The United States faces a new world order as we begin 2020. It is an unstable world filled with uncertainties and significant threats. It is thus important to remind ourselves as Americans that Russia and China remain the two formidable enemies of the US. Each has goals that run counter to American interests and each poses both a global and a military danger. We must understand them.
As a leader, Nehemiah had to deal with threats from external enemies as well as oppression & exploitation within the Jerusalem community.
Most US presidents have had a spiritual “advisor” of some sort. For President Lincoln it was Dr. James D. Smith (when he lived in Springfield) and Rev. Phineas D. Gurley (when he resided in the White House). For President’s Eisenhower and Nixon, it was Billy Graham. President Obama turned to Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California. In November 2019, Pastor Paula White-Cain joined the Trump administration as an advisor to President Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative, which aims to give religious groups more of a voice in government programs devoted to issues like defending religious liberty and fighting poverty.
Wisdom is a curious term, often difficult to define. The Bible presents wisdom as a practical outworking of profound truths centered in God’s Word. Several times it affirms that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (e.g., Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7). The wisdom literature of the Old Testament further adds terms such as prudence, discernment, understanding, and discretion to characteristics of wisdom. As we begin 2020, perhaps it is beneficial to refresh our understanding of what a life of wisdom looks like.
In late November 2019, my wife and I saw the movie, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Arguably one of the best movies of 2019, it stars Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, the host of the popular PBS program Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood, which aired from 1968 through 2001.
As Nehemiah and his people begin to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls they face mockery, a conspiracy from their enemies, and discouragement, fear and exhaustion.
In Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” the dialogue between the ghost of Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge is most enlightening. As Scrooge protests Marley’s intervention, he declares that Marley “was always a good man of business,” to which Marley responds: “Business! . . . Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business: charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business.” The feverish materialism of the Christmas season seems to side with Scrooge’s miserly greed, not Marley’s redeemed perspective.
Nehemiah, a strategic leader, was a man of prayer—prayers of adoration, confession and petition; and a man who fired straight-arrow prayers to God.
In 1947 C.S. Lewis published The Abolition of Man, in which he charted the “negation of human dignity in the name of progress.” He lived long enough to see the accuracy of his assessment: “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.” Historian Joseph Loconte of King’s College speaks of “an echo of another era of medical innovation amid moral ambiguity.”
The historical background of the Exile to Babylon, which began in 586 BC, and the return to Jerusalem, which began in 539 BC, provide the context for Nehemiah’s request of the Persian king Artaxerxes.
