A
Peculiar Warfare
We come now to the
warfare, the warfare related to the full testimony of the
Lord or the Lord's testimony in fullness and
completeness. Let me say again at once that this is a
peculiar warfare. There is a warfare relating to the
salvation of the unsaved, which involves all who seek to
bring to the Lord those who know Him not. We know very
well that it is a real battle and there is real warfare
associated with that. There is that warfare which relates
to being a Christian and just going on as a Christian. It
is not an easy thing to continue in the way of the Lord.
Most of the militant hymns that we sing have to do with
the Christian life in general, and they certainly have a
rightful place, because the Christian life on one side is
truly a warfare. But when we have said that, we have not
said all. There is a peculiar warfare connected with the
Lord's ultimate purpose. The warfare becomes of a
different character, is in a different world, and takes
different forms, when it is related to this, and it is
with that that we are occupied in our present meditation.
So, coming back to this
book of Nehemiah, which, after all, is only an
illustration of the spiritual and heavenly realities
which we find in the New Testament, particularly in such
parts as the letter to the Ephesians and the book of the
Revelation, we find ourselves in the presence of a very
great deal of conflict, which takes on a peculiar form
because of the thing that is in view. It is that wall
that is the trouble, or the cause of the trouble; that is
to say, the recovery of a full expression of what the
Lord wants concerning His people; and that provokes a
great deal of very positive and persistent antagonism of
a particular character.
The
Enemies
If you look into this
book, you will find that there are a number of people
mentioned who are the sworn foes of this particular
object, so we look at these before we look at their
methods and the forms of their opposition. There is
Sanballat, Tobiah and Geshem. Who are these people? what
are they? what are they doing here? how have they got
here? And when you answer those questions you get very
near to the heart of things as to spiritual opposition.
You go back to the second book of Kings, chapter 17, and
you read from the twenty-fourth verse to the end of the
chapter, and you have the whole thing explained. We will
not read all those verses now, but just enough to lead us
into the situation.
"And the king of
Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and
from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed
them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of
Israel and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities
thereof. And so it was, at the beginning of their
dwelling there, that they feared not the Lord: therefore
the Lord sent lions among them, which killed some of
them. Wherefore they speak to the king of Assyria,
saying, The nations which thou hast carried away, and
placed in the cities of Samaria, know not the manner of
the God of the land.... Then the king of Assyria
commanded, saying, Carry thither one of the priests whom
ye brought from thence; and let them go and dwell there,
and let him teach them the manner of the God of the land.
So one of the priests whom they had carried away from
Samaria came and dwelt in Bethel, and taught them how
they should fear the Lord. Howbeit every nation made gods
of their own, and put them in the houses of the high
places which the Samaritans had made, every nation in
their cities wherein they dwelt... So they feared the
Lord, and made unto them from among themselves priests of
the high places, which sacrificed for them in the houses
of the high places. They feared the Lord, and served
their own gods, after the manner of the nations from
among whom they had been carried away" (verses
24-29, 32-33).
These are the people
with whom Nehemiah had to contend, and who sought to
frustrate or hinder the continuing of this work. Let us
look at them, and see what they are made of, what is the
stuff of which they are made.
Superstitious
People
First of all, they are
superstitious people. They see certain things happening
and they draw the conclusion that those happenings have
some background of a supernatural character. They do not
know the Lord and they do not know that this thing is
from the Lord, but they come to the conclusion that it
has a supernatural background, it is something occult.
They think if only they can find out the secrets of the
supernatural realm, can be initiated into the mysteries
of it, they will be able to clear up this situation, and
so they proceed. They make their complaint to the king of
Assyria, mark you, about the Lord, and he sends one of
the priests who had been taken away from the land, and he
tells them about the Lord - but the thing is so unreal,
so false, in such a wrong, altogether wrong realm. You
have a statement here which is almost unthinkable:
"They feared the Lord, and served their own
gods". 'Fearing the Lord' there does not by any
means mean what the fear of the Lord means amongst the
Lord's people. To fear the Lord means that He really is
the Lord, and that you have become utterly and completely
subject to Him as Lord. That is fearing the Lord in the
true sense. But that was not true of these people. They
had superstitious recognition of Him, born of fear,
misfortune, difficulties, things going wrong, but their
knowledge never brought them really to the Lord. They
went on serving their own gods. These are the people.
That is the first thing that we take account of.
This statement, made
more than once, that they feared the Lord, must have
implied something. I do not know what to say about the
priest or what to think about him. He evidently spoke
about the Lord, about Jehovah, taught them something, but
they merely received it second-hand for their own
convenience, to save them in their troubles. So we
may conclude that they used the Lord's Name, they
probably offered Him some kind of recognition. They took
on a form of worship which was ostensibly to Him, but
right deep down they knew not the Lord. They were using
the Lord's Name and using the Lord's things, but were
mere professors, without any real knowledge of the Lord.
Their religion was an imitation, a second-hand thing, not
something of the heart.
And then you notice
that, in any case, they are all the time referring and
deferring to Babylon. They are in servitude to the king
of Babylon. And so, because of all these things, there
was plenty of ground for this hostility to Nehemiah. The
real test of them was their attitude toward this thing
which is of primary importance to the Lord, the thing
which is truest and nearest to the heart of God. How do
they stand related to that? That finds them out.
No
Living Relationship With the Lord
We could have proceeded
from the other end, and said, 'Now, here we have some
people, with leaders whose names are mentioned, who are
hostile to this that is so important to God and to
Heaven. That is their position, that is their attitude,
that is their spirit. Why is it?' The answer essentially
is that they have no real relationship to the Lord.
Whatever may be their profession, whatever may be their
phraseology, whatever may be their pretence, their form,
they themselves have really no living relationship to the
Lord. That is where we begin with these people.
But we go a little
further, because we have some of their leaders mentioned,
and these men were outstanding men.
First of all there was
Sanballat, who is called "the Horonite" (Neh.
2:10). That simply means that he came (probably) from
Beth-boron, a Samaritan city; he came from one of the
towns of Samaria. He was one of those people who had been
placed in the land by the king of Assyria; they are
described in the chapter from which we have read. He was
one of them, he was after that kind.
Then you have Tobiah.
You notice the pronunciation - Tobi-jah. It does not
sound like that in your Bible, but that is the right
pronunciation. You notice the end of his name is 'Jah',
'the Lord'. This man is ostensibly linked up with the
Lord in some way. But Tobiah is an Ammonite, and you
remember the word in Deut. 23:3: "An Ammonite...
shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord; even to
the tenth generation shall none belonging to them enter
into the assembly of the Lord for ever". And then
the reason is given: "They hired against thee Balaam
the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse
thee". This is the background of Tobiah: something
which is impinging upon God's inheritance, in a kind of
link and association with Him, but really in nature
inimical to the Lord. That is Tobiah, the Ammonite.
And if we get right back
behind him, we remember that Ammon was one of those
children of Lot through his own daughters - one of the
most tragic and terrible things in the whole of the Old
Testament. So that Ammon has to be numbered among those
mentioned in Hebrews 12:8: "If ye are without
chastening, ... then are ye... not sons" - false
children, the horrible word which we refrain from using;
false children, pretending to be children of God. That is
Ammon through Lot: in association with God, with Abraham,
but inwardly not of the pure seed of Abraham, not of the
pure seed of Israel, not of the pure seed of God's
people. He has his name mixed up somehow with the Lord's
people, but he is not a true son - he is a false son.
That is Tobiah: a fleshly association with the land, but
a spiritual alienation from the Lord, and persecuting the
truly spiritual. As Paul puts it: "he that was born
after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the
Spirit" (Gal. 4:29); and so it is always.
We come to another man a
little later on. He is Geshem, at one point called
Gashmu, the same man, and he is called "the
Arabian". He was either an Edomite or an Ishmaelite:
whichever it was, it was very bad. You know their
history, how they both of them warred against that which
was spiritual. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians,
dwells much upon that. This one, Ishmael, born of the
bond woman, warred against him who was born of the free
woman. So the flesh wars against the Spirit, the earthly
against the heavenly. Or he was of Edom, of Esau. How
Esau fought against Jacob! He was against that which was
in the line of sovereign election; he would indeed slay
that at one point. Both of these, whether it was Esau or
Ishmael, whether it was the Arabian from Edom or from
Arabia, represent the conflict between the flesh and
Spirit, the natural and the spiritual.
Carnal
and Fleshly Men
Now you will know how
full the New Testament letters are of this very thing.
You find not only what I have mentioned, the hostility to
the salvation of souls and the general conflict bound up
with being a Christian, but you find a specific kind of
assault wherever God's fuller purpose is brought into
view. If Paul represents anything at all, he represents
the full and ultimate purpose of God. It is through him
that we have the wide, vast range of the eternal counsels
and purposes concerning the Lord Jesus, and it was with
assaults related to these very things that Paul was
having always to contend, in peculiar ways. They did not
seem to bother Peter so much. James had his difficulties,
John had his difficulties, but Paul seemed to have
difficulties of a peculiar kind.
Take these Judaizers, to
begin with, who were always on his track. He never went
anywhere but what they were soon on his heels to undo his
work, to destroy his ministry, to defame his name, to
undercut his apostleship. What sort of people were these
Judaizers? They were not all the non-Christian Jews. If
the letter to the Galatians is true, what these people
were saying to the Galatian churches was: 'Christianity -
yes, we allow it, we permit it, we recognize it; but
after all, it is only an attachment to Judaism - it is a
kind of supplementation of Judaism'. They would make it a
Jewish Christianity. You remember how the Jews, the
Jewish leaders, went down to Antioch to try to get the
Christians to recognize the Jewish law and to incorporate
it into Christianity, to observe all the Jewish rites and
still be Christians. The whole letter to the Hebrews is
on that matter. But here are Christians who are being
tempted, not to give up the law, to depart from the law,
to cease to recognize and own the law - that is not the
question at all - but to add this Judaism, the law and
its practices, to their Christianity, and combine the
two. They were told, 'You must be circumcised, you must
do this and that, observe this and that.'
Paul regarded this as
subverting them from the faith. That was turning their
back on Christ. The men who taught thus were Paul's real
enemies. I am not saying that they were all converted
men; but I am saying that they were in some measure
associated with the Lord and yet were really inimical to
Him. It was a strange mixture - taking the Lord's Name
and yet being against the Lord's full purpose. That is
the kind of thing that is related to the ultimate
intention of the Lord. It is a peculiar kind of
opposition. It comes, let us put it in a word, from
carnal and fleshly men: men of influence, very often, who
are actuated by natural interests and considerations. Oh,
yes: they know the Lord, they will speak about the Lord,
they will take certain forms of Christianity, they will
be very loyal to fundamental truths of God and His
Person, and so on and so on; but when it comes to this
ultimate issue you find them out of sympathy and very
often in hostility. They will go so far, but when the
full thing comes into view they are not willing, and it
is in that realm, in relation to God's full purpose, that
the real and peculiar antagonism arises. Is it not
strange that, when you are bent upon the whole counsel
and purpose of God, you find your main opposition from
Christians and Christian leaders, far more than from the
world?
So it was when Nehemiah
came to Jerusalem. These people were "grieved...
exceedingly, for that there was come a man to seek the
welfare of the children of Israel" (Neh. 2:10). You
cannot understand that. You say, 'Well, if these people
had any knowledge of the Lord at all, any recognition of
the Lord, if their talk about the Lord meant anything,
they would say, "Anything you can do for the people
of God, we are with you" '. But they are afraid -
oh, strange anomaly! - they are afraid that if the Lord
has more they will have less. It is true, and we have to
be very faithful about it. It is a fact; it has
always been so. These are the foes.
You find much of it in
the New Testament - the envy of the Jews, the jealousy of
the Jews. "If we let him alone... the Romans will
come and take away both our place and our nation"
(John 11:48). They are afraid of losing something that is
theirs, that they have sponsored, that they have taken
up. 'If this goes on, we shall lose, we shall lose
people; we stand to suffer some loss if this goes on.'
You know how true that is. It is a peculiar kind of fear.
It is an unreasoning fear - fear that they themselves
have never analysed or looked into, as to why it is they
are afraid; but there it is. We know, surely we know why,
if they do not. There is a mighty kingdom which, while it
will withstand the salvation of the unsaved and will try
to make the Christian life at all times difficult, seems
to be most malignant when the fullness of Christ, or
Christ coming into His inheritance, is in view. That
seems to arouse something extra, of a peculiar character.
The
Forms of Opposition
For a moment or two let
us look at the forms of the opposition. We have been
saying that this particular object in view provokes a
peculiar kind of hostility and conflict, and it will take
any form that it can to defeat God's end. In this book of
Nehemiah you find a constant opposition on the part of
these enemies. They will try one form of tactic at one
time; then, if that does not work and they are defeated,
they will swing round to another angle and try from that;
and if that does not work they will change again.
'Grief'
So you find in the first
place that they were very "grieved" that a man
had come. But that does not get very far, does not do
much damage. We must look behind their great grief. Why
were they grieved? Well, here again it would be such a
perplexing thing, if there were a modicum of concern for
the Lord's interests. Nehemiah explains his motive for
doing this work of rebuilding the wall: "that we be
no more a reproach" (Neh. 2:17). The existing state
of things means that the Lord's people are under a
reproach. Dishonour rests upon the Church - that is what
it amounts to; the world does not think much of it; the
glory of the Lord is veiled and there is reproach. You
might think that these people, if they had any sincerity
of motive, would at least want to remove that reproach.
But there you get to the
heart of things, because Satan's one object, as we said
on a previous occasion, has always been to bring reproach
upon the Name of the Lord. Always, by any means, along
any line, if he can defame the Name of the Lord which
rests upon the Lord's people, he will do it. They were
very grieved that there was someone seeking to remove the
reproach of the Lord which rested upon His people. A
terrible thing, that. Paul got himself into a lot of
trouble for that very reason. He tried to clear up that
reproachful situation at Corinth, but there were those in
Corinth who turned on him, who said all kinds of things
about him.
Scorn
and Ridicule
Then they turned to
scorn. "What do these feeble Jews? ... if a fox go
up, he shall break down their stone wall" (Neh.
4:2,3) despising, scornfully trying to make out that
after all this does not amount to anything, it is not
worth taking note of - don't take it too seriously! Some
of the Lord's people cannot stand up to that sort of
thing. They just go to pieces under it. You have only got
to try to transfer to them an inferiority complex, and
that has done it - down they go. But not Nehemiah.
Nehemiah knows the reproach is not levelled at him and
his fellow-workers - it is levelled at the Lord; and he
says here: '0 Lord, You take note of Tobiah' (4:4,5). He
passes that back to the Lord. But this action and
attitude of despising is a very real one, a very real and
subtle art of the Devil to try to bring home the idea
that you are trying to be something which you cannot be,
you are trying to do something that does not count for
anything at all. All that you are doing, all the labour,
all the suffering, all the cost: after all, what does it
amount to? There is nothing in it! You will have your day
and pass on and the whole thing will fizzle out!
If you take that on, you
will not go beyond the first stages of this whole
business of recovering the Lord's testimony. Though it is
not right to think more highly of ourselves than we ought
to think or to give an undue importance to the ministry
committed to us, if we have seen the heavenly vision of
what God in purpose is after, we are clothed with a
dignity that is not our own. Nehemiah afterwards was able
to say, with true dignity born of the deepest humility:
"Should such a man as I flee? and who is there,
that, being such as I, would go into the temple to save
his life?" (Neh. 6:11). That is a dignity that is
more than his personally. He says: "I am doing a
great work". It is the dignity of a great calling.
It is the great work, not what we are in ourselves, that
gives the dignity.
Wrath
The wall is now coming
on, things are coming to an end and the finish is in
view, and now the enemies are very wroth. There is much
significance in that kind of ridicule. The fact is the
enemy is deeply stirred. This wrath means that Satan
recognizes that here is something that he should take
account of. Whatever he may put on outwardly, underneath
he is aware that there is something here that is going to
shake his kingdom to its foundations. Remember all that,
if a day of wrath breaks out! It is an indication - it is
really complimentary. It is an acknowledgment that there
is something here worth while. You cannot explain the
Devil's wrath except that he must recognize something
even more than we recognize. There must be something that
matters to him.
These enemies were very
wroth, and out of their wrath they conspired to come and
fight. But this became known to Nehemiah, and he took
special measures. He armed the people who were working,
not only with a trowel in one hand, but with a sword in
the other. When the enemy's plans are known, half the
battle is yours. So the conspiracy failed.
Subterfuge
The opposition took many
other forms. You know about the letter. "Let us meet
together in one of the villages in the plain of Ono"
(Neh. 6:2), 'and talk this over'. Very cunning. Nehemiah
is alive to it: they meant to do him harm, they meant to
assassinate him - that is what it amounted to. And he
said: "I am doing a great work, so that I cannot
come down". That failed, but the enemy is subtle. He
will try to get us in some way to a place where we
compromise, come to some agreement with him, find some
terms where he can get an advantage, where we can be put
out. The Apostle Paul concentrates all his great argument
on spiritual warfare on that very point. "Put on the
whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against
the wiles of the devil" (Eph. 6:11) - against his
subterfuges.
Misrepresentation
Then misrepresentation.
'It is reported that you intend in the building of the
wall to make yourself king, and to have it proclaimed
that there is a king in Jerusalem, and you are appointing
prophets to preach of you' (Neh. 6:6,7). When the enemy
tries that line it is sometimes very disconcerting. It is
a horrible suggestion. 'You are trying to make a name for
yourself, to get a position for yourself; all this, after
all, is only a secret motive of yours to get notoriety,
to be something and to do something that will make the
world take note of you.' If you have any meekness at all,
that shaft is a very dangerous, cruel one - God only
knows what it costs. The enemy tries to impute a false
motive to all your labours. 'After all, you only have
your own ends in view, trying to do something, to make a
name.'
Yes, the enemy will stop
at nothing - lies or slander. The answer is, 'What is the
truth about this? is this true?' After all, let us stand
back from these lies of the enemy, and say, 'Is it true?
Have I anything to set over against that?' Nehemiah's
reply was: "There are no such things done as thou
sayest, but thou feignest them out of thine own
heart". Our answer is, 'These imputations are not
true! If I had been seeking my own ends, I would have
taken a very different course from this. If I had wanted
to do something grand and great, that everybody would
accept and recognize and acknowledge as a great piece of
work, I should not have taken this course'. We can reply
with Nehemiah: "There are no such things" - it
is lies and slander.
Intimidation
And then there is
intimidation. Here is a man to whose house Nehemiah went.
Nehemiah, with all his uncompromising spirit, seems to
have been a very friendly soul, and he went to see this
man one day in a friendly sort of way. This fellow
feigned to be his friend and to be very concerned for
him, and said. 'We had better go into the temple and shut
the door, because they will come and kill you'. But
Nehemiah retorts: 'Should I flee to the house of God to
save my life? I will not go in'. This was a false friend,
after all; right in close proximity, a Judas. This was
such a one as would say to the Lord Jesus: "Be it
far from thee, Lord: this shall never be unto thee".
Although those words came audibly through Peter - none
other than Peter - the Lord immediately says: "Get
thee behind me, Satan: thou mindest not the things of
God, but the things of men" (Matt. 16:22, 23).
Coming through a friendliness is a suggestion of the
enemy to create fear. Nehemiah puts his finger right on
the spot - 'they would make us afraid'. If the enemy can
get fear in, we are finished.
Tiredness
You read the book, and
you can see all this from the outside. And then comes
this from the inside: "The strength of the bearers
of burdens is decayed" (Neh. 4:10). The people got
tired, got weary. Perhaps there is no greater enemy to
going on with the testimony than tiredness. You know
something about that. Even when you get physically tired,
what a tremendous force that can be to discourage. Does
not the enemy rush right in on tiredness? Let us get
mentally tired, where we feel we can no longer cope with
things mentally - and what a perilous position that is.
"The strength of
the bearers of burdens" went, and that was a
perilous moment, and Nehemiah had to take special
measures in the presence of tiredness. Oh, be on your
guard. It is not just that the enemy makes you tired.
Sometimes he does: I think sometimes a good deal of
tiredness is due to his wearing out, his drive. But
sometimes he gets us to do a lot of unwise things that we
should not do, so that we bring tiredness on ourselves,
and he thus gets an advantage to himself. But whether
that be the case or not, always remember that the enemy
will take hold of tiredness to stop you going on, to
destroy your testimony. It is a perilous moment. You need
to take special precautions in the moment of tiredness.
The
Need for Watchful, Intelligent Prayer
This is the warfare. We
have just entered a little into the nature of it, the
forms that it takes, but you notice that the salvation of
the whole situation was due very largely to close
watchfulness. If Sanballat and Tobiah and all the rest
had their secret informants of all that was going on
inside, and they did, Nehemiah also had his information
coming through. He kept very closely in touch with what
was happening in the enemy's ranks, and his close
watchfulness, coupled with his persistent prayerfulness,
was the secret of the victory. "Watching unto
prayer" (Eph. 6:18). It is not enough to pray - we
must pray intelligently. We must pray with information,
with knowledge, with discernment, with perception, for
these things are the strength of effective prayer.
So the victory and the
completion of the testimony were largely due to this
watchfulness unto prayer, seeking at every point to guard
against what the enemy was doing, in a suitable way. That
is a subject in itself. Here, truly, is a warfare! The
fact is, that, when God is seeking to do a new thing in
recovering something more of His whole purpose, this is
fraught with intense and peculiar conflict. The conflict
may take many different forms, but the object of all is
one - to make the work cease.
The Lord keep us moving
on to the end.