Then the rest of the people—the priests, Levites, gatekeepers, singers, Temple servants, and all who had separated themselves from the pagan people of the land in order to obey the Law of God, together with their wives, sons, daughters, and all who were old enough to understand—joined their leaders and bound themselves with an oath. They swore a curse on themselves if they failed to obey the Law of God as issued by his servant Moses. They solemnly promised to carefully follow all the commands, regulations, and decrees of the Lord our Lord: Nehemiah 10:28-29 NLT
In the previous devotion, we talked about the fact that as humans we cannot separate the physical and the spiritual. What we are on the inside will inevitably be apparent on the outside. So we talked about the walls of Jerusalem, and the way in which the absence of those walls was an indication that the people had no spiritual walls either.
The idea that the real issue is a spiritual one is apparent in the structure of the book of Nehemiah. The first six chapters are about the rebuilding of the walls, but chapters seven through thirteen are about rebuilding the people, particularly chapters eight through ten, where Ezra reads the Torah, and the people commit themselves to it. Interestingly, there is a piece about the people’s behavior in chapter five, and the walls are dedicated in chapter twelve, so there is a clear intertwining of the two behaviors. With the exterior walls finished, the interior walls could also be reconstructed. Walls – what this tells us is that there are clear boundaries between what is acceptable to God and what is unacceptable. If we are committed to pleasing God and doing his will, then there are some behaviors that are clearly off-limits.
To be sure, the opposite danger to syncretism is legalism, and it is terribly easy to point to externals as proof of a spiritual reality that does not actually exist. It would be as though the Judeans were to say, “Since we have city walls, that is the proof that we are exclusively dedicated to God” when that was not the case at all, as some of the behaviors reported in Nehemiah 13 show. The two aspects of our lives must be kept in balance, with the spiritual reality being foundational.
Called To Be Transformed 