Driving Nehemiah
NEHEMIAH 1:1-4
This morning, I told you how excited I was to get back into John. Well, if I’m excited about getting back into John, I’m doubly excited about getting into Nehemiah. As you remember, we finished Ezra back in the first week of July. So it’s been 6 months since we spent time with our remnant. I miss them. As we’ve talked about before, Ezra and Nehemiah were originally two parts to the same book. Ezra wrote it, but he used different perspectives throughout. He wrote the first 6 chapters of Ezra in the third person, because those events happened before he got to Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit inspired him to compile most of his information in those chapters from historical records and interviews. Then chapters 7-10 were recorded in the first person. He wrote them as an eyewitness. He wrote them as an eyewitness for two reasons. First, because he was there. And second because they were the things he was directly responsible for. They told of his mission. And then we get to the second part of his book—what we know of as Nehemiah. Even though Ezra was still there as an eyewitness to most of these events, he quit writing in the first person. Instead of writing from his perspective, he began to write from Nehemiah’s perspective. Most scholars say that when Ezra wrote this, the Holy Spirit inspired him to use Nehemiah’s personal diaries. So even though Ezra wrote it, it is as if it came directly from Nehemiah’s mouth. That’s the way biblical inspiration works. When the authors wrote the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit inspired them to use all kinds of sources. Sometimes God dictated directly to them. Sometimes they wrote from their own minds and perspectives. Sometimes they used historical or governmental or secular documents that already existed. But when the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical writers to use all of those things to write God’s Word, He carried them along throughout the process. He guided them to write exactly His Word. He protected them from error and divinely breathed out His Word through the very words and parts of speech He influenced them to use. So no matter what sources Ezra used to compile Ezra and Nehemiah, his very act of putting them together was carried along by the Holy Spirit. And it resulted in the inerrant, infallible Word of God we have translated before us today. Because of that, we’re going to look at each part of this book knowing that it all has equal authority before God. Whether a well known passage we might have heard preached a hundred times… or a list of names we can’t even pronounce. Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable. So we will treat it as such. And I can’t wait to get back into this wonderful book.
Just a quick review as to where we are in history. I know that some people find history boring. But it shouldn’t be that way for Christians. Because it isn’t for God. Because if history was boring to God, He wouldn’t have made so much of His Book revolve around history. Ultimately, all history is His story. It is the story of Jesus. And the only way we can have a complete picture of our Savior is to know the history He has given us—the history He was born out of and the history He was born into. So, let’s just quickly review where we are at this point in His story.
The events in chapter 1 take place late in the year 446 BC. Nearly five centuries earlier, King Solomon, the son of King David would have his reign come to an end. You remember that David was the first king to rule over Israel from Jerusalem. He passed on his throne to his son Solomon. But Solomon didn’t follow after God with his whole heart like David did. He multiplied foreign wives to himself and began to worship the gods of those foreign women. And because of his disobedience, God told him He would tear the kingdom away from him. But because of God’s promises to David, He didn’t tear it all away. And he didn’t do it while Solomon was alive. But when Solomon’s son Rehoboam took the throne, he tried to impose a very harsh rule on the people. So God split the kingdom. The ten northern tribes split away and left David’s line with only Judah and Benjamin to rule over. Both the northern and southern kingdoms fell into idolatry. The northern kingdom would fall first, and Judah would follow. God sent good kings and bad kings and prophets and priests to the people to get them to change their ways. But with each passing year, things only got worse. Finally in 722BC, the Assyrian Empire invaded Samaria and captured the northern kingdom. Judah should have learned from their example what happens when nations rebel against God. But they didn’t. They continued on their path for more than another century. And then God chastised them as well. He caused the newly formed Babylonian Empire to siege and conquer Jerusalem. And when they did, they carried them off into exile three times starting in 605BC. Now, the Jews were reunited as a people. No matter if you had previously been part of the northern kingdom or Judah… it didn’t matter… they were all removed from the land and exiled in Babylon. The Assyrian Empire had been taken over by the Babylonians and became the Babylonian Empire. And within a few years the Babylonian Empire would be taken over by a coalition of Medes and Persians. That would form the Medo-Persian Empire that was in place as we get to Nehemiah. The Medo-Persian Empire had a much more tolerant view of the captives in their land than did the Babylonians or especially the Assyrians. And because of that tolerant view, a king named Cyrus issued a decree in around 538BC for the Jews to go back and resettle Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. It took nearly two years for them to get there, but Zerubbabel and Jeshua led a group of exiles back from Babylon to Jerusalem. Just as the prophet Jeremiah prophesied many years before, it was exactly 70 years from the time the first people were exiled until the first people returned to the land. God told the people through Jeremiah that they had failed to give the land its Sabbath for 490 years. Because of that, God was going to take them all at once. So the land was purged of Israelites and rested for 70 years. And then God made a way for them to return.
But even when they returned, everything wasn’t rosy. They got to work on the temple right away. The work took off like gangbusters. They got the altar set. They did some sacrifices. They got the foundation laid. They did some ceremonies and some sacrifices. But they quit building. They quickly got satisfied with what they had and quit working for 16 years. Then God sent them the prophets Haggai and Zechariah to stir them up again. And they did. They finally completed the temple in 516BC—22 years after Cyrus issued the decree. They reinstituted the Passover and things seemed to be going well. But there were more Jews who still hadn’t returned. So 59 years later, around 458BC, Ezra comes on the scene. And he’s bringing a whole new crew of Jews with him from Babylon. And when he gets there, he’s not happy with what he finds. Because he finds that the people have become lax in following God’s law. They have begun to do the same thing that got King Solomon in trouble so many years ago. They were marrying foreign wives. So Ezra preached to them. And they were convicted by God’s Word preached by God’s man. And they repented and turned away from their sin. All that happened just about a decade before our passage tonight. And in that decade, nothing else happened. As a matter of fact, nothing much happened since the people had completed the temple back in 516. Remember that now it’s 446. That’s another 70 years. The people have a temple. They are worshipping. They are offering their sacrifices to God. They have cleaned up their lives. Church is happening. Living is happening. Dying is happening. But nothing else. Their blinders are on. They are in a routine and have forgotten to open their eyes to the condition of things around them. But God wasn’t going to let them stay there. That wasn’t why He brought them back out of exile. He didn’t put them there in that place just so they could mark time. He had them there for a reason. And He unfolds that reason in this book. He unfolds His plan through the leadership of a man. A man we’re introduced to in these opening verses. In these opening verses, we see three things that drive leadership. The first thing that drives leadership is the character of God’s man. Look at the first verse:
NEHEMIAH 1:1
The character of God’s man drives leadership. Ezra doesn’t tell us a lot about Nehemiah’s background. He tells us who his daddy is, but that’s not much help. Because we don’t know anything about him at all. This is the only time in Scripture that Hachaliah is mentioned. And history doesn’t provide any clues either. So, even though his daddy’s listed, that wasn’t what qualified him for the job God had for him. Later on at the end of this chapter, the Bible says that Nehemiah was cupbearer to the king. That was a pretty important position. He was basically the king’s taste tester. Except he wasn’t testing for taste. He was testing for poison. You see, they didn’t have any high-tech ways to check the king’s food for poison. So they had to do it the most effective way they knew how. They had to have the cupbearer taste it. If he lived, the food passed and everybody was happy. If not—there was a job opening at the palace for a new cupbearer. Now that said two things about the person who held that job. First, he had to be expendable. That meant he was of no social importance to the king. He wasn’t politically or socially connected in any way. He was basically of no standing in society. But, not only was he expendable… he was completely loyal and trustworthy. He had to be someone of unimpeachable character. He had to be brave and bold and decisive. He had to have a good personality because he was expected to be personal and close to the king. As a matter of fact, many times the cupbearer had more access to the king than even his closest advisors. So he had to be likable. He had to be tactful and respectful and pleasant. He had to be completely transparent. If something was bothering him, he had to be open and honest about it. He couldn’t hold anything back or be reserved or hide things. But most of all, he had to be selfless. He had to be willing to sacrifice everything including his life for something bigger than himself. That was the character a cupbearer had to have. True character, not something derived from his position or his name. The kind of character that only comes from the inside. The kind of character that can only be forged and molded and shaped by God Himself. The kind of character that Paul tells each of us is told to have in Philippians 2:5 when he says, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” The character of God’s man drives leadership just like it did with Nehemiah… just like it does today. The second thing that drives leadership is the condition of God’s people. Look at verses 2-3:
NEHEMIAH 1:2-3
The condition of God’s people drives leadership. Don’t think that Nehemiah was sitting in the palace minding his own business when Hanani and his crew just barged in. People didn’t just barge into the palace without being invited. It’s obvious what happened here. Nehemiah was concerned about his fellow Jews. He was concerned about God’s people. So he sent his brother off with a group of other people to check things out. Now remember the condition of the remnant. They were there in Jerusalem. They had their temple and their sacrifices and their Passover. They were content. Content to the point that they didn’t care what they looked like to the outside world. But God didn’t call them to be content within themselves. He didn’t call them to do temple worship just to fill their own religious needs. He called them to be a witness to the other nations. He called them to show the other nations how great their God is. And they certainly weren’t doing that with the way Jerusalem looked. Oh, it looked fine to them. They didn’t notice the rubble in the streets. They’d walked over it so many times, they were used to it. They didn’t care that the walls were down. Besides the weeds growing up in the rubble looked kind of like flowers. Isn’t it amazing what a different perspective “outside” eyes can bring? The Jews in Jerusalem were fine with the way things were. But when Nehemiah sent a crew in there from the outside to take a look, their perspective was completely different. They saw what a terrible witness the appearance of the city was. They called it a great affliction. They called it a reproach. It was not only just an eyesore. It brought reproach to the name of God. And seeing God’s people living as a reproach to the name they carried drove Nehemiah to action. Just like it should drive us to action. When we see people who call themselves by the name of Christ living as a reproach to His name… that should drive us to action. Not stakes and torches and pitchforks action… but love and exhortation and discipline action. It should drive us the same way that it drove Nehemiah. It should drive us into the heart of service and leadership and action. It should drive each of us to get busy to fix what’s broken. To repair the breaches. To fight the battles with the enemy. When we see apathy and contentment in our church, as the world around us goes to hell, it should spur us on. It should drive us. The condition of God’s people drives leadership. Finally, the third thing that drives leadership is concern for God’s plan. Look at verse 4:
NEHEMIAH 1:4
Concern for God’s plan drives leadership. I want you to notice Nehemiah’s reaction to the report he received. Was he angry with the people? Was he ready to kill the messenger? Did he bad-mouth the existing leadership who was down there? Did he start throwing blame around? No—he sat down and wept. But why did he weep? Was he emotional about his homeland? Was he sad and nostalgic about how things used to be? No—he wept and mourned because of his concern for God’s plan. Not that he thought God wasn’t going to be able to work out His plan. But that He would have to do it without the people He had chosen from the beginning. That’s why Nehemiah fasted and prayed. It would have been easy to go into a raging fit about who didn’t do this and who didn’t do that. “The reason they’re in the shape they’re in is because of that no-good Zerubbabel.” Or, “If that Ezra had done anything more than just preach, they wouldn’t be in this shape.” “All he ever built was a pulpit.” “If he spent a little less time studying and talking, maybe the people would have gotten something done in all these years.” That would have been the easy thing to do. It would have been easy to point his finger at somebody else and said that they were responsible to accomplish God’s plan. But that’s not how God’s plan works. God shows each of us pieces of His plan. We might see really big pieces of it, but He usually shows us the piece that He wants us to take care of. And the sad thing is that that’s usually the one that we see isn’t getting done. And it bugs us to no end. And we complain to ourselves that it’s not getting done. And we wonder why “they” don’t do something about it. But God has given you a burden about that for a reason. Not for you to be mad that somebody else hasn’t done anything about it. He’s given you a burden about it so that you can do something about it. Nehemiah understood that. He understood the importance of God’s plan. He understood God’s plan for Jerusalem. He was burdened about it. So he wept. And he prayed. And he fasted. All to confirm his part in God’s plan for Jerusalem.
Do you know why you’re here tonight? Do you know why God has placed you here? He’s placed you here for a purpose. God has placed Brushfork Baptist Church here—at this place, in this time—for a reason. He’s placed us here so that we can be a witness to this community of God’s glory. And He’s placed you here in this church as an integral part of that purpose. He’s given you all the tools you need to be a person of character. He’s given you His Spirit to sanctify and cleanse you and strengthen you to live a holy life before Him. He’s opened your eyes to the condition of things and people inside and outside this church. And somewhere in the midst of all the things He’s opened your eyes to… He’s given you a burden for something. In your flesh, that burden might show itself in the things you complain about most. Guess what, if you complain about the preaching, God might be calling you to come and do a better job. If you complain about the facilities, God might be burdening you to do something about it. Complaining and griping is Satan’s twisting of God’s burden He’s giving you. So how is the Lord burdening your heart tonight? What has He opened your eyes to and showed you that needs to be fixed? Then the next question that has to follow is, why has that burden not driven you to leadership?
Before you can be the leader that God has called you to be, you have to have the character He’s called you to have. The first step to fixing the problems that burden you is allowing Jesus to fix you. You have to be saved. You have to be in His will in your own life. That means you have to submit your life to Him. You have to obey Him. You have to long for His company He shows in His Word and in prayer. You have to be living for Him. Otherwise, you have no stake in what happens. And people with no stake have no basis for burden. And if you have no basis for burden, you can’t lead or you can’t complain. Do you have a burden tonight? Isn’t it time you did something about it?