Nehemiah 13:17

The Message

I confronted the leaders of Judah: “What’s going on here? This evil! Profaning the Sabbath! Isn’t this exactly what your ancestors did? And because of it didn’t God bring down on us and this city all this misery? And here you are adding to it—accumulating more wrath on Jerusalem by profaning the Sabbath.”

Cross References

Proverbs 28:4

If you desert God’s law, you’re free to embrace depravity; if you love God’s law, you fight for it tooth and nail.

Isaiah 1:10

“Listen to my Message, you Sodom-schooled leaders. Receive God’s revelation, you Gomorrah-schooled people.

Jeremiah 13:18

Tell the king and the queen-mother, “Come down off your high horses. Your dazzling crowns will tumble off your heads.” The villages in the Negev will be surrounded, everyone trapped, And Judah dragged off to exile, the whole country dragged to oblivion. * * *

Ezekiel 20:13

“‘But Israel rebelled against me in the desert. They didn’t follow my statutes. They despised my laws for living well and obediently in the ways I had set out. And they totally desecrated my holy Sabbaths. I seriously considered unleashing my anger on them right there in the desert. But I thought better of it and acted out of who I was, not by what I felt, so that I might be honored and not blasphemed by the nations who had seen me bring them out. But I did lift my hand in a solemn oath there in the desert and promise them that I would not bring them into the country flowing with milk and honey that I had chosen for them, that jewel among all lands. I canceled my promise because they despised my laws for living obediently, wouldn’t follow my statutes, and went ahead and desecrated my holy Sabbaths. They preferred living by their no-god idols. But I didn’t go all the way: I didn’t wipe them out, didn’t finish them off in the desert.

Leviticus 19:17

“Don’t secretly hate your neighbor. If you have something against him, get it out into the open; otherwise you are an accomplice in his guilt.

Micah 3:1

Then I said: “Listen, leaders of Jacob, leaders of Israel: Don’t you know anything of justice? Haters of good, lovers of evil: Isn’t justice in your job description? But you skin my people alive. You rip the meat off their bones. You break up the bones, chop the meat, and throw it in a pot for cannibal stew.”

Micah 3:9

The leaders of Jacob and the leaders of Israel are Leaders contemptuous of justice, who twist and distort right living, Leaders who build Zion by killing people, who expand Jerusalem by committing crimes. Judges sell verdicts to the highest bidder, priests mass-market their teaching, prophets preach for high fees, All the while posturing and pretending dependence on God: “We’ve got God on our side. He’ll protect us from disaster.” Because of people like you, Zion will be turned back into farmland, Jerusalem end up as a pile of rubble, and instead of the Temple on the mountain, a few scraggly scrub pines.