Ezra: Rise up and build

I would like you to turn with me now to the book of Ezra. So as you move through the first historical section of the Bible, and you get to 2 Chronicles, the next book, as you know, is Ezra, and then the book of Nehemiah. Now before you think that this is going to be esoteric stuff, somewhat irrelevant, semi-interesting, but not really applicable to my life, let me ask you a couple of opening questions.

Do we live in a world of materialism? Do we notice among us, not only among believers in assembly fellowship to some extent, but believers in general, a clear lack of distinction from themselves and the world, a lack of separation? Do you think that that is something you have observed from time to time? Do you think that there is something we might call apathy among Christians today? Do you think this is a day of small things where nothing great is really happening and we just put the effort in every week and nothing much happens, kind of small things? Do you think that there is an epidemic of ignorance of the Bible? Certainly there is among the culture. What about among believers, too? Do you think worship has been downgraded and has been dumbed down to a large extent? Do you think that there has been wholesale compromise with the world among so-called evangelicals? Do you think the world is hostile to what we're doing? I think the answer to all of those questions is yes, right? Obviously yes. Well, then we need to read Ezra and Nehemiah because the conditions I described were not the conditions of today, although they are the conditions of today, but what I've just read to you were the conditions of Ezra and Nehemiah.

I have more to say than that. You say, I wish we lived in a day of miracles. I wish we lived in a day when a priest could consult Urim and Thummim.

I wish we lived in a day when we could see the miraculous. I wish we lived in a day when, well, do you know Ezra and Nehemiah lived in a day like ours not only in the moral climate and the conditions among the people that I've described, but they only had two things to go on, the word of God and prayer. There were no miracles.

It's a mistake to think that there are miracles throughout the Bible. This is one of the apologetic points we make when we speak about miracles. Miracles occurred at very specific times in the Bible when there was new revelation being given, but there are large tracts of the Bible where there were no miracles other than the miracles of salvation.

God always performs those miracles. I'm talking about sign miracles. So if you suspect that it would be hard to live and to believe when you didn't see evidence of divine superpower, well, that's not the case.

In fact, we are told in Luke 16 that even if Lazarus came back from the dead, the rich man's brother seeing such a miracle would not believe because they were not inclined to believe. The only thing that will make a person believe is when the spirit of God applies the word of God to their hearts, and then they believe. So those are the conditions of Ezra and Nehemiah, very much like our own.

This is what we call remnant testimony, and you've heard that one before. But you know, this is what happens throughout the Bible in cycles. We have new revelation.

We have a fresh beginning, and we have the people agreeing to follow God as they did at the mountain, and then immediately beginning to grumble and to sin and to depart from God until the point where God judges them, and then they recover to some extent. You certainly see this cycle throughout the book of Judges. What we learn is that in the big piece of Israel's history, there was a time when there was no more remedy.

We've talked about it this morning, and they were taken away captive to Babylon. They had crossed a line, and God says, no farther. This is now going to be your fate.

What came back from Babylon was a trickle, a small group, and we can relate to that ourselves. We're a small group. So maybe the encouragement God gave to this small group could be an encouragement to us as well.

Let's read then some excerpts from these two books. It's obviously a big chunk to bite off to try to cover two books in 40 minutes, but we'll just pull the major themes out, and I think it will still be helpful. I trust it will be.

Let's read the beginning of Ezra. Now, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing, saying, thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth, the Lord God of heaven has given me, and he has commanded me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. This is a miraculous thing right here.

I said there were no miracles. This is a miracle. God's working on the heart of this pagan king, and this is the house of God in Jerusalem, which, of course, had been destroyed by the Babylonians.

Who is among you of all his people? May his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel. He is God, which is in Jerusalem, and whatever is left in any place where he dwells, let the men of his place help him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, besides the freewill offerings for the house of God, which is in Jerusalem. So, the word of the Lord now comes to pass as God is going to recover his people from the punishment of Babylonian captivity.

And so, what we find is that we get a list of the captives who returned to Jerusalem in chapter 2. We're not going to read that. We're going to go down to chapter 3. Now, we need to introduce a couple of characters that were mentioned, that are mentioned now, their names are Zerubbabel and Jeshua. And later on, we're going to meet two prophets named Haggai and Zechariah.

So, here comes the first thing we need to know about Ezra structurally. The first six chapters of Ezra are the first return of this trickle, this remnant, who, obeying the word of the Lord, left the kingdom of Persia and went back to Jerusalem to build the altar of God, which had been broken down, obviously, and to lay the foundations and then to complete the house of God. Now, they did that, but there's a gap between six and seven of about 57 years.

Interesting little gap, because who fits in there? Esther. Esther in the story of King Xerxes, who's called Ahasuerus, that fits in this gap, this part that is enveloped or bookended by the two pieces of Ezra. So, the first part, we have a king, Zerubbabel, we have a priest, Jeshua, and we have prophets, Haggai and Zechariah.

Then we have this interlude, a very interesting one, where Esther is really working for God in a book that never mentions the word God. And why do you think it is that Esther never mentions the word God? I'm sure there's 15 theories, at least out there in the audience, but I'll give you my take on it. I think the book of Esther is primarily about a group of Jews who refused to return to the land of Israel.

It is a picture of Israel in their current apostasy, and yet God still works among them. He worked among this young woman named Esther to save the people ethnically and racially from destruction. But it was not God's intention for people to stay in Persia.

He wanted them to come out from there and to return to the true worship of the Lord in Jerusalem. That's where the word God rightly applies. The second part of Ezra is the return of Ezra.

So, this part is starting to talk about Ezra. We get firsthand knowledge. And again, we have a prophet and a priest and a king, sort of.

Nehemiah is an administrator, so we're going to allow him to be a king for the purposes of my little structure here. And then, of course, Ezra is a priest who can trace his lineage all the way back to Aaron. And we have another prophet, and his name is Malachi.

All right? And the general principle is that when God is going to bring his people into a place of blessing, he needs to have the mediation of a prophet, a priest, and a king. And, of course, those three positions, those three roles, those three offices, as we call them, are all occupied by one man in God's purposes, our Lord Jesus Christ. And God would not tolerate any circumstance where a person would be a prophet and a priest and a king.

There were some who had two roles. Jeremiah was a priest, for example, and he was a prophet, but he was never a king. Uzziah the king wanted to be a priest, and God smote him with leprosy.

God will not allow a man to have three roles because only one man can have those roles. And yet we see in this Old Testament story these three roles working as they ought to work to bring the people of God into the blessing God has in mind for them. So we will begin reading in chapter 3, verses 1 through 4, just a couple of selections here.

When the seventh month had come and the children of Israel were in the cities, the people gathered together as one man to Jerusalem. Then Yeshua, this is the name Jesus or Joshua, Yeshua the son of Josedach and his brethren, the priests, and Zerubbabel, who is a direct descendant of David now, so he's the Davidic king, and he's in the lineage of the Lord Jesus. Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel and his brethren, arose and built the altar of the God of Israel to offer burnt offerings on it.

Now here immediately we come to one of the most illogical and paradoxical things in this whole story of these two books. And by the way, Ezra and Nehemiah are one book in the Hebrew Bible. They've been separated into two in the English Bible.

There's a number of ways I can prove that, but it's not important to my point, so we'll leave it. We're going to come to this interesting fact that instead of building the walls to protect the people first, and then building a suitable temple, and finally furnishing that temple with an altar, God wanted it to be done in exactly the opposite order, which makes no sense unless you're thinking the way God thinks, all right? He wanted the altar to be built first, then the temple, and finally the wall. You say, but the people would never be protected without a wall, and the altar would never be protected without a temple.

But the whole point of these books is this isn't man's responsibility. God is there to protect. It's God's work.

And when the people depended on the Lord, he protected them. He provided for them. The other principle and the reason for this order is very clear.

God is first. God is first. Every true believer says amen in his heart to that.

God is first. His interests, his priorities, his worship, his prerogatives, they come first. And when he gets his proper place, everything else falls in order.

So this is a wonderful day when they build this altar, and they start offering burnt offerings, and they celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles at this point. Now, then we're going to drop down and just read in chapter 3, verses 10 through 13. When the builders laid the foundation of the temple, this is, of the Lord, the priests stood in their apparel with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with symbols to praise the Lord according to the ordinance of David, king of Israel.

And they sang responsibly, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, for he is good, and his mercy endures forever toward Israel. And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of the fathers' houses, old men who were older than 70, right? That's how many years it had been since the captivity had been done.

They had seen the first temple, and they wept with a loud voice when the foundation of the temple was laid before their eyes. Yet many shouted for joy. The young people were all happy about it.

The old people were bittersweet at the very best. And why was that? Because this house was so much smaller, so much less glorious, it seemed, than the house of Solomon. And yet there was this cacophony, we might say, of joy, some people crying, some people laughing.

The noise was difficult to sort out. There was happy people, and there were sad people, and the sad people were happy, and they were sad at the same time. It's an interesting commentary, but you know what? The size of the house isn't what matters.

What matters is whether God is in the house. And there was a day when Solomon's temple, in all of its glory, was vacated by God. And therefore, it was not a house of God at all, no matter how pretty it looked.

But now, this new structure, quite humble maybe in comparison, is going to be filled with the very presence of God. I might add, though, that this was not going to be the Shekinah cloud that we saw in the first, because this is a day of no miracles. This is a day of no sign gifts.

And so this is going to be a spiritual presence very similar to what we have today in the assembly. So the heart of God is the first thing that gets ministered to. That's through the altar.

And now we have the house of God. Foundations are laid. We don't have too much more to read in Ezra.

We're going to scoot through the rest of the book. I do want to read, though, in chapter 4 to discuss some of the opposition, because the people of the land were not going to take this lying down. They did not want the worship of God restored.

They did not want God's people in the land. They would rather they had stayed in Persia. And so this is what happens.

When the adversaries of Judah, verse chapter 4, verse 1, heard that the descendants of the captivity were building the temple of the Lord God of Israel, they came to Zerubbabel and the heads of the fathers' houses and said to them, Let us build with you. For after all, we're all serving the same God. Allah, God, they're all the same deity.

So we might as well work together on this. We seek your God as you do. We have sacrificed to him since the days of Esarhaddon, the king of Assyria, who brought us here.

But Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the rest of the heads of the fathers' houses of Israel said to them, You may do nothing with us to build a house for our God, for we alone will build it to the Lord God of Israel. And so what was an ethnic situation and a religious one to them parallels our own day when we have people who want to compromise with us and say that we have some sort of lowest common denominator agreement on religion. And we might as well agree on the things we agree about and forget the things we don't agree about.

Well, that wouldn't work here and it doesn't work today either. So this first call is to compromise. And we're going to come back and talk a little bit about that.

I do have one other quick reading in Ezra because I do want to introduce to you the second piece. So between six and seven in Ezra, you have the whole story of Ezra. Esther, excuse me.

All right. There's 57 years, give or take. Now, at the beginning of chapter seven, we're done with Zerubbabel.

We're done with Jeshua. We're done with Haggai. We're done with Zechariah.

And we're now coming to the prophet Ezra. Excuse me, the prophet is Malachi in this case. And then the priest is Ezra.

And the administrator slash king is Nehemiah himself. What chapter seven does is it gives us the genealogy of this Ezra who is probably the chronicler, probably the man who wrote Chronicles, or at least compiled most of the Chronicles and also the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, a very important person in the closing of the canon of the Old Testament. That would be a different topic, but I thought I would mention it.

You can see he can go all the way back to Aaron the priest through the line of Zadok, through the line of Phineas, through Eleazar, all the way back to Aaron. That's very important that people be able to prove their genealogy in this book, especially if you're a priest. If you're a priest and you can't prove you're a priest, then you can't work.

You have to wait. They had to wait until the Urim and Thummim perhaps could be reinstituted and they could get God's mind on the matter because they were not going to accept people who could not prove their birthright, just as we today, of course, are only interested in fellowship with people who are truly children of God. Now, we won't read any more in the book of Ezra, except as we turn over the pages, we'll notice that this issue with intermarriage with pagans comes up.

We're going to see this again at the end of Nehemiah and how that was necessary for them to separate from the people of the land with whom they had entered into relationships, including marital ones. Now, as we move, we're going to read a few selections from Nehemiah. Remember, this is one book in the Hebrew Bible.

So, we get to Nehemiah. The words of Nehemiah, the son of Hekeliah. This is 1.1, of course.

He came to pass in the month of Kislev in the 20th year. I was in Shushan, the citadel, and Hanani, one of my brethren, came with me, with men from Judah, and I asked them concerning the Jews who had escaped, who had survived the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem. So, of course, Zerubbabel and his group, along with Yeshua, they had been there some 60, 70, 80 years before now at this point, and he's getting a status report.

All right? So, what he finds out is mentioned in verse 3. They said, The survivors who were left from the captivity in the province are there in great distress and reproach. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are burned with fire. So, Nehemiah is very upset about this, and he prays.

Verse 5, I said, I pray, Lord God of heaven, O great and awesome God, you who keep your covenant and mercy with those who love you and observe your commandments, please let your ear be attentive and your eyes opened, that you may hear the prayer of your servant, which I pray before you now, day and night, for the children of Israel. So, this is one of the extended prayers of Nehemiah. In case I forget to mention it, though, it's interesting, you move through the book of Nehemiah, you see it in several places, right? In chapter 2, we'll see an example of it.

And if you go to the very tail end of the book, right? At the very last verse, you're going to get it again. I think this occurs some six or eight times, I forget the exact number, where we get these prayers where Nehemiah is in the middle of the action, and he says, And I just prayed to the God of heaven. We talked about this last night.

There was no formal, Our God and Father, we come to thee in the worthy and precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ. None of the formality of public prayers, which are unnecessary in a case like this, it was simply a matter of looking up to heaven and saying, God, I need help, and I need it right now. Please help me, Lord.

Some of these prayers don't even have words. But I prayed to the God of heaven, and God knew what I was thinking. He knew what I needed.

I just appealed to him for help. That's a great habit to learn from Nehemiah, all right? That's a by the way. Let's turn to chapter 2. And here we see Nehemiah in his role as the cup bearer of the king here.

And this king, Artaxerxes, has Nehemiah as a trusted counselor. Now, if you're the king, there are people who want you not to be king anymore. They would like you to be a dead king, and they would like to replace you.

So they give poison to you, and you drink the poison, and you die. Right? So a very important role was a person to be a cup bearer in that day who would taste the wine first and make sure it was safe. But not only that, such a person who would obviously have to be trusted himself was a very close confidant of the king, right? So the king depended very much on his cup bearer for advice.

And you can tell from the story here that Nehemiah was quite close to Artaxerxes, even though he feared him as the king. So we'll let the story speak for itself. It says in verse number one, It came to pass in the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes when wine was before him that I took the wine and gave it to the king.

Now, I had never been sad in his presence before. That's because Nehemiah knew what it was to control his emotions, which is a good lesson for some of us to learn, by the way. He needed to understand that you need to be pleasant, and this is a matter of the will.

Your heart can be sad, but you're not supposed to show it on your face. But he couldn't help it here, so the king says, Nehemiah, why the long face, right? Well, why is your face sad, is actually what it says, since you are not sick? This is nothing but sorrow of heart. And I became dreadfully afraid because I had let my cover down and he was really seeing what was in my heart.

And I said to the king, May the king live forever. Why should my face not be sad when the city, the place of my father's tombs lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire? And the king said to me, What do you request? I don't think Nehemiah was expecting this. So what's the first thing he does? So I pray to the God of heaven.

Lord, I can't believe this. He's actually asking me what I would like to do. He's going to give me a blank check.

So I pray to the God of heaven. And I said, If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in my sight, I ask you that you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's tombs, that I may rebuild it. And of course, the king grants his request.

It's a wonderful thing. Now we turn over to chapter 2. We're on chapter 2. Excuse me. We're going to, I want to read one other verse in chapter 2, verse number 18.

And I told him of the hand of God that was upon me, which had been good to me, and also of the king's words that I had spoken to me. Sorry, I need to fill in the gap here. I'm sorry, without reading this random verse.

So Nehemiah goes, he inspects the wall, and he gets the people of Judah and Benjamin together, and then he says what I'm reading in verse number 18. I told him of the hand of my God, which had been good upon me, and also of the king's words that he had spoken to me. And they said, let us rise up and build.

And they set their hands to this good work. That's a very important verse. Let us rise up and build.

So one of the things, like Matthew's saying, you finally get to the point you're trying to bring across halfway through the message. Let us rise up and build would be a good title for what I want to talk about today. Because we have an altar, Hebrews chapter 13.

We have, of course, a house of God, the pillar and ground of truth. And we have the need for a wall of separation, and we need to make sure that we're rising up and building today. We're going to use all these as analogies to our present world as soon as I'm done with the reading, which seems to be taking a long time, although it is annotated reading.

So in chapter 3, they rebuild the wall from gate to gate. It's quite interesting. We're not going to read it.

In chapter 4, they have to defend the wall against the enemies. We're going to talk about some of that opposition again. Again, this comes up in chapter 5. In chapter 6, we have a conspiracy against Nehemiah.

But despite that, the wall is finally completed at the end of Nehemiah chapter 6. Chapter 7 gives us a very long list of people who were involved, the captives who had returned to Jerusalem. And now we turn to chapter 8, where we're going to take our last readings. We'll actually grab the last phrase in chapter 7. When the seventh month came, the children of Israel were in their cities.

Now all the people gathered together as one man in the open square that was in front of the water gate. That may be symbolically important because the water of the word of God is now what we're going to talk about. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded Israel.

This is the same book that Josiah, of course, through Hilkiah, had discovered and took heed to many years before. So Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men and women and all who could hear and understand on the first day of the seventh month. Then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the water gate from morning until midday, before the men and women and those who could understand it and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

Now Ezra the scribe stood on a platform of wood that they had made for this purpose. And beside him were a number of other men. These are men who were now going to take the word of God to the people.

And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people for he was standing above all the people. And when he opened it, all the people stood up. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God.

There are many churches today where when they're reading the word of God, everybody stands up. And I think that's an interesting gesture. I think I actually admire it in one sense.

It's obviously showing respect for the word. Not a tradition that's common among us, but this is where they get it from. That the word of God is so important that when it's read, the people actually change their posture to one of respect and one of obviously careful attention.

And all the people answered amen, amen, while lifting up their hands. All right, so what happened then is these men who are listed again in verse seven, they go among the people and they read from the word of the Lord distinctly or clearly, and they give the sense and they help the people to understand the reading. What we're going to find a couple chapters later is that for this period of time, the people spent three hours a day listening to the word of God being read and three hours a day worshiping and praying.

So my 40 minutes this morning sounds rather paltry. There are people more serious than I, and I'm not surprised to learn that. Not all of us have six hours.

This is a very special occasion in Israelite history and it's also a very special occasion in this book. This is probably not sustainable for most people who work for the rest of their lives, but maybe there are periods of time in our lives when we need to take it this far. Six hours of the day were spent in either reading the word of God or praying and confessing their sins.

Amazing thing. So the word of God has a wonderful place. Now, what we've done so far, using up a good portion of my time, is we have surveyed... I haven't got to the end of Nehemiah.

We're going to get at the end another issue with separating from the world, with these mixed marriages. We'll talk about that. We've talked about worship and the restoring of the altar.

We've talked about the house of God and the laying of the foundations, the fact that the people stopped after they laid the foundations because they were discouraged and there were people harassing them. They were making fun of them. Say, what are these feeble Jews? What are they doing? Sanballat and Tobiah, you know, they come and they say, you know, if a fox goes up on the wall, the weight of this fox is going to be so great it'll knock the wall over.

That's how flimsy this stupid wall is. And, you know, the people were discouraged. But that's a separate story in Nehemiah.

I'm actually in Ezra right now. But it's a very similar type of jeering mockery. And, you know, it takes the words of a Haggai to come along and say, look, you people have done pretty well since you moved back to Jerusalem.

The Lord's cleared the way. He's given you prosperity. You've got nice houses.

You've got beautiful paneling in your houses. Nice paneled houses. And the house of God is lying in ruins.

The foundation's not good enough. You must lay the foundation. No other foundation can man lay than what is laid.

That's Jesus Christ. But now the gold and the silver and precious stones need to be put into that house. And so the people then complete that.

So the house of God is completed. Then we have this issue of separation. That is, separation by the wall and separation from relationships with unbelievers.

And then we have the issue of the word of God and its centrality. The recurrence of prayer throughout this whole story and the fact that the people are just basically willing to work, that they have overcome their apathy. So this is a great analogy, I think, for us.

I think we can probably relate to and benefit from each one of those things, which I will now spend a few minutes discussing. So let us talk first about ministry to the heart of God. I've already mentioned that God must be first.

He must be first in our affections. He must be first in our service. He's first in everything.

And if we give God his rightful place, then everything else in our life will fall into its proper place and we will have a balanced and godly life. The minute we start to put our own priorities above God's, then everything is upside down and our life will not go along the path that God wants it to go. So I ask you then, is it important that we minister to the heart of God? You see, this is a distinction that is made throughout the Bible, and I'll just mention it briefly.

There are two directions, for example, of the priesthood that is mentioned in 1 Peter 2. We have a holy priesthood and we have a royal priesthood. And without going into the whole story, let me just make this simple. A holy priesthood offers sacrifices and worship to God.

A holy priesthood ministers to the heart of God. It's Godward. Where the royal priesthood shows forth the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

A royal priesthood is centered on ministering to the house of God and to the world at large. Both are important roles of priesthood. God doesn't want us doing only one and not the other.

But very often we give God the short shrift. We're interested in the activity of the house of God or even in the gospel, which are very important things. But we've denied God his rightful portion.

Now you see this in many other cases, and I'll bring up another one from Ezekiel 44. In Ezekiel 44, we're talking about the Millennial Temple, the final temple that will be built. And that temple, like all other temples, has to be staffed by priests.

But there were two types of work to be done in this temple. One was to offer sacrifices, to draw near to me, God says, and to offer to me. And that was going to be limited to the Zedekite priests.

Very quickly now, we have Aaron, Eliezer, Phineas, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. We have Ezra in that line, dot, dot, dot. We go all the way down to the Millennium.

We have people named Kohen or these priests that will have their Levitical heritage certified and identified in the Millennium. And they, if they are of the line of Zedek, Zedek who is faithful to David, they will be able to minister to the heart of God. They will get that top priority.

Then we have another son of Aaron. His name is Ithamar. Ithamar, dot, dot, dot.

Eli, Hophni, Phineas, dot, dot, dot, dot. Abiathar, who abandoned David. People are still priests.

But they are not going to be able to minister to the heart of God. They will be limited, according to Ezekiel 44, limiting to the house of God. Now, the house of God is great.

The heart of God is greater. And I'm asking us today, is our priority worship? You see, Satan would want us to do everything we want in Christian service but worship God. Now, don't get me wrong.

He'd love to stop us preaching the gospel. He'd like us to stop using our gifts to edify each other. And he does those things.

But his top priority is to shift us off the worship of God. So if he can turn the Sunday morning meeting into a sharing session, or if he can turn it into therapy for believers in need, he'll do that. He'll alter the very purpose of the communal relationships of Christians in the church in order that their priority might no longer be offering praise to the awesome God and offering thanksgiving for his son and explaining to God all the things we have learned of him from the scripture and bringing these words and presenting them to God as the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name.

That is the number one priority for an assembly and it's the number one priority for you in your closet and in your house. You give thanks to the Lord and you adore him for being who he is. That's your first thing.

And we understand that from this because the top priority of these people was not to look around them, but it was to look up to heaven and make sure that altar got built properly and the sacrifices started going morning and evening. Point made. The next priority is the house of God.

Now the house of God is today what we might call the household of God because the word house in the Bible doesn't so much mean a structure with four walls and a roof with shingles, but rather it means the people who occupy that house. For example, the house of David, right? It's not a house with brick and mortar. It's a group of people who are related in a particular lineage, right? So although I think the idea of a house is broad enough to include a place and in the Old Testament particularly there was a place, the temple, or before that the tabernacle, yet it is people primarily who are being referred to here.

So who are the house of God today? Well, according to the New Testament, there is a household of faith. There is a house that is being constructed through this dispensation and it is essentially the exact same thing as what we often call the universal church. It will be comprised of all believers from all ethnicities and all parts of this history right from the time of Pentecost to the rapture.

But just like the word church is used in that way and yet also in a second way, in a limited way, in a local setting, the local assembly, so the local assembly is also seen to be a house. It's the church of the living God. It is the house of God.

It is the pillar and ground or bulwark, we would say, of the truth. And this is what they built in Ezra's day and this is what we are to build today. So how do you build a church? Well, you start with the foundation like all buildings.

And Paul tells us about this in 1 Corinthians 3. He says there is no other foundation. There's only one. It's Jesus Christ.

We gather to his name alone. This building is about him. It's not about us.

His interests and the presidency of the Spirit of God, with all people coming together, sharing a common faith, sharing a common love of God, no one person exalted above another, all of their degrees and titles and importance and their wealth and their fancy cars and whatever else they have that distinguishes them from each other out in the world is gone. They're coming in level plane as people who are commonly worshipping the Lord Jesus Christ and seeking to carry out his word. That's the house of God.

In that house of God, there is something displayed. A couple of things displayed, according to 1 Corinthians, that God will find not displayed at least anywhere else on earth. I have to be careful about making such exclusive statements.

And I'll agree that there are believers we may not know about who are doing these things that fully constitute a local assembly. But I'm talking about, well, I'll tell you what I'm talking about. We look over the audience today and we see the covered heads of our sisters.

This is something that was understood to be the simple, obvious, important, and transcultural meaning of 1 Corinthians 11 until some smart aleck physician, not physician, there are smart aleck physicians too. That was a slip of the lip. Some smart aleck theologians, smarty pants we might call them, decided that they had a bead on this and an insight that no one else for 1,900 years has had.

And so in the last 50 years there's been a wholesale abandonment of this as if it's the most obvious thing in the world that this is totally cultural and is speaking only to local conditions in Corinth when no Christian group has ever believed that until modern times. It's the reproach of it that they don't want. But I'm going to tell you it's very, very, very precious to God.

And he doesn't get it anywhere else. So never despise things that God values. The headship of Christ is the greatest truth, really, when it comes to the purposes of God that we could possibly embrace.

And what about the lordship of Christ? The lordship of Christ is uniquely displayed in an assembly pattern, in the pattern of the New Testament which we seek to carry out. This is the house of God. It's the pillar.

It ought to be a thing that people look at like a kiosk or an obelisk or some sort of monument, we might say, to the truth. It's also the buttress of the truth. Now you say, that's not very likely because there aren't too many people who are trained in seminaries, in assemblies, and you need seminary training to be a person who can protect the truth, don't you? Well, without sounding too cynical, I would say that's the last thing you want because there are no seminaries that last very long.

They're unbiblical structures. How are they going to last? They start out great. Dallas Theological Seminary starts out great.

Grace Theological Seminary starts out great. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School starts out great. And then they have, you know, because it's not a biblical structure, they have people coming in who just want to bring the truth of God down, down, down, down, down.

Now, I once had lunch with a friend, and he said to me, this man is the head of Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of Michigan, okay? Or it's called CRU now, but they used to call it Campus Crusade for Christ. He's a very godly man. Puts me to shame.

I used to go out and we used to go into the cafeteria at the Michigan Union, and we'd just go up to a table and sit down with somebody and start sharing the gospel with them. He was good for me. He was a good person for me to be with.

But he said to me one day, he said, I wonder how old Jesus was when he realized he was the Son of God. And I just, my jaw just... And I realized something. That even though assemblies may be very humble places, and they may be laughed at and mocked, as they did with Ezra, as they did with Nehemiah, what are these weaklings doing? The little building they go to.

A bunch of people with no particular training. They come together and they call it a Bible study. They're just pooling their ignorance.

Little Sunday school. Just a few people. What is that worth? You know, it's just mocked.

But you know, God, according to 1 Corinthians 2, will be honored and glorified, and he will thwart the proud and the arrogant and the strong. And he will allow the weak to be the ones whom he entrusts with truth, if they're dependent on him. I believe one of the reasons local assemblies have so little error with respect to the person of Christ is that every Sunday morning we come together and we tell each other what we believe about that person.

No other churches do that. I believe one of the reasons the gospel remains pure in assemblies in general is because every Sunday evening we get together and we say out loud what we all think about that as well. And it's a self-correcting system.

If a brother says something out of line, he'll be corrected by the others so that we agree that this common faith is something we are going to uphold. So don't despise what God does not despise. Weak assemblies, as men would see it, just as the weak house of God in this day were the very place where he had deposited and protects his truth.

Now this is not a triumphalist statement. This is not bragging by this person up here. This is an understanding that it is the pattern that's perfect and we're the failures.

And this is to understand that my level of devotion to Christ was not as great as Glenn's, the man I'm talking about I was working with. And he was much more beneficial to me than I was to him to be together. And we love the Lord's people wherever they gather.

What I'm saying is the building of the house of God with no compromise is what we need to go into with heart and soul because that is what God values. There are people who will come to us and they'll say, you need to be more tolerant. This is an age of tolerance after all, is it not? And you need to learn to be tolerant.

I just want to talk for a minute or two about tolerance because this is very important. The most wonderful thing you can say about a modern person is that he or she is tolerant. But you know what? Tolerance has changed its meaning altogether.

Here's what tolerance used to mean. I'm right and you're wrong but I'm not only going to allow you to live as if I had the power to do anything else about it but I'm going to love you and I'm going to serve you and I'm going to work with you as your friend and guide until you come to the knowledge of the truth. I don't tolerate your error.

I tolerate you as a person. Tolerance is toward people, not toward ideas. It's toward people.

Now, not all Christians have been tolerant. John Calvin burned a few people at the stake in Geneva. That's really not the way to go.

We want to be loving to people and allow them space to change their minds and be persuaded by God in the Scripture. But that's not what tolerance means today. Tolerance means we're both right.

And if you say we're not, we're not going to tolerate you. You see, that's a completely different thing. What we are to tolerate is people living with them as we seek to show them the truth.

Now, you might say, well, that's a pretty arrogant thing to say. I'm right and you're wrong. I wouldn't say that in many areas of life.

I would only say it when I have Bible truth to back me up. This is the ultimate epistemology. This is where truth is found.

This trumps every other kind of truth, as we were hearing from Matthew. Scientific truth and the Bible, if we understand science properly, fit together. But if they appear not to fit together, if there appears to be a disagreement between the two, then we go to the highest authority.

We go to the ultimate epistemology, which is Scripture and not the machinations and the mind wanderings of men. Anyway, I only have three or four minutes, but we'll move on. I want to talk about separation next.

So we've talked about the altar being built. We've talked about the house of God being built and how we're to do those things today, ministering to the heart of God, ministering to the house of God. Now we need to minister to the world around us.

And of course, the first thing we want to do is build a wall. And you say, well, that's the last thing we want to do. We want to be welcoming and we want to invite people in and make them feel at home.

And we need to be a seeker-sensitive place. And so we don't want walls, do we? Remember, Reagan stood up on the Berlin Wall in 89. He said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

And it was torn down. And the rest is history, right? Some walls need to be torn down. There were walls that never should have been constructed.

The Berlin Wall is one of them. But there may be walls between people that need to be torn down. The gospel tore down a wall between Jew and Gentile.

The middle wall of partition, as it's called, so that they were made one new man. That's Ephesians 2. That wall needed to come down. And any walls that may separate people based on their race or on their gender or on any other feature like that need to be torn down.

But then there are walls that need to be built. And the walls that need to be built are the walls that separate the purposes and people of God from the world. Those walls need to be built and maintained.

That's what Nehemiah did. That's what the people did. They had a mind to work.

They threw the apathy aside. They got started. All of a sudden, they realized you can't build a wall if the whole place is full of rubble from the old walls.

So they had to take a break, and they had to get rid of the rubble. And in building for God and for the assembly, there is rubble that needs to be removed in our lives. The local assembly will never rise higher than its leaders, and its holiness is dependent on the holy living of every individual in it.

So what your assembly needs from you and what my assembly needs from me is holiness in my life, holiness in your life. That's why it wasn't just a matter of building a wall to protect the things of God and to protect the people of God from the influences of the world, but there was a necessity for each individual person to separate himself or herself from worldly associations, which are represented in these stories by intermarriage with pagans. That would never do, because what commonality is there between light and darkness, between Christ and Belial? I'm referring to 2 Corinthians 6, of course.

When you're going to have a relationship with another person that's very close and personal, it's very difficult for that to go very far if you're not both believers, if one of you is a believer and the other one is not, because you're only relating to that person at a very carnal, fleshly level. That doesn't mean we don't do business with unbelievers. Of course we do.

But we're going to enter into some sort of pact, some sort of agreement, and marriage is the greatest example of this because it's the most serious. How is it that two people, one a believer and one an unbeliever, would ever find common ground to marry? Now, they have physical attraction for each other. That's biology.

That works. They may have a soulish attraction for each other. They both like old cars.

They both like antiques. They both want to live on a farm. They both don't want to live on a farm.

They want 10 kids. They want no kids. So they come to these sort of agreements with each other, and that's what the whole deal is based on.

But the thing that is most precious and important and central to the believer's life is a big void, a black hole in the other person. So my only conclusion is that if a believer wants to be united to an unbeliever in marriage, and I hate to be so blunt, I can't see how the state of that believer's spiritual health and relationship to God can be very great. Now, I realize the pull of hormones.

I realize this. I realize other factors come into bear. But how do you relate at the highest and most intimate level with someone who does not believe the gospel and does not have your Lord and my Lord as the center of their lives? I ask because we really have nothing in common.

Spiritually, there's nothing in common, and that's what these people needed to learn. Now, that's just one example. In marriage, it can be applied to other areas of life.

But the best thing we can do for the unbelievers, as I close now, it's time for our break, is to separate ourselves from the world. Again, the old cliche, separation is not isolation. Monasteries and monkatories and retreats into far islands where you raise goats and make beer like some of these monks do, this is not God's plan, okay? God's plan is for us to be in the world but not of the world.

And the best thing we can do for believers, to help them, is to be separate from their world, from their worldview, and to show them that there's a better way, the way of joy, the joy of the Lord, said Nehemiah, is your strength. May the Lord bless His word.