Part 1: Nehemiah 1-2

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the triumph and failure of reformation from Nehemiah 1-2.

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Male: “The words of Nehemiah son of Hakaliah: In the month of Kislev in the twentieth year, while I was in the citadel of Susa, Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that had survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem. They said to me, ‘Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.’

When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. Then I said: ‘O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and obey his commands, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel.

I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses. Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, “If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.”

They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand. Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man.’ I was cupbearer to the king.

In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before, so the king asked me, ‘Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.’

I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, ‘May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?’ The king said to me, ‘What is it you want?’ Then I prayed to the God of heaven, and I answered the king, ‘If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.’

Then the king, with the queen sitting beside him, asked me, ‘How long will your journey take, and when will you get back?’ It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time. I also said to him, ‘If it pleases the king, may I have letters to the governors of Trans-Euphrates, so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah?

And may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, so he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residence I will occupy?’ And because the gracious hand of my God was on me, the king granted my requests. So I went to the governors of Trans-Euphrates and gave them the king’s letters. The king had also sent army officers and cavalry with me.

When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites. I went to Jerusalem, and after staying there three days I set out during the night with a few men. I had not told anyone what my God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem. There were no mounts with me except the one I was riding on.

By night I went out through the Valley Gate toward the Jackal Well and the Dung Gate, examining the walls of Jerusalem, which had been broken down, and its gates, which had been destroyed by fire. Then I moved on toward the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool, but there was not enough room for my mount to get through; so I went up the valley by night, examining the wall. Finally, I turned back and reentered through the Valley Gate.

The officials did not know where I had gone or what I was doing, because as yet I had said nothing to the Jews or the priests or nobles or officials or any others who would be doing the work. Then I said to them, ‘You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.’ I also told them about the gracious hand of my God on me and what the king had said to me.

They replied, ‘Let us start rebuilding.’ So they began this good work. But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official and Geshem the Arab heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us. ‘What is this you are doing?’ they asked. ‘Are you rebelling against the king?’ I answered them by saying, ‘The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding, but as for you, you have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it.’ ”

Don Carson: Let us pray.

Now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Through Jesus Christ, amen.

Lone-Ranger Christianity won’t make much sense of the book of Nehemiah. Lone-ranger Christianity is too individualistic. It talks a great deal about personal salvation, but it never thinks in terms of the categories of the entire people of God. Even when it talks about leadership, it extends beyond the domain of personal piety.

It envisages not leadership that embraces others and leads others into a common vision, but it thinks, rather, in terms of the heroic high-noon mold, the “Though all others forsake you, yet not I” mold, forgetting what happened to the last person who said that. By contrast, Nehemiah is a believer who eschews the Lone-Ranger mold even while he cuts, in some ways, in astonishingly independent swath.

He cares passionately for the well-being of God’s covenant people. He is distressed when they are not doing well, even if he is doing quite well himself, thank you very much. He remembers the promises of God and projects his thinking, his prayers, and his goals along the axis of God’s promises, and when he exercises leadership, he knows full well with whom he must work, whom he must influence, what ways must be found to get to the goal.

In short, this book brings small comfort to Lone-Ranger Christians, and there are many of us in the Western world. We’re a fairly individualistic culture. Among the many strengths of this book is the display of passion it fosters for the promises and for the people of God. Nehemiah is introduced right away. Verse 1: “The words of Nehemiah son of Hakaliah …” Nehemiah and his patronymic, because there is another Nehemiah in the book.

Immediately, the first two chapters display this man as a servant of the Lord. That’s the expression he uses of himself in verse 11. “O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your Name.” He is a servant constrained by his passion for the promises and the people of God.

1. A servant who perceives the need with tears and contrition

Verses 1 to 4: “In the month of Kislev …” Late in the year, mid-November to mid-December. “… in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes.…” He is in the citadel of Susa, the capital, and he hears that Hanani, one of his brothers, has returned, and he takes the initiative to question those who have come with him about the Jewish remnant who survived the exile and also about Jerusalem.

He himself serves the Persian King Artaxerxes (that becomes clear in the next chapter), and he lives a little more than a century after the catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. The Babylonian Empire has itself been taken over by the Persian Empire. Moreover, by this time there have already been two movements to return to Jerusalem.

We’re familiar with the fact, of course, that Nebuchadnezzar transported people away from the land when he took over some new turf. The reason for it was because rebellions were likely to occur if the threefold cord of ancient civilizations were maintained: land, people, and local gods. The gods were connected with the land and the people, and if this threefold cord could be maintained, you were much more likely to get a rebellion.

What the Assyrians did and what the Babylonians did was to remove the leaders, especially, to another land. They were removed not only from their land but from their gods. Thus, you broke up the likelihood of rebellion. That was the theory behind it, but of course, what it also did was break up your tax base. It meant you moved all these people somewhere else and they started off as dirt poor farmers. It was quite a while before they became prosperous and so forth, so your revenues suffered.

That’s why the Persians reversed all of this. They allowed a whole lot of people to go home, not just the Jews, of course, but also Ammonites and Midionites and so forth. They all went home, and in that frame of reference, the book of Ezra has already reported two movements back to Jerusalem (in Ezra, chapters 1 to 6 and in Ezra, chapters 7 to 10). By the by, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that by the time you get down to the New Testament era, the Romans had another way of breaking up this threefold cord.

Instead of moving leaders around, they arranged god swaps, so when they took over some new territory, they insisted the locals take on some of the Roman gods, and they always took some of the local gods into the Roman pantheon. The result was, if war came, nobody could figure out which side any particular god was on. There were different ways of heading for the same imperial aims, but at this point, the Persians are trying to improve the tax base, and in God’s providence, that fulfills the promises that the Jews will return at the end of the exile.

Although they have returned, they are clearly not in a very good state. Nehemiah takes the initiative to find out what is going on, and he discovers the remnant is not doing well and Jerusalem is still a broken-down pile of masonry. The destruction that is described in verse 3 may refer to the old destruction of 587, but it may be also more recent destruction.

You will recall, according to Ezra, there was an effort to rebuild the wall. Some of the local leaders had written to Artaxerxes … the same Artaxerxes … in the first year of his reign and complained, “These Jews were rebuilding the wall, and the records would show Jerusalem had always been a difficult city. Therefore, it was in the king’s interest to keep this plot to resuscitate the great wall minimal. Shouldn’t a decree be given to stop the project?”

And that’s what happened. The same Artaxerxes had forbidden that the wall be rebuilt. And it may be, then, either Persian soldiers or Arabs from the South came and destroyed what little bit had been built. In any case, at this point there’s not much more than rubble. Nehemiah has found out what is going on, and his own response is depicted in verse 4: tears, fasting, and prayer to the Sovereign God over an extended period of time.

It wasn’t just one emotional catharsis. This goes on for four months, as the next chapter makes plain. In other words, here is no distant professionalism but deep, personal identity with the people of God. That is so common amongst those who follow God in both the Old Testament and the New. It lies at the heart of Ezra’s passion in chapters 9 and 10. You find Paul in Romans in great travail for his own people.

Paul, in 2 Corinthians, is dismayed not only by beatings and shipwrecks and hunger and things like that, which he can dismiss as light and momentary afflictions, but he is much more distressed by the travail he faces from all the churches, the care of all the churches and false brothers from within. These things trouble him far, far more. He can ask rhetorical questions: “Who is wounded and I do not hurt?”

Moses, in Exodus 32 through 34. Isaiah, after all of his strong prophetic woes in chapters 3 and 4 … “Woe to those who add house to house until they squeeze out all the little people. Woe to the hedonists who add strong drink to their cups and boast about how much they can down. Woe to those whose entire pleasure is one more party and the minstrel singers out yet again. Woe to those whose word is worthless and who love a bribe and corrupt justice.”

Then he sees a vision of God, and now he says, “Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.” Instead of a simplistic them-versus-us, he now sees himself in deep identity with this corrupt people, and it is not a neutral, professional assessment. At its best, you find Jesus weeping over the city. You even find the saints who have gone on ahead hidden under the throne in Revelation 6, passionately concerned for those who are left behind. “How long, O Lord, will they be made to suffer?”

There is so much in the heritage of our culture that thinks in philosophical categories or political categories or analytic categories, and in some ways, all of those approaches to assessing what’s going on have their place. You want to be accurate. You want to know the demographics. You want to understand what’s going on with intellectual history and all the rest. The danger, of course, is at the end of it we merely have a fairly secular analysis, and therefore, fairly secular solutions.

Somewhere along the line, if we’re to follow the pattern of Scripture exemplified here in Nehemiah, we must so identify with the people of God and with those called to be his people, though sometimes it is not yet clear that’s what they are, that we are driven in time to tears and fasting and intercessory prayer. Here, then, in the first instance is a servant who perceives the need with tears and contrition.

2. A servant who prays with a deep knowledge of God

 There are some wonderful prayers in this book. In a couple of talks down the road, we’ll spend a lot of time on the prayer in chapter 9, which, in my view, is one of the most moving public prayers of contrition in all of Scripture. Here Nehemiah prays by himself.

His response to the bad news is not just emotional, though it is emotional, and it is not just reflective, though it is reflective, but it issues in highly principled, passionate, intercessory prayer. Note some of the startling characteristics of God that are presupposed by his prayer.

A) God is sovereign.

“O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God …” It is very common in Scripture when things are going wrong to stress God’s sovereignty. Thus, in the first whiff of persecution that breaks out in the book of Acts in Acts, chapter 4, the church gathers for prayer and the first thing it does is quote Psalm 2. “Why do the nations rage, the heathen rejoice and conspire against the Lord and his anointed? But you are the Sovereign God. You made all things.”

The book of Revelation, where the church of God either is under immediate attack or under threat of attack, stresses God’s sovereignty again and again and again. When you are facing the most virulent situations, open theology is no comfort at all. None. All it means is that God was too small or chose to be asleep at the switch that day. There may be mystery in the doctrine of providence; there is also comfort.

B) God keeps covenant.

“O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and obey his commands, let your ear be attentive …” It’s lovely that the Mosaic covenant should be called by Nehemiah the covenant of love. What he’s referring to here when he speaks of God keeping covenant, I suspect, are the kinds of things God says in, for instance, the Decalogue.

He’s the God who “shows mercy to the third and fourth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments,” but he also “shows justice to the third and fourth generation of those who despise me.” He is a covenant-keeping God. Moreover, this covenant established blessings and hopes and fears and promises, and what the Old Testament repeatedly shows is that the blessing remains tantalizingly out of reach if it depends, finally, on our obedience.

So many of the prayers of contrition make the same point. Here is Daniel in Daniel, chapter 9. “I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed: ‘O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with all who love him and obey his commands, we have sinned and done wrong.”

That covenant of love established a frame of reference in which there would be renewed judgment and exile and chastening; yet, it is still presented on the part of a God who is slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, and who extends his mercy to the third and fourth generation, so the covenant of love establishes the importance of obedience. It establishes the necessity for obedient faith. Nehemiah prays on the basis of these covenantal terms.

Yet, by the same token, experience has shown Nehemiah how the blessings are so often out of reach. They’ve been experienced, for example, in the period of judges again and again and again, and then a generation or two on people have fallen aside. No wonder, when Paul reflects on all of these cycles of downward spirals during the time of the Davidic dynasty, during the time of the judges, he can finally conclude, at the end of the day, the law cannot justify anyone.

The law was given out of God’s great checed, his great mercy. It’s rightly called a covenant of love, and it provided the means under the stipulations of that covenant for people to be reconciled to God by virtue of the sacrificial system which, in the whole scheme of things, points forward to something even greater. Yet, at the end of the day, it was no final answer.

There is both promise in that covenant of love (“Repent, and I will restore you to the land”) and there is frustration, because the cycles are so patent to a man like Nehemiah living as he does almost a millennium on from the establishing of the covenant.

C) God expects repentance where there is sin.

Verses 6 and 7: “Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel. I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees and laws you gave your servant Moses.”

D) God punishes and restores his people.

Verses 8 and 9. All of this is teasing out what he first says in nuce, in kernel form, in the opening verses, referring to the God of this covenant of love who blesses those who love him and obey his commands. Now, likewise, he punishes and restores his people. Verses 8 and 9:

“Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.’ ”

In some ways, this is the crux of the entire prayer, and it is based, of course, on what God himself promised in passages like Deuteronomy and elsewhere. Deuteronomy, chapter 4, verses 25 and following: “After you have had children and grandchildren and have lived in the land a long time—if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess.

You will not live there long but will certainly be destroyed. The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a few of you will survive among the nations to which the Lord will drive you. There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell. But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the Lord your God and obey him.

For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you forever or abandon the covenant with your forefathers, which he confirmed to them on oath.” That passage recurs again and again. You say, “Ah, that’s well and good. That’s the old covenant.” Yes, there are some differences between the covenants, but isn’t it worth remembering that when the resurrected Christ confronts the churches of Revelation, he warns them if their conduct does not change their candlesticks will be removed?

Asia Minor, where those seven churches existed, was once the lodestar of Christian reflection and thought for that whole part of the world, but after the Greco-Turkish population exchange in 1923, apart from a few Eastern Orthodox believers still in Constantinople and places like that, modern Turkey became so completely and utterly Muslim that in a population of 60 million people for a few years there was not one known evangelical.

By 1975, there were about 35 of them, about half of them converted in Cambridge in graduate programs at Tyndale House. Today there are something like 1,500. Oh, God is quite capable of removing the candlesticks. That happens under the new covenant, too, you see. It looks a little different because the church is not localized in a piece of turf the way Israel was, but judgment can still fall on communities that abandon the covenant today. Just look at Europe. After all, the discipline promised by God in Hebrews 12 is quoted from the Old Testament.

E) God knows his own people and watches over them.

Verse 10: “They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand.” Of course, the locus of the old covenant community was the race itself even though the remnant was only some small part of it. Yet, it must always remain a matter of great, great consolation that, as the apostle puts it when writing to Timothy and Titus, the Lord knows those who are his.

When we see decline in some parts of the world, we must never, ever for a moment think God has sort of lost count or lost the game plan or any such thing. He still knows those who are his. While the churches of the Apocalypse are being destroyed and the candlesticks are being removed, still the Word of God addresses those who are faithful in those churches and tells them what they must do to overcome which, in the context, simply means to persevere in faithfulness.

F) God guards his own name.

Verse 11: “Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of this your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name.” In our prayers and concern for the restoration of the gospel in western European lands, let it not be out of a desire to restore imperialism or the primacy of Western culture or the guarantee of secure borders. Let it be because we revere God’s name. The nations are but the fine dust in the scales. The empires rise and fall. Let our intercessory tears be stamped by the desire to revere God’s name.

G) God controls everything so only he can work out the practical responses needed.

Nehemiah remains throughout not only God-centered but a kind of practical man. The last petition in the prayer becomes a transition to chapter 2. “ ‘Give your servant success today by granting him favor in the presence of this man.’ I was cupbearer to the king.” Thus, you see this man, Nehemiah, has figured out to pull off the restoration of the nation and the building of the wall, practically speaking it meant the reversal of his own decree 20 years earlier.

He is not asking now for something ethereal. “Bless Israel.” “God bless all the Christians in Europe.” He has thought through enough to see what must be done to secure the desirable goals and to see what must be done and what must be accomplished in order to bring about God’s own promises regarding the return from exile. He sees what he must have is imperial sanction.

But he believes, as the Proverbs put it, the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord. He turns it any direction he wills. God remains sovereign at that level, too. We sometimes read the news with such fearful hearts, don’t we? What is this king or this governor or this president up to next? “He who sits in the heavens laughs and has them in derision.” With all of the evil, with all of the vaunted independence, God still wins.

I love Isaiah 10, verses 5 and following, where God through the prophet addresses the Assyrians. He says, “You are the rod in my hand, the battle-ax of my indignation. I send you against a wicked people …” He means the Jews. “… to chasten them, to tear down and destroy.” God is sending the Assyrians themselves against his own covenant community to discipline them.

He says, “However, that’s not what you think. You think you are doing this all by yourself. You say, ‘Is not Calno like Carchemish? I’ve already bumped off those cities. How about Damascus? I’ve shown what I can do there. Don’t you think I can take it out on Jerusalem as well? Are not my princes kings? My senior officers are like royalty in other cultures.” God says, “Therefore, when I have finished using you, I will turn again and rend you. Shall the ax boast itself against the one who wields it? Shall the saw clamor against the one who is using it?”

If I try and sort that all out, my brain hurts, yet, surely, it must give us enormous confidence when evil nations rise and fall, that behind it all God is doing some wonderful things we will see in due course and he holds all to account because righteousness exalts a nation and sin is a reproach to many people. It’s not as if he’s waiting for them to make their chess move so he can make his chess move, tit for tat, as it were. No.

He still is working in all of these things his own good pleasure to bring about his own good purposes. Within that framework, Nehemiah perceives he is ideally placed, and he wonders in the same way Esther was forced to wonder. Here was the prayer of this man who knew his God offered daily for months, four of them, until we get to the next chapter and find …

3. A servant who plans with patience and with understanding of God’s enigmatic providence

Chapter 2, verses 1 to 10. Four months have elapsed since Nehemiah had started his praying. He has waited with patience and persistence. Now in the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, serving in his capacity as cupbearer, undoubtedly tasting in advance to make sure the wine hasn’t been poisoned, he is sad in the presence of the king.

Whether he let his sadness show as a ploy to see if, “Well, maybe God is opening up this door,” or it simply leaked out and he couldn’t hide it anymore, the text doesn’t say, but in any case, the fact he was sad in the imperial presence precipitates three exchanges. First, in verses 2 and 3, the king asks, “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.”

This could be imperial threat. On the other hand, it could be a mark of genuine courtesy. Some superiors really do care for their inferiors. The text does not say. However, Nehemiah understands the potential for disaster, at least. He says, “I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, ‘May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?’ ”

On the one hand, he’s very careful not to mention Jerusalem just yet. After all, Artaxerxes could not have but known his own decree regarding Jerusalem. It might have taken him a few minutes to remember where this servant came from. It’s cast in personal terms that almost anybody in the ancient Near East would have appreciated: graves destroyed, the well-being of one’s ancestors and the like. It’s cast in those terms. It’s also cast in terms of the current imperial Persian policy to allow people to return to their lands and rebuild, so it’s cast wisely.

That precipitates the second exchange. “What is it you want?” Not a dumb king, this one. “Then I prayed to the God of heaven …” This is not something he just thought up on the spur of the moment. This is merely the overflow of four months of tears and fasting and intercessory prayer along the lines already established.

It’s almost, you see, as if he is now offering a quick shaft heavenward in the light of the last clause of the prayer in chapter 1: “Give your servant success by granting him favor in the presence of this man.” This is already planned out. This is not just accidental. He has already seen what he is going to do. That’s why he has been praying this prayer, so now when he offers this shaft heavenward, it’s merely the culmination of planning along this line to see what God will do, and quite frankly, he doesn’t know, or else he wouldn’t have been so frightened.

There is an enigmatic element to God’s providence, isn’t there? You do what is right and trust God. You cast yourself upon him. You pray to God, and whether he will respond with judgment or give this role to somebody else, who knows? In the book of Esther, isn’t that the advice of Mordecai?

“God will preserve his people, but who knows if you are brought to the kingdom for such a time as this? Understand, however, if you do not play your role with integrity, then God will find some other way. He has some other plan. It’s not as if his people will finally be destroyed, but you may well be.” There is Esther going into the king’s presence. “But if I perish, I perish.” There is a kind of enigmatic nature to God’s providence, isn’t there? You go off as missionaries to the Auca Indians, and you want to plant a church. “But if I perish, I perish,” and some do.

I have a close friend who is working with the underground church in Iran. The rate of conversion in Iran currently is staggering. It’s almost as if there’s a growing revulsion against Muslim terrorism. People recognize increasingly, not least in those circles, although it is true not all Muslims are terrorists, currently most terrorists are Muslim, and some of them are fed up with it just to here.

They’re looking around. The underground church is growing at pace. Yet, some weeks, three pastors die. He goes in and out seven to ten times a year, this converted Muslim, and every time he goes in and leaves his wife and two children behind, he says, “If I perish, I perish.” There’s an enigmatic element to God’s providence, isn’t there? But you still do what is right, what is courageous, what leans on God’s promises, and take an eternal view.

Already, then, we see the response. “If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.” Even by referring to the city in Judah rather than to Jerusalem, there’s a wee stroke of wisdom, isn’t there?

“Then the king, with the queen sitting beside him, asked me, ‘How long will your journey take …?’ ” He has already turned the corner, and he knows it. “ ‘… and when will you get back?’ It pleased the king to send me; so I set a time.” It’s transparent he has thought this one through a little farther than that.

“I also said to him, ‘If it pleases the king, may I have letters to the governors of Trans-Euphrates, so that they will provide me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah? And may I have a letter to Asaph, keeper of the king’s forest, so he will give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple and for the city wall and for the residence I will occupy?’ And because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my requests.”

He received the letter, and he went to the governors of the Trans-Euphrates, and the king sent a group of army officers and some cavalry. It’s remarkable, isn’t it? This man has thought it all through. He has his building list. He wants safe-conduct. Yet, when you think through what is going on here, it sounds so different from what Ezra did.

Do you remember Ezra? Ezra, because he didn’t want to give the impression he was frightened, didn’t ask for military support. It might give the impression, you see, that God isn’t big enough, so he goes on this long, dangerous trip all by himself. Nehemiah, by contrast, asks for safe-conduct, and not only so, but a whole lot of supplies. Does that mean in Nehemiah’s case there is a certain want in his faith? At heart he’s a big chicken? Is that what’s going on?

I suspect we do well to reflect on the flexibility of different appeals even by one person before we condemn either party here. There can be good motives both ways. There is Paul, for example, in some instances prepared just to take the Roman beating and in other instances insisting he’s a Roman citizen. Why?

There’s Paul bringing Titus up to Jerusalem and refusing to have him circumcised. Then he takes Timothy and circumcises him. No wonder his enemies call him two-faced, a man-pleaser. “He’s the sort of person who changes his opinion according to the politics. He puts his finger up, takes a poll, figures out which way looks better, and does that. Inconsistent.” Yet, usually, when you find these sorts of people making decisions like this, with a little careful thought and study you can see exactly why they’re doing it, that there is some deeper principle at stake.

In the case of Titus and Timothy, if people are saying, “Titus really must be circumcised to be accepted as part of the messianic community and this must be,” then Paul will say, “Absolutely no way.” What that does is challenge the exclusive sufficiency of Christ and nothing must ever be allowed to challenge that. You don’t have to be an observant Jew to be a Christian; you must put your faith in Christ, Jew or Christian.

If, on the other hand, nobody is saying, “You must be circumcised in order to be a Christian, and you must be a part of the Jewish community in order to accept the Jewish community’s Messiah,” and if it, rather, is a matter of strategy in order to be more acceptable in Jewish synagogues, then Paul will say, “Go ahead. Circumcise them.” What is at stake is still in both cases the supremacy of the gospel. In one case, it is at risk if a man is circumcised. In the other case, it is promulgated if a man is circumcised.

On the one hand, he accepts the beatings. He suffers for the cause of Christ. “If we suffer with him, we shall also reign with him.” On the other hand, in other contexts, he realizes by his example he is establishing legal precedent in the empire which, ultimately, preserves Christians, and he wants those legal precedents set.

So a man like Ezra, without a great plan to renew the city.… Ezra, the great Bible teacher but without any sort of plan to work this out in the imperial courts and get the kind of protection necessary to build the wall … by all means, let him display his faith by going independently of any empirical blessing.

On the other hand, at this point in history now, 13 years after Ezra has gone with his plan to rebuild and 20 years after Artaxerxes has insisted Jerusalem not be rebuilt, Nehemiah wants things worked out so he has imperial sanction before he gets there or else he can well see what will happen.

Sanballat and his friends will send off some other nasty, half-baked, half-true and half-untrue letter back to the imperial courts in Susa and the decree will come down again. In this case, he wants imperial sanction not only for safe-conduct but for such blessing that the empire itself is standing behind the rebuilding of the city. What that will do is clip the wings of all of the people who are going to be confronting him when he actually gets there.

At the same time, Nehemiah is faithful enough, deep enough in his understanding of God and his ways that he knows this is not finally something he has worked out so cleverly because he has an above-average IQ. He has thought it through. He says in verse 8, “And because the gracious hand of my God was on me, the king granted my requests.” Here, then, is a servant who plans with patience and with understanding of God’s enigmatic providence.

4. A servant who prosecutes his work with wisdom and collaboration

Verses 11 to 20. In verses 11 to 16, we find Nehemiah displaying careful reserve. He arrives onsite, spends the first three days looking around, perhaps getting rest. It doesn’t tell us what he was doing. Then reconnaissance at night to find out exactly what needs to be done. No doubt, he makes lists of things, sorts out the various sections of the wall. We discover a little further on he divides the whole project into 40 units.

He has it all figured out, but he does all his reconnaissance work first, under cover, as it were, because he knows well there is a fifth column in the camp. That emerges a little later in the book itself. Some of the people amongst the Jews themselves are already forsworn to some of the enemy. He doesn’t want to go down any of those routes. He’s very careful thinking things through very wisely, going independently, not telling people why he’s there until he has all of his ducks in a row.

Then he displays inclusive leadership in verses 16 to 18. Note for the first time now some first-person plurals. In verse 16, “The officials did not know where I had gone or what I was doing.” Now he gives this report. Verse 17: “ ‘You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.’ I also told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me and what the king had said to me. They replied, ‘Let us start rebuilding.’ ”

Here is a man who understands at this stage he must secure the collaboration, the approval, and the commitment of the local leaders. He’s not a Lone-Ranger leader any more. Yet, at the same time, he is happy to ignore the opposition in verses 19 to 20. In addition to Sanballat, who has been introduced to us as the governor of Samaria, and his henchman, Tobiah, now we are introduced to Geshem the Arab, king of Kedar.

He was head of the Arab league at the time that was also linked to Persia. Now he is tied politically to Sanballat, so they are surrounded by people to the north and people to the south who are against them. Here, Nehemiah quietly draws a line in the sand. “You have no part with the covenant people of God. Let’s not pretend otherwise. We are doing this on our own.”

So the very same man who seeks collaborative inclusiveness with respect to the covenant community, nevertheless, wants to draw some sharp lines so it is not taken over by a kind of insipient paganism. As we progress through this book, we’ll move away from looking at Nehemiah and more and more to what is being done and the nature of the reformation and so on, but we must pause here for a moment and observe some things.

As we shall see, Nehemiah stands at the very heart of this commitment not merely to rebuild the wall but to renew the covenant community. The first thing he weeps over at the beginning of the chapter is not that the wall is down but that the remnant is in disarray. The wall is merely a mark of that.

When the reform starts, yes, the wall gets built, but it’s not long before there are these massive Bible conferences, these re-readings, these re-teachings of Holy Scripture to teach people again what covenantal faithfulness looks like and large public confessions and festivals of joy and so on, all under Nehemiah’s administration.

What that demonstrates, at the same time, is this reformation is brought about not only by someone who is deeply committed to the Word of God and someone like Ezra who, apparently, is called upon precisely because he’s so gifted at teaching the Word of God and teaches others, but by a man like Nehemiah with (I don’t know what else to call it) a godly entrepreneurial vision.

There’s a danger in saying that, because there’s so much in the Western world that wants to fix everything by means of some course or some new institution or some new agency or some new organization, and we will see in due course in this book at the heart of all of it still stands the reforming power of the Word of God, or else Nehemiah wants no part of it.

Yet, at the same time, it’s not Ezra who rebuilds the wall; it’s Nehemiah. It’s not the man who was thinking in entirely antithetical categories and will go it alone and will trust God for the safety of the trip. No, no, no. It’s the man who prays diligently before God to get the imperial sanctions so he can have both the safe-conduct and the money, thank you very much, and the authority to do it.

I’m going to stick my neck way out here and embarrass one of you three-quarters to death. Many of us thank God for the teaching ministry of Dick Lucas, but Dick Lucas also has an entrepreneurial spirit that sees how to rebuild, and part of the heritage is us sitting right here in Proclamation Trust. There is no other organization more significant in uniting Christian preachers across the state church and non-state church divide than any other man.

That did not come out of simply a man who has a preaching gift but who has a preaching gift and a vision of how to get from here to there, and that, too, comes from God. That’s why Dick can’t sit there and blush too badly, because he would be the first to say with Nehemiah, “It pleased God to plant this in my heart,” and gave him the kinds of people and resources that enabled him to do some of these things with the founding of these things 22 years ago.

It also suggests to us who are preachers working in small parishes.… Some of, for example, in a tourist area where our biggest numbers are in the summer and others working in cities where there’s nobody there on the weekend and others working in suburbia and others working next to major universities …

Part of our job is not just being faithful in cranking out the next sermon, although that’s a huge part of it and you can’t ever take that away. That’s at the center of everything. Yet, at the same time, we need to think entrepreneurially, strategically, wisely, and petition God with tears. “What do you want me to do next? How do I reach my pack? How do I build the walls here? And if I can’t think in those terms, who will you give me to work with me in this regard?”

In all of our right commitment to handling the Word of God, let the Word of God itself teach us that God raises up Nehemiahs, too, and puts it in their hearts what to do, whom to avoid, how to win collaboration, how to lead a nation in repentance, how to build, and how to get sanction even from pagan emperors to do things that are right and good. Let us pray.

We remember the men of Issachar who understood their times, but we don’t want merely to understand them and, thus, promulgate the times or analyze the times but to be so devoured by the desire to see your name revered, to be passionate about the well-being of your people here and around the world, to be reminded afresh of your promises, the Master himself saying, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not destroy it,” the promises regarding individuals and groups. The Lord knows those who are his. “Lo, I am with you to the very end of the age.”

That our vision will not be small or merely individualistic or merely ethereal because you are sovereign over all and you are wise and good as you are powerful. So in our dark hours, in our discouragement, in our fears, give us not only a passion to teach your most Holy Word aright faithfully, truly, as workers who do not need to be ashamed rightly interpreting the Word of Truth, but give us this least common gift, what some call common sense, a way of looking at things from eternity’s perspective that dares to trust you even in the enigmatic nature of your providence.

That we may be bold and courageous, and if we fail, we fail, and if we perish, we perish, but let it not be because our vision is so small and our view of spirituality so individualistic and isolated that we cannot dream dreams, we cannot think big thoughts, we cannot imagine our communities being massively changed by the gospel. Increase our vision, Lord God, and show us what to do. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you, and as you put into the heart of Nehemiah, so put into our hearts what to do. For Jesus’ sake, amen.