Sometimes people set too much store by confessions of faith, as though they are the effective wall of Jerusalem. Yes, we need confessions of faith; of course we do. A church subscribes to a confession of faith, but that is only one safeguard against doctrinal error, because while everybody is saying, ‘I am for the such-and-such confession; this is my confession of faith’, the world has come in by another route. It has sidestepped the confession. The confession has been like a French Maginot line, and Hitler has gone right round it. The evil is coming by practice, by activities, and we have got to safeguard against them too. The trouble is that many evangelical pastors and churches are only looking at the confession of faith. They are not watching the practices: what people do. Consequently, terrible things, things that are totally inconsistent with the confession of faith in print, are being done in practice. This is the passage before us, and it is analogous to what is happening in the Christian church even today.
The people – even the better people among them – must have somehow been convinced that having Tobiah in the temple, would be to their advantage. We can assume that the compromisers were teaching the people, ‘If we let the Samaritans share the temple and have their offices there, they will be very pleased and all the harassment will come to an end and there won't be marauding bands coming into Judah and into Jerusalem, and robbing our houses. There will be peace, and we won't live in constant nervousness and anxiety. There will be trade and there will be prosperity, and we will do much better.
We need to be careful of that today. There are many, many books and articles published now to persuade us that it is a good thing to have the world in the church. Then the world won't be afraid of us; we will be much more attractive to them, because we are more like them. They will flock in because we are playing their music, using their rhythms, providing something for the flesh, which you can enjoy at the level of the senses, and not just through the word and through worship in the spirit. There is persuasion going on. People are being brainwashed, Christian people, to accept these things.
There was recently a conference in London and a question was put to a panel in which he was included, ‘How are we going to reverse the trend because the world is so far away from us. How can we reach people, and turn the tide, so that they seek the Lord, and bring them in?’ This brother gave an answer, and he was a distinguished man and a sound evangelical. He said very thoughtfully, ‘Well what we've got to do is build bridges.’ That old phrase comes up again: build bridges. What did he mean? One would have expected a good answer to be, ‘We've got to buckle down to witnessing to people, preaching the gospel regularly in the churches, visiting the neighbourhoods, enlarging the Sunday Schools. These things will reach communities, and people will be affected. But ‘build bridges’; what is that? Well in a way it is an answer which will please everybody. If you are a Christian rapper, that is exactly what you think you're doing. ‘I'm building bridges. I'm excelling in something which is intensely worldly to build a bridge with the world.’ That is completely the wrong answer. Build bridges? Whatever can it mean? Well it is another way of spelling ‘compromise’. That is what this Book of Nehemiah is all about. We are a people who proclaim, and explain, and testify, and witness. We are not building bridges, trying to be like the people we are trying to save. We are obeying God and pleasing him from whom all blessing comes. He will send blessing when we use the means he has ordained.