I am doing a Great Work

Sanballat and Tobiah enlist the help of Geshem to try a couple last tricks to prevent Nehemiah from completing the wall. But he refuses to be distracted.

Nehemiah was rebuilding Jerusalem. Under his leadership, the men of Judah had closed the gaps in the wall and built the wall to half its original height. The only breaches left were at the gates. If Tobiah and Sanballat were to retain their power, they needed to stop the work before the Nehemiah hung the city gates.

Nehemiah wasn’t an easy man to stop.

When they threatened to tell the king that Nehemiah was staging a rebellion, he waved the king’s warrant in their faces and laughed at them.

When they scared his workers’ families enough to call their husbands and sons home, he reminded the workers that the families were the whole reason they were building the city in the first place; then he forced their creditors to return all confiscated property so that his men knew their families would be safe.

When they attempted to stage a nighttime attack to violently stop the construction, Nehemiah organized the workers into an army capable of defending itself.

Each time that Tobiah and Sanballat tried to stop the construction, Nehemiah foiled their plans.

Nehemiah had to go.

But attacks just seemed to make him stronger. Every ploy they used to try to stop the construction put him in a better position than he’d started in.

What could they do?

Distraction

Geshem had been around since the beginning of the story. He was one of the ones who accused Nehemiah of rebelling against the Persian king when Nehemiah first arrived in Jerusalem. But since then, he had been relatively quiet, leaving the obvious attacks to Tobiah and Sanballat. Now he suggested a different approach.

“What if,” he schemed, “instead of attacking Nehemiah in his stronghold, like the two of you have been trying to do, we propose a meeting to discuss business? When he comes down from his hill to meet with us, we can kill him there on the plains when he’s alone and vulnerable, separated from his guards.”

Tobiah and Sanballat were willing to try anything at this point, so they sent a message to Nehemiah.

“Come and let us meet together at Hakkephirim in the plain of Ono¹” they said (Neh. 6:2).

But Nehemiah refused to be distracted, and this is where I see the second great lesson we should learn from Nehemiah².

“I am doing a great work,” he responded, “and I cannot come down” (vs. 3).

Tobiah and Sanballat sent the invitation several times, and every time, Nehemiah responded that he was doing a great work, and he did not have time to pause this great work to meet with them.

Over and over, they sent the invitation, and over and over, Nehemiah said, “I don’t have time for your distractions right now. This matters more than whatever business proposal you have for me.”

Nehemiah’s single-minded dedication to his purpose saved him from the ambush that Geshem had planned.

Fear

When Sanballat saw that Geshem’s plan was not working, and he was not going to get the opportunity to assassinate Nehemiah on the plains of Ono, he sent an open letter making the same accusations as he had before about Judah rebelling against the king. Sanballat already knew that Nehemiah would not be concerned by the accusation, but he wanted to undermine Nehemiah’s support in the community by scaring the people. Nehemiah just brushed this aside and sent a response that said, “No I’m not; you’re just making things up” (vs. 8).

There was a priest who lived by the temple, a man named Shemiah. Shemiah was confined to his home and the temple. It is unclear from the story if he was under some sort of house arrest, or if he was ill or injured. One night he invited Nehemiah to come have dinner with him (vs. 10).

As Nehemiah approached his residence, Shemaiah started acting panicked, like he knew something that Nehimiah didn’t. “Your enemies are coming for you!” he said. “Let us meet together in the house of God, within the temple. Let us close the doors of the temple, for they are coming to kill you. They are coming to kill you by night” (Neh 6:10).

Nehemiah knew that God’s temple is not a common place that a man could arbitrarily use for his own purposes. As governor, the temple was not his personal fortress. The temple was God’s house and the priests’ responsibility to protect³.

Nehemiah said, “Should a man such as I run away?” (vs. 11) In modern language, “What kind of coward do you take me for?”

Suddenly, Nehemiah had a revelation. This priest, Shemaiah, claimed that he was prophesying for God, but he wasn’t speaking God’s words. He was being employed by God’s enemies, Tobiah and Sanballat, who were trying to scare Nehemiah into sinning. If Nehemiah had fallen for that trick and let his fear drive him into the temple, the people who looked to him for courage in following God would also have lost the courage to finish the work.

The Wall is Finished

What must have seemed like an eternity after he failed to circumnavigate the city of Jerusalem on his donkey, but what was really only 52 days later, Nehemiah stood in front the newly raised gates of Jerusalem and blessed God. The new wall was not strong. It was made up of pieces of previous walls, and it was much smaller than the walls of Jerusalem during the height of its power, but it was complete. God’s people had come together and raised a wall to protect God’s temple.

Coda

“I am doing a great work, and I cannot come down” has become my life’s motto.

I often wonder how much I could have done with my life if I had learned that lesson at 20. I was in my early 30s before I really understood that life isn’t that long, and there’s not much time for messing around. If we let ourselves get distracted by every interesting opportunity that comes along, we might have an interesting life, but at the end of it we probably won’t have accomplished the things that God has put us here to accomplish.

Life is a grind. You aren’t always obviously accomplishing your goals. Sometimes you might not even have a clear sense of what you’re trying to accomplish at all. In those times, it can be very tempting to give up and go back to the video games or the bass boat or the bar.

But if you do that, you will never finish that wall. Don’t be discouraged. Don’t give up. Don’t let the people who want you to quit—the ones who love you or the ones who hate you—stop the mission God has given you.

1. This pun was irresistible to all traveling kid’s evangelists when I was a kid. “How did Nehemiah respond?” they would ask before holding out their microphones to the congregation.

“Oh no!” We would all exclaim back at them.

2. The first being that we should tackle problems by relying on divine providence but also engaging in divinely inspired human action.

3. 2 Chronicles 26 tells the story of the one the good kings of Judah, who served God and did what was pleasing in God’s sight. When he grew strong under God’s blessing, he became prideful and started to think that he as king could do the role of a priest, and he went into the temple to offer incense, something that only the priests should have done. The priests tried to correct him, but instead of accepting their correction, he became angry. When he became angry instead of repenting, God struck him with leprosy, and he lived as a leper for the rest of his life. Misuse of God’s temple was nothing to trifle with.