Nehemiah 7:3 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Nehemiah 7:3

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As a further precaution, he strengthened the security of the city. ‘And I said unto them, let not the gates of Jerusalem be opened until the sun be hot.’ Don't open them at daybreak, which was the normal custom. Wait until the sun is high. Wait till everybody is up and the city is full of life and people are alert. We can't open the city at daybreak, like all other cities. Wait a couple of hours until there is an adequate defence force is assembled to do the work in the city, and then open the gates. They have got to be super vigilant; the enemy will always take opportunity to get in. ‘And while they stand’, by which probably means, while the guard is still there on parade, standing by and active, let them shut the doors. Don't delay the shutting of the gates until after the guard has dispersed or finished its duty. Do it while they are still there, and bar them. ‘And appoint watches of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.’ There weren't many inhabitants. Jerusalem was very low in numbers. As the people had returned from the former Babylonian empire, from all the places where they had been, they preferred to settle in the countryside where they could farm, even with the difficulties of awkward neighbours. Very few assembled in the city, which was in ruins. This is something that Nehemiah had to put right: to repopulate the city. Some were in Jerusalem, and those who were there seem to have built or reconstructed their houses by the walls. So there is this instruction: ‘Everyone in his watch, and everyone to be over against his house.’ Station people right where their houses are. Now we might think that was a dangerous thing to do, because if you are too close to home, you are always likely to slip away off your watch and enjoy the comforts of home. But more likely it's a different line of reasoning: ‘If you're conscious that your own family is right there, well hopefully you will be more vigilant on the wall; you will have them in mind. You are protecting not just the city, but your loved ones. So people who had made their homes against the inside of the city wall, even when it was largely in ruins. were now the watches over the city.

Application

Security! Of course, our great happiness and joy is to teach the positive things of God, the salvation of God, the great doctrines of the faith, the plan of redemption; to exhort to Christian living and the application of all the standards and blessings of the word of God. But as a church we have constantly got to exercise a warning ministry, and warn people about the tactics of the devil, and what might happen. We passed through a phase in the 1960s and the 1970s when there was a fair amount of warning. One of the great warning ministries of the 50s and 60s was that conducted by an independent, former Baptist Union, minister, named EJ Poole Connor, and a book about his life by David Fountain was published many years ago and revised more recently called Contender for the Faith. Now EJ Poole Connor was born about the time of the death of Spurgeon, and he lived right up to the end of the 1950s, so his life spanned the great decline. And he chronicles it, and he ministered about it all his life and gave warnings. If you want to know in a really easy book what really happened in the United Kingdom at the end of the 19th century, and into the 20th century, you want to read this book, Contender for the Faith. He gave rise to a lot of vigilance and exposed the decline of the Baptist Union. Many more ministers left the Baptist Union as a result than did at the time of Spurgeon, and they became more independent and more biblical, more faithful to Scripture. He was the means of bringing Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones to respect the need for biblical separatism, and Martyn Lloyd Jones used to say so: it was EJ Poole Connor who opened his eyes to what Satan was doing by his ministry of warning, and so there was vigilance. But coming into the 1970s and the 1980s it all collapsed, and nobody wanted to be vigilant anymore. People started to say, ‘We've got to defend the essentials of the faith, the doctrines that you need to know in order to be saved, but everything else, important as it may be, we are not going to separate over. If people abandon this and abandon that, then as long as they keep the very central things we will walk with them. We will make no difference between us; we won't argue; we won't defend. That spirit came in, and one organisation in Britain which was called the British Evangelical Council, which had been founded by EJ Poole Connor, and that existed to defend the faith, turned itself into something else. It became known as Affinity and was much more concerned about brushing over differences, and minimising differences, just sticking to the very fundamentals, persuading the independents to get together with evangelical Anglicans who were compromised in ever so many ways. The warning ministry was gone. Anything could come in to the churches. Unity became much more important than truth. What a tragedy!

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Nehemiah 7:3 Commentary and Bible Study