Nehemiah’s Wisdom

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

All right, so Nehemiah chapter 6. And Bonnie, I don’t know if you’re watching. I guess I’m talking to everybody else too.

But last week you put a comment on our Facebook page underneath that said, Build the wall. And I don’t know if you were just excited or if you’re telling me to get on with it and just get the wall built already. But we are getting close.

So I wasn’t sure how to take that. She said, build the wall, and I said, and make Persia pay for it. So that’s what happened.

They got Persia to pay for it. So we are in chapter 6, and we are getting close to the wall being done. As a matter of fact, at this point, I believe everything was done except for hanging the doors and the gates.

So we’re going to start in chapter 6 at verse 1, And we’re going to read through to verse 19 tonight and come back and talk a little bit about what happened. And there’s a lot of wisdom in the way Nehemiah handles these situations. And number one, we know that the wisdom was provided by God.

And we also know that God had raised Nehemiah up for the purpose of building the wall. God put Nehemiah just where he wanted him to be. And so even though we look at this and we say, you know, how wise Nehemiah was, We also need to understand, as I’ve told you with just about every chapter of this book, understand this is not really the story of Nehemiah, or of what Nehemiah did, it’s the story of what God did through Nehemiah.

All right, so starting in verse 1, it says, Now it happened when Sanballat, Tobiah, Geshem the Arab, and the rest of our enemies heard that I had rebuilt the wall, and that there were no breaks left in it, though at that time I had not hung the doors in the gates, that Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, Come, let us meet together among the villages in the plain of Ono. But they thought to do me harm. So I sent messengers to them, saying, I am doing a great work so that I cannot come down. Why should the work cease while I leave it and go down to you?

But they sent me this message four times, and I answered them in the same manner. Then Sanballat sent his servant to me, as before, the fifth time, with an open letter in his hand. In it was written, It is reported among the nations, and Geshem says, That you and the Jews plan to rebel.

Therefore, according to these rumors, you are rebuilding the wall, that you may be their king. And you have also appointed prophets to proclaim concerning you at Jerusalem, saying, There is a king in Judah. Now these matters will be reported to the king.

So come, therefore, and let us consult together. Then I said to him, saying, No such things as you say are being done, but you invent them in your own heart. For they all were trying to make us afraid, saying, Their hands will be weakened in the work, and it will not be done.

Now therefore, O God, strengthen my hands. See, he’s running into trouble, and he goes to God. He doesn’t merely rely on his own strength.

He prays for God to strengthen him. Verse 10, Afterward I came to the house of Shemaiah, the son of Deliah, the son of Mehetabal, who was a secret informer. And he said, Let us meet together in the house of God within the temple, and let us close the doors of the temple, for they are coming to kill you.

Indeed, at night they will come to kill you. And I said, Should such a man as I flee? And who is there such as I who would go into the temple and save his life?

I will not go in. Then I perceived that God had not sent him at all, but that he pronounced this prophecy against me, because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. For this reason he was hired that I should be afraid and act that way and sin, so that they might have cause for an evil report, that they might reproach me.

My God, remember Tobiah and Sanballat according to these their works, and the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who would have made me afraid. So the wall was finished on the 25th day of Elul in 52 days. And it happened when all our enemies heard of it, and all the nations around us saw these things, that they were very disheartened in their own eyes, for they perceived that this work was done by our God.

Also in those days the nobles of Judah sent many letters to Tobiah, and the letters of Tobiah came to them. For many in Judah were pledged to him, because he was the son-in-law of Shekaniah, the son of Ere, and his son Jehohanan had married the daughter of Meshulam, the son of Berechiah. Also they reported his good deeds before me and reported my words to him.

Tobias sent letters to frighten me. One thing I’ve learned already in looking at this passage is no matter how much I practice pronouncing the names and how well I think I’ve got it down in the office, I get in front of people and no, there’s no way to wrap the oaky tongue around some of these names. Well, thank you.

It’s all about confidence. Just act like you know what you’re saying and plunge right ahead and they’re dead. They’re not here to correct me.

And I make myself feel better by telling me they wouldn’t be able to pronounce my name either. But what we see here is that we’re getting close to the end of the wall being constructed. It’s all done except they’ve got to hang the doors in the gates.

And it’s one last big project. And the the enemies of the Jewish people, some of them who have Jewish ancestry, which we’ve talked about previously, they’re looking at this and they realize this is our last chance. Once they get behind that wall, they’re safe.

So if we’re going to stop this, this is our Hail Mary pass. All right, this is our last ditch effort to try to get the wall stopped. And so they go through all these things, they send letters telling Nehemiah, come down, come talk to us.

He says, I’m busy. Come down, come talk to us. I’m busy.

This goes on four times. Finally, they send on the fifth time, they send this open letter. That means he hasn’t sealed it up.

It’s just there for everybody to read, meaning he’s probably, you know, he’s probably shared it around saying, you know, we know what’s going on here. There are rumors. There are people saying, and by the way, whenever I’ve learned in church whenever somebody says, oh, other people are saying, what they usually mean by other people is, I am saying to other people, other people are saying that you’re doing this.

There are people around saying that you’re wanting to rebel against the king, that that’s the whole thing. You’re wanting to rebel against the Persians. You’re doing this so that you and your followers can be there in Jerusalem behind the wall.

You can be secure and you can make some kind of, I don’t know, custer-like last stand against the Persians in your walled city. Now, Nehemiah would have to be an idiot, even with the wall, to think he could, unless God was in it, think he could withstand the whole Persian army, because they had the walls, and the Babylonians just came on in anyway. So, but they’ve said, you know, we’ve heard these rumors, and you’re trying to set yourself up as king there, and he says, I am not.

And so then they hire people to tell him, you know, oh, just go hide in the temple. Stop work and go hide in the temple until it’s safe. And he realizes these are not prophets.

These are not even people that just have his best interest at heart. These people work for his enemies. And Nehemiah is really kind of outgunned here from a human perspective because the people around him, many of the people around him are not trustworthy.

that even some of the nobles there in Judah are in tight with Sanballat and Tobiah and the others. They’ve pledged loyalty to these men, and they’re sending him letters, and they’re receiving letters from him, and meanwhile they’re sending information back and forth, and then they’re buzzing in Nehemiah’s ear about how great these men are, and just doing everything they can to undermine this. It is like the worst that we assume happens in politics and all of the corruption and the two-facedness.

I don’t know if any of you. . .

Please don’t tell me if you have, but I don’t know if you’ve ever watched an episode of House of Cards on Netflix. Okay. Everybody kept telling me because I’ve been big into politics.

You need to watch House of Cards. I did not make it through a whole episode. It was just icky.

I mean, it made me feel gross to watch it. I did not even make it through a whole episode. What they were doing makes the intrigue and the lying and the corruption in House of Cards kind of look tame.

All right? And Nehemiah had all of this stacked against him. And to make it through that was going to take some wisdom.

Because all these people were gunning for him. All these people had their plans. And for Nehemiah to avoid every single pitfall, every single bump in the road, took incredible wisdom.

And so we just open up here in chapter 6 with the opponents of the wall trying everything that they can try. Throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Nehemiah to try to stop the construction of the wall. Now fortunately they were unsuccessful in this because God put the right man at the right time in the right place.

and God orchestrated all these things. But you look at all the things that they tried to do. And I made a list here, and I’m sure there’s some things I missed.

But they tried to hurt him because he says in verse 2, they thought to do me harm. They were trying to get him to come down off the wall. And he says, but I knew they were going to hurt me.

I don’t know if that means physical harm, if it just means harm to his reputation, but they were trying to hurt him. And then we see when that didn’t work, they tried to wear him down. In verse 3, he sent the messenger saying, I’m doing a great work.

I’m doing something important here. I can’t just leave it. Why should the work stop while I come down and talk to you?

But they sent me this message four times, no matter what I told them. Most of you in this room have raised children. And you know that wearing somebody down can be effective.

I feel like Charla and I are fairly strict parents. But, you know, I had the kids Monday and Tuesday and trying to do my work and trying to homeschool. Well, I would say, well, she’s off living it up at the doctor’s office in the city.

With Jojo, who was hilarious on drugs, by the way. She sent me videos. She’s staring at the lights.

Anyway, well, I was back at the ranch with the kids. There were a couple times that I said no, and this doesn’t normally work, but I’m tired and I’m outnumbered. And after you asked me about four times, suddenly the answer became, I don’t care.

Just don’t make a mess. We know we get tired. We get stressed out.

We feel outnumbered and we can be worn down. And Nehemiah, they were trying their best to wear him down. Send the messengers back five times trying to wear him down.

He didn’t fall for it. He didn’t give in. He didn’t take the easy way and say, fine, if you’ll shut up, I’ll come down off the wall for five minutes and talk to you.

Then we see in verses 6 and 7 that they tried to slander him. There is no doubt in my mind that Sanballat was behind the rumor. It is reported among the nations.

There are people saying that you’re trying to do this to rebel against the Persians, already knowing this was a hot-button issue, right? Because the Persians had shut down construction in Jerusalem once because rumors started that the Jews were planning to rebel. So now that they’ve got the construction started back, this rumor starts up.

Oh, and we hear that you’re doing all of this to make yourself king. They were attacking his character and his motives. They were slandering him.

and then they tried to charm him. I almost missed this one. In the little slander letter, by the way, we hear that these things are being said and we have it on good authority.

Even Geshem says it. And this is what’s being said and this is what we think. But if you notice at the end of verse 7, so come therefore, let us consult together.

Let’s talk about it. Can’t we be reasonable and talk these things out? We’re trying to charm him.

You know, we think this might be happening, but man, it really doesn’t sound like you. Can’t we talk about it? There must be a miscommunication here.

If we just sit down together, I bet we can work this out. We’re all reasonable men. They’re trying to charm him into coming down off that wall, trying to pretend that they’re on his side.

It’s kind of interesting to close out a letter like that in that way, accuse you of all these horrible things, and then say, but let’s be reasonable and talk about it. So then they tried to intimidate him in verse 9. He says they were trying to make us afraid.

Everything they were doing was trying to make the Israelites afraid, trying to make Nehemiah afraid to continue. You know, if these rumors are going out, even if Sanballat started it, even if Tobias started it, if these rumors get back to the Persians, even if the king that he has this close relationship with isn’t inclined to believe it, but here’s Nehemiah still pressing right ahead, What will the king think? I mean, there’s reason here for Nehemiah to be worried about this.

He says, but they were trying to make us afraid. And what happens, by the way, if the Persians hear it and believe it and overreact? They send in their forces and Nehemiah is a dead man.

So they tried to intimidate him. Verse 10, they tried to isolate him. Somebody came who Nehemiah knew was a secret informer and said, Let us meet together in the house of God within the temple and let us close the doors of the temple for they are coming to kill you.

Indeed, at night they will come to kill you. And the guy fails to mention that he’s part of the they. He’s in cahoots with these people.

Not necessarily that he was going to be involved in the plot to kill him, but if he can convince Nehemiah, they’re coming to kill you, he can get Nehemiah to go in the temple and isolate himself, put himself in quarantine until the danger is over and the work stops. because you can isolate Nehemiah. If you can cut the head off the beast, the others are going to stop working.

The construction’s not going to be finished as long as Nehemiah’s hiding out in the temple. So when they couldn’t intimidate him, they tried to isolate him, and then they tried to discredit him. And he says about this person who tried to get him to flee and hide.

For this reason, he was hired, that I should be afraid and act that way and sin. In other words, instead of being about what I told them God told me to do. He had publicly made sure everybody knew, this is what God told me to do.

And so they wanted, if all else fails, if we could convince Nehemiah to go into hiding and not do what he had told everybody God sent him to do, and it looks really bad on Nehemiah, that they might have cause for an evil report, that they might reproach me. They tried to destroy his reputation as somebody who was there on a mission from God so that others wouldn’t follow. They tried everything.

And you may read through this and see some things I missed. But the point is here, they tried every evil scheme they could come up with to try to discredit this man and try to undermine the work that God had called him to do. And it should come as no surprise to us as we read this and as we read other things that happened in Scripture, and even as we think over our own lives, it should come as no surprise to realize that obstacles and opposition are an expected part of our service to God, but they’re not an excuse to stop being obedient.

You know, I’ve gone through periods of time in my life where I might kind of whine to my mother and ask her, why is all this happening to me? I don’t understand why somebody would do this to me. I don’t understand why this happened.

And what she’ll normally say is something along the lines of, you know, God must be doing something really important. God must be doing something really important. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be under such attack.

Because when you start doing what God wants you to, the enemy is going to throw everything he can to try to stop it. If you’re following God, Jesus said, in this world you will have trouble. Not you might.

Not expect it from time to time. He said you will have trouble. We should expect.

We shouldn’t be surprised. And I say this knowing that I’m going to be surprised next time it happens. And I’m going to go whining to God and my wife and my mother all over again.

But we shouldn’t be surprised when opposition comes because the enemy, when he sees us being obedient and accomplishing what God wants us to accomplish, he wants to do everything he can do to throw a wrench in it. It’s an expected part of our obedience, but it’s not an excuse to start being disobedient. It’s not an excuse to say, well, I didn’t know this was going to be hard and put down what God gave us to do and walk away.

And Nehemiah is a great example of that because it says in verse 15, so the wall was finished on the 25th day of Elul in 52 days. In spite of everything they threw at him, Nehemiah got out there and finished the wall. Nehemiah avoided every temptation that was set before him to just stop and take the easy way out.

Nehemiah said, God put me here to do something, and I’m going to be obedient to what God called me to do until it’s finished. And Nehemiah finished the wall in 52 days. That’s less than two months.

Because this is not unique to Nehemiah, and he’s not the only example of this for us that we ought to follow. I’ve told you I like to look for the parallels between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And Jesus also faced severe opposition in trying to carry out God’s plans.

As I’m preaching through on Sunday mornings these I Am statements that Jesus made in the book of John, I go to each one of these and say, okay, what are the Pharisees throwing at Him this week? Because each of them seemed to be a conflict between Him and the Pharisees, by the way, instigated by the Pharisees. Because as Jesus, some of these, as I’ve gone back and re-read them, I’ve realized for the first time, Jesus was talking to somebody else, and the Pharisees just happened to be standing over here on the side and butted their way into the conversation.

They’re looking for something that they can stir up trouble with Jesus about, and He just shuts them down every time. But every time Jesus turned around, the Pharisees were right there. They were just right there on him, looking for how they could throw a wrench in God’s plans.

Of course, they thought they were doing God’s work, or said they thought it. But they were trying to throw a wrench in what Jesus was trying to accomplish for his father. The Romans, you know, probably come in a close second as far as the ones he had to deal with on a regular basis.

Of course, even that a lot of times was instigated by the Pharisees, because the Romans didn’t care what anybody was teaching as long as everybody stayed calm. But Jesus dealt with opposition from the Romans. And with the Romans and Pharisees working together, Jesus was eventually crucified because they thought they were stopping God’s plans or they thought they were stopping what Jesus came to accomplish.

Satan, Satan too, threw everything he had at Jesus. We look at the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness and it says he was there for 40 days. And I think it’s a mistake to think that he was tempted with three things in that 40 days.

I think that’s God giving us the highlights of what we needed to know. But the reason I come to that conclusion is not just me assuming things, but the Bible says Jesus was tempted in every way that we are, but without sin. And I think Satan had a lot of opportunities over 40 days to throw a lot of temptations Jesus’ way.

He was trying to undermine Jesus as the sinless Savior, the Son of God. I don’t know what he thought was going to happen, but he knew he could. .

. well, he was doing everything he knew to do to throw Jesus off his mission. And then Jesus said that Satan had put it in Judas’ heart to betray him.

Now, we also know that it fit right in with the plans of the Father. I don’t think Satan did it because he thought he was doing God a favor. I think Satan thought, if I could get Jesus killed, we’ll put an end to this right here.

Didn’t realize that the very thing he did to try to stop God’s plans fulfilled God’s plans. Isn’t God brilliant? Even a word like brilliant doesn’t seem enough to apply to the wisdom of God.

But he had all that worked out. My point in this being, Jesus is our ultimate example, right, as Christians. He’s supposed to try to be like Jesus.

Jesus every day woke up, and what was on his mind was, how do I be obedient to the Father and the mission that he’s given me to come here? Now, the Father and Son are equal, but yet in coming to earth, he said, I’m going to be obedient to my Father. Every day he woke up, how do I walk in obedience and accomplish the mission the Father has given me today?

Every day Satan woke up and said, how do I throw him off that mission? And Satan has a lot of tools in his arsenal. He used every one of them. Jesus faced this incredible opposition.

And yet Jesus said repeatedly, he said it to the Pharisees, he said it to the disciples, I’m here to do what my Father has sent me to do. And we see this in a lot of these conversations about these I am statements. I’m here to do what my Father sent me to do.

I’m not going to be tempted away from it. I’m not going to be intimidated away from it. I’m not going to be distracted away from it.

I’m here to do what the Father sent me to do. And so I think from this example of Nehemiah, which is just a lesser example of what Jesus did for us, what Jesus did, from these examples throughout Scripture, I think we can see here that the key to acting wisely amid opposition is knowing what God sent you to do and staying focused on that, staying committed to that. And sometimes our problem is we will start to do something and we’ll say, maybe God called me to do this.

I don’t know. Or maybe we don’t even think about whether God called us to do it. We just say, oh, that sounds like a good idea.

And then like five minutes later, some kind of opposition comes up and we put it aside. And we wonder, why does God not use me? Why do I not accomplish anything for God?

The first step is knowing, like Nehemiah and like Jesus, what it is the Father has called us to do. If you look back at the early chapters of this, Nehemiah went to the king. There was no doubt in his mind that God had called him to this work.

You look at what Jesus did. There was no doubt in his mind that the Father had sent him for the work that he came to accomplish. They had dealt with the Father about it, and they knew.

They knew. And we need to ask the Father for direction. We need to seek his direction.

Say, what is it that you’ve called me to do? And not make a move until we know it. But once we know it, stick to that.

Be committed to that. Focus on that.