Nehemiah
8and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple, for the wall of the city, and for the house that I will occupy.” The king granted my requests, because of the good hand of my God on me. 9Then I came to the governors beyond the River, and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent captains of the army and horsemen with me. 10When Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the Ammonite, heard of it, it grieved them exceedingly, because a man had come to seek the welfare of the children of Israel. 11So I came to Jerusalem, and was there three days. 12I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. I didn’t tell anyone what my God put into my heart to do for Jerusalem. There wasn’t any animal with me, except the animal that I rode on. 13I went out by night by the valley gate, even toward the jackal’s well, then to the dung gate, and inspected the walls of Jerusalem, which were broken down, and its gates were consumed with fire. 14Then I went on to the spring gate and to the king’s pool, but there was no place for the animal that was under me to pass. 15Then went I up in the night by the brook, and inspected the wall; and I turned back, and entered by the valley gate, and so returned. 16The rulers didn’t know where I went, or what I did. I had not as yet told it to the Jews, nor to the priests, nor to the nobles, nor to the rulers, nor to the rest who did the work. 17Then I said to them, “You see the bad situation that we are in, how Jerusalem lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire. Come, let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we won’t be disgraced.” 18I told them of the hand of my God which was good on me, as also of the king’s words that he had spoken to me. They said, “Let’s rise up and build.” So they strengthened their hands for the good work. 19But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammontite servant, and Geshem the Arabian, heard it, they ridiculed us, and despised us, and said, “What is this thing that you are doing? Will you rebel against the king?” 20Then I answered them, and said to them, “The God of heaven will prosper us. Therefore we, his servants, will arise and build; but you have no portion, nor right, nor memorial, in Jerusalem.”
Israel held the temple as precious as its own life. To protect a holy temple and to offer sacrifice, there has to be a wall. But the people of Israel threw away God’s command to depart from sin and fell, and in the end they were brought down by Babylon. In those days most of the people lived outside the walls; inside the walled city lived the governor, the merchants who paid taxes, the soldiers, and the priestly group who offered sacrifice and prayed for the safety of the nation. Only about ten percent of the people lived inside the walls, so the rest lived in villages around them, came inside for protection when war broke out, and gathered their strength to drive off an enemy army.
But Jerusalem, attacked by Babylon, had its temple and its walls destroyed and became a ruin. The elders who sat in the gate and judged the people were carried off, and the priests who offered sacrifice to God were carried off as captives, and so their life collapsed in a moment. Look at how the people who lived inside the walls were taken captive, and you see how brutally the conqueror must have slaughtered the people living outside them. People can live rightly only when the law is taught to them, and in Jerusalem the priests who taught the law had fallen, and that is why God’s wrath came. God warned Israel of their sin again and again, and when they disobeyed he made them captives of Babylon. Captive for the long span of seventy years, they could not offer sacrifice to God, and they were in no position to return to the homeland they longed for.
But God moved Cyrus, the first king of the Persian empire that destroyed Babylon, so God fulfilled his promise to bring them back to Jerusalem after seventy years.
Nehemiah’s name means *comforted by Yahweh*. He was a man of the period around 464 to 424 B.C., and during the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, he took up the post of governor of Jerusalem and rebuilt the wall. He was in the palace at Susa in the month of Chislev in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, when his brother Hanani, who lived in Judah, came and told him the wretched state of the homeland, with the temple in ruins. Hearing that the wall of Jerusalem was broken down and its gates burned, Nehemiah fasted and wept and prayed to God. God had warned them beforehand that if they did not keep his commandments and statutes and ordinances he would scatter them among the nations; Nehemiah knew Judah had not repented, which is why he prayed all the more earnestly. Judah had fallen into idol worship and a life of pleasure and deserved God’s discipline; but now, he prayed, let me return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple and the wall. Four months after Nehemiah began to pray, God answered him.
In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, the king saw Nehemiah’s face full of sorrow and asked him why. But however urgent the situation, he could not tell a conqueror that the walls of his own country had all been broken down. Even so, knowing there was no one but the king who could help, he prayed silently to God and then asked that if it pleased the king he might be sent to Judah to build the city. The king readily agreed and even gave him letters so that he could travel to Judah in safety.
After that the astonishing work of the captives returning under King Cyrus took place. Zerubbabel and Ezra came home in the first and second returns and did the work of rebuilding the temple, and Nehemiah did the work of rebuilding the wall. Under the leadership of Zerubbabel, a descendant of David, the people of Israel became one and began to rebuild the temple that their own sin had laid waste.
After his work on the wall, Nehemiah worked at correcting what was wrong in their faith — the matter of keeping the Sabbath, the matter of intermarriage with foreign women, the matter of the Levites’ discontinued support.
Rebuilding the temple went forward by God’s providence and by the people’s wholehearted devotion, and while they rebuilt it the people came to see how precious a country is. They learned that faith cannot be kept once a country is taken away. They came to know what a great pain it is to lose a country through your own sin, to be a captive unable to return home, and to be unable to hear the Word.
But Satan interfered so heavily during the rebuilding of the temple and the wall that they had to go through great difficulty at every turn. From Satan’s side, once the temple was finished the Word would be proclaimed and souls bound by sin would repent, and he was not going to stand and watch. From the moment God set Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Satan did not want them living by the Word. Bringing God’s kingdom down is exactly Satan’s purpose, and that is why he interfered to keep the temple and the wall from being built.
When Israel put all their strength into rebuilding the temple, the Samaritans likewise did their utmost for six years to stop the work, and at last a royal command to halt construction brought about a fifteen-year suspension of the rebuilding. You must keep in mind that Satan will never leave believers alone to work hard at God’s work. God’s kingdom expanding in the world means failure for Satan, and so Satan is the one who uses every means to stop the work of restoration. We have no idea what plan Satan will attack with, so we must always arm ourselves with prayer and receive God’s help. Spiritual war begins the moment you resolve in faith, and so, having received Jesus Christ, you must live the life of a new person born again.
The people of Israel completed the rebuilding of the temple by God’s grace and by their own devoted faith. Ezra and the people were overcome, and as God’s word was proclaimed in the finished temple the people could return to the God they had wanted so badly.
But once the Word they had longed for so deeply could be heard easily in the temple, sadly they sinned again. They had come the long way around to hearing the Word, and they should have kept their faith to the end. How badly they had wanted this temple, how badly they had wanted to offer this sacrifice, how badly they had wanted to hear this Word — and once they could have it all every day, they forgot what it had felt like.
Ezra 9:10
10“Now, our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken your commandments,
Watching the people fall, Ezra fasted and wept aloud. They had sworn they would never change when they came home by God’s grace, and once they had grown a little used to a comfortable life they abandoned their first love entirely, mixed with the people of the world and worshiped idols. Their spirits were seared, and so the word of truth moved them no longer, and the worship they had once offered with such feeling became a form. Just as a high priest who offers sacrifice while in a state of sin dies on the spot, if God took a life on the spot for worship offered as a form, there would be no one worshiping carelessly. The people forgot to give thanks, and human nature showed itself, and they sinned.
The clothing believers wear is white cloth without a single stain. It is foolish for a white cloth to be dipped in red dye and swear that it will never take the color. God says that whether you are dyed bright red or only faintly pink, anything that is not white is sin. And yet people think, the world out there is that red, and I am not so bad; surely God will forgive this much. This is an evil attitude that believers really must guard against. They think, I am not the only one living this way, everyone lives like this, and at least I know the Word and have a sense of sin, so it is all right. But keep in mind that a single sin can kill you. Only by listening to the word that tells us to abstain from every form of evil can we become people who overcome in a world full of sin. Nehemiah grieved sincerely, watching people who had come under God’s fearful wrath and still could not drive off the world’s temptations, and fell.
Nehemiah 2:8
8and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple, for the wall of the city, and for the house that I will occupy.” The king granted my requests, because of the good hand of my God on me.
The temple and the wall of Jerusalem had lain in ruins for seventy years, with no one able even to think of raising them again. The temple was rebuilt, barely, but the wall was still broken down, so foreigners came and went freely, doing business, and even preached their gods in the temple. And then the bad habits the people had picked up in captivity slowly showed themselves, and they offered as a mere form the sacrifice they had wanted so badly.
Nehemiah knew that God does not receive a sacrifice offered without a true heart, and he was afraid Israel would be rebuked; so he resolved to build the wall, protect the temple and guard the people’s faith. Nehemiah’s thinking was that rebuilding the wall must come first if they were to worship God, and only then could the temple be preserved. Nehemiah felt keenly how necessary the rebuilding of the wall was; he made a concrete plan and prayed earnestly for God’s help. The wall not only protects the temple but plays the very important role of blocking the invasion of evil spirits and evil people, and that is why the wall has to be built.
1 Corinthians 3:16
16Don’t you know that you are a temple of God, and that God’s Spirit lives in you?
Just as Jesus called his own body a temple, every person redeemed by God is a temple. Believers are temples where the Holy Spirit dwells, so they must keep working at building a wall to protect that temple.
Once a wall is built by the Word, by prayer and by a holy life to protect the temple, sexual immorality, greed and fallen human nature cannot attack, which is why a believer who builds that wall high can stand against Satan. It is not a matter of working to block the world by your own strength; the wall of faith blocks it naturally. Nehemiah did his utmost to wake the people, because they must never go back to the place of suffering that captivity had been.
The church and brothers and sisters in faith play a very important role for a believer, but the one who plays the greatest role is the Holy Spirit who walks with us. The intercession of brothers and sisters in faith gives strength to live boldly in the world, and the Holy Spirit helps us discern spiritually with wisdom and understanding. A person who has built the wall may become a king like David, a prime minister like Joseph, or a rich man like Job, and will still be able to discern the world rightly by the Word, because the Holy Spirit has given them wisdom.
Longing for the place where God’s word is heard is also building the wall. Bearing with things and being patient when your temper rises and you feel wronged is also building the wall. If a believer cannot bear with things by the Word and acts on human judgment, sin can block the way to God. So the wall must be built high; then you will not compare yourself with others and grow greedy or lose heart, and the world’s way of thinking will not come in unfiltered and shake you.
Protecting a believer from the world is exactly what the wall does. Nehemiah, who knew deep truth spiritually, thought how pitiful it was that the people, with no wall, were being pushed around by foreigners. But it cannot be done by human strength, and so Nehemiah prayed earnestly for God to protect this country and this people. The time when Nehemiah began praying for the wall was twenty-nine years after the feast of Purim, which commemorates the events of Esther.
Prayer is a believer’s privilege of being clothed with God’s power. In every age prayer has always been the best solution to a problem. Prayer moves the heart of the God who supplies the materials and the people needed to build the wall of faith, and it becomes the power that brings down the schemes of the enemy. That frail prayer — just kneeling and moving your lips — is the key that moves heaven and earth and a human life. From today, may you pray with an earnest heart to cleanse the temple and to build the wall completely. God will certainly show you: ‘I heard your prayer, and this is how I am working now.’
Nehemiah was a prime minister, but he never forgot that he was a captive, and he did his utmost not to live a life that shamed him as one of the people of Israel. Only when the leader is clean first can the people be set right. In carrying out his work Nehemiah had decisiveness, thoroughness and a gift for winning people, and he was wise enough to make use of both people and circumstances. He dealt with people out of faith, character and wisdom, and he also had the humility to raise others up, build them up and take them in. Becoming a leader in this world is never easy, but becoming a spiritual leader who carries God’s work is harder still. Without painstaking effort, sacrifice and self-examination, no one can ever become a right leader. A worldly leader who has his share of faults will still be followed, complaints and all, so long as he brings people some benefit.
But a leader who carries God’s work must have faith, character and ability, and, because it is a weighty place that has to lead souls to salvation, his relationship with God must also be holy.
Nehemiah had risen to the office of a minister in charge of the wine in the enemy country he had been carried to as a captive; and he never once abandoned his faith, and he carried the worldly office he had been given faithfully as well. He held the high position of minister, so he could receive the help of the king who ruled the world, and could build the wall of Jerusalem in fifty-two days. So believers must carry their responsibilities in the world well too, and must hold strength in order to preach God’s goodness.
If Nehemiah had been irresponsible and lazy, and had not been respected and trusted by people, he could not have had the king’s confidence. We too, like Nehemiah, must stand straight in faith within and build up our own souls and the souls of others, and must carry well the role of a fence outside, building the wall that guards those souls.
Nehemiah 3:4
4Next to them, Meremoth the son of Uriah, the son of Hakkoz made repairs. Next to them, Meshullam the son of Berechiah, the son of Meshezabel made repairs. Next to them, Zadok the son of Baana made repairs.
Nehemiah divided up the work so that the people would take part in building the wall. Next to them Meremoth, next to them Meshullam, next to them Zadok — he showed the leadership of parceling the work out to the people that way, and so a wall more than three kilometers long could be finished in fifty-two days.
This is exactly Nehemiah’s wisdom. He did not let those with money or power rest while making only the weak and the poor work; he arranged it so that all the people could take part in God’s work. In the same way, the work of a church cannot be carried alone. Only when pastors, officers and all the believers devote themselves together and work according to their own talents does God’s kingdom expand, and this is what it looks like for the members of Jesus Christ, the head, to be spiritually healthy. For a church to stand this firmly, a wall of the Word, a wall of prayer and a wall of devotion must be built.
Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabians and the Ammonites heard that the city of Jerusalem was being repaired, and in their anger they prepared to attack. Satan’s attack had begun again, as it had when the temple was hindered. They interfered with the building of the wall because once it stood they could not walk into the temple and do business as they pleased. Hearing that they meant to attack, Nehemiah ordered the people to work holding swords and spears and bows. Making people who were already worn out from building the wall take up swords and spears and bows teaches us that believers must put on the whole armor of God to stand against evil spirits.
You too must fight a spiritual war this fierce to keep a believer’s place in the world. If you live a lazy, slack, lagging life, you cannot help people as Nehemiah did even if you want to, and you cannot carry the calling God gave you; so you must work at gaining outstanding skill and ability. This does not mean you must have money and power in the world. If you are lazy in the body and ignorant in the spirit, your judgment clouds, and you may not even notice Satan attacking, and may end up helping him instead; that is why you must be diligent and wise in both body and spirit.
Nehemiah let go of worldly greed and lived in the posture of a dead man. The Persian king had appointed him governor of Judah, so he held considerable power; and he took no allowance from a poor people. He knew how poor and hard-pressed the people were, and so, although he had every right to proper compensation, he served them freely. Giving up everything a minister’s position could give him is something no one can do who does not live in the posture of a dead man. He helped and served the people as governor of Judah and led by example in building the wall, because Nehemiah believed God is alive and almighty.
Once the wall was completely finished, the prophet Ezra began to preach the Word from the book of the law of Moses in the temple. In a holy temple that foreigners could not enter, because of a strong wall, the true truth was proclaimed. The people who heard the law through Ezra began to live rightly; look at this, and you see that a person can be changed only by hearing the Word and understanding it.
Does your own temple perhaps have no wall, so that the greed and the cravings of the world come and go freely? You must watch carefully whether the idols of the world are coming inside the city. All of this happens because there is no wall protecting the temple. We are already children of God who are walking with the end of the world in view. If believers who know that the world, Satan and their own lives all depend on God are brought down by Satan’s attack and shaken by temptation, they will not overcome sin even with the Holy Spirit walking beside them.
Just as Nehemiah won a fine victory in the kingdom you enter by dying, may you too live as one dead to the world and risen in God, and show us what victory looks like. You can do it. Like Nehemiah, you are God’s people, who grasp his will, build their faith whole and stay loyal to him. May you take as your pattern the faithfulness and courage of Nehemiah, who asked a conquering Persian king to let him return to his own country for the sake of God’s word alone, and may you live a holy life and preach the gospel to the world.
Like Nehemiah, who rebuilt the temple and the wall by faith and restored the faith of a people, you too can be believers who do your utmost to preach the truth honestly and boldly, for God’s kingdom and for this country and this people.