With The Help Of Our God (Nehemiah 6:16)

 


Friday, November 1, 2024


Psalms 1; 2

Nehemiah 6:10-7:4

2 Peter 3:3-10


Observance: All Saints [unless translated to November 3]


With The Help Of Our God (Nehemiah 6:16)


The grand project is finally finished – the mighty walls of the holy city of Jerusalem have been rebuilt. Yet even after all that minute, specific detail about who built what and where, Nehemiah reflects on how it all only happened because God was with them.


This is indeed the only way that anything will happen in the church – if God is with us. Nehemiah was living several hundred years before Christ, yet he still understood that our God is the God who is with us. Thousands of years on the other side of all that, we look back and we agree that, yes, our God is the God who is with us: and his name is Emmanuel, God With Us, Jesus of Nazareth.


Without the aid of specialist workers, the people did a mighty thing, all on their own backs. By all rights, it should never have happened. And yet this marvellous thing did happen: just look at those walls! All this, only because God was with us.


And look at the response from his enemies: the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence; and why? Because they realised that this work had been done with the help of our God.


The point of fairy tales, according to Chesterton, is not to scare the children by teaching them about the bogey monster; children already know about the bogey monster perfectly well. Rather, the point is to teach them that the bogey monster can be defeated. And our reading from Nehemiah today serves the same lesson for us. But, even better than a fairy tale, this story actually happened: God actually is with his people, and he actually does help them, and surrounding nations actually do realise this.


What impossible task have we been given? How much do we trust that God is with us? Do we have the courage to learn from the saints of old that God brings us the victory?


Jesus Emmanuel, be with us always, hold us close, and never let us go.

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