Nehemiah 1:5 Commentary and Bible Study

So Nehemiah goes to prayer: ‘I beseech the O Lord, God of heaven, the great and terrible God.’ These are tremendous words. ‘I beseech thee, O Lord.’ The word ‘Lord’ is in capital letters which means that Nehemiah was using the divine name, the Jehovah name, which describes God as the self-existent God, the all-powerful God from whom all life and substance and matter and energy flows, the source of all things. It describes him as the eternal ruler, the great ‘I am’; to the Jews of old the unpronounceable divine name. Nehemiah knows what he's doing. He prays to a great God. He doesn't stumble into God's presence and start talking about himself. You hear that today. You hear well-meaning ministers starting a service of worship by saying to God, in so many words, ‘Oh thank you for all our blessings. Thank you that we are all saved. Thank you that this has happened, and we've seen this and that’, instead of starting with God and the worship of him, and the acknowledging of him, and his might and majesty. Unless we are praying an emergency prayer, that is how we have to pray. We have to get our perspective right to begin with, and address the living God, showing due humility and reverence to him. We have to truly connect with him as he is: the glorious God on high. ‘God of heaven’, transcendent over all, ‘the great and terrible God’ – that word ‘great’ includes all the attributes of God: his truthfulness, his holiness, his infinite power, all his attributes. Terrible God! We recoil at that word ‘terrible God’. Are the modern translations right to render it awesome God? Oh yes feels much better: ‘the awesome God’. Surely that would be more fitting and more accurate than ‘the terrible God’. Well, possibly, except that the word ‘awesome’ has become quite a trivial term these days. It carries more the sense in which Hollywood uses it – the big green dinosaur in the children's book is awesome, so the word ‘awesome’ is cheapened and trivialised. It isn’t any longer good enough God. The word ‘terrible’, though it’s a word that jars us, is actually nearer to the Hebrew. The word in the Hebrew comes from the verb ‘to fear’: the fearful God, the God who is to be feared. Not of course negative fear entirely, but fear because, as we approach him, he sees us through and through, and he sees all our disobedience and our failings and weaknesses, and we fear in a sense, even his dear children who believe in him as a loving heavenly Father. He is the God to be feared. I can't cheat him. I can't play the hypocrite before him. I can't pray for things that I'd like, while at the same time not putting right things in me that are wrong. I have got to respect him utterly. There is something about God, even our loving heavenly Father, that cautions us as we come. ‘That keepeth covenant and mercy for them that love him.’ This is an important plank in Nehemiah's reasoning. What right do I have to come before God, he says to himself, and to ask that something be done to reverse things in Jerusalem? Ah, he is a covenant keeping God. He is going to quote Deuteronomy 30 where God promises that, even though his people have sinned against him, and been chastised, and been put to one side, if they or a remnant of them return and repent, then God solemnly promises to revive them again. So no wonder Nehemiah says, ‘Oh God, the covenant keeping God, the God who is faithful to all his undertakings’ – and we can do that today. ‘Mercy for them that love him, and observe his commandments’ – he comes to this. Nehemiah wouldn't be able to approach od, if he didn't believe that God will be faithful to promises he has made, and show mercy towards offenders.