Nehemiah 9:36-38

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         36.  Behold, we are servants this day, and for the land that thou gavest unto our fathers 
        to eat the fruit thereof and the good thereof, behold, we are servants in it:  37.  And it 
        yieldeth much increase unto the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins: also 
        they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we are in 
        great distress.  38.  And because of all this we make a sure covenant, and write it; and 
        our princes, Levites, and priests, seal unto it.
      
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        	Thus by affliction they promise to keep God's commandments to which they could not be 
        brought by God's great benefits. 
      
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        	Alas, for Israel, their sinful kingdom would never be restored. Their nation would 
        continue to be subject to the Persians, to the Greeks, and then to the Romans, until the 
        promised Messiah would suddenly appear.  Physical Israel would be scattered once again, 
        this time for almost 2000 years!
      
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        	God's prophets, whom they had despised and murdered and whose words they scornfully 
        rejected, would come no more. With Zechariah and Malachi, who were contemporaries of 
        Nehemiah, the age of the prophets terminated. They were the last of the prophets until 
        John the Baptist, in the spirit and power of Elijah, would thunder the message from the 
        wilderness, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of God is at hand," 
      
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        	Their priesthood became more and more reprobate; and God even cursed it; and, by the 
        times of Christ, the Temple itself had become a "den of thieves and robbers." There is no 
        tragedy like that of Israel; and something of the infinite pathos of their judicial 
        hardening, of their rejection and murder of the Son of God, and of God's destruction of 
        their nation in just retribution of their wickedness -- something of the pathos and 
        tragedy of racial Israel, as distinguished from the true Israel, appears in this pitiful 
        prayer of the Levites who tried in vain to bring the racial Israel back to God. 
      
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