I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Nehemiah 9-10.

    When Nehemiah first had the people assemble to listen to the Law, he and the other leaders told them not to mourn for their failure to keep the Law at that time. That was a time to celebrate what God had done for them. However, the people assembled a second time a few weeks later for a time of mourning and repentance. There is a lesson for us here when dealing with sinners who come to the Lord. When they come to know the Lord we should encourage them to celebrate their salvation, there will be time to mourn and repent of their sins later. I want to be careful on this because many people have sins which have become deeply embedded in their lives which need to be rooted out (that may even be true of some who have been walking with the Lord for years). I want to note that there was not much time between the celebration of renewal and the gathering for repentance. The former happened on Oct 8th and the latter on Oct 31st (as the dates were translated from the calendar used to our modern calendar). I want to also say that there may be times when God calls us to follow a similar pattern, celebrate what God has just done NOW, mourn and repent the sins which He revealed to us later. I would think that these occasions would usually be corporate events rather than individual ones.

    I think we should look at the procedure they followed on this day. First, the people gathered and spent three hours listening to God’s Law being read to them. Then they spent three more hours confessing their sins. After this, their leaders led them in a prayer worshiping God and confessing their sin. Finally, their religious leaders wrote out a covenant under which the people bound themselves to obey God’s Law. A covenant to which all of the people present old enough to understand bound themselves to keep. The passage does not spell it out, but the context makes it seem to me that this gathering, and this covenant, were the idea of those who gathered to study the Law of God with Ezra. This was not something imposed on them by Nehemiah, or Ezra, or another of the elite leaders. Instead this was a gathering initiated by the people in response to beginning to truly understand the Law of God.