3. Nehemiah inspired a defeated and dispirited people. Not only was the objective itself overwhelming, but Nehemiah also had to cope with a people who had tried to build the walls before, had failed and were now dispirited. There had been nearly a century of defeat. The people had settled down into accepting things as they were. Somehow Nehemiah inspired this dispirited people to believe the job could be done.
4. Nehemiah overcame a bewildering barrage of opposition, some from his enemies without and some from his own people within. After the project got underway, Nehemiah was opposed by many people and in a variety of ways. Nehemiah overcame these attacks by five great qualities: 1) he was close to God; 2) he had a strong sense of God’s calling; 3) he had a healthy sense of his own abilities and worth; 4) he had discernment; and 5) he had courage. God used these qualities to see him through the attacks of his enemies and enable him to press forward to victory.
5. Nehemiah completed the reconstruction of the wall. What a great accomplishment and triumph this was! He did in just fifty-two days what others had been unable to do in almost a century.
6. Nehemiah encouraged and assisted in a national revival. His achievement here was two-fold. First, he saw the need for revival where a lesser man might have been content merely with his own personal and external accomplishments, that is, the building of the wall. Second, he realized that someone else was better positioned to lead the revival than himself, namely, Ezra, and therefore he stepped aside until this phase of the work, led by Ezra, was accomplished. A lesser man would have been unwilling to do this.
7. Nehemiah reorganized and repopulated the city. The last in this list of accomplishments was the implementation of a plan to repopulate the city of Jerusalem. It was after he had completed this—with the walls, the temple, the religious and civil leaders and the masses of the people all in place—that Nehemiah proceeded with the wall’s dedication.
Few people have had as much to celebrate after a lifetime of hard work as Nehemiah had after less than a year as Judah’s governor.
In the eighth chapter of 2 Corinthians the apostle Paul is writing about the surprising generosity of the Christians in Macedonia, asking how they had managed to be so generous when they were actually quite poor. His explanation is that “they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us in keeping with God’s will” (v. 5). That is a secret for spiritual success anywhere in any situation at any time: to give ourselves to God first, and then to others. There was something like this in the dedication of the walls of Jerusalem, at least in the sense that the people dedicated themselves to God before they dedicated the gates, the wall or the city.
What is a dedication? The word comes from the Latin verb do, dare, dedi, datum, which means “to offer” or “to give.” When an object is dedicated to the Lord, for example, it means that it is given to Him for His control and use. When a person dedicates herself or himself to God it is for the same reason.
