#5 in the Nehemiah series: Nehemiah chapters 10-12
Sacred Vows
CHCC: June 1, 2008
INTRODUCTION:
Nehemiah 10 is a chapter about Sacred Vows. If you’ve been keeping up with this series on the book of Nehemiah, you know that for over 100 years Jewish Exiles had been returning from Babylon to Israel. These exiles had resettled the land. They rebuilt the Temple and re-established Temple Worship. When Nehemiah came, they rebuilt the Walls. In Chapters 8 and 9 the People heard the reading of their Books of Law.
Most of them had never heard God’s Word read in their lives. Now that they understand what God expected from them, the people made a set of VOWS to the Lord. Can you remember the last time you made a VOW? If you are married, that may the last time because we don’t do a lot of Vow-making these days; now we just sign on the dotted line.
The Bible gives many examples of people making Vows to God. But it’s not something to be taken lightly. Numbers 30:2 says, “When a man makes a vow to the Lord, or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said. Ecclesiastes 5:4 says, “When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow.
So, to make a vow and break it is to be a fool. If we are going to make a Vow to God, we need to give careful thought to what we are promising, and then fulfill it as soon as we can … before we forget or something gets in our way. Even though it’s dangerous to MAKE a vow, I think it’s more dangerous to NEVER make promises to God. It’s like that old saying, “If you plan to go nowhere, you’ll probably get there.”
The Vows found in Nehemiah 10 are the kind of promises every Christian needs to take seriously. The first one is found in Nehemiah 10:29. All the people --- that included the men and women and the youth who were old enough to understand --- all these people bound themselves with a curse and an oath to follow the Law of God given through Moses the servant of God and to obey carefully all the commands, regulations and decrees of the LORD our Lord. Nehemiah 10:29
In other words, they made a Vow to Live the Right Way.
1. Vows for Right Living
What are the chances that all these people would perfectly keep that Vow? None of us can live up to the standard of the LAW. That’s why Jesus came to pay the price of our inevitable failure. These people weren’t proclaiming themselves to be super-saints who would never fall short. But they WERE showing that they were serious about doing what God said. They were willing for God’s curses to fall on them if they turned away from His Word.
I wonder if we are that serious about following God’s Word today? Pledging to OBEY God’s Word is a promise worth making. It means we’re not going to look anywhere else for our definition of what is RIGHT and what is WRONG. We’re not going to follow popular culture and let Oprah or Dr. Phil tell us what’s politically correct or practically expedient for the moment. The problem with the “mood du jour” is that it rarely lasts longer than a nano-second and is then replaced by the next trendy idea. Let’s face it, there is no permanent foundation in the shifting mores of popular culture. How can we possibly pen our lives, our hopes, our future on something so unstable as what we hear on tv or radio these days.
The latest proposal coming out of our Texas state legislature is the creation of a mandatory parenting class for all public school kids starting this fall. Using the same logic that promotes mass condom distribution to all teens, the assumption is that 55 thousand pregnant girls a year in Texas mandates parenting classes to all boys and girls assuming that since they will have babies anyway, they might as well learn how to parent them. And once again, we make decisions based on the lowest common denominator which is the assumption that most kids will do wrong so we must accommodate their foolishness rather than encouraging them to live according to a higher standard of living. My suspicion is that parenting classes aimed at younger and younger kids, will only promote growth in the number of early teen pregnancies. Teach a 12 year old girl how to parent, and you might just inspire her to go out and make a baby.
What makes the word of God and the laws of God so valuable is the fact that they have held up so well to millinea of scrutiny. The problem these days, is not that the Bible has been proven itself to be unreliable, but that society has proven itself to be woefully illiterate to what the Bible actually teaches. So often, those who critique the Bible can’t even quote even a verse of it correctly. When the people of Nehemiah’s day finally heard God’s law for themselves, they willingly bound themselves, by oath, to live by it. And in doing so, they gave a solid underpinning to their whole society.
After making a vow to live by the higher standards of God’s laws, They went further, from a general Vow to make God’s Word their LAW of conduct to a more specific VOW to follow God’s wisdom in their Relationships.
2. Vows for Right Relationships
We promise not to give our daughters in marriage to the peoples around us or take their daughters for our sons. Nehemiah 10:30
Talk about something not politically correct these days, the idea of encouraging our children to marry those who share our religious convictions doesn’t seem to play well in Peoria these days. But after 36 years of seeing what plays out so often in unequally yoked relationships, I have to say that for every time a religiously mixed marriage worked out okay, there were another 10 that turned into disaster. The Bible itself gave dozens of examples of tragedy from examples like Sampson and Delilah, to Solomon and all his foreign wives, the root of the problem was not in racial mixing, but in people of faith marrying people without faith. It was the problem that led to 70 years of exile and the destruction of Jerusalem in the first place. And knowing the problems that resulted from unequally yoked unions, the people of Nehemiah’s days vowed to avoid further complications by doing the right things in choosing marriage partners for their kids.
Since, these days, we don’t practice arranged marriages for our children, at least we can advise them to choose their dates (and potentially their mates) from the right pond to begin with. Far better to look around at church for that spiritual giant you are seeking, than to go slumming at the local watering hole.
3. Vows to Rest Right
31 "When the neighboring peoples bring merchandise or grain to sell on the Sabbath, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath or on any holy day. Every seventh year we will forgo working the land and will cancel all debts.
This vow dealt with Sabbath keeping, and indicated a desire to return to full obedience in keeping Sabbath practices rather than the compromise condition they had slumped into during their time in exile. The principle of Sabbath rest was a blessing on the people bestowed by a loving God, and even though some legalists attempted to turn that blessing into a heavy burden, these people had learned the hard way, that compromising God’s Sabbath laws had led them into another kind of burden that Sabbath keeping was designed to prevent.
As Jesus himself, said during his public ministry, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) And Jesus himself was Lord of the Sabbath, therefore he spoke with authority concerning the Sabbath.
The People of Nehemiah’s day knew all about the hardships that Sabbath neglecting had caused. For example, buying products from the Gentiles on Sabbath day forced Jewish merchants to depart from Sabbath practice or suffer the economic loss their obedience caused them. Therefore, the buyers who had been shopping on the Sabbath day, vowed to return to keeping Sabbath laws so as to keep Jewish merchants from being disadvantaged by gentile merchants. And keeping the Sabbath laws concerning farm land and loans to those needing to borrow money to avoid disaster, meant a return to trusting God for prosperity rather than taking advantage of other needy people when they were most desperate for help. The Jews knew that God was their benefactor, and that their obedience to proper Sabbath practices revealed their faith in God’s provision, and their understanding of God’s kindness in instituting Sabbath rest in the first place.
4. Vows of Right Responsibilities
32 "We assume the responsibility for …… 39 "We will not neglect the house of our God."
This was their vow to return to the provisions of the law for offerings, sacrifices, contributions, and first-fruits. In an agrarian culture, that meant keeping track of harvests and birthing of animals in their herds so that they could remember to bring their tithes, offerings, and sacrifices at the right times. It is much easier for us these days to look at a pay check stub and figure out what constitutes a tithe or offering. It even became easier just recently when we included e-give to the ways folks can take care of offerings. I just got an e-mail from one of our members who complemented the leaders for implementing a way that he could make contributions even when he is unable to be present in the pew on a Sunday morning.
The vow they took came because they knew how beneficial their regular giving was to the health and vitality of the work of the restored temple. They made a vow not to neglect their responsibilities to participate actively in the life of the Jewish community. They wanted God’s kingdom to thrive and were willing to do their part to keep it viable and healthy.
CONCLUSION:
The people in Nehemiah’s day took those 4 vows because they understood what it meant for them to be wholehearted in their commitment to their God and to the community he had reestablished in and around Jerusalem. They were grateful, for God’s provision and wanted to do their part to keep the community of the faithful intact and healthy for future generations. Their promises were not flippant or hasty. They fully understood the significance of their vows, even to the point of including curses and blessings as conditions of their vows. Knowing what they and their ancestors had gone through, they made serious vows in behalf of their children and future generations to come. I can’t help but assume there is something here for us to learn, and perhaps some promises we would be wise to make ourselves.
