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The characters and stories of the Old Testament form a rich tapestry, revealing both the best and worst of the human condition—and, most importantly, how God relates to us.
Based on the Living Covenant book series, this podcast explores the sometimes messy lives of those who lived under God’s first covenant, asking what these blessedly unsanitised saints can teach us about living out our faith in relationship with a God who promises never to leave us or forsake us.
Welcome to the Living Covenant Podcast, where we journey through the messy human stories of the Old Testament explore what it means to live in covenant with a promise keeping God. I'm your host, Zanita. Let's dive in.
Jesse hello. Welcome to the Living Covenant Podcast.
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Now, this podcast is all about learning about people that we've heard about but don't know too much about, and that is probably how many people feel about yourself. Obviously, you work for Signs and we know that you're a bit of a podcasting guru that you. Started Burn the Haystack podcast. We know that you were a pastor, but can you give us a behind the scenes, of the life of 📍 Jesse, what do you do in your free time? What excites you? What could you talk about for hours, that kind of thing.
Well, uh, so many things I often get in trouble with my dear wife because I have too many hobbies according to her. I love photography. I love reading. I love board games. People who know me know my love for board games. I love history. I love reading about particularly ancient history. Recently, I've gotten a little bit more into sort of modern history, but I love, reading about history and I also love to listen to a lot of podcasts about history. So that's probably not surprising.
Do you have a period of history that fascinates you the most?
Yeah, if I had to pick one, it would probably be the period between the. Middle ages and the modern era, so like 15th, 16th century, around that period. There's a really interesting hinge period in particularly in Europe. I mean, this is a Eurocentric kind of history view.
Where this is around the reformation and also the lead up to the Renaissance, and it's just a really fascinating period in European history. There's a lot of wars, there's a lot of heretic burning, there's just a lot of conflict, a lot of very interesting people. People like Yarn Huss and Martin Luther and Philip Millon and on the Catholic side as well.
It's a really tumultuous time in. European history and it's one that I am fascinated by. So yeah it changes, but at the moment, if I had to pick one, it would probably be that period.
Yeah. Awesome. Now you've written about an interesting period of history.
I think it was a 586 bc, and we'll get into that in a second, but you sort of did a three in one deal for us with this series. A lot of people, they just chose one character. You wrote on three leaders, Zerubbabel. Ezra and Nehemiah, what compelled you to explore these three characters?
Well look, apart from providing three times the value, uh, the, the story of Nehemiah is often talked about in isolation, when really he's kind of the third act of a three act story. A story that begins with the Jewish exiles who are scattered across what is now the Persian Empire. It used to be the Babylonian Empire.
And they're kind of expats, they're exiles, and they are given the opportunity to return to their homeland, to, to Judah and to Jerusalem. And the first person who kind of leads the first group of refugees, uh, uh, returners is ve. And the second is Ezra. And then Nehemiah is the third. And they all kind of exist, and they're the catalyst for the beginning of their stories are all slightly different, but they're interconnected, and so that's why I decided to at least pay some homage to VE and to Ezra because. Not only are they interconnected, but their stories overlap. So Nehemiah and Ezra knew each other. We don't know so much whether they had personal contact with VE probably, but it's not as much in the story. But we know in Nehemiah's story that Ezra and Nehemiah, they knew each other and they collaborated together. So really the story of Nehemiah can't be understood without understanding the story of these two other figures.
Hmm. So it's not like they were like the three stooges tied at each other's hips, but they kind of carried on each other's work or
Yeah, ve is a populist figure. He is sort of a rah rah figure who gets the Jewish exiles initially going. And then Ezra is, is more of, a scribe, a priest. He's a priestly figure, and so he is a preacher. He's a teacher. And he, his story is more theological but it also has some real world implications, which I talk about in the article.
And then Nehemiah is interesting because I guess when we talk about Nehemiah, a lot of the time we talk about him in terms of being a leader. So he's a visionary. He you know, seeks God's will and he tries to undertake it in whatever way that he can. And his story really, if people. Need some reminding is about rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, whereas ve is really about restoring the foundations of the temple and restoring worship.
And Ezra is more about bringing the people who are in Jerusalem back in line with what he considers to be Orthodox, Judaic worship and living. So they all overlap, but they all have a special mission.
Kind of heading in the same direction, but in different ways.
Yeah.
So what was it, was this a period of history that interested you, or what was it about this story that made you wanna write about it?
The exilic and post exilic period is probably one of the most important periods for us to really understand the story of the Bible. I would say. The reason for that is because a lot of what we know as the Bible today, particularly, well, specifically the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, really didn't come about until the exilic period.
So. Prior to the exilic period, a lot of the writings of what we would call the Torah or the prophets and a lot of the wisdom literature was not codified in the way that we see it today in the Hebrew Bible, and as well as the Jewish conception of what it means to worship. God was not really codified until the exilic period.
And what I mean by that is. Up until the exilic period, most Jews would have worshiped God as the God of Israel and the God who dwells in Israel, who dwells with his people. And this provides the fodder for a massive problem a sort of, uh, crisis, if you will, when the people are taken out of the land.
And Jeremiah talks about this. Isaiah talks about this. How can we then worship God? By the rivers of Babylon kind of thing. And so a theological and a social revolution takes place during the exilic period where Jewish teachers and Jewish preachers have to wrestle through this idea of how can we worship the God of Israel when we no longer are in Israel.
Interesting.
As well as how can we think about the scriptures that speak to the God of Israel when we don't have a canon. And of course, there is no canon in the Hebrew scripture at this point. That's not an idea that really develops until Christianity, but it is the time when the worship of God is codified.
In scripture and where a lot of the teachings and a lot of the scrolls are gathered together in a much more official form than what had been previously. And so the Hebrew Bible that we see today is largely together in the form that it is because of the work that was done during the exilic period and this idea of God being.
God of the universe really didn't develop until the exilic period either. So it's a really significant period of history not just on a geopolitical level. There is that, that's a massive part of it, which I haven't even mentioned. But also just like the way that Jewish people thought about their faith, thought about their God and thought about their scriptures really is because of what happened during the exilic period.
Hmm. Fascinating. So, I guess around this period, around 586 bc the Jews were taken into exile to Babylon, which is a big deal in itself. But what you're saying is that meant that they couldn't worship God because they were no longer 📍 in
the, the conception was that God dwells in his holy temple with his people in Jerusalem. Jerusalem became after. It wasn't always this way, but eventually Jerusalem became the center for worship. And became thought of as the place where the spirit of God dwells. And so, yeah, this provides a massive problem.
What do you do when God no longer is, when his people are no longer in the place of worship, the focal point of worship. And so, yeah, this is where a lot of the ideas we see this in the Psalms, the development of God being. God of all creation, God over the universe, that God needs no temple, that God needs, no place because all the world belongs to the Lord. These sorts of ideas that we see in the Hebrew scriptures develops during this time of the exilic period.
Yeah. Wild. All right. So let's go, I guess into the story of these three leaders a bit more. They, I understand have just come out of exile.
Yeah. So to give you a little bit of a context on the geopolitical level, so the Assyrians, they're the big bads for the most of Hebrew history. The story of Jonah focuses around Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. Assyria falls eventually to the Babylonians, and then the Babylonians go on a conquest. So Nebuchadnezzar goes on a conquest, the famous king of Babylon, and we see a lot of his story through Daniel and his three mates.
Um, but in five 86 Judah, which at this point had been a client state, a sort of, uh, puppet under the rule of Babylon rebels and says, we're not gonna pay you tribute anymore. We are going to do our own thing. We are gonna exert our own sovereignty. And like many of the other nations that do this Nebuchadnezzar comes in and crushes Judah.
He destroys the temple, he destroys the walls, he kills much of the population of. Judah and Kaz most in the way to exile. And that's, we've already talked about the exilic period, but about, what do we say 40 years later Babylon is then conquered by the Persians and the Persians wanna set up a different kind of empire to the way the Babylonians ran the thing.
So we often talk about the Meto Persian empire. So that's sort of a clue as to the cultural makeup of the empire. Persia is much more multicultural and it's much more open to different cultures and different religions and different people groups. Uh, it's a confederation and part of its strength is its ability to cooperate with different people groups.
And so because of this. The Persians then say in 5 38, king Cyrus says that all of the Judah Heights, if they would like to, are able to return to Judah. Now, they're not free, they're not going back to a country that has their own sovereignty and has their own self-determination.
They're still under the Persian empire. But Persia's like, Hey, if you want to rebuild Jerusalem. You still have to pay me tribute, but you can return if you want to. And Vel is the first major character in the story who takes a group of exiles back and he rebuilds the temple and establishes the, sacrificial system it was beforehand or as much as they can. So that's where the story starts.
So they were in exile for 40 years?
They were in exile for, uh, yeah, 40, 40, 50 years about that time. So a generation roughly.
Yeah, sure. And what was um, the, the, life expectancy of people in this period? Because I know in the Bible some people lived till, you know, 800, some people just lived till 60. What was it during this period? Is this like the end of their life, the middle of their life, or what?
That's a good question. I'm not too sure, but I would probably say roughly a generation would pass. So I would imagine that probably none of, or perhaps very few who may have seen the walls of Jerusalem being pulled down and people being put into exile. Would have been alive to see this. So this is probably the children of those who were carted away mostly. There may have been some elderly, but I wouldn't be able to tell you for sure.
Okay. So. They've obviously got almost like a permission slip to kind of do things with like certain, rules, restrictions, I guess you could say. Are they successful in what they set out to do?
Yes and no. So, as I mentioned, Abel's mission is to go back to Jerusalem, to start the rebuilding of the temple and to reestablish the sacrificial system, and he is largely successful in this. However, there are some speed bumps. So he gets to Jerusalem and there he finds. People still living there. So there's there, there are people who live in the area.
Some of them are descendants of those who are not carted away. Some of them are people who have since moved to the area and have settled down and have been living there. And some of them are combination of the two. So this is a theme that comes back in Ezra's story as well as in Nehemiah's is actually a theme that runs through all three of these stories.
It's the theme of intermarriage, particularly specifically with non-Jew. And so this becomes a massive tension point for all three of these characters because when Ivil comes back, there are people who are living there and they basically come to him and say, Hey. Um, can we be part of what you're doing here?
You know we are living here, we're locals. Um, can we help you rebuild and ovl, rebuffs them, uh, really rudely. So the story of IL and of ezra are mostly in Ezra, and then Nehemiah and a little bit of Ezra are in Nehemiah.
Um, these people, they come to him and they say, let us help you build because like you, we seek your God and have been sacrificing to him since the time of Asan, king of Assyria, who brought us here. But verse three, Joshua and the rest of the heads of the families of Israel answered, you have no part with us in building a temple.
To our God, we alone will build it for the Lord, the God of Israel. As Cyrus the King of Persia has commanded us. And then the peoples around them set out to discourage the people of Judah and make them afraid to go on building. So this sort of exchange creates a long-term issue for not just the Rivervale, but for Ezra and for Nehemiah because at the outset there is a confrontation and I mean, it's not for me to say what's right or wrong. Later on, a lot of these people are characterized as villains and as people who are just there to see the Judah Heights suffer and just fail in their mission.
When you say these people are characterized as villains, who are you referring to?
So there's various characters that are brought in. So, Sanballat is one that is named in the story of Nehemiah, and there are others that are not named uh, you know, I think Sanballat is characterized as an Arab.
So he's characterized as somebody who is obviously in opposition to the people of God just by, virtue of his ethnicity. Um, but. The thing I think to focus on here is the fact that a lot of these people are either foreigners or people who are part Jewish, part Gentile, you could say non-Jew.
So the theme that runs throughout this is the struggle that these men have with integrating people who are not Jewish and the tension of what do you do when the people living in your land are not all exclusively Hebrew? This is something that they have never had to deal with before. But, this becomes a huge issue as time goes on and as these characters go about their work, it becomes a, a constant source of conflict.
What would you say like. They're obviously unified in some sense, but what would you say their main intention and end goal kind of is?
So I think this probably has to come back to core ideas of identity. The implication of mixing with those who are not Jewish is that you are diluting. God's holy people, right? We often think of ideas of like religion and ethnicity as being separate. I am a European person who just so happens to be a Protestant Christian. But for Jewish folks, especially Jewish folks in, you know, the fifth century, sixth century bc those are two distinctions that don't exist. They're one and the same. Even today to be Jewish is to both belong to a quote unquote religion, but it also is to belong to a people. You can become Jewish if you are a gentile. But there is a sense in which to be Jewish, ethnically as well as spiritually together, there is something special and distinct about that. And of course, that has become the target of much antisemitism throughout history. Is this idea that if you are Spanish or American or French or whatever, you can be a Christian, you can be Catholic or a Protestant, but to be Jewish is not to just believe in a certain faith, but to also belong to a specific people.
And you don't get to choose that. The fact that you are, you know, blood. Is Jewish, even though that's a a nonsense kind of idea, it's still an idea that has driven a lot of, not just Jewish identity, but also antisemitism. And I I think that this is part of the problem with the conflict that happens in these stories.
So, for instance, Ezra's story picks up in chapter seven and the catalyst for him coming to Jerusalem is he hears that, in, chapter nine verse two, that the people in Jerusalem have quote, mingled the holy race with the peoples around them. That's a direct quote. That's not me embellishing.
So these non-Jews have married Jews, they've had children, and now they are growing up around God's holy city, around God's holy temple. And this is a massive problem to Ezra. And so he goes to Jerusalem, and he essentially preaches a series of sermons where he demands that these men who have married non-Jewish women divorce them.
And he threatens for them to have their lands confiscated, their property confiscated, and that they'd be exiled if they don't.
Wow.
Now the story tells us some of them do, but not all of them do, and we don't know if. The men who choose not to are indeed exiled. We just don't see that. But what we do see is Ezra preaching these impassioned sermons where basically the message is that we as a people have to stay pure. And in order to stay pure, we have to reject into marriage and into breeding. I've really tried not to use that word, but that's sort of what it comes down to with these non-Jewish peoples. And so this is a theme that comes back, again and again in, in all three of these stories.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So, so different from our landscape of things today. But I feel like when you look at these three leaders, you almost feel like. Even though they might not be doing what today, we would consider appropriate or normal or sane or whatever.
You see this like rhythm of hope and disappointment running through their stories. Like they're passionate about what they're doing, but they're also facing setbacks and disappointments. And you started this article by sharing some of your own struggles, in ministry and doing things for God and how you also experienced some setbacks.
Can you walk us through that a bit? Because I think that corresponds with this story of these three leaders.
So when I was a young pastor, I was in a pretty, pretty big church in New Zealand and the church was full of elderly folk and middle aged people, but there was one demographic that was missing in this that wasn't well represented. And that was sort of like the teens and young adults demographic.
And it wasn't that, you know, none of these church members had no children. They had children. It just so happened that a lot of them weren't attending church who weren't connected in church. And so one of the missions that I was given was to start a youth ministry and it was my job to try and engage, reengage some of these young people back into church.
And so that's what I did. My wife and I, we started this youth ministry. We got local leaders involved and it was a lot of hard work. A lot of early morning meetings we would often meet. At six o'clock in the morning at McDonald's. 'cause that was the only time that anybody was available to, to meet.
They're all busy people. And with the bribery of egg McMuffins, it was sort of what we had to do. But it was a lot of fun. Like I look back and, you know, it was a lot of fond memories. So we did this for about two years which really, in terms of ministry is just an absolute blip. It wasn't very long, but we were, you know, in the middle of it.
And we were having a great time. We were running bible studies, we were running Vespas events we were doing service projects. We were going away. We were doing all the things that you do in a youth ministry and for all intents and purposes, it seems to work out pretty great. We were having lots of unengaged kids and young adults come back to church.
We were bridging the gap between the youth ministry and local church life, and slowly we seemed to be turning the dial. In fact, I just randomly had a conversation the other day with somebody on the other side of Australia. Who mentioned that he was, makes for somebody at this local church and said, oh, you were part of that ministry, weren't you?
It was really great. And it was like so, so random that people still remember it. So that was all very well and good, but unfortunately what happened as often happens with young pastors is that you get moved. And so that's what happened. We got moved. And as often happens, you're so busy with your new gig that you kind of lose touch with the people back where you used to be.
And, you know, I tried to keep contact. And after a while you just kind of stop, you know, sending those Facebook messages and you stop those phone calls. It's, and you feel guilty about it, but it's like, you know, it, it happens to everyone.
Hmm.
And then one day I ran into a church member who basically he dropped a bomb on me. And it was completely unexpected and it was shocking. I won't go into the details because I wanna be sensitive to those people who are listening to this and who know people in the church. But essentially there was a, uh, moral failure within the leadership of our youth ministry. And there was some controversy. And as a result, basically all of our leadership had resigned. The people, the volunteer leaders that I had trained up who were locals, who I had entrusted the ministry to, and the local church, pastoral team, and the elders team tried to step in and tried to sort of save the ministry. But unfortunately, the damage had been done and within.
I wanna say 12 to 18 months. The ministry that we'd spent the better part of two years building was just, it was gone. And this was, uh, it was a blow to me and my ego. Um, it was a blow because not only, well, first of all the people that we knew and that we trusted, we felt betrayed by, you know.
That they would just chuck it in and they would not stick it out and sort of honor the hard work that we'd put into the ministry. But it was also a blow because it felt like everything that I'd done, all the hard work, all the early morning meetings. All of the planning and the running to op shops for props and items and organizing of trips and Bible studies and all of that.
It was all for nothing. Like it was all for nothing. And it just felt like I had failed that it was my fault that somehow if only I had done something differently, or if only I had maybe chosen different people or if I had trained them better or if I had, I don't know, maybe it wouldn't have happened and I felt like it was my fault.
Yeah, I think this is probably a really common experience people have in ministry.
I think also because we throw around all these ideas, like all glory to God and Jesus is doing it all . But it's difficult to say that when you know, we are the ones gonna max at 6:00 AM or sending all the messages or organizing all the events or preaching at the events.
We are the ones making the connections and the time. It's really hard then to not make it a reflection on our efforts and our work when it does fail.
yeah. And look, you're right, we don't talk about this in the church that much. We love to talk about what God is doing and I think we should. Absolutely. But I think we often, when things don't go well, we often cover them up or we reinterpret them. Or we try to justify them in our own minds because sometimes to really sit with failure it can be in incre, it can be really, yeah, really uncomfortable.
Um, and I think for many pastors, for many ministry leaders, it's a coping mechanism because a lot of the time you work really, really, really hard. And you don't always get the results that you're looking for, or things work for a while and you think, oh, finally we've cracked the code.
I've made the breakthrough. I've, you know, done the thing that I need to do and then it all comes crashing down or whatever the case may be. And so it's a way I think of us trying to protect our egos in a way and I think that's potentially as problematic as, any of the other things that we do in this space.
Yeah, I assume a lot of people, either experience failure and they either walk in and try even harder and find other solutions, or they just get really disheartened and completely back out.
Yeah, I mean, you've seen both kinds of ministry leaders, haven't you? You've seen those who are just so bitter about all the things that the church has done to them, or the unmet expectations. And then equally, you've also seen those ministry leaders that are just so unshakeable, even though so many things have gone wrong.
I wonder if perhaps those two extremes are not the healthiest in that maybe those people who just think everything's awesome all the time need a little bit more introspection. Perhaps those people who think that the world is out to get them need a little bit more responsibility in their life. I don't know. It's hard for me to say, but yeah.
I think this is something that we see, especially in Nehemiah story, like a lot of people know. Nehemiah's story, they know about the Jerusalem walls and that he convinces the king to take on this great building project. They know he faces opposition, but kind of prevails against those odds.
And this is often, I think you mentioned this in your article, this is often where the story ends. But after that we do see that the temple is misused and he also faces great disappointment and he responds by calling curses on people, beating them up, pulling out their hair. Like quite extreme reactions.
But what have you learned as to like how we can better respond in these situations of feeling like we've failed, feeling really disappointed in the outcome of what we've put such hard work into. Have you found through reading this story a better way to approach these setbacks or these experiences?
I think I have. The first thing I'd say is we need to read the stories of these figures more in completion than just focusing in on certain episodes of their lives. Because the more you read the stories of these men and women, particularly in the Old Testament, the more you realize how human they were and how even though they achieve great things through God and with God's assistance, their stories often end in failure, or they end strangely, or they end in a weird anti-climax. And Nehemiah's story is no different. It does end in a weird anti-climax, and he's angry and he's upset. And he's calling down curses. And he's pulling out people's hair and he's then saying, Hey, God, you know, uh, please remember me with favor, almost with a, a tinge of desperation of despair. Um, and many stories of these biblical characters are just like this. Jonah's story ends in a weird anti-climax. It doesn't have a happy ending. It has a happy ending for the Ninevites, but not for Jonah. He's upset, he's angry, and the story doesn't have a resolution for him. Noah's story ends strangely as well with him naked and drunk in a tent. And then kind of like Nehemiah, he calls down curses on either his son or his grandson, depending on which passage you're talking about. Um, David's story ends awfully as well as does Solomon, his son. By the way, so do many of his sons. 📍 And so what does this tell us? Well, it tells us that these people were human number one. These are not mythological figures who have just been created out of hand to illustrate some sort of moral lesson.
You know, perhaps some of the elements of their story are mythological. But I think I, I truly believe that these people were real people who went through real struggles. And the fact that their story portrays that I think should give us hope, should give us hope that even if our story ends badly, it doesn't invalidate what God can and will do through us.
Um, it also reminds me that each of the stories in the Old Testament and even our stories today all lead to the same place. And that is God is always seeking to work in and through our lives, whether we are receptive to that, whether we are resistant to that, but God will also honor our choices. And will allow us to make mistakes because of his value for free will. Now that's, you know, we are not gonna go into the free will esoteric, you know, philosophical idea.
But I think what it also, what it leads us to is a realization that often when we are doing ministry there is a impurity and I don't mean this, you know, let me try and explain what I mean to this. A lot of what we do in ministry is God, but also a lot of what we do in ministry is us.
Hmm.
And sometimes it's difficult to know what's God and what's us, and that's just because we're human and that's because we're broken. A lot of what Nehemiah and Ezra and will do is through God. And I truly believe that God worked through these men, but their humanity bubbles up to the surface so many times.
You know I didn't get time to talk about this in the article, but I, I think I mention it now when these men are talking about what it means to be a pure people. They're really going against a lot of what the prophets talked about. You know, Jeremiah particularly, and Ezekiel and Isaiah, in various parts of their writings, they talk about God's intention for humanity.
That God will bring all the nations to fullness and to their best version under him that the whole idea of the Abrahamic promise is that God would bless all nations through the family of Abraham. Then we see this throughout the entire Old Testament, and we see it in the New Testament.
This idea of Jesus the Messiah being the person through whom all of the nations would find their fullness and their completion, and that. God's plan for all humanity is for all humanity, not just for one family of humanity. And so when these men are going about their, uh, sort of campaigns of purity and ritual, purity and alienating families from each other and causing conflict in the camp, and all of these things, I think they miss the point.
They really, truly miss the point, and the point is that I think fundamentally they are doing what they think is God's will. Whilst ignoring or perhaps not realizing that God's will is going to be fulfilled fully and most really in the Coing Messiah.
Yeah.
And that when we do ministry today, we have that same choice.
Do we allow our preferences, whether they be political or social or theological to color the way that we do ministry? Do we dress up our preferences as God's will, or do we point to Jesus? And allow his teachings to allow his ethos, to allow his spirit to shape our work and our ministry and admit, hey, we're not always gonna get it right.
But look to Jesus, look to the Messiah and truly depend his spirit and his guidance to be able to. In some ways, detach our egos and our preferences from the work of God. Um, yeah
yeah. Yeah. I think the awesome thing, and this is highlighted in both these three men's stories and in your story, is that even though sometimes we completely miss the mark, God still brings good things out of it and people still have incredible experiences and their lives are still changed in ways we don't expect because we think it's failed.
yeah, my story is definitely evidence of that. There were some people in that ministry who I was working with, who I just felt like they were gonna drop off the map because of the failure. But God put other people in their lives who worked with them, who journeyed alongside them, and in some cases who saw them through baptism and local church engagement and disciple making. And that is a story that probably has been repeated many, many times throughout church history. Um, I had to come to the place where I realize that, you know what, I'm here for a time and I get to do some good work for a time. And then when that time's up.
I have to trust that God is gonna find other people to work with and to work through, to continue his purposes, because I might not be here forever, but God's spirit is, and his purposes are always working, and he is always at work despite my failures and sometimes because of my failures. And look, I've come to the place where I can only write about this story now because I've had to do the work to realize that, you know what, there were things that were outside of my control that I couldn't have changed, I couldn't have known, and I've come to peace with it.
So if I was still struggling with it, I wouldn't be able to write about it in the same way. But I just hope that we can talk about our failures in ministry more. That we can acknowledge the times when we've messed up and that we can also point to the fact that God is still at work whether we are there or not, and whether we succeed or not, God still works and, you know, all glory to him. And, uh, we just have to know our part in all of this.
The title of this series is called Living Covenant. How have you seen the struggles and the successes of these leaders show us a more, a live version of Covenant that is in our everyday lives?
Well, I mean, God's Covenant with his people in the Old Testament is about mutual work and I guess participation. And we see this expanded in the New Testament, you know, in the new Covenant. And I think the passage of scripture that has really spoken to me that I think encapsulates this covenant is the scripture passage that I end the article with.
Uh, it's a famous one, two Corinthians 12 verse nine. This is the apostle Paul speaking. Saying of God my grace, God's grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. And then Paul says, therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness so that Christ's power may rest on me.
And I think that oftentimes we characterize the Old Testament covenant as being about works and the New Testament covenant about being about grace. But I think I see that grace all throughout the Old Testament, and specifically in the lives of Nehemiah and of Ezra and of ve, God's grace abounds in the lives of these men because they get it wrong so often because they are so misled by their own preferences and by their own prejudices. God's grace is absolutely manifest in these men's lives, and I don't think that they would've been able to accomplish what they accomplished without the grace of God. And so when I see them, I do see weak men. I see men weakened by their own prejudices, by their own preferences, by their often narrow minded viewpoint about the world and yet God works a mighty work through these men's lives and God can continue to work a mighty work through each of ours in our weakness, not if we're weak, but because we are all weak in various ways. And so I think that's probably for me, what it comes down to. God's grace in the midst of covenant and the midst of failure.
Is such a powerful thing and I think it's something that we should definitely, definitely all find comfort in.
Absolutely. Well, I think that's a good note to end on. So thank you, Jesse, for your deep dive on.
Nailed it.
Ezra and Nehemiah.
And yeah, everyone can find that in the Living Covenant book or on the record website if they would like to read the full version.
Perfect. Thanks Zanita.