"Why We Fight" Nehemiah 4 Sunday Evening Worship Service

So a illustration that I um never tell because it's been banned, but I'm I'm bringing it out tonight was when I guest spoke at a church in a town somewhere that doesn't need to be named, and the pastor took me out to eat afterwards with some of the small group leaders and one of the other elders and associate pastor at this restaurant, and we stayed uh late, and uh in fact one of you may have even been there with us that night, and we went out back and uh afterwards and we were hanging out, one of the guys had a landscaping company at his landscaping truck out there, and so we're behind this restaurant in the middle of the night, and some car drives up behind us and boxes us in, and these two guys get out and they want to fight us.

So, this is a collection of pastors uh and elders and one landscaper, and we're being challenged to a fight in the back of this parking lot.

Uh one of the guys had obviously been drinking too much, definitely too much, to be driving.

I think one of us may have suggested that to him, that it wasn't right for him to be driving, and then that was that.

And so they get out and they start, you know, pushing us around.

And we've got one of the guys is married, and his wife is with us, and there's a small group leader from the church, this lady who's with us out there.

So there's I mean there's like six of us, I think six or seven, and a couple of ladies, and these two guys are trying to fight us, and uh they grab me and they push me up against the truck, and they're holding me against the truck, and um the guy's like poking me in my eye, and he's telling me to say that you know he's okay to drive kind of thing, and he puts his hands in my mouth and is like making my mouth say it's okay for me to drive.

Uh, with lots of other words in there that I won't repeat.

And I'm thinking, like, am I really gonna get in?

This is as close as I'll ever be in my life to a bar fight.

I mean, in a parking lot at midnight after I just preached at some conference.

I mean, what is happening here?

And uh, you know, the pastor of the church is telling the two girls, you go inside, okay, go inside.

And what all the guys in the situation know is he's telling the girls to go inside so that we can fight with more of a clean conscience.

Um but the girls I think were picking up on this, and they were not going any there.

We're like, no, we're staying here, and it's like, you know, four, I forget exactly, four or five on two, and seven on two if you count the girls, and uh, which I was willing to count at this point.

And and when the guy's finger went into my mouth, like it was right between my teeth, I thought, like, if I'm going to fight, this is the moment right here.

Like, this is a pretty good jump on the dude.

When his I mean, I could I could I don't I've never tried to bite someone's finger off, but I feel like I could come pretty close right here to do just that.

You know, I'm a chaplain with the sheriff's department at this point in my life.

I'm like, you know, pastoring and uh so maybe not a bar fight, I guess, is not the best way to get on.

But I've got all these complex moral situations that I'm gonna like turn the other cheek, but there's girls here.

So part of that was a justification.

Like, there's girl, we need to protect the ladies was part of the justification, but you know, that wasn't really true.

They could run, I guess.

And after all, we did tell them to go inside, and they refused.

And so at that moment I thought, uh, I guess we just take this then.

I mean we're not gonna fight these two dudes, and I guess we just take them.

And yeah, so we just kind of in my heart I settled, like I'm just gonna not fight.

And then the landscaper dude stands up in the back of his pickup truck and grabs a specific kind of shovel that is good for excavating sprinklers.

It's a nasty, nasty little shovel.

And this dude was the biggest of us, and he'd been sitting and down in the pickup truck the whole time.

And when he stands up with this massive shovel uh in his hand, he he was not having, you know, Matthew, five arguments in his head about loving your neighbor.

You know, and uh seeing the guy with the shovel sobered up these two dudes really quick.

Um, I think they did a quick win-loss analysis and realized they'd be picking up their teeth probably in a few moments.

And so uh they decided to let us go and they're got in their their car and you know, backed away and and and drove away.

And it was just a surreal experience.

And when they left, the one guy who was uh kind of a reformed Presbyterian pastor, he then proceeded to pray an imprecatory prayer over them as they drove away.

Like, Lord, when they get in an accident, we pray they don't hurt anyone, and then when they're drinking their food out of straws for the next year of their life that they reflect on their wrongdoing and you would bring them to the point of repentance.

And I was like, whoa.

Then uh the two ladies started apologizing.

We're so sorry, we weren't listening to you, we should have followed you.

You you you wanted us to go inside and get help, and we should have done that and say we were saying, and the truth is there was nobody was thinking go inside and get help.

It's not what we were thinking.

Um, but we received their apology and restored them.

This is a situation where we were not looking in any sense for trouble, didn't know who those two guys were, never saw them before, never will likely see them.

Again, and the ethical dilemma in the back of your head is when do you fight and when do you run?

And I tell you that illustration just to let you know that in much of life, you know, you can make these principles that are somewhat simple, but then in much of life is where the simplicity of those principles intersects with the reality.

And it's it's much more difficult to apply biblical principles when you're faced with a complex moral situation.

So tonight I titled the sermon Why We Fight.

Last week we looked at Why We Work, and I framed the discussion of Nehemiah chapter three around the idea that God made the world in a way that it requires us to work.

We have to provide for our families.

God did not make the world so that manna grows out of the ground for everybody to have enough to eat, so they don't have to work.

Although God could certainly do that because he did for 40 years of human existence.

He fed the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness.

They did not need to work, but God has not, in his providence, directed the worr most of the world to operate with those parameters.

Instead, God has allowed us and required us to work.

So we looked at that last week.

This week I want to kind of carry on that same theme, the same way of framing the question of the chapter.

This time, instead of why work, I'm gonna phrase it this way, why do we fight?

Why does God create the world in such a way that it requires people, for example, to have swords or to modernize it, people to have guns and weapons and military and armed law enforcement and those kind of things.

Why did God make the world so that we have to work in Nehemiah 3 and so that we have to fight in Nehemiah chapter 4?

Nehemiah 4 · chapter mention

The scene, as it has been set, is that the Israelites are rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem.

We got kind of the introductory credits last week in Nehemiah 3.

We have the names and the family and the building assignments of everybody who is there.

It is the Jews from Jerusalem, most of whom are building right outside of their homes.

You have other people that have come from surrounding lands, some people from the Arab lands, some people from the area behind the river, and these were not the wealthy and powerful people.

These were the wealthy and powerful people didn't go because their governors had intimidated them.

But there are others who went kind of to lend a helping hand with the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem.

Perhaps they had sympathy for the Israelites, perhaps they wanted to curry favor with Nehemiah, who was a royal official.

Their motives, I'm sure, were mixed when you have this many people.

Of course, there's mixed motives.

You also have people from Jericho that came.

You know, a day or two walk to get there to work on a wall that's not even their wall and would serve no purpose.

Remember, nobody attacks Jericho through Jerusalem.

They attack Jerusalem through Jericho.

And so this was just probably a purely an altruistic act to help their fellow Jews rebuild the temple wall.

But as we mentioned last week, or be rebuild the wall of the city, as we mentioned last week, not everybody is okay with this plan.

There are those who are opposed to it, namely the governor and some of the other royal officials.

Anything that built up the strength of Jerusalem would they perceive as antagonistic, even though the emperor had signed off on this.

They were uh the governor of the area under which Jerusalem fell, and they had their own power.

The headquarters of their state, their uh provincial capital was across the Jordan River, modern-day Jordan.

So they did not want to see another strong city built up.

Jerusalem was not able to be ruled effectively by them.

They knew this, and they did not want to see their power dissipated.

They did not want a strong Jerusalem.

They were Samaritans.

Some of them were, some of these opponents were.

The Samaritans had religious uh dog in this fight, so to speak.

They didn't want to see temple worship restored to Yahweh.

For the Samaritans, you worshiped on their own mountain up in northern Israel.

That's where you were supposed to worship God, not at the temple in Jerusalem, which is fine and well when the temple in Jerusalem is torn down.

But now the temple has been built up, and now there's a wall around Jerusalem.

The main argument in favor of the Samaritan religion will be cast on the wayside.

And so when Sanbala heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews.

So the first reason that we fight, the first reason that God has called us to fight is because, simply put, that God gave us enemies.

The first reason is because God gave us enemies.

Now, God uses means in giving us enemies.

He doesn't give us enemies directly.

This is uh God is not the author of sin, but he providentially orchestrates the world so that enemies come.

They come under God's sovereign control, and they're under God's sovereignty.

Even our enemies operate under the sovereignty of God, and that's why I use the language because God gave them to us.

But God gives them to us in a way that does not make God responsible for sin or the author of sin, merely sovereign over sin, which he uses for his own glory.

Nevertheless, we do have enemies in this world, and that is according to the providential and sovereign plan of a good and holy God.

And so we meet one of those enemies in verse one here, Sanbalat.

We had met him a few weeks ago back in chapter two.

He is opposed to the rebuilding of the wall.

He said, In the presence of his brothers and the army of Samaria, the art's the uh remember, Samaria was the original ten tribes of Israel, the northern tribes.

They were taken into captivity by the Assyrians.

Not every single person was taken into captivity.

There's a remnant there.

Now they're no longer called Israel.

Now, after the exile, when Judah is taken away, they've returned.

After the exile, they're just called the Samaritans or the land of Samaria.

They have an army.

And so, in the presence of his brothers of the army of Samaria, that's designed to be intimidating here.

Uh San Balat has come to Jerusalem with his own army, with his own military entourage.

So this is not, you know, we're not making up a threat here.

Nehemiah is not inventing a threat to motivate the people working here.

There's an actual enemy he has with an actual army opposing Nehemiah.

In the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, he says, What are these feeble Jews doing?

Will they restore it for themselves?

He's mocking them.

How few are the Jews, he's saying, how few they are.

They can't rebuild Jerusalem's wall.

And this is a this is a sore subject for them, if you remember from the book of Ezra.

It was difficult to get Jews to come back and repopulate the lands.

And Sandbal knows that, and so he's poking them right at their weak spot.

Oh, you're so little, you can't rebuild this, you're so feeble.

Will they sacrifice, he asks?

Will they finish it up in a day?

And what's behind that threat is that he has an army there.

You know, you guys are gonna go home.

You're gonna have to go to sleep sometime.

And when you go to sleep, we have an army that's waiting for you.

And so the uh Nehemiah 3 left off with this image of them almost working through the night.

They're gonna keep pushing forward to finish this wall.

And Sam Ball says, You can't do this in a day, you got a whole city.

Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish and the burned ones at that?

And this is what was happening, remember?

Nehemiah was trying to walk around the city on his donkey back at the end of chapter uh one and then in chapter two, and he couldn't navigate because the stones were burned.

The city had been burned, the the rocks had been put in the rubbish pile.

Remember, they're working on the dung and gates.

It's called the dung gate because they threw out the refuse from there.

So they're picking through the rubbish to get the rocks to rebuild the wall.

There's not a rock quarry there.

There's no, you can't order uh yards of rock in the dump truck, back them up.

You're having to fish out the rocks from the sand and from the dump and from the refuse.

And that's what they're doing while they're being heckled by their enemies.

Your stones are burned.

That's gonna look nice in a wall.

Got these nice fancy stones, and the stones that were burned by the last time you got conquered by your enemies.

Tobiah, the Ammonite, which are kind of the besetting enemies of the Jews, was beside him and said, Yeah, what are they building?

If a fox goes up on it on the wall, he'll break down their stone wall.

Ha ha.

Tobiah comes across as like the sidekick, who's not nearly as funny as the first villain, you know.

Sandball's jokes are at least funny, and Sobiah's like, yeah, a fox could land on it, it would probably fall down.

Ha ha, a fox, okay.

Tobiah, thanks for showing up, man.

But they're both jeering at the Jews.

Are you gonna make sacrifices?

Are your sacrifices gonna help the rocks grow?

I mean, you're in an impossible situation.

And this is, by the way, where the battle gets a little bit theological as we keep going.

Hero God, Nehemiah says, for we are despised.

Nehemiah's praying.

Nehemiah's responding to their insults and to their threats with prayer.

Turn back their taunt on their own heads and give them up to be plundered in a land where they are captives.

Bring it back on them.

Do not cover up their guilt.

Let not their sin be blotted out from your sight, for they have provoked you to anger in the presence of the builders.

So they're jeering at Nehemiah, they've got their army intimidating Nehemiah, and Nehemiah is responding by praying, God, you better hear their taunts, because my workers are hearing them, so I want you to hear them.

And God, don't even think about forgiving them.

You better judge them, God.

Don't let their sin be wiped out.

So Nehemiah has a concept of forgiveness.

Just in the in the negative sense, look at the language he he uses.

Nehemiah says, Do not let their sin be blotted out.

That means, and this is sometimes tough for us to understand how Old Testament saints thought, that means Nehemiah knew that God could blot out people's sins.

Nehemiah had a very robust understanding of forgiveness.

They knew that his sins were blotted out, for example.

And he's praying that the Ammonites and the Samaritans would not have their sins forgiven.

Because they're trying, they're making an assault on the building of God's city.

I love verse 6.

So we built the wall.

That's the best response right there.

They taunt you?

Yeah, we built the wall.

All the wall was joined together to half its height, for the people had a mind to work.

But when San Bal and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashdites heard of the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward, and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry.

Their taunts weren't working, their intimidation wasn't working.

Now the wall is halfway up, Nehemiah says.

So they plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and cause confusion in it.

That's going to be their new approach.

They have their kind of National Guard activated.

There's enough of a contingent there that can cause problems.

Maybe they'll sow confusion.

And you would think, how could a little band, like how could like almost guerrilla warfare, how would you do that on people that are building a wall?

Well, remember, part of Jerusalem goes down a big hill, you know, kind of around the, you know, the four, five, and six o'clock part of Jerusalem is kind of going down the big hill.

And then you've got kind of raggedness, not very smoothness from six o'clock up to like seven, eight o'clock, and then a very straight line along the backside, a very long distance across the Mediterranean side of Jerusalem, and then it cuts to the temple.

It's not easy to navigate around the temple because you don't, not just anyone can go through the temple, and so it's very difficult to see.

There's no one spot where you can see all of the wall.

And so if a little band comes in and starts a skirmish at one, say the dung gate, the people who are up at the fish gate aren't gonna know about it.

And they might hear of confusion through the city and they might scramble down, now leaving the fish gate unprotected.

There's no place where you don't have a central command post here.

This is before cell phones, you know.

You can't text your friends, SOS at the fish gate, come help.

So it'd be very easy to cause confusion just for a few people to do it.

And so Nehemiah, again in verse 9, prays.

We prayed to our God, and we set a guard as protection against them day and night.

Nehemiah, Nehemiah understands.

I love his one-two punch.

I'm gonna pray and then I'm gonna act.

He gets them in the right order.

He doesn't act and then pray, like he doesn't just go do it and then like, Lord, please bless what I just did.

No, he dedicates it to the Lord in prayer.

He prays first and then he acts.

And he's not, you know, apathetic here.

He doesn't pray and then stand back.

He doesn't pray for God's protection and then leave.

He prays and then he acts.

He prays and he sets a guard as protection against them day and night.

So they've got an army to intimidate them.

Fine.

Nehemiah, here in a day.

I mean, this is I I know many of you have have led men and women into combat.

You know how difficult it would be to organize even a small band of people in one day.

That's what Nehemiah is doing here.

He's only been in Jerusalem for a short period of time, but now in one day, he's organizing uh shifts.

He's getting people to set guard in shifts to ward off the army.

In Judah, it was said, the strength of those who bear the burdens is failing.

There's too much rubble.

By ourselves, we will not be able to rebuild the wall.

And so the first reason we're called to fight is because God has given us enemies.

And you see that the enemies, even though they haven't thrown a punch yet, even though they haven't unsheathed their swords yet, they are causing harm.

The people feel like they're failing.

There's the rubble everywhere.

Remember, this whole place was destroyed a couple hundred years ago.

It hasn't been rebuilt.

There is rubble everywhere.

And so there's a sense of desperation.

This desperation is going to lead to the second reason why we fight.

The first is because God gave us enemies.

The second is to protect our families.

To protect our families.

You see this in verse 11.

Our enemies said, They will not know or see till we come among them and kill them and stop the work.

So that's the conniving of the enemies.

They say, let's just okay, since they have their guards out, then our next approach can't be just to we were going for the intimidation first.

That was step one.

Intimidation.

That's not working.

They're praying, they are getting discouraged, but they're going to work through their discouragement.

So now let's kill them.

Let's sneak in.

This is clearly a guerrilla warfare idea here.

We won't know or they won't know or see it until we come among them.

I mean, these are gates they're working on.

So the city is obviously not secure.

These there's Ammonites and Arabs that are working on the gates.

And so there's people that look like, you know, the the outside look that are building the wall.

You wouldn't be able to, if they take off their military dress, you wouldn't be able to tell who the bad guys or the good guys were if it came to fighting.

This is a very dangerous and precarious situation they are in.

And it's it's not just politics here.

Your family members could die.

That's the plan.

We will kill them, it says in verse 11.

And so we fight in order to protect our families.

At that time, the Jews who lived near them came from all directions and said to us ten times, You must return to us.

So people are calling their loved one home.

So in the lowest parts of the space behind the wall, in the open places, I stationed the people by their clans with their swords and their spears and their bows.

So rather than letting Nehemiah leave, Nehemiah begins stationing armed soldiers that he's, I mean, he's drafting them in right there, and he's having them protect their own families.

I want you to think through Nehemiah's strategy here.

In the first ten verses, it's all about the nation.

It's about Jerusalem and Israel as a people, and they have national enemies.

The Samaritans, the Arabs are their nationalistic enemies, and they will oppose them and they will fight them.

And so Nehemiah is saying, we need to fight to protect our nation, to protect our city.

In the second instance, that will first answer was not compelling enough.

It wasn't warding off the danger.

And so now Nehemiah downshifts and goes to a more personal reason.

You're not just protecting your country.

Here you're protecting your family.

And he places them next to their clans.

You know, their family was calling them home.

Come home, come home.

It's too dangerous.

Come home, come home, come home.

Ten times it said, from all around them.

So Nehemiah says, Okay, fine.

You're not going to go home, but I will get you soldiers, and the soldiers will defend people by their clans with their Swords, their spears, their bows, they're fully armed.

They're fully armed.

Now I made a comment this morning about pacifism, which I think was I made in jest, and I hope it was received in jest.

You know, and if you weren't here this morning, I said, if you're a pacifist, you might be offended by something I say tonight, uh, but what are you gonna do?

Punch me?

And uh I meant it, I I sincerely did mean it in jest.

I know there is a strong history of pacifism in Christianity.

Jim Elliott, for example, a martyr to the uh the Indians, strongly believed in pacifism, that there was no means by which, or no time in which a Christian should bear a sword or bear arms to defend himself, uh, that God has given armies to defend countries, he's given police to enforce laws, and Christians are better left out of that.

And there's certainly a mission context to how Eliot lived out his pacifism, and of course, he was martyred, um, and obviously he could have defended himself had he so chosen.

And of course, the gospel has grown wings in that part of Ecuador, and the you know, the reputation of both Jim and Elizabeth Elliott has reached millions of people because of his martyrdom.

So that would be the strong argument for pacifism, is the kind of the Jim Elliott argument that when Christians lay down their arms, even in the threat of their own family, uh, it leads to a gospel expansion.

I don't find that argument ultimately compelling, and I give it to you just so you're you know aware of it.

I see the strength of that argument because certainly in church history you see the missions context of pacifism where it, you know, the gospel can go forward through those kind of sacrifices.

Kind of a Colossians 1.24 attitude where Paul says, I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake.

I'm filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church.

There's this idea, certainly, that in the case of suffering and affliction, the gospel is magnified by the one who suffers.

Um, you know, I was talking last week about Chad and how just the remote places those missionaries are.

And I shared with you some of the ways that they suffer, just from the lack of running water and the lack of electricity, all the way to persecution and actual uh, you know, threat that they have to endure and how remote it is and how far they have to travel to the store.

One of the reasons I shared those things with you is not, I hope you understand this, not to make you feel sorry for the missionaries who are there or anything like that.

But I really do believe that when you understand the sufferings that people endure for the gospel, it has the effect of magnifying the glory of the gospel.

You realize these people who know Christ well will suffer much for Christ's sake.

Okay.

So that's kind of the argument for pacifism that when you know Christ well, you're willing to turn the other cheek, you're willing to be struck and not fight back, and the just the preciousness of Christ is magnified.

And there are certainly cases where that is true.

Jesus preaches on that in the Sermon on the Mount, where you are called to turn the other cheek.

We read that.

I open this is why I opened the service today by reading that passage.

Nevertheless, I don't find that ultimately and entirely persuasive because of examples like this in Nehemiah 4, where Nehemiah recognizes that when it comes to threats in your nation or threats in your family, there is a time for armed defense.

And he does though right here.

He arms the people, he puts them next to their families.

They're obviously armed.

Swords, spears, bows, verse 13 says he's listing the weapons they have.

And he wants them to protect their family.

I hope you see an order in the commands that our Lord gives us.

You are supposed to love your enemies.

All right, it's one of the things I wish Jesus never said, but he said it, and so we've got to deal with it, okay?

Love your enemies.

Amen?

Amen.

Not all of you said amen.

Love your enemies.

Love your enemies, amen.

But recognize that there's a triage.

You're also supposed to love your neighbor, right?

And you're also supposed to love your wife.

Amen?

I mean, you guys believe that one.

And recognize that sometimes those commands are in conflict.

At least they can appear to be in conflict.

If you have the pacifistic understanding of love, and you say, my expression of love towards my enemy cannot be one of violence.

There can be no weapons, and I can't be loving my enemy if I'm armed and I'm going to use lethal force to stop him.

That's not loving towards him.

That's how the argument goes.

But what about your neighbor?

Or what about your family?

It's very convoluted to see your neighbor being attacked by your enemy and saying, I can't protect my neighbor because I love my enemy.

And your neighbor would be thinking, yeah, but aren't you supposed to love your neighbor as yourself?

Help.

Or to see your family attacked and say, no, because I love my enemy, I'm not going to defend my family.

There's a your family says, Aren't you supposed to love me more than a neighbor?

So there is a little bit of a hierarchy here, and Nehemiah understands that hierarchy.

Do you see this?

Nehemiah is arming his citizenry to defend first their nation when that's not effective, now their families, knowing that certainly people will fight for their families.

And I hope you understand that kind of triage.

There is a certain element in this that when, you know, if you're attacked by yourself, you obviously would defend yourself less than if your wife or your children were attacked.

You understand that when, you know, in the context of missions or evangelism, that if somebody takes your jacket, you give your coat as well.

I mean, that's what Jesus tells you to do.

In the context of missions and evangelism, if you're punched in one cheek, you give your other cheek.

Of course you do.

That's true even in the Old Testament.

But in the context of leadership of a nation and of an army and of people defending their families, you kind of have to turn that around a little bit and recognize that you have an allegiance here to use lethal force to defend your family and your nation.

And by the way, C.S.

Lewis, who wrote more about this than almost anybody since Augustine, C.

S.

Lewis makes very complex arguments that I think that are true about how you can have, for this reason, you can have Christians that love the Lord equally on different sides of a war.

And he's writing this in the middle of, you know, World War I and World War II, where he understands what evil is in the world.

He talks about how Christians could be on two different sides of World War II and both be fighting and loving the Lord in the same way.

He even has a little comment in his book, The Four Loves, that they should be able to pray together.

If there was a ceasefire, say on Christmas Day, the Christians on both sides should be able to get together and pray together and worship the Lord together and then go back to fighting the next day.

I mean, you have to have a pretty robust understanding of categories of ethics to be able to entertain that, right?

He writes about how even loving your enemy in some cases might mean using lethal force.

Let me read you a long paragraph from this is from Mere Christianity.

He writes, go a step further in your love for your enemy.

Does loving your children mean that you would punish your children?

Does it?

Yeah.

Amen for that one.

And he says this Does loving your enemy, therefore, mean not punishing him?

No, of course not, Lewis writes.

For loving myself doesn't mean that I ought not subject my own self to punishment, even to death for the sake of the gospel.

If you had committed murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and for you to be hanged.

You love yourself when you surrender to the police and receive that capital judgment.

It is therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.

I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian.

And long before the war, I still think so now that we are at peace.

I imagine someone will say, well, if someone is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts and punish him and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view of morality?

I say, all the difference in the world.

Remember, we Christians think that man lives forever.

Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central inside part of the soul, which are going to turn it in the long run into a heavenly or a hellish creature.

Therefore, it is loving to kill our enemies if necessary, but we must not hate or enjoy hating.

We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.

Even while we kill and punish, we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves.

To wish that he were not so bad, to wish that he were not so evil, to hope that he may in this world or another be cured.

In fact, to wish his good.

This is what is meant in the Bible by loving our enemy, wishing his good, not feeling fond of him, nor saying he is nice when he is, in fact, not nice.

In other words, it's not loving to tell your enemy you deserve life when you don't deserve life.

It's not loving to him to live in that kind of falsehood.

If you ever understand that you recognize you owe a love to both your nation and your family that requires, sometimes mandates the use of lethal force, as we see here in verse 13.

I looked up in verse 14 and arose and said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, do not be afraid of them.

Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your home.

I mean, that is that is a speech right there, isn't it?

Remember the Lord and fight for your daughters, fight for your wives.

When our enemies had heard that it was known to us, and that God had frustrated their plan, we all returned to the wall, each to his own work.

From that day on, half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, the shields, the bows, the coats of mail.

I mean, this is getting hardcore.

The leader stood behind the whole house of Judah who were building on the wall.

Those who carried burdens were loaded in such a way that each labored on the work with one hand and held his weapon with the other.

And so now this is a pretty cool scene.

Remember, there's the hill here.

You've got dudes outside the wall laboring on the ground, pulling the burned rocks out of the dung and the trash heap, and they're only working in such a way that they can work with one hand.

Well, they have their sword in their other hand.

Meanwhile, the leaders are on patrol up on top of the wall.

The leaders aren't hiding in safety.

They didn't retire.

They're out there exposed, overseeing the work.

Each of the builders, verse 18, had his sword strapped at his side while he built.

And the man who sounded the trumpet was beside me.

I said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, the work is great and widely spread.

I mean again, this is a it's Jerusalem.

This is a big city, and we're separated on the wall, far from one another.

In the place where you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there.

Our God will fight for us.

And so, hey, there's no cell phones, but they figured something out.

You hear the trumpet blast, you start booking it towards the trumpet.

Bring your swords, by the way.

Verse 22, I also said, or verse 21, we labored hard at our work, and half of them held the spears from the break of dawn until the stars came out.

Implication being the other half then had the night shift.

Verse 22, I also said to the people of that time, let every man and his servant pass the night within Jerusalem, they may be a guard for us by night and may labor by day.

So neither I nor my brothers nor my servants nor the men of the guard who followed me, none of us took off our clothes.

Each kept his weapon at his right hand.

So even when they took naps at night watch, they still slept in their full military uniforms here.

They slept with and Nehemiah is a royal official.

He's got, I'm sure he's got a rockin' uniform, and he's got his hands on his sword the whole time.

This is an intense scene.

And it's a scene that shows bravery and leadership, a scene that shows the complexity of Christian ethics.

And let me give you a third reason why you would fight.

We saw earlier for your nation, and we saw, secondly, for your families.

Thirdly, you fight to advance the kingdom of God.

You fight to advance the kingdom of God.

Let's not lose track of the theological theme in Nehemiah 4, that they are laboring to build the temple.

And this temple is necessary for the Savior to come.

When Jesus is born, he's presented in the temple.

That's where he's brought.

He's born in Bethlehem, it's just a few miles down the road.

He is brought to be presented in the temple.

At the end of his life, he's going to clear out the temple with his teaching.

There is so much prophecy that is interconnected with that.

He will take over the temple, both at the beginning of his ministry according to John chapter 2, and at the end of his ministry, according to Mark 13, he and 12 and 13.

John 2 · chapter mention

So this is a component of ushering the Savior into the world.

Nehemiah doesn't understand all that, but Nehemiah does understand that for Passover to be celebrated, for the hope of the future Savior to be commemorated in Israel, they need the temple.

They don't want to be exiled again.

God made a promise to them through Daniel that there would be the sounds to come and rebuild Jerusalem.

They came and they rebuilt Jerusalem, and now they need to defend it, and then the Savior comes.

Do you remember?

That's what's happening in Daniel's 70 weeks.

The next step is the Savior, and it is a couple hundred years away.

Are we going to make it?

And Nehemiah is not doubting God's word here.

He's saying, We're going to make it, and we're going to make it through my efforts.

I'm going to work for us to make it.

And for us to make it to the Savior, we need these walls up.

And that's why he can tell people remember the Lord.

That's who we're working for.

Or verse 20, our God will fight for us.

That's the thrust of this.

He recognizes that he is fighting for his future Savior.

He is fighting to establish the nation.

You need a little bit of understanding between the Old Testament and New Testament difference here.

The Old Testament God is working through a nation, very much so.

He is working through Israel.

Israel was called to be a steward of the promises, a steward of the law, a steward of the seed.

In other words, a steward of the promised Savior.

The Savior would be a Jew.

Israel was supposed to be ethnically distinct from the nations in the world so that the Savior could come to those people.

That was the plan in the Old Testament.

If Israel is falls and is exiled, then the Savior will not be born into an ethnically distinct, uh he won't be able to keep the law without fail like he did.

So much is at play.

He keeps the law where they failed, and he becomes the true light to the nations.

This is why Paul says in Galatians that the law was given to be a steward or a tutor, would be another word, somebody who keeps watch on Israel for a certain period of time until graduation day, until the Savior comes.

That's the idea behind this.

That's what they're building here.

That's why they're fighting.

They're fighting to protect the promised seed, the promised savior.

So the New Testament comes.

In the New Testament, God is no longer working through a nation.

In the New Testament, God is working through the church.

The gospel is going to the world through the church.

And that will affect your Christian ethics.

I am not saying it leads to pacifism because I argued earlier that it is right for nations to check evil.

Nations will rise up against nations.

It's not just true of a quote-unquote Christian nation.

All nations that fight each other are, in some sense, doing God's will by checking one another's evil.

So it is good for nations to check each other's evil.

That goes back to the days of the Tower of Babel and the days of Peleg where the nations shifted.

Nevertheless, God is not advancing his kingdom in the world any longer through a nation.

Let me say that sentence one more time because I really want you to hear it and believe it.

God is not advancing his kingdom in the world anymore through a nation.

He is advancing his kingdom in the world through gospel proclamation and conversion.

Therefore, there is no such thing as a Christian nation.

Certainly there can be nations that are founded more or less on Christian principles, but there is no such thing as a nation can't be baptized and become a member of a church, so to speak.

Okay.

I'm not persuaded that that means you're a Christian.

I mean, that's not what it means to be a Christian.

God is not advancing his world through a kingdom.

He's not advancing his kingdom through a nation in the world, the United States or Armenia, or otherwise.

I used to teach high school in Los Angeles at a school called Village, Village Christian, and our mascot was the Crusader.

And it was the knight with the shield and the you know the Gothic cross on it and the big sword.

He actually looked, I I mean, I would be surprised if they have still have that mascot today, but that was the mascot when I was coaching there.

And I thought that's kind of weird.

I have a Catholic invader as my mascot of my Protestant team, and it's just it was weird.

I had issues with the Crusader mascot.

One, two, three, go crusaders, I guess.

God is not advancing the gospel through a nation.

Now he uses nations by his common grace to do things.

I mean, I I in some sense I believe in this idea of American exceptionalism that God has used our country in a very unique way in world history to channel missionaries around the world.

There's so much of a mission movement that has come through our nation that we should be thankful for.

And we should receive there's a certain amount of freedom that you have in the United States under most seasons of life that we should be thankful for and give thanks to God for it.

But that's the closest thing I would be comfortable saying as God works through a particular nation today.

I uh somebody at church gave me a long podcast to listen to on the danger of Christian nationalism.

As I listened to it, I thought, you know, in some sense, this idea of Christian nationalism now is kind of a boogeyman, like, you know, you're pro-life, you're against abortion, that means you're a Christian nationalist and you deserve to be exiled to Panama or someplace, I don't know.

But there is a danger.

I listening to it a second time and thinking critically about it, I think there is a real danger in Christian nationalism and some people's thinking that conflates the kingdom of God with the certain political agenda.

There was a statistic in this uh podcast that said something like 53% or some number like that of white evangelical Protestant Christians believe that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is divinely inspired.

I don't think I've ever met somebody that would say that, so I would I would argue with that number.

Uh I hope.

Please don't say that you think the Constitution isn't divinely inspired because they have that would mean it's scripture and it would be the 67th book in the Bible, and then you got all kinds of problems because it's missing from my Bible, and that's just not what the word inspired means.

Inspired means God breathed.

Only Scripture is God breathed.

Only Scripture is infallible.

There is fault in our Constitution.

Of course, it's not infallible, nor is it inspired.

This is one of the reasons I uh feel so strongly about not having an American flag in church.

Because this is not a this is not an embassy of the United States of America.

This is an embassy of the kingdom of heaven, and we advance the kingdom of heaven at church, not some kind of patriotic or political or nationalistic agenda.

I'm thankful for freedom and I'm thankful for politicians that stand for freedom and that will make hard choices and will lead our country towards freedom and towards morality, but that is not advancing the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is advanced through gospel proclamation and personal conversion demonstrated through baptism, celebrated through communion, and the ordination of new pastors and missionaries is sent out in the world to wash, rinse, and repeat.

That's advancing the kingdom of God.

So there are parallels to the church in Old Testament Israel as far as ethics go.

Christians are called to fight, but not in the sense the Old Testament saints were.

2 Corinthians 10, verse 4 through 6 says the weapons of our war for war warfare are not of the flesh, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds.

2 Corinthians 10:4–6

We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete.

That's 2 Corinthians 10 verses 4 through 6.

2 Corinthians 10:4–6

So there are parallels for the Christian when it comes to warfare.

You are supposed to grab your sword and you are supposed to fight against false doctrine.

And when I'm saying sword here, I mean I mean this sword.

You are you're not in the New Testament.

First of all, in the physical world, in the New Testament, there is a law enforcement ethic, there is a military ethic.

It is good to have soldiers that defend our country and advance our country's agenda around the world and will risk their lives to do so because that's how our freedom is procured.

It is good to have police officers and law enforcement that enforce laws even with the threat of lethal force.

And it is good for families to defend themselves and their neighbors.

It's loving to your family and your neighbor to defend yourself.

But shifting gears into the New Testament, that transcends all testaments right there.

And the New Testament specifically, there's a Christian ethic that takes the fighting language of the Bible and applies it to your sanctification.

Go to war against your Sin.

Grab the sword of the Word of God and go to war against your sin.

Fight against false doctrine.

Fight against threats to the church.

Fight against teaching that will have an adver adverse effect on the truth.

It will dilute truth in the church.

This is why Spurgeon called his newsletter the sword and the trial off of Nehemiah 4.

Because he viewed his own pulpit ministry as having the sword and the trial.

Discipleship is the trial.

Discipleship is building bricks together.

As you cause people to grow in maturity, you're causing the wall of the church to grow.

The more mature Christians are, the higher the wall is for false doctrine to scale.

And yet you also have false doctrine that worms its way in because it dresses like Christians and sneaks inside.

And you better have your sword handy for that.

He's not advocating killing heretics.

He's advocating taking Nehemiah 4 and applying it to having that kind of attitude towards false doctrine in the world.

And I tell you what, I mean, that was the attitude that got Spurgeon fired from his denomination.

They couldn't stand that kind of rhetoric.

They were Baptists.

They didn't want some fiery Spurgeon.

This Baptists in the 1800s were a little bit different.

They didn't want some fiery Spurgeon up there talking about people with worldliness in their lives needed to meet the sword of the Spirit through the heart of their carnality.

That was the kind of language Spurgeon used.

So they censured him for it, and he responded to his censure by renaming his newsletter, The Sword and the Trowel.

There.

That's what kind of guy Spurgeon was.

I have his grave, is a big picture.

A picture of his grave is in the center of my wall.

In that sense, he's my hero.

There are parallels for us in this passage.

We are called to take stands for the truth, knowing that our stands are not with swords, but with the power of the gospel.

We must be ready to bring the gospel to bear in all areas of life.

Of course, we're called to love our enemies.

The reality is that our enemies and our neighbors in our American situation are probably the same people.

For most of us, there's no distinction between our enemies and our neighbors.

At least they were Nehemiah's case.

I mean, these Nehemiah's enemies were his neighbors.

So we love our enemies by bringing the truth of the gospel and the hammer of God's word down on their worldly arguments.

We love our enemies enough to actually bring them the gospel.

Because real love wants real change in real people.

And the loving thing for an enemy of God to do is to beg God to be reconciled to God because judgment is coming.

And so if you love your enemies, you will point them to Jesus Christ.

If you love your enemies, you will beg them to be converted.

If you love your neighbors, you will point them to Jesus Christ, and you will beg them to be converted.

And if you love your church, you will defend the church against false doctrine and against false teaching, using weapons of the word to expose the lies and the errors of the evil one.

We have the tool of God's word to smash their arguments and expose people to the truth of the gospel.

This is what the Lord told Jeremiah in the Old Testament.

My word is like a hammer, it breaks the rocks of their heart.

We are called to be ambassadors, to beg people to be reconciled to God before judgment comes.

So Nehemiah 4 is very much about the Jews building Jerusalem up to be a guardian of the promise for the future Savior Jesus Christ.

But there are applications of it to our own life.

Namely, we recognize it is important for people to defend their own nation even at the cost of their life.

It is important for people to defend their own families, even at the extent of lethal force.

And it is important for believers to passionately defend the truth, even using the language of warfare to go to war against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Lord, we're thankful that you have called us to be ambassadors of the truth for good news and to equip us to go into the world.

We know that you've called us to love our enemies.

We know that you've also called us to go to war against error.

We want to do all of those things.

We want to do them well.

We want to love our enemies enough to show them the gospel.

We want to love our families enough to defend them, but more than their physical safety, Lord.

We want to love our families enough to teach them the truth.

We don't merely want our children to grow up safe from harm.

We want them to grow up filled with the knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And so, Lord, help us defend our family from the attack of false doctrine, the attack of worldliness.

Pray for our children right now.

We pray that our children's hearts would be safe from worldliness.

We know we can't take them out of the world, but Lord, we pray that you would make fathers and mothers and older brothers and older sisters brave enough to use the weapons of the Word of God to defend our children from the attack of heirs and worldliness in this world.

Give us the courage to be soldiers for the truth.

We ask this in the name of Christ.

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.