something that you add laws to that God never made you now become a Pharisee and you now become somebody who has added to God's law.

If you are lackadaisical about the Sabbath and you don't enforce the Sabbath upon yourself and even others in your care, you are also in violation of God's law. And so we have to try to treat the subject very carefully because it's important. And along with treating it carefully because it's important, we want to be very gracious towards others who are at different levels of learning and people who are in different life circumstances.

So one of the things I want you to look for today is that there are certain circumstances where one thing that would be a violation of the Sabbath any other time suddenly is not a violation of the Sabbath in that circumstance. There very few of God commandments that have as many gray areas as the Sabbath There actually only two that I know of And that the ninth commandment which we get to in I don know five months or something at this pace So, anyway. One thing to note.

The seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God. It says this in verse 10 of Exodus 20. in verse 11 it says God rested on the seventh day one of the patterns that we see in scripture is that God has created a one in seven sabbath notice that it doesn't say Saturday is your sabbath it is the one in seven pattern that God has given to his people that we are to follow and And so that is actually a very clever way that God built into the very beginning of time that he could change the actual positive command of when to observe the Sabbath anytime he saw fit. And so the argument goes like this.

God told us to rest one in seven. One out of seven days we rest. this is a gift from God that you get to actually sit back and rest from your work you live in a cursed world you live in a world where your work is specifically cursed in the book of Genesis and God has said hey for one day I want you to be able to rest from your work you don't have to worry about where your food is coming from you don't have to worry about where the paycheck is coming from for one day you will acknowledge that I'm the sovereign one. It's as if God is letting you know, you're not sovereign, I am.

And for one day, you can rest, knowing that I will take care of you. And when God tells us to do this one in seven, he doesn't specify which day when he institutes the law. But he does specify a particular day in the Old Covenant, and that was Saturday. and so the Jews were expected to observe the Saturday Sabbath and the faithful Jews did so and we will see that Jesus himself also did so but when we get to the New Testament God has the prerogative because it's a one in seven pattern the commandment is obeyed if it's one in seven God has the prerogative because he's Lord of the Sabbath to change the day to Sunday and call it the Lord's Day.

And we are still obeying the same commandment that is eternal and that God gave to the people of Israel, but we have a positive enforcement to do it differently than it was done in the Old Testament. While still obeying the command, some of the specifics can be different. So that can be a little bit confusing. I understand that it is. There is no verse in Scripture that says, Thou shalt observe a Sunday Sabbath.

It just isn't. It doesn't say that word. It doesn't have that sentence. And you know, a lot of us like to believe, it's a little faithfulness and hermeneutics lesson for you. A lot of us like to believe, well, it would sure be easier if God would have made that more clear, right? And when you say something like that, when you say, oh, I wish God had just told us it was a Sunday Sabbath, then we wouldn't have to have the arguments.

You're actually arguing with God. Because God is the one who wrote the scripture the exact way that it's now been passed down to you. And for you to wish that the scripture said something differently than what it says is for you to wish that somehow God would have done something different. And God does all things well. He does all things perfectly. And so, God wants you to wrestle with the text of scripture.

He wants you to have to have the discussions with people who are Seventh-day Adventists, maybe even. I hope you don't have to have too many. They're difficult people, let me put it that way. But He wants you to wrestle with these facts. He wants you to read the Confession and read chapter 7 of paragraph 22, where it references 1 Corinthians 16 and Acts 20, verse 7, and Revelation 1-9, all in the paragraph describing the Sabbath and the Lord's Day.

He wants you to work those things out a little bit on your own with your parents, with your church, with your spouse. And so I don't want to get into all those details now because that's actually a little bit later, the Sunday part. But you're all here right now, so we'll assent to the fact that you're all at least, for argument's sake, you're giving me the chance that it's a Sunday Sabbath, right? even if I didn't prove it the confession says it so we're all bound to that in this room anyway but the command says the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God but before it gets to verse 10 it says in verse 9 six days you shall labor and do all your work this in my opinion is the forgotten part of the fourth commandment.

Most people think the fourth commandment says don't do any fun stuff on Sunday. And then they hate it. And they tell other people to hate it. And now you have a whole bunch of people that simply think that God is out there trying to reduce our fun and minimize our joy. And one of the ways he does it is by making sure that you don't get to watch the NFL or so or whatever your favorite thing is on Sunday. and that is not the God that we serve when people mischaracterize God as saying something that he never said and creating laws that he never created you set up a false God for people to hate and then people hate that God but they end up blaming the real God the Sabbath command six days you shall labor and do all your work is a reminder that you were put here to work When God put Adam in the garden one of the first things he told him to do was to take care of the garden.

And Adam named all the animals and he had work to do. The problem when the fall happened in Genesis was not that Adam suddenly had to begin working. The problem was that God said your work will be cursed. And by the sweat of your brow you're going to have thorns and thistles. And in order to even get a bite to eat, you're going to have to work probably harder than it was worth.

That's one of the reasons why we really love living in the 21st century and having a lot of technology. The fact of the matter is the amount of effort we have to put in to actually put food in our mouths in this century is probably the lowest in the history of time, at least in our country. I know there's countries where it's more difficult right now.

But your work is cursed. And so you're told to work for six days. God could have said work for seven. That's what we forget. We live in the world of weekends where we have five days of work, and then theoretically we have two days off, unless you're Elijah and you're building a patio, then just throw it all out the window, right? Or if you're a mother.

Mothers don't seem to get as much time off as other people either. If you add up the total hours they're actually doing things compared to the rest of us. But six days of labor rather than seven is actually a gift from God. We think of it as a lot because we're so used to a five-day work week where we live. But God says you're to work for six days. It's for six days that your life is dedicated to feeding yourself, feeding others, clothing yourself, clothing others, putting a roof over your own head and others' head so that we can even be meeting in this building right now. several people have to do something that makes money so that we can pay the rent to be able to be in this building in the first place and so what we have is we have this command to work and I think that we have a lost art of working I think that there's many of us who want to rest more than we ought it's part of our sinful tendency and our laziness which is built into each one of us as a child of Adam to want to work less.

And there's some incentive there. If you can do something wiser, or I'll say smarter, I don't know if that's really a word. More smarter? Is more smarter a word? No, it's not. If you can do something in a more smart way, you might be able to get more food after having worked for less time, right?

I mean, nobody invented steam engines and plows and stuff because it was harder. They did it because it made things easier. And so we have this cursed world where we have to work. But God in His kindness and in His mercy towards us says on the seventh day you shall not do any work. For one day out of seven, you have been granted the amazing gift that you can trust that God will take care of you. that you can sit back and forget about in our day and age emails and reconciliations and all these different things that we all have to worry about.

And in different days and ages it would have been farming and it would have been taking care of animals and it would have been slaughtering chickens and all the different things that homeschool families do probably once a week anyway. But here we are and we're told that you can have one day where you don't have to go out into the cursed world and do what's most difficult that's causing you so much angst. And instead of thanking God that He gives us even one day to do that, we're mostly resentful because what we are thinking about most of the time is what are we missing out on that we want.

One of the reasons why the New Testament calls Sunday the Lord's Day is a reminder that it's not yours. It is not your day. and so we're told you shall not do any work you or your son or your daughter, your male servant your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner is within your gates God knew that if he told people that they didn't have to do any work on the Sabbath that there would be some people that would make all the people in their house do all the work then and they would say well I'm obeying the Sabbath and so then they make their kid do all the work or they would hire an outsider to do the work for that day so the work would still get done. But then they would think they're technically obeying God's command.

And so God makes it very clear that you do not make your daughter's work or your son's work. You don't have servants of any kind. And now we see the word servants and we think, okay, well, we don't have servants. But literally every single time you go somewhere and pay someone to do work for you, they are your servants at that time. When you pay the barista at Starbucks, when you pay the kid at Wendy's, when you go to the gym, anywhere we go, when you're using the Internet.

There are a lot of very difficult areas of our life where we are paying somebody to be our servant. And on the Sabbath, we are supposed to try to not do that. I know there's difficulties. If you drive to church, you're using the lights on the road maybe, right? And if one of those goes out, somebody's got to come fix it sometimes. There's emergencies and there's difficulties that come up.

But we're supposed to reduce what we are employing other people for. If you go to a website, and the website works just fine on the Sabbath, and you can read articles that are about God, and you think that you're doing something good, praise the Lord for that. But if the website goes down and somebody's expected to fix it within an hour and it's on the Sabbath, you have a problem.

So these are things we have to think about. I not saying it easy I not saying I have it all solved But I am saying we should be thinking about whether or not we are causing other people to do work by employing them Yesterday this was brought up, this was a good question I thought of myself and other people thought of is, well, if somebody's going to be working anyway, what's the difference, right? So the kid at Wendy's is going to be working there anyway, what's the big deal if I stop and buy a sandwich? and there is no justification for us sinning just because somebody else is sinning.

And so if people didn't go to Wendy's, I'll use the example of Wendy's, if you didn't go to Wendy's on Sunday, and if Christians everywhere and even non-Christians were obeying the fourth commandment and not employing people at Wendy's on Sunday, Wendy's would stop opening on Sunday because it would be unprofitable. They're open because there's a demand for their product. Now, turn to Nehemiah 13.

That was a little bit of getting you started to understand what the commandment is saying. So there's Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. So in the Sabbath command, we have a command to work and a command to rest. What does it mean to work? What does it mean to rest? What is allowable on the Sabbath?

What is not? If I could give you a list, there'd be a problem. Because as soon as I gave you a list of what was okay or what was not okay, someone would find an exception to it. So I'm going to provide examples. and probably with most of the examples, someone will find an exception to it. There always seems to be an exception anyway, but part of it is with the Sabbath, there in fact comes exceptions.

God's law and obedience to God's law is always though measured by your heart. God doesn't really care what your outward actions are for the most part. God cares what your inward heart is thinking at the time you're doing the things. because you can have outward actions that comply with God's law and conform to the outward obedience that it appears to have.

And God knows deep down inside you don't love him and you're not doing it out of faith. And I think there's also, it's rarer, but there's also times that people do things that outwardly maybe appear like sin, but they actually had good motives the whole time. And God recognizes these things. so as you're thinking about the Sabbath rather than me taking notes which I don't mind if you take notes but rather than thinking to yourself okay if Michael saw me doing this on the Sabbath would he yell at me or not so rather than wondering if that's my way of keeping the Sabbath and understanding it think about to yourself why am I doing what I'm doing or why am I not doing what I'm not doing and as you're doing things week by week by week by week by week Lord willing if the Lord doesn't come for a long time you've got thousands of Sabbaths remaining Lord willing you will start to notice that as your mind is renewed by Christ and as you are thinking to yourself what ought I be doing with my time how can I be glorifying God and prioritizing God and avoiding worldly recreations and worldly secular pursuits and simply focusing on loving Him and actually enjoying that day with Him, I think you'll find yourself modifying your own behavior without somebody needing to be over your shoulder telling you yes or no.

But also I have no problem with people wanting to ask questions like, well, can I do this on this Advent? And I think it's good to ask those questions. I think some people will be critical about that. Like, well, if you have to ask, maybe you should. Well, maybe they ask because they want to do what's right, and we should help people. Jesus answers a lot of these questions in his life, though, if you're reading the Bible.

So Nehemiah 13, interesting chapter. It's the end of Nehemiah. Nehemiah is at the beginning of the Bible for all intents and purposes, and yet Nehemiah is actually like the very last thing that happens to the Israelites. So as you read Nehemiah, other than Malachi, which most people think is a contemporary of Nehemiah, this is the end. There's nothing after this that we read about historically in the Bible.

And so what Nehemiah says is kind of the final word, the final thing that's happening. And so in chapter 13, he says, On that day they read from the book of Moses, so they read God's law, and the hearing of the people, And it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God. For they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam again against them to curse them.

Yet our God turned the curse into a blessing. And it says, as soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent. So the first thing these people did when they heard God's law is they repented. and they started to separate the people that don't belong in the assembly of God. Now before this, Eliashib the priest who was appointed over the chambers of the house of our God and who was related to Tobiah prepared for Tobiah a large chamber where they had previously put the grain offering, the frankincense, the vessels, and the tithes of grain, wine, oil which were given by commandments to the Levites, singers and gatekeepers and the contributions for the priests.

And Nehemiah says, well this was taking place. I was not in Jerusalem. For the 30 year, 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I went to the king and after some time I asked leave of the king and came to Jerusalem. And then I discovered the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah preparing for him a chamber in the courts of God. So Nehemiah discovers that Eliashib, who was supposed to be the high priest taking care of business, was actually making room for people that didn't belong in the assembly of God to actually have a place to live there.

Violating the law of God to please the people around him most likely for some kind of political gain. And I was very angry, Nehemiah says, this is a righteous anger. He says, and I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber. He says, then I gave orders and they cleansed the chambers. We've got to clean this out. There was a Gentile in here.

And I brought back there the vessels of the house of God with the grain offering and the frankincense. I also found out that the portion of the Levites had not been given to them. So people had stopped paying their tithes. it says and the singers who did the work had fled each to his field so people had stopped bringing their tithes to the levites into the temple and the people who lived off it no longer could live off it and they had to just go out and work in the field and so now you had no priests left you had nobody to lead the people of god and be their mediator between them and god because the people themselves didn't want them.

And they didn't bring the tithe offering. So I don't want to turn this into a big tithing sermon, but the same thing can happen in our church today. There's a reason why we have a nation full of hirelings right now. If you don't know what that word means, I'll explain it after the sermon. But we have a nation full of hirelings right now, and we have a country that's going down the tubes fast, and there is hardly a church in every state that is standing up and able to speak against it with any credibility.

And part of it's because there's good men all over who have to show up at work five, six days a week so they can feed their own families because nobody else will take care of them so they can be out doing the work of God throughout the week. So I confronted the officials. Oh, but you can afford conferences and books and all these things that we spend all sorts of money on.

And most, I'm preaching to the choir in this room mostly, but we can afford $15 and another $9 for popcorn to go watch, you know, wicked liberals act out as the Hulk or something like that. But we can't afford $25 just to give a Christian a little help as a missionary somewhere. I think we have a priority problem. So Nehemiah is mad, right? He's starting to get things fixed, okay?

But now look at verse 15. We have three major or four major things going on here. One is the mixture of the Gentiles in the assembly of God, people stopped tithing. And now we have two more things Nehemiah is going to address. But he says, in those days, I saw in Judah people treading wine presses on the Sabbath. So basically he's just saying they were working on the Sabbath.

It's unimportant that it happens to be a wine press right here, I don't think. It's the fact that they were violating the Sabbath by working. He says they were bringing in heaps of grain and loading them on donkeys, and also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of loads, which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day and I warned them on that day when they sold food.

So people were bringing in all the fruits of their labor to sell it on the Sabbath. So there were people who were buying. Let me give you a little economic clue. Nobody sells anything that people aren't buying. So unless you have a government that's forcing people to buy it somehow, which we do have but anyway nobody buys things that nobody sells things people aren't buying okay people don't bring their food truck to the corner of nobody and no one okay they go somewhere where they're going to make some money and so people are buying the things on the sabbath they're hiring temporary servants at the very least on the sabbath and if the excuse is well they're gentiles they don't actually live under the law that's what some people might say the fourth commandment was for Israel only.

That's what people will say. I'm speaking as a fool right now. Listen, verse 16. Tyrians also, these are Gentiles, people from Tyre. They lived in the city. They brought in fish and all kinds of goods and sold them on the Sabbath to the people of Judah.

And then Nehemiah exclaims, in Jerusalem itself, he's flabbergasted. In the city of the great king, is what Jesus called Jerusalem, where people are supposed to be worshipping God. It's supposed to be the center where people can actually find out how to have a relationship with God and worship Him properly. They were letting Gentiles come in and sell on the Sabbath.

And so Nehemiah confronted the nobles of Judah and he said to them, What is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the Sabbath day? I try to be kind to people because that's biblical and I try to be courteous and nice and some of those things but this whole 21st century obsession with winsomeness and nuance and indirectly trying to get people to hear things from you is one of the reasons we have the problems we have today Nehemiah didn take these guys out for coffee and tell them what a good people he thought they were and how much he really liked them and how much they helped him with something in the past And he didn't do what do they call it, like a brother sandwich. Hey brother, let's go talk.

Nehemiah just straight up told them, what is this evil thing you're doing? These people were not murdering. These people were not stealing. they weren't forcing the government to steal from you to get money either these people were not adulterers these were people who were working to make foods and growing things and they were processing them and then they were loading them up and they were bringing them to sell to people who probably were certainly hungry and needed these things something that every other day of the week would have actually been a noble pursuit and something God created for us to do is an evil thing when it's done in violation of God's command to not do it on that one particular day.

And he calls it profaning it. And so Nehemiah reminds him, he says, did not your fathers act in this way? He's talking about the Israelites of old. He says, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? so remember the history of the Israelites is riddled with battles with death, with difficulty and the Babylonian and the Assyrian exiles where they weren't even allowed in their own land anymore because they didn't observe God's Sabbath and he looks at them and he says now you are bringing more wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath and I'll tell you what it's notable it's notable that the very next thing you see historically is basically Jesus Christ showing up and kind of saying I'm sort of done with Israel now.

I'm done with the national version of this. And if you're into the revelation thing I'm with Brian Borgman of the opinion in that Babylon is Jerusalem in Revelation. So this is not a good thing. So he says, as soon as it began to grow dark at the gates of Jerusalem, so here we've got an interesting thing. So Nehemiah is telling these guys, you're wrong.

This is evil what you're doing. Now the question is, okay, Nehemiah, what are you going to do about it? Right? Well, let's see what he does. As soon as it began to grow dark at the gates of Jerusalem before the Sabbath, I commanded that the door should be shut and gave orders that they should not be opened until after the Sabbath. So he says, okay, we're just going to keep you out of here.

Sounds easy enough, right? We'll keep you out. And I stationed some of my servants at the gates that no load might be brought in on the Sabbath day. So he makes sure you're not coming in here and you're not going to do your evil in here at least. then the merchants and the sellers of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice so here we got these guys and they're told you're not welcome here this is evil what you're doing and our people are no longer going to participate and they lodge outside and say okay okay now I'm willing to bet that on the Sabbath day some of these Israelites just still just waltzed straight out.

They found a way to get out and go get the stuff they wanted on Sunday. So they fought against Nehemiah's even trying to put up a guard for them to help them. But also it's the fact that these guys, they couldn't just observe it. They couldn't just go away and come back Monday. Or in this case it would have been Sunday. And it bothers Nehemiah that they're camped out.

And so there's a lesson here for you. When you spend your day Sunday and you're not working and you go to church and you do family worship but you spend the day in your mind and you're still at work when you're still in your mind thinking about what am I going to do Monday I can't wait to watch football tomorrow when your mind is not focused on the things of God you're no different than the guys that were lodged outside the city. They weren't observing the Sabbath.

They were just forced to do the outward behavior of observing the Sabbath, while inwardly they were simply waiting to be able to do what they wanted to do anyway. And if one of those servants had been a wicked guy, or if Nehemiah had walked away from it, they'd have violated it as soon as they could. So the question is, in your heart, are you obeying the Sabbath? because most of us most of us can fake it I guess is what I'm going to say so he warned them and he said why do you lodge outside the wall he said if you do so again I will lay hands on you okay so he's not offering to pray for them alright okay so we lay hands on an elder if we're going to get an elder we're going to do that right you know this is a threat of violence okay this is the opposite of of American Christianity 101 first of all Christianity is so unbelievably countercultural its countercultural even to the cultural version of it This is a threat of violence If you're going to, listen again, if these people showed up and said, we're going to come in and murder all your babies, and Nehemiah said, well if you even attempt that, I'm going to shoot you.

We'd say, okay, that's self-defense, you know, just like Kyle Rittenhouse this week with self-defense, you know what I mean? like, okay, we'd say that makes a little sense, right? Or if a guy said, I'm going to come and I'm going to do harm to your wife, and another guy said, I'm going to defend my wife, and he ended up hurting the guy, we'd say, well, that's great. Listen, these guys wanted to sell figs.

And Nehemiah says, keep away from this city on the Sabbath, or I'm going to come out and I'm going to hurt you. And I think because it's under the inspiration of God, we have some reasonable assumption that God's endorsing this. So I'm not telling you necessarily that that's how you're supposed to react to people in your life. Some of you may end up in a position one day as a magistrate of some kind where maybe you should be enforcing by the power of the sword that people at least have to outwardly see what the Sabbath is.

I think we'd have a better time right now in the United States if our magistrates did so. No, that's not theonomy. He says from that time on they did not come on the Sabbath. Okay, the threat of being hurt was greater than the money they'd make off some figs, right? Then I commanded the Levites that they should purify themselves and come and guard the gates and keep the Sabbath day holy.

He lets them know, hey, some of you should actually be enforcing this. And this is for dads. we should be enforcing these things. We should be enforcing it within the church. We should be enforcing it within our homes. And we need to be careful. We want to try to be compassionate and helpful to people as they learn it.

But I'll tell you what, if you teach your kids at a very young age what the Sabbath is about, it's going to be a lot easier for them to figure it out when they're older, for them. And if you make the Sabbath such a horrible, difficult thing to obey because of all of your additional laws and difficulties and anger and things like that over it, they're going to probably at least use that as the excuse when they grow up and leave the Lord. That'll be one of the excuses they use.

So take away those excuses. And if your kids elect, they're going to get saved and they're going to love it. So he commanded the Levites to guard the Sabbath. And then he just says, he just prays in the middle of this. Remember this also in my favor, oh my God. And spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love.

Nehemiah understood that even though he was like maybe the only righteous man alive at the time, you know, it's hyperbole, but he needed God's grace. That he wasn't going to go to heaven because he kept the Sabbath and tried to make others do it. He understood that. Spare me, he says. And he says, in those days, I also saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab.

So he had Jews who had intermarried with people they weren't supposed to intermarry with. and their children spoke a different language. They didn't even speak the language of Judah. They couldn't even read God's Word. So this isn't about not being multicultural. This is about not being multi-religious. You are to raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That is what you are to teach them. And you are to make relationships with people, to the extent that you have power over doing those things, that promote that for your own good and for their good. it also says in the New Testament that if you're married to an unbelieving wife, you stay with her. So if you're already in that position, you're not to put her away.

But listen, this is where I... I just fell in love with Nehemiah all over again here. And I confronted them, he said. So he confronts these guys who had gone and taken these wives they shouldn't have taken. And he cursed them. okay so you know when he says he cursed them he's saying he cursed them like like he told them woe to you he didn't you know say curse words at them and he beat some of them right okay so it's starting to get this is starting to get pretty good right forget avengers movies for a minute like this is violent okay but this is holy violence now listen and pulled out their hair so these people who were the culmination of not helping Levitical priests with the money that they needed they were the culmination of Sabbath forgetting of violating God's holy Sabbath they were the culmination of mixing with Gentiles to the point now where hey let's just let's get married to people that don't observe any of these things we'll let them raise our kids even we won't even teach our kids the right way these people that are the culmination of that wickedness had their hair pulled out turn to Isaiah 50 in Isaiah 50 verse 6 Isaiah writes but I just spoil it for you This is Jesus speaking He says, I gave my back to those who strike and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard.

I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting. the penalty that these men suffered in the book of Nehemiah because of their iniquity was the same penalty that Jesus suffered. Jesus Christ says, I gave my back to those who strike. So while Nehemiah had to run these people down, when they came to strike Jesus, it was like he turned and said go ahead give it to me he says I gave my cheeks to those who pull out the beard and this is prophecy I promise you is fulfilled it's not mentioned that his beard was pulled out in the New Testament but the passage is referenced by Jesus as prophecy that will be fulfilled and so we can know that when those soldiers were mocking him and they reached to pull hair out of his beard that it was like he turned it a little closer to them because he did that for you.

Because you break the Sabbath. And because we don't raise our kids in the nurture and admonition all the time. And because we don't give purposefully, cheerfully, out of our heart to those who are servants of Christ. and because we've mixed the assembly of God with all sorts of other people that don't belong in it, Jesus Christ gave his back to those who strike in his cheeks to those who pull out the beard and he didn't hide his face from disgrace and spitting if that doesn't motivate you I don't know what would I wish I had something really profound to say after that but I don't because I don't think I can top that Jesus Christ suffered in the place of sinners in every jot and tittle of the curse of God's law if you want to have some understanding of how Jesus suffered Go on DuckDuckGo and type in curse in the Bible and read of all the curses.

Deuteronomy 28, I think, is the big list of the big ones. Jesus suffered the curse that sinners deserved. And it wasn't like he was running away and some Nehemiah type guy that was really God was chasing him down and trying to hit him on the back and maybe hardly getting him, he walked right into it intentionally so that he could be bruised for our iniquities and crushed for our transgressions.

So that by the chastisement that was found on him would bring us peace and by his wounds we could be healed. So today is the day. Today is the Lord's day. Today is the Sabbath. today is the day and simply turn to him in faith to cry out for the mercy of God upon your soul that he would forgive you for the evil things that you have done and if you don't think you've done evil things because you haven't done all the big bad ones remember in this chapter we just read there was really nothing that most people would consider to be very evil but in God's eyes when we violate His commands in any way, it's seen as rebellion and evil.

Father, we pray that You would save souls in this room, that You would open the hearts of those who are still in Adam, that You would open the eyes of the blind, and that You would save souls, that they may see the sweetness of Jesus Christ, who did not hide his face from those who spit on him, who offered his beard to those who pluck it out, led like a sheep to the slaughter. He opened not his mouth. We thank you that this brave man knew his purpose in life and we pray that you would help us to see our purpose to glorify Jesus Christ.

Lord please do not let souls leave this room without dealing with Jesus Christ directly may he be glorified in his exaltation in his resurrection from the dead and being seated at the right hand of the Father and that we may know that he is coming again to judge on the last day and may we have no fear of that at his coming in Christ's name I pray Amen