Walls (Part 3)
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Scripture References
Works
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger, and we are talking today about Nehemiah.
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking about the biblical theology of the imagery of walls throughout scripture, what they have represented constantly throughout scripture in different iterations. Today we’re going to bring that all to bear on the restoration era, that is when Ezra and Nehemiah and Joshua the high priest came back and started rebuilding Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity. Some things change, Greg, do they not, from Solomon’s temple to this new restoration temple?
We’ve talked about this before, but it never hurts to repeat it. You asked me on one occasion to justify my contention that this is a new covenant, because it’s not usually listed in the lists of covenant administrations in the Old Testament. “Restoration covenant? What’s that?” But key to God’s renewing his covenant is renewing and altering forms of worship.
When Joshua and Zerubbabel come back and lead the original return and set about reestablishing worship, they do the altar, which we would expect, and they build a temple, but there are some things missing. From our point of view, I suppose, the chief thing is the ark of the covenant. It does not exist, and the tables of the law have been lost. We’re never told what happened to them. They’re probably not hidden in some little underground sandpit in Egypt where Indiana Jones can find them. They just vanish, but that does raise some interesting questions about worship. How do you do the Yom Kippur ceremony without an ark? When the high priest goes within the veil, what does he do with the blood?
There is no mercy seat. We’re not told what they did, and yet God orchestrated all of this and told them to rebuild the temple, allowed them, and sanctioned it. This was not their imaginings, nor was it simply an attempt to get back the good old days. The people who had been expecting the good old days when they saw the foundation slab cried and wept because it was so disappointing.
The Shekinah glory too is missing. There’s no visible representation, no lightshow of God’s presence. That doesn’t mean God wasn’t present, and that’s kind of what we’re going to be talking about today, but he did not reveal or manifest his presence in the same way he had, so there are some things that have changed. There is still a temple, but no Shekinah glory, no ark, no completing the atonement ceremony the way it was supposed to be completed.
Right. Things have changed, and they needed permission. We’ve looked briefly at Zechariah’s vision where the angel of the Lord intervenes and says basically, “Okay, I’ve cleansed you. Restart this thing,” so they have God’s sanction and permission and urging and commandment, but it’s not what went on in Solomon’s temple and it’s not what went on in the tabernacle in the wilderness, so there’s something new. And what we’re coming to is there’s something even newer.
After a generation or so, during which I believe the events of Esther took place, Jerusalem is again in great distress. The new gates have been burned. The walls, such as they were, such as they had been rebuilt, are down again and Nehemiah, the king’s cupbearer, gets permission to go back and fix them.
He’s a very thorough detail-oriented kind of guy. He’s got the task maps and the agendas and the billing and everything set out. He’s got the plan and he thinks through this, but he faces considerable opposition from the Samaritans, who resent this upsurge of this old religion. It’s the way liberals look at conservatives. “We thought we got rid of you! What are you doing here?”
Also economically and politically the possibility of Jerusalem regaining its own footing would cast their little Samaria in the shadows, so on a lot of rounds they don’t like this and they try to oppose Nehemiah. They threaten him and they hire character assassins and such, but he perseveres through prayer, and the book of Nehemiah in part is his prayer journal and we see him wrestling to get the job done. Finally, around chapter 12 or so, the walls are finished and they hold a dedication ceremony.
This too is something brand new. When David took the city of Jerusalem a long, long time ago, the city existed already. We’re not told exactly how it got there. Presumably this is the Salem of Melchizedek, but we’re not told if he originally built it or if he inherited it. Then there’s no talk about doing any kind of special rites or ceremonies to sanctify the city.
There was kind of an understanding that the temple sanctified Zion, and Zion becomes the synonym for Jerusalem, so there’s a lot of talk in the prophets about the lifting up of Zion in the last days and nations flowing to it, Zion being the City of God, but the I think the phrase “holy city” is only used once before now. From here on out it becomes a rather appellation for Jerusalem because Nehemiah and friends – Ezra and the rest, all the priests and Levites – get together and they do a dedication ceremony. This is in chapter 12 and it goes kind of like this, starting in verse 27 –
And at the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem they sought the Levites out of all their places, to bring them to Jerusalem, to keep the dedication with gladness, both with thanksgivings, and with singing, with cymbals, psalteries, and with harps. And the sons of the singers gathered themselves together, both out of the plain country round about Jerusalem, and from the villages of Netophathi; Also from the house of Gilgal, and out of the fields of Geba and Azmaveth: for the singers had builded them villages round about Jerusalem. And the priests and the Levites purified themselves, and purified the people, and the gates, and the wall.
Then I brought up the princes of Judah upon the wall, and appointed two great companies of them that gave thanks, whereof one went on the right hand upon the wall toward the dung gate…
He lists people there, and some of them were carrying trumpets, and some with musical instruments were going with Ezra. Then verse 38 –
And the other company of them that gave thanks went over against them, and I after them, and the half of the people upon the wall, from beyond the tower of the furnaces even unto the broad wall…
We’re on the walls, and suddenly we’re in the house of God, and that’s what’s startling. The Shekinah glory isn’t present, and yet now the whole city is sanctified. Now, this is ceremonial and ritual. It doesn’t mean that all the people were suddenly converted or born again. It doesn’t mean that they all lived sinless lives. Heaven has not arrived. This is not quite Zechariah’s ideal city where holiness to the Lord is written on the very pots and horse bells, but it’s typical of that. It points out that this is the direction that the kingdom is moving.
There’s the Holy of Holies, and there’s the Holy place, and there’s the temple, and now the whole city, and it’s connected with these walls. These walls delineate a place that is holy, and yet – and I suppose this is a good part of what we’re talking about – though the city is holy, Gentiles could come and God’s house is still a house of prayer for all nations.
I don’t want to jump ahead or short-circuit anything, but it makes me think of 1 Corinthians, where the church, the believers, are the temple of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit lives in them. When we’re said to be the church, we’re not a building.
Of course, the word is assembly, but there is this connotation throughout history of the church being a building, which is funny, except that it makes sense with scripture. “Why is this? Hmm, let’s look at the rest of scripture to see why that might be.” It’s that connection where the people of God are said to be living stones in Peter. It is our job to be a dividing line.
And at the same time, to have open gates. At this point we might as well just jump to Revelation 21 and 22, because that’s where this is all going. You’ve taken us through a little bit of Paul, and we could go further. We could look at Ephesians 2, where we have the middle wall of partition being broken down and, as you say, we are the temple of God, and you mentioned Peter. The New Testament epistles are full of this sort of thing.
It started in the gospels with Jesus pointing at himself and saying, “Destroy this temple and in three days I’ll raise it up again,” so Christ is the temple. And yet as his body, the church is the temple, and individual believers are the temple, and yet we’re the holy stones that together make up the temple. Finally, when we get to Revelation 21 and 22 we see a city.
Here unfortunately, too often people of a very literal mind bent look at that and say, “Wow, that’s a really cool city. I want to walk on streets of gold!” Why? Ever walk on metal all day? It’s worse than concrete.
And it misses the whole point, because right up front when John sees the heavenly Jerusalem descending, the angel comes and says, “Let me show you the Bride, the Lamb’s wife.” Jesus is not married to concrete and asphalt and steel and glass. He is married to a body of believers, to his elect, to those he died for, to those who will believe on him, who have been born again.
So as we go further into that chapter we need to realize that we’re not talking about a literal city, because we’ve already been told this is not a city in that sense. It’s a city in the original sense. It’s a bunch of people and it begins using all the language I mentioned.
You mentioned that the church is a temple, and we’re told in Ephesians 2, “…built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.” In Revelation 21 we see that this city is built upon foundations that have the names of the apostles of the Lamb in it. He’s quoting Ephesians, and Ephesians is talking about the church, just as he is.
As we stand back and look at this thing, it’s a huge city. If it were literal, from one corner to the other would be the distance from Dallas to New York, and the height would leave Everest far behind and would brush the lower regions of space, but that’s not the point. The point is this is an incredibly huge city because God has an incredible number of people.
We saw them earlier in Revelation, the great multitude which no man can number, of every kindred, nation, people and tongue, so we get to the end of the book and we see the final thing laid out in front of us, and the city does have walls. We were talking about this before we started our broadcast. The city has walls, but it also has open gates. That seems counterproductive.
Yeah, if you’re thinking in literal terms, what’s that all about? We’re told that there are those who were without, but the people who were without, as you suggested, are not extra-terrestrials. They’re not from other countries, other races, or other ethnic groups. In fact, let me read who these people are who are outside the city.
Because we’ve already established that those who make up the city are from every kindred, tribe, and tongue.
Right, but without are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolators and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie. In other words, the boundaries are ethical. To be in the city is to be holy. To be outside the city is to be unholy, and yet the gates are open and there are angels.
Remember at the garden of Eden there were cherubim that guarded the throne, the Tree of Life. Here there are angels who are inviting people in, so the coming of Christ into the world has changed things. It does not change the fact that God requires holiness. God simply has supplied holiness in the person of his Son.
The gates of the city face all four compass points, three gates on each side, and these angels are calling people to come. And more than that, we’re told, “The Spirit and the Bride say come. And let him that heareth say come, and let him that thirsts come. And whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.”
So with the waters of life rushing out of the city, and the angels and the church and the Spirit inviting people into the city, yes, there are walls. There are boundaries, but they’re ethical boundaries. They’re questions of holiness, but it’s a holiness that is initially and most fundamentally supplied by God himself in Christ. Here is God’s long-term solution.
What Nehemiah did foreshadowed this on a very small level. The city became the Holy City, and yet Gentiles could still come in, but the sanctifying of the walls and the gates didn’t make the people holy. It just pointed forward in picture form to what God’s after, which is what we see here. We see the church in all of its glory, as God sees her, as she will be in time and eternity, and while time lasts there is still this invitation. “Come, be part of this.”
This really creates some cognitive dissonance for me with my background growing up dispensational, where all of Revelation is supposed to be at the end of time when it’s final. If this is the final time, there’s no point to the angels going out and saying, “Come,” because the final judgment is final. It’s in the name. So it’s not like those in hell have more opportunity to repent.
“The twelve gates were twelve pearls.” First of all, that would be really giant pearls from one mega-oyster going on here.
They were pearls, and pearls in general were not counted that big a deal, but they come from the ocean. They come from the Gentile sea.
Every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.
And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there. And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it. And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life.
Then he goes on in chapter 22 and talks about the river of the water of life that’s pouring out of the city.
So the city is pure. It consists of those who have been justified and sanctified by faith, who are holy in Christ. That which is impure has no part there, and yet here are the nations bringing their glory and honor into it. Redemptive history is still going on here.
Now, it climaxes when all of this is brought to utter fullness but, as you say, when we finally get to everything settled and final, the gates are closed. There will be a day when the trumpet will sound, and where you are is where you are, and there’s no more repentance. There’s no more salvation. The last soul is saved and God calls time and there’s a final judgment, and final means final. In that day you will either be in the city or out of the city.
As long as it called today, as the psalmist and the writer of Hebrews say, the invitation is there. Enter into God’s rest. Come into the city. Belong to God’s people. Salvation does involve belonging to God’s people, so we’re back to a city is a community.
After the Day of Pentecost, God added daily to the church such as should be saved. It’s none of this, “Just me and Jesus,” the attitude that some people have toward the church of, “I don’t need you, because it’s just me and Jesus. I can go to church if I want to, the same way a philatelist goes to a stamp-collecting club if he wants to, but he doesn’t really have to because he’s a stamp-collector in his own right.” There’s none of that here. God, in saving us, is saving us into and as a part of and to become one with this community, which is eternal.
As we look at this thing we have to keep reminding ourselves that the borders are ethical. Will you keep the commandments of God? Have you been declared righteous in Christ? It’s not a question of what color your skin is or what shape your eyes are or where you were born or what language was your first one. None of that is relevant to this. Unfortunately, there are still some Christians who look at these things as if they were determinative, and it can happen on both sides of the aisle, as it were.
Someone has to be the first to smile, the first to give, the first to reach out a hand and say, “You guys are acting awfully racist, but we love you. Come on over, or we’ll come to you if you let us. Let’s break down some of these walls that we’ve invented, because God sure enough didn’t invent them.”
It’s natural enough to want to hang out with people you have a lot in common with, and there’s nothing wrong with that as such, but when you start saying, “And they can’t really be real Christians, because real Christians have my skin color and speak my language and live in the good ol’ US of A,” that’s not Christianity. Christianity is universal and calls to the whole world, and that city will be filled, the city that’s immensely huge, with a great multitude that we can’t even count. We won’t have to take a census anymore.
There’s the ultimate vision. The walls fall, as far as everything else is concerned, except the holiness of God, and we have that in Christ. It’s not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saves us. This is the gospel.
This might be a little bit of a tangent, but – gold. We haven’t done a biblical theology of gold, but it would be really interesting to do that. There are things about gold that are obvious, that it’s very valuable and precious. It’s very shiny.
There’s kind of been this trend lately to use precious metals for their antimicrobial properties, which is weird to me.
Yeah, people sewing silver and gold into clothes and pillowcases and what-not.
It’s a strange little thing that the internet and our vast wealth has made possible, I suppose.
They’re also very good for conducting electricity, as far as that goes, stamping out microchips.
It kind of adds more to the king’s cup being made of gold. It’s the right choice. It’s healthier to drink from a gold vessel than from a wooden one. There’s something there that maybe hints at the concept of clean versus unclean.
Yeah. The gold of that land is good or pure, unmixed, but that was downstream. It wasn’t in the garden itself, and yet Adam and Eve somehow were told that it’s out there, so from the beginning gold is held up as a good thing.
There is the question of why? You can’t eat gold, and electric circuits are a long way off, and copper is cheaper to use anyway. God obviously has established some connection in our hearts and minds between gold and what we think of it representing.
Kings migrate to gold and they have gold migrate to them. They want gold. The ancient world, as you say, the cups, the crowns, scepters – everything is made of gold. For one thing, it is rare, but there’s a lot of things that are rare that we really don’t care about. You said it’s sparkly. It is. It is sparkly and it is durable and it is uncommon.
There is just something about it that reminds us of the glory of God, so when we get to the tabernacle God wants lots and lots of stuff made of gold. Everything in the Holy of Holies is gold. Most of what’s in the Holy place is gold. By the time you go out into the outer court we’re shifting toward bronze, brass, and wood, which suggests that God is reinforcing that gold is reflecting something of who he is. Why should that be? Because God made it that way.
“No, no, no, why did God choose to make the sky blue? What’s the point there?”
“You’re talking about how the sky is blue. We’re talking about why the sky is blue.”
Yeah. Why did God do this? Why does he describe heaven as up? As far as we can see, using modern sci-fi terminology, it’s a different dimension, and yet people seem to get there by going up. Is it really far away or is it really close or is the dimensional portal just really near?
There’s a lot there that we don’t know, and yet God deliberately chose these kinds of images and words and wove them into our experience. When we think of something great and wonderful, we think of “as high as heaven,” and that which is depressing and debasing is “as low as the pit.” Even directions mean something to us. Up and down mean something to us. Blue and red mean something. Put them together you get purple and that means something.
Gold means something, and God has built that into us, so that by the time we get to the book of Revelation the street is gold, the city is gold, there’s gold all over the place.
As I said earlier, practically that’s not what it sounds like. You can think of some hick or redneck or someone from where I grew up walking into a golden city and saying, “Wow, this is incredible!” but honestly, after a day of walking on metal streets, you’re going to want parkland. And actually, although the streets are gold, the rest of the city seems to largely be orchards of the Tree of Life. We’re not told where the buildings are. It’s because this is an image. The people are the city. You mentioned before, the people are the living stones that make up the city.
Which further implies that no matter what purpose your particular stone is doing, whether you’re the thing that people walk all over, or you’re the one holding up the walls, you’re still made of gold.
That’s God’s evaluation of his people, because that’s who we are in Christ – not what we merit, but what he makes us in his Son. So there’s something of the significance of gold, and then that helps to explain some little economic things like why does a gold-based currency work so much better than other things? That’s why. It’s not because gold is intrinsically valuable. The only thing that’s intrinsically valuable is God himself, and his Word taken as his Word, not as just a copy of the Bible or magic words.
God wrote this into us, so we by nature navigate toward using gold rather than all the other things in the world that are scarce but that no one cares about. As I said, you can’t eat gold. What can you do with it? Give it to your true love in a ring or a pin or a necklace.
Yes. We seem to have passed the day when civil rulers are adorned with it. I did not see King Charles’ coronation. I still mourn Elizabeth’s passing. For me, her coronation will always be the last one in British history, but that’s just me. She’s given the gold orb with the cross on top and is told, “Know that the whole world is subject to the dominion of Christ.” That’s fitting.
I don’t think we want to give a gold hat to the president of the United States, or a gold wig to the Supreme Court justices. We’ve passed by that and we’ve put gold where it belongs. Well, no, we haven’t. We were putting it where it belonged for 100 or 200 years, which is circulating around in people’s hands, getting dirty, grimy, and messy.
I think of the Hello Dolly line. “Money should be flowing out like manure, making young things grow.”
There you go, because now that we have the reality in Christ it’s not as important, and yet it still has its practical uses because God has not removed that.
I suspect. I am suspicious of it because it recognizes this – that humans do impute value to particular objects, often by free choice.
When I was a kid, pet rocks were a thing. Our little five-and-dime sold pet rocks for a season and then they were gone forever, because people suddenly realized, “Wait, I could make one of those if I wanted to,” at which point they realized, “And why would I want to?” and that was that. But for a little while, people said, “These things are valuable and I have to have one!”
Garbage Pail was the next step down and, for a season at Christmas, dads were falling all over themselves to get the last one available, and then they went away.
We do, for brief times, impute value to things that have no functional use, no ornamental value to speak of, or at least one that can easily be supplanted by something else. We do that and that’s alright. If you can make something that everyone wants to buy for a little while, that’s great. Go for it. But to assume that that’s going to sustain itself over decades and even centuries is incredibly naïve.
Gold is not a historic currency because people keep on rediscovering how pretty it is. It’s because of something that God has put into us, and it will always be there to some extent – probably not to the extent that it was before Christ came, but it’s going to be there.
The whole thing with bitcoin, as far as I can see, is one big assumption that this will be valuable because people think it’s valuable, which is true as long as they think it’s valuable, and when they stop thinking it, it will be absolutely worthless. It becomes a game of, “How far can I keep my hand in the game before I get out and everything collapses?”
Honestly, it sounds a lot like the days just before the Great Depression. “Can I pull the money out of the bank or out of the stock market just before everyone else does, and make a killing? Or if I’m one day late I lose everything.”
There are supposedly gold-backed cryptocurrencies, which still feels Gnostic to me. I don’t understand. David could probably tell us.
Anyway, there’s a biblical theology of gold for you, to go with the city theme. The garden of Eden didn’t have gold, but it had access leading to it. The tabernacle had gold. Solomon’s temple had lots of gold. Nehemiah’s temple, not so much, nor did it have the Shekinah glory in a visible sense, and yet the holiness is spreading. That’s a key, that holiness is an ethical matter, not a matter of how pretty you are on the outside.
When we come to the new Jerusalem we’re shown gold again, but again we’re to understand – in fact, some of the things you said – that no matter who you are or what you are or what your function is in God’s kingdom, you are in God’s eyes gold, just like his Word, just like Christ himself.
That’s a good place to wrap up. We should have some recommendations. My recommendation is making cookies.
I made chewy chocolate ginger molasses cookies. They’re basically gingersnaps, but with a little bit more molasses gooey-ness and chocolate chips.
My recommendation would be more of a recommendation after today, but it’s taking your wife out on a trip to go book shopping and have a picnic lunch with your favorite food items from Trader Joe’s, and afterwards ending up in the best Italian restaurant in town and having tiramisu. In other words, break the routine and do something fun together.
I will freely confess, as I did to Emily earlier, that I just thought it sounded like fun, and my wife said, “Oh, that’s so romantic!” and I said, “It is? Oh, right dear, yeah. Romantic, okay.”
Anyway, when she gets home we’re going to be off. It’s amazing how many bookstores there are in Grass Valley.
Yeah, being such a small place, there seems to be more bookstores there than in most of Sacramento put together. I did find one that had nothing but bad reviews, so we won’t go to that one, but it should be fun. Then we’ll look for someplace to have our little snack lunch from Trader Joe’s. We got special cheeses and nuts and such.
You know what I really like from Trader Joe’s is the Green Goddess cheese, and they don’t have it all the time. I look for it every time and it’s kind of occasional. I don’t know if they just stopped doing it.
My favorite is Cotswold cheddar, which they did not have this time. I was very upset because I hadn’t bought it in a while. It’s probably not good for my gout, but I thought, “Oh, we’ll splurge.” No, wasn’t even there, so we got a couple other kinds, and if they turn out to be any good I’ll let you know. I don’t remember what they are, but they looked like they had the same spirit as Cotswold cheddar, so we’ll see how that goes.
Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. I’m glad we got to go on that little tangent about gold. It was fun.
Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you buying us the software that makes it possible to get this podcast out to you. Listener, if you would like to join our financial supporters you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion, or you can become a Patron at patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
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