"Sovereignty and Suffering" Nehemiah 2 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Nehemiah chapter 2, like much of the book of Nehemiah, is not a very well-known chapter.

Nehemiah 2 · chapter mention

Most of Nehemiah, when people think of it, they think of the building of the wall of Jerusalem, which in uh sense won't begin until next week.

This chapter tonight describes how Nehemiah goes from the presence of the emperor of the most powerful nation in the world to the presence of a couple governors who are opposed to him.

He goes from being powerful and influential, Nehemiah does, to being the object of derision.

He walks away from power to embrace a very much a less prestigious role in the world.

That's the specific sense.

You know, I've heard it said about uh, for example, politicians that they always want the next highest office.

There's never a congressman who doesn't want to be a senator, never a senator who doesn't want to be a vice president, never a vice president who doesn't want to be the president.

That's just always going to be the case in life.

Nehemiah stands out as a bit of an exception.

He goes from a high-ranking political position to a low-ranking position.

He gives up his position of authority and power to assume a position tonight we'll see of basically a glorified uh architect, a works construction manager is where he descends from the very presence of the emperor.

But that's the narrow scope of this chapter.

When you zoom out a bit, Nehemiah chapter two is very much about the constant conflict between good and evil in the world.

And I don't mean that in a yin-yang kind of perspective.

I mean that there is an actual good.

God in his word stands as what is good and righteous, as Jesus told the rich young ruler, no one is good except God alone.

Our own conscience bears witness to that.

God's word is in this world as good.

God stands good as over this world.

Nevertheless, this good stands in opposition to God, often opposed to him.

And that's really what's at the heart of Nehemiah chapter 2.

Nehemiah 2 · chapter mention

We live in a fallen world.

We live in a world where people fail us, where they say things they shouldn't, where people fail us and that they sin against us, and we live in a fallen world where there is disease that runs around, and we live in a fallen world where walls fall down.

This is Nehemiah's world as well.

This is not the world that God designed in the garden.

It's not the world that God will consummate at the end of the book of Revelation.

We live in between those two worlds.

We live in a world where things are not as they should be.

I love the song that uh Sarah and Danny sang tonight, shine into our night, just because of that line.

We are not what we should be.

This world is not what it should be.

We're stuck in the middle right here.

There was a everything was good and perfect in the garden.

Everything will be good and perfect again in the future.

In the meantime, people rebel against God.

Entropy takes place, and the walls fall over.

How do Christians live in that world?

Romans 12, verse 21 says, Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 12:21

So that becomes our marching orders.

And the the tricky part about this is that not everybody agrees on what is evil, not everybody agrees on who the opponent is or how to stand against it.

And so we'll find counter that tonight in the book of Nehemiah.

Let me just give you an outline tonight.

It's in your Nehemiah book that you uh received when you walked in.

How do you respond to difficulty when you know that God is sovereign?

That's going to be the overarching question I want to answer in, I think, five or six different ways as we go through tonight.

How do you respond to difficulty when you know that God is sovereign?

That's very much the story of Nehemiah chapter 2, first.

Nehemiah 2 · chapter mention

You respond with sadness over sin.

It is right to be sad about sin in a fallen world.

It's right to be grieved by it.

Stoicism is not a virtue.

The Stoics are not the good guys in the New Testament.

They are very much on the bad guy camp.

A sign of maturity, Christian maturity, and Christian righteousness is a grief over sin.

This is what we encounter with Nehemiah in these first three verses in the month of Nisan, the 20th year of King Artaxerces, and this is an important little uh date demarcation here because we're going to talk about the end of our sermon tonight, how it uh cues a countdown here.

This is ties into Daniel's prophecy.

We'll circle back to that at the end tonight.

But in this particular month, the month of Nisan, the 20th year of King Artaxerces, wine was before him.

I took up the wine and gave it to the king.

That's an important detail because we learned in the last verse of chapter one that Nehemiah was the cupbearer of the king.

He was the one who brought the king his wine.

We've seen the same phrase back in the book of Esther, when the king was given too much wine.

It was the habit of this king to drink wine on somewhat of a regular basis.

Nehemiah as the cupbearer would have partaken in it first and then brought it over to the king.

Do you remember with the cupbearer?

I mean, part of it is just the elementary level.

He's supposed to taste the food before the king does, because if it's, you know, the kind of poison that was more common in the world back then worked relatively quickly.

So the food would still be hot by the time you were, you know, at least the color went out of your face.

Okay.

You might you might hang on to life for a few more hours or a few more days, but it would be evident that you ate poisoned food almost immediately.

And so the cupbearer would taste the food, and he would taste the wine, and he wouldn't taste everything.

He wouldn't eat a bite of everything off the king's plate, of course not.

He would be back sort of in the kitchen, so to speak, and he would taste stuff repeatedly as it was being prepared.

But the cupbearer is so much more than that.

Understand that he's the king's confidant.

He has to have the king's confidence because there's no way to make sure the cupbearer really tasted everything.

If the cupbearer wanted the king dead, he's in the best position to make it happen.

And so the king and the cupbearer have to have a very good relationship.

Moreover, the cupbearer and the king's enemies have to have a good relationship.

He's got to be trusted by both sides.

He's got to be able to walk in and out of the kitchen.

He's got to be able to see the people on their way into the king and relate to them.

It's very much a political position.

So when you hear the word cupbearer, don't diminish that to like, you know, a mature D kind of thing.

That's not what we're talking about here.

It's really closer to kind of the American equivalent of a chief of staff more than a somebody who's really working in the kitchen.

So that's just your concept there.

That's who Nehemiah is.

Now, this is Nehemiah, who his dad, uh not Nehemiah's dad, but the king here, uh, Artaxerces, his father was murdered.

Um this was common in the Persian Empire to have their leaders murdered.

Uh Arta Xerces' father was murdered.

Arta Xerces himself, this king, came to power by before he murdered the person who murdered his father, so before he got revenge on his father's death, he murdered his two older brothers first.

So think about the strategy that took.

You're the third in line to the throne, somebody kills your dad.

Before you take revenge on him, you wipe out number one and two in line of authority, and then you go get revenge on the guy who murdered your dad.

That's how he became emperor.

So he's not to be trifled with.

He knows how to kill one or two or three people.

Moreover, his stepmother, so this king's stepmother, was likely Esther, Queen Esther.

And so there's a Jewish flavor in this family, in this house, which would explain Nehemiah's presence as cupbearer.

By this point, with Daniel's ministry to uh Darius back in the start of the Persian Empire, ruling over Babylon when it fell all the way to the way uh Esther and Mordecai served Xerces.

It would make sense that our king now, our Xerces, would elevate a Jew to this position.

So that's Nehemiah's position.

That was spared all in chapter one.

It was just dropped in the last line of chapter one.

By the way, he's cut bearer of the king.

He's found out that Jerusalem is in shambles, those walls have fallen down.

Now it's the time to bring wine to the king's presence.

Four months have passed since chapter one.

So he heard, we get the date of chapter one back in uh uh Chislev, up at the chapter one, verse one lets you know when this happened, is four months later that the month of Nisan happens.

Perhaps the emperor was out of town.

The Persian emperor would often move around his empire.

Uh that would explain why he was away for four months, or perhaps Nehemiah was strategizing or waiting for this particular feast.

We don't know, the text doesn't say, but four months later, Nehemiah comes into the king, he gives the king his wine, and he was looking sad.

It says in verse one, I had not been sad in his presence, meaning those four months had gone by, Nehemiah was not sad whenever he was around the king.

But now, the king said to me, Why is your face sad, seeing as you are not sick?

Remember their relationship?

Do you see why Nehemiah walking around with a frown on his face would immediately arrest the king's attention?

If the cutbearer walks into your room bringing you your food and he looks like he is ill, you're going to want some questions.

Because if he is sick, you're not going to eat the food.

So the king says, Why is your face sad, seeing as you're not sick?

And you can imply in that, right?

This is nothing but sadness of the heart.

And I mean when I hear the king saying that I hear like optimistically.

Right?

You're only feeling sad about something, right?

Nobody's trying to kill me.

And Nehemiah is very much afraid.

And again, why is Nehemiah afraid?

Because if the king thinks that Nehemiah has been poisoned, heads will roll, possibly starting with Nehemiah.

And so he is very much afraid.

This is a very delicate situation.

This is one of the kind of situations you have to handle precisely.

You get one syllable wrong in this, and your life is at stake.

And that's where Nehemiah finds himself.

Nehemiah is very much afraid.

So I said to the king, Let the king live forever.

Again, Nehemiah's no dummy here.

First words out of your mouth.

No, you're going to live, king.

You're going to live.

This is not just a platitude here.

He's actually making an appeal to the king.

I want your majesty to live forever.

I said to the king, let the king live forever.

Why should my face not be sad when the city, the place of my father's graves, lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire.

Now, Arta Xerxes was supposedly a very good emperor.

Historians are pretty much agreed on that.

He's just about the only one of his emperors in this whole area of Persian rule to die of natural causes.

Arta Xerxes will die of natural causes.

He will not be murdered, unlike those who came before him and after him.

He's a very good emperor.

You can see that even with the window in his relationship with Nehemiah.

However, Nehemiah is distraught in his presence and asks the king a question.

This is such a very Jewish way of reasoning, isn't it?

Why are you sad?

And you know, you might be tempted, you, you poor American with poor rhetorical skills, might be tempted to actually answer the question.

That's because you lack the Jewish art of rhetoric.

The Jewish art of rhetoric is always to respond to a question with a yeah, so why are you so sad, Nehemiah?

Why wouldn't I be sad, O Emperor?

When the city of my forefathers is in ruins.

He's asking the emperor to relate from him from his perspective.

If you found out that your grandfather's grave was in ruins, would you be upset about it?

What if his city was in ruins?

You could infer for this, perhaps that Nehemiah had some kind of royal blood, but it's also likely that they had buried people already beginning at this time on the Mount of Olives, facing over Jerusalem.

You can, this day you can't really walk from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem from the gate on that side.

It's been bricked up, closed up.

You have to kind of walk around the city to get in.

It's very difficult to navigate.

This apparently was true in Nehemiah's day.

We'll see that as we go on this morning or this evening, that it was difficult to navigate that side of the city.

Nehemiah is saying, The graves of my ancestors are in shambles.

Jerusalem is fallen.

Jerusalem has been a free city now for a hundred years.

Ezra has been back there.

There's been people that have been living there.

The temple has been somewhat rebuilt, not anywhere near to its foreign glory, former glory.

Remember at the end of the book of Ezra, people and Haggai, people wept over it, how small it was.

Nevertheless, there were people there.

They were sad about it.

This is not what Jerusalem was supposed to be.

Jerusalem was supposed to be the city where God put his name.

Remember when David conquered Jerusalem and put moved the capital there, moved the ark there, that went off with some difficulty.

You remember God struck Uzzah dead, and David had to repent from that whole uh just train wreck of an encounter.

That's the 2 Samuel chapter 6.

2 Samuel 6 · chapter mention

He finally got the ark into Jerusalem with much singing and dancing.

This is the nature of the world.

That you try to do something right for God's kingdom, and you fail, and there's suffering involved in it, because we're not yet at the end of the book of Revelation.

We're in the fallen world even now.

We try to serve the Lord, we fail in how we try to serve the Lord, and that our failure brings consequences to those that we know and those that we love.

And so things are fallen in this world.

That's the story of Jerusalem.

It's supposed to be God's city.

His king is supposed to be there.

The priests are supposed to be there.

Passover is supposed to be there.

And the Jews just can't get it done.

They try to work on it and they keep on failing.

And now almost a century has gone by.

The temple is, you know, barely constructed, and the whole place, it is a disaster.

And so Nehemiah hears about this and he is sad about it.

And it is right to be sad about it.

It's right to be distressed about living in a fallen world.

And I would encourage you tonight, it seems like a superficial point, doesn't it?

Sadness over sin.

You're like, yeah.

Of course.

Who celebrates sin?

But I would encourage you tonight to actually think about in your heart does the sin in this world grieve you?

Do you get distraught about the sin in this world?

Not just generically the sin in the world, but do you think about what you're trying to do for the kingdom and do you see how sin interferes with it?

Sadness is the right response to that.

Nehemiah's question is more than a rhetorical flair.

It is actually profound.

Isn't it appropriate for me to be sad?

The city that God is trying to build, its gates have been destroyed by fire.

Have you heard that phrase before?

From Jesus, right?

I will build my church.

Jesus says it on his march to Jerusalem.

I will build my church.

And the gates of Hades, the gates of hell, will never overcome it.

He will build his church.

Here, Nehemiah, 400 plus years before Jesus, 470 years probably before Jesus said that, is just sitting here.

It seems like fire is winning.

It seems like fire is defeating the Lord.

Nehemiah finds himself in a tricky situation, of course, because he is the cupbearer.

He does live in two kingdoms.

We'll talk more about that later on this evening, but Nehemiah is a subject of the king, and he's a subject of Yahweh.

Because he's the subject of Yahweh, he's supposed to be sad about sin.

Because he's the subject of the king, he's not supposed to be sad.

How do you navigate that?

How do you know when to be sad and when not to be?

How do you know when to work for Yahweh and when to work for Caesar?

That's what Nehemiah is navigating right here.

Well, the first way you respond is with sadness over sin.

The second way you respond, I'm bringing the question is how do you respond to difficulty or sin in this world when you know that God is sovereign?

The first is with sadness over the sin.

The second is with a prayer for usefulness.

Don't end in your sadness.

There's not a period here.

Don't be sad about sin and just end there.

You've got to keep pressing forward.

Verse 4.

The king, and I'm going to insert the word providentially, said to me, What are you requesting?

I mean, Artisurces is a good king.

He just gets right to it.

So you're sad.

You're telling me that your city is destroyed by fire.

There's hundreds, there's 140 plus provinces in this empire and states in this empire.

The king doesn't know.

I mean, we have a hard enough time memory memorizing the 50 states and capitals plus the you know seven territories or whatever it is.

I'm not even sure about that.

I think it's 57, but I don't even know.

Imagine you've had 140 and you're the emperor, you're trying to keep up, and there's all these cities everywhere, and he he doesn't know about Jerusalem.

So he gets straight to it.

Nehemiah, what do you want?

How many how what are you requesting?

Nehemiah, four months planning this.

Mind you a bit of Esther, right?

Four months planning this.

And before he answers, he prays.

He prays.

Just God help?

Help?

We don't get the content of his prayer because it's in the middle of a conversation.

Nehemiah, you can assume, didn't pray out loud, right?

This is one of those examples in the Bible where we know somebody prayed silently.

We know the prayer was heard by God and it was effective.

A common kid question, but you need to have a very good theological answer for it for yourself.

Can God hear your prayers when you don't say them out loud?

Yes, he can.

How?

How can he hear your prayers when you don't say them out loud?

I mean, when you say them out loud, the words travel from your mouth.

You don't have to say it that loud.

God can hear anything in your room.

That's kind of the way our mind thinks.

But if you don't say them at all, how can God hear them?

And the answer, of course, is he's omniscient, he knows, and he knows your secrets.

He knows all the way inside of your heart.

That's how he hears them.

And I mean, I caution you not to think about that too hard because you will be convicted by of lots of sin.

I mean, it's not just that God hears your pre that like that's the secret things in your heart that God hears.

Like, oh, he Jesse's praying now, let me tune in.

Okay, he's done praying.

I'm gonna tune out and give him the rest of his secret thoughts to himself.

No, God hears your secret thoughts even when you're not praying.

He knows what you harbor in your heart and in your mind when you don't want him to know that.

So file that away, okay?

But beyond that, notice that Nehemiah doesn't just stay with sadness.

He immediately prays that God would use him.

He wants to be part of the solution.

We didn't see this coming at the end of chapter one.

At the end of chapter one, we knew Nehemiah was broken over Jerusalem's situation, but we didn't know how this would turn out.

Now in chapter two, four months later, suddenly God providentially has put Nehemiah in a situation where he is going to be the answer of the prayer he prayed in chapter one.

He prayed in chapter one that God would fix this problem.

And now in chapter two, the king has said, What do you want?

Nehemiah prays again.

Don't overestimate.

I don't underestimate this.

You're in a difficult situation in life, somebody asks you a tough question.

It is worth pausing and praying.

You will be surprised how much better your answer will be if it is bathed in prayer.

Just this is this is even almost practically, this is in the secular kingdom right here.

Granted, it intersects with God's program for the world, but this is a secular conversation here.

It is the emperor asking his subject, what do you want from me, the emperor?

And Nehemiah prays.

And God, of course, will answer his prayer.

It was Hudson Taylor who says, if you expect great things from God, you should ask great things from God.

Nehemiah asks that the God who moved Cyrus on behalf of Ezra's prayer, who melted the hearts of Nebuchadnezzar and Darius on behalf of Daniel's prayer, would do his work now in the heart of our deserces because of Nehemiah's prayer.

Nehemiah fears our deserces, certainly.

But he recognizes that Yahweh is sovereign even over our deserces.

Our Xerces could be king on earth, but Yahweh is king in heaven.

Amen?

Martin Luther, in his commentary on Nehemiah, has a very interesting line.

I didn't know how to fit it in my sermon, so I thought I'd just share it with you.

Martin Luther says this kind of immediate prayer is actually a form of keeping the second commandment.

No idols, the second commandment.

No, don't bow before idols.

How?

Because if you think you can answer every question yourself, if you think you can solve every problem yourself, you in fact are worshiping yourself in violation of the second commandment.

So you find yourself in a tough situation, just pray, and that keeps your heart from making an idol right there.

That's great.

I love that.

So first, be sad over sin.

Second, pray for usefulness.

And again, this sounds simple, but challenge yourself.

If you're sad over sin around you, don't just pray that God would take that sin away.

Don't pray for other people to take that sin or difficulty away.

How about you pray that God would use you?

That God would use you.

Don't come up to one of the pastors or elders of this church and say, hey, I have a friend or neighbor that really needs to hear the gospel, so would you pray that somebody would have an opportunity to share it with him?

No, that's not going to be what I'll pray.

I won't do that.

I will pray that you would have an opportunity to share with him.

Why don't you pray for your own usefulness?

And that's what Nehemiah does here.

So thirdly, first we see sadness over sin.

Secondly, a prayer for useless usefulness, and thirdly, the desire to do good.

The desire to do good.

Now we get to Nehemiah's answer.

Nehemiah wants to be part of the solution here.

He says in verse 5 I said to the king, if it pleases the king, remember he's dealing in two kingdoms here.

He's subject to the king.

If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found Favor in your sight, send me to Judah, to the city of my father's graves.

Let me rebuild it.

Now, this is a very bold request, because kings don't want fallen cities in their empires rebuilt, especially if they are fallen, precisely because they rebelled against the empire that conquered them, which is what happened to Jerusalem, if you remember.

They wouldn't yield to the Babylonians, despite even Jeremiah telling them to, so they were taken off into captivity.

Describe in Jeremiah 31 to 33, the end of 2 Kings.

They were led away into exile and treated like rebels.

The city was destroyed.

Cyrus let them rebuild, but they were a city that was conquered for their rebellion.

And so this is a very tricky question.

Let me rebuild it.

Nehemiah would have to be very trusted by the emperor to be allowed with this task.

So he says, if it pleases the king, I'm not trying to rebel.

I just want to rebuild the city where this happens.

Remember, he highlights the second time.

It's a city of my father's graves.

Process because our deserts would relate to that.

Let me rebuild it, he says.

And the king said to me in verse 6, with the queen sitting beside him, and I think this is a little footnote here that uh there's some of Esther's influence going on in the room here.

How long will you be gone?

And when will you return?

Which is a very legitimate question to ask.

So it pleased the king to send me when I had given him a time.

We don't even get to know the time.

It would take away from kind of the suspense of the book of Nehemiah, but a time was given, and so the king lets him go.

He says in verse 7, If it pleases the king, let letters be given to the governors of be given to me, for the governors of the province beyond the river, that they may let me pass through until I come to Judah.

And a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king's force, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the fortress of the temple, for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall occupy.

The king granted me what I asked, for the good hand of my God was upon me.

The gist here is that Nehemiah prays for usefulness, and he also prays for very practical usefulness.

He's anticipating the objections, namely, the governor who rules the area where Jerusalem is will not want Jerusalem rebuilt.

We'll find out more in a few minutes why that is, but uh, he's an enemy of Israel.

Nehemiah knows this, and so he wants assurances from the emperor that he has the legal authority to do this.

He also wants the timber to build it, which would come again.

Timber is a very precious commodity back then.

This would come only from the king's court.

And the king gives it.

Nehemiah is actually praying for very practical and tangible things.

It's possible in all his four months of praying, Nehemiah didn't know that it would be him that would be end up going.

And yet, here it is.

And Nehemiah, I just I feel convicted by this paragraph here.

Nehemiah didn't busy himself with getting all worked up against how Jerusalem was fallen.

He didn't get angry at the Jewish leaders.

He didn't write a blog post about six rays the Jewish leaders failed Israel by failing to rebuild the wall.

He says, you know what, this isn't right.

I'm gonna go fix it.

Let me fix it.

I'm not gonna harangue the poor leadership in Israel.

I'm gonna be the one that steps up and does it.

I will get it done.

I remember a sermon by Jerry Vines.

He was the uh former president of Southern Baptist Convention.

I heard him preach a sermon on evangelism once, and he's told him that he stabbed somebody at his church who always could uh always criticized him for how he evangelized.

I'm sure this line isn't original with Jerry Vines, but he's the first person I heard it from.

Jerry Vines responded to the person with, I like my way of evangelizing better than your way of not evangelizing.

That's Nehemiah's attitude here.

You know, he's I like my way of rebuilding the gates of Jerusalem better than your ways of not rebuilding them.

He makes his plan and he's gonna go.

So the fourth way here, you respond to sin in a fallen world, is you have the patience to act wisely.

Nehemiah waited for four months before he made his request.

Now he's got his request, and he's going to take patience in his journey.

He takes several months of preparation.

Verse 9, I came to the governors of the province beyond the river, and I gave them the king's letters.

The king had sent with me officers of the army and horsemen.

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

Now, Sanbalat was the governor of Samaria.

He was the Samaritan.

They were the enemies of the Jews.

The Samaritans mixed the worship of Yahweh with the worship of the Assyrians, the Assyrian gods.

It was a very asyncretistic religion.

It was bad.

They were excommunicated from Judaism.

It remained this way into the life of Christ.

This is the woman at the well.

Remember when Jesus was cutting through Samaria?

This is the story of the good Samaritan.

The Jews despise these people, and these people despise the Jews.

Sanbalat, who was the governor of this whole province, including the rightful governor of Jerusalem, was a Samaritan.

And he did not want to see Jerusalem rebuilt.

Because the temple in Jerusalem was a threat to the Samaritans.

They thought they had the rightful temple up in their mountains.

As long as the Jerusalem temple was there, that was a threat to their integrity.

So they hated the Jerusalem temple.

They definitely didn't want the walls rebuilt, and the walls were critical around Jerusalem because walls are where the gates are where civic life happens.

Judges hold courts in the gates.

This would be the American equivalent of the courtrooms all burned.

You can't have a functioning country if you don't have court, if you don't have a place to hair judges, if you don't have police stations, if you don't have, you know, a hall of parliament or Congress, you can't have a functioning society in a modern world.

In this world, if you didn't have a city wall with gates, you couldn't have a functioning society.

Sanbala is happy for Jerusalem to be dysfunctional.

He was happy for this.

By the way, the name Sanbala, I just find this interesting.

It means literally it's sin will give life.

Now, sin is the name of the moon god.

I know it doesn't really mean sin, but I just find it humorous.

His name means sin gives life.

I mean, this guy is the opposite of everything true.

Tobiah, on the other hands, Tobiah has a good name.

Tobiah means Yahweh is good.

He was obviously had parents or some kind of influence that believed in Yahweh.

Sanbalat named his kids Jewish names.

So, I mean, these people have some kind of Jewish influence with them, which would be typical of Samaritans.

But they are upset about the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

Well, Nehemiah goes anyway.

He went to Jerusalem.

He was there for three days.

He arose in the middle of the night.

He and a few men with him.

He told no one in the city what God had put into his heart for Jerusalem.

So Nehemiah is not there secretly.

Everybody knows he's there.

He shows up with an army escort from the Persian emperor.

This is a big deal.

This is, I mean, this is like blasting in an Air Force One in some small town, you know, short runway area.

I mean, everybody is going to know a giant 747 landed and the president got off, kind of situation.

Nehemiah's presence here would be a huge deal.

He's the cupbearer for the king with a military escort.

Picture banners and horses and trumpets and hundreds of people and massive amounts of timber being procured.

I mean, something is going down in Jerusalem, and Nehemiah spends three days not telling anybody what it is, except provoking a fight with the governors of the area.

That's the background here of him sneaking out at night.

And he arose with a few men with him, and he told no one what God had put in his heart.

This is God who's working in Nehemiah's heart for Jerusalem.

There was no animal with me, but on the one in which I rode.

So he didn't bring the military escort out where he sneaks out at midnight.

He just brings his one little horse.

And it went out by night by the valley gates, the dragon sprang into the dungate.

So he's working along the south, kind of the he's working along from like, let's say, uh five o'clock over to eight o'clock around the city.

If you picture Jerusalem like a clock there, he's working from like five o'clock around to eight o'clock, that side of the city.

That's going to go around where the graves are.

It's going to go around the kind of the Kidron Valley where uh Jesus describes, you know, Hades as the place where they threw the refuse out.

It was the garbage dump that they would light on fire during the life of Christ.

He goes out that way to try to walk around the city.

He inspected the walls of Jerusalem.

They were broken down.

Its gates had been destroyed by fire.

I went on to the fountain gate.

This is down kind of by the tunnel of Siloam there.

All right.

And the king's pool.

But there was no room for the animal that was under me to pass.

He couldn't get around the city on that side.

He couldn't do it.

I went up by night in the valley.

I inspected the wall.

I turned back and entered by the valley gate and so returned.

The officials didn't know where I had gone or what I was doing.

I had not yet told the Jews, the priests or the nobles, or the officials, or the rest who are going to do the work.

So Nehemiah arrives.

He's not immediately walking the perimeter of the city to see if the story about the gates is true.

He waits three days to go look at night.

It would be dark.

He doesn't know his way around.

It's on a hill there, too, by the way.

This is not an easy place to walk.

Even today, you can't really walk on that side of the city.

But Nehemiah is trying to see can I walk around the city gate?

Can I walk around the city?

Well, and the answer is no.

He cannot.

He's having the patience here.

He's waiting for the right time to act.

So, first, how do you respond to sin in the world?

You have sadness over it.

Second, you pray for usefulness.

Third, you have a desire to do good in your heart.

Four, you have the patience to act wisely.

You wait for the right moment.

Fifthly, you have the integrity to stay holy.

You have the integrity to stay holy.

The next day, Nehemiah says, You see the trouble we're in.

How Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned.

Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.

People are mocking Jerusalem because of their gates, which is not a big deal.

This is not a sticks and stones can break your bones kind of thing, but words never hurt you.

This is a thing where people are not believing in Yahweh and has promised to send a Savior into the world because Yahweh can't even get Jerusalem clean.

You know what kind of God can't keep his temple with a working door?

You know, you're gonna say that your God is gonna send a savior to the world, and your God can't build a wall.

I'm not buying it.

That's Nehemiah's concern here.

They're subject to derision because Jerusalem is in shambles.

He says here, verse 18, I told them the hand of my God had been upon me for good, and the words the king had spoken to me, and everybody said, Let's rise up and build.

Let's do this.

And this is like the halftime speech or the pregame speech, better yet.

He gives it in the locker room, and everybody's like, Yes, let's go build the wall.

I mean, that's a motivational speech when you got a bunch of people that are like, Yes, let's go build a wall.

Try this with my girls.

Yes, let's float the laundry, let's go.

How can we say I'm a pastor when there are a pile of clothes everywhere?

Rise up.

It doesn't work.

So they strengthen their hands for the good work.

But Sanbal, the Horonite, and Tobiah the Ammonite, servant of Geshem the Arab, servant and Geshem the Arab, this third person, he was a ruler of the province across the Jordan River, over on the other side of where Jericho is now.

These three heard of it, they jeered us and despised us.

And they said, What is this thing you're doing?

Are you rebelling against the king?

Are you rebelling against the king?

That's an interesting question, isn't it?

That would be what everybody would think unless they had seen the letters the king wrote, which we learned earlier that they had seen those letters.

So this is not an objection with it with integrity.

They know this isn't rebellion against the king.

They know that.

They don't care.

Their objective here is not to honor the integrity of the king.

They don't care about the king here.

They only care about keeping Jerusalem down.

That's their motivation.

And so they are jeering at them and they are trying to rile up opposition against them by saying, this is treasonous.

It's hostile against the king.

Now, if you were Nehemiah, how would you respond to that objection?

Don't cheat and look.

I'll tell you how I would be tempted to respond.

By saying it's not treason because the king knows I'm here and I have letters that show it.

Wouldn't that be the natural way to respond?

It's almost the easy way to respond.

Let me tell you why it's the easy way to respond.

First of all, because it's true.

But secondly, it doesn't require you to stand on religious conviction to say that.

You don't have to be making a religious point.

It requires no religious courage whatsoever to say that.

It's just pointing to a press release from the office of the emperor that is so easy.

But that is not how Nehemiah responds.

And this is what I mean by the integrity to stay holy.

Nehemiah does not allow himself to fall back and trust on the hands of men for this work, although it will require the hands of men to build it.

That's not where he finds his confidence.

He says in verse 20, the God of heaven will make us prosper.

And we, his servants, will rise and build.

He responds with a theological argument.

He says, It doesn't matter what the emperor says.

What matters is that we are doing God's work.

God put this in our hearts to do.

That's why we're standing here building.

That's why we're going to build this thing.

It has nothing to do with what the emperor said or didn't say.

Now, we know the backstory behind this.

The emperor did approve this.

But that's not where he goes.

That's not where he goes for his confidence in this.

Now, I know you don't want to read current events back into the day of Nehemiah, and I will guard myself for that for the majority of this book.

The book of Nehemiah is not about a church building project, okay?

Amen.

You know, normally when churches preach to Nehemiah, it's because they're starting a building project.

That's not what this book is about.

How will we ever show the other church down the street that we're a good church if we don't have a soccer field?

Let's put a thermometer on the wall, everybody give, let's go.

I get that.

At the same time, I mean, I'm studying this chapter this week, and it is just, it's right on my heart when I look at how so many Christians are responding to COVID restrictions and all of this, to not have my mind go to these verses here.

And just think, so so it's so easy to fall back on, you know what, the government says that we can't have more than what, 170 people in here right now or something?

We can't have more than 170 people or we we've got a ruler in here to see what it would actually take to comply with the executive order we're under right now.

We got a tape measure in here and measured it out.

And I think we came up with I don't know, 170 or 190 or 250 or something, some number, and that depending on how many size family groups were.

And you know, we couldn't we had 900 or a thousand people here this morning, way more than we're we're allowed.

And so how do you respond to that?

Do you say, hey, it's a First Amendment right?

We have the right of the First Amendment to be able to gather together and worship.

See, First Amendment.

Let's go to court and sue for our right to worship here.

I'm not persuaded by that.

I don't think that's the right place to go.

I think it's better to do what Nehemiah does and say, the Lord has called us to worship together.

He has put it on our hearts to be together on the Lord's Day, to sing his songs, to open his word, to have fellowship one with another.

That's what he's called us to do.

Now, do we have the legal right to do this?

Yes, we do.

We have, we're not being illegal.

We have the First Amendment that guards the right to do this.

We have a judge's order down in uh Madison County, Virginia, that has declared the governor's executive order against the Virginia Constitution and set it aside.

But I mean, he doesn't care.

They just, you know, he reissued it just a few weeks ago.

I got an email right as we were beginning tonight from one of our elders, sent me an email letting us know the governor reissued the executive order, the same one the judge struck down.

I mean, it's not right.

We it's not legally right what he's doing, and it's a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

But that's not our grounds for meeting.

That's not why we're meeting because the orders violate the First Amendment or because we have First Amendment protection.

We're meeting like we're meeting because it's what God has called us to do.

So when I say the integrity to stay holy, that's what I mean.

The integrity to find your conviction in what you're doing, in what the Lord has called you to do.

Not in appealing to the First Amendment.

I talked to somebody this morning, uh military guy who served our country so well and bravely and has buried people he's fought with.

He said I could use his name, but it's just he probably I could tell he didn't really want me to use his name in this illustration.

But he gave me permission to say this.

You know, he told me I fought for my country.

I've seen people buried for my country that served under me.

And I love my country.

I love my country, but I don't go to church because my country lets me go to church.

I think we're in a better place if we think like that.

I think we're in a better place if we say what we're doing, we're doing because the Lord has put it on our hearts to do.

That's why we're operating this way.

I think we just have more integrity that way.

And as a practical example, churches that have sued their governors making First Amendment arguments, have all won and are still not able to worship together.

There's several churches that have gone to the Supreme Court and won exactly what they've asked for, which is to be treated like, you know, businesses and restaurants, and which means they can't meet together.

They still can't put it their congregation together in a building.

So they sue and they win and they still can't worship.

So I think just on a practical and a theological, a spiritual level, the approach that Emmanuel is taking is the better approach.

I'm saying, you know what, the Lord has put, we're not trying to make us think about anything.

We're not gonna go to the courts, we're not gonna publish an article in a newspaper about why we're doing what we're doing.

We're just meeting together to worship because God has put it in our hearts.

And we're content to do that.

And I find an example, not the only example of this, but an example of this, is being here in Nehemiah.

The God of heaven will make us prosper.

God, as Nehemiah said earlier in chapter two, has put this on our hearts.

He's called us to worship here, he's called us to gather together.

Nehemiah may have been a cupbearer, but he knows that God holds in his hand the cup from whose lips we will all be forced to drink.

He is the real cupbearer, God is.

We will all drink his wrath or we will drink his mercy.

He is the one whom we fear.

So don't elevate your own sense of government above what God commands.

Don't make it a complicated exegetical exercise in navigating executive orders or the First Amendment even.

Know that we have the legal right to do what we're doing.

We do.

But that's not why we're doing it.

All right, sixthly.

Sixthly, the questioner, again, how do you respond to difficulty when you know God is sovereign?

First, sadness over sin.

Second, prayer for usefulness, third, the desire to do good in life, fourth, the patience to act wisely, fifth, the integrity to stay holy.

I have way more I could say about that.

Namely, you know, Nehemiah doesn't draft in Sam Baltimia.

That's what they wanted.

He wanted to part, they wanted to, they're upset that they got passed over.

That's the bottom line.

They wanted to be part of a big operation in their state, and Nehemiah wouldn't let them.

But sixthly, confidence because of God's sovereignty.

Confidence because of God's sovereignty.

Nehemiah says, God will prosper us.

The God of heaven will make us prosper.

We, his servants, will rise and build.

You have no portion or right to claim in Jerusalem.

They were Samaritans, they will not be allowed to worship Yahweh in his temple.

They are cut off from the kingdom because they worship idols.

That's the bottom line.

Meanwhile, God is in control.

Nehemiah took an escort here.

Remember, Ezra did not take an escort.

Nehemiah took an escort to demonstrate that he was operating under the authority of the emperor.

But also, in his words to Sambal and Tobiah, he recognizes that he doesn't need his escort's protection.

He doesn't need his king's permission, although he has it, because he has God's protection and he has God's permission.

He has confidence in the unwavering hand of God.

Nehemiah's motivation to build the wall was to demonstrate that God was done punishing his people and that God's promises for the Savior still stand.

He's demonstrating to the world and to us tonight that you can live in a fallen world and have confidence in God's sovereignty.

And I hope you appreciate that statement.

That you can live in a fallen world and have confidence in God's sovereignty.

You can live In a world surrounded by gates that are fallen and burned by fire and be unwavering in your belief that God is sovereign still.

When there is difficulty in the world, tries in the trials in this world, when there is sin in this world that comes crashing down your door, it's so easy to run in your heart to the place where you say, Maybe God's not sovereign anymore.

Maybe God never was sovereign.

How could God be sovereign when these bad things happen?

Notice that's not Nehemiah's response.

Nehemiah is praying for usefulness.

He's sad about the sin.

He wants to be used by God for good, but he can still look at a burned-out gate in the eye, or in the keyhole, so to speak, and believe with all of his heart that God is good and God is in control.

That is a balancing act that I hope you have in your life.

You look at sin and suffering in the world, and you could say, Well, God must not be in control then.

No.

You say, God is sovereign, God is good over this.

And God is going to build something out of this.

It's not just true with Jerusalem's walls, it's true with your life as well.

Your life is marred by sin.

Your life is tainted by sin, and yet God is building you.

It's the language Paul uses in Philemon and Philippians, both.

He says that you're a work under progress.

You're under construction still.

God is building you.

2 Corinthians chapter 12.

2 Corinthians 12 · chapter mention

You're being built together brick by brick.

God is building you into a church, he's building your own life, he's working on you.

He's using your sin to magnify the power of redemption and how he forgives it and then to sanctify you and cause you to grow into maturity.

That's what he's doing.

And Nehemiah knows this.

The God of heaven will make us prosper.

God will build something out of this.

Yeah, it's lame that Jerusalem is in shambles right now, but God's going to make it good.

Because that's what God does.

I hope when you're confronted with sin and fallenness in the world that you don't waver in your commitment to the sovereignty of God.

I love Nehemiah's forcefulness of this.

The God of heaven will make us prosper.

You, Samaritans, you'll be cut off.

You'll have no portion.

You'll have no right.

You'll have no claim in Jerusalem.

Go have your fake temple up in the mountains somewhere.

Go worship your idols wherever you want to.

We don't care.

God is going to build this here.

And certainly he will.

Now, I'd like to end there, but there is just.

I'm skipping through pages of notes, by the way.

If you're wondering what I'm doing up here.

Pages of notes.

Nehemiah has confidence in God's timing here.

What you're seeing in Nehemiah's chapter 2 is the commands the king wrote to rebuild Jerusalem.

This happened in 445 BC.

This starts the countdown that was prophesied by Daniel.

This is Daniel's 70 weeks.

Remember, there was a first group of seven years, and there was a second group of 62 weeks.

434 years from the end of the Old Testament, or 483 years from Arta Xerces' decree to rebuild the wall until Jesus would enter Jerusalem.

That's what we're reading about tonight.

I'm not even aware if Nehemiah knew this.

Nehemiah could have no way to time his request before the king so it would coincide with the right number of years before Jesus enters Jerusalem for Passover week.

He would have no idea.

But in God's providence, Nehemiah waited those four months.

He waited the right time.

I'll spare you all the math tonight.

When I preached through Daniel's 70 weeks, that sermon's online, you can find it.

I did all the math there.

I put all the dates up.

I carried the ones and everything.

I'll spare you all that math tonight.

But I want you to know that this date starts the countdown.

It was fulfilled on the triumphal entry on the 10th of Nisan, the year of our Lord 30 AD.

And of course, you know, Daniel 70 weeks keep going.

It says the Messiah will be cut off at the end of the 69th week.

The Messiah will be cut off.

Common reference to death in both Aramaic and Hebrew, a reference to death.

The Messiah will be killed.

He'll be cut off from the people of Israel.

He'll be put to death after his triumphal entry.

And then you have the final week, which of course is picked up in Revelation, the Great Tribulation.

It's that gap between the 69th week and the 70th week where we find ourselves now.

It's the church age where God has planted the church in between.

We don't worship in Jerusalem yet.

The temple from Jerusalem will descend unto the earth again in the new heavens and the new earth after the tribulation.

So in that middle between the 69th week, this is the period of time for the church.

Daniel did not prophesy a church age.

This was a bit of a mystery to him, but he prophesied the future of Israel.

He says that in Daniel, when he describes the 70 weeks in Daniel chapter 9, he prophesies the future of Israel.

Daniel 9 · chapter mention

That there will be a seven-year period.

There will be followed by that 62 weeks.

Remember the groups of seven years that will make up the 483 years that will bring you from this decree in chapter 2 all the way to the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ.

Then the Savior is cut off.

And then in the future, God will unleash wrath upon this world through the Antichrist and then through judgment on the earth that will culminate in his establishing of the kingdom.

I believe in the pre-tribulational rapture of the church, that the church will be removed before that final 70th week of Daniel.

I believe the church fits in the gap of that because it's not prophesied.

That seventieth week of tribulation is for the Jews.

The whole earth will experience it.

But of course, when you read the book of Revelation, the focal point of it is the Jews fleeing in the wilderness, how they're protected, then in Zechariah, how they're ultimately rescued from the tribulation, converted, starting with the women, then the children, then the men, recognizing they're not even converted by household, they're converted individually as they become partakers of the new covenant and are ushered into the kingdom of God.

That's the promise of this.

So when I say, the reason I walk you through that right now is here's where it is.

And when I say that God is building something good out of what is fallen, that's what I'm talking about.

Here's a very practical example.

Jerusalem is destroyed by fire.

And what's God gonna do with it?

He's gonna build up the city where the Savior will come, fulfilling prophecies given by Jeremiah and by Daniel, all the way to the date that Jesus will walk in to be the Savior of the world.

The Savior was cut off, but through his being cut off in his resurrection, we can have what Sanibal and Tobiah lost.

We can have a portion or right or claim in Jerusalem because of our Savior's death and resurrection there.

If you're here tonight and you don't know the Lord, let me make an appeal to you.

This is not just a story about a wall, it's not just a story about Jerusalem.

This is a story about a prophecy God gave that he was preparing the way for his Savior to come into the world to save people from their sin and to validate that Jesus is the only way to God.

He marked it out 500 years before it happened.

He told you the date it would happen.

You can't fake that kind of prophecy.

Nehemiah didn't understand how the date's working out.

He understood that God's sovereignty is working out, that God is holy, and God will direct all affairs in this world to make a way to be saved.

When you think of Nehemiah chapter 2, think of the overarching power of the sovereignty of God and think of how much suffering sin causes in this world.

Nehemiah 2 · chapter mention

And then respond accordingly.

Be sad over the sin.

Pray that God would use you.

Have a real desire in your heart to be used by God for good in this fallen world.

And have the patience.

Look around, find the right opportunity.

And then trust in God's calling on your life.

Trust in what God has given you in His Word.

Trust in His promises about Jesus Christ.

And then act on them with an unwavering confidence in God's sovereignty.

If you've lived like that, I mean your life will be spent building something greater than these walls.

Your life will be spent building the kingdom of God as you minister to others.

Lord, we're thankful for your call in our life.

You've called us all differently.

You've given us all different gifts and different abilities and capacities to serve the church.

But you've given us all the same call to love and worship you through our faith in Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection.

So we pray that you would be honored through Christ tonight.

We pray that your word as it goes forth would do its work in our heart.

Give us courage to stand on your calling in our life.

Give us courage to say, we want to be obedient to you.

We want to be men and women of integrity who serve you, who find our confidence in you, who stand up in this world under your sovereignty.

Lord, we pray that you would do that in the life of this church.

We're thankful for all the ways you protected this church.

What a blessing this church has been.

In Springfield for what, fifty to eight years now or something like that.

You've just been so kind to this congregation.

So kind to the leadership here, so kind with the so many capable teachers and pastors and elders here.

So kind with the congregation that serves you in so many ways.

But I pray we would excel still more.

I pray that our confidence and convictions would be deepened still more.

That you would use us in this fallen world even this week.

Help us act this week with integrity in a way that serves you.

Equip us for the Great Commission and send us out in the world, we ask in Jesus' name.

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.