Nehemiah - Broken Walls And Burned Gates Series

We are continuing with our series called The Story. God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. This Sunday will actually be our last week we will be looking at the Old Testament. Next week we will be opening up the stories told in the New Testament. Specifically, we will be looking at the story of Jesus, his miracles, and his ministry. But what we want to do today is finish off the story that I began last week. The story of the Jewish people returning back home from exile in Babylon back to their beautiful city of Jerusalem. You may recall last week we talked about some prophets by the name of Haggai and Ezra. Today, we are going to look at the prophet known as Nehemiah. Nehemiah is somewhere about the middle of your Bible. A little bit of background on Nehemiah. He was someone who worked for the king during the time of Babylonian captivity. About 606 B.C. the Jewish people, because of the sin, were taken over by King Nebechudnezzar. He came into Jerusalem, destroyed the city, and destroyed their temple. As kings often did at that time, the kings would drag away the people and bring them into their foreign land. The goal would be that they would assimilate them totally into their culture to take away their identity. In this case their identity as a Jewish people. I was trying to think of a modern analogy you might be able to relate to. The only thing I could think of was a football analogy. It would be something like you had a bunch of Pittsburgh Steelers fans who are tired of those Browns fans. So they decided to get a busload of Steelers fans and go to Cleveland and go to the Browns stadium and destroy the stadium and take all the people back to Pittsburgh and force them to wear Steelers jerseys and root for the Steelers.

As the story goes, the people were in captivity in Babylon. God raised up this king named Cyrus who had a good heart and decided he was going to let the people go. He was going to let the people return back to Jerusalem. Not only was he going to let them return back to Jerusalem. He was going to give them the supplies they would need to go back and rebuild their city and the temple. The temple was very important for them because the temple was their worship center. More importantly, it was the place that they believed actually contained the very presence of God. They went back and began to rebuild. First they rebuilt the altars then they rebuilt the temple. Although they had some false starts and stops, after 20 years they ended up rebuilding their temple and thus establishing their relationship back with God. That was really what the temple was. It was symbolic that they had reestablished their relationship back God.

As we come to this point in the story, we see there was a problem. There was a very, very big problem. Although they had built this temple, they had failed to rebuild the walls surrounding the city and the temple. That is where we pick up in the story of Nehemiah. Nehemiah did not come back with the initial wave of Jews that returned from Babylonian exile back to Jerusalem. It was only about 50,000 of them. There was a good contingency that stayed back in Babylon just to see how things would go. One of these people was Nehemiah. Nehemiah was called a cupbearer to the king. In this case, it was King Artaxerxes. The cupbearer was the guy who tasted the wine before he gave it to the king to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. It wasn’t really that bad of a job unless you had people trying to kill the king and then it wasn’t the best thing. So he was a Jew and a cupbearer that worked for King Artaxerxes. As the story goes, a contingency of Jews returned back from Jerusalem and basically Nehemiah wants to know how things are going. What is going on? In Nehemiah’s very own words, he says in Nehemiah 1:3 : “They said to me, ‘Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been burned with fire.’” This is 90 years after the first wave of people came back to Jerusalem and 70 years after the rebuilding of the temple, and the walls were still down, which meant trouble. Trouble in the sense that they had lost their protection and were vulnerable to the attacks of their enemies and even disgrace, the mocking of their enemy. They are living in disgrace which basically means outside of God’s grace. Outside of grace. They had built this beautiful worship center, but they failed to establish their ruler-ship over the city. Nehemiah being a man of God and a great Jewish man, this really upsets him. So much so that when he heard these things he sat down and wept. He says Nehemiah 1:4 “I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.” That is what he did. I will be honest with you. When I think about a major problem that we might have in the church or a construction project or whatever, my first response is not to cry and fast and pray. Nehemiah knew the situation. He knew there was a lot of risk to the situation. He knew there would be people that wouldn’t want these walls to be rebuilt. He knew that it would require a lot of great resources to get this job completed, these massive walls and gates. He also didn’t know whether or not his boss, King Artaxerxes would allow him to have the time off to go and complete the project. What we see is not only did Artaxerxes give him the time off, he gave him the authority to pass through the various provinces throughout the land that he would need. He gave him a permission slip to give to the various governors of the land so that he can pass through freely. Back then, it was a time when you didn’t just cross borders freely. As Ramsey mentioned a few weeks ago, there were these guys called satraps. They would be the ones that were responsible for securing the boundaries of the king. To cross over borders, you would have to make sure you had all your permission and passports and documents and whatever you needed to pass on through. Nehemiah got from the king letters or authority that basically told the people he is operating under the authority of the king so let him go. Not only did he give him permission to pass through the various borders but he actually gave him authority to go into the king’s very forest and get all the timber that he would need to rebuild these massive gates. He goes on to say in Nehemiah 2:8 “Because the gracious hand of my God was upon me, the king granted my request.”