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Part 2: The Triumph and Failure of Reformation

Nehemiah 4

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the triumph and failure of reformation from Nehemiah 4.


Male: “When Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became angry and was greatly incensed. He ridiculed the Jews, and in the presence of his associates and the army of Samaria, he said, ‘What are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble—burned as they are?’

Tobiah the Ammonite, who was at his side, said, ‘What they are building—even a fox climbing up on it would break down their wall of stones!’ Hear us, our God, for we are despised. Turn their insults back on their own heads. Give them over as plunder in a land of captivity. Do not cover up their guilt or blot out their sins from your sight, for they have thrown insults in the face of the builders.

So we rebuilt the wall till all of it reached half its height, for the people worked with all their heart. But when Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites and the men of Ashdod heard that the repairs to Jerusalem’s walls had gone ahead and that the gaps were being closed, they were very angry. They all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and stir up trouble against it.

But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat. Meanwhile, the people in Judah said, ‘The strength of the laborers is giving out, and there is so much rubble that we cannot rebuild the wall.’ Also our enemies said, ‘Before they know it or see us, we will be right there among them and will kill them and put an end to the work.’ Then the Jews who lived near them came and told us ten times over, ‘Wherever you turn, they will attack us.’

Therefore I stationed some of the people behind the lowest points of the wall at the exposed places, posting them by families, with their swords, spears and bows. After I looked things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, ‘Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.’

When our enemies heard that we were aware of their plot and that God had frustrated it, we all returned to the wall, each to his own work. From that day on, half of my men did the work, while the other half were equipped with spears, shields, bows and armor. The officers posted themselves behind all the people of Judah who were building the wall. Those who carried materials did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other, and each of the builders wore his sword at his side as he worked.

But the man who sounded the trumpet stayed with me. Then I said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, ‘The work is extensive and spread out, and we are widely separated from each other along the wall. Wherever you hear the sound of the trumpet, join us there. Our God will fight for us!’ So we continued the work with half the men holding spears, from the first light of dawn till the stars came out.

At that time I also said to the people, ‘Have every man and his helper stay inside Jerusalem at night, so they can serve us as guards by night and workmen by day.’ Neither I nor my brothers nor my men nor the guards with me took off our clothes; each had his weapon, even when he went for water.”

Don Carson: In 1975, I was asked to give the Easter Bible readings at CICCU, and although I had given many, many individual ones, I had not done a whole series there at that time, so I decided I would pick up some of the series of previous years just to find out what sort of standard and approach was being adopted.

It turned out the year before I went to Cambridge (I went in 1972 for research), in 1971, the speaker was our dear friend Alec Motyer, and his assignment was to go through Isaiah in six weeks. He began, “This evening, I must cover Isaiah 1 to 12. Owing to the paucity of the material, I thought I would throw in Jeremiah as well.”

Well, I’m not quite covering 12 chapters, but this evening I want to do chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6, and there is no paucity of material so I won’t throw anything else in. Yet, I warn you there will be a bit of a hop, skip, and a jump here and there, and you will need to keep the text in front of you as we work through these chapters.

“Never, never, never give up.” Those words are ascribed to Winston Churchill and he ought to know. We think of Churchill persevering in the war, but in some ways it’s far more impressive what he did between the wars when everybody was laughing at him. He was dismissed as some sort of bigoted militarist living in yesterday’s triumphs, an old man. “Didn’t he learn anything from the stupidities of his own mistakes at the Dardanelles?” Never, never, never give up.

Of course, it’s not always good advice. At the level of tactics, sometimes a strategic retreat is on order (ask Churchill himself at Dunkirk), or when you are pursuing an unworthy goal or doing it in an unworthy way or, quite frankly, you are simply mistaken, then Paul’s advice to Peter in Galatians 2 is scarcely, “Never, never, never give up.” He’s saying, “You’re just plain wrong. Turn around.”

Struggling with the wrong career while you go deeper and deeper into debt may not be a mark of perseverance but stupidity, but where the direction, principles, and priorities are right this is merely a memorable way of saying what the Bible repeatedly says: perseverance is outstandingly important. “He who perseveres to the end …” or “He who endures to the end will be saved.” “Endure hardship as a good soldier.”

The parable of the five wise and the five foolish virgins makes the distinction between the two solely on the basis of who is prepared to continue for a long time if the wedding party’s return is delayed. In Revelation 2 and 3, the overcomer is not the one who is so victorious in his or her Christian living that there are never any doubts; it’s merely the one who perseveres even when everybody else is not persevering.

In fact, Hebrews 3:14 almost makes perseverance a definition of what a genuine Christian is. “We are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end.” Colossians 1:21 and following says rather similar things over against a Demas who does not persevere and who is forsaken. Thus, in many, many contexts, the words of Churchill are entirely appropriate. “Never, never, never give up.”

That’s one of the things that is important in these chapters, but it is worth remembering such exhortations to perseverance presuppose struggle. They presuppose conflict, opposition, discouragement, confrontation. One does not need to speak of the urgent demand of perseverance if everything is going swimmingly, thank you very much, and all are eager and cooperative and blessings just keep rolling in.

Any shallow and ephemeral idiot can be enthusiastic when a movement is popular and exciting and triumphant. That is one of the reasons why, in this broken world, genuine revival so often sows the seeds of its own defeat. It is such a popular sort of thing that all kinds of people get attached to it who really have not been tested in any way.

They’re merely along for the ride, and pretty soon the movement is swamped by a lot of glad-handers who really know very little of perseverance. Isn’t that part of what the parable of the sower is about? “Some receive the seed gladly.” They seem to be the most promising of the crop, but they have been sown in shallow dirt, and when the first rains cease and the hot mid-East sun heats up the ground and the roots go down looking for moisture, they hit rock.

That’s what rocky ground means there. It does not mean ground with lots of little pebbles. It means ground with the bedrock of limestone close to the surface. So the plant which seemed the most promising because the seed heated up the fastest, now looks for moisture and keels over and dies. It just doesn’t count.

It’s in the same category as the seed that is snatched away by the Devil right at the beginning or the seed that produces a stalk but no fruit because other things clutch it to death. When the tough times come, if your priorities are biblically faithful, then never, never, never give up. Especially for those in leadership it is helpful to frame our perseverance sometimes, I think, in terms of the opposition about which we should be realistic.

1. You never get 100 percent cooperation.

That is at least part of the lesson of chapter 3. There is an awful lot that is good going on in this chapter by contrast with those described in chapter 2, verse 20, who have no share or stake in Jerusalem, no political association, no claim to it, no legal standing such as Judean citizenship guaranteed, no historic right to it. Perhaps, a right to worship there as in Ezra 4:3. Most of those in chapter 3 do have a stake in Jerusalem, a claim to it, a historic right to it.

The very careful listing of the families and clans may have gone into Nehemiah’s report back to the emperor himself. At very least, it shows Nehemiah is a careful, methodical, grateful administrator. All the details of people and places, he knows them all. The list begins with mention of the high priest and other priests who were not afraid to get their hands dirty. They led by example.

The whole job is a remarkable triumph of organization and cooperation, doubtless with a great deal of practical wisdom and diplomacy. The wall is divided, we are told, into 40 sections, each with its own work party very often repairing the wall nearest their own homes and shops, for that matter (verse 28), all the way from the sheep gate (verse 1), and all the way around to the sheep gate (verse 32).

Moreover, it’s not just the Jerusalemites but the people from neighboring towns. Still Judeans, nevertheless, but not Jerusalemites. They all chip in again and again. This is made very clear. For instance, verse 22: “The repairs next to him were made by the priests from the surrounding region.” Chapter 3, verse 2: “The men of Jericho built the adjoining section.” Chapter 3, verse 5: “The next section was repaired by the men of Tekoa.” In chapter 3, verse 12, women chipped in.

But inevitably, even in this surge of enthusiasm at the very beginning of it all, there is a sour note. Verse 5: “The next section was repaired by the men of Tekoa, but their nobles …” The nobles of Tekoa. “… would not put their shoulders to the work under their supervisors.” Or conceivably, under their governor.

The language suggests pride is at stake rather than sheer laziness. One of the most uncooperative groups, of course, are those who operate out of deep unconfessed pride, like Diotrephes who always wants to have the preeminence, or those in Philippians 1, who think by their style of preaching and their positions and their stances they can actually increase the burden on the apostle Paul even if they themselves are orthodox.

One can imagine the nobles’ reservations about Nehemiah. “Johnny-come-lately telling us what to do. He hasn’t borne the heat of the day. I have more important things to do.” Still, here, too, there is a bright spot. It appears as if some of the ordinary folk of Tekoa first mentioned in verse 5 compensated for their nobles’ haughty refusal to help by taking on two sections. Look at verse 27. “Next to them, the men of Tekoa repaired another section, from the great projecting tower to the wall of Ophel.”

What we must learn, of course, is that you never get 100 percent cooperation, and the sad fact is, even in the local church, it’s sometimes the naysayers who devours a disproportionate amount of our emotional energy. Even when things are going pretty well and you have 85 or 90 percent of the people behind you on some project or some evangelistic scheme or some Bible study or the like, then you have another 5 percent who couldn’t give a rap and another 10 percent who are actually out to undermine you.

That 10 percent can devour you. You start worrying about what they think, and they keep you awake at night, and you start losing your thankfulness for the 85 percent who are doing very well, thank you very much. Suddenly, 90 percent of your energy is going into the 10 percent who are right pains. It’s not wise. This is a broken world. Get used to it.

You’re never going to have 100 percent cooperation. There will always be some naysayers. Occasionally, very occasionally, they may even be right, but get used to the fact that you’re not going to be swarmed with approval at every suggestion you make or every program or every plan or every step you hope to take the church into.

2. You can count on ridicule.

Chapter 4, verses 1 to 5. It’s a kind of war of intimidation, of course. Savage mockery. Sanballat uses some sort of military review or parade on his own turf as the occasion for his scathing comments. Verse 2: “In the presence of his associates and the army of Samaria, he said, ‘What are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall?’ ” A long pause for a mild chuckle. “Will they offer sacrifices?” The chuckle swells.

“Will they finish in a day? Are they so stupid as to think this is some minor task? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble—burned as they are?” Then his yes-man Tobiah has to score a few licks as well. “What they are doing is such a load of rubbish, if a fox runs along it, it will fall down!” By now he has the entire military guffawing in approval. Archaeology shows the wall they built at this time was about 9 feet thick. Some fox!

Nevertheless, this ridicule prompts Nehemiah’s blunt, frank prayer in verses 4 and 5. “Hear us, O our God, for we are despised. Turn their insults back on their own heads. Give them over as plunder in a land of captivity. Do not cover up their guilt or blot out their sins from your sight, for they have thrown insults in the face of the builders.”

I know there is a school that wants to rush from here to the Sermon on the Mount and say, “That’s the Old Testament. Now we’re supposed to turn the other cheek, don’t you know?” You’re going to have a hard job reading Matthew 23 that way or Mark 3:5 or Paul in the Pastoral Epistles warning Timothy about Alexander. “He has caused me a great deal of difficulty. Watch out for him and the other two chaps whom I’ve handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”

If I understand the Sermon on the Mount aright, we need to take extraordinary care to turn the other cheek when it is a matter of personal offense, personal umbrage, personal pique, but when there are fundamental issues concerning the well-being of the people of God (their establishment, their security, their trust), doesn’t Jesus himself say, “If someone destroys the faith of one of these little ones, it would be better for that person if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea”?

Pray against them. Pray against them. God is a God of justice. Of course, there is always a danger that gradually our project becomes bound up with our self-identity and what begins as genuine, righteous, moral outrage becomes mere cheap vindictiveness.

That’s the danger, of course, but want of moral outrage on any occasion is not a mark of spiritual maturity but of moral indifferentism. Nehemiah’s prayer seeks both to shield his people from demoralization by reminding them who is in charge and by asking for simple justice. In any case, in much of the Western world, one of the chief weapons currently used is virulent mockery. Get used to it.

One of my former students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a bright lass, went up to the University of Toronto to do a PhD in New Testament. She decided she would take some advanced seminars on the Septuagint. She sat in class the first day of her first semester in graduate school at the University of Toronto, and the lecturer, a very distinguished and learned man, was going through the class list which had the schools of each member of the class on the list.

He finally came to her. “Linda Belleville.… Bethel College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Who are you?” She put up her hand. “Can anybody with that pedigree have an open mind about anything? Are you a bigot?” She got the best mark in the class, yes. She had to earn it more than others would have.

It is now commonplace for the press to identify virtually all confessional Christians with the Taliban. Often, Christians are described as those who are ignorant and bigoted and right-wing and ill-informed and appealing merely to emotion. I still do quite a lot of university missions, and I have to tell you that once in a while I come across a really intelligent Peter Singer or somebody like that who really is a pain but very bright and with a lot of astute arguments.

It’s hard work, but to be quite frank, most of the reasonable arguments and weighing of evidence and that sort of thing is on the Christian side. The other side is mostly sneering, condescending ridicule. It’s compounded today by a fairly recent development. It’s the appeal to tolerance where tolerance has been redefined, and it is hard to blow it up unless you show this tolerance has been redefined. The history of tolerance is itself nowadays, in fact, an intellectual discipline. There is an intellectual history to the discipline.

Tolerance, however, until fairly recent times was defined along these terms: if you hold strong views on something or other but insist someone else who holds different views has no less right than you do to articulate his or her views, then you are tolerant. For example, Voltaire … “I may dislike what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That’s tolerance.

In the new definition of tolerance, tolerance is bound up with not having a strong position about anything and being unwilling to condemn anything except for those who have some other definition of tolerance. Thus, as far ago as 15 years there was a massive survey of undergraduates in North America who were asked to make a decision between person A and person B.

Person A, a person with strong views who insisted virulently that those who disagreed with him, nevertheless, had no less right than he to speak and articulate their views, and person B, someone who had no strong views about anything. Who was more tolerant? Eighty-five percent opted for person B.

If you read the official documents of the UN or the Canadian government or many other bodies now, tolerance has been defined in this new way. The UN charter now says, “We tolerate everything except intolerance.” Does that load the dice? That means the notion of tolerance has become simultaneously intellectually incoherent and morally bankrupt.

It is intellectually incoherent because it is incoherent to speak of tolerating something unless you disagree with it. How can a Capitalist say to a Marxist, “I don’t disagree with you at all; I tolerate you”? How can a Christian say to a Muslim, “Deep down we’re all saying the same thing; I tolerate you”? The Christian must first say to the Muslim, “I disagree with some of what you say profoundly, but I insist you have a right to speak.” That’s toleration.

I want to argue the contemporary notion of tolerance is intellectually incoherent. Worse, it is morally bankrupt because in the one domain where they prove to be intolerant it is in the domain of those who adopt a different definition of tolerance. That is the one thing they are very sure is wrong, and there they have no tolerance whatsoever.

In our media, on our university campuses, and many other places, this is becoming a major problem, and every time it happens, every single time in my judgment (this is one to fight over), you have to question their tolerance when they become intolerant. You have to expose it. Otherwise, you get an increasing clampdown on free speech.

Thus, in politics, in acts now before a number of Western countries, there is a whole new persecution level that is beginning to develop. At this moment, there is a Swedish Lutheran pastor in jail for preaching Romans 1. What he says about homosexuality has come under Sweden’s new hate laws. In Canada, from which I spring, likewise, dismissal of homosexuality comes under the hate laws, and the first case now is before the courts.

In the name of tolerance we send people to jail, and all of this is accompanied by the most amazing, sneering condescension. “I loathe homophobia with a passion,” but in much of the Western world today there is far more danger from homophobia phobia than there is from homophobia.

There was a very famous case four years ago in North America, the murder of a young gay man named Matthew Shepard by two right-wing, ignorant buffoons. They were caught and sent to jail. It made endless headlines. If you hit the LexisNexis search six weeks after the event, you found 3,600 print media articles and essays on this event.

About six weeks later, a 12-year-old boy down in Tennessee was repeatedly sodomized and brutally murdered by two gays. Six weeks later, we did another LexisNexis search through the media to find out how that was touched. Two hits, both by the local newspaper. That’s it. We are living in very strange times. Expect ridicule.

There has always been some element of ridicule, of course, against the Christian church. For the first three centuries a tremendous amount of pagan ridicule was directed against the church for its intolerance because in most pagan religions there was a footnote that said their own way was the not the only way to God, so Christianity was simultaneously viewed as quasi-atheistic, since they couldn’t demonstrate their god, and intolerant. Read Celsus, for example. These things are returning in sneering condescension. Expect it.

3. You sometimes face direct, dangerous, and diverse opposition.

Chapter 4, verses 6 to 23. Begin with Nehemiah’s situation in chapter 4, verses 6 and following. “So we rebuilt the wall till all of it reached half its height, for the people worked with all their heart.” Then you get Sanballat to the north, the Arabs to the south, and now the Ammonites and the men of Ashdod from the east and the west.

They are now absolutely surrounded by opponents, hearing that the repairs have gone ahead and the gaps now have been closed, though not yet to a very great height, and they are very angry. They plot. They plan to come and fight and stir up trouble. Whether as gangs of marauding riffs or an ordered military attack, Nehemiah can’t know, but he prays and posts a guard day and night, a bit like Oliver Cromwell. “Put your trust in God and keep your powder dry.”

In verses 10 to 15, the same situation repeats itself, but it is now compounded, first, by exhaustion, secondly, an awareness of being massively outnumbered, and thirdly, nasty reports. Still, Nehemiah tries to slow the pace if need be to protect his people as they build carefully. In 16 to 23, there is still more crisis because of the threat of these attackers. You sometimes do face direct, dangerous, and diverse opposition.

That, of course, is the frame in which the church was born. For the first few decades, the worst opposition came from synagogues. Then it came from the Roman Empire. I sometimes smilingly remind my Muslim friends and acquaintances, for the first three centuries the church grew in the context of persecution, death, and martyrdom, whereas Islam grew during in its first three centuries exclusively by bloodshed, terror, and conquest.

Some of us when we were young read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Nowadays it desperately needs updating. Have you read The Killing Fields on what went on in the church in Cambodia? People who keep track of these things say there are now approximately 160,000 Christian martyrs a year over the last 10 years, and if Christian martyrdom continues at the same pace for the next three decades or so, if it does, it means for all the genuine Christians in the world today, something more than one in 200 will die a martyr’s death. Not very evenly distributed, of course, but that’s what’s going on.

I have a friend working underground in a way I cannot tell you in Saudi Arabia in the university circles, and he has seen some of his converts beheaded. Iran has pressure coming on and off, but in bad weeks they can lose three pastors. The Karen people of Burma are just about wiped out now. In the eastern islands of Indonesia, not fewer than 9,000 in the last three years, to say nothing of what has taken place in southern Sudan.

One does not have to go that far away. In the last few years I’ve spent a little more time in Central and Eastern Europe. A year and a half ago I was in Hungary for some training of Central-Eastern European leaders, and I met for the first time the senior bishop of the Lutheran church of Lithuania. He had been arrested by the KGB during his lifetime a little over 600 times. He couldn’t remember how many of them with torture.

About seven or eight years ago, the first time I went to Slovakia.… It’s a bit changed now. I was there this past summer. Seven or eight years ago when I went, I observed the over-45 pastors, almost none of whom had any decent education because universities had been closed to them since they were Christians and their children were not allowed to go. In the under-40 pastors this side of the 1989 wall, these were all getting masters and some PhDs and talking about the dangers and interests and possibilities and potential in postmodernism and that sort of thing.

The older pastors had been tried by fire. They viewed these young ones as whippersnappers who had not been properly tested, and the younger ones viewed the older ones as dinosaurs who had no doubt paid their dues in their day but didn’t understand what was going on. The sad fact of the matter is they were both right.

A friend told me when the wall came down it was three weeks before he saw porn being sold on the streets. I sat down with some of those senior pastors, and with a translator they said, with tears streaming down their faces, “Some days we wish communism were back, for then we understood who the enemy was.”

Most of us are not in that position now in the West, at least, the European and Anglo West, including places like America and Australia, but there are outbreaks still of this sort of thing in Latin America, and it would not surprise me at all if some of this came back. One has to remember the Devil powerfully displayed in apocalyptic imagery in Revelation 12, has two cohorts, two beasts, described in chapter 13.

The first beast operates by specific, historical, direct, bloody confrontation. The second beast is the False Prophet. He operates by subterfuge, by deceit, by seeming to be a friend, by false doctrine. In the West we have more of the second beast, but in many parts of the world, they have more of the first. You do, sometimes, face direct, dangerous, and diverse opposition.

4. You will be disappointed and frustrated by people in your own camp.

I’m full of cheer tonight, aren’t I? Chapter 5. On the face of it, this chapter brings us to a somewhat different world. The issue now is not imminent military opposition or raiding parties but long-term, internal economic injustice.

The time frame for the acute crisis (when the wall was being built) was, after all, only 52 days (the time cap is given us in chapter 6, verse 15), but when you read chapter 5, verses 14 to 18, it’s pretty clear some of these things worked out in the context of Nehemiah’s 12-year term as governor.

In chapter 5, verse 14: “Moreover, from the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when I was appointed to be their governor, until his thirty-second year—twelve years—neither I nor my brothers ate the food allotted to the governor. But the earlier governors—those preceding me—placed a heavy burden on the people and took forty shekels of silver from them in addition to food and wine.”

Why, then, does Nehemiah introduce this part into his report? There are at least, it seems to me, two reasons. Some of the economic roadblocks described in the chapter did occur during the period of the building of the wall, as we’ll see in a moment, but by tying this chapter to chapters 4 through 6, Nehemiah is handling the theme of opposition topically.

He’s laying out all the different kinds of opposition he has faced, some of which came about a little later, but this means he is unpacking now another form of challenge he does not want his readers to overlook and he has no intention of introducing a little later in the book. That is why this whole section really is about perseverance and opposition in its various forms and how to confront it.

What exactly is the nature of the problem? While all these people are working on the wall, of course, their farms are languishing. Simply facing up to this reality soon brings with it how widespread is the seething feeling of even greater economic threat precipitated, in part, by a recent famine (verse 3).

These dirt farmers need to eat. They need to pay their taxes. According to Herodotus, the satrapy of which Judea was a part had to pay 350 talents annually, so their taxes were high, and they had to have enough grain for the next year’s crops so they could seed the land again. In those days, there was no bankruptcy protection. No government was going to put you on the dole, nor was this a case of frivolous and unprincipled speculation.

To top it all off, here’s Nehemiah wanting them to spend weeks and weeks and weeks building a wall, for goodness’ sake, which is not exactly bringing in the harvest, so their lands became mortgaged, mortgaged at interest rates for collateral so these people could buy or borrow seed or could borrow their tax money. The whole issue has become harder because of this recent famine and now because of the building of the wall.

The result is the breaking of brotherly bonds. Verse 5: “Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our countrymen and though our sons are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.”

Old Testament law did permit certain kinds of economic slavery, but at least in principle though sometimes observed rather more on the breach, it was always time limited. People were supposed to be released after a certain amount of time, so it was really a form of indenture. It was not in law based on usury, and the legal rulings were themselves tempered by exhortations to be benevolent and generous toward the poor. For example, Exodus 23; Deuteronomy 15, and many other passages.

What does Nehemiah do about it? He calls a large assembly. Look at the steps in his arguments (verse 6). Although he is outraged, it’s almost as if he takes a deep breath and becomes ordered. We’re told in verse 6, “I was very angry. I pondered them in my mind and then accused the nobles and officials.”

There is an appeal in verses 7 and 8 to consistency. “I told them, ‘You are exacting usury from your own countrymen!’ So I called together a large meeting and said: ‘As far as possible, we have bought back our Jewish brothers who were sold to the Gentiles.” We have no other evidence of this, but it makes perfectly good sense.

Because slaves were a commodity on the open market, you could just imagine some of these new settlers in the land with a little extra cash saying, “Part of our commitment to resettlement and bringing about the end of the exile is to buy back some of these slaves.” They’re quite prepared to buy back other slaves, and meanwhile, they’re enslaving some of their own people, so Nehemiah makes an appeal to consistency. He appeals profoundly to the fear of the Lord.

Verse 9: “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies?” In verse 10, he appeals to good example. In verse 11, he demands repentance and a return to law. In verse 12, he demands a binding oath. In verses 14 to the end, he appeals to his own personal example as a leader. Verse 19 gives us the first of several “remember” passages, a kind of refrain in Nehemiah’s memoirs. “Remember me with favor, O my God, for all I have done for these people.”

What shall we say about this? The particular structures, of course, are bound up with the stipulations of the Old Testament law, but it’s not as if the early church never faced any similar problems. Read, after all, what goes on in 1 Corinthians 11:17 and following. The Roman world worked on a 10-day week, so Christians who did meet on the first day of the Jewish week only rarely had the day off, which is why first Christians met early in the morning and late at night.

If they met late at night, you could see what would happen. Those who were independently wealthy would manage to put in an appearance at the agreed meeting place fairly early on and bring along a bottle of Beaujolais and have some Christian fellowship (prawn sandwiches). Two or three hours later, the tradespeople finishing their day’s work would come in tired and maybe with a peanut butter sandwich and not more than a bottle of Guinness.

Two or three hours after that, by which time the party has been going at some length (they’ve had a whole meal by now and they called it the agape), in would come the slaves. They couldn’t get off quite as early as the rest, of course, and they weren’t supposed to bring any food with them. That would be stealing from their masters.

Now it’s time to sit down and celebrate the Euchariste, the Lord’s Table. Up until now in the book of 1 Corinthians, Paul has been saying things like, “Yes, on the one hand, but on the other.… Yes, it’s good not to get married, but on the other …” Now he says flat-out with respect to the Lord’s Table, “I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good,” because of simple economic injustice in the local church. There’s no other way of putting it. Barbarous, condescending conduct on the basis of cash.

Some of Paul’s own appeals here and elsewhere are other New Testament appeals and turn on rather similar sorts of arguments. How often does Paul insist, for example, on the integrity with which he has handled money? “I have not taken anything from you.” When there is a collection for Jerusalem, he makes jolly sure there are multiple witnesses so he cannot be accused of siphoning a little bit off for himself.

Think of Paul’s warnings about those who are rich in the Pastoral Epistles. Think about how James applies the gospel differently. To those who are rich and powerful, he says, “It humbles you and teaches you that you are a fool.” To those who are despised, “It elevates you and reminds you of your dignity in Christ Jesus.” There’s pastoral smarts. I know it’s difficult to handle some of these matters, and sometimes, quite frankly, our push toward complete egalitarianism in fiscal matters leads rather less to Christian love than to a kind of enforced socialism. That’s not quite right either.

I remember on our campus a few years ago we had a mature student.… Really, quite mature. He was about 55. He had been an exec in a high-powered company and was, quite frankly, very well-to-do. Rather later in life, he just felt more and more hunger to teach the Word of God. He had been a layman all his life, but he couldn’t put it off anymore and sold off his part in the company and came to Trinity. He was one of a very small number of students and absolutely no faculty who drove a BMW.

Some of our more self-righteous and considerably younger students started talking about economics and sacrifice. “Could any genuine Christian ever drive a BMW?” This man bore all of this with perfect equanimity, but only three of us on campus knew he was entirely funding four international students from his own pocket. That’s another side of the man he never talked about. One also has to be careful about judging prematurely and the like. I like Wesley’s advice on this matter. “Earn as much as you can; give away as much as you can.”

How many great projects are the results of rich Christians who really do learn to give away as much as they can? I don’t want to introduce a new legalism here. Yet, in the church, not only the local church but in broader enterprises, how careful must we be that we do not start paying more attention and more respect to people who have a little more money?

Because of the way our cities are going, I look every year at our graduating crop of MDiv students, and I hunt out the ones who are able to talk to anybody in the same way they talk to anybody else. Some of our graduates are going to be really great as pastors in the farmlands of Nebraska.

In my advisee group, I had a couple of years ago an African-American dude who had been in one of the gangs when he was converted. I think he had probably committed every crime in the book short of murder, but he got wonderfully converted, and here he was at seminary. He is going to be great in black Detroit. He’ll be a great pastor.

But the ones I look at for our cities are those who can talk to anybody and treat them all the same: black, white, rich, poor, educated, uneducated, blue-collar, white-collar, immigrants, anybody. I want those people in our cities. They just don’t ever treat poor people differently from rich people. They just don’t do it. They don’t treat minorities differently from other people. They just don’t do it. It’s merely Christian. It follows Jesus. It anticipates the day when men and women will be drawn from every tongue and tribe and people and nation.

5. You can expect a measure of deviousness amongst those who hate God.

Chapter 6, verses 1 to 14. The chapter deals with a certain kind of intimidation. The word is used five times. It’s translated in different ways in most of our English translations, but it crops up in verse 9, verse 13, verse 14, verse 19, and again beyond, and in each case the idea is, by one ploy or another, these people are trying to frighten us or intimidate us and sometimes with suspect invitations to dialogue (chapter 6, verses 1 to 4).

Whether this was for the purpose of kidnapping Nehemiah (it may have been), we cannot be quite sure, but what sounds like an innocent invitation to dialogue Nehemiah sees as one more way of either slowing him down or possibly putting him into a dangerous position. There is a place for dialogue. Who wants to be found in the position where you can’t talk to somebody seriously? On the other hand, there are a lot of appeals to dialogue which are, quite frankly, wastes of time at best and actually deceptive.

Then there are intimations of imperial threat (verses 5 to 9). It worked, after all, 20 years earlier which is why Artaxerxes had banned the project at that time, but the response is simply, “Nothing like what you are saying is happening; you are just making it up out of your head.” Sometimes you have to say, “You are a liar.”

Then there is intimidation by an assortment of spiritual arguments (verses 10 to 14). “Let us meet in the house of God, inside the temple, and let us close the temple doors, for some people are coming to kill you.” What their intentions were it’s hard to tell. Maybe they wanted to kill him. Maybe they just wanted to destroy his reputation and show he was a scaredy-cat frightened of his own shadow so he would become a public mocking. Perhaps they wanted him right inside the temple, not just the temple precinct, so he would actually be violating the temple laws, because after all, he was not a priest. I don’t know, but Nehemiah sees through it again.

“Should a man like me run away? Or should someone like me go into the temple to save his life? I will not go! I realized that God had not sent him, but that he had prophesied against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. He had been hired to intimidate me so that I would commit a sin by doing this, and then they would give me a bad name to discredit me.” Subterfuge. Corruption.

We need to get used to the idea that people don’t fight fairly. Just ask our dear friend Steve who writes up reform meetings in the Guardian. Half-truths and whole lies. There are some who are merely sheep in sheep’s clothing (they’re wimps so don’t worry about them), but there are others who are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and that shouldn’t surprise us.

In the first century, there were those who Paul dismisses as false apostles. The very Devil who sometimes goes about as a roaring lion deceiving, if possible, all sometimes goes about as an angel of light deceiving, if were possible, the very elect. There is the second beast in Revelation 13.

6. You should not be surprised by a fifth column.

Chapter 6, verses 15 and following. The success of this work means some of the attacks lost their punch. They drifted away. “They realized that this work had been done with the help of our God.” Yet, at the same time, Nehemiah notes, “Also, in those days the nobles of Judah were sending many letters to Tobiah, and replies from Tobiah kept coming to them.

For many in Judah were under oath to him, since he was son-in-law to Shekaniah son of Arah, and his son Jehohanan had married the daughter of Meshullam son of Berekiah. Moreover, they kept reporting to me his good deeds and then telling him what I said. And Tobiah sent letters to intimidate me.”

This in the covenant community. There will be fifth columns. Sometimes this works out in remarkably blunt ways. In many parts of the world where there are totalitarian or semi-totalitarian regimes, people are paid to pretend to be Christians to visit churches in order to get the inside dope and find out who is there and get their names and addresses. Then every once in a while there are roundups. Just ask some of our brothers and sisters in China.

Sometimes it’s more subtle, of course. People pretend to be ever so spiritual and have not an ounce of spiritual sense. Meanwhile, they’re gossiping behind your back and reporting on what you’re doing and mocking. They’re a fifth column because they claim to be Christians and some of them are outstanding men and women of the church.

If your ecclesiology will permit, so that you are not in the Believers church tradition, then you can have an entire array of fifth-column bishops and others who, in the name of tolerance and freedom and maturity in Christ with a great deal of spiritual talk, will destroy the church if they possibly can. It’s a lot easier if they’re just on the outside. It’s a lot harder when they’re on the inside.

I should tell you this is the most depressing of my five talks (it gets better), but I don’t want to lighten this. I don’t want to lighten this because, you see, we should expect opposition. All those who live godly lives in Christ Jesus will face persecution. This is a fallen and broken world. If you are so insecure that the only way you can function is to be praised by a lot of people all the time, go and become a dustbin collector, go and pack pork, write computer software, but stay out of the ministry.

Here it is always a struggle, and what should surprise us are those times when, in the Lord’s great mercy, things go swimmingly, and when they’re going swimmingly, brace yourself and never, never, never give up so at the end of your years you can say, “I have fought a good fight. I have finished the course. Henceforth is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.”

I know some of you are hurting. Some of you are in small, difficult churches with angular deacons or international-class pains as wardens. I know that. Some of you are trying to take a church out of the distinctly atheological tradition or even flat-out liberal tradition and bring it into a confessional camp. Some of you are dealing with conservative churches that are somewhat to the right culturally speaking of Attila the Hun and think somehow it’s letting down the side to evangelize. Never, never, never give up. Let us pray.

Who is sufficient for these things? Strengthen us, Lord God. Fasten our eyes on the men and women for whom Christ shed his blood. Fasten our eyes on eternity. Fasten our eyes on the risen King who even now builds his church through such feeble vessels as we are. Have mercy on us, Lord God, and make us faithful in small things as in great, enduring to the end as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, to whom be all praise, both in this world and in the world to come. Amen.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.