The period of time between the destruction of the walls and the sacking of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, to the time of Nehemiah, is pretty much the same period of time that we've seen a lapse in this country between the fourth quarter of the 19th century and today. The fourth quarter of the 19th century saw a great attack by Satan on the churches of Christ, and it's been relentlessly kept up ever since then. You go through the 19th century and the Victorian age, and you see great advances of the kingdom of God. You have only got to look around you in London and you still see the evidence. You can see the remains of numerous churches from a time when the population of London was only a fraction of what it is today. Almost every block of streets in central London has a church building. It is probably converted into something else – shops, offices, warehouses, and so on – but you have only got to look around you and you can see the church architecture of the Anglicans and the Nonconformists all over the place – a mission hall, a ragged school, a Sunday school, a church, or a chapel. The strength of spiritual witness in the 19th century was tremendous, and it had been – with ups and downs – pretty strong in the United Kingdom ever since the Reformation. But come to the last quarter of the 19th century, and you see Satan's counter attack at its peak. It comes into the churches with the movement for Biblical criticism. It started in the seminaries and the theological colleges with professors pouring doubt on the infallibility, the inerrancy, the inspiration of Scripture. Pulling it apart, inserting all the theories as to who wrote this and who wrote that, and how many authors there were to this book and that book, disagreeing with each other, and asserting the fragility and fallibility of the record. The young ministers were sent into the churches of all the main line denominations who didn't even really believe this Bible, this book, or the faith. So the collapse began and false things being taught and churches being turned over to theological liberalism, where everything was critiqued and doubted.
Here in the Metropolitan Tabernacle C H Spurgeon, the pastor of this church in 1887, was protesting about the false teaching, first of all, in some of the Baptist seminaries, and it led to a great confrontation and theological battle known as the Downgrade Controversy. The Tabernacle and numerous others left the Baptist Union denomination, because it wouldn't take action against liberalism and unbelief, and discipline its ministers. The Baptist Union considered it wasn't it's business to implement discipline, and that everybody had a right to contribute to this debate, and so liberalism was allowed in, and the denomination began to turn sour and to become totally discredited. People with any strength of conviction, for the most part, have long since left the Baptist Union, and have become Independent Churches. The same thing happened with the Methodists, the same thing happened with the Congregationalist. The rot in the Congregational churches started a little earlier, and with the unitarianism, Arianism, piercing their ranks, but the big collapse was the last quarter of the 19th century. Of course, accelerated by atheism, Darwinism, the theory of evolution, and then later on into the 20th century, Freudianism, but mainly it was the churches themselves. The people who held the truth and believed the gospel, and believed the word, and had tasted the converting power of the Spirit: they were not quick to separate themselves from those who denied these things. So you had churches mixed: unbelievers, theological liberals, with evangelicals in the same denomination, as you have, say, in the Church of England, where the vast majority don't believe in an inspired, inerrant Bible, and a minority of ministers and congregations that do believe these things stay in. Of course, that's a contaminating influence, because the majority is constantly further eroding the little minority of people who are trying to be faithful. One of the things we will find in Nehemiah is the disaster of those who are true believers not standing apart from those who are not true believers, and who teach false things.
In our time it's gone even further. We've seen Satan making inroads among Bible believers with all the confusion and mistakes of the Charismatic Movements and evangelical worldliness entering the churches, and the contemporary Christian worship, putting the world into the church. Many independence churches that are evangelical are harbouring now things that are destroying them. What can be done? Well, the Book of Nehemiah answers this. This is describing a reformer – and we pray always that there will be pastors, ministers who are of a reforming characteristic, and like Nehemiah will be grieved at the state of affairs, and commit themselves to standing for the old ways. We have here the qualifications for a reforming person or a reforming congregation.