Build The Church By Being The Church

There exists a direct correlation between the effectiveness of our mission and how we treat one another as God’s people. We must be the church before we can build the church. We must care for one another before we can hope to reach our neighborhood, this city, the world.

*No one is going to believe our witness, if our witness isn’t consistent with the one we are witnessing about. The text in Nehemiah 5 is ALL about this witness. We must BE the church before we BUILD it.

The Wall Is Nearly Done

It took years to complete Jerusalem’s wall.

It began with the construction with the altar so the priests could offer sacrifices to God. Everything they did, everything they hoped to do was overshadowed by the smoke from the sacrifices that were offered daily to Yahweh, God our Father.

They did not build the wall first. They built the altar first. Then the temple. Without the massive walls needed for protection, the Jews labored on the foundation. A massive hole was dug by hand with iron age style tools and it was then filled with huge stones. The temple would need to be stable. They faced opposition all along the way from guys like Sanballat and Tobiah. They mocked what they were doing, threatened what they were doing, and finally managed to stop what they were doing by sending a message to the King of Persia.

The Jewish people’s historic habit for violent uprisings and failing to pay their taxes worked against them and the King stopped further construction. Just when the foundation was laid! After some years, the ancient edict of a previous king was found which authorized the building of the temple and construction resumed.

Then, the wall would begin. This was a mammoth project to provide for the protection of the Holy City, the temple and her people. They had nearly finished with the wall. After all the opposition, after all the politics, after all the feuding with their neighbors they were on the brink of success.

To protect themselves, and simultaneously work on the wall, the laborers on the wall would work in bricks, mortar and stone with one hand and with the other they would hold a spear. The Jews had finally defeated their enemies; the wall would be built.

But…

Internal issues surfaced

The people had worked wholeheartedly on the temple and the wall. Now that the wall was nearly done, there were many among them who could remain silent no longer.

Nehemiah 5:1-5

While the wall was being built by dedicated, faithful people who loved God and Nehemiah, the people were being swallowed up by debt. There is no evidence whatsoever that those who worked on the Jerusalem wall were being paid anything. They had evidently left farming which would provide food and financial support to their families to build the wall.

The wall was not a ‘side hustle.’ It was their life. Nehemiah had emphasized that there was nothing, nothing more important than doing this work for the Lord God of Israel. Crops didn’t get raised or they were raised by someone else. Property payments weren’t being made. The marketplace where food and goods were bought and sold were filled with people exhausted from the work on the wall and in debt up to their necks.

A People in overwhelming Debt

This at a time when debt was paid in ways foreign to our customs. For many millennia it was common to sell one’s children and one’s self to pay off a debt. The rich Jews had found a way to exploit the ones living crop to crop. They loaned money and then demanded payment in property and finally, in slavery. Selling one’s children into slavery would have been a last resort certainly. They had to mortgage their farms and vineyards to pay debts they could never pay so they lost their property, and sometimes even their children.

Nehemiah responded…

Nehemiah 5:6-8

The wealthy became wealthier and the middle-class became a destitute class and Nehemiah couldn’t take it. He called a meeting of the nobles AND the officials, meaning the political leaders of the day.

When Nehemiah confronted them with the facts, we find our one and only miracle in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah: these guys kept quiet because they couldn’t find anything to say.

Nehemiah wasn’t done.

Nehemiah 5:9-13

A couple of things really hit me hard here. Their immediate repentance. They didn’t just feel bad about what they had done, they actually took action to remedy what they had done. Like Zacchaeus, perhaps. Jesus found this really short guy up in a tree because he couldn’t see for the crowd. Probably another reason, too. They Jews hated Z because he was a tax collector.

When Jesus invited himself over for lunch he spoke of God’s love and Z agreed to make every unfair tax assessment, every extortion, every evil confiscation of personal property…RIGHT. In fact, he offered to pay back 4 times what he had cheated AND this wealthy man did this…