Today we're going to look at a prayer in the scriptures. This prayer in particular is going to look
at the longest prayer in the Bible. So you can open your Bibles to Nehemiah 9. It is the longest
prayer in the Bible.
But I want to tell you first about the shortest prayer in the Bible. Do you know where the shortest
prayer in the Bible is? It comes from that story of Jesus, who was walking on the water in the
midst of a storm, and Peter (being the brave guy that he is or ADHD or whatever he had),
decided he wanted to get out of the boat and walk on that water. And it was hard. So he started
walking toward Jesus. In his walk, though, he started paying attention to all the things around
him and he fell under the circumstances. You know what that means, right? When someone says
to you, “How you doing?” and you say, “Well, under the circumstances…” I have to say, what
are you doing down there? You don't have to be under the circumstances, not if you're a
Christian. Right? But he got under the circumstances and so he calls out that prayer, and he says,
“Lord, save me!” If you've never prayed that prayer, that is the first prayer, you pray. “Lord,
save me.” And of course Jesus was right there to walk with him then back to the boat. We all
need that prayer in our lives, we need to be able to come to Him and say, “Lord, save me.”
Today, we're going to look at the longest prayer in the Bible, Nehemiah 9. I want to take you
through it. But what I'd like you to do is start by standing up with me and I'm going to read now
the introduction before we get to the prayer, as we all stand together.
Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and
in sackcloth, and with earth on their heads. So they’re very serious about this. And the Israelites
separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and their iniquities
of their fathers. And they stood up in their place and read from the Book of the Law of the Lord
their God for a quarter of the day (wouldn’t that be like three hours?), for another quarter of it
they made confession and worshiped the Lord their God. On the stairs of the Levites stood
Jeshua, Bani, Kadmiel, Shebaniah, Bunni, Sherebiah, Bani, and Chenani; and they cried with a
loud voice to the Lord their God. Then the Levites, Jeshua, Kadmiel, Bani, Hashabneiah,
Sherebiah, Hodiah, Shebaniah, and Pethahiah, said, “Stand up and bless (that’s the word baruk,
which we’re going to be singing in just a moment) the Lord (Adonai) your God from everlasting
to everlasting. And so now the prayer is going to begin.
You may sit down.
Before I share with you this prayer that we're going to go through very carefully, I want to talk to
you about entering the Holy of Holies. Because that's what I imagine is taking place in this
prayer. When you enter into the Holy of Holies... Just imagine this, you've got the temple, and
you've got the holy place, and then you've got this big curtain. If you go behind the curtain is one
piece of furniture. That is the Ark of the Covenant called the mercy seat with the big angels
above it. And when you enter behind that veil, just imagine you're the only person who can go in
there. You're the high priest. You can only go in once a year and this is the day. You move the
veil back so you can get behind it and you can go in there into this. The curtain is very high,
higher than the ceiling. It's very high. And as you go in there, it's kind of spooky, it's kind of
awesome, it's kind of reverent, maybe even a little bit scary. The priest had a rope tied around his
foot in case he dies in there they're going to pull him out. Nobody else is going in there. This is a
very special place as you come in there because the only piece of furniture is the Ark of the
Covenant. And the Ark of the Covenant, as you know, lead the people through the wilderness. It
was the Ark of the Covenant that came to the Jordan River and when it did, the waters parted and
they walked through. It's this Ark of the Covenant that represents the very presence of God. And
here you are, you and I, we’re walking into this Holy of Holies. That's what I imagined as I
studied this passage this week. I'm walking in the very presence of God.
There are three things about God we must understand as we go into this prayer. You're going to
see them in the passage. And you need all three of these things in order to trust the Lord. One,
that He's in control. Two, that He's good. And thirdly, that He cares. He cares about us. All three
of those. If He's in control but not good, then you don't want to trust Him. The fact that He cares
makes Him intimately interested in your life and my life. So that's what we're looking at here in
the midst of this.
Let's look at the verses. Here's the prayer. Blessed (that’s baruk) be your glorious name (that is
hashem, bless the Lord), which is exalted above all blessing and praise. You are Yahweh or
Adonai, you alone. Those are the words we're going to sing in our song in a moment. That's how
the prayer opens up.
You have made heaven (and notice the God is in control part here), the heaven of heavens, with
all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all
of them; and the host of heaven worships you. You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram (see,
God has this plan; He’s in control) and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the
name Abraham. You found his heart faithful before you, and made with him the covenant to give
to his offspring the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and
the Girgashite. And you have kept your promise, for you are righteous.
Now that’s verse 8. You've kept your promise, for you are righteous. Jot that down. Just put a star
by verse 8. We're going to come back to that in a moment.
But now as we enter verse 9, we're going to see God's care and His personal nature that He cares
for us. He says – And you saw the affliction. God sees your pain. You just got to know this. If
you’re struggling in your life today, God sees that. Not only sees it. You saw the affliction of our
fathers in Egypt and heard their cry at the Red Sea, and performed signs and wonders (God’s
doing something about their problem) against Pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of
his land, for you knew… See, God is intimately caring for the people here. We see the care nature
of God here. You knew that they (that’s Pharaoh) acted arrogantly against our fathers. And you
made a name for yourself, as it is to this day. And you divided the sea before them, so that they
went through the midst of the sea on dry land, and you cast their pursuers into the depths, as a
stone into mighty waters. By a pillar of cloud you led them. You’re going to see this idea of God
leading them. He’s going to continue to lead them, even when they fail. But this leading is so
important. Notice it says – You led them in the day, and by a pillar of fire in the night to light for
them the way in which they should go.
You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them right rules. I
underlined the right rules because that’s our word shaphat. The right rules. There's a lot of
wrong rules being presented to us by the world, but there are the right rules that God has laid out
for us, the code that helps us know how to live life successfully. That’s the shaphat, the right
rules and true laws, good statutes. Underline the word good there. That’s the word tov. We’ll see
it five times in the passage. I’ll comment more on it in a moment, but they are good. God’s
statutes are so good and commandments, and you made known to them your holy Sabbath and
commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses your servant. You gave them
(here’s God caring again) bread from heaven for their hunger and brought water for them out of
the rock for their thirst, and you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give
them.
This is all about God. These are the things we're talking about about God. That God is in control,
that He's good, that He cares. This is the description we've already seen about God here, but we
come back to the passage. It says but. But they and our fathers did three things. We’re going to
see what those three things are, but let’s go to the next slide because this is man. This describes
what man is like. He’s rebellious, prideful, and has a selfish attitude. We can see ourselves there.
And we’re going to see it over and over again in this passage.
It says – But they and our fathers acted presumptuously (pridefully) and stiffened their neck.
That’s this selfish attitude. You know how that is. Sometimes a child says, “No.” Selfish attitude.
Stiffened their neck and did not obey (they’re rebellious) your commandments. They refused to
obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened
their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.
Now you notice I’ve circled the conjunctions here because we’re going to go back and forth
between God and His greatness and man and his weakness. So it says – But you are a God ready
to forgive. Notice this verse. Verse 17. Mark it again. You are a God ready to forgive, gracious
and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.
That word steadfast love is the word chesed. This is one of the very important theological words
of the Old Testament. C-H-E-S-E-D. Write that down. Circle that word. Steadfast love. This is
the covenant faithfulness of God. It is the infinite love that God has for us. It's translated
steadfast love here. Sometimes it's translated tender mercies. But it's this idea that God has
chosen to love us based on His promise, not on our behavior. It's the steadfast love of the Lord
that we see in this passage. And He did not forsake them. It’s this powerful thing that God has
done.
Verse 17 is going to help us understand the posture that this great God has with weak people. So
let me show you in the next slide this posture of what it looks like. Because you can see in these
verses that there is this posture that God has. We already read verse 8 it says – And you have kept
your promise, for you are righteous. This is God's posture toward us. He's faithful. But you are a
God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and
did not forsake them. That's His posture toward us.
You in your great mercies… We’re coming to this verse in verse 19. You in your great mercies
did not forsake them in the wilderness. The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not depart
from them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should
go. Even when they were messed up, even they were doing the wrong thing, God has this posture
that He has toward us.
Some people don't understand this posture. They think differently about God. Some people view
God as His posture is that He's like this genie. If you rub Him in a particular way, He's going to
give you what you want. And so there's a real wake-up call when tragedy comes into their lives,
or disappointment happens, or things don't go their way. They go, “What's the deal here? God's
supposed to make me happy.” God does not have a posture like that for us. There are some who
believe God has this posture of judgment. That He's watching you to see if you're doing the
wrong thing. Because if you do the wrong thing, He’s going to throw lightning bolts down at you
and get you. God doesn't have that posture either. God is this…look at the words. But you are a
God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and
did not forsake them. That is God's posture toward us.
Now you might be saying to yourself, “Well, you know, I've done really bad things. I mean, you
don't know how bad the things I've done because they're so bad I don't think God can still have
that posture toward me.” That's why we need the next verse in verse 18. It says this – Even when
they had made for themselves a golden calf, even when they got that bad and they said, ‘This is
your God who brought you up out of Egypt,’ and had committed great blasphemies, you in your
great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness. The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way
did not depart from them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which
they should go. Even when they were doing the wrong thing, there was always this light. Come
on, you can do this. This is where you need to go. It's the same thing God does with us. There's
nowhere you can go that's outside of God's grace. There's always this pointing back, there's
always the cloud, there's always a pillar of fire that's drawing us back to the Lord.
You gave your good Spirit (that’s our word tov) to instruct them and did not withhold your
manna from their mouth and gave them water for their thirst. Forty years you sustained them in
the wilderness, and they lacked nothing. I'm going, “Wait a minute. They lacked nothing?” I
mean, if I was in the wilderness, I would have said, “Where's my house? Where's the outhouse?
Or where's the bathroom?” I don't know how they handled that kind of problem out there as
they're walking around in the wilderness. I can think of a lot of things they didn't have. But the
Bible says they lacked nothing. Which could lead us in a whole tangent about contentment with
what we have, instead of complaining about what we don't have. But it says very interestingly
that these that these Israelite people wandering around, lacked nothing. Their clothes did not
wear out and their feet did not swell.
And you gave them kingdoms and peoples and allotted to them every corner. So they took
possession of the land of Sihon king of Heshbon and the land of Og king of Bashan. You
multiplied their children as the stars of heaven, and you brought them into the land that you had
told their fathers to enter and possess. So the descendants went in and possessed the land, and
you subdued before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and gave them into their
hand, with their kings and the peoples of the land, that they might do with them as they would.
And they captured fortified cities and a rich land, and took possession of houses full of all... This
is a fun phrase here. It says good things. But in the Hebrew it says good goodness. It repeats tov
twice. So it says tov and then it's another form of tov. In other words, the good goodness. This is
how God works in our lives. He gives us the good goodness in our lives.
It's such a beautiful word, this word tov. We see it first in Genesis 1. In the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the
face of the earth. And the Spirit hovered over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light.”
And God saw the light and it was tov. It was good. And every day thereafter, God created the
seas and it was tov. He saw the fish and the animals, He says it was tov. It’s good. That’s good.
This is the goodness of God being demonstrated. Until He gets to the last day. And the last day,
He looks at it and He says – This is very good. That's where we live. We live in the goodness of
God. And we get to the next chapter where God creates man. He looks at him and He says, “This
is not good,” and so He creates woman. It's fun to see all of the tov take place throughout the
Bible, because we trust in the goodness of God. That's where we live. God has given us all these
good things to enjoy. If you recognize the goodness and you live in the goodness of God, then
even the challenges that you face in your life you can handle because God has given you every
good thing. And it's right there for you, this goodness. It's just a beautiful word.
He describes it more. He says – cisterns already hewn, vineyards, olive orchards and fruit trees
in abundance. So they ate and were filled and became fat (I like that word – they became fat) and
delighted themselves in your great goodness. I underlined great because this is gadol. You
remember, gadol? This is the word used by Nehemiah when he says I can't come down to you
guys, because I have a great work. We also have a great work and we're not going to stoop down
to the other kind of stuff that goes on. We have a great work. It’s used later to say this is our
great God. And now it describes God's goodness. That God's goodness is so great.
But look at the next verse. Nevertheless, they were disobedient. You're going to get kind of
embarrassed, I think, for the people here as I do. Nevertheless, they were disobedient and
rebelled against you and cast your law behind their back and killed your prophets, who had
warned them in order to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies.
Therefore you gave them into the hand of their enemies, who made them suffer. And in the time
of their suffering they cried out to you and you heard… This is the compassion of God. Just cry
out to the Lord in the midst of your challenges. God will hear them. He heard them from heaven,
and according to your great mercies you gave them saviors who saved them from the hand of
their enemies. That’s the whole book of Judges as described there. But after they had rest, they
did evil again before you. I’m starting to feel embarrassed for these people. They just can’t get it
together. But if you have an addiction problem, then you know what this means because you say,
“Oh man, I don’t think I can come to God again. Here I failed again.”
But they had rest and did evil before you, and you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies,
so that they had dominion over them. Yet when they turned and cried to you, you heard from
heaven, and many times you delivered them according to your mercies. And you warned them in
order to turn them back to your law. Yet they (here we go again) acted presumptuously and did
not obey your commandments, but sinned against your rules, which if a person does them, he
shall live by them. Ooh, that’s an interesting statement. You see, if you take on the code of the
world, it has all of its consequences that you can’t see and you live by them. That’s really sad.
And here’s what they did. They turned a stubborn shoulder and stiffened their neck and would
not obey. This is the description of these people who were just unwilling to respond to the Lord.
So let’s take the next slide. Many years you bore with them and warned them by your Spirit
through your prophets. Yet they would not give ear. Therefore you gave them into the hand of the
peoples of the lands. Nevertheless, in your great mercies… Do you see the contrast between
God’s greatness and human frailty? That we must experience in our own hearts and recognize
who God is. If we don’t rely on God to validate us and we find ourselves secure in who we are in
God, then we continue to look to other people to validate us. It's dangerous. Nevertheless, in your
great mercies you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and
merciful God.
Now, therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who keeps covenant and
(there’s our word chesed again) steadfast love. You see, now they’re right in a place where they
need God’s care. They want it. And so they’re coming out, this is what they’re praying. Lord, let
not all the hardship seem little to you that has come upon us, upon our kings, our princes, our
priests, our prophets, our fathers, and all your people, since the time of the kings of Assyria until
this day. Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt…and
there’s our word. This is God’s posture toward us. He has dealt faithfully and we have acted
wickedly. Our kings, our princes, our priests, and our fathers have not kept your law or paid
attention to your commandments and your warnings that you gave them. Even in their own
kingdom, and amid your great goodness (this is God’s goodness again) that you gave them, and
in the large and rich land that you set before them, they did not serve you or turn from their
wicked works.
Behold, we are slaves this day. And that’s what happens when you live by the word’s code. You
become a slave, in the land that you gave to our fathers to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts (this is
the tov, this is where we want to live, in God’s good gifts), behold, we are slaves. And its rich
yield goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins. They rule over our bodies
and over our livestock as they please, and we are in great distress. We can come before the
Lord. “Please hear my cry, Lord. I am in great distress.”
And now they come to their conclusion of what they want to say as we look at the last words of
this chapter. Because now they're saying, okay, we're in this place again, but now we're going to
do a differently, Lord. This time. This time we're going to remain faithful. Verse 38 says –
Because of all this we make a firm covenant. Not just a regular covenant; we’re going to make a
firm covenant this time, Lord. We’re going to do it better and we’re going to put it in writing; on
the sealed document are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests. So they were
making this great commitment to the Lord.
Imagine going into this holy, Holy of Holies, place. You're in there in the presence of God, and
this veil is there that separates the people. This veil doesn't stay that way. So we read in the
gospel of Luke, in the middle of the greatest day in human history, we read the story about the
crucifixion. It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the
afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Jesus
called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said
this, he breathed his last. You see, the curtain was ripped in two because Jesus Christ died to
satisfy the holiness of God. So that we have access now into the most holy place.
Do you know where the temple is today? The temple is in our hearts. Paul says – Your body is
the temple of the Holy Spirit. So we can enter into this Holy of Holies, this very special place that
God has designed for us. We can enjoy that. We can spend time there. We can come into the
intimate contact with God. We can say, “God, please forgive me again. Lord, I'm coming before
you.” That's why we don't have to go to a priest because the veil has been opened up. You come
directly to God and confess your sins to God Himself. Because you, if you've trusted Christ as
your Lord and Savior, your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. What a privilege.
This is what we're talking about, the faithfulness of God. Because God has this stance toward
you and me. When the people recognize this faithfulness of God, they will do what we want to
do and there's a stamp that says because of all this we make a covenant. And I think this is what
we want to say too. “Lord, I'm all in. I am in. I want to trust you. I give myself. Lord, I know I
messed up today, but I'm giving myself to you 100%. Lord, I am all in to serve you. In the midst
of whatever challenges take place, I am all in. I'm going to love you with all my heart. I want to
come in and be in that special place of intimacy with you.” That's what's being talked about in
this passage.
Such a beautiful, beautiful story, a beautiful prayer that we can understand and appreciate and
value because God has something very special for us. It is intimacy with Him. That's what Jesus
gives us. It's a privilege for us to know Him, to trust Him, and to have that close relationship
with Him. And that's why we bless the Lord.
