Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Uh today’s sermon text is the 13th and concluding chapter of the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah 13. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. On that day they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people. And in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever come into the assembly of God because they had not met the children of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them.

However, our God turned the curse into a blessing. So it was when they had heard the law that they separated all the mixed multitude from Israel. Now before this, Eliashib the priest having authority over the storerooms of the house of our God was allied with Tobiah and He had prepared for him a large room. I should just mention that if we had read the rest of the book by now, we’d know Tobiah was a very bad person, a wicked man, and an Ammonite.

So, he had prepared for him a large room where previously they had stored the grain offerings, the frankincense, the articles, the tithes of grain, the new wine and oil, which were commanded to be given to the Levites and singers and gatekeepers, and the offerings for the priests. But during all of this, I was not in Jerusalem. For in the 32nd year of Artaxerxes, king of Babylon, I had returned to the king.

Then after certain days, I obtained leave from the king, and I came to Jerusalem and discovered the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah in preparing a room for him in the courts of the house of God. And it grieved me bitterly. Therefore, I threw all the household goods of Tobiah out of the room. Then I commanded them to cleanse the rooms, and I brought back into them the articles of the house of God with the grain offering and the frankincense.

I also realized that the portions for the Levites had not been given them. For each of the Levites and the singers, who did the work had gone back to his field. So I contended with the rulers and said, “Why is the house of God forsaken?” And I gathered them together and set them in their place. Then all Judah brought the tithe of the grain and the new wine and the oil to the storehouse. And I appointed as treasurers over the storehouse Shelomiah the priest and Zadok the scribe and of the Levites Pedaiah and next to them was Hanan the son of Zaccur the son of Mattaniah for they were considered faithful and their task was to distribute to their brethren.

Remember me, oh my God concerning this. Do not wipe out my good deeds that I have done for the house of my God and for his services. In those days, I saw people in Judah treading wine presses on the Sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and loading donkeys with wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens which they brought into Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. And I warned them about the day on which they were selling provisions.

Men of Tyre dwelt there also, who brought in fish, and all kinds of goods, and sold them on the Sabbath to the children of Judah and in Jerusalem. Then I contended with the nobles of Judah, and said to them, “What evil thing is this that you do by which you profane the Sabbath day? Did not your fathers do thus? And did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? Yet you bring added wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath.” So it was at the gates of Jerusalem, as it began to be dark before the Sabbath, that I commanded the gates to be shut and charged that they must not be open till after the Sabbath.

And I posted some of my servants at the gates so that no burdens would be brought in on the Sabbath day. Now the merchants and sellers of all kinds of wares lodged outside Jerusalem once or twice. Then I warned them and said to them, “Why do you spend the night around the wall? If you do so again, I will lay hands on you.” From that time on, they came no more on the Sabbath. And I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse themselves and that they should go and guard the gates to sanctify the Sabbath day.

Remember me, oh my God, concerning this also, and spare me according to the greatness of your mercy. In those days, I also saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. And half of their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and could not speak the language of Judah, but spoke according to the language of one of the other people. So I contended with them, and cursed them, struck some of them, and pulled out their hair.

And made them swear by God, saying, “You shall not give your daughters as wives to their sons, nor take their daughters for your sons to yourself. Did not Solomon, king of Israel, sin by these things? Yet among many nations there was no king like him, who was beloved of his God? And God made him king over all Israel.” Nevertheless, pagan women caused even him to sin. Should we then hear of you doing all this great evil, transgressing against our God by marrying pagan women?

And one of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib, the high priest, was a son-in-law of Sanballat, the Horonite. Therefore, I drove him from me. Remember them, oh my God, because they have defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites. Thus, I cleansed them of everything pagan. I also assign duties to the priests and the Levites each to his service and to bringing the wood offering and the first fruits at appointed times.

Remember me, oh my God, for good.

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Let’s pray. Oh Father, it is our heart to be able to join with Nehemiah, each one of us to say, remember us, oh God, for good, knowing it’s your grace and mercy that our good works merit nothing. But we do ask you, Lord God, that we would be faithful to you and that you would bless our faithfulness, Lord God, to remember it. Help us, Father, to understand this text, the central pillars of the faith as described to us in this chapter and the ongoing reformation that Nehemiah brought.

We thank you, Lord God, for this season of reformation that we celebrate in the Protestant churches. And we pray that you would instill in us, light our hearts on fire, Lord God, to pursue an ongoing reformation in our day and age as well. To that end, bless the text to our understanding. Lord God, may it speak words to us that bring us to repentance that cut us in two and yet heal us as well and make us better people being transformed by the power of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In his name we ask this and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen. Please be seated.

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, but yet in love he sought me and on his shoulder gently laid and home rejoicing brought me. May the Lord God grant that at regular times in our lives we understand the frequency of our strength. And may we understand that when the Lord God speaks things to us through other people through our ministers that this is the Lord God himself gently reaching us and bringing us home to him in repentance.

I won’t be here next Lord’s day. Ralph Smith will be in the pulpit from the pastor of Mauka Evangelical Church in Japan. Be a privilege to have him here. October 29th would normally be Reformation Sunday, but I thought, well, maybe I should do my Reformation sermon today since I won’t be here next Lord’s Day. And that’s what this is.

What we have here is Nehemiah’s return to Jerusalem after—we don’t really know, but commentators say probably about two years away. He instituted the reforms at first. Goes away, comes back in two years, and he notes specific things that he had to put in order again. You know, it’s kind of hard to tell if chapter 13 is a downer or an upper. It’s kind of a downer because here we have the great restoration and all this, but the reformation doesn’t last for but, you know, less than two years and we have an evil man in the middle of the house of God.

I mean, astonishingly kind of interesting. Did you notice how Nehemiah cleanses the temple? You know, connection with our Savior cleansing the temple. But in any event, the very heart of the worship of God—there’s an evil man residing in one of the storerooms of the temple. They’re no longer tithing and so the Levites are out working in their fields again. They can’t—they’re not supported to sing or to teach.

They’re no longer practicing the Sabbath. Buying and selling is going on. And then they’re also no longer holding to faithful marriage. They’re giving away marriage to women or to men outside of the faith.

And so these are, you know, specific—I’m sure they were doing many other things wrong but I believe the text gives us some specific indicators of the importance of these by enumerating these reforms and he goes back. These are the same things really that they at the top of the list they covenanted to back earlier in chapter 10. And so I think it’s important as we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes here.

I also want by this sermon to begin a series of crucial conversations with our youth on Friday evenings and anybody else that wants to show up. Now, it won’t happen this Friday because Matt and I will be up at Presbytery, but a week from this Friday, we’ll have a discussion time about beginning a series of discussions on distinctives of the Reformed faith and specifically our distinctives as well. And not just on them, but about their importance, their real life importance to what’s happening.

And so today, I’m going to stress particularly the Sabbath. This is the one where people say, “Why are we weirder than everybody else? All kinds of people don’t do it anymore and is it really a Reformed distinctive or not and why do we do it?” So, I want to explain why we do it and I also want to explain what’s happened to the Presbyterian Church in the last 100 or so years. And so we’ll talk about that as we get into that topic.

But the idea here is to bring our young people to an understanding of the importance of these issues, the next generation. Now, Nehemiah goes back after two years. We’re kind of going back after 20 years here at RCC to stress some basic distinctives because we have another generation here. We have another generation of young people. We also have another generation of people that have become members that did not—weren’t here at the founding of this church when these texts from Nehemiah were so very important to us.

So, this begins a series of topics that we’ll be discussing on Friday nights. And so, the idea is for young people to listen to this sermon carefully to formulate questions and discussions for our time together a week from Friday. It’ll be a friendly environment. You’ll be encouraged to raise differences with my interpretation of the text or our distinctives. You know, we’ll probably challenge you a bit if you’ve got a difference to help us to understand the reason in the scriptures for that difference.

And we’ll have to—we’d love to answer any questions and kind of prod a little deeper.

But so this sermon is a Reformation Day sermon. It is about an issue that I think is quite important in the history of the church and it’s about several of them and it’s a hopefully an opener to a series of Friday night discussions. You know this image on the front of the worship service—you know this is kind of important to us. When we began there was a Reformed publication probably still is called Sword and Trowel.

So you know some of these guys have swords some have trowels. We’re rebuilding so to speak the city of God a Christian culture. There’s guarding activity that needs to go on. Nehemiah you know chases out this evil man. And then there’s building activity that has to go on multigenerationally, the planning of families, etc. So when they literally built the walls, the text tells us that they employed both sword and trowel.

So this is what we think we’re doing and we think this is what the church of Jesus Christ is doing. We think this is what the CRC is doing. We think this is what other denominations are doing. We think that in our day and age, there’s a new reformation beginning and we’re we’re building the wall. And so these distinctives in Nehemiah have always been very important to us to understand who we are and what we’re about.

So, let’s work our way through this. And you know, Nehemiah 13 gives us a very easy structuring device, right? You don’t need an outline. You’ve got three times in this last chapter where he says, “Remember me. Remember me. Remember me.” And so that gives us three specific sections. And so that’s how we will deal with this. But I want to begin first by looking briefly at Nehemiah chapter 10. So turn there in your scriptures to Nehemiah chapter 10.

And as you turn, you can listen. What’s going on is the people of God have been brought back to the land. Cyrus has let them go back, sponsored them. God is restoring his people. The exile is over. And so they at the end of this exile period, there’s an establishment of a new covenant. In Jeremiah, we read about the new covenant and God will write his laws upon our hearts. Well, that was talking about this.

I mean, ultimately, it’s talking about the coming of Jesus. Hebrews tells us that, but very clearly, and we can’t take the time today, but if we look at the prophetic statements about the new covenant, they’re applying first to this thing right here, this taking of the covenant, Israel reconstituted as a nation. Ezekiel, the dry bones is about the bringing back of the nation to the land. And then by implication, things for the ultimate transition of covenants with the coming of Jesus Christ.

So it’s not as if there are two separate things. This retaking of the covenant going on in Nehemiah 8, 9, and 10 is in the context of this establishment of the sixth or maybe some say seventh covenantal period of the Old Testament. And so it has that kind of initiatory thing. Now the church has always said that at various times this is what the Scottish covenanters are all about. At various times in church history we think it’s good to retake national covenant.

And so they did this in Scotland, the Solemn League and Covenant. They used this as an example. And now things have slid away so bad that we need to affirm our loyalty to God, our separation from pagans and loyalty to God. Now, normally you don’t do that, but this is something that nationally occasionally has happened in the history of the church. And when we read all these things, we thought, well, ultimately a church’s covenant is when people are baptized, they’re brought into the covenant community.

But it seems good during our time whenever people become members to retake covenant to make sure we understand that they are in the spirit and mode of Nehemiah’s reforms which prefigured the coming of Jesus and so we sort of took it as our model and in Nehemiah 10 verse 28: “Now the rest of the people—they’ve listed all the leaders and people before this by name the priests the Levites the gatekeepers the singers the Nethinim and all those who had separated themselves from the people of the lands to the law of God.”

See, that’s that’s really what we’re about, right? In some sense that’s what we’re doing. We’re separating ourselves from the cultures, the doctrines, the tongues—not the literal language, but the tongue, the confession of those who are in opposition to God, the culture of our country, for instance. We’re being separated from disobedience and rebellion unto the law of God. Our religion is not a series just of don’ts. It’s the things of dos. So, we don’t do certain things to the end that we might do other things. We were set apart to the law of God.

“Their wives, their sons, and their daughters, everyone who had knowledge and understanding. These joined with their brethren, their nobles, and entered into a curse and an oath to walk in God’s law, which was given by Moses, the servant of God, to observe all the commandments of the Lord our God, and his ordinances and his statutes.”

And then he begins to list these specific statutes. “We would not give our daughters as wives to the people of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons, that the people of the land brought wares or any grain to sell on the Sabbath day. We would not buy it from them on the Sabbath or on a holy day. And we would forego the seventh year’s produce and the exacting of every debt.”

Notice here some people have said, well, Nehemiah 13 is a prohibition on selling, not on buying. But what does it say in verse 31? “We the people of the land if they bring wares or any grain to sell on the Sabbath day, we would not buy it from them.” So prohibition on buying and selling.

Notice, by the way, they’re going to go on here to talk about the tithe. And there’s a, you know, a kind of chiastic thing going on. He begins his list of specifics with Christian marriage, we would say, Sabbathkeeping and the tithe. And when he gets to the end in chapter 13, it’s reverse order. He starts with the tithe and then Sabbathkeeping and then Christian marriage. So, there’s a balance here that balances what these things are here and then the renewal of it in chapter 13.

Now, my point is here, right? We go back. This is because the children of these parents are also included in the oath and vow that these people call into. There’s no later covenant taking by them. They’re in the covenant because they’re represented covenantally by their parents here and their generations after them, their grandkids and their grandkids. They don’t have to retake covenant when they turn 20. They’re included in the covenant here.

And this church believes—and other churches have other ways of looking at it—but we believe an application of this principle is that some of you young people now who are full-blown adults, your parents signed this church covenant on behalf of their family and since you were born to them, you were part of this covenant as well. You’re also bound by this covenant. You may agree with that, you may disagree with that, but that’s the practice of this church at this point in time.

This is another conversation we should have with the young people on Friday nights. And probably—I haven’t talked to the elders about this—it would probably be good to write up just a paragraph or a page. We’ve talked about various ways of having kids reaffirm their covenant. Well, they reaffirm it every Lord’s day here, right? This covenant here isn’t something odd or different from what the covenant renewal that we enter into every Lord’s day here.

So, the position of our church is that the evidence of scripture is that parents bind their children their posterity by means of these covenants as well. Now, that doesn’t mean, you know, a child can grow up to go to a different church. Sure, of course. But the presumption is you’re a member, you—the reality is you’re a member until you’re released by the elders.

It’s like, you know, people—so Takashi comes to Oregon and becomes a citizen, right? So he goes through a process of becoming a citizen. But the children who are—this is all of us at some point in time. We all came here from some other place, but now we’re citizens. And when we have children, they’re not asked at some point of time when they’re sensient, when they’re understanding of ways: “Do you desire to be a citizen of the state of Oregon? Do you agree to be bound by the laws of Multnomah County or Oregon City wherever?” No, there’s no there’s nothing like that because this is the setting in which you have been by the providence of God brought into—think church membership is the same way.

So, it’s important to understand that as we begin these conversations, that’s our understanding. Now, maybe we’re wrong, maybe we’re right, maybe it’s a good application, maybe it isn’t, but that’s where we start. That’s where your fathers, the fathers of this church, we can say, have taught you and are practicing. And in this household, until the fathers of the church change, that’s the way it is. Now, we’re intreatable. We’re easy to intreat, I hope. But that’s the way it is.

Now, let’s move on then back then to see Nehemiah 13. So, this has implications not just for the adults, but for the kids born into church membership in Israel or in church membership in the context of Oregon or Reformation Covenant Church as well.

So in the first few verses, you know, it sets us up for the problem with Tobiah because it says that no Ammonite could enter into the assembly of God. So now we’ve got not just entering into the assembly—while Nehemiah’s away, Tobiah is actually set into one of the storerooms of the temple that was supposed to store grain and incense for the offering of God.

So it’s a it’s a real obvious problem that we have here. And Nehemiah gets at it. He gets at it very directly and he throws out—he cleanses the temple. Throws the furniture out. Cleanses the temple explicitly here. So, this is what the—and linked to that we don’t have a remember me after that. Linked to that is the next action he takes. He finds out that they’re not—and again he’s been gone for two years.

He’s come back and he finds out that they’re not tithing anymore. At least not you know, fully tithing. And as a result, the Levites—those that are to instruct in the law, those that keep the services of the temple, those that sing in the context of the temple, that, you know, remember David’s reforms at the tabernacle of David, which is now incorporated into the temple, singing and choirs and orchestras can’t have them because people aren’t paying them.

And so, it’s every man, you know, just sort of doing his own thing out with his own family, more or less. And so, God says, “This isn’t good.” And Nehemiah says that He is going to take care of this problem. He gathers together the rulers and he sets them in their place. He gets it right. He says, “Look, you have to enforce the tithe in the context of the church. You got to do it because it’s the way that this instruction and the practice of the worship of God is going to occur.” So, he sets in order the tithe.

Now, we’re going to talk in a minute about the Sabbath. And some people have said, “Well, that stuff about the yeah, the tithe, that’s good.” And the intermarriage job, but the tithe thing, that’s not good. And they say, “Well, because, you know, because this is a civil ordinance. Nehemiah is a civil governor.” So, when we get to the place of passing blue laws again, then we’ll do it. Then we’ll have Sabbath set apart as a day of worship, rest, and friendship and fellowship, recreation, and benevolent activities.

But until then, it’s okay to go down to McDonald’s after church or before church. Well, the problem with that is in for a penny, in for a pound. That means since the tithe is also being enforced by the civil governor. Well, we shouldn’t require tithing either until we get to the place the civil governor can pass a law—and everybody’s got to tithe. And intermarriage with the pagans, same thing. This is something he does as civil governor.

He tells you can’t do this. And so, if we’re going to throw out the Sabbath, we throw out the tithe and we throw out Christian marriage. That’s what we do. I don’t see any way around it. If you know other ways around it, bring it up during question and answer time. Maybe I’m wrong.

So, he says, in place the tithe and then he sets in place Sabbath regulations again and then finally he moves to marriage. Right now there’s a progression here and the first remember in verse 14: “Remember me oh my God concerning this and do not wipe out my good deeds that I have done for the house of my God and for his services.”

Now see it’s okay to tell God I did a good thing. You know sometimes we think that isn’t okay. Well Nehemiah says it’s okay. Nehemiah says, “Hey, please remember me. I did good in this thing. I’m sure I did.” And what does he do good for? He does good for the house of my God. the statements will get shorter as we move to the end of the chapter, the remember statements. But he establishes the sequence of remember statements.

They begin with a concern for the house of God. And by the end, they’ve moved out into a general statement: “Remember me, Lord God, for what I’ve done.” Now, the house of God is both a place of worship and it’s the people that convocate to do that worship. So it has this significance. It does in the Old Testament too. The temple is supposed to be thought of as a person. Looks like a person if you draw it out on a whiteboard.

And it’s the people of God convocated together. It’s God in the midst of his people. And so the house of God is the people of God. And there’s a big overall sequence going on here in Ezra, Nehemiah, Zechariah. The people are being cleansed. Cleansed people are the house of God. The house has been dispersed in the exile. Now they’re being brought back together and being cleansed. And so the physical structure that represents them is cleansed as well.

And I guess what I want you to see here is there’s a progression. You know, if you wanted to think about it in terms of our day and age, well, we’ve got the communion table and over there at the side we got Satan sitting. We’ve kicked out the things that represent ultimately Jesus, bread of life. Incense, wine, and we’ve kicked them out and put in there Tobiah at the right hand of the communion table.

We got a devil. Tobiah, you know, he fought against Nehemiah. And the whole project here was fought against by Tobiah. Tobiah, he’s an accuser. He’s an adversary. He’s trying to stop the entire work. He’s a bad guy. Not just because he’s an Ammonite, but because he’s an evil man.

So to be as if at the very center, the heart of our worship here, we got, you know, bad things going on. Because reform begins right there. Maybe we could say at the table with grain and wine and stuff and the temple. The next and connected to that is we move out here to me. I’m a Levite. So now he needs the Levites reform by giving them their tithes. They can dedicate themselves not have second third jobs. They can dedicate themselves to study of God’s word, prayer, leading and worship etc.

So it’s moving away from the heart which is there the storm in the temple. to now the Levites and the Levites of course didn’t just work in the temple they also taught the people in the land so what’s going on in the temple is moving out through the Levites right and then the next layer if we can have series of circles here so the interior circle is the temple storerooms the next one are the Levites the next circle is the Sabbath day the Sabbath day is this place this liminal space This buffered day that is in is is in the progression here is taking what’s going on at the center of our faith and worship where God dwells and they’ve kicked out God and put into Tobiah where God dwells it moves out into the world.

Now it’s going to get to families and their homes marriage but it gets there by means of the Levites and then the Sabbath day. So you know it begins with the very worship service. It moves out to the instruction of the Levites. Then it the importance of that is the whole Sabbath day is this transmission belt from what’s going on at the heart of our worship out to our families and the cultures we build.

You see that there’s a movement. He this isn’t random how he sets these things up. There’s a movement here. When they were moving into these reforms, they began with their families and got closer to then the temple, right? No bad intermarriage with the bad people. Keep the Sabbath, support those Levites. So when they came back into the land, the reforms begin out there, move into the center. But now the reform has happened and the center now is the transmission belt for keeping that going out into the culture.

So what I’m saying is this, I think, puts a renewed significance to us on the keeping of the Sabbath because it’s this buffer space where we take what’s holy, the ministers and the service that’s going on, and it moves it out into our culture.

So in verse 15, he then talks about the Sabbath. Well, other people working, trading wine presses, bringing in sheaves. Ah, this is great. Well, well, sure. The Sabbath’s about, you know, bread and wine, you know. So, well, we can do this kind of work, surely. No, he says, you can’t you can’t do any kind of work like that. Loading donkeys. See, we’re not supposed to burn our animals either, right? Loading donkeys with this stuff. They brought him to Jerusalem on the Sabbath day and I warned them about the day in which they were selling provisions.

His entire discussion of the Sabbath, there’s implications for labor because the donkey is laboring. But the entire reform that he brings is addressed at commerce, right? So you know when we began our church, well there are contemporary things here. He chooses out particular problems they have in terms of its reformation. We want reformation. We out particular problems that we have and one of them is the desecration we believe of the Sabbath, the setting aside of it. Another is tithing, another is you know abortion, homosexuality.

So these things all become part of the church covenant that we write according to the model of Nehemiah. But understand that he is his discussion of the Sabbath is specifically geared at this idea of commerce. This is not some kind of trivial little minor aspect to him. This is the aspect that he focuses on as He attempts to rebuild to readress reformation after he’s been gone for a season. Okay? And this is, you know, so this buying and selling thing, people, well, Sabbath, sure, we can rest, but where’s this buying and selling?

Well, it’s not just a minor issue to him. It’s a major issue to him. And you notice what he says. “Did not our fathers do thus, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us?” What disaster is he talking about? He’s talking about the exile. We just got back from 70 years out there in the wilderness. You know why we were out there? He says because of the Sabbath and not keeping the Sabbath. We God brought all these things on us.

Because of this very thing, he says, so you know, let’s look at some scriptures about the Sabbath. Turn to Isaiah 56:1-7. Isaiah 56. Let me read before we go there. Just don’t turn to this. But Amos 8:5, the bad people are saying, “When will the new moon be passed that we may sell grain on the Sabbath that we may trade wheat, making the ephah small and the shekel large, falsifying the scales by deceit.” So even in the time of Amos, see this idea of commerce and its prohibition on the Lord’s day is talked about.

So there’s another reference. But in Isaiah 56 we have some stuff about the Sabbath. “Thus says the Lord, keep justice, do righteousness, for my salvation is about to come, my righteousness to be revealed. Blessed is the man who does this. And the son of man who laid holds on—lays hold on him. Justice. Righteousness. Yeah, we’re tracking, right? Who keeps from defiling the Sabbath and keeps his hand from doing any evil.

So, you know what he does here is he draws a parallelism between justice and righteousness and keeping of the Sabbath. And on the contrary side, defiling the Sabbath is put in parallel with doing evil. Not falling short a little bit. Who keeps his hand from doing any evil? ‘Do not let the son of the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord speak, saying, “The Lord has utterly separated me from his people.” Nor let the eunuch say, “Here I am a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths and choose what pleases me and hold fast my covenant. Even to him I will give in my house within my walls a place and a name.’

So the inclusion of those who had been ceremonially excluded when Jesus comes. So he’s talking about when Jesus comes, right? And he’s talking about in a general sense single people. We should have single people in the context of the house of God here, but also in the houses of God in our homes who should have a special concern for single men and women. I believe that. But listen to who it said: “For thus says the Lord to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths. That’s the head description of the ones going to be blessed in this way. Choose what pleases me and Hold fast my covenant. The Sabbath is related. It’s synonymous to keeping the covenant. It’s synonymous to keeping the covenant.

‘I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. Also the sons of the foreigners. Now the foreigners and the inclusion of them—that’s going to happen eventually with Jesus—who join themselves to the Lord to serve him to love the name of the Lord to be his servants. Everyone who keeps from defiling the Sabbath.’ So there what do we have?

It’s loving the Lord that is put in parallel with keeping the Sabbath. Holds fast my covenant. Parallelism. Keeping the Sabbath is keeping the covenant. Breaking the Sabbath is breaking the covenant at the core of it. The heart of it. ‘Even then I will bring to my holy—even them I will bring to my holy mountain. Make them joyful in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar. My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.’ That’s what Jesus said when he cleansed it, right? He cleansed it so that we would keep the Sabbath and Sabbath is not a bad thing.

It says here that these guys get to come and do these Sabbath feasts being joyful in my house of prayer. You know, it’s an interesting thing. I found out this last week. Some of you remember that I found out a couple years ago that Polish jokes apparently were begun by Nazis.

You know, we make these Polish jokes. When I first went to Poland, I hate to say this, but somehow those jokes had affected my perception of Poles. I mean, not overtly, but it was back there. Nazi propaganda, I think, was primarily behind Polish jokes. Why? Because they wanted to kill them all and they dehumanized them. If you make a subhuman out of somebody, it’s easy to then do all kinds of things to them.

The Polish are the butt of those jokes and have been the propaganda has stuck for many years. You know, we have this perception of blue laws and Sabbath laws and we think, well, the problem is in this country, the you know, the Reformed church always kept it dourly or hourly, right? Well, one agnostic I think in the 19th century said, “There’s nothing more dull or worse than a Puritan, nothing more horrible than a Puritan Sabbath.” Can you believe that?

Is that the way you feel about our convocations on Sunday? I hope not. And will it be the way you feel when we get a bigger place we can go have recreation or clean up the stuff out here, make it into the kind of joyous feast day at our homes in the church? This is the worst thing on earth. This agnostic said was a Puritan Sabbath. Well, it turns out that there weren’t all these blue laws and bad things.

It turns out that this was a deliberate propaganda effort, I believe in the 20s or 30s to malign Sabbathkeeping and the churches that kept Sabbath as the as the ones the opponents of God, the Tobiahs of that day and age tried to get rid of the Christian Sabbath. There was real warfare in the 1910s, 1920s getting into 1930 and by 1950 and 60 to by and large the Sabbath was gone. Not because the Presbyterian Church had rethought or restudied the texts.

They just couldn’t win the war culturally and they just gave up on it. I’m going to quote some stuff here, I think. Well, we’ll see if I have time. But the point is that the Sabbath is a joyous time and the only it was propaganda that indicated it was a horrible time. Okay. So, in any event, it’s equated to the covenant. It is a time of great joy. Breaking it is breaking the covenant and keeping it is necessary.

to be included in the holy hill of God. Isaiah 58—if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, many of the old-timers here know this by heart because we read it every week for many, many years. “If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath,” and the idea is that your foot is trampling on the Sabbath. “If you turn it away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day,” and it doesn’t mean you don’t have pleasure, but your pleasure apart from how God says you should get pleasure, right?

We all want glory and knowledge in life. The problem is we try to get there through some way unmediated by God and we end up with no glory, no knowledge and lousy lives. “So from doing your own pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable and shall honor him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words. Then you shall delight yourself in the Lord.

I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth. I’ll feed you at the heritage of Jacob, your father, the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” How do we become the head and not the tail in this culture? How do we lead this country into rejoicing and giving praise to God? Seems to me that God says an important mechanism to accomplish that is proper keeping of the Lord’s day. “My day” he says—think about this.

Okay, you may disagree with me what we should or shouldn’t do. Is it restricted to a day? Is it just the worship service? Okay, but whatever it is, it’s got be something. And in the New Testament, it’s called the Lord’s day, the day of the Lord. And a day—I don’t know why we would want to restrict that to the hour and a half of worship. Seems like it’s still a day to me.

And if it is the day, and it’s a day that Jesus says is particularly my day, and if we then take that day and make it like every other day except we go to church, what have we done? We have, I believe, trampled the Sabbath day and trampled the Savior. Trampled the Savior. I believe that’s what we do when we do that.

Now, you know, I you know, I’m talking to you. I’m talking to myself. We have a long way to go to understand how to do this properly. There’s all kinds of things maybe that we do that we shouldn’t do. I don’t know. But there are certain things we know we shouldn’t do. And if we allow those things to happen in the context of this church, we lose the whole thing.

And I believe I believe that the loss of the Christian consensus in this country over the last hundred years was because of the loss of the Lord’s day. And they predicted it. The Presbyterian Church of both the South and the North in the late 1800s, early 1900s says, you know, you lose the Lord’s day, the whole thing’s gone. The whole thing’s gone. And you think, why would that be true? Let’s I’ll get back to that, but let’s let’s look at a couple of other verses.

And you have to turn there. And I in Exodus 31:12-17. Well, turn there, I guess. Turn to Exodus 31. Exodus 31 beginning at verse 12. “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak also the children of Israel, saying, Surely my Sabbaths you shall keep, for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know. that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.”

So this is now not just one little rule among many. It’s not the fourth commandment among 10. It’s like the ultimate way of demonstrating our covenant loyalty to God so that he knows that we know that he is the Lord who sanctifies us. And I I believe that if we cannot sanctify the Lord’s day, we’re not going to be able to sanctify anything. And that’s exactly what’s happened since my birthday. No, not my birthday. Since it’s the year of my birth about 1950.

It’s been over. It’s a dead issue. Took that long for him. Took a hundred years for him to wear down the Presbyterians. But by 1950, I think it was 1950, the Commission on the Lord’s Day Alliance or the Sabbath Committee that had gone on for years promoting Sabbath observance, Lord’s Day observance disbanded. And so it was over.

And what’s happened since then? We’ve not been able to sanctify anything. We’re in a battle to sanctify marriage from homosexuality. But we already lost the battle of the sanctified Christian marriage when the you know when great percentages of people live with each other and fornicate in the church of Jesus Christ. I mean 20 years ago I knew a gal who went to—I won’t name the church—a charismatic church. It was pretty well known that at that church all kinds of people were sleeping together. It was kind of the deal.

If you want to you know pick up a Christian girl and have a fun time you go up to Jesus Northwest and at the end of that event, you know, there girls looking for guys and guys looking for girls. We lost the sanctification of marriage and sexuality. You know, long time ago, we lost the sanctification of our commerce, the sanctification of our government. Over and over again, these the covenant involves statutes, civil implications. We lose theonymy, I believe, if we give up the you know why Greg Bahnsen wrote the book. He wrote the book because the library at the seminary, I believe, Westminster Seminary west began to be open on Sundays.

That’s why he wrote the book. What? What’s going on? He said he wrote the book because of the see all of the ten commandments, nine are clearly repeated in the New Testament. So if that’s all you’re doing is holding up to the nine, you’re like every other dispensationalist. God had to repeat it for you to believe it. Well, does he have to repeat the fourth commandment to you? I believe he does. In Hebrews, a better translation.

“There remains a Sabbathkeeping.” It doesn’t just say rest. It says Sabbathkeeping. In the Greek, there remains a Sabbath. So, I think it is repeated. But that’s really the issue. And the issue is should we move toward having the day sanctified? That was what the was all about at its core. We lose everything. We lose the ability to sanctify anything if we don’t sanctify what God says should be sanctified in the first place.

The transmission belt of what we do here into the rest of our lives is this day set apart. It’s a ritual, a practice. Churches that have moved away from Sabbath observance have moved away from attendance at worship. That was the next thing. Well, you don’t you can come, you can go. The pastor bemoaned the fact I think in the 50s he said, “I don’t know what to pray for anymore. If I pray for a good day, my folks are going to go driving around in the countryside and have fun recreating.

If I pray for rain, they’re going to stay home and say it’s too bad a weather to go to church.” This is what started to happen when the Sabbath would decline. And so the religious practices of a culture, what do you have left if you give this up? This is the way God trains us as a church, the Lord’s day, the worship service, the sanctification of the Sabbath, living together in community this day and rejoicing with each other.

This is the way the army of God is trained to take that into the rest of the world. You see, that’s the point. As you move from the center of the temple out to Christian families, you do it by means of the sanctification of the Sabbath. And Nehemiah shows us that verse 17 of Exodus, this text in Exodus, verse 16:

“Therefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.”

Now that’s important because the Sabbath is what some people call a creation ordinance. It wasn’t something that Moses started. It wasn’t distinctive. Now, there were elements of how the Sabbath was observed. New moons, the calendar of the Mosaic covenant, all that stuff is put out of whack. It’s not creation ordinance, but the basic Sabbath, the reason why it’s a sign God says to him and his people is it was part of the creation model. And so, you know, as long as this creation goes on, the one day and seven is to be observed.

You know, the communists tried to make it a 10-day week. completely failed. People have—I think it’s a reality that God builds in a sabbatical cycle and we’re either going to, you know, get with the program or resist it. And if we resist it, then God turns us over. Really lousy things happening.

Listen to this. Ezekiel 20. Turn to Ezekiel 20. Ezekiel 20:12-13. “Moreover, I also gave them my Sabbaths to be a sign between them and me that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them.” See, it’s directly connected to the sanctification of his people. Verse 13: “Yet the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness.

They did not walk in my statutes. They despise my judgments, which if a man does, he shall live by them. and they greatly defiled my Sabbaths.” That’s what happened here. That’s what happened between the late 1800s and the mid 1900s. the Presbyterian Church began—by actually they said they said that when the Sabbath day and Lords of the Alliance began in the 1800s, they said that very few states had Sabbath laws.

We tend to think it was not like that, but it but actually they had very few had of the flaws. And they claimed in one of their reports, I think in the early 1900s, that by then 47 of the 48 states had them now. They were very successful as a as a lobbying force and civil legislation to get the country to observe the Sabbath. They did it. They did it successfully. But then there was the roaring 20s and things began to fall apart.

And so what there’s an article called “On Dropping the Subject.” And what they eventually did is they just dropped the subject. The reports got fewer and fewer. The permanent committee to protect Sabbath and to encourage the Presbyterian Church of both the North and the South, that’s all the Presbyterians in the country. Committees to establish and promote Sabbathkeeping, they were they were folded up, done away with.

And then eventually what the Supreme Court ruled against prayer in the public schools. We know that. But in the same session, I believe Steve will be able to tell us later on, but during the same session, I think that same court at least also ruled against Sabbath laws. And so then the Presbyterian denomination after you know now after you know 30 or 40 years of abandoning the Sabbath they then passed a resolution that no Presbyterians should fight either one of these things that we should not try to get Christian prayer in the schools.

That’s wrong. And we should not try to get the country to observe the Christian Sabbath. So we went from the denomination—Presbyterians advocating for, successfully lobbying, personally practicing the Sabbath in their congregations to now personally exhorting their people don’t do that anymore. That’s what happened. And now then social justice became, you know, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua supporting them instead of supporting the Christian Sabbath, Christian marriage, etc.

But that’s how it happened, folks. The mainstream liberal denominations that you know of didn’t used to be that way. They got there over a process. And I think and the author of a book I’m going to mention here, an article in a book I’m going to mention in a moment thinks that the Sabbath was the thing that moved them away from this. Now, that be in keeping with God’s word because after he says that you gave up on my Sabbaths, he says, “Then I said I would pour out my fury in them to consume them.” Own the curse.

The curse is abroad in the land. Why? Well, according to Ezekiel 20. The curse was abroad then because of the Sabbath. And I believe that if you track the history of this republic in the last 100 years, you will see a definite connection between the decline and getting rid of the Sabbath and then the incoming of evil.

Another look at Ezekiel 20:23. Look at this. Verse 23. “Also, I raised my hand in an oath to those in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the Gentiles and disperse them throughout the countries. Why? Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, profaned my Sabbaths, and their eyes were fixed on their father’s idols.”

That’s what Nehemiah says. We got in this mess because of Sabbath. We went into exile because of Sabbath. And look what he says next. And think about our country. Verse 25: “Therefore, I Yahweh gave them over—up to statutes, laws that were not good, and judgments by the courts by which they could not live.”

Can I get an amen—that’s where we’re at, right? We have laws that are bad and we’ve got judgments that we cannot live with. If you read the PAC literature or other Christian groups, you know what the Ninth Circuit says about a parent’s ability to control the education of their children. It’s gone according to them, right? All kinds of things. Homosexual marriage, all kinds of weird, horrible things. But see, the problem is not them.

The problem Ezekiel says is you guys stepped on my day. You stepped on my day and as a result I’ve given you over to judgment and the judgment will take the form—since you’re not going to enforce my Sabbath because you’re not going to keep up what your forefathers did in this country by enforcing Sabbath and by encouraging folks to do it. I’m going to give you up to the Supreme Court that says you can’t do it anymore.

That’s the state we’re in. How do we get out? I’m not waiting till we elect a Christian magistrate who’s going to reinstitute Sabbath. That’s what I hope eventually happens in some form. Now, what it means, we can talk about—got to make provision for alternate Sabbath. It’s a complex issue. I understand that. But I’m not waiting around for the civil magistrate to figure it out and tell me what to do. And I don’t think you should either.

We think at this church that we should live according to how we think these laws should already be in effect. And we think we ought to have a civil governor saying, “What are you guys doing? Quit breaking the Sabbath.” Well, then we live that way. We live that way in our lives. We keep Sabbath and as a result of that, we tell God, “Remember us for the good that we do. Bless us, Lord God.” I believe you will.

I’m a very busy guy and you guys are very busy. And yet, you know, yesterday I had the love of the blacks and the roaches, you know, put under my family and household again. They came out. They re-roofed my outbuilding. and they’re very busy people. Right? But to keep the Sabbath and I try to keep the Sabbath. We all keep the Sabbath. And you know what? The Lord God just does neat stuff. He takes your time and he will give you things that it would have taken you several hours to find and he just lays it in front of you.

Two weeks ago, Monty Harmon comes up at the end of the Lord’s day here and says, “Well, pastor, I bought these books and I don’t know if they’re any good or not. They’re kind of interesting. They’re about Presbyterianism.” And one of them is this one, The Presbyterian Predicament. And these are like mainline Presbyterian guys. Well, I don’t know if it did any good or not, but you know, I open it up and I see this article called “On Dropping the Subject: Presbyterians and Sabbath Observance in the 20th Century” by Benton Johnson.

And it, you know, God just drops it in my lap. I know that this sermon’s coming up. I know that the emphasis on Sabbath, I’m going to be dealing with it. And here it is. And I was going to quote from it, but probably too long. Maybe next sermon. I will quotes from some of this. Angie has made 30 copies of this. I strongly encourage all families to take a copy. You know, it’s it’s a little dry. But what this guy does is he studies the minutes of the Presbyterian church for the last, you know, 150 years.

So, you know, every time they meet, they create minutes. And you can go back and study the history of the Reformed church, the Presbyterians, by just reading their minutes. And he studies the minutes. And he shows this progression that I’ve been talking about and all the evidence are the minutes that he gets out of these meetings and just to watch the flow here and the way it happened. He does a wonderful job of talking about that.

Let me—I’ll conclude with just reading a bit of his conclusion. At the end he sort of gives some of his own ideas as to what’s going on here. So I’ll I’ll read a concluding thing here and and this is how he concludes his article which brings this and his point was they dropped they dropped the subject they didn’t actually you know find new text or evidence or no it’s not like that—let’s just drop the subject, let’s not talk about it anymore.

So he says: “Which brings us back again to Sunday. It is a trivial thing when it is weighed against the requirements of justice in southern Africa. So they say. But it’s not a trivial thing when we remind ourselves that spiritual practice—so things we do—spiritual practice is one of the three pillars of a religious tradition.

The other two being the doctrine or teachings and its morality. Spiritual practice waters the roots of the soul and thereby enlivens the spirit. When done by the members of a community, it recreates the energy to sustain its morality which means that it is able to sustain both itself and its various missions. Without teaching in spiritual practice, the will to live by the moral code of faith fades away.

Those in the old mainline churches” he says “need to remember this. He says that if Presbyterians are serious about revitalization, they need to say something about sacred time and how it should be used. Something about the disciplines of personal life and something about how these matters should figure in the life of the church. The erosion of Sabbath observance is not only a paradigm of the erosion of faith in general.

It is also a paradigm of the loss of spiritual practice in the mainline churches. Protestants dropped some important subjects years ago without saying why. If the church is to revitalize itself for whatever missions it adopts, these subjects need to be raised once again.”

We’re raising the subject in this church again.

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Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for today. We thank you for the wonderful benefit we have the result health of the Protestant Reformation. And we also thank you for the faithful Presbyterian Church that labored away for many years in a positive way here. Thank you, Lord God, for your judgments. May you, Lord God, continue to strike us and to come after us as we stray. And may we remember that it’s your hand of love that’s bringing us back to yourself, back to joy and life and our Savior.

Help us, Lord God, as we come forward to bring the result of our labor before you to recognize that this is the day when we don’t labor and don’t enter into commerce, that we do dedicate it to be the Lord’s day in totality. Help us to do that today and to rejoice in it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.