The Inspection (Nehemiah 2:9-20)

Introduction

A. Preliminaries

Good Morning.

Please turn with me in your Bibles to the second chapter of Nehemiah. The text for the sermon this morning is verses 1 thru 8. You can find it on Page 46X of the Bibles in your pews.

We’ve come to the point of the story of Nehemiah’s arrival in Jerusalem. The King has given him letters, as he requested, and he sets out on his journey. Much like we saw in Ezra, the concern here is the story in Jerusalem, not the journey to Jerusalem. So the four month trek is skipped over, and we are taken right to the arrival.

So with that, let’s look at our text

B. Sermon Text

Nehemiah 2:9–20 ESV

Then I came to the governors of the province Beyond the River and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent with me officers of the army and horsemen. But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant heard this, it displeased them greatly that someone had come to seek the welfare of the people of Israel. So I went to Jerusalem and was there three days. Then I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. And I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem. There was no animal with me but the one on which I rode. I went out by night by the Valley Gate to the Dragon Spring and to the Dung Gate, and I inspected the walls of Jerusalem that were broken down and its gates that had been destroyed by fire. Then I went on to the Fountain Gate and to the King’s Pool, but there was no room for the animal that was under me to pass. Then I went up in the night by the valley and inspected the wall, and I turned back and entered by the Valley Gate, and so returned. And the officials did not know where I had gone or what I was doing, and I had not yet told the Jews, the priests, the nobles, the officials, and the rest who were to do the work. Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.” And I told them of the hand of my God that had been upon me for good, and also of the words that the king had spoken to me. And they said, “Let us rise up and build.” So they strengthened their hands for the good work. But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they jeered at us and despised us and said, “What is this thing that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?” Then I replied to them, “The God of heaven will make us prosper, and we his servants will arise and build, but you have no portion or right or claim in Jerusalem.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God!

C. Textual Overview

So we will begin with a brief overview of our text this morning, and then get into the details.

In verses 9 and 10, we read that Nehemiah is escorted by Persian officers to Jerusalem, and his arrival causes immediate political tension with regional officials (Sanballat and Tobiah).

Nehemiah waits three days, and then in verses 11-16, he rides out at night to assess the damage.

After seeing the devastation, in verses 17 and 18, he calls the people to rebuild, declaring God’s favor and the king’s support. The people rise up encouraged, and they commit to the work.

In verses 19 and 20, Israel’s enemies mock and question their motives. Nehemiah responds not with defensiveness, but with firm conviction: “The God of heaven will make us prosper.”

D. Sermon Points

So there are at least three things I want us to observe in this text this morning:

1. The Wisdom of Assessment

2. The Reality of Enemies

3. The Faithfulness of God

E. Sermon Prayer

Let’s Pray

God, Our Father,

We confess that there is no ignorance as dark as what we think we know. We pray that your Spirit would banish any ignorance of this sort this morning, and that we would let go of it gladly, and without a fight. Teach us from your Word, for we pray in Jesus’s name, and Amen.

(A Prayer by Douglas Wilson)

So let’s begin with the first point

I. The Wisdom of Assessment

The narrative set up at the start of this section, has an almost Hollywood movie set up to it. Nehemiah starts his work by going on an unannounced nighttime expedition.

Nehemiah 2:12 ESV

Then I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. And I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem.

And his expedition is recorded in rather emotional overtones. He speaks of the broken down walls, and how there are spots where his animal can’t even pass. I don’t think we’re meant to simply read this as a cold assessment. I think Nehemiah’s heart is as broken as the walls of Jerusalem when he surveys the damage.

And I wonder if as he was going at night, he was singing Psalm 87 with tears:

Psalm 87:1–3 ESV

On the holy mount stands the city he founded; the Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwelling places of Jacob. Glorious things of you are spoken, O city of God.

Now this side of the cross, I think there is a tendency in modern evangelicalism to sort of disdain being to attached to things like places, cities, and physical structures. We are tempted to think that things like church buildings and cathedrals don’t matter so long as the heart is right before God.

But I think that is an attempt to be more spiritual than God made us to be. Now, to be sure, the reverse is true: If God does not have our hearts, it doesn’t matter how lovely our buildings are, and it doesn’t matter if we worship in the midst of some grand cathedral. But surely it does not follow from that, that if our hearts are right, the physical world around us doesn’t matter.

Appreciating the place you are in is part of how we were made. I took ordination vows standing on this platform. I was married in this room. I danced with my wife for the first time in that Fellowship Hall. I baptized my children in waters from that font. And many of you can tell similar stories. There is power and glory in the history of a place, and it’s good for us to love that.

So with that in mind, imagine the work of Nehemiah here. He’d heard of the ruin. But now he gets a good look at it. He goes out at night, with only a few people, and the secrecy is evident. He said nobody knew what he was doing or what he was about.

So what was he doing?

I think there’s a parallel here with Jesus’s words:

Luke 14:28–30 ESV

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’

He’s taking stock of the damage, so he knows what he’s in for. Now there’s some real wisdom here that I think is for us today.

If you’re about to walk into a hard situation, a difficult task, and you know the Lord has put it before you, try take some time to take stock of the matter before you try to start making decisions.

I know that sometimes in Christian piety, we tend to shun planning. Don’t make plans. Just trust the Holy Spirit. That’s not a biblical sentiment. Nehemiah took stock of things and made plans. Paul wanted to get to Rome and strategized to get there. Even Jesus, through his whole ministry was carrying out the plan and will of the Trinity, determined before time itself.

The biblical instruction is Make your plans with wisdom, seek to obey the Lord, and trust God with every step.

Because I want you to note—look at verse 12—Nehemiah had no doubt this work was from God,

Nehemiah 2:12 ESV

Then I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. And I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem.

God has put this in his heart. And yet, there’s no step-by-step plan from God on how to do it.

Derek Thomas observes,

Nehemiah was asked to exercise his own judgment, trusting that the Lord was in the decisions he would make. Knowing that God is sovereign did not cripple him into inertia but motivated him to act prudently and wisely. —Derek W.H. Thomas

So whatever kind of work is before us, there is value in assessing the problems and challenges, and discerning what steps to take.

There’s also some truth here for Elders. Elders in Churches must be aware of the ruin that confronts their own people. Where are the places where we’ve been knocked down? What are our soft spots where Satan can hit us? Where have we failed? Where do we need to be made strong again.

This is also true of fathers. Dads, you should know what are the particular temptations and sin patterns that confront and trouble you? That confront and trouble your wife? That confront and trouble your kids?

Paul says in Ephesians that a husband must be washing his wife with the water of the Word of God, to sanctify her and prepare her for the last day to meet Jesus. And surely that’s no different for your kids. You must do it as a shepherd of your house, not as a mere manager. This is something that is expected of us in the home and the church.

And kids and young people in the room, I want to encourage you. When Nehemiah went out at night to look at the broken-down walls, he didn’t pretend they weren’t broken. He didn’t say, “It’s not that bad,” or, “Let’s just ignore it and hope it goes away.” He told the truth.

That’s something you can learn from too. When you know you’ve done something wrong—maybe disobeyed your parents or been unkind to a sibling—you don’t have to hide it or pretend it didn’t happen. God already knows, and He wants you to be honest.

You can go to your parents, say what you’ve done, and ask for forgiveness. And even more than that, you can pray to Jesus, who always forgives and helps us grow.

You don’t have to fix everything by yourself. But you do have to be honest about what’s broken. That’s where healing and help begin

With all of this in mind, I would invite you to be in prayer over the next few months as the Session has started to plan our retreat. Or as Eddie has said, we should not call it the Session Retreat, we should call it the Session Advance. And the primary concern before us will be “Ok, we’ve got this shiny new Mission Statement we’ve set before the congregation. Now what’s it going to look like on the ground, when we put our hands to the work?” So please pray for us. Pray for us to discern where the particular sin areas are in our church that need tending to. What areas of work and ministry have been neglected that deserve attention. And what the next few years look like. Please do be in prayer.

So, Nehemiah exercises wisdom in assessing the work to be done.

Second, he faced

II. The Reality of Enemies

We meet three new characters in this part of Chapter 2:

Sandballat, Tobiah, and Geshem.

Sandballat was the governor of Samaria. Tobiah was probably the governor of Ammon. And Geshem was a powerful chieftain in Northwest Arabia.

In other words, these guys represented the surrounding provinces. Ammon to the Northeast, Samaria to the northwest, and Arabia (that is Edom and Moab) to the southeast.

Historical records do not indicate that these territories had any formal alliance, but nothing unites like a common enemy.

We meet the first two in verse 10

Nehemiah 2:10 ESV

But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant heard this, it displeased them greatly that someone had come to seek the welfare of the people of Israel.

Why would that bother them? I mean, my first impulse was “Can these guys not mind their own business?”

And the answer is that they were happy to mind their own business so long as the people of God were not a threat to their sense of security.

I have often wondered if Martin Luther would have made himself an enemy of the Roman Church in the 16th century if he had left the discussion of indulgences alone. If he hadn’t messed with the income stream of the papacy, would he have been considered a threat?

The martyrs of old who went to the stake or the lions. They weren’t killed because they had the wrong religious views. They were killed because the powers that be considered them threats.

Mary Queen of Scots, the one who is aptly remembered as Bloody Mary, once famously said “I fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the armies of England.”

He was persecuted because he was an actual threat.

And I have often wondered if the church does not face real forms of persecution in a day like ours, is it because we are so well protected? Or is it simply because we are not a threat? Something to think about.

All three of these enemies are mentioned again near the end of our passage, in verse 19:

Nehemiah 2:19 ESV

But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite servant and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they jeered at us and despised us and said, “What is this thing that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?”

Now we know that’s absurd, right? Most of our story so far has been to make clear that Nehemiah is there with the king’s own orders! This could not be further from the truth.

In other words, the tactics are insinuation, innuendo, and straight up lies. Which is instructive for us. Satan has been at work tempting God’s people for centuries. And his tactics usually are not new. He uses what works.

We should remember that Satan is a liar. He loves to spread lies of suggestion and lies of accusation. That is why biblical justice is so careful to do things like demand witnesses when elders are accused, and why Jesus gives us the church discipline process in Matthew 18 to kill gossip.

Satan is a liar. As Jesus said in John 8:44

John 8:44 ESV

He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

And we are called not to be ignorant of Satan’s devices. Not to be obsessed with them. There is a way that some Christians can get obsessed with the devil, convincing themselves that they have cracked his code and mastered his strategy, and they understand what’s really going on out there in the world. It’s an easy thing to build an obsession with the Devil. But we do want to be mindful of his favorite tactics, like lying, insinuation, and inuendo.

This is why, in our Larger Catechism, in the discourage on the 9th commandment, we are forbidden from believing a bad report about someone until we know with certainty that it’s true. Did you know that? Our Larger Catechism instructs us that if you hear a bad story or report about someone, and believe it before you verify it, and especially if you spread it around, you are guilty of lying.

So Nehemiah has enemies with predictable patterns, and we should expect that as Christians today, we too will have enemies. People who hate and despise us, and want to see our plans ruined. Now a lot of times, a lot of us have trouble naming enemies. Either personally or enemies of the church. And the reason why we don’t have enemies is usually either because we desperately want to be liked, and the plans that we make are usually not a threat to anyone. In many places, the church is not threatened by wicked men, because wicked men do not consider the church a threat to their plans in the first place.

So there’s a place for us to be mindful in prayer. Do we flee the thought of the affliction of enemies, because we think we shouldn’t have any. Jesus told us to love them, so it seems he assume we would have them.

So we have Nehemiah’s work of assessment. We have the reality of enemies. And most importantly,

III. The Faithfulness of God

Nehemiah preaches the covenant faithfulness of God, and in so doing, stirs up the hearts of the people to believe and to act.

After assessing the damage, Nehemiah addresses the people

Nehemiah 2:17 ESV

Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.”

So notice what he does here. He does not sugar-coat the trouble. You see the trouble we are in. You see how bad this is. Unlike his enemies, and unlike the devil himself, Nehemiah does not lie. If you want to see Reformation and Revival, you must start with how bad things actually are.

If people are lazy and slothful, you have to address that with honesty, as Ezra did. If marriages are a wreck, you have to address that with honesty, as Ezra did. If things are a mess, you have to be honest about the mess. In your own life, in your home life, in your church life. That’s where the work has to start.

But Nehemiah doesn’t just say “Look at this lousy city, with all these lousy people in it. You guys are losers! How dare you!”

Instead this is what he does:

Nehemiah 2:18 ESV

And I told them of the hand of my God that had been upon me for good, and also of the words that the king had spoken to me. And they said, “Let us rise up and build.” So they strengthened their hands for the good work.

He says God is with us. For our good. Here’s the evidence.

Notice the approach. He basically says “We are in this together.” He identifies with the people. But he also ties their identity to their work and responsibility.

Because what you do must first flow from who you are. Do you remember when we were going through Ephesians?

Did Paul ever say “Ok, get to work. This is how you live.”

Yes. He sure did. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6. After he had made clear this is who your God is in chapters 1 thru 3.

Your identity must be clear before you can start the work. It doesn’t mean there’s not a place for biblical shame. There’s a time to say “We should be ashamed of what we have become.” But that must be followed up with “By God’s grace, this is not who we shall remain.” Who we are is God’s own people, loved by him, bound together with him, united to His Son, inheritors of all his promises, and we’re going to live forever. We cannot die. Therefore, let us work.

And when enemies try to stop the work because we are an actual threat to actual wickedness, we can say with Nehemiah

Nehemiah 2:20 ESV

The God of heaven will make us prosper, and we his servants will arise and build

The people respond with joy— “Let us rise up and build.” Because the sufficiency of God is a powerful motivator. Christ shall have dominion, after all. That’s what we sang earlier. Earth’s remotest regions shall his empire be. The people were motivated because they knew they could do the work with God’s help.

Nehemiah stirred the hearts of the people to work by reminding them of God's covenant faithfulness. But we have seen even greater faithfulness from our God than Nehemiah ever knew. We have seen Jesus Christ, the true and better builder, who came not to repair a wall but to restore a ruined humanity. He saw the devastation of our sin and entered it fully. He bore the mockery of enemies. He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. And he rose again from the dead.

And now he says to us, “You are my workmanship. I am building my church.”

So we rise up and build. Not in fear or pride, but in resurrection hope.

And it is true that we have a lot of work around us. Our hearts break for a dying city, full of ruined families, wrecked marriages, victimized children, and incompetent political leadership.

But we have not been given permission to despair. Christ shall have dominion. From the Red River to the Bayou Boeuf, as far as the curse is found. He will have it. That’s not the question. The question is are we ready to rise up to answer the call for the work?

We might not see all the fruit. The fruit of our work might be a gift we give to our grandchildren. But what’s before us is to trust the goodness of our God much more than we now do. We are not to read the situation by the amount of wickedness in the city, or the number of people arrayed against us. Rather, our trust is in the Lord. For in him we have nothing to fear.

In the name of Jesus, Amen.