Have you ever been caught in a situation or a conversation that feels like it is a rerun of many others before? Or perhaps you have been part of a club or congregation where the same problems surface every year, and just when you think it has been put to bed they surface again. Any parent probably experiences the same feeling with children not listening and you feel like you would get a better response from a brick wall.
Sadly God’s People are like this, past and present. The same problems keep surfacing again and again. For Nehemiah, it was the same issues that he and Ezra had dealt with before. For the Apostles, it was the same variation on problems and false teaching in the congregations they planted. For us, it can be the same thing. Same again, same again.
At first it seemed so good. Nehemiah and the Jews dedicated the rebuilt Jerusalem walls, the climax of months of hard work and spiritual reformation. They read from the Scriptures and learnt of the importance placed on separation from the Moabites and Ammonites (cf. Deut. 25) because of their acts against Israel as it approached the Promised Land (13:1-3).
Some twelve years later, Nehemiah went back to the King’s Court to report on his governorship of Judea. While he was away, Eliashib the priest defiled the Temple by turning over one of the storerooms as a personal apartment for Tobiah (vv.4-6), who had previously tried to stop Nehemiah’s project.
When Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem and discovered what had happened, he moved swiftly. He threw out all of Tobiah’s personal furniture and had the room ritually cleansed and filled with Temple effects and grain (vv.7-9).
Then Nehemiah discovered neglect of the Levites, as “the portions of the Levites had not been given to them, so that the Levites and the singers, who did the work, had fled each to his field” (v.10). So much for the promises of chapter 12. Nehemiah did not respond by rebuking the Levites but the officials who had overseen the neglect, and appointed trustworthy administrators to put things right (vv.11-14).
But worse still, the officials and leaders had allowed work and commerce to resume on the Sabbath (vv.15-16). Nehemiah confronted the leaders for allowing this to happen (vv.17-18), then took swift action.
Nehemiah called on the Levites to purify themselves, and then lock the gates of Jerusalem so that merchants could not enter to sell on the Sabbath (v.19). After a couple of weekends of this and some threats, the merchants went away (vv.20-22). In effect, Nehemiah expanded the Temple bounds to the whole of Jerusalem, to convey the spiritual importance of prioritising God over daily work activities.
The final problem Nehemiah identified was a relapse into mixed marriages between the Jews and surrounding nations (v.23). Besides the violation of the Law (designed to teach the people to be holy and distinguished from the pagan nations surrounding), these marriages threatened the covenant people because the children did not grow up learning languages to hear the Scriptures (v.24).
Nehemiah invoked the example of Solomon and pointed out that if all his wisdom did not keep him walking with God, then how would they fare? (vv.25-27) Nehemiah made them promise not to marry outside the faith again.
What made things worse was that it involved priestly families, including one where a daughter of Sanballat, arch-enemy of Nehemiah, had married the son of the High Priest (vv.28-9). Nehemiah chased them away. I guess sometimes people just have to be chased away.
With these acts, Nehemiah repeated the acts of Ezra and of himself years before (vv.30-31). And the acts of many reformers before him.
And hundreds of years later, the Apostles ran into the same problems. Religious compromise. Corruption in Christ’s Church. Moral failure. False teaching that condoned sin. Same again, same again.
Recently my Bible Study has been looking at Acts, and in the early chapters we have seen the Devil’s methods of attack – persecution, hypocrisy, and division. It seems that he does not need more methods, just variations. Presumably because they seem to initially work.
They work so well because we are all the same, deep down. We are all sinners, and respond to the same sinful temptations and the same pressures. Same again, same again.
So it should not surprise us that the story of the Church through the ages is the same story of the same problems, internal and external, again and again. By ourselves, we do not change. The devil, our adversary, does not change in his goals and his methods either.
If this passage and our own experience of life teaches us, we are unable to break the “same again” pattern ourselves. We need someone new to do something new to save us from our sin – Jesus. We trip up and fall into the same sins and problems. But Jesus stands where we fall. We can always rely on him to forgive our sins. Same again, same again.