The Message Remix (148 page)

INTRODUCTION NEHEMIAH

 

Separating life into distinct categories of “sacred” and “secular” damages, sometimes irreparably, any attempt to live a whole and satisfying life
, a coherent life with meaning and purpose, a life lived to the glory of God. Nevertheless, the practice is widespread. But where did all these people come up with the habit of separating themselves
and the world around them into these two camps? It surely wasn’t from the Bible.

The Holy Scriptures, from beginning to end, strenuously resist such a separation.

The damage to life is most obvious when the separation is applied to daily work. It is common for us to refer to the work of pastors, priests, and missionaries as “sacred,” and that of lawyers, farmers, and engineers as “secular.” It is also wrong. Work, by its very nature, is holy. The biblical story is dominated by people who have jobs in gardening, shepherding, the military, politics, carpentry, tent making, homemaking, fishing, and more.

Nehemiah is one of these. He started out as a government worker in the employ of a foreign king. Then he became—and this is the work he tells us of in these memoirs—a building contractor, called in to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. His coworker Ezra was a scholar and teacher, working with the Scriptures. Nehemiah worked with stones and mortar. The stories of the two men are interwoven in a seamless fabric of vocational holiness. Neither job was more or less important or holy than the other. Nehemiah needed Ezra; Ezra needed Nehemiah. God’s people needed the work of both of them. We still do.

 

 

From:
When we think of a man of action—practical, brave, a gifted organizer and administrator—we don’t necessarily expect him to be the type who would grieve, fast, and pray about a concern for four months to be sure he was following God’s lead and not acting impulsively. But that was Nehemiah: a man who prayed and acted, acted and prayed. He left a comfortable job as an official in a rich and powerful city to become governor of a tiny, impoverished, backwater province surrounded by enemies.

 

To:
Few among the People of God had Nehemiah’s backbone in the face of endless temptations. Rebuilding a nation was grueling work. A guy could get ahead so much more easily if he married a non-Jew and dabbled in his father-in-law’s religion. These people needed constant reminders that they were part of something larger than their own struggle to make a living, that sharing in God’s story was worth the sacrifices.

 

Re:
About 446-433 B.C. Athens was booming. The city had finally signed a peace treaty with Persia, and Pericles was building the Parthenon (a temple for the goddess

Athena) on the Acropolis. Socrates was a promising young man, not yet the philosopher who would see that Athens’ survival depended on the people’s willingness to admit that they didn’t have life figured out. But the disastrous war with Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, was about to start bleeding away the city’s resources and spirit, bringing to an end Athens’ golden age.