Nehemiah 7

With the wall built and the gates hung, Nehemiah’s first act is to set faithful men over the city — and the one he commends is praised not for skill but for fearing God above many. He gives charge of Jerusalem to his brother Hanani — gracious, the man who had carried the bad news to Susa in the first place and has now walked the whole road back to hold the gate of the city his news rebuilt — and to Hananiah the ruler of the palace, for he was a faithful man, and feared God above many. The gate is entrusted to the God-fearing, not the merely able — the wall is only as safe as the men who open and shut its doors, and the qualification that matters is the fear of God.

The orders for the gates are careful. They are not to be opened until the sun is hot, and to be shut and barred while the keepers still stand watch; the inhabitants take their turns as guards, every one over against his house. The finished wall still needs watching — a built defence is no defence if the gates stand carelessly open; the security won by labor must be kept by vigilance, each watching the stretch nearest his own door, as the builders had built it.

Then the city, large and great, but the people few, and the houses not yet built, prompts the register — Nehemiah finds the genealogy of those who came up first under Zerubbabel, and copies it out. Forty-two thousand three hundred and sixty, with seven thousand three hundred and thirty-seven servants and two hundred and forty-five singers: forty-nine thousand nine hundred and forty-two souls, counted, and a note on what they carried. They had gone into Babylon with nothing. The roll of the returned is preserved again — the same families, the same care to know who belongs, the same note that some could not prove their priestly descent and were put from the priesthood. The community defines itself by the record of those who answered the call to return.

The chapter is largely a list, and it is worth naming what kind of list it is. This is the holy seed (Ezra 9:2), the godly seed (Mal 2:15), the seed royal — and Isaiah has a word for a register like this: every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem (Isa 4:3). The ecclesial roll is a shadow of the book of life, and the enrolling is a shadow of the judgment: names sought, names found, names put from the priesthood because they could not be found. There is also a plainer reason for all this careful pedigree, and it is the best one: without these genealogies nobody could have proved that Yahshua was of the line of David. The lists exist so the Messiah could be identified.

A people known to God by name — every returning family written down, the city repopulated from a register, the holy seed counted and kept. The wall is stone; the city is people; and the people are not an anonymous crowd but a named and reckoned remnant, set behind walls watched by men who fear God above many.

Entrust the gates to those who fear God above many; the finished wall still needs watching, and the people behind it are a remnant known and named.

Joel 2

Joel 2 sounds the trumpet for the day of Yahweh in full force — a day of darkness, an unstoppable army — and then turns on a single hinge: rend your heart, and not your garments. Blow ye the trumpet in Zion… for the day of Yahweh cometh, for it is nigh at hand; a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness. The army comes like the dawn spread on the mountains, a great people and a strong; before them a garden of Eden, behind them a desolate wilderness. And there is a sting in the figure: the locust was Egypt’s plague. The eighth blow that broke Pharaoh — they shall cover the face of the earth… and they shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field — is now marching on the people that plague delivered. The rod turned on Israel; the land of Goshen is where the swarm lands this time. The day of Yahweh is a darkness no one outruns — the locust-army of chapter 1 grown into the apocalyptic host of the great and terrible day.

Into the terror comes the call to return, and it cuts past the outward forms. Turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping… and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto Yahweh your God. Rend the heart, not the garment — the torn robe is the easy sign; the torn heart is the real repentance, and Yahweh wants the inward thing the outward sign was always meant to carry. Who knoweth if he will return and repent, and leave a blessing behind him?

The mercy answers, and it is total restoration. I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten — the stripped field replanted, the vats overflowing, and ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and my people shall never be ashamed. The eaten years are restored — what the four waves consumed is given back, the kind of reversal only Yahweh can work, turning the very wasteland into the proof of his goodness.

And then the promise that Pentecost will claim. I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy… And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of Yahweh shall be delivered. The Spirit poured on all flesh, and deliverance to all who call — Peter stands up at Pentecost and says this is that; the firstfruits of the outpouring fell then, and the full measure belongs to the day Joel sees. The day of darkness for the nations is the day of the Spirit and deliverance for all who call on the Name.

The day of Yahweh comes as darkness no one outruns — rend your heart and call on his Name, and the eaten years are restored and the Spirit poured out on all who call.

2 Thessalonians 1–2

Paul answers a young ecclesia frightened that the day had already come, and his answer sets the day of the Lord in its order: first the apostasy and the man of sin, then the Lord consuming him at his coming. He comforts the persecuted with an even-handed sentence: it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you; and to you who are troubled, rest. The same word, handed back. The troublers get tribulation; the troubled get rest — at the same revelation, in the same hour. Then the certainty of that day: the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God. Their punishment is named: everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord. Everlasting destruction, not unending torture — the wicked are destroyed, perished from his presence forever; the destruction is permanent, the second death from which there is no waking, not an eternity of conscious pain.

The Thessalonians had been shaken — and it was worse than a rumour. Paul names three channels: neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us. Somebody had forged his signature. A letter was circulating in Paul’s own name telling this frightened, persecuted ecclesia that the day had already come and they had missed it. The first recorded attack on the young ecclesia’s hope was a fake letter from its apostle — which is why he signs the end of this one with his own hand as the token in every epistle. He steadies them: that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition. The day waits on the apostasy and the man of sin — there is a great falling-away to come first, and out of it a power that opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God… so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. This is the long apostasy the prophets and the Apocalypse trace — a power seated in the holy place, claiming what belongs to God alone.

Paul says the thing is already germinating. The mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. The seed of the apostasy was sprouting in Paul’s own day — restrained for a time, but growing toward the full revealing; the wickedness that would climb into the temple of God was already at work beneath the surface of the early ecclesia.

And the end of the man of sin is certain and swift. Then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming. The brightness of his coming consumes the apostasy — the same day of the Lord that Joel called darkness for the nations is the blaze that destroys the man of sin; no battle drawn out, the mere brightness of the returning Lord undoes him. Paul ends by anchoring the saints: stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught.

The day waits on the apostasy and the man of sin who sits in the temple of God — but the brightness of the Lord’s coming consumes him, and the wicked are destroyed, not endlessly tormented.