Under Attack

I  am a science fiction nerd and one of my favorites is the Star Trek universe created by Gene Rodenberry. And almost no matter which one you watch, there is inevitably a scene where the crew is on the bridge and there is some kind of noise and they all jolt around. (one of the unanswered questions of this universe has always been if you can travel the speed of light, why can’t you figure out how to make a seatbelt?) and someone always says with great gravitas. “Captain we are under attack.”  Now one might wonder what other possibility there would be. Traveling through space you don’t exactly have turbulence, hit a pothole, and to the best of my knowledge no one ever says “Captain, we hit a possum.” which would be much more likely if they were traveling the dark wet roads of the Key Peninsula. Nehemiah probably never heard those words either(I am not sure they even have opossums in Israel) but he most certainly heard the words “We are under attack”. It was not enough that he faced the daunting task of encouraging a broken down and discouraged people to rebuild a broken down wall, but he had to do it all while being under attack.

 Jesus said that we should not be surprised when we come under attack. In fact, if we are doing what he was doing, we most certainly should come under attack. The world after all hated him first. We live in a country where we are free. We live where currently, we are able to worship, share the gospel, and enjoy what was hard won at our founding. Yet even in all of this we still experience attacks. The reason being is that the evil one does not abide by our constitution. He uses the same lies over and over again because they can often be so effective. He used some of those lies in Nehemiah’s time and put them in the mouths of his followers. He first used the good ole verbal attacks like; “you can’t rebuild your wall” or “Even a fox could break that wall down” and I am sure Nehemiah was not comprehensive in listing all the attacks. When discovering that the verbal attacks were not enough God’s enemies always step up to the next best thing, physical attacks.   Yet in spite of all the attacks, Nehemiah built the wall.

I find great encouragement from Nehemiah, and hope you can too as we talk about how we can still build our people and our wall, even in the face of attacks.

 See you at church,

Pastor Chris.