Rebuilding in the Face of Opposition (4 of 8)
Series: Nehemiah
Ross Lester
Nehemiah 4:1-23
Intro:
Morning church. Welcome to week 6 of our study in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah 4 is where we will be.
Here is where we are in context.
• About 450 years before Christ.
• Nehemiah is part of the exiled people of Judah, living in Susa with the Persian king.
• Some of the people of Jerusalem have been allowed to return, but it hasn’t gone well. The walls are broken down, the gates are burned, the people are in distress.
• Nehemiah decides to do something about it. He prays and he asks the king for some miraculous assistance, and he gets it.
• Last week we looked at him getting to work in Jerusalem and how he started to rally the people, ordinary people, to commence the immense work of building the wall.
One of the questions we should ask at this point is why the city was still in ruins nearly 100 years after the first exiles returned? Were the people just lazy? Was their leadership ineffective? Well, if you read the account in Ezra, you will see that there are some good people of God who are part of the crew who are there before Nehemiah. Why was their work so ineffective? Well, we don’t know fully. Part of it is just the complexity of a big building project. Have you ever tried to build something in a resource scarce environment? It’s hard … right?
But a large part of it, and this is where I want to focus today, is that the people of God have opponents, and some are spiritual and some are physical, and their work is often intertwined and their cumulative effect is very real. When I summarized this in some sort of a logic statement of biblical theology that is true for the people of God across the ages, it goes something like this.
God has an enemy.
God’s people have an enemy.
When you try to live as God’s people, you will experience opposition from that enemy.
What we will see in the text today is that Nehemiah runs ...
Series: Nehemiah
Ross Lester
Nehemiah 4:1-23
Intro:
Morning church. Welcome to week 6 of our study in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah 4 is where we will be.
Here is where we are in context.
• About 450 years before Christ.
• Nehemiah is part of the exiled people of Judah, living in Susa with the Persian king.
• Some of the people of Jerusalem have been allowed to return, but it hasn’t gone well. The walls are broken down, the gates are burned, the people are in distress.
• Nehemiah decides to do something about it. He prays and he asks the king for some miraculous assistance, and he gets it.
• Last week we looked at him getting to work in Jerusalem and how he started to rally the people, ordinary people, to commence the immense work of building the wall.
One of the questions we should ask at this point is why the city was still in ruins nearly 100 years after the first exiles returned? Were the people just lazy? Was their leadership ineffective? Well, if you read the account in Ezra, you will see that there are some good people of God who are part of the crew who are there before Nehemiah. Why was their work so ineffective? Well, we don’t know fully. Part of it is just the complexity of a big building project. Have you ever tried to build something in a resource scarce environment? It’s hard … right?
But a large part of it, and this is where I want to focus today, is that the people of God have opponents, and some are spiritual and some are physical, and their work is often intertwined and their cumulative effect is very real. When I summarized this in some sort of a logic statement of biblical theology that is true for the people of God across the ages, it goes something like this.
God has an enemy.
God’s people have an enemy.
When you try to live as God’s people, you will experience opposition from that enemy.
What we will see in the text today is that Nehemiah runs ...
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