Sometimes the Study Bibles are very disappointing. They love the technicalities and some of them are very helpful on technicalities – sorting out things that are puzzling to you concerning dates and geography – but most of them don't bother to tell you anything about the meaning and the purpose of the passage at all. What's the purpose of all this in Nehemiah? One Study Bible spends a great deal of time going into elaborate information about the layout of Jerusalem and the wall, and the names of all the gates that are mentioned in the book and where they are in relation to each other. But you could go through life as a Christian, totally ignorant of the gates of Jerusalem and their location and distance from each other; it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference to your spiritual life. It wouldn't improve your walking holiness or your witness, or your coping with trials or problems. That information might be interesting to you, but to obtain help we must go for the meaning behind the passage. It is not enough to learn that Eliashib let Tobiah into the house of God, and then Nehemiah comes along and throws him out, and ceremonially cleanses the entire space, and rededicates, and has it scrubbed two or three more times than necessary, so that the stench of Tobiah and the Samaritans and their ever having been there is gone. That is all very exciting, but what does it mean? Well it means a great deal.
The apostle Paul says in Romans 15: 4, ‘All these things are written for our learning’, and then he proceeds to give some of the things that we’re supposed to be learning. They are supposed to help us in practical ways in our faith: in giving faith and comfort and help in spiritual matters. So what are those matters here? Clearly they are parallels with experiences that might be had by us today. Don't we see this on every hand – letting Tobiah into the temple of the Lord; letting paganism, letting hedonism into the temple of the Lord? Not only letting it in, but giving it prime space to make a home and headquarters, a place to receive people, a place to claim position. We see it in the church. You see the world brought into the church wholesale. The world that we are supposed to be winning, the world that we are supposed to be evangelising: we take it wholesale and imitate it as closely as we can and install it right in the middle of the temple, the church. That's what this passage is all about. We are supposed to be delivering those who are made captive by it from its culture and from its ways and from its godlessness. How can we issue any serious warning against the world, when we have one foot in the world ourselves? This is about the great compromise with worldliness, sin, and false teaching: letting it in to the work of God, to the kingdom of God, to the house of God. So Nehemiah, representing the will of God, casts it all out – his furniture, his trappings, his carpets, everything – and cleanses the house.