"With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?" Nehemiah 6-7 Sunday Evening Worship Service

And I know I was acting like the tour guide this morning telling you where we're headed, but this this evening will be in Nehemiah 6 and 7, in the first part of 7, and you know, by extension the rest of it.

Next Sunday morning will be in Nehemiah 8 on Sunday morning, and we'll finish Nehemiah 8 Sunday evening.

And we'll do the same thing the following week, Nehemiah 9 Sunday morning, the first half, and then Nehemiah 9, the rest of it Sunday evening.

So we'll be dividing Nehemiah 8 and 9 in half, the first half in the morning, second half in the evening, then Nehemiah 9, the same thing the following week.

So that's where we're headed in the worship service the next few weeks to keep pressing through Nehemiah.

And I'm excited for this studying God's word because Nehemiah is a very rich book.

So Nehemiah is a very rich book, and it is a rich book that is about the building of a wall.

And you would be forgiven if you asked why this much story about this wall?

I mean, why do we have a story in the Bible about this wall around Jerusalem back then?

Why not a story in the Bible about a different construction project?

Like the I-90 construction project doing the mixing bowl, where all those roads come together and old King Mill goes through and Van Dorn dodges through.

I mean, that's got to be one of the most complicated interstate exchanges in the whole world right there.

Right around the corner.

When we moved here, it was such a bane of our existence because our GPS wasn't updated.

Whenever we went anywhere that direction, we just guaranteed we would be lost.

And our GPS, back in those little days, you know, nine years ago we moved here, you had the GPS that was like mounted on your car windshield, so you couldn't see out the windshield anyway.

And going through the mixing bowl is just a picture of our car driving through a grass field, and that's uh it was never encouraging.

But they have completed that thing, you know, with carpool lanes and everything.

I mean, that would be a good story to be in the Bible.

That's a complex construction project.

I looked up the amount of drainage piping that was used in that project, and I forget the number, but I remember reading it going, that can't possibly be true.

You could go to the moon and back without much drainage piping.

It was a complex construction project, not described in the Bible.

Not in the Bible.

There are other massive construction projects in the world that you just like, well, the Bible was completed, that's why it's not in there.

Okay, you go back in time.

There's m the the the construction of the Roman pantheon, the Temple of Diana, the wonders of the world, the Egyptian pyramids.

Do you realize how many people have gotten PhDs and trying to figure out how the Egyptians built their pyramids?

And that happened with the Israelites there.

That should be in the there should be a chapter about that, and it would just solve so much time.

I mean, that's an incredible construction project.

Tombs for pharaohs, maybe?

Or a compass for the seasons, who knows?

But that's not described in the Bible, and you would think that would be a cool building project to have described in the Bible.

We don't get that.

What we get instead is the wall around Jerusalem.

For an entire book, we get a book of the Bible.

66 books in the Bible.

One of them, Nehemiah, devoted to building the wall around Jerusalem.

And so it is worth asking yourself the question, why?

Why the story about the wall?

And the truth is, the reason Nehemiah is such a critical book in the Bible is because the question Nehemiah is after here is is God going to dwell with man?

That's what Nehemiah understands, that Nehemiah is working on Jerusalem to build a wall that will protect Jerusalem from their enemies, so the temple can be secure and stop being raided, so that God can have a place to dwell with mankind.

I mean, that's what we're after here.

Nehemiah wants the answer to the question, will God dwell with mankind?

And if the answer is no, it's not going to be because Nehemiah didn't build a safe place for him.

You know, other nations have idols.

Idols are practically ubiquitous around the world.

Every nation has idols, even offshoots or cults or branches, whatever of Christianity have their own idols between saints that you can adore and altars that you can bend down at, or certain images that you prop on your walls, or whatever.

It is just ubiquitous.

People want idols.

People want some way to represent God with man.

That's what they desire in their heart.

They want to bring down there's something in our human heart that wants to bring God down to us.

This is what both Moses asked at the end of Deuteronomy, and Paul asked in the book of Romans, will anybody ascend up to heaven to bring God down?

Of course not.

You cannot do it.

It's Romans 10.

Can you ascend to heaven and bring God down?

You can't do that, but that's the desire of the human heart is to bring God, to make God more accessible and to bring him down to us.

And you know, this is the way it used to be in the garden before the fall.

Adam and Eve dwelled in the garden in peace and harmony, and God walked with them in the garden and talked with them in the garden.

He dwelled on earth with them.

And then people sinned and they were exiled from the garden.

And even then, God dwelt with them through his promises.

Then he established his nation Israel.

Abraham, he called, and Abraham would make a nation.

The nation would guard the promised seed for the Savior until the Savior arrived.

The laws of Israel made them distinct from the nations of the world so they could have an isolated people group so the Savior could come into the world through that group.

The middle of that people group had the temple, and God dwelt in a very specific way in the temple for the longest time, from 1 Kings 8, probably to the reign of Manasseh.

When Solomon dedicated the temple in 1 Kings 8, it was filled with the Spirit of God in some visible way, and the Spirit of God resided in the temple differently than he lived everywhere else in the world.

I often joke that God lives in New Mexico.

It's beautiful out there, and you know it's not.

It is theologically correct to say that God lives in New Mexico because he is omnipresent.

So he is everywhere, he's certainly there.

Are you going to deny the omnipresence of God?

No.

So you agree with me then that he dwells in New Mexico.

Amen?

Look, it's logically solid, I promise you.

I did the math and everything on the paper.

It works out.

But he dwelt in a more particular way in the temple in the Old Testament, not in the general way that he dwells in the world, but in a particular way.

He took residence in the temple.

And he resided there.

People prayed facing the temple.

And then God departed the temple.

The glory of the Lord loved the glory of Yahweh, left the temple in the days of Manasseh, delivered it over to destruction.

Of course, as it was filled with idols, you remember when Manasseh was finally converted, uh, 2 Kings 21, he's lobbing all the idols out of the temple.

He's trying to purge the temple.

It's too late, you know, and Israel's going to go into captivity.

Well, now they're back in the land.

After their time in captivity as prophesied by Jeremiah, they're back in the land.

The temple has been rebuilt.

We looked at that in the book of Ezra.

And now they're trying to reconstitute temple worship.

They need to protect the city, and it's a desire to bring God back to his people again.

Is God going to come back and dwell on earth with his people again?

I fully think, as I study the book of Nehemiah, that Nehemiah is expecting the Spirit of God to come back and dwell with his people again.

That's what Nehemiah wants.

He wants Yahweh to return to the temple.

That's why there's a book in the Bible about this construction project.

It is a book about building a place for God to dwell with mankind.

Now, when you zoom out a little bit, you realize it doesn't work.

They build the walls, and the book does not end with the Holy Spirit returning to the temple.

In fact, in a few weeks, when we get to the end of the book, you will see the book ends with sadness.

The book ends with sin and compromise and despair, as does almost every book of the Old Testament.

And that's not a coincidence.

That's in the design.

I mean, the Old Testament is one unfulfilled expectation after another, because none of these expectations are fulfilled until Christ comes and fulfills them himself.

And that's the same as true with Nehemiah.

Nehemiah is going to have the presence of the Lord dwell on the earth with mankind in a more even robust and materialistic and manifest way in the person of Christ than the Spirit returning to the temple.

But the point of Nehemiah, the whole book, not just Nehemiah 6, but the entire book, is Nehemiah's effort to secure the city so that he can repopulate the city, so it can support the temple life.

There's a lot of priests and Levites that will be going on the temple.

He wants to support that.

For him to have the priests living in security, he needs a temple around there.

If God is going to dwell with mankind again, the wall has to be completed.

This is a book about temple work.

Even though it's about the wall, it's about securing the temple.

And temple work is about sacrifices.

That's what happened in the Old Testament for sacrifices.

They didn't have the massive worship services like you might envision.

The temple was predominantly a place for sacrifices, and it required a lot of priests to do this.

And so that's what Nehemiah is about getting sacrifices back to going into Jerusalem.

The wall work, all the things about the wall of Nehemiah is really about pointing people to the work of sacrifice, God dwelling with mankind, people offering sacrifices that point towards the future sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

And so when we get to the book of Nehemiah, we see a small group of people.

We see sons and daughters, priests and slaves and landowners, rich and poor, and they're all working together in this book for the common cause of building the wall to secure the city for the sacrificial system.

And because they are laboring for the temple, because they're laboring for this desire to have God dwell with man, they have enemies.

They do not have enemies for political reasons, although their enemies try to present themselves as political enemies.

The enemies we'll see today in Nehemiah 6, they are out there, ostensibly, they're it's a political problem they have with Nehemiah, but it really isn't.

It's a theological problem.

The Samaritans don't like the Jews because the Jews teach that the temple is where the sacrifice takes place, and the Samaritans reject that.

People reject the exclusivity that Yahweh demands.

God demands exclusive worship, and people don't want to worship him exclusively.

People want to worship their idols because their idols feel so close to them.

And so because Nehemiah is rejecting the idols and building a wall to secure the temple, which highlights the sacrifices of Yahweh, their covenant-keeping God, Nehemiah has enemies, and the enemies are God's enemies.

People oppose God because they love sin, and that is fairly consistent throughout the Bible and throughout the ages.

And that's why there is always a temptation in believers' lives to water down our testimony.

There's the temptation in believers' lives to water down moral stands or to make moral compromises around non-believers, because it helps us fit in better, it helps us assimilate with them better, it reduces friction with them.

If you just go along with whatever the cultural cause de jour is, if you just nod and smile about whatever is important to them at the moment, you go along better and more easily with them.

That is the temptation to compromise because listen, people reject Christians not because they don't like you, they reject Christians because they don't like God and the exclusivity that He demands.

This is Nehemiah's world as well.

Eventually you're telling them, listen, everything you think and you know about the world is wrong because Yahweh created the world, not your idols, not it didn't just appear out of nowhere.

It wasn't a big bang.

Yahweh actually created the world.

He spoke it into existence, he made you, and he demands that you worship him, and that's just the basic realities of the world.

You can see that people in the world are going to reject that.

Because it goes contrary to everything they believe about the world.

You know, the world views, not just in the American culture or in the Samaritan culture, but every culture in the world.

Have you noticed that worldviews are generally tailored to allow you to sin in ways you want to sin?

But not the worship of the true God.

And so worship of the true God always has produced enemies.

Nehemiah certainly has his enemies because they will not stand for the exclusive worship of Yahweh.

They have their own temple system, the Samaritans do.

The Arabs wanted not to see a focus on Jerusalem, but back in the Arab world, they were working for a political agenda in the world to elevate the king.

They didn't want Jerusalem as a focus, and they did definitely didn't want people believing that God would dwell in Jerusalem.

So these men that Nehemiah finds himself opposed by, they just want to act like businessmen.

They want to make money, they want to lead a good upper class Middle Eastern life, and they want to have other people do the same.

And here comes this Jew from Susa who rolls into Nehemiah and tells them to abandon their pursuit of pleasure and abandon the things they're holding on to in the world and dedicate their life to building the walls to secure the temple for sacrificials, sacrifices to return.

So Nehemiah has enemies simply for that.

And I think we can learn from Nehemiah's enemies, and I want to give you that as an outline tonight.

Why do we have enemies?

Why does God give us enemies in this world and in this life?

And I'm going to give you, I think, four reasons as we go through this tonight.

Four reasons that we God gives us enemies or four lessons we can learn from enemies.

The first of those four lessons is don't be distracted.

Don't be distracted from godliness, don't be distracted from the work that God would have us do.

God has called us to pursue Christ with a single-minded devotion and enemies that God has given the gospel and the church desire to distract you from those things.

We see this in chapter 6, verses 1 and 2.

When Sanbalat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arab, so remember, Sanbala is the Samaritan.

Tobiah has wormed his way into Judaism.

He's allegedly a Yahweh worshiper.

His name means God is good, and he has a lot of family that lives in Jerusalem.

Sanbalat is the Samaritan, he was the governor of the area until Nehemiah got him ousted.

And Geshem is the Arab who has a lot of political connections, a lot of the money around what's modern-day Jericho and Jordan.

That area falls under Geshem's leadership.

We've seen these three men before.

They've opposed Nehemiah before.

They're still around.

And they are quite an interesting collaboration of enemies.

As I mentioned, you've got the Samaritan, who is, you know, Jewish ancestry somewhere, Tobiah, who is a Jew, and then Geshem, the Arab.

You have the Samaritan religion, the watered-down Judaism religion, and then the Arab religion.

All three of these men have more in common through their hatred of Yahweh and the true God's worship than their differences than you would think.

They have a great partnership and their hostility towards Nehemiah.

And the rest of their enemies, the other ones don't get named.

We'll meet a few other ones in chapter 6 tonight.

They had heard that I built a wall, and there was no breach left in it.

Although up to that time I had not set up the doors and the gates.

Nehemiah doesn't want to exaggerate.

He's like, the wall is done.

The doors aren't quite up yet.

And you know, whatever.

Husbands know this on housing projects or whatever around the house.

Yeah, it's totally done with that project.

The shed is totally built.

I think the door's missing.

Yeah, we haven't got to the door yet.

It's on its way, don't you worry.

That's Nehemiah here.

Everything is done.

The wall is complete.

The enemies have heard about it.

In fairness, the door is not up yet.

Verse 2, Sanbal at the Geshem, Sanbal and Geshem, who's the Arabs, sent to me saying, Come, let us meet together at Hakaphirim in the plain of Onoh.

So this is out towards the Mediterranean Sea.

It's down south of Joffa or modern-day Tel Aviv.

Ashkelon is kind of the closest Jewish city to this area.

It's away from where the Arabs would be.

It's isolated.

Even to this day, there's not a lot of Jewish population out there.

There definitely wasn't a lot of Jewish population in Nehemiah's life out there.

And Sandbal sends him a message saying, I need to have a secret meeting with you out here in the middle of nowhere.

A secret meeting.

A top, don't tell anybody, come alone.

And Nehemiah points out, but they intended to do me harm, you think?

This is not exactly a very covert plan.

I mean, this would be the modern-day equivalent of saying, Hey, I'd like to have something to discuss to you.

Could you meet me in a dark alley at one in the morning?

Leave your cell phone at home.

You're like, I think an ambush is probably coming.

That's where Nehemiah is invited to this ambush, and he rightly concludes they're trying to cause me harm.

They're trying to cause me harm.

Why would they want to lead him away from Jerusalem?

Well, because they want to invade Jerusalem.

Remember that was their plan back when we were in chapter four and chapter five.

That's what they wanted to do.

They wanted to distract Nehemiah from the work so that he would stop working.

They have this whole watch system, if you recall, that was set up to keep watch on the city.

Nehemiah was orchestrating that.

They were working in shifts.

And so now they understand if I get Nehemiah away, they're thinking, if we get Nehemiah away from the city, then we can finally ambush them.

Nehemiah says, they're trying to cause me harm.

Verse 3.

Nehemiah carries on.

I sent messengers to them saying, I'm doing a great work, and I cannot come down.

Why should the work stop?

Well, I leave it and I come down to you.

So Nehemiah is playing along with this.

Like he's he's acting like he doesn't know it's an ambush.

You know, he's notice he's not denying the work of the wall.

Earlier, they were accusing him of working the wall, and he was playing coy with them.

Of course, he'd already showed them the letters that he had permission to rebuild the wall.

He already had the zoning permits and everything.

But still, he could have denied it or he could have played dumb.

Here he says, you know, look, I am building the wall, and it's a great work.

It's a massive work.

You would be so impressed.

That's kind of pouring salt on their wounds, isn't it?

Oh, you would be stoked if you saw this wall.

It's huge.

Pity you're not here.

But I'm not going to leave it to come meet with you.

And verse 4, they were persistent.

They kept sending messengers four times in this way.

And I answered them in the same manner.

They kept trying to wear him down and wear him down.

Notice that even their persistence in this, that is in itself a distraction.

Not just the request to come come leave, but their persistence in it.

They keep repeatedly.

Or is that just me?

You understand the persistent Jesus tells the parable, the persistent widow will get what she wants because of her persistence.

She keeps pursuing it.

And that's what's happening with Nehemiah.

He's trying to push this off and push this off, but they keep pursuing them.

Now, listen, not all distractions are sinful in and of themselves.

You know, let's transition here from Nehemiah to our own Christian life.

We're not building a wall for God to come dwell with us, but we are pursuing godliness in our life.

We are supposed to have a single-minded devotion to pursuing Jesus Christ.

God has placed us in the world.

He's given us a vocational calling in this world.

He's given us a family in this world.

We're supposed to be magnifying Christ in our family, magnifying God at work as we bring the gospel into the world.

We're supposed to be evangelizing our neighbors and coworkers, and we're supposed to be bringing the gospel into the world.

That's what God has called us to do.

And yet there are so many things that distract us from that, if we're being honest.

We are so easily distracted from wherever the latest news is to the presidential election to politics to family matters that aren't that significant with extended family or things going around the country that you don't really have a lot to do with.

Everything gets distracting.

It's so easy to be distracted.

It's so easy to take your eyes off of Christ.

I always have a one particular seminary student in my mind who I thought was gifted.

He was a friend of Deezer and my, and then he wanted to take a year off of seminary just to go work for his dad for a while.

And it was just one of those things that you knew if that guy left, he was not coming back.

And it's not sinful to go work for your dad, of course, but you could tell in this guy's life it was a distraction from what the Lord had called him to do.

And of course, he never came back to seminary.

He eventually got more and more involved in secular work and eventually ended up even apostatizing from the Christian faith, and you know, which I'm thankful for the Lord exposed that before he became a pastor.

But you just can sometimes see how distractions set in in someone's life, and when they are fed, and they are fed and they are fed, they grow, and you're no longer working for the Lord, but you're trying to put out all these fires that you allow to burn around you.

Luke chapter 9, verse 57, Jesus talks about this.

Luke 9:57

He's going along the road, and someone comes up to Jesus and says, Lord, I will follow you wherever you go.

Remember what Jesus tells him?

Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Someone else comes running up to him and says, I'll follow you.

And Jesus says to the guy, Okay, follow me.

Come along then.

And the man says, But Lord, first let me go and bury my father.

Let me go put him put him in the in the ground.

And of course, his father probably hadn't died.

It's probably an idiom for taking care of family situations before I follow Jesus.

And Jesus said to him, Listen, let the dead bury their own dead.

But as for you, go out and proclaim the kingdom of God.

I mean, you're not going to get a more clear instruction than that.

The guy says, I want to follow you, and Jesus says, Okay, let's go.

And the guy says, Ah, I got some things to take care of at home first.

I'll totally be ready to leave in three years, though.

And Jesus says, Why don't you let those things take care of themselves, man?

They're not significant.

Let them take care of themselves.

And you just go preach the kingdom.

Jesus doesn't even change it.

He doesn't even say go with me.

He doesn't even say follow me.

He says, just go out there.

You don't have to go physically with me.

Go wherever you want to.

Just preach.

Share the proclaim the kingdom of God.

Another person comes up, Luke 9, verse 61.

Luke 9:61

Another person, a third person comes up and says, I'll follow you, Lord.

But first let me say farewell to those at my house.

Again, it's not wrong if you're going to go on a short-term mission trip.

Go say goodbye to your parents, of course.

You'll probably need to ride to the airport.

Jesus isn't saying it's sinful to say goodbye to people before you go to work in the morning, but he's rightly perceiving the tendency towards distraction in people's hearts.

And Jesus tells him in Luke 9, verse 62, no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.

Luke 9:62

You want to follow Christ?

Follow Christ.

If you want to follow Christ with one eye in the rearview mirror and thinking about the life that would have been, you're not fit for the kingdom of God.

Give up on it, man.

Either follow Christ or don't.

But make some decisions in life.

That's the nature of distractions.

Those who are enemies of the gospel, one way to be an enemy of the gospel is to outright oppose Christ.

But the most common way you'll see the gospel opposed in your life is through people that just want to distract you.

They want to give you things that aren't eternally significant, to fill up your time, to cause you to manage them.

And it keeps you from reading the word.

It keeps you from spending time with your family.

It keeps you from working at your own secular job with all of your strength and your attention.

It keeps you from glorifying the Lord as you're supposed to, because there are people who their goal in life is to distract.

And certainly Nehemiah has encountered that.

And his enemy shift, by the way, from lure.

To lies here.

They started trying to lure him away out into an ambush, and now they go to lies down in verse 5.

In the same way Sanballat, he's a Samaritan, for the fifth time sent his servant to me.

This time the guy shows up with an open letter in his hand.

So if you if you were really, if it was really a correspondence between the former governor and the current governor, that's the exchange here, you would expect the letter to be sealed.

And probably have the governor's seal on it.

You'd expect some kind of uh diplomatic propriety here.

But instead the letter comes, it's open, clearly left open.

And it says, uh, verse 6, it was written in the letter.

Uh it was reported among the nations, and Geshem also says it.

That's ridiculous.

Um Geshem also says that you, the Jews, intended to rebel.

When somebody says everybody is saying, and also this one person is saying, you know that not everybody is saying, right?

You understand that?

Everybody says that they don't like this.

And but really, I've also heard it from my wife.

That's true.

Everybody says usually means my wife says.

I hope I don't get in trouble for saying that later.

That's the case here.

Everybody, all the nations are saying this.

Also, my good friend Geshem thinks it too.

So I thought it's important to tell you.

I wouldn't be gossiping.

Geshem also believes that you and all the Jews intend to rebel.

And that's why you're building the wall.

According to these reports, you wish to become their king.

Now, if this was a serious accusation, it would be sent in a secret letter, not in an open letter for everybody to read.

And of course we know this isn't true.

The letter keeps going in verse 7, it gets better.

You've also set up prophets to proclaim concerning you in Jerusalem.

There's the king in Judah, and now the king will hear of these reports.

So let us come and take counsel together.

So do you catch this ambush here?

He tells Nehemiah, you are seeking to overthrow the king, and you've got prophets stationed everywhere.

Remember what happened when David died.

There's the same kind of shenanigans happened with his son that set prophets up to proclaim that he was king.

That was not God's plan.

So he's accusing Nehemiah of doing that.

You've paid prophets to proclaim that you're the king.

You're buying these false prophets to announce that you're the king, and this is a huge deal, and the king's gonna hear about it.

So we need a secret meeting to talk about it.

What do you want a secret meeting when you just publish an open letter to everybody?

Everybody can read the now you want a secret meeting?

I mean, come on, this is the equivalent of saying, listen, here's a here's a prayer request.

So-and-so is going through this.

Let me announce it to my whole small group.

My whole Bible study is gonna hear this prayer request, but hey, don't tell anybody.

It's super secret.

You just told your whole Bible study.

And now you're saying, don't tell anybody?

I think you lack a little bit of integrity with your.

This is so secret.

I can only tell my 20 closest friends.

That's how secret this is.

You 20, don't tell anybody.

Everybody always tells one person, you know that, right?

That's what Nehemiah is dealing with here.

This is a super secret thing that I accidentally wrote in this open letter for everybody to read and know, and we need an immediate secret meeting about this.

So I wrote back Nehemiah, verse 8.

Well, I sent back this, so it says sent here in the SV, but he wrote back a response.

No such things as you say have been done.

You're inventing them out of your own minds.

You're making these up.

You liar?

I mean, he just straight up calls him out.

You want a private conversation?

You gotta be joking.

You are a liar.

So first Nehemiah was playing along licey, like, oh, the wall is too important for me to come meet with you.

Now he just straight up says, You are a liar.

And he rebukes it.

He was confronted with a lie and he rebukes it publicly.

The accusation was made publicly, Nehemiah rebukes him publicly.

He was slandered publicly, Nehemiah responds publicly.

Which is okay to do, by the way.

If somebody makes something public, you hear this with the book reviews all the time.

You know, somebody writes a book and announces it publicly, and you hear people say you shouldn't criticize that book unless you go to the author first.

Yeah, probably not.

It's the nature of publishing a book.

It's kind of public.

You're allowed to disagree with the book.

And I get that principle from here.

If somebody says something publicly, you can respond publicly.

It's okay.

Nehemiah certainly responds with bold confidence here.

Nehemiah lets you know what's going on in his thinking, verse 9.

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.

I love Nehemiah's prayer here.

Because so far he's Nehemiah's like standing strong to his enemies.

He's being bold.

He's going toe-to-toe with them.

He's saying, You guys are liars, you former governor, get out of here.

I'm not going to fall for this trap.

You're not going to ambush me.

And Nehemiah seems bold and strong and confident, but the strength is not from himself.

You get that.

Nehemiah knows he's not being strong because of himself, because he immediately prays.

Oh, God, strength in my hands.

Nehemiah knows he is not adequate for this at all.

This is the Lord's work in his life.

So enemies will often try different approaches, trying to distract you, trying to lie about you.

Our job is to not be distracted from what the Lord has called us to do.

The Lord hasn't called us to build a wall, but the Lord has called us to live with a single-minded attention towards him and for his glory as we bring the gospel to the world.

And I pray that you embrace that and you reject distractions.

Second lesson.

Don't be deceived.

The first is don't be distracted.

Second lesson, don't be deceived.

Down in verse 10.

So I went to the house of Shemiah, the son of Deliah, son of Mehetabel, who was confined to his home.

Now, this phrase confined to his home, it could mean that he's afraid of death himself, and so he's locked up in his home.

It could be that he was ceremonially unclean, but I doubt it because Nehemiah probably wouldn't have gone and met with him.

It could also be that he's kind of prophetically confining himself to his home to try to give credence to the prophecy he's about to give.

So here's the guy who says, I'm locked up at home, I cannot come out.

Okay?

I'm locked up at home, quarantine time, I'm shut up in my house, I can't come out, Nehemiah.

So you want to meet?

You got to come to my house.

So Nehemiah goes.

Nehemiah goes and visits him, knocks on his door, comes on in, and the man says, Let's meet together in the house of God within the temple.

Let us close the doors of the temple, for they're coming to kill you.

They're coming to kill you by night.

So this man, according to Second Chronicles, if he's related to who we think he is, he's probably descended from a priest.

He's acting here like a prophet.

He is being a false prophet.

And Nehemiah is going to refer to him as the false prophet later on in this chapter.

And he's acting like he has a prophetic gift here.

He's telling Nehemiah, the Lord spoke to me, and you're going down this very night.

And cue the ominous music.

So you better, Nehemiah, run and lock yourself in the temple?

Well, that's an odd place to go hide.

You're not just allowed to go hide in the temple.

There's specific rules about where you can go.

You can go in the courtyard outside the temple, which would be a very bad place to hide.

It'd be the worst place to hide because everybody could see you from all around.

To go into the actual temple would be a sin unless you were a priest and you were on your priestly duties.

You could appeal for refuge, like this city of refuge kind of logic, if you met specific criteria, which Nehemiah certainly did not meet.

And so there's no way that Nehemiah could go into the temple.

So this is one of the best ways to discover who a false prophet is when they're telling you to sin, okay?

The false prophets that say you should do this, and you're like, I think that's probably sin.

No, it's okay, I'm a prophet.

No, it does not count.

Does not count.

So this man's telling Nehemiah to sin by hiding in the temple.

And forget the temple part of it.

Nehemiah is trying to get this guy, again, distracted.

He's trying to take him out of building the temple.

Telling him to go hide in the temple?

You gotta be joking.

The whole army would probably defect on Nehemiah.

What would you do if you're the watchman on the wall that he's stationed all around Jerusalem and you're looking for Nehemiah?

Oh, he's hiding in the temple because they think he's gonna, somebody's gonna ambush him tonight.

Oh, great.

You left me on the wall.

Thanks, Nehemiah.

That's what the ambush is.

In verse 12, Nehemiah says, I'm not gonna do it.

He said, Well, in verse 11, he says, Should such a man as I run away?

And what man such as I could go in the temple and live?

I'm not gonna go in.

He says, I'm I'm too, I, I'm I have a position, I'm governor here.

I'm not gonna go hide in the temple.

And also, I'm just I'm not a priest.

God would kill me.

Notice Nehemiah makes this straight theological.

I go in the temple, God would strike me dead.

Nehemiah has the right understanding of himself.

I will not go in.

Verse 12.

I understood and saw that God had not sent him.

He was a liar, but he had pronounced the prophecy against me because Tobiah and Sandbala had hired him.

Do you pause real quick?

Pause.

What is Sanbala and Tobiah just accused Nehemiah of doing in the verse before this?

Like you've hired false prophets, you've hired prophets to proclaim your king.

It's so interesting that the very things that wicked people often accuse you of doing are the very things they're doing themselves.

Have you ever noticed that?

That's what is happening here with Nehemiah.

They accuse him of hiring false prophets.

Next verse.

Oh, here's a false prophet they hired.

They must have forgotten about that.

For this purpose, Nehemiah says, I was hi 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.

And you might think, oh, sticks and stones break your bones, words never hurt you, kind of thing.

Well, no, taunting him would be a significant deal because it would undermine his credibility.

He's the Lord, clearly the Lord's man to be leading Israel through this, and so he's not going to subject himself to ridicule.

He's not going to tear down the authority that God has given him.

And there are lies that Jesus faced too.

He ran into the same kind of false prophets, the same kind of so-called religious leaders that were prophesying wrongly against him.

The religious leaders of Israel lied about Jesus.

Do you remember Luke 23, verse 2?

Luke 23:2

They begin to accuse Jesus, saying, We found this man misleading our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar.

And saying that he himself is Christ, the Messiah, a king.

And you remember this that Jesus never told people not to give money to Caesar.

They asked him, Should you pay taxes to Caesar?

And he said, Render unto Caesar that which is his.

He said, Pay taxes.

Three days later, not even three days later, 48 hours later, they turn that to he told us not to pay taxes.

They lie, enemies of the Lord lie.

Don't be deceived by the lies.

And you might think, who would be lying about me?

Who would be lying about what I'm supposed to do?

Listen, if people tell you to sin, it's not of the Lord.

It's just a basic spiritual principle.

Somebody tells you to sin, it's not, it is never God's will for you to sin.

Ever.

And if one of your like very godly friends encourages you to go sin, don't listen to him.

It doesn't matter how godly he is.

Don't sin.

I mean, this is that's pretty much basic Christianity right there.

God hates sin.

Don't do it.

You're like, yeah, but that guy's been a Christian longer than me, and he's doing it.

Nope, doesn't it doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter.

Don't be deceived.

So one way to take your focus off of serving Christ is to be distracted by all the things in the world that distract.

Another way to take your focus off of serving Christ is to be deceived, is to fall into sin, is to believe lies.

Third lesson from enemies is to persevere.

To persevere.

Nehemiah says, verse 14, remember San Bal and Tobiah, oh my God, according to these things they did.

And also the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who wanted to make me afraid, by the way, before we go to verse 15, that's one of the few female prophets in the Old Testament.

I think there's three or four.

This is the only false female prophet in the Old Testament.

The others, uh Miriam, and some others that escaped my mind right now, but this is the first false female prophet you see in the Old Testament.

They were hired by Sam Bal and Tobiah to spread lies about Nehemiah.

And of course, people believe prophets.

There's something in us that when somebody stands up and says, I'm a prophet, the Lord says this.

You're like, I just don't know what to make of it.

Let me tell you what to make of it.

Don't listen to it.

Don't listen to it.

Don't listen to so-called prophets.

They shouldn't have.

You see, you know, here's a YouTube video.

People used to send me these videos.

Here's a video of, you know, a new prophecy for our generation.

Here's a prophet that says this is gonna happen.

I'm not gonna watch more than a millisecond of that.

Won't even register the click.

Verse 15.

So the wall was finished on the 25th day of the month, the Lul.

In fifty-two days.

That's crazy.

That is a fast construction project.

They got that wall up less than two months.

And when 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.

I mean, this is a lot of work, and the people recognized this had to be that God was working through them.

Nehemiah stayed focused.

He stayed on task.

Moreover, in those days, the nobles of Judah sent many letters to Tobiah, and Tobiah's letters came to him.

So Tobiah apparently is living in Jerusalem.

Sanbalad is up in the north, and uh the Arab is over in Jordan.

But Tobiah is living in Jerusalem, and he's getting mail, and he's sending out mail, and he is organizing this resistance from inside the city.

For many in Judah were bound by oath to him because he was the son-in-law of Shekaniah, the son of Harah, and his son Jehoiakim had taken the daughter of Meshualim, the son of Barakiah, as his wife.

A complicated relationship.

Short version of it is this guy has married into power and is in Jerusalem.

And nobody wants to cross him because of whose family is.

So everybody goes along with him.

And so he is organizing this revolt from inside of the city.

And they spoke of, also they spoke of his good deeds in my presence and reported my words to him, and Tobiah sent letters to make me afraid, which is just annoying.

You know, Nehemiah is trying to do the work, avoid these ambushes, and people are walking by him talking about what a good guy Tobiah is.

You know, like, hey, nice weather outside today.

Oh, Tobiah is so brilliant.

Do you know about how what a genius this guy is?

You should hang out with him.

You know, have a good day.

Not helpful.

Not helpful.

But Nehemiah refuses to get distracted, and he works with his hand to the plow and finishes the task.

You know, the appropriate lesson for us from this is that you're called by God to fight sin, to live a radical life, to support missions, to stay above reproach, to care for your family, to teach your children godliness, to spread the gospel in the world as much as you're able.

That's what God has called you to do.

And when you lead a holy life and you do those things, those who oppose you are put to shame.

Titus 2, verse 7 says this show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works.

Titus 2:7

In your teaching, show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent will be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.

You might think, yeah, I don't have many enemies.

If you can't think of many enemies that you have, try witnessing more.

You'll get some, I promise.

Tell more people the gospel, and you will find yourself with more people who reject you.

Take a more radical stand for Christ.

And you will find people that are opposed to you for your stands for Christ.

Even other believers might be opposed to you.

If they feel like you're living too much of a godly life, it starts to convict them.

You might even find opposition from inside the camp that way.

If you try to lead a radical Christian life in a way that makes you a jerk, then you deserve your enemies.

I want to be clear about that.

If you're obnoxious and you have enemies because you're obnoxious, then your enemies are not gospel enemies, they're your enemies because you're obnoxious.

But it's better that you lead a godly life so you put your enemies to shame as you take stands for Christ, then you know.

This is Peter's point in 1 Peter 3, verse 15.

1 Peter 3:15

Make it offense to anyone who asks you for the reason to the hope that's within you.

And do it with gentleness and respect and with a good conscience, so when you're slandered, those who avow your good behavior will be put to shame.

If you're obnoxious when you're evangelizing, you'll get enemies who are upset about your obnoxiousness.

Jesus is not glorified that way.

But if you're kind and you're gentle and you have respect while you're taking radical stands for Christ, then your enemies will be the ones who are put to shame.

That's certainly what happened in Nehemiah's life.

Chapter 6 ends with Nehemiah's enemies walking around him talking about what a good guy Tobiah is.

I mean, that's just got to bug Nehemiah right off the wall, probably.

It's gonna drive him up the wall, I think.

But nevertheless, he does persevere, which leads to our final lesson to be vigilant.

When the wall had been built, chapter 7, verse 1, uh, well, the word persevere, sorry, is from verse 19.

They spoke of my good deeds in our presence, and nevertheless he stuck with it.

Chapter 7, verse 1, the wall had been built, I set up the doors, and the gatekeepers and the singers, the Levites had been appointed.

I gave my brother Hanani, and Hananiah, the governor of the castle and uh of the castle, charge over Jerusalem, for he was 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're still standing guard, let them shut and bar the doors, appoint guards from among the inhabitants of Jerusalem, some at their guardposts, and some in front of their own homes.

The city was wide and large, but the people within it were so few, and no houses had been rebuilt.

So this is a very dangerous situation.

The work is done, but it is a dangerous situation because there's a lot of space here and not a lot of people in the city.

They need more people in the city.

Ezra led an ex uh led a return earlier.

There's gonna be more people that keep coming back, but Nehemiah's goal is to repopulate the city so they can return to the temple worship.

That's the point.

The wall is done now.

So, in a sense, they're more secure because you can bar the doors and the enemies can't get in.

But you have to open the door for business and commerce.

And so Nehemiah is not naive.

He doesn't think the enemies are gonna disappear.

He knows they'll be waiting for an opportune time.

And so that's why he says, don't open the gate until it's hot.

If you touch the lock and it doesn't burn your hand, don't open it.

The idea being it'll be harder for your enemies to attack.

If it's hot, they can't just stand up there and wait.

They'll need to go away for food or water, open it when it's hot, and then close it right away with the guards still there.

So you cannot get ambushed.

He is still being vigilant, the wall is done, and he has not given up.

He's put the godly person in charge of it.

He's going to return back to the capital, but he's going to leave it under the authority of a very godly man.

In fact, the godliest man he can find.

Notice how he's described in verse 7.

He was a more faithful and God-fearing man than many.

That's probably an understatement.

Nehemiah has shamed and silenced his enemies, but they didn't go away, and Nehemiah remains on the lookout for them.

Opposition to what God has called Nehemiah to do is perpetually lurking just outside the city walls.

It was Andrew Bernard who said, Quote, let us be as watchful after the victory as we were before the battle, and that is a great principle for even New Testament believers.

Now, this is the rest of chapter 7 is going to be the list of people that did return to repopulate the city.

This, as I mentioned, is largely from Ezra chapter 2.

Ezra 2 · chapter mention

And so the idea is that these have populated more and more.

You can draw your eyes just over to verse 62 real quick and see the sons of Delilah, and uh you've seen that they have already been compromised.

The people that came back are the ones that are trying to thwart Nehemiah with their false prophets.

Verse 64 of chapter 7.

They sought the registration among those who enrolled in the genealogies but weren't found there.

They were excluded from the priesthood as unclean.

Nehemiah didn't let people who were not registered become priests.

The governors told them they were not able to partake of the most holy food until a priest with the um and the thurium should arise.

In other words, he did not let people just say, Oh, honest, I'm a Levite.

Nope.

So Nehemiah is guarding the gates to let keep the enemies from coming in, and he's guarding the temple to keep false priests from coming in.

He is staying on the lookout.

The whole assembly of those people that resettled the area, 42,000.

That may seem like a lot, but it is a massive, massive city.

Verse 73, the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, some of the people, the temple servants, and all of Israel lived in their towns.

When the seventh month had come, the people of Israel were in their towns.

So this is how Nehemiah's wall construction project ends.

The book of Nehemiah shifts in chapter 8 and 9, where we're going to look at how Ezra reads and look at those the next few Sundays.

But I want to go back to where we began today.

Why this story in the Bible?

Why the wall building?

Why not another construction project?

Because Nehemiah is expecting the Lord to come dwell with them.

We know how the story ends, and it ends very differently than Nehemiah expected.

It ends with compromise in Nehemiah at the end of the book.

But we know that the Spirit of God does again return to earth.

He does come to dwell in the temple, just not as Nehemiah was expecting.

Rather, God himself, the Son of God, comes incarnate in human flesh with the human nature, and he goes to Jerusalem.

He goes to the temple.

He tips over the tables and drives the money changers out and proclaims that this is his father's house.

The spirit of the Lord was upon him when he was doing those things.

It was even said when he cleansed the temple, they should have known this was going to happen because the prophecy said the zeal of the Lord, the zeal for this father's house, would consume the Savior and the Messiah.

And so Nehemiah's work on the temple was not for nothing.

It did allow Jerusalem to grow and be reestablished.

It's just the Holy Spirit did not come and move back into the temple.

Instead, the Savior himself came to the temple and claimed it as his own place.

Another way the book ends in an unexpected way.

This is what Jesus encounters.

The people Nehemiah was trying to keep out, the sandbals and Tobias, had actually moved into the temple.

We'll see them physically in the temple before Nehemiah is done, even, but in Jesus' lifetime, he was most opposed by those who had most access to the temple.

Don't let that point miss you.

Jesus was most opposed by those with most access to the temple.

The biggest haters of Jesus were the most religious.

It was the religious leaders of Israel who were thoroughly opposed to him because they rejected his exclusive claims for worship.

They didn't want to worship him.

And so they rejected God.

And Jesus told them listen, you can you can't worship the Father unless you worship me.

And when he said that, they took rocks to put him to death because he kept, though he was a man, he kept making himself Out to be equal with God.

The most religious people, the people that Nehemiah feared the most, eventually did take control of the temple, and Jesus had to drive them out.

And thirdly, Jesus became the religious leader who stood for God.

So the first unexpected twist in the ending of this book is that the Spirit of God comes in the form of the person of Jesus.

Second, that Jesus eventually expels the enemies from inside the temple.

And the third way that's kind of a surprising of this is that Jesus becomes the religious leader who stood for God.

Jesus, like Nehemiah, came to Jerusalem to claim the temple for God.

Like Nehemiah, he came to God's people to proclaim forgiveness of sins through sacrifice.

Only Jesus himself would be the sacrifice.

Unlike Nehemiah, Jesus was sinless.

Like Nehemiah, Jesus was lied about.

He was lied to.

He was attacked by enemies.

He was attacked by friends.

He was attacked by strangers.

He was betrayed by those who knew him.

Much like God protected Nehemiah through his life, God protected Jesus through his life.

His first sermon in his own town of Nazareth, they seek to put him to death by throwing him off the cliff.

It was not his time yet, and he was allowed to depart.

God providentially protected both Nehemiah and Jesus.

In Nehemiah's day, the enemies circled outside the city, waiting for weakness in their leader.

In Jesus' life, they circled him.

In Nehemiah's day, they hovered around the city like vultures, waiting to pounce.

In Jesus' life, they didn't hover around Jerusalem.

They hovered around Christ.

They followed Jesus wherever he went.

They spied on him.

They waited for any weakness to jump in and attack and betray him.

So much so that Jesus had to use all the subterfuge even for the Last Supper.

He had to send a secret messenger with a secret sign and get a secret room to have the Last Supper so he wouldn't be betrayed.

He really does follow in the footsteps of Nehemiah.

And he gave them no window to betray him until it was the appointed time by God.

Jesus lived a life above reproach.

He relied on the Father and the Holy Spirit for strengthening his ministry, and he never sinned, and yet he was killed anyway.

I hope from the book of Nehemiah so far you've taken this lesson that God has called you to single-minded devotion to Christ.

Nehemiah really does, in a sense, point forward towards Jesus Christ.

Nehemiah is trying to rebuild Jerusalem for sacrifices.

Jesus is the sacrifice.

Nehemiah was trying to protect the city.

Jesus reclaims the temple.

The temple does belong to Jesus Christ.

And now, of course, the temple is the church as the Holy Spirit dwells in us.

And God calls us, like Nehemiah, to have a single-minded devotion to doing the work of the ministry, to preaching the gospel, to encouraging one another to grow the temple through evangelism and to strengthen each other spiritually, as we talked about in this morning's message.

And I pray that you, as a Christian people, would not be distracted from that task.

That you would not let the things of this world, this can be so loud, distract you from what God has called you to do with your life as we wait for the return of our Lord and Savior, Jesus, from heaven.

Lord, we're grateful for the book of Nehemiah and the example it is to us of single-minded devotion to you.

I pray for this congregation and pray that we would have a single-minded devotion, that we would learn from Nehemiah's example, that we would not be distracted by things in the world for clamor for our attention, we wouldn't be deceived by people in the world that lie to us about what is biblical and what is not.

That we would persevere, that we wouldn't grow lazy in our Christian work.

But having put our hands to the plow, we would persevere all the way till the end.

That we would be vigilant, keeping watch over any threat to our spiritual life, so that we can stand for you in boldness.

Lord, empower us to lead a life that is pleasing and honoring to you.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to meet you personally at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and other church information is on our website at ibc.church.

If you want information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been an encouragement to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.