July 2, 2018: Day 79 – Nehemiah 2

It has been a while since I read Nehemiah.  What a great story!  So remember we saw in the last chapter that the prophet Nehemiah was the cup bearer to the king.  Just last chapter he had heard from those who had returned to Jerusalem and they said that while the temple was rebuilt, the walls of Jerusalem were a mess and so they were exposed to any sort of danger that might be around.  This made Nehemiah sad, and the king noticed his sadness as a sadness of “of the heart”.  “What’s wrong?” the king asked Nehemiah, which gave him the open door that he needed to request to return to his beloved homeland to rebuild the walls.

I love the covert mission on which he finds himself.  He is all alone and goes out and inspects the walls, he gets to a point that his animal cannot pass through so he goes out on foot.  When he comes back he declares to the people gathered that it was time to rebuild the walls because they were a mess.  I’m guessing because of the covert nature of the mission that he expected the people to object.  Instead they say: “Let’s start building!” , and as a result they get to work.

Once the foreign locals heard that they were going to get to work in rebuilding the walls they mocked them.  They said that they were rebelling against the king in building this fortified city.  But Nehemiah doesn’t point to the permission that he got from the king but rather to the promise that the Lord would be on his side.  He didn’t need permission, he just needed the assurance of the Lord.