The mixed multitude (vv. 1–3). According to 10:28–29, the Jews had willingly separated themselves from the people of the land and united with their Jewish brothers and sisters to obey the law and walk in the way of the Lord. But apparently their separation was incomplete, or some of the people formed new alliances, for they discovered that there were Ammonites and Moabites in their congregation, and this was contrary to the law of Moses (Deut. 23:3–4).
Ammon and Moab were born from the incestuous union of Lot and two of his daughters (Gen. 19:30–38), and their descendants were the avowed enemies of the Jews. Somehow this “mixed multitude” had infiltrated the people of Israel in spite of previous purgings (9:2; 10:28). It was the “mixed multitude” that gave Moses so much trouble (Ex. 12:38; Num. 11:4–6), and it gives the church trouble today. The “mixed multitude” is composed of unsaved people who want to belong to the fellowship of God’s people without trusting the Lord or submitting to His will. They want the blessings but not the obligations, and their appetite is still for the things of the world.
Balaam was a hireling prophet who tried to curse Israel but each time saw the curse turned into a blessing (Num. 22—24). Finally, however, he hit upon a scheme to defeat Israel: He encouraged the Moabites to be “neighborly” and invite the Jews to share in their religious feasts, which involved immorality and idolatry (Num. 25). Balaam knew that human nature would respond to the opportunity for sin and the Jews would disobey God. As a result of their sin, Israel was disciplined by God, and 24,000 people died.
The “mixed multitude” in the church today urges us to follow the philosophy of Balaam and do what the world wants us to do. I was told about a dedicated youth pastor whose ministry was bringing many teens to Christ and building them up in the faith. He didn’t entice them with entertainment; he simply taught the Word, kept the young people busy witnessing, and met with them regularly for prayer. The church was being greatly helped by this group of dedicated teenagers.
But the enemy went to work. The youth pastor was called before the elders and asked, “What is your program for ministering to the carnal young people in the church?” He said that he had no special program for carnal teenagers, but that they were welcome to join in the Bible studies, prayer meetings, and witnessing trips. The elders dismissed the youth pastor because he was not catering to the carnal teens in the church!
When I was ministering over “Back to the Bible Broadcast,” the manager of a Christian radio station phoned me to complain about my messages about Lot and worldliness among professing Christians. He felt I was being too hard on the carnal Christians. “If you keep that up,” he said, “we’re going to drop your program!”
The old Youth for Christ slogan is still true: In ministry, we must be “geared to the times and anchored to the Rock.” If we understand the times (1 Chron. 12:32), we can relate to people more easily and apply the Word with greater skill, but we must not imitate the world in order to try to witness to the world. Years ago, Oswald Chambers wrote, “Today the world has taken so many things out of the church, and the church has taken so many things out of the world, that it is difficult to know where you are” (The Servant As His Lord, 17). “Today the world has so infiltrated the church,” said Vance Havner, “that we are more beset by traitors within than by foes without. Satan is not fighting churches—he is joining them.”
An enemy intruder (vv. 4–9). Not only were some of the Jews married to Ammonites or Moabites, but also an Ammonite was living in the Jewish temple! Tobiah the Ammonite (4:3) had been given a room in the temple by Eliashib the high priest (13:28). Eliashib is the first one named in the list of workers (3:1), and yet he had become a traitor. Why? Because one of his relatives was married to Sanballat’s daughter (13:28), and Sanballat and Tobiah were friends. They were all a part of the secret faction in Jerusalem that was fraternizing with the enemy (6:17–19).
Just because a family has been active in the church a long time and has helped to build the work, it is no sign that each generation will be spiritual, or that any generation will remain spiritual. Children and grandchildren can drift from the faith and try to bluff their way on the testimony of their ancestors, and fathers and mothers can depart from the faith just to please their children. Eliashib’s relative was privileged to be born into the priestly family, yet he threw away his future ministry by marrying the wrong woman (Lev. 21:14; Deut. 23:3), and Eliashib apparently approved of it.
All this happened while Nehemiah was away at the palace, which suggests that those he appointed to lead in his absence had failed in their oversight. It doesn’t take long for the enemy to capture leadership, and too often the people will blindly follow their leaders in the path of compromise and disobedience.
It was bad enough that an Ammonite was living in the temple, and that a Jewish high priest had let him in, but this intruder was using a room dedicated to God for the storing of the offerings used by the Levites. He defiled the temple by his presence and robbed the servants of God at the same time. Nehemiah lost no time throwing out both the man and his furniture, rededicating the room to the Lord, and using it again for its intended purpose. Like our Lord, Nehemiah had to cleanse the temple, and it appears that he had to do it alone.
But this is not an easy thing to do. A new pastor may discover officers or leaders in the church who are not spiritual people but who are entrenched in their offices. What does he do? He knows that these leaders have relatives in the church who, like Eliashib, will cooperate with their family rather than contend for the faith. Should the pastor try to “clean house” and possibly split the church? Or should he bide his time, lovingly preach the Word, and pray for God to work? With either approach, the pastor will need courage and faith, because eventually the blessing of the Lord on the Word will arouse the opposition of the “mixed multitude.”
Mixed marriages (vv. 23–31). “We would not give our daughters as wives to the peoples of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons!” was the promise the Jews had made to the Lord (see 10: nkjv), but they did not keep it. In his survey of Jerusalem, Nehemiah saw women from Ashdod (see 4:7), Ammon, and Moab married to Jewish men, and he heard their children speaking foreign languages. (A child is more likely to learn how to speak from his mother, with whom he spends more time, than from his father who is away from home each day working.) If these children did not know the language of Israel, how could they read the law or participate in the holy services? If a generation was lost to the faith, what was the future of the nation?
God’s people and the people of the world can be identified by their speech. “They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood” (1 John 4:5–6 niv).
While ministering at a summer Bible conference, I had dinner one evening in the home of the daughter of a well-known Christian musician and her husband. Both of them were able to talk about her father, now deceased, or about music and musicians, but when the conversation turned to the Word and the Lord, they were silent. I wondered if either of them really knew the Lord, or, if they did, if they were on speaking terms with Him. They had no problem talking about the things of the world, but they did not know “the language of Zion.”
Nehemiah dealt with the problem by first expressing his horror that such a thing should be done in Israel (Neh. 13:25). In a similar situation, Ezra had plucked his own hair and beard (Ezra 9:3), but Nehemiah plucked the hair of some of the offenders! Ezra had dissolved the mixed marriages (Ezra 10), but Nehemiah only rebuked the offenders and made the people promise that they would not do it again.
Nehemiah also delivered a sermon, reminding the people that Solomon, one of Israel’s greatest kings, was ruined by marrying foreign women (Neh. 13:26; 1 Kings 11:4–8). In Solomon’s case, his mixed marriages were a threat to the throne and the kingdom, and in Nehemiah’s day, mixed marriages even threatened the priesthood. The law of Moses was clear, but both the priests and the common people had deliberately disobeyed it. Nehemiah then purified the priests and made certain that only those who were qualified served (Neh. 13:30). However, the problem with the priests was not completely settled, for the prophet Malachi had to deal with disobedient priests in his day (Mal. 1—2).
How important it is that we take a stand for separation from sin “and having done all, to stand” (Eph. 6:13).