The Great Confession (Part 1 of 2)

Being confronted with the reality of our sin makes us uncomfortable.

How we respond to that kind of confrontation shows what's in our hearts. Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn how the Israelites responded when God's law was read after the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt and their own sin was exposed. Alistair Begg is continuing our study in Nehemiah. I invite you to take your Bibles and we'll turn again to Nehemiah chapter 9.

The events of Nehemiah 8 and 9 take place in the space of one month. That is clear from a careful reading of the text. At the beginning of chapter 8, we have the description of the gathering of this large congregation. We're told at the beginning of chapter 8, who was present in the congregation, it was made up, verse 2 tells us, of men and women and all who were able to understand. We discovered that if God's people are going to benefit from such gatherings to hear the Word of God proclaimed, then they need to gather expectantly. Secondly, that we would listen attentively.

And this attentive listening is such that, given that things are to be done decently and in order, anything which hinders attentive listening should be addressed graciously, imaginatively, properly, and so on. And then that the people would respond properly to the Word of God, and in responding properly, that they would leave joyfully. In the thirteenth verse of the eighth chapter, we found along with them that there had been a feast that they were missing. They had been neglecting the feast. This was the second day of the month. The feast was due to begin on the fifteenth, so they had about a fortnight to get organized for it.

They used their time well, and they engaged in the feast. And central to all that is taking place in chapter 8 and then in chapter 9 is the reading of the Law of God, the proclaiming of the Word of God. Those of us who are the consummate clock watchers, who have determined that a service can only last a certain amount of time, and that any attendant blessing of God stops when a certain bell rings, must be finding tremendous difficulty with what we have confronting us here in these chapters. Because in the third verse of chapter 8, we're told that the reading of the Law took place from daybreak until noon. Let's assume that daybreak was seven o'clock. It could easily have been earlier than that.

And if it was a seven, then they had a five-hour service. In the thirteenth verse of the eighth chapter, there is more of the same. On the second day of the month, they were back for another one. And in the eighteenth verse of the chapter, we discover that this was going on day after day. There was this reading from the Law of God. By the time we get to chapter 9 and verse 3, we discover that they stood where they were and read from the book of the Law of God for a quarter of the day. Now, Jewish days were twelve hours long, therefore a quarter of twelve is three. So they had a three-hour thing where they were reading the book. Presumably, it was similar to what we had described in eight.

They read a little bit, they answered questions on it, they read some more. But the reading of the Law was a three-hour presentation, and then that was immediately followed by three hours of singing and worshiping and praying—the six-hour service. Now, that is why I tell you all the time it is very important to determine what is prescriptive and what is descriptive. If we were to determine that this was prescriptive rather than descriptive, then of course we would be beginning six-hour services as of next Sunday.

And I know how much you would enjoy that. The fact of the matter is that time flies when you're having fun, doesn't it? If you go to something that you're really enjoying, time is not of the essence to you. You know that you're not enjoying it because you're constantly looking at your watch. You're in that dreadful situation where you're meeting with somebody, and they're explaining something to you, and they're going on and on and on and on and on, and you're trying to look for an opportunity when they look down just ever so quietly to glance at your watch, just a little look, because it's tedious. You wish they would dry up and move along. And you are not to feel badly because you have the same experience when you're in one of your little diatribes and the people are giving it one of these.

So, I just want you to know I know how you feel. Now, the fact of the matter is that time passes quickly also when God meets with his people. When God meets with his people, when you have a prepared speaker and an expectant congregation and you have a divine encounter between God and people, then the concerns of time lose much of their significance.

We shouldn't really be surprised by that because on a far more superficial level, we're prepared to rearrange our lives. We're going through the routine of our days and somebody phones us up out of the blue and says, I have tickets for such and such an event. And you say, when do you have to leave? And the person says, now. And in that moment, you determine what priorities are.

Oh, I think I can change this, move this phone here, get that moved and everything. I can do anything to be there. Or an emergency, your child falls, smacks her chin on the bath, splits it wide open. And all of a sudden, all the plans that you've had for the day go right out of the window instantaneously because this inrush of a new event has transformed everything. We have every right loved ones to pray that in the preaching of the Word of God and in the experience of worship, we would ask God for such things. I believe when that happens, we're on at least the fringes of revival. For revival is nothing more than the breathing of life into a body that's threatening to become a corpse. And many of our church services are very corpse-like. I don't mean this church in particular. I mean just church services in general. They're marked by routine, they're marked by prayers and readings and talks and listenings and so on, various songs. But by and large, they're deathly. By and large, they make very little impact upon the faithful, and they certainly have no attraction for the faith less. How quickly can that become apparent?

Very quickly. How may it be erased by a divine encounter as a result of the people of God taking a delight in the law of God, being like the Psalmist's individual in Psalm 1, that their delight was in the law of the Lord, and on their law they meditated day and night? Now, I want you to know that this morning, I was thinking that I would go through the thirty-seven verses of this chapter. I thought that I would do a kind of Goodyear blimp approach to chapter 9. That is, the high camera angle taking in big sections at a time, rather than the close-up where you can see the hands on the grip.

That is an allusion to the Masters tournament for all golf enthusiasts at the moment. So, we were going to look from the camera over the whole thirty-seven verses rather than close-ups so you could see a tight list on the verse, as it were. The more I studied, the more I studied, the more I realized that even the blimp was going to take a long time to get through these thirty-seven verses. Indeed, I became particularly perplexed sometime on Thursday morning that we were actually heading not for the six-hour service but for the six-hour sermon.

And so, I want you to know I've backed off all of that completely, but for now, I just want to bring to you what God impressed upon my heart as I studied these verses. Now, let me pinpoint three interesting features of this six-hour service, which are described in the first five verses. The first feature is that how they dressed declared their hearts. Verse 1, on the twenty-fourth day of the same month, the Israelites gathered together and their clothes were interesting. They were wearing sackcloth that was perhaps made out of a coarse camel or goat hair. Not exactly what you would call cashmere. Itchiness to the max. And furthermore, they wore dust on their heads.

Why? Well, it was an expression of self-humiliation. What they were saying in their dress was, this is how we feel in relationship to what we found. We want our outside to be representative of our inside.

We want to let the world know our response to the reading of God's law is to recognize that we are far from what we might be or should be. Now, it becomes immediately apparent to us that it is relatively easy to dress up and that the expressions which are outward remain significant only insofar as they are directly expressive of what is going on inside. That is why we can wear clothes that make us appear very respectable and yet inside we're very disrespectful.

We can wear clothes that are representative of a particular lifestyle, but in point of fact, we haven't really embraced it. In the same way, the people in Nehemiah 9-1 wore sackcloth and dust on their heads as an expression of their self-humiliation. Secondly, we notice that not only was it true that how they dressed declared their hearts, but where they stood declared their allegiance. Those of Israelite descent, verse 2 tells us, had separated themselves from all foreigners, and they stood in their places. Now, you need to turn back to the third book of the Bible, Leviticus, to understand just why it was they did this. Leviticus 20 and verse 26. God is giving all this instruction to those who are his people. To mark them out is different from the people around them. For example, back in verse 23, he says to them, you must not live according to the customs of the nations I'm going to drive out before you.

Because they did all these things, I abhorred them. Verse 26, you are to be holy to me. That means you are to be set apart to me. You are to be peculiar in your belonging to me.

You are to be distinctly mine because I the Lord am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own. So their acknowledgement of this here in chapter nine, as they separated themselves in this occasion from their neighbors, should not be construed as an expression of arrogance, but rather should be understood as an expression of their submission and of their dedication. They understood that they were different. Today, an Orthodox Jewish family still understands that. A third of my school class at high school in Glasgow was Jewish. Many of my friends were Jewish.

Played with them, tennis, golf, swam with them, did everything with them. And yet, on Friday afternoons at 3.30, they left me. They split, always. Friday afternoons, 3.30, they were gone.

Why? Because they were different. Because the Sabbath was about to begin. And since the Sabbath was about to begin, and because they were different, they must separate themselves from those who are aliens and strangers to their faith and religious convictions, and so they did. Now, that picture in the Old Testament then finds its expression in the New Testament when God redeems a people for himself. Those, soon, Paul says, are the true children of Abraham.

Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. This, says Paul, is the expression of faith. This is the understanding of what it means to be the people of God. Turn to the New Testament, chapter two of 1 Peter, and I'll make it clear to you.

1 Peter chapter two. Who are you if you're a Christian? What's your identity? Are you different? And in what way are you different? And it's where you stand at school and in the office and in the club.

Mark this out. Well, yes, you're very different. Peter writes to them, and he says in verse nine of chapter two—and these are to his Christians scattered throughout the regions of Cappadocia, Bithynia, and the surrounding environs—he says, you're a chosen people. You're a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God. That you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.

Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. And since that has now happened to you, he says, therefore, because you've been changed and made this new creation, I urge you as aliens and strangers in the world to abstain from sinful desires which war against your soul and to live differently. Now, to whom does this refer? To anybody who wanders into a church? To somebody who's born in a Christian country? No, it refers to those whom he describes in the first few verses of his first chapter.

So turn back a page and you'll see. Here are three facts which are true of every Christian. Every Christian knows themself to have been, number one, chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. Secondly, to be being sanctified, set apart for God's purpose through the work of the Holy Spirit, and to have been called to obedience through the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. So the application of Nehemiah chapter 9, when we come to it, and it says that the people of God separated themselves from all foreigners, is simply this. If you are in Christ today, you are different.

Radically different. So how they dressed revealed their hearts, where they stood made clear their allegiance, and thirdly, what they said revealed their need. They stood in their places and confessed their sins and the wickedness of their fathers.

I want you to notice this carefully this morning, it's so very important. The direct correlation between the reading of the law of God and the confession of sin. Paul says of it in Romans chapter 3, he says, through the law, we become conscious of sin. Now you see, this is an immediate problem to people who have been so imbibing the idea that what Christianity is about is the ultimate feel-good trip. That whatever Christians are, they're about being positive and about being successful and about being fulfilled, and if you hang around with them, you ought to feel better about yourself and generally about everything. Therefore, if you go to listen to the proclaiming of the Word of God, then it ought to be an experience where you feel really great. And as a result of feeling really great, then you go on your journey and everything falls into place.

Well, you know, while the Christian life is not a call to drudgery, not a call to emptiness, not a call to some kind of horrible, funereal existence, the fact of the matter is that the Bible makes it perfectly clear that the first encounter that the believer has with the law of God will point out what's wrong. And since we don't want to know what's wrong, we run away from those kinds of encounters. We want to go to the doctor, as it were, and always get a clean bill of health.

Fine. But what use is a clean bill of health if we're not actually physically clean? If he puts his hands on an area of our bodies and it says, uh-uh, problem, or if he takes the X-ray, puts it on that screen and says, uh-oh, shouldn't be there. In that moment, what he needs to do is give us the bad news of our condition so that he may then provide us with the good news of a possible solution.

We are so consumed with the idea that all we're supposed to get is good news that if anybody apparently brings us bad news, we regard them as being a close cousin to Attila the Hun or having their license plate in Salem, Massachusetts. But when the law of God was read, sin was pinpointed and defined, sin came out of its hiding place, sin showed up and revealed the immensity of the problem. And loved ones, I need to say to you this morning, and God is bringing this forcibly home to my own heart and my own life, as long as sin in our minds remains simply a nuisance or an inconvenience or an embarrassment, then we will never ever deal with it and we will never make any progress.

This kind of encounter with God is directly related to understanding that sin is an offense against God. And the only way that we will come to that conclusion is if we have the privilege of sitting under the kind of proclamation that took place here in Nehemiah chapter nine, not in terms of its length, but in terms of its content. The law of God needs to be proclaimed. Without the proclaiming of the law of God, there will never be any forward movement.

Now let me try and think this through with you for a moment or two. Turn to 2 Chronicles and to chapter six. Here we're going to come to one of the most familiarly quoted verses as it relates to this process of discovering sin and dealing with it. It's the story of Solomon's prayer of dedication for the completion of the construction of the temple. Solomon as the shepherd king of his people is crying out to God in front of the whole assembly of Israel.

He stands, verse 12 tells us, and he spreads out his hands. The prayer is worthy of our consideration. When we get to the 40th verse of the prayer, we find him crying out to God, now my God, may your eyes be open and your ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.

Here it is. Now arise, O Lord God, and come to your resting place, you and the ark of your might. Make your priests, O Lord, clothed with salvation. May your saints rejoice in your goodness. O Lord God, do not reject your anointed one. Remember the great love promised to David your servant.

Tremendous cry from his heart, basically what he's saying is, Lord, meet with us. We've built this temple. We're trying to do your will. We want to know you. We want to experience you.

We don't simply want to have services. We want to meet with God. God, meet us. Now look at verse one of chapter seven. When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices and the glory of the Lord filled the temple. We can't fully comprehend just what that means except to say that when we have this sort of thing in the Old Testament, it is a theophany. It is a manifestation of God's divine glory. It is an inbreaking of eternity upon time. It is, if you like, that which is not a common encounter and yet which is a necessary one. And as a result of this, the priests were unable to enter the temple of the Lord because the glory of the Lord filled it.

They couldn't go about their business because the sense of God's presence was so awesome they could not continue. I long for this. Know my heart.

I long for this. For an encounter with God that breaks through the molds of all of our conventionality. For an encounter with God that cannot be explained simply in terms of doing church ala Americana. For an encounter with God that breaks the hearts of his people, my heart first, my heart first, all of our hearts together so that we cannot even have church the way we normally have church.

That's what it's saying. They couldn't do the routine because God shattered it in an instant. When revival comes to a church or to a nation, this will take place. The effect of it will be things we are trying to create at the moment without the revival.

We want the effect without the inrush of the Spirit of God. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. He has titled today's message, The Great Confession.

We'll hear the conclusion on Monday. We live in a world that is increasingly dismissing sin and its consequences. Our study in Nehemiah is showing us just how offensive sin is to God and why it needs to be dealt with radically. We want to recommend to you today a book that will help you do that, not by focusing on our sinfulness or our efforts, but by pointing to the grace and glory of God. The book is called The Beauty of Divine Grace. When you read this book, you'll grow in your understanding of salvation by exploring the five solas that salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone through the scriptures alone and all for God's glory alone. This is a book that will help you rest in God's provision and confidently live out your faith.

Ask for your copy of The Beauty of Divine Grace today when you support the teaching ministry of Truth for Life by donating through our mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate or you can call us at 888-588-7884. And by the way, if you're a pastor or you're involved in leadership in your local church, let me encourage you to attend Alistair's annual conference called Basics. This is a conference that Alistair hosts each year at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Registration for the 2024 conference, which will be held May 6th through the 8th, is now open. Alistair will be teaching.

He'll be joined by Rico Tice and Sinclair Ferguson. If you're a pastor or a church leader, you can register now online at basicsconference.org. I'm Bob Lapine. Hope you have a great weekend and hope you're able to worship with your local church. Monday, Alistair shows us what the book of Nehemiah teaches us about revival, both personal and corporate, and what our responsibility as believers needs to be when God is bringing revival. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.