Nehemiah 3:1 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Nehemiah 3:1

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Having had their hands strengthened for the work, the people begin to build. It is rather interesting that Eliashib the high priest is seen here in a leadership capacity as high priest, taking the initiative, rising up with his brethren the priests, and setting about the building. We read in the chapter that all the heads of the major families, or most of them, were involved and how the building work was organised. It wasn't only the high priests and the priestly class, but everyone was involved. But it is the high priest who is mentioned first. What is particularly noteworthy about this is that Eliashib turns out to be one of the worst compromisers, one of the greatest menaces to the whole endeavour, as the record go on (Nehemiah 13). In fact in some of the chapters he isn’t mentioned again, and he isn’t mentioned because he is going to discredit the work, so his name as erased from the record. But here he is named, which is significant. He is named at the very beginning of the rebuilding of the wall. This is the beginning of Nehemiah’s term as governor in Jerusalem. I won't recapitulate, but he has arrived now and he has found on his survey of Jerusalem that everything is in ruins. The temple has been reconstructed, but it isn't open for worship at this time. Sacrifices are not being offered, the priesthood is not functioning, and nothing else in the city has been rebuilt, and particularly not the walls. All the rubbish and the debris is still there, filling the city, and so his first task is to inspire everybody to get down to work, to get on with their task. The city is in a desperate state. They have been intimidated by the Samaritans, the pagan nations, who are their immediate neighbours, who seem to be running things. They have bought the allegiance of half the priests and the rulers, it turns out. They have great influence in the city. They run protection rackets in the city, and all kinds of other things, and so the city is deprived of prosperity and advance, and the central mission of the returnees, the rebuilding of the walls is being neglected. Everything is in ruin and decay. So Nehemiah, under God, stirs everything up, and inspires them to resume the building, and one of the leading lights is one who turns out to be in the pay of Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, and Tobiah his secretary, and probably also the governor of the region east of Jordan. They are pagans and yet the high priest is indebted to them, and in correspondence with them, and being paid off by them. But he has a good start. The passage doesn't actually commend him, and the reason for that will turn out to be obvious, but we see that he starts well. You find in the first verse, that they start with the Sheep Gate. This is the old inner-city wall, the north-east part of it, and the priests build the Sheep Gate, where the sacrificial offerings are brought in, and especially sanctify it. The building of the wall is covered in chapter 3 in an anticlockwise direction round the wall. And in verse 32 it ends up back at the Sheep Gate.

Application

In life in the great battle against the church from the world, orchestrated by Satan, many people start well among the people of God, and yet they become compromisers in the course of time. There have been those who have been famous international evangelists and they started well, and in the 1950s when they came to London and they preached repentance, they seemed to do well and they seemed to be clean cut one hundred percent. They were Arminian perhaps – they didn’t stand in the doctrines of grace – but nevertheless they were mostly sound, and seemed to do well. But as time went by you saw compromise after compromise come in, and denial of one vital point of the faith after another, until they ended almost denying entirely the exclusive saving efficacy of the gospel of Christ. Yet they started so well.

It happened in the UK on a widespread scale. There was a very well-known clergyman as a young man who took up a rectory in the very centre of London in the 1940s, just after the war, and everybody thought this man was a wonder. He seemed very faithful, very straightforward. He just seemed to be sound long enough to secure a following, and the trust of the people, and then he began to compromise and he turned out to be hand in glove in his thinking with Rome. He wrecked great areas of evangelicalism with his compromises but he started so well. You see it here with Eliashib, the high priest, and he becomes one of the arch compromisers of the book. So this is a very ugly warfare. Satan knows how to plant among sound believers, people who will turn out to be compromisers and cheats and phonies, who will be used by him to wreck and to injure. We have to be vigilant all the time. It's a vicious warfare – Satan against the churches. The true church of Christ must follow Christ and trust in him alone.

We make objects of special prayer people who preach the gospel, people who teach the gospel in Sunday School, people who go out visiting. We support them in our prayer meetings. We do the equivalent really of the sanctifying of the Sheep Gate. We recognise that there are important points in Christian work, the heralding of the truth, and we particularly single out those points, those people, for prayer.

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Nehemiah 3:1 Commentary and Bible Study