Finding certainty in our shifting world (Neh 9:6-8)

When trying to gauge what a church is like, worship songs are often as revealing as the sermon. Sadly, many contemporary Christian songs express how confused, wounded and lost we feel in the world and emphasise God coming to the rescue, healing our loneliness, and easing our pain. What is often sidestepped is the issue of sin and our responsibility in the mess. We are simply the victims of our circumstances, tossed about by the storms of life. God then becomes the divine therapist and friend, who listens to our heartache without judgment and tends to our wounded self. It mirrors how the postmodern world sees itself and the solution to its pain. Yet, unless we get to the root of the problem, there is no true restoration possible. As the Levites lead the people in public confession and worship, their view of God and the world is derived from God’s Word and is a corrective to false thinking.

The objective reality of a sovereign Creator

The starting point is that Yahweh alone is God (Neh 9:6), the one who exists and commands Israel’s loyalty, which echoes Israel’s creed in Deut 6:4.[1] As Creator of everything, He is outside creation and the source of life for all (an allusion to Genesis 1), so that created beings depend on Him, not He on them. This is a corrective to pagan thinking that worshipped the gods in natural phenomena like the sun, moon or stars. The gods did not stand outside creation but were part of it and even depended on human beings to feed them. The emphasis on God being sovereign over all (including the nations) also reminded the Jews that no matter what remote corner of the earth they were driven to, they were never beyond God’s power to save and restore them.

In our postmodern world, God as an objective reality outside creation has been banished from the public sphere, so that the emphasis falls on a ‘personal God’, who is private, near, and who meets with us inwardly, indeed who is almost fused with our being. In the secular context, people choose their ‘god’, their meaning and values, but as Christians we can also be tempted to make God into what we want Him to be, to pick character traits from the Bible that appeal to us and ignore others that make us uncomfortable. Like the ancients, we too struggle to honour God as an entity outside creation. Unless we do so, however, we will not understand what is wrong with our lives because biblically speaking sin is defined in relation to God and His will.

Unchanging and faithful God

The Levites’ prayer also reminds Israel that this all-powerful God who is sovereign over the whole creation chose their ancestor Abram (Neh 9:7). The name change to Abraham (father of a multitude) is an allusion to the promise of many descendants (Gen 17:3-7) and God’s covenant also encompasses the gift of the land (Neh 9:8). His commitment to these two aspects of promise is underscored by the description that He is righteous (v.8), which in the OT indicates that a person fulfils his obligations to another. For the small band of exiles, peoplehood and land would have encapsulated the hope of their full restoration and the comfort that God was indeed faithful.

 For us today, God’s constancy is likewise an encouragement. In our changing world the shifts we have to make come on ever faster, driven partly by new technologies. We also move more often, change jobs more often, and the expectations on us keep evolving. Gone are the days when people were born and lived within the same geographical location most of their lives and retired from the job where they started 40 odd years earlier. Having to make constant adaptations affects our ability to be consistent in our character, to keep our promises made at a different time under different circumstances. We live in a shifting world and are having to change with it, so that much in it feels uncertain and shaky, including our own selves. Yet, our hope and anchor are in the God who kept His promises no matter how circumstances, people and the world changed. May we, like Abraham, respond to such a God with faithfulness (Neh 9:8).  

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[1] The Hebrew in Neh 9:6 literally says ‘you alone are Yahweh’. Out of respect, Jews did not pronounce God’s name but said Adonai, ‘Lord’ instead. To indicate that the Hebrew has the divine name, translators capitalise LORD. Yahweh is thought to be derived from the verb ‘to be’, so that the name may indicate that God is the existing one. There is some debate about Deut 6:4 and how to understand the phrase ‘Yahweh, our God, Yahweh alone/one’ (the verb ‘to be’ often drops out in Hebrew and is supplied from context, so that the English could be ‘Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone’ or ‘Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one’. Either the emphasis is on God being the only god in existence or on the exclusive relationship between Israel and God (He is Israel’s one and only who commands their loyalty).

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