The Bible Bloke

In reading Nehemiah over the last several days it occurs to me that Nehemiah had no idea how it was all going to turn out. The only thing he was aware of was that he needed to do something. Psalm 37:5 tells us: “Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him and he will do it.” Nehemiah put his trust in the Lord. And yet, was he not doing what he was created to do? What God had planned for him to do all along? Ephesians 2:10 says: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.” If God have given you something to do then there is very little you can do to work against it. Like Johah, we can resist what God tells us to do, we can back away from it, but we will always, but necessity return to it. We have to, it’s an imperative placed in us by God as we were knitted together in the womb. But how glorious is that? To have a purpose, a part of the plan God has laid down for His Kingdom. So the quest...

There is an old saying, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” What you had, who you knew, where you lived are things that remain close to your heart and vivid in your memories. It must have been like this for Nehemiah. Driven out of his homeland by the Babylonian invasion. He has to build for himself a new life. Interesting to use the word build here. When we move to a new town, or even a new country, we find somewhere to live, and we settle down, and we start to build ourselves a life. And yet, there is always an ache, isn’t there? For the longest time, we have that sense of not really belonging. The Psalmist laments “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” How indeed. It’s the question that rings in the opening verses of the book of Nehemiah. We can feel the deep ache in his heart when he hears of the condition of Jerusalem and those people, his countrymen, his kin, who were left behind. His sense of place...