Nehemiah 6
Let’s give our attention to God’s
word. Nehemiah chapter six, beginning at verse one. Now in Sanballat
and Tobiah and Geshem, the Arab and the rest of our enemies heard
that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left
in it. Although up to that time, I had not set up the doors and
the gates. Sanballat and Geshem sent to
me saying, come and let us meet together. at Hackith Farim in
the plain of Ono, but they intended to do me harm. And I sent messengers
to them saying, I am doing a great work and I cannot come down.
Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you? And they sent to me four times
in this way. And I answered them in the same
manner. In the same way, Samballot, for
the fifth time, sent his servant to me with an open letter in
his hand, and it was written, it is reported among the nations,
and Gishom also says it, that you and the Jews intend to rebel. That is why you’re building the
wall. And according to these reports, you wish to become their
king. And you have also set up prophets
to proclaim concerning you in Jerusalem, there is a king in
Judah. And now the king will hear of
these reports. So now come and let us take counsel
together. Then I sent to him saying, no
such things as you say have been done for you are inventing them
out of your own mind. For they all wanted to frighten
us thinking their hands will drop from the work and it will
not be done. But now, oh God, strengthen my
hands. Now, when I went into the house
of Shemaiah, the son of Deliah, the son of Metahetabel, who was
confined to his home, he said, let us meet together in the house
of God within the temple. Let us close the doors of the
temple for they are coming to kill you. They are coming to
kill you by night. But I said, should such a man
as I run away and what man such as I could go into the temple
and live, I will not go in. And I understood and saw that
God had not sent him, but he had pronounced the prophecy against
me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. For this purpose,
he was hired that I should be afraid and act in this way and
sin. And so they could give me a bad
name in order to taunt me. Remember Tobiah and Sanballat,
oh my God, according to these things that they did. And also
the prophetess, Noadiah, and the rest of the prophets who
wanted to make me afraid. So the wall was finished on the
25th day of the month of Elul in 52 days. And when all our
enemies heard of it, all the nations around us were afraid
and fell greatly in their own esteem, for they perceived that
this work had been accomplished with the help of our God. Moreover,
in these days, the nobles of Judah sent many letters to Tobiah,
and Tobiah’s letters came to them. For many in Judah were
bound by oath to him because he was the son-in-law of Shekeniah,
the son of Arah, and his son Jehohanan had taken the daughter
of Meshulam, the son of Berechiah, as his wife. Also, they spoke
good of his good deeds in my presence and reported my words
to him. And Tobiah sent letters to make
me afraid. Now when the wall had been built
and I had set up the doors and the gatekeepers, the singers
and the Levites had been appointed, I gave my brother Hanani and
Hananiah, the governor of the castle, charge over Jerusalem,
for he was a more faithful and God-fearing man than many. And
I said to them, let not the gates of Jerusalem be opened until
the sun is hot. And while they are still standing
guard, let them shut and bar the doors, appoint guards from
among the inhabitants of Jerusalem, some at their guard post and
some in front of their own homes. The city was wide and large,
but the people within it were few and no houses had been rebuilt. Amen, the word of the living
God for us. You remember back in the garden
of Eden, in the early chapters of Genesis, God tells us that
he made man, he made Adam out of the dust of the earth and
he put Adam in the garden to work it, to make it fruitful
and to keep it, to guard it and protect it. It was to be a holy
place, a holy precinct where God would meet with his people.
and they were to keep sin and enemies out. His task also was,
along with Eve, to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the
earth, to subdue the earth. And the goal was that the glory
of God would extend over all the face of the earth. Now, just
a couple of chapters in the Bible, we have that dark chapter, chapter
three, where Satan slithered into the garden and he asked
Eve and Adam, did God really say? And they said, yes, he did. And he said, you will not surely
die. And so Eve took interest in his
offer. You will become like God. You
will know good and evil. And so she saw the fruit. She
took delight in it. She took some, she ate some and
gave some to Adam, her husband who was with her. Their eyes
were opened. They were naked, they were ashamed, and they hid
from God. And can’t you imagine Satan sort
of in a little victory dance? I’ve had a success. I’m on the
path to destroying God’s glory. I’m on the way to stopping his
purposes. Well, until God came looking
for Adam and Eve in the garden and he found them and he clothed
them with the skins of an animal that had been sacrificed that
would point to the way of salvation through the death of his son,
the Lord Jesus and our covering with his robes of righteousness. The work of redemption would
be on the docket. It would be on the pages of human
history, the blood, the garments, the covering, the way forward. The long look to the coming of
the Messiah. Well, do fast forward in your
minds to the coming of Jesus. He was led by the Spirit into
the wilderness. He was 40 days in the desert.
He was tempted and he was under that probation that Adam failed
to keep. Adam lived in paradise. He lived
with provisions. He lived with plenty. He had
companionship. Now here’s Jesus. He’s desperate.
He’s in the desert. He’s in want. He’s alone. He
stays on mission to the work of the kingdom. But nevertheless,
Satan gave it a good try. Hey, Jesus, you’re hungry. Take
these stones, turn them into bread. Hey, Jesus, you want the
kingdoms of the earth? You don’t have to go to the cross
to get them. Just bow down and worship me and I’ll give them
to you right here and right now. Just skip the cross. And then
he said to him, throw yourself from the pinnacle of the temple
and ask your angels to save you. Well, Jesus responded the way
that Adam should have, but didn’t. Man shall not live by bread alone.
You shall not put the Lord, your God to the test, worship him
only in him alone. And so Jesus, we see stays on
mission. There’s no shortcuts in the work
of the kingdom, no shortcuts to glory. And you think about
between Adam in the garden and Jesus in the wilderness, God’s
people serving him along the way, serving in the church, serving
in the kingdom, serving in the commonwealth of Israel. There
was Abraham who knew the commands of God. He knew to go to the
land of Canaan. He knew to build an altar. He
knew to live by faith and to trust in God for an offspring.
But he went to Egypt a couple of times when the food got scarce
instead of trusting the Lord. He got off mission. We think
of Jacob who was a child of promise, yet he felt like he had to cheat
his brother out of his birthright. Or we think of Joseph who was
tested by Potiphar’s wife And he said, I’d rather be a sinner
or a saint in prison than a sinner with a stained reputation. And
so Joseph was tested. We think of David, we think of
Solomon, but now we land on Nehemiah, this figure in our story, whose
memoirs appear in the book of Nehemiah. And we think of these
four really sinister attacks. that come on Nehemiah, the governor
of Jerusalem and the province of Judea under Persian rule.
And we think of these sinister temptations from Samballot and
Tobiah and the others, but we see that here God’s man is steadfast
to the mission. He stands firm on the word of
God. Well, the first temptation comes, come let us meet together,
say these enemies. You find it in chapter six, verse
two. You find it again in chapter six, verse four. And it says
four times they called, I sent my messengers, nope, not coming.
The fifth time they send this viral letter. You know, they
put it out on the internet. It goes out on Facebook. And
thanks be to God that Nehemiah understands what they’re up to.
He understands they’re intending to harm him. Let’s get Nehemiah
away from the city. Let’s get him away from the finishing
touches on the wall of Jerusalem. And let’s get him about 30 miles
away in this coastal town. And there we can do him harm
and kill him. And the people won’t know what
happened to him. The people won’t know what to do without their
fearless leader. And the building of the city of God will stop.
and the wall will continue to have breaches in it. It will
have open gates, unfinished doors. Well, Nehemiah remembers his
task. Instead of being like Adam and
Eve who saw the fruit and it was a delight to their eyes and
it hindered the mission of God, which was obedience to God, fidelity
to God, they went their own way. We see in Nehemiah following
the pathway of Jesus. If it means suffering, if it
means hardship, that’s what I’m gonna choose. If it means I do
the work of God. Well, he sends the letter back.
I’m working on the city of God here. I’m building the church. I’m doing the Lord’s work. I
don’t have time to come out to your little powwow. I don’t have
time to come to your committee meeting. And you know how easy
it is for us to be distracted. We wake up in the morning, we
get on our phone. We get on our computers and before
we know it, we’ve been sucked into that waste of time, time
warp. Not so Nehemiah. He is going
to continue to work at the work that God has given him to do. I remember being told in seminary,
we had a rather unorthodox teacher who said, I’m gonna teach you
everything that I never learned, but wish I had. And he had a
little saying, for pastors, life is too short to stop for every
barking dog. And what he meant by that was
you can’t do everything in ministry. You just need to do the big things,
the main things, the important things, the necessary things. And I think we see Nehemiah here.
He’s not gonna stop for a barking dog. He’s not going to stop and
be sucked away from the ministry of building the city of God. So come and let us meet together. No, thank you. I don’t have time
for that. I’m doing the work of the Lord.
Well, the second temptation comes in that fifth letter or that
fifth appeal, come out and meet with us. And they put in this
viral letter, the words in chapter six, verse six, it is reported
among the nations. And Gishom also says it, that
you and the Jews intend to rebel. They’re accusing Nehemiah of
sedition. This is a big deal. He was sent
to the land of promise, to the city of God by the emperor himself. He was sent by Artaxerxes. He
was his right-hand man. He was his cupbearer. He’s given
him a leave of absence to come govern the city and to build
the walls and the city back. And then he’s supposed to return
and report. and serve Artaxerxes again. And so you and the Jews
intend to rebel, that’s why you’re building a wall. You’ve sent
prophets out to say there is a king in Judah. You’ve got yourself
set up to be a man, a king, a leader over these people. Well, Nehemiah
goes to prayer and he prays, may our hands be stronger than
ever in God’s work. What would you do if somebody
threatened you? I’m gonna tell something bad
about you. I’m going to tell something stinky about you. I’m
going to put it on Facebook. I’m going to put it out on the
internet. I’m going to tell people how rotten you are. We wouldn’t
get fearful. Not Nehemiah. He’s not going
to get suckered out into this committee meeting in the plains
of Ono. He’s not going to get hoodwinked
into believing this letter is going to do him any harm. No,
he fears God and not man. He fears Yahweh. and he is gonna
stand and he is going to fight and he is going to build and
he is going to stay on task. Well, a third temptation comes
up and you find it in chapter six, verse 10. Shemiah, who’s
apparently an old man who’s unable to leave home, apparently he’s
some sort of man of God, at least by appearance, and he’s been
paid, he’s been paid to see if they can get Nehemiah into the
temple. And so Shemiah says to Nehemiah, let us meet in the
house of God. The bad people, they’re coming
to get you. They’re going to come in by night and they’re
going to, they’re going to slit your throat right in your bed.
You know, it’s going to be curtains for you, Nehemiah. And Nehemiah
says, he discerns this isn’t of God. He says, should I hide?
I’m the governor of the people, should I hide? And then he says
something very striking, something we should take note of. Should
I enter the temple? Should I go into the place where
I am not authorized to go? We think of Nadab and Abihu and
how they offered strange fire and God killed them before the
altar. We think of the poor guy Uzzah
who studied the ark. When instead of the Levites carrying
it on the poles that were supposed to be run through the rings and
they were to carry it and keep it safe, they put it on an ox
cart. And when the ox began to stumble,
Uzzah reached out and well-intentioned wanted to stabilize the ark and
God put him to death because He disobeyed God’s command. No unholy person could touch
the ark. And Nehemiah fears God and he’s
not going to go in the temple. He’s not going to hide. He’s
not going to shrink back from his job and from his work. And
he says, by the way, if I were to get schmickered into going
in there and defiling myself and breaking God’s law, you would
taunt me. Look at the scaredy cat. He goes
into the temple. Look at him. He thinks God can
save him. Look at him. He thinks the altar
will protect him. He’d rather suffer at the hands
of enemies than sin against the Holy God. I think of Polycarp,
the Bishop of Smyrna towards the end of the first century,
I believe it was. was an old man, a very old man.
He was being tied up at the stake. The fire was being prepared. And they asked him one more time
in front of the great audience that came to see this human sacrifice,
this persecution, this martyrdom. And they said, one more time,
Polycorp, you can renounce Jesus and you can live. And his reply
was this. Jesus has been faithful to me
my whole life. Why would I now be unfaithful
to him? That’s a hard saying, isn’t it? But if we’re true to our convictions,
we will be steadfast. We will be immovable. We will,
when life sends hard things our way, we will bear up under them
and we will come out shining for the Lord Jesus. May he give
us strength to do that. Well, there’s a fourth temptation.
They’ve tried to draw Nehemiah out to the meeting on the plains
of Ono. They’ve tried to scare him with
the letter, you’re trying to rebel. Shemaiah has tried to
get him to go into the temple and hide. And now the fourth
temptation, Tobiah sends letters to the people of Israel to make
him afraid. And you find the content of those
letters in chapter six, verse 19. It says, they spoke of his
good, his good deeds in my presence. And they reported my words to
him and Tobiah sent letters to make me afraid. What’s going
on here? You have to sort of do a little
sleuthing, a little detective work here to figure out what’s
going on. They want Nehemiah to be afraid. They want him to
fear and to quit working for God. And so they made some unholy
alliances. Some of the people of God have
married into the people of the land. Remember Ezra during his
ministry dealt with that. the intermarriages, they had
to be annulled. The men, the leading men of the
city sometime back had to put away their foreign wives and
the foreign children that came as the fruit of those unions
that were ungodly and unholy. Well, they’re back at it again
some decades later, they’re doing the same thing. And apparently
Tobiah is the son-in-law to Shekeniah. And so there’s, some promises
made to one another will tell you things. There’s a little
espionage going on. There’s some spies among the
camp of the saints. The people are afraid of the
people of the land. And so they make these unholy
alliances. And I think Tobiah is waving
these letters in Nehemiah’s face and saying, look, I got more
people than you do. I mean, we, we, we read just
a few verses into chapter seven and you know, they’re setting
up the city, they’re shutting the gates and they’re opening
them at certain times. And there’s that little statement
that says there’s not too many people yet living in the city.
There are still a very vulnerable people and it could, it could
scare, it could cause Nehemiah to lose sleep at night, but he’s
not going to enter into these unholy alliances. He’s not going
to invite them to the law dedication ceremony. They are not going
to get, as it were, a key to the city, not a figurative one
or a real one. Flattery doesn’t work. Fear doesn’t
work. He means to be a separate, a
distinct, a holy person. You know, every human being has
a price on their head. What will you do for a sum of
money? What will you do because you’re
beholden to another person? What will you do because of a
rash bow or a sorry oath that you have made? Well, it’s good
to look at Nehemiah here and remember that he’s building the
holy city. It’s good to remember he’s helping
establish the house of worship and the sacrifices and the witness
of God and his people to the watching world. It’s an increasingly
hostile world. It’s an increasingly pagan, area
that they’re living in, but he wants to press on in the work
of the kingdom. He wants to be a man with no
fear and in 52 days, that’s just a little over seven weeks, they
get the city built. The wall is up. The reproach
of God’s people has been repaired. Just a few days to go when these
enemies come and they’re you know, putting the finishing touches
on the wall. They’re, to use a football term,
they’re first in goal. They’re almost at the finish
line. It’s kingdom work. And it’s good to be reminded,
isn’t it? Leaders don’t, or they can’t,
or they shouldn’t get off of mission. And sometimes, you know,
there are things that can get in the way, private things, personal
things, issues, depression, hardships, spiritual conditions. And it’s why we always need to
pray for God’s people. We noticed in our passage that
Nehemiah was a man of prayer, prayed a couple of times in this
passage. He’s been praying through the whole book. but it’s why
we need to be people of prayer. Lord, your work is important.
Your city is important. Your church is important. Let
us not get distracted. Let us not get hoodwinked into
these little side things or these unholy alliances. It’s why we
need good decisions. It’s why we need to stick to
our guns. It’s why we need God’s grace
and a whole lot of human grit. Because Satan comes slithering
into our church just like he did in the garden. He wants to
attack a good thing to prevent God’s glory from spreading across
the face of the earth. He wants to prevent God’s plan,
God’s work of redemption. And he’s got a little more time
to keep trying, which means if you’re doing something godly
in your home or personal life or in the church, you better
look out. for he’s coming. But you ought
to also look to Jesus, who faithfully and completely and fully served
his God, staying on mission. Remember Luke. Luke says of Jesus,
his eyes were fixed on Jerusalem. His eyes were fixed on Calvary. His eyes were fixed on going
to the cross. Nothing was going to get in his
way. And through Jesus’ help and with
the Holy Spirit’s power, that also ought to be our desire as
we live for the King of Kings in this life. Let’s ask him for
his help. Lord, we thank you for the chance
to think on what life under the gun looks like. Life and ministry
and temptations help us to see how Jesus was faithful, how Nehemiah
was faithful and help us to desire to be faithful. Keep us true
by your grace to the mission that is before us. We ask all
this in the name of Jesus, our great savior. Amen.