It Matters

Nehemiah 2:11-20

[Editor’s note: Good to be back—thanks for letting us take a brief break!  We’re always looking to add to our Connect Devotional writing team.  You don’t need to be a professional writer or Bible scholar.  If you’re at all interested in exploring the possibility, contact Alex or Brian.]

Why rebuild?  In Nehemiah’s day Jerusalem was a shattered city on the far western edge of the Persian empire, its walls broken down, its gates destroyed by fire.  When we hear “exile,” we might think that the Babylonians (about a century before the events described in Nehemiah) deported every Jew from Israel, but that’s not how these things were handled.  The Babylonians deported (or executed) many of the “best and brightest,” to eliminate the potential leadership of resistance movements in conquered territories, but left much of the population in place.

But without a king, a capital city, and particularly the Temple, the Jews who remained were a demoralized and disgraced people.  Other people from neighboring regions were happy to move in and take over lands that were historically part of Israel.

Nehemiah was in all likelihood born outside of the Holy Land and had never been there prior to the events recorded in his book.  A Jew, he was not a “native” of the Persian Empire, but had ascended to a position of major responsibility and influence within the emperor’s court.  Jerusalem was the city of his ancestors, but not a place he had ever been to.

Why rebuild a ruined city that is no longer at the center of anything, even, it appears, no longer at the center of the purposes of God?  Why rebuild if you and your people are finding ways to live and make a go of things in all kinds of new places?  Because of the Story that you inhabit and which inhabits your community.

Nehemiah expresses this Story in the first (of ten) of his prayers recorded in this book: “Remember the instruction you gave your servant Moses, saying, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the nations, but if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name’” (Nehemiah 1:8-9).  It is the Story of the Creator God sovereignly choosing Abram, and building from him a family, a nation, whose God-ordained purpose was to be a source of blessing to all the nations of the earth.  It is a story of Exodus, covenant, kingdom, commandment and now even Exile—but it is a Story that is heading somewhere, a Story moving towards its conclusion: “The LORD reigns—let the earth rejoice!”

It matters that Jerusalem is rebuilt; something needs to happen there, something that completes the Story of Israel and opens it up to the whole world.  It matters what Nehemiah does.

What we do in our time, what we build or rebuild or fail to build, and how we go about that work—that matters too.

Keep looking around your life: what needs rebuilding?  What is God putting on your heart?  What’s your one next step?

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