Nehemiah 4:9 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Nehemiah 4:9

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The response is one of prayer: ‘Nevertheless, we made our prayer unto our God,’ – the possessive again – ‘and set a watch against them day and night because of them.’ Verse 11 doesn't seem to be connected to verse 10, but it is. Just as the adversaries are about to strike, we catch the ‘it cannot be done’ syndrome. How extraordinary! ‘And our adversaries said, They shall not know, neither see, till we come in the midst among them, and slay them, and cause the work to cease.’ They were going to arrange an army outside the wall; they were going to have stealth squads come sneak up quietly, and find ways into the city, and then strike suddenly. But intelligence picked this up. The scheme would have been massive. There would have been thousands of Samaritans involved in this. Verse 12: ‘It came to pass, that when the Jews, which dwelt by them’ – who travelled out of the city each day after their labours on the wall, back to their smallholdings where they were neighbours with Samaritans – they picked all this up. They heard the talk in their communities and they came ten times to those who were building in Jerusalem. We were warned on every hand: ‘Our neighbours are telling us that they are going to attack you by stealth and sneak in among you, and kill and strike you down. They will set fire to supplies, pull down recently reconstructed areas of the wall which are still setting, and utterly demoralise and ruin your work.’

Application

The war between the world and the church – all the time you have to be vigilant and watching. I remember a pastor in the Midlands phoning me up years ago. We had been publishing on the whole entertainment evangelism scene which was opening up in those days, and giving warnings and there were various publications issued. This pastor said to me that this problem had arisen in his church. What should he do? How should he deal with it? Well, I was taken aback because we knew this brother very well. He was familiar with all our publications and the things we had been recommending along these lines, but he just hadn't paid attention to them. He hadn’t made any use of them. Now he had the problem and he had it on a large-scale, it was probably too late to warn anybody. He wasn't going to come out of the battle that ensued without considerable sad loss among his people. It just reminds you that you have got to be vigilant all the time. As soon as this or that unbiblical method, or teaching, or approach, is launched into evangelicalism, you must to warn people about it, identify it, demonstrate its error. To leave it is disastrous. Of course, in order to do this you must be teaching positively as well. You must be teaching the richness of the faith, and all the doctrines of the faith. You can't be somebody who is one hundred percent negative; people won't listen. But you must warn about the error and the negative. ‘Nevertheless, we made our prayer unto our God and set a watch’, and we have to watch in these last days.

‘And Judah said, The strength of the bearers of burdens is decayed, and there is much rubbish; so that we are not able to build the wall.’ Just at this moment, verse 10, comes the ‘it cannot be done syndrome’. That is typical of human beings – human despair. We are serving the Lord: you hit tired patches, difficult patches. And the ‘it cannot be done’, the ‘what we are being asked to do is unreasonable’ syndrome comes in. ‘We should all relax; we shouldn't be doing this; we needn't be doing this.’ And it came into Judah just at the time that the enemy was preparing for a major strike. The opposition is relentless, and we must not tire of resisting it.

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Nehemiah 4:9 Commentary and Bible Study