Nehemiah 6:11 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Nehemiah 6:11

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But, of course, Nehemiah cannot do that; he is not a priest. He cannot go into the temple. That is against the law of the Jews. He certainly cannot go into the holy of holies, if that is what is referred to. Nehemiah knew instinctively that this man was a fraud. ‘Should such a man as I flee?’ I am governor of Jerusalem and Judah. Should I flee in terror? Who is there in my position that would go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in. If he had fled to the temple for refuge, it's obvious that he would lose all authority in the city. Suddenly their leader, who in matter of weeks has picked them up from being an oppressed people, and given them strong morale and encouraged them to stand against their enemies, and has pressed them to the point where they responded and they built this wall furiously and amazingly, with the blessing of God – for him suddenly to be a cringing, cowardly being, who runs wrongly and against the law in craven fear into the temple with the doors locked to avoid assassination: he might just as well proclaim from the housetops: ‘We’ve had it. This is all at an end; they are stronger than we are; I capitulate; I surrender.’ Not only would it be illegal and improper, and he the governor would be losing and forfeiting authority and magnifying the enemy by this; it would also be cowardice and desertion. At the same time the passage tells us he realises that Shemaiah is a false prophet, and he has not received any such message from God. How can he be so sure? Because Nehemiah knows the Scripture, and he knows that it is improper and against the law for him to go into the temple in that way, so no prophet would prophesy something which God had forbidden. You see then a perfect example of this man who is not a clergyman, not a priest; he knows the law, so by reference to the word he immediately discerns that that prophet is phony. The word decides everything for us.

Application

I saw that there was a man in some kind of a blog expressing this view: ‘Ah, there are conservative Christians, and they want to sing the old hymns and they want to avoid worldly ways, and I'm one of them’, he says. ‘I don't like all this percussion and drums and the rest of it. In fact, I'm stopping attending meetings where this goes on.’ But he says, on the other hand, our duty surely is to find a middle way; unity is the great thing. So why don't they at the Metropolitan Tabernacle School of Theology have some of these contemporary hymns, and why don't some of the contemporary people have the some of the old hymns, and then the we can all meet in the middle, and be happy and be content?’ How do you deal with a problem where you’ve got people bringing in things that are wrong and worldly? Do you apply some kind of friendly human philosophy: ‘Let's meet in the middle.’ Or do you say, ‘What says the Scripture?’, and you look at the texts and the duty of biblical separation from error and harm and so on? Well Nehemiah applied the Scripture. This can't be a legitimate prophecy because it is telling me to do something which God has forbidden. He went to the word, and he didn’t apply mere human thinking. But that’s the trouble. Today there are even many pastors and they are solving everything by human thinking. They're not referring to the Scripture and going back to the sole authority for Christian people.

In the 1970s in the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, there was a college principal, the Northern Baptist College, who one day denied the deity, the divinity, of Jesus Christ. So naturally there was a rumpus – not as big a rumpus as there should have been – and many people drew attention to this. ‘What is the Baptist Union going to do about this? This man is a member of the Baptist Union council. This man is a principle one of its colleges. What are they going to do about a denial the deity of Christ?’ The Baptist Union decided to do nothing. They decided that this man was pushing out the frontiers of theological knowledge, and what he was doing was quite legitimate. He was researching theological knowledge. How do you research theological knowledge by denying the Bible and the Lord? But there were some evangelical ministers, famous evangelical ministers in those days, within the Baptist Union, who also sat on that council. And it became known that when the council met together to decide how they would deal with this problem. But when the council decided they would defend that college principal, those evangelicals didn't say, ‘Well, if you say that, we go.’ They said, ‘Craft your news release and your public statement a little more gently so that we can sell it to our evangelicals.’ What a terrible thing! They were in the pay, if you like, of liberal unbelievers, that majority of ministers in the Baptist Union in this country, who do not believe the Bible, who do not believe in the evangelical faith of the Scriptures.

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Nehemiah 6:11 Commentary and Bible Study