Church Hopping

Nehemiah hears about the plight of the Jews who have returned to Jerusalem.  Apparently they had no protection for the city because the wall had never been rebuilt.  This greatly troubles Nehemiah to the point where he weeps and mourns for days.  I admire the compassion he has for his fellow countrymen.  It is so [...]

In Nehemiah 2, he requests and get permission from the king to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the wall.  He travels to Jerusalem and gets his first supporters and opposition almost simultaneously.  My favorite thing about this chapter is the king’s name, Artaxerxes, who I believe was the son of Xerxes.  Any name with an [...]

If I were teaching on Nehemiah 3 I would probably have to teach about community because that is the only thing I see coming out of this chapter, unless you’re an archaeologist. It is pretty unparalled in modern day for a community to set aside their time and money for such a massive project. [...]

Well the rumblings of opposition are getting louder as the opposition becomes bolder as the wall is closer to being finished.  It’s has to be pretty strong prejudice against the Jews for someone not to want a group to succeed.  It doesn’t seem that the opposition has anything to lose by the Jews building a [...]

Apparently a famine hit the area and I’m sure it was only exacerbated by the fact that the men were splitting time between the wall building and their regular jobs.  That’s probably why you see the women complaining in this chapter.  It was also difficult because the nobles weren’t following the guidelines set out in [...]

This chapter more fully reveals to conspiracy against Nehemiah as well as the completion of the wall in spite of it. His enemies continue to undermine his work, but Nehemiah is wise to their true intentions. I’m not sure if this is because God revealed it to him or maybe he just knew because [...]

Nehemiah has finished the building of the wall, so now he must begin to rebuild the rest of the city.  Since Jerusalem is still in ruins and vulnerable, he orders that the city gates are only open during the busy hours of the day.  The fact that there were so few houses reminds us that [...]

In Nehemiah 7 we finally get an intersection of Ezra and Nehemiah.  Ezra begins reading the Book of the Law to the people in the square.  It is very likely that many of the people had not heard it before or at least not recently due to the exile.  This means that Ezra got up [...]

This chapter should be titled “The Faithfulness of God” because look at how many times the people disobey yet God remains faithful.  I count at least 4 or 5 times in the story when the Jews disobey God yet each and every time He restores them when they cry out to Him.  We see the [...]

This chapter surprised me a little because look at the first section…it’s made up of 27 verses.  I’m not exactly sure why it was decided to split every three or four names into a separate verse, but I guess if you want to brag about memorizing a big chunk of verses then this would be [...]