Nehemiah is not the hero most people go looking for when they open their Bibles. He carries no sword, wins no battle, and delivers no thundering prophecy. He is something more rare, a man who showed up, did the work, and trusted God with the outcome. There is wonder in how his story has more to say about ordinary life than almost any other in the Old Testament. That’s why it’s so valuable to us thousands of years later.
This is the first in a series of articles devoted to the work of Nehemiah. He is not the hero most people seek when they open the Old Testament. He is not David or Samson or Solomon. There are no moments in his story where he charges into battle, headstrong and faithful, staring down an enemy with the kind of valor that fills movie theaters. In fact, Nehemiah is not a soldier at all.
He is an organizer and a builder, but builders rarely occupy the hero’s role in the stories we tell ourselves as children. Builders are the complementary parts. They work behind the scenes, shuffled into the margins of grand narratives, undervalued through no fault of their own. They do the difficult, unglamorous work that is too often rewarded with indifference. Those of us who sit in houses we didn’t build and inhabit buildings we don’t maintain have a habit of overlooking the ones who do. That’s tragic.
There is an irony in those thoughts because Yahweh is a builder.
Genesis 1:1 announced, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”1 He didn’t just make the third rock from the sun and plop us down onto its surface. He formed our understanding of right and wrong, of goodness and ruin, of love and its cost. He made us in His image (see Genesis 1:27) and gave us this world as the place where we would learn to draw near to Him. He is a builder, yet, for reasons we would do well to examine, this is not always our first instinct when we think of who God is.
There was a time when I did not give Nehemiah the attention his story deserves. Writing about him, preaching his story, and learning the circumstances of his world forever deepened my appreciation of him. Knowing he took the tools God placed in his hands and rebuilt a wall, a people, and a covenant challenged my idea of what a hero of the faith must look like. Today, I believe there are only a few figures in all of Scripture who can claim the amount of influence he did over the spirit of the Lord’s people.
Nehemiah through God built walls. God through Nehemiah built saints. That declaration, simple as it sounds, is the heart of everything that follows in this study.
His greatest achievement is not the stone and mortar of Jerusalem. It’s the faith and future of the people, restored through his work. He built a wall and, in doing so, rebuilt a people. He was close enough to the Lord to draw from Him the wisdom, patience, skill, and perseverance the work required. He was, in every meaningful sense, the foreman of Yahweh’s great work of restoration.
The Setting
To understand Nehemiah’s story, we must first understand the world he inherited. He was born a slave in the ancient Kingdom of Persia, roughly 100 years after Jerusalem was destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar (see Daniel 1).
The destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of God’s people had set Nehemiah’s path in motion generations before he drew his first breath. In the days before that event, the prophet Jeremiah had given Israel warning after warning, but the people learned to tune out his message just as their fathers, grandfathers, and countless ancestors before them had done to the other prophets. Some of his most fateful words appear in 25:8-9 which says, “Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words, behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, declares the Lord, and for Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all these surrounding nations. I will devote them to destruction, and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting desolation.’”
J.M. Boice describes the scenes of destruction with these haunting words, “When Nebuchadnezzar attacked Judah, Jerusalem burned, and the great stones of the city wall were dislodged and tumbled into the steep valleys that surrounded it on all sides. Nothing of value remained.”2
We cannot fully appreciate Jeremiah’s grief. We cannot know what it was like to see the people of God led away in chains, robbed of their dignity, bound for slavery. We cannot imagine the weight of watching the physical embodiment of God’s promises crumble and fall. But the divine record gives us language for that loss in Lamentations 1:1 which says:
How lonely sits the city
that was full of people!
How like a widow has she become,
she who was great among the nations!
She who was a princess among the provinces
has become a slave.
These words are the opening of Nehemiah’s story. They are the prologue written in grief before his name appears anywhere in the narrative.
The Only Way Back
After Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem in 586 B.C., the most capable and influential (especially artists and skilled workers) were among the Hebrew people carried to Babylon in exile.3 The Babylonians were not random with their selection of slaves. They took the best: those with skill, education, and social standing. What remained in the land was a people too bereft of leadership, surrounded by the rubble of the Temple where they once worshipped and the home where they once felt safe.
In 539 B.C., the Babylonian Empire fell to the Persians and the Medes swiftly and with little resistance. Cyrus, the Persian king, was a man of unusual tolerance for the ancient world. Following his capture of Babylon, he allowed the kingdom’s displaced peoples to return to their homelands and rebuild their holy places.4
In the opening verses of Ezra, that decree is recorded for posterity’s sake. It says, “In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem.”
These verses — and others like them scattered across Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels — make plain that the Lord does not merely direct the history of His own people. He accomplishes His will through the powerful leaders of foreign nations as well.5 It should be noted that upon Cyrus’ decree, not all Jews felt called to return to Jerusalem. Many had built financial lives in Babylon. Others held positions of influence in the government, serving as advisors and administrators. This was no expulsion. Those who remained were permitted to do so in relative peace and prosperity.6
Over the following decades, an initial wave of roughly 45,000 returnees under Zerubbabel and Ezra rebuilt the Temple and repaired portions of the walls and gates — but they could not restore Jerusalem to its former glory. Regular worship was inconsistent and peace was elusive. To make matters worse, the Gentile neighbors who settled in and around Jerusalem complicated the rebuilding process. Almost one hundred years after Cyrus’s original decree, Nehemiah began his journey to a city in desperate need of reform — physically, spiritually, and socially.
Providence at Work
There is no ambiguity in my mind: God set these events in motion with full knowledge of how the story would end. The years between Cyrus’ decree and Nehemiah’s arrival were not wasted years. They were years of preparation. Kingdoms rose and fell. Political alliances formed and dissolved. And all the while, Jerusalem stood there — exposed, incomplete, unable to govern itself.
Many tried to bring the city back to life. Most fell short. If their failure was a matter of circumstance or a deeper design of God’s Will is not ours to decipher. Only Yahweh truly knows the scope of His involvement to set the stage for this story.
I know that Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Ezra, and Zerubbabel each had a part to play in this long story of ruin and return. The history of Jerusalem was convoluted, complicated, and at times deeply discouraging. The only constant thread through every chapter of its destruction and eventual restoration was the Lord. He was the author of the story that town and its people wrote. They were His people, and His Will was inescapable.
That is providence (i.e., God working behind the scenes) in its plainest form. When He wants a work done, He prepares His workers. He places them in the right situation at the right moment. He took a generation of frustration and used it to ready Jerusalem for Nehemiah.7 After years of study, I am convinced that this much is true:
Nehemiah rebuilt the walls, and God rebuilt His people.8
He accomplished everything he set out to do because he walked closely with God, and from that closeness he drew the wisdom, patience, skill, and perseverance the work demanded. He was a “man of God.”9
The project began long before Nehemiah was born, but it would not be finished until he took it up as his own. I am in awe of that simple idea. And I’m left with this question: What great project has the Lord started that needs you?
Notes and Further Reading
- Scripture quotations are from The ESV (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright (c) 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ↩︎
- James Montgomery Boice, Nehemiah, An Expositional Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1990), 10. ↩︎
- F. Charles Fensham, The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 9. Fensham notes that Jeremiah, who had urged the Jews not to rebel against Babylon, was left behind in the devastated land. ↩︎
- Fenshem, Ezra and Nehemiah, 10. ↩︎
- Fenshem, Ezra and Nehemiah, 19. See also Genesis 41; Exodus 5; Matthew 27. ↩︎
- Walter F. Adeney, Expositor’s Bible: Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther (LaVergne, TN: 2016), 13. ↩︎
- Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Determined (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 1992), 20. Wiersbe observes that though Nehemiah could have joined the early returnees, God had a work for him to do in Susa that could not have been accomplished elsewhere. ↩︎
- Adapted from J. I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1995), 27. ↩︎
- Boice, Nehemiah, 9. ↩︎
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