Friday Faithfuls Two: Nehemiah

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Oh, Nehemiah.  A man of rigid integrity and high temper.  But he led the people to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem in an astonishing 52 days...and about half of that was with half the people working and half guarding them, and the ones who were working went about with their weapons in their hands, because the enemies of God's people had threatened to attack them to prevent them from completing the work.  So they were pretty severely handicapped and they STILL rebuilt the wall in 52 days.

It's an amazing story, but there's more than wall building in the face of opposition in the book of Nehemiah.  There's also the record of the Jews who had returned falling into the old practices of their forefathers...intermarrying with the pagan people around them, which was the first step down the slippery slope to pagan worship. Nehemiah had a pretty confrontational response to that... Plus, the people were oppressing their fellow Jews...loaning them money at interest so that the poorer people were forced to sell their children into slavery to cover the debts.

They were more concerned with their welfare than they were with the well being of their fellow countrymen...who were, after all, distant cousins...and Nehemiah was Not Pleased.

He called the moneylenders in to a big meeting and pretty much tore them up, concluding with 

So I continued, "What you are doing is not right.  Shouldn't you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies?"   -- Neh. 5:9

What they were doing was giving fuel to their unbelieving neighbors to judge them as unrighteous.  No different than any other money grubbing group.  It was bringing a reproach to all of God's people.

Even today, this holds true.  When a handful of folks who proclaim themselves Christians behave in a way that is self-centered, it brings reproach on all of God's people.  It's one of the enemy's favorite strategies to get folks to ignore the message of Jesus...holding up for examination the behavior of people who are not Christ-like. It's interesting...today, Nehemiah would probably be ridden out of office in disgrace for the rather violent way he went about enforcing the instructions in the Law, but at that time his actions actually caused the people to stop and consider what they were doing and repent.

And it is worth noting that the Jews did NOT fall back into the pagan practices of their neighbors from that point on...Nehemiah nipped that in the bud and it never again became an issue.

But here's the question it raises now...am I doing something out of selfish personal interest that is bringing reproach on all the people of God?  

That calls for repentance...which means to stop, turn around, and go the other way.

Stop.

Go the other way.

The money lenders of Nehemiah's day stopped charging interest on loans and they paid back the interest they had collected from their countrymen.  That's what I'm talking about.