A Better Way
When we promoted our current Nehemiah teaching series, we said, “Yes, it is a book about a wall, but it is so much more. It is a book about being an exile in your own homeland and about what God has next for them and us.” The real beauty in the book of Nehemiah comes out when we realize that the wall work was important only because of what it facilitated, the inner transforming work of the people of God. God wanted to redeem, reform, and restore his people, and so he used Nehemiah and a construction project to get after it. God wants to redeem, reform, and restore us (you, me, and all people). In order to do this, he has to break down our poor or wrong conceptions of who he is. Donald Miller talks about that very process in his life when he writes,
“In my opinion, there are two essential problems with believing God is somebody He isn’t. The first problem is that it wrecks your life, and the second is that it makes God look like an idiot. When I was a kid and, to be absolutely honest, a teenager and perhaps even a young twenty-something, I believed God was like Santa Claus. I realized grown people should not think God is like Santa Claus, but you wouldn’t believe how perfectly convenient it was for me to subscribe to that idea. The benefits were astounding. First: To interact with Santa Claus, I did not have to maintain any sort of intimate relationship. Santa simply slipped into the house, left presents, ate half a cookie, then hit the neighbors’. There was no getting out of bed in the middle of the night to have sloppy conversations about why I was still wetting the bed. Second: Santa theology was very black and white; You either made the list or you didn’t and if you didn’t, it was because you were bad, not because of societal pressures or biochemical distortions or your parents or cable television, but because you were bad. Simple indeed. Third: He brought presents based on behavior. If you were good, you got a lot of bank. There was a very clear reward system based on the most basic desires of the human heart Big Wheels, Hot Wheels, Legos. You didn’t have to get into the spirit of anything, and there was nothing sentimental that served as the real reason for the season. Everybody knew it was about the toys: cold, hard toys. 4th: Kids who were bad got presents anyway.
Perfect.
Slowly, however, everything began to unravel. I tried to stop it because it was also lovely and perfect, but there was nothing I could do. Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to keep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.
Santa went first, then God.
…
One of the reasons I came to trust the God of the Bible was because he was big enough to explain the imposters. In scripture, God never gets confused about who is and who isn’t representing him. Impostors represent a small God, a vapor in the imagination of a child, a God we would all do well to renounce.”[1]
In Nehemiah, God wanted to weed out the imposters, the substitutes, and the idols his people had acquired along the way in exile. He wanted them to know and understand that there was a better way, His way. God wants the same for you and me today. He wants to shape our identities to look more like Jesus than our fleshly nature. But, that process means we’re going to have to give God access to our bad theology and cooperate with the Holy Spirit as he transforms us. The God of the Bible, as Miller says, is big enough to explain the imposters. And when an imposter god is exposed in our lives, we would do well to renounce it. Why? Because our best future will always be centered around God. That is the story of Nehemiah and the conclusion of Miller.
There is a better way… God’s way.
[1] Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What (2004)