A Lesson in Leadership (Part 2 of 2)

In our day, the word tolerance is a popular term.

It's widely promoted. While the Bible encourages us to bear with one another in love, as we'll hear today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains that sometimes it's more important to stand firm against the prevailing tide. We're learning an important lesson in leadership from Nehemiah.

Now, let's go back into chapter 13 again, then, of Nehemiah. Let us see that this is a word for us, not for them, because I think most of us have been prepared to notice the link here, insofar as we are not all that we would like to be. We're not what we once were. We're not what we're going to be, but we're not all that we would like to be.

And it's sometimes helpful just to admit that to one another. Now, you will notice that Nehemiah's strength of leadership is revealed in his response to these circumstances. He addresses, first of all, this issue of unhelpful associations. Now, the first three verses provide a helpful background to the event that follows, because they speak to the issue that the people of God, having discovered in the law of God—you can read this in Deuteronomy 23—had realized that they weren't supposed to do certain things. Deuteronomy 23, 3, No Ammonite or Mobite or any of his descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord even down to the tenth generation. Kind of categorical.

No way you're coming in here. Now, the people had understood that. Remember, they said, We make a binding agreement to be committed to all the law of God? And part of that involved this, and here they are in a relatively short period of time.

They say, Hey, you know what? It doesn't really matter. I mean, it's not a big issue.

It's not a huge issue. I mean, it's just one guy in a couple of rooms, and it won't really have much of an effect. Because in verse 4 and following, you realize that this chap, Eliashib, had decided to provide a room in the courts of the house of God. Eliashib was the priest who had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of God.

As a result of one of the other problems—namely, the neglect of the house of God—there wasn't a tremendous amount of produce coming in to be stored in the house. So in the absence of what should be there, there was a vacuum. And into that vacuum, Eliashib decided he would put what shouldn't be there.

You know, if you clean a closet in your house, and you've got in mind that you're gonna put in there a certain category of materials that you as the mother or whatever it else have determined, I suggest to you get it in there fast. Because if you don't get in there what should be in there, I can guarantee you you're gonna get in there what you don't want in there. And that is exactly the case in the house of God, Nehemiah 13.

What should have been in there wasn't, and therefore what shouldn't have been in there was. It's the same in our lives. If we do not fill our lives with what God says we're to fill them with, then there is a vacuum, and they will be filled with other junk. And that is the reason that some of us live our lives all junked up—because we are not filled with all the fullness of God.

We understand the Bible says we are to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and we're just leaking all over the place, and in the vacuum created by the leak, we are filling our lives with all kinds of nonsense. And Eliashib had made the space available not just to any character but to one of Nehemiah's key opponents. It wasn't a superficial relationship. They were hand in glove with one another. That's what verse 4 says. This fellow Tobiah was closely associated.

They had entered into some measure of partnership. And there is a distinct absence of clear discernment and leadership revealed in this guy Eliashib, even though he is the priest in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. Just because you're the priest in charge of the storerooms of the house of your God doesn't mean you necessarily know how to bring up your kids. Just because you've got a position and a place and a prominence doesn't mean you'll be able to cut it at home. And he couldn't.

And he didn't. And indeed, when you get to verse 28, you find out that his grandson has married the daughter of Sanballat, who was another member of the unholy trinity opposed to Nehemiah and the work of God. So here, this fellow, Grandpa Eliashib, lets it go. He lets it go in an apparently trivial matter.

What's a room, and what's it to you, and who's Tobiah? It can hardly matter, can it? Yes, it mattered. Because his son noticed that his dad, who said he was going to be committed to these things, had a fudge factor in his life, and he didn't walk the walk. He just talked the talk. And so what he said and what he did were two different things. So the son said, Aha!

So you can do that, can you? And then his son said, It doesn't matter who you marry, because, oh, Grandpa Eliashib, he let Tobiah in the house of God, don't you remember? He blew it out at that level.

My dad blew it out at this level. So what does it matter if I get married to this girl after all she's so cute, and who cares if she comes from the background of Moab? Let me say something to you this morning. The decisions that we make in a moment in time that are apparently existential—you know, they only have implications for the immediate—they don't. And we have to recognize that in leadership, many people will say, Oh, but, you know, that is a far too stringent approach to these things. You say, Well, maybe it appears to be. But we're thinking not only about now.

We're thinking about tomorrow and all our tomorrows. Tobiah was vehemently opposed to the work of God. He had criticized and maligned Nehemiah, and here he is in the house of God. Now, you've got to remember that when Nehemiah was involved in the building project in his leadership, and he had these characters constantly coming up and opposing him, one of the things he was determined to ensure was that Tobiah and Sanballat would not get inside the project. Remember that? So, we prayed to our God, and we posted a guard. We took a trowel in one hand, and we took a sword in the other hand.

Why? So that Tobiah and his buddies couldn't get in. So he labors all this time to make it clear to the people of God why it is that you can't associate with these people.

He goes away for a wee while, and he comes back, and the joker's living in the place. That's why leadership is so important. Moses leaves, goes up on the mountain, right?

Strong leadership up the mountain for a brief time comes down. There's an orgy going on. The same people he just left, dancing round a golden calf and worshipping this and neglecting the one who came to bear the very law of God from the presence of God. We're not here dealing with a clash of personalities.

That's the important thing to see. This is not Nehemiah versus Tobiah. They never liked one another. I never liked your face, Tobiah, and I don't like your style, and I don't like you in here.

It's not that at all. It is the issue of evil, verse 7. I came back to Jerusalem, and I learned about the evil. The evil. Why was it evil? It was evil because God's Word said, Don't do it. And they did it, and that's evil.

You want a definition of evil? Go look in the Bible, find out what you're supposed to do, and then do the opposite. That's evil. Go look in the Bible, find out what you're not supposed to do, and then do it. That's evil.

And the Bible said, Don't have these characters in here, not even for ten generations. He goes, Eliashib says, It's not a big deal. Bring him in. It won't matter.

It's only a room or two. I mean, we're not talking about him taking over the whole place. We're not talking about him becoming the leader. We're not giving him a place of prominence and so on. Just the same way that we always rationalize sin when we want to take it into our lives. We take it in a little bit at a time and just for a little place. No, I'm not gonna do a lot of this. I'm not gonna do it often. I just want to do it a little bit, a little time, just have a little place in here.

If you don't understand it to be evil, then you will allow your sense of rightness or your conscience or pragmatism to rule, and you and I will be able, by the perversity of our own minds, to be able to tolerate just about everything and to explain it away and to let people know that we're still going on well for God, when in point of fact, we're a walk in contradiction. He doesn't get a closet, he gets a suite of rooms. How did you feel about this now, Maya?

We ask him. Well, he replies, I was greatly displeased. I was greatly displeased.

Why was he displeased? It seems to me that part of the skill in parenting is getting mad about the right things. I find it real easy to get mad about the wrong things. Then I've got nothing… When I need to get mad about the right things, you've got to get exponentially mad in order to let people know how mad you are, because you got mad about some dumb thing that really wasn't that important. And some people get mad about everything all the time, then their kids never know, you know, the degrees of madness. I mean, what are you going to do?

Have steam smoke coming out your ears, fire, you know, flame guns or something? This is a grade-16 madness coming up, whatever it is. And now Maya—we haven't seen now Maya getting mad all the way through thirteen chapters, have we? I mean, he's got concerned, he's got prayerful, he's got interested, he's got motivational—he's got a number of things, but he hasn't got mad. Now he gets mad.

He says, I'm really greatly displeased. I'm greatly displeased, because these people shouldn't be in here, and you've brought them in here. It's just as simple as that. People of non-Israelite blood were only welcomed into the community of Israel when they accepted the faith of Israel. And that remains true today in Orthodox Judaism.

Every Orthodox and devout Jew knows, you are not coming in here, and the reason you are not coming in here is because I believe God's law, and God's law says, you ain't coming in here. And I admire them for that commitment, and that is right. They may not have read the whole story, but the part of the story they've read, they're committed to. And I like that commitment, and I honor them for that commitment. I grew up in a school with… Forty percent of my school class was Jewish.

They all come before my gaze even now. But four o'clock Friday afternoons, I got kicked out of all of their houses. Vamoose. Gone. History. Out of here. Was never a question. Was never a, could we have a sleepover, Mrs. Brody?

No. Out of here. It's okay if I stay for dinner, Mrs. Brody? No, you can't stay for dinner. Why? Because you're not allowed in here when we're having dinner.

Because you don't share our faith, and you don't embrace our commitments, and you are not one of us, and we read in this book, said, get you out of here so you're out of here. So what did you do about it, Namaiah? If that's how you felt about it, you felt displeasure, what did you do? Well, he says, I threw the stuff out of the room. Now, depending on whether you're a, you know, a type A or a type B or whatever you are, you recoil from this, or you get excited about this.

I'm excited about this. I am told… You know, the idea of Namaiah being some kind of quiet-spoken, benevolent, nonaggressive type B character is dealt a heavy blow here in this chapter, and particularly in verse 8. Actually, it gets worse. You read on, and he starts pulling people's beards out and beating on them before we get to the end of chapter 13. He's not gonna monkey around with sin. He's not gonna monkey around with sin. That's the lesson.

Tobias shouldn't be in here. So it's going out in the street. He gives a whole new spin to the idea of room service.

Room service! Okay, out of here. I mean, every mother understands it. You go in your daughter's bedroom, and it's like a post-Second World War decor, and you can stand it for so long, and then all of a sudden you just start throwing things all around. It's out of here, out of here, out of here, and stuff. Then you have to go out in the hall, you do it again, it goes all over the place.

Of course, maybe you don't do that, because your children are wonderful. That's what Nehemiah's doing. He took out what shouldn't be there, and he put in what should be there. He's not praying about it, he's doing it.

Prays all the way through the book, doesn't he? Oh Lord, help me with this. Oh Lord, I'm about to talk about that. Oh Lord, I'm going there. Oh Lord, I need these. Oh Lord, Lord, help, help, help, help, help, help, help. There's no praying here.

Straight at it. I do not like this. You're out of here. Now let me apply this, and we'll wrap it up. We live in a climate today of such prevailing compromise that tolerance has become the shrine at which we worship rather than truth. The issue is not whether a thing is true. The issue is whether it is tolerable. And people today are prepared to tolerate everything except the intolerance of those who would be as bold as to say, Hey, this is wrong, but this is right. For the environment in which we live says, It may be wrong for you, but it's not necessarily wrong for me. So let's just tolerate one another. After all, we don't want to become fanatical about these things. And so, the prevailing drift is such that it is very, very hard to stand against the tide. Now, when Jude wrote—and it's the second-last book of the Bible—in the first century, he felt that while he would like to write a letter that was full of positive things about salvation and the goodness of Jesus, he says in Jude 3, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. Why? For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you.

The tobacco factor is here. Now, who are they? Well, they are godless men who exchange the grace of our God into a license for immorality, and they deny Jesus Christ, our only sovereign and Lord.

Okay, here we are, twenty centuries later. Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, U.S. News & World Report has covered the story of the silly scholars who sit around deciding which bits of the Bible aren't true. So far, they're left with about seventeen lines out of the whole of the Old Testament, and they don't have many more for the news.

So it's no surprise that in the final run-up to Christmas, they wanted to let everybody know that there is no conviction whatsoever that the New Testament actually teaches the virgin birth, that the church has taught it but the Bible doesn't teach it. So what do you do with that stuff? You throw it out the house. What do you do with the ordaining of homosexual clergy?

You throw it out of the house. What do you do with those who challenge the very veracity of the Bible itself and say, Well, you know, we are part of the family of God, we just don't believe the Bible, and we would like to join up with you, and we would like to have a room with you, and we would like to be partners with you, and we don't believe what you believe, and we don't think it matters, and we don't think that you should think it matters. All that matters is that we're prepared to be committed to being fine, upstanding members of the community.

What do you do with that? Well, if you want to go with the flow, you say, Yeah, that's right. And I want to tell you that the flow in America is real wide, with some surprising people in the mainstream.

And it is increasingly challenging and daunting to swim against the flow. And before this decade ends, we as a church, I can guarantee you, will be forced to take a stand on many of these issues, which at the moment are objective and distant to us, but will very quickly become issues of absolute fact. And that's why I'm teaching you the way I'm teaching you this morning, in order that you might be prepared when that day comes to be, with the spirit of Nehemiah, prepared to say, We don't have that in here. We don't do that.

We're gonna get rid of that. And then, finally, if that's a word of application on the level of the church, what about an application on the level of our individual lives? Can I ask you this morning, are you involved in any unhelpful associations? I'm not asking you, do you have non-Christian friends?

I certainly hope you do. I hope you've got some good non-Christian friends at school and college and work and in the neighborhood. If we were supposed to dissociate ourselves from unbelievers, then we would have to either go to heaven or live in a cave. It's not that.

The issue is, am I entering into partnership, which is jeopardizing the commitment to the gospel and to faith and to truth, as a result of becoming hand in glove with those who do not follow my master or share my faith? I've lost count of how many times parents have come to me and said, you know, we really missed it at the level of their peers. We should have been smart enough to realize that they would get like the people they hung with, and we didn't intervene. It was the threat of unhelpful associations.

Do you or I have any little closet in our lives where we're tolerating, as it were, the Tobiah factor? Nobody really knows. You think it doesn't matter?

It matters. Sin—tolerated sin—robs us of our joy, robs us of our peace, robs us of our usefulness, robs us of our prayerfulness. Sin needs to be dealt with at the point of entry. Sin needs to be resisted in the power that God provides. And we do not need to live in faltering, bumbling disobedience.

Nor are we going to live in dramatic, unsullied success. Instead, we're going to live in the healthy tension that recognizes, I'm not what I'm going to be, I'm not all that I should be, but I thank God that I'm not what I once was. One of the greatest threats to your life and mine, to our church and to the wider church in the continental United States, is right here, between verse 4 and verse 9, of this ancient book, Nehemiah—the threat of unhelpful associations.

May God make us alert to the threat. You're listening to Truth for Life, that is, Alistair Begg explaining that sometimes intolerance is actually a godly response. We've been learning why understanding God's Word is so important if we're going to live lives as Christians in a confusing world. And of course, our mission at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible in a way that is clear and helpful as you seek to apply God's truth to your daily life. Our prayer at Truth for Life is that God's Spirit will work through the teaching to draw you closer to Jesus. Now, as we anticipate celebrating Thanksgiving in the United States tomorrow, I just want to say how thankful all of us at Truth for Life are for the privilege that we have of opening the Bible with each of you every day and studying God's Word together. We hope that in the weeks ahead you will have an opportunity to share the good news of the Gospel with friends, family members, neighbors. And giving someone a Bible as a gift is a great way to do that.

Maybe you know somebody who doesn't own a Bible, or has never read directly from God's Word. We have a beautiful leather-covered ESV Bible. It's in our online store. You can purchase it at our cost of just $35. This is a Bible that regularly sells for $199. And it's because of listeners like you who support Truth for Life that we can offer quality Bible teaching resources at these low at-cost prices. So if you purchase a Bible today, you can pay your fellow listeners generosity forward by adding a donation at checkout. You'll find the Bible, along with other high-quality books, at truthforlife.org slash gifts. And if you have a young child in your home or in your extended family in your neighborhood, let me encourage you to request a book written to help you teach young school-aged children the Gospel. The book is called The Big Book of Questions and Answers About Jesus. It's written by Alistair's good friend Sinclair Ferguson, who has a wonderful way of explaining to children why knowing Jesus is the most important choice they will ever make.

This is a hardcover book. It's designed to be interactive. It presents 34 lessons you can work through with children ages 5 to 10. Each lesson includes a question about Jesus with the corresponding answer. You and your children can memorize a Bible verse, read a passage of scripture, pray together. You'll also find additional questions to prompt further family discussion, even a creative activity to solidify the lesson. Ask for your copy of The Big Book of Questions and Answers About Jesus today, when you donate to support the teaching ministry of Truth for Life through our mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate.

I'm Bob Lapine. Most of us can identify things that endanger our physical health, but how alert are we to things that make us spiritually vulnerable? Tomorrow we'll have a spiritual wellness check on Truth for Life. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.