by Tad Lindley
A 6 hour church service!
Imagine a church service that started at 6:00 AM and lasted until noon. The service started with prayer and worship, and then for the next five hours, 14 men took turns reading scripture and preaching. The power of God was so strong that the people started weeping just from hearing the Bible read! At noon, the priest, Ezra, dismissed the service and the people feasted. (See Nehemiah 8:1-12)
Church 2 days in a row!
The next morning, the people gathered again. We would say, “They had church,” but the word church didn’t exist in those days. And just like the day before, the preachers got to reading the Bible out loud and then explaining what the reading meant. You must understand that the Bible was shorter in those days, not all of it having been written yet. And so they were just working their way through it, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, and book by book.
Missing holiday discovered
They had read and preached on Genesis and Exodus, and they were now in the book of Leviticus. They were up to chapter 23. Things were looking good. The preacher read about the Sabbath (Saturday) and how it was to be holy, nothing new there. He went on to Passover, familiar to all of the people, Pentecost, and the Day of Atonement. Suddenly the priest began to read and he must have stopped and looked confused.
Where did this come from?
The people had gotten so far away from the word of God that they had forgotten some of what it teaches. And the priest had to preach about something that had been set aside so long ago that they did not remember it. It was the lost celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. The Jews were commanded to do it, and yet nobody was doing it.
What did the people do next?
I can’t tell for sure from reading Nehemiah, but it almost looks like when they finished reading the Leviticus 23:33-44 that the service was finished, and the people repented. They had not been doing what they were supposed to, and they read it in the Bible and they realized, “If the Bible says it, then we have got to do it!” And so the next thing we know from history is that the people set about immediately celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles. In obedience to the word of God, they set about making tents for themselves to stay in. For the next week they slept not in houses, but in tents. And on the eighth day they had a special Sabbath and gathered together in solemn assembly (Nehemiah 8:13-18)
Bible teaching gets lost
Now I realize that the people in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah did not actually discover the Feast of Tabernacles anymore than the Basques or the Vikings “discovered” North America. The priests had simply failed to teach the Bible, and the words had been forgotten. This is how even after 2,000 years of the New Testament, there are many people who honestly don’t know much more than John 3:16. There are others whose priests and preachers forbid the people to read the Bible, because they have intentionally failed to teach the word and are trying to hide it.
Here is an example
Even though the word, baptize, means to put under water, for many years, and I mean centuries, people were sprinkling water on people and calling it good. And then one day someone was reading the Bible and realized, “Wait a second, it says right here that we are supposed to put people underwater! Why haven’t we been doing that?” The natural response is to do what the people did in Nehemiah, repent, and do it right. And yet there were many who refused to do what the Bible says. How do you handle it when you “discover” something in the Bible that you didn’t know about?
For pastors and priests only
If you are a pastor or a priest who is still sprinkling people, you need to show your people the truth, and honestly baptize them, and do it in Jesus’ name (Mark 16:16, Matthew 28:19, Acts 2:38, 4:12, 8:16, 10:48, 19:5, 22:16, Galatians 3:27). If we are going to tell people that the Bible is the word of God, then every time we “discover” something in the Bible that is not in agreement with our church, we have only two choices, 1. reject the Bible and cling to man made traditions, or 2. repent of our error and obey the word of God. Pastor, priest, there may be hundreds or more who are looking to you to bring them the word of God. We must get it right.
Reverend Tad Lindley is a minister at the United Pentecostal Church in Bethel, Alaska.
