Nehemiah 1:1-11

Nehemiah 1:0

"The words of Nehemiah, the son of Hachaliah" ( Neh 1:1 ).

The Message to Nehemiah

WHAT should we imagine was coming from such an opening of a book? We should naturally suppose that we were about to hear an ordinary narrative to listen to the contemplations and reflections of a literary man. He is simply about to say something he promises nothing more than words yet out of this very simple and humble beginning we have one of the most remarkable stories of activity that can be found in any writing. Words are more than we think everything depends on the speaker. To some persons life appears to be only an affair of words, syllables, empty utterances that is to say, they are people who must talk: they have a good deal to say about nothing, and they say nothing about it, and their life is thus summed up as mere gabblers and gossips, speakers without a speech, words with no battles behind them. These, however, are the words of Nehemiah, the governor of Judah and Jerusalem. When such a man speaks, he means to do something his purpose is always practical, but he thinks it needful to lay down a good strong basis of explanation, that people may understand clearly why he began to work and upon what principles he proceeded.

Nehemiah lived in a very wonderful time. If we could have called together into one great council all the great men who lived within the eighty years which were the measure of Nehemiah's own life, we should have had one of the most wonderful councils that ever assembled under heaven. There is Nehemiah in the middle; yonder is Æschylus writing his tragedies in Athens; Democritus elaborating a philosophy whose atomism and materialism are coming up as the originalities of our own day; Aristophanes elaborating his wonderful comedies; Herodotus writing his gossipy history, and Thucydides writing a history marked by much majesty. And bring also into this symposium Plato and Socrates and other of the most notable men that ever led the civilised world they were all living within that same span of eighty years, yet what different lives they were pursuing! The words of the comedy-writer were words only; the words of the great tragic composer were only words with a keener accent, however; but the words of Nehemiah meant strife, contention, the assertion of right, patriotism, battle if need be, the reclamation of a lost cause, the leading of a forlorn hope. What do our words mean? Do we purpose to carry out our words? Are they words that culminate in covenants, or mere empty syllables used for jangling in the air? If we did but know it, a word should have blood in it a word should be part of our innermost heart; a word should be a bond; a saying should be a seal; an utterance should be a pledge made sacred with all the resources and all the responsibilities of life.

"And it came to pass [rather, Now it came to pass] in the month Chisleu [the ninth month, corresponding to the end of November and beginning of December (see Zec 7:1 )], in the twentieth year [i.e. of Artaxerxes (comp. ch. Neh 2:1 )], as I was in Shushan the palace" [comp.Ezekiel 1:2; Ezekiel 1:2 , Ezekiel 1:5 , etc.; Daniel 8:2 . Shushan, or Susa, was the ordinary residence of the Persian kings. "The palace," or acropolis, was a distinct quarter of the city, occupying an artificial eminence] ( Neh 1:1 ).

It was in the very grey December time that the message came. It was about our midwinter that the messenger arrived in Persia. How does it come that we set down some days as the beginning of other dates? We call them red-letter days they are memorable points in our poor changing story. 'Twas the day when your mother died; 'twas the day when the poor little child had that serious accident which threatened its life; 'twas that crisis in your commercial affairs when you did not know but that the morrow would find you a beggar; 'twas just as you were pulling your foot out of that pit of long affliction which you thought would have swallowed you up; and you date from these occurrences, landmarks, memorable points, eras in your story. And Nehemiah never could forget that December day when Hanani came, and he asked him that all-important question we are now about to consider.

"Hanani, one of my brethren [comp. ch. Daniel 7:2 . Hanani seems to have been an actual brother of Nehemiah], came [i.e. arrived at Susa from Jerusalem], he and certain men of Judah; and I asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped, which were left of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem" ( Neh 1:2 ).

What do we know of Hanani? History is full of nobodies. The story of human life is a story of obscurities. It is the nobodies that create the renown of the great men, and yet the great men treat the nobodies as so many mats on which to wipe their feet Hanani was a very ordinary man historically viewed he is indeed nowhere. This is probably about the only occasion upon which his name occurs, and yet that man brought a torch and set fire to a nobler life; and that is what we may do: we can relate the difficulty of things to greater men than ourselves we can drop a story into their ears, we can tell what we have seen and heard and felt and experienced. We know not to whom we are speaking, and no man can measure the full effect of his own words. If, therefore, we are nobodies in ourselves, yet if we confine our attention to those things we know, we are powerful in proportion as we keep within the limit of knowledge. A weak man, an intellectually weak man, keeping himself within the line of facts which he can personally attest, is more powerful than a far nobler intellect than his own, that is prone to overstep its own boundaries, and to trespass upon fields whose entrance is forbidden. The difficulty with some people is this that they will not tell a plain straightforward tale of facts. They are not unwilling to go to a meeting and recite verses of somebody else's poetry, and that they call contributing a quota to the entertainment. If you would simply tell the plain straightforward history of your own heart, you would find that assemblies would melt under your pathos. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." What do you know about the great truths that gather round the name of Christ? What have you felt of the power of the gospel? What have been your resources and defences in the day of temptation? How did you answer the devil when he fell back before you, blanched and vanquished? If you would tell these things you would be amongst the best preachers speaking naturally, pathetically, really, tenderly, and many a man, far greater than you are, personally, might be set aflame from your simple saying.

Let the young man take a hint from that fact. Where you can, drop a word: if it is only one word so much the better. Rest assured of this let me fall back on no authority that may not have grown out of my own varied experience that it is better to speak one word than to speak a hundred. Keep within your own knowledge, as the poor man did whose eyes had been recovered. There were decoy-ducks that wanted to lead him off into fields adjacent, and he said, "No, no." They said, "We do not know who this man is who has cured your eyes (we say apparently, we do not say really), we never heard of him, he does not belong to our sect, he is not a member of our club, he is not marked with our chalk we do not know this fellow." He said, "Why, here is a marvellous thing, that ye know not whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes! Whether he be a sinner or not, I know not; one thing I know, whereas I was blind, now I see." And with that one word, he cut their backs into ridges, flogged them all, and drove them out of his presence. Stand to what you know, however simple the story. You may find in the long run that even a stone picked out of a brook may fell a giant and kill him.

Hanani was nobody: he had a hearer in Nehemiah, who was an army himself. He set fire to the right sort of man, and what that man did will appear as we proceed in this vivid and stimulating story.

"I asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped."

How indestructible is love! "I am in favour with great Artaxerxes I am cupbearer to the king the king likes me the king speaks familiarly to me my bread is buttered on both sides for life I will not ask this envoy who has come to Persia anything about the Jews; I will forget the past, I will live in the sunnier present." Was it so that Nehemiah spoke? No, he spoke very softly; his was a wonderful voice, there was a rare power of penetration in that whisper of his. He hardly speaks above his breath, yet his breath searches Hanani through and through. He says, "How about the Jews, my brethren, and about those that escaped the poor remnant; and how about the dear old city; and what about Zion, loved of God? Have you heard anything; can you tell me anything?" This is the indestructibleness of love. If you had had a child in that great crisis of history whose life had been in peril, whom you had not seen for dreary months, you could not have asked more tenderly about the child's life than Nehemiah the cupbearer of the Persian king asked about Zion and the places of the dear old footprints. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her cunning."

Unless we have enthusiasm we can have no progress. If you belong to a church, and do not love every inch of the old walls, why, then there is no pith in you. Let us have enthusiasm and rapturous attachment to persons, places, ideas, programmes. Let every heart have a Zion for which it would die. Nehemiah had passion in his heart, enthusiasm in his blood; a man of fine, high, keen temper, and the old old days were singing in the chambers of his memory. When he saw anybody from the old place, he felt they were sacred because of the air they had last breathed, and he asked from them tidings of the things that were dearest to his heart. Would to God that the Church of Christ would recover its enthusiasm its deep, pathetic, tender love of sacred things; we should now and then hear its voice above a whimper; now and then the loudest thunder in the air would be issuing from the Church, singing proudly its holy anthem, rapturously its great majestic paean.

When Nehemiah heard the story, what happened?

"It came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept" ( Neh 1:4 ).

Exactly what we might have expected from the temperament and the pith of that man. A man is not weak because he sits down to cry now and then. There are some tears that are dreadful some tears that will harden into bars and bolts and be heard of again in sharp encounters. What are our tears? Nehemiah's words were battles, and his tears may be said to have been the ammunition of war. Are we all words and tears? Is there no stroke behind? no activity, no force? What are we doing? Could we hear of sacred places being burned down without shedding a single tear for them? Could we hear of St. Paul's cathedral being burned down without feeling that we had sustained an irreparable loss? and if anything happened to that grand old Abbey at Westminster we should feel as if we had lost a sacred place a sanctuary, and as if it were every Englishman's duty to help to put it up again. No, he never could put it up again! There are some men who never could be replaced; some structures never can be substituted. Let us have pathos of nature, enthusiasm, passion, feeling! Let us care for something; that care for something may be our salvation some day. It is out of such smoking flax that God causes the fire of high consecration to burn.

And whilst he wept he prayed. He said:

"I beseech thee, O Lord God of heaven, the great and terrible God that keepeth covenant and mercy for them that love him and observe his commandments: let thine ear now be attentive, and thine eyes open, that thou mayest hear the prayer of thy servant" ( Neh 1:5-6 ).

Sometimes we are shut up in prayer. When we are, we are inclined to debate the whole subject, as we call it the whole subject of prayer. But when the Zion of our heart is thrown down, the dearest life of our whole circle is torn out, when we are blind with tears and weak because of bereavement, then we do not debate about prayer we pray. If you want to prove the hollowness of prayer, do your best to pray sincerely for seven years at a time, and that is the way either to confirm or to upset the whole doctrine of prayer. To have told Nehemiah at this time not to pray would have only exposed the speaker to the charge of insanity. There are times when the heart takes everything into its own care and into its own keeping, and when prayer bursts from the heart irrepressibly. And it is in these agonies, in these tragic hours, in these blood-shedding moments, that we can tell whether prayer is a conception of the fancy or a necessity of the heart. How true and beautiful is that priestly element in a man's nature for we contend that every man's constitution is touched with tragic circumstances when conditions in which he is personally most keenly interested are pressed upon his attention.

"Then I stood and prayed," the natural priest, not ordained of man. As Macaulay said of the Puritans, so we may say of this praying Nehemiah: "He is a priest, not of man's ordination, but by the imposition of a mightier hand." Have you ever prayed for anybody? Has the priest that is in you, in the best sense of the term, in the sense of intercession, mediation, longing desire to serve somebody, ever risen up to plead one cause with God? If so, in that high attitude you realise, so far as your poor nature can reach him, the true conception of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. "He ever liveth to make intercession for us." "There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

What does Nehemiah do in relation to this matter? He takes the case to head-quarters at once, and in doing so he openly, minutely, fully, exhaustively, unreservedly, confesses guilt. That is the first thing to be done in any case. Did Nehemiah say, "Lord, we have been badly used: in the course of this controversy with Babylon we have suffered as the weak suffer under the hand of the strong. We have not deserved our punishment; it has been our misfortune rather than our fault to find ourselves in these circumstances; now be good enough to look upon us and help us in this hour of undeserved calamity"? Was that his prayer, was that his intercession, was that his supplication? It would have died before it reached the roof of his own chamber; that is not the prayer that throws back the doors of the kingdom of heaven. The man shed as it were great drops of blood, and his whole heart was in his desire, and he spoke in anguish, with that clear, keen, poignant voice that would find its way through the interstices of the stars, and make God hear. How have you prayed? Artistically, formally, conventionally? You never sent out the heart as a keen cry of unsupportable agony to God for anything that was consistent for him to give and good for you to receive without that cry coming back, dove-like, with a branch from some tree in heaven. Nehemiah's was a model confession. There was no disguise, no reserve. He made a clean breast of it. Do you the same, about your theft, and your lying, and your untruthfulness in every way, and your dishonourableness. Set a window of the most beautiful transparent glass right in the very middle of your breast, that all that is going on there may be seen. Confess it, and confession itself is half restoration. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins." Whilst we confess he remits. But there is no peace to the wicked. If you are keeping back any part of the price, he will keep back the whole of the blessing.

Now, he said, I will go and see the king. "Grant me mercy in the sight of this man, O Lord." I will do something. And it came to pass in the month Nisan that he went in about the same time as our March. He got the news in December, and for three months he kept it like a fire in his bones. Well, it does seem as if in March we could speak about better things. Has the spring any effect upon us? It does seem that about March or April, when the blossoms are just beginning to peep out here and there, as if we too nobler trees should be putting forth our vows, and resolutions, and purposes. We do not wonder that men should at such a time be speaking things that they had in their hearts in the cold December, and seeking to realise them in some beautiful and useful way. We cannot always speak the thing that is in us. Some things want three months' musing and meditation and turning over. "I mused in my heart, and the fire burned; then spake I with my tongue," and that which was buried in our hearts in December snow awoke up in the March breezes and longer light of the opening year, and shed itself into those who were about us.

How long has the vow to serve Christ been in your heart? Where is the vow now? We fear lest you should exclaim: "The harvest is past, and the summer is ended, and I am not saved!" No one could reproach you for keeping the vow awhile in your heart; rather let it rest there awhile work in thee mightily presently we shall see that vow coming out in open speech, in high declaration for God.

Prayer

Almighty God, be thou our strength, and we need no more defence; be thou near us, and the enemy must stand back; let thine eyes watch over our way, and our feet will never stumble. We put ourselves into thy keeping we would not go out alone: the darkness is too dense, and the road too difficult for our poor wit, and sense, and power, and therefore we give up ourselves wholly to the direction and blessing of God. Enable us to say every morning, God is my refuge and strength, therefore will not I fear the engagements and difficulties of the day: enable us at eventide to say, God is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? And in the hour and article of death, enable us by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us, who was delivered for our offences and rose again for our justification, to say, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Thy fear drives out all other fear. Perfect love takes full possession of the heart where thou dwellest, and behold, where perfect love is, there can be no fear. Work in us mightily the completeness and beauty of thy love, and thus deliver us from all danger, and save us and comfort us by thine infinite grace. Amen.