Chuck Larsen

Israel’s history is full of hatred, unrest, and outright war. What’s happening with Israel and its neighbors today is not new.  Five hundred years before Christ, Israel was a nation without a homeland. God moved the hearts of the world leaders of the day to reestablish the Jewish state. Cyrus II, founder of the Achaemenian dynasty of Persia and conqueror of Babylonia, issued an order in 538 BCE allowing exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Nehemiah was chosen to accomplish the task. He was a man of great vision. He attempted great things for God and faced much opposition. His enemies united against him and came together to taunt Israel as they tried to carry out the vision of rebuilding Jerusalem and its walls. When his enemies saw the wall was progressing, “they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it.” What did Nehemiah do? “…And we prayed to our God…”

In the 13th Chapter of the book of Nehemiah, he is said to have prayed ten times. The first action he took upon receiving every negative report, facing any opposition, or dealing with his people’s organization and leadership was always to pray. He wept, mourned, prayed, and fasted often in this book. Seeking God in prayer was Nehemiah’s primary resource in life. Nehemiah’s significant venture, a vision of the city of Jerusalem, of his people living and worshipping God in peace, frequently drove him to his knees. The magnitude of his task was beyond him, and he sensed a desperate need for God.

I don’t always sense this need, do you? This may be true because I’m not passionate enough about my mission. Maybe I think I’ve arrived, and since I’ve retired, I have nothing useful to contribute anymore. Unfortunately, I have no desire to go further. I’m satisfied with my status quo and have no more vision for the future. I spend most of my time reflecting on the past. It’s so easy to lose one’s vision in life. We don’t need God when our sights are low and we have no vision for what we might accomplish.

Sir Francis Drake was hailed as the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth. He left us with this prayer: “Disturb us when we are too pleased with ourselves, and our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little when we arrive safely. After all, we have sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess, we have lost our thirst for the waters of life; having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity; and in our efforts to build a new earth, we have allowed our vision of the new Heaven to dim. Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery; where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes and to push into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.”

Nehemiah was a bold man. He confronted the “Nobles and Officials” for financially abusing people with low incomes in times of famine. They used their resources to further their advantage over people experiencing poverty rather than to feed and assist the poor. Nehemiah called a national assembly, and in the presence of everyone, he specifically addressed the “rich” for abusing their privilege at the expense of the poor. Verses 8 & 9 of chapter five say, “They were silent and could not find a word to say. So, I said, “The thing you are doing is not good. Ought you not to walk in the fear of our God?”

Whenever walking in, “the fear of the Lord” was used; it referred to obeying God’s Word. Without God’s word, we have no message, mission, ministry, methods, ministries, or morals to test our life choices. The absolute truth of God’s Word always confronts us regarding our life choices. It convinces, convicts, corrects, cleanses, and changes us if we “walk in the fear of the Lord.”

Although we see how Jesus always loved sinners, he always called sin “sin.” When the adulterous woman was publicly exposed to her sin, Jesus shamed her accusers into dropping their stones and walking away. But his words to her were, “Go and SIN no more.” He didn’t accept her lifestyle; he lovingly confronted her with the reality of SIN.

When we relate to those who do not walk “in fear of the Lord,” we must also be careful about throwing stones, yet we must also be firm in not approving sinful behavior. Love and Mercy are incomplete unless we do as Jesus and Nehemiah did. We must call it “sin.” In some respects, we have winked, giggled, made alibis, or ignored sin all too long. A true friend says quietly but firmly, “What you’re doing, friend, is sin. It is harmful to you and others. It is destructive to God’s dream for you.”

When Nehemiah returned to the promised land from Babylon to rebuild the walls around Jerusalem, they made rapid progress.  The enemy coalition panicked when they saw that the walls around Jerusalem were almost finished. They sent for Nehemiah to meet with them, but Nehemiah refused to abandon the project for any reason. Sanballat and Geshem sent messages to Nehemiah four times to come to meet with them, but Nehemiah said, “I am doing great work, and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?” He also knew that they, along with Tobiah and the rest of his enemies, were plotting against him. What did Nehemiah do? He prayed. “For they all wanted to frighten us, thinking, “Their hands will drop from the work, and it will not be done. But now, O God, strengthen my hands.”

If it wasn’t enough stress having outsiders against him, some of his people opposed him and sided with his enemies. One of those was a prophet who prophesied his death if he did not desert his mission and run and hide from his enemies. But Nehemiah saw through his ploy and said, “…And I understood and saw that God had not sent him, but he had pronounced the prophecy against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. For this purpose, he was hired, that I should be afraid…” What did Nehemiah do? He prayed. “Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, according to what they did, and also… the prophets who wanted to make me afraid.”

Prayer should be our first recourse also as we face increasing opposition from those outside the faith and even those professing to be Christians. On April 9, 1996, Antonin Scalia spoke at the Mississippi College Law School in an address that gained national attention. Pointing out that the word “cretin,” or “fool,” is derived from the French word for “Christian.” He continued: “Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. … We are fools, for Christ’s sake. … We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.”

Nehemiah saw God’s activity in all areas of his life. He even attributed God’s movement to recording the genealogies of the returned exiles. He says, “Then my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles, officials, and people to be enrolled by genealogy. And I found the genealogy book of those who came up at the first…” The rest of the chapter records the lists of the “sons” of those who “belong” to the original immigrants and their hometowns.

I’ve become interested in my genealogy as I’ve grown older. But I can only trace my father’s side. My mother was adopted and never knew her father. Therefore, I never knew my grandfather on her side. I’ve tried several things but can’t find out who he was. Further, I can only trace my father’s side back a few generations because they came from Denmark and didn’t maintain their genealogies. There were times when that bothered me, and I know it broke my mother’s heart when she learned she was adopted and never knew her birth father. There is a sense of identity in our heritage.

The scriptures teach us that when we come to faith in Jesus, we “belong” to Him, and our names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Although we may have lost our original heritage, we’ve inherited a new one. Maybe that’s another reason why coming to faith in Jesus in a truly biblical sense is referred to as being “born again.”

There’s a fascinating difference between the genealogies of Genesis and the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew. The constant refrain in Genesis 10 is “and he died…” Death is never mentioned in Jesus’ genealogy, even though the physical men and women did die. But it suggests that we are in Adam’s genealogy of death by our sinful nature, but by our spiritual “new birth,” we appear in Christ’s living register of the redeemed. Maybe you’ve heard the story of the man whose name appeared in the obituaries by mistake. He complained to the newspaper, “This is terrible! How could you do such a thing??” The editor apologized and said, “Cheer up, I’ll put your name in the birth column tomorrow and give you a fresh start!?” That’s what happens when we find new life in Christ. Now I know who I am!

Nehemiah’s register of all those who returned to Israel updates the one previously prepared by Zerubabbel and Ezra. The land was resettled in three phases over about 50+ years. The three phases are represented by the three groups who returned from Babylon. The group with Zerubabbel came to rebuild the temple. The group with Ezra came to rebuild the city. The group and Nehemiah came to rebuild the wall and the people. The people of all three returns and those born in the process were few. After his final census, Nehemiah says, “The whole assembly together was 42,360.” If you counted all the slaves and servants, there were still less than 50,000.

This is out of millions of Jews who were exiled to Babylon and other spots around the known world. No wonder this is referred to as the “remnant.” Like the more recent resettlement of the Jewish people in their land in 1948, the remnants of Nehemiah’s day were moved by piety, patriotism, and passion to live as independent, free people under the hand of their God. However, most Jewish-born individuals worldwide did not share Nehemiah’s characteristics of piety, patriotism, and passion in Nehemiah’s time or our time. These characteristics are essential because of the opposition that they would face. All the peoples of the land in Nehemiah’s day stood against the reforms of Nehemiah’s Jewish state. So, too, was the case in the latest resettlement. Someone estimated that today, Israel “is a country of 3.8 million in a sea “of 100 million enemies.” This has remained the same for thousands of years. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been at war with their enemies. The world wants peace in the Mideast, but Israel knows that any peace that allows the existence of their enemies will end up with another terroristic attack on Israel’s remnant living in the land.

Israel’s God brings judgment to a people; he never destroys the faithful with the wicked. He always leaves a “remnant.” The concept of a remnant stands for “that part of a population who remained steadfast even though most people rejected the ways of God. The existence of a remnant is always attributed to the goodness of God. You might say, by definition, the remnants are the real people of God. The New Testament calls the universal body of the Church the “remnant chosen by God’s grace” (Roman” 11:5).

As remnants in the land, we should also be characterized by piety, patriotism, and passion for our God.