Nehemiah 6:1-14—The Tactics of the Enemy

Nehemiah 6:1-14—“The Tactics of the Enemy”

Please turn with me in your Bible to Nehemiah 6. If you’re using one of the Story Bibles we provide, you’ll find that on page 322. We’re in the middle of a series of sermons going through the book of Nehemiah passage by passage, and so far we’ve seen Nehemiah courageously following God’s leadership in his life by rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem—that’s really what the book of Nehemiah is about. And this morning we find ourselves in Nehemiah 6:1-14. Nehemiah 6:1-14:

1 Now when Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left in it (although up to that time I had not set up the doors in the gates), 2 Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, “Come and let us meet together at Hakkephirim in the plain of Ono.” But they intended to do me harm. 3 And I sent messengers to them, saying, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?” 4 And they sent to me four times in this way, and I answered them in the same manner. 5 In the same way Sanballat for the fifth time sent his servant to me with an open letter in his hand. 6 In it was written, “It is reported among the nations, and Geshem also says it, that you and the Jews intend to rebel; that is why you are building the wall. And according to these reports you wish to become their king. 7 And you have also set up prophets to proclaim concerning you in Jerusalem, ‘There is a king in Judah.’ And now the king will hear of these reports. So now come and let us take counsel together.” 8 Then I sent to him, saying, “No such things as you say have been done, for you are inventing them out of your own mind.” 9 For they all wanted to frighten us, thinking, “Their hands will drop from the work, and it will not be done.” But now, O God, strengthen my hands. 10 Now when I went into the house of Shemaiah the son of Delaiah, son of Mehetabel, who was confined to his home, he said, “Let us meet together in the house of God, within the temple. Let us close the doors of the temple, for they are coming to kill you. They are coming to kill you by night.” 11 But I said, “Should such a man as I run away? And what man such as I could go into the temple and live? I will not go in.” 12 And I understood and saw that God had not sent him, but he had pronounced the prophecy against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. 13 For this purpose he was hired, that I should be afraid and act in this way and sin, and so they could give me a bad name in order to taunt me. 14 Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, according to these things that they did, and also the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who wanted to make me afraid. 

December 7, 1941 has rightly been called “a date which will live in infamy.” Of course, that’s the date on which the Empire of Japan attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor without any prior warning that they were going to do so. This attack led the United States to almost immediately declare war on Japan and enter the fray of World War II. And one of the reasons this attack on Pearl Harbor was so devastating for the U.S. is that our navy was almost entirely unprepared for it. I did a little research and, for starters, many of our soldiers and sailors were still sleeping. In addition to that, antiaircraft guns were unmanned, ammunition lockers were locked, and fighter planes were parked wingtip to wingtip. So our level of preparedness was extremely low. That’s why we lost 19 ships, whereas Japan lost 0. That’s why we lost 188 airplanes, whereas Japan lost 29. And that’s why we had 2,335 men killed, whereas Japan had 64. Pearl Harbor was devastating largely because we just weren’t ready.

And honestly, I have to wonder how many Christians are in a similar position spiritually. I wonder how prepared we as Christians are to defend ourselves against spiritual attacks—because the Bible teaches that we have an enemy named Satan who’s on a mission to destroy us. And when you think about it, there’s really no excuse for us to be unprepared for Satan’s attacks because the Bible clearly tells us all about Satan. The U.S. Navy might have had a bit of an excuse for not being ready for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor since Japan hadn’t declared war. But we as Christians don’t have any excuse for not being prepared for Satan’s attacks because God’s clearly told us in the Bible what Satan wants to do and how he plans to do it. So it’s on us to be ready. And I believe this passage here in Nehemiah 6 helps us do exactly that.

Here in this passage, we see that Nehemiah’s enemies, Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem, are up to no good yet again. You may remember from previous chapters how these three guys caused Nehemiah a lot of trouble before and were even on the brink of engaging Nehemiah in open warfare. And thankfully, it didn’t come to that, but as we can see, that doesn’t mean Sanballat, Tobiah, and Gesham have given up. They’ve just adjusted their tactics a bit. But…Nehemiah was ready. That’s the main thing I believe we see in this text. Nehemiah wisely and skillfully responds to the tactics of his enemies. And there are three specific ways Nehemiah responds to them. Number one, ignoring the enemy’s distractions. Number two, identifying the enemy’s lies. And number three, resisting the enemy’s temptations.

Ignoring the Enemy’s Distractions

So first, ignoring the enemy’s distractions. Look again at verses 1-4: 1 Now when Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left in it (although up to that time I had not set up the doors in the gates), 2 Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, “Come and let us meet together at Hakkephirim in the plain of Ono.” But they intended to do me harm. 3 And I sent messengers to them, saying, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?” 4 And they sent to me four times in this way, and I answered them in the same manner. So Sanballat and Geshem are trying to draw Nehemiah away from what God has called him to do. They keep sending messengers urging him to come out away from Jerusalem and meet them at a place called Hakkephirim. And really, this was much more than a mere distraction since it says in verse 2 that they “intended to do [him] harm.” So they were really trying to assassinate him by luring him away. And I would suggest to you that Satan’s distractions have a similar intent. Think about the story of David and Bathsheba. We don’t have time to read the whole story, but for those of you who are familiar with it, when did David see Bathsheba bathing and decide he wanted to sleep with her? When did that happen? 2 Samuel 11:1 states that it was “in the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle.” So what was David supposed to be doing? He was supposed to be leading his army into battle. But instead he sends Joab out to lead the army while he himself stays in his comfortable palace in Jerusalem. And it’s then that he sees Bathsheba and gets into trouble. But his first mistake wasn’t sleeping with Bathsheba but rather neglecting the task God had called him to do. That’s what made him vulnerable.

And in a similar way, back in our main text, Nehemiah’s enemies try to pull him away from his God-given work of rebuilding the wall. But thankfully, Nehemiah has enough sense to refuse. He tells them on all four occasions when they send for him, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?” So Nehemiah understands that he needs to be focused on the wall and that bad things will happen if he allows himself to be drawn away from the wall. If you’re a Christian, let me ask you something: How often to you allow yourself to be drawn away and distracted from the work God’s given you by relatively trivial things? Sometimes when I see my one-year-old daughter Grace playing with something I don’t want her to play with, I’ll try to distract her with something else. I realize that if I just take away whatever it is that she has, she’s probably going to erupt into tears. So to avoid that, I find it helpful to bring another toy over to her and get her to start playing with that toy so that I can then take away from her the thing she has that I don’t want her to have. And it usually works. She usually forgets all about what she was playing with as she now focuses on the new thing I’ve brought over to her. 

And that’s strikingly similar to a tactic Satan often employs with us. Satan loves to distract us. He sees us laboring for God’s mission and spreading the gospel, and he definitely doesn’t want us to be doing that. So he comes over to us and distracts us with various other activities—activities that aren’t necessarily bad in themselves but often have a way of taking up way too much of our time. You know what I’m talking about: various hobbies, projects, TV, other forms of entertainment—things like that. And again, many of these activities really aren’t bad in themselves, but they become problematic when we get so absorbed in them that we neglect the things God calls us to do. And I believe Satan is often involved in pushing us toward that kind of excess. He loves to distract us. And it’s really not hard to see why he loves it so much. Think about how much is not getting done for the Kingdom because a lot of Christians spend upwards of 3 hours a day watching TV. This tactic of distraction is remarkably effective. And of course, just like David was made vulnerable by distraction and just like Nehemiah would have been made vulnerable by distraction, when do you think we’re the most vulnerable spiritually? It’s when we’re distracted by all these other things and not very in tune with God and the truths of God and the purposes of God and the ways of God. 

Identifying the Enemy’s Lies

Then not only did Nehemiah ignore the enemy’s distractions, he also identified the enemy’s lies. That’s the second way he responded to their tactics: identifying the enemy’s lies. We see this in verses 5-9: 5 In the same way Sanballat for the fifth time sent his servant to me with an open letter in his hand. 6 In it was written, “It is reported among the nations, and Geshem also says it, that you and the Jews intend to rebel; that is why you are building the wall. And according to these reports you wish to become their king. 7 And you have also set up prophets to proclaim concerning you in Jerusalem, ‘There is a king in Judah.’ And now the king will hear of these reports. So now come and let us take counsel together.” 8 Then I sent to him, saying, “No such things as you say have been done, for you are inventing them out of your own mind.” 9 For they all wanted to frighten us, thinking, “Their hands will drop from the work, and it will not be done.” But now, O God, strengthen my hands. 

So after Sanballat’s attempts to draw Nehemiah away from Jerusalem prove unsuccessful, he now tries to make Nehemiah afraid of how the king of Persia is going to perceive what Nehemiah’s doing. You see, both Nehemiah and Sanballat are regional governors under the Persian king, so the last thing either of them want is for the king to get the idea that they’re not loyal to him. That’s an easy way to get yourself executed. So Sanballat tries to get Nehemiah to believe that there’s a rumor going around that he’s rebuilding the wall because he intends to rebel make himself king. That way, Sanballat’s hoping, Nehemiah will get scared and stop building the wall. But Nehemiah calls his bluff. He tells Sanballat straight up, “No such things as you say have been done, for you are inventing them out of your own mind.” So Nehemiah identifies the enemy’s lies. 

And in our battle against Satan, we need to be aware that we also are dealing with a liar. In fact, in John 6:44, Jesus calls Satan “the father of lies.” He says that Satan “does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” And we certainly see that very clearly in Genesis 3 as Satan deceives Eve in the Garden of Eden. And guess what? He’s still doing the same thing today. His tactics haven’t changed. Let me just list off a few of the lies Satan loves to whisper in our ear and then show how we can demolish those lies with biblical truth. First, God doesn’t really care about you. Satan loves to tell us that when we’re suffering—that God doesn’t care what we’re going through or how we feel. Yet God says in Isaiah 49:15, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Another favorite lie of Satan is that prayer doesn’t really work. God won’t listen to you; don’t bother praying. But the Bible says in Matthew 7:7, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Number three, Satan loves to tell us that we’re all alone in our struggles with sin. Nobody else struggles with that. Yet 1 Corinthians 10:13 says that “no temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.” Satan also loves to tell us that we’ll never to able to overcome the sin we’re struggling with. It’s hopeless; you might as well give up. But Jesus declares in John 8:32 that “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Number five, Satan would love to get us to believe that our sins are unforgiveable and that God still views us as guilty even after we’ve confessed our sin. After all, how could God ever forgive you for that? But the Bible says in Romans 8:1 that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Also, a related lie from Satan is that the sinful things we did before we became Christians continue to define us today. They’re never truly in the past. But the Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” Then finally, number seven, Satan wants us to believe the lie of “I’ll be happy when (you fill in the blank).” Maybe when we get a better job or buy this or that material thing or have children or marry a person or divorce a person or lose weight or any of the things we so often look to for ultimate satisfaction. Satan wants us to think those things will bring ultimate happiness. But David says to God in Psalm 16:11, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” 

So those are just a few of the ways Satan lies to us. He wants us to be defeated, he wants us to be discouraged, he wants to keep us in bondage, he wants to make us doubt, he wants us to chase after satisfaction in all the wrong places, and he wants to sear our conscience to sin.  So he tell us all different kinds of lies to make us the way he wants us to be. But as we’ve seen, the Bible exposes Satan’s lies the way light exposes darkness. When I was a kid, I used to be scared of the dark. Whenever it was dark, my imagination would get the best of me. And I would start thinking that some scary things were there that really weren’t there. But when the light came on, the illusions of all those scary things suddenly vanished, and I could see that the monster I thought was climbing in my window was actually just the shadow of a tree from the moonlight. Light exposes things—it exposes what’s true and real. And that’s how the Bible functions in our lives. In Psalm 119:105, the psalmist says to God, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” It exposes the lies of the enemy.

Resisting the Enemy’s Temptations 

Then finally, returning to Nehemiah, we’ve seen Nehemiah ignoring the enemy’s distractions and identifying the enemy’s lies. Then lastly, we see him resisting the enemy’s temptations. Look at verses 10-14 of Nehemiah 6: 10 Now when I went into the house of Shemaiah the son of Delaiah, son of Mehetabel, who was confined to his home, he said, “Let us meet together in the house of God, within the temple. Let us close the doors of the temple, for they are coming to kill you. They are coming to kill you by night.” 11 But I said, “Should such a man as I run away? And what man such as I could go into the temple and live? I will not go in.” 12 And I understood and saw that God had not sent him, but he had pronounced the prophecy against me because Tobiah and Sanballat had hired him. 13 For this purpose he was hired, that I should be afraid and act in this way and sin, and so they could give me a bad name in order to taunt me. 14 Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, according to these things that they did, and also the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who wanted to make me afraid.

So the temptation here was for Nehemiah to do something he wasn’t supposed to do and take refuge in the temple. The scriptures were clear that only the priests were allowed to go into that part of the temple, but Sanballat hires a prophet to try to convince Nehemiah that some assassins are coming to kill him and that the only way he can save his life is by hiding in the temple. And that was probably a big temptation for Nehemiah. I imagine he’s continually on edge throughout this building project and is legitimately concerned for his own safety. But since this prophet tells him something contrary to the scriptures, Nehemiah understands that God hasn’t sent this prophet and that this is yet another tactic of the enemy to stop the wall from being completed. He understands that Sanballat and Tobiah are trying to trick him into entering the table so that he would be publically discredited in the eyes of his people.

And in the same way, Satan loves to tempt us and lure us into sin. And just like he’s been a liar from the very beginning, he’s also been a tempter from the very beginning. The truth about sin is that sin is a snare. I remember my pastor when I was growing up reminded us often that sin always takes you farther than you ever thought you would go and makes you pay more than you ever thought you would pay. It always takes you farther than you ever thought you would go and makes you pay more than you ever thought you would pay. Listen to how James 1:14-16 describes it: 14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. 16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Do you know why verse 16 warns us not to be deceived? It’s because, go figure, it’s easy to be deceived by our sinful desires. Verse 14 describes it as being “lured” and “enticed.” We think we’re choosing life when we sin, but really in the end, we’re choosing death. It’s actually pretty comparable to the path of a drug addict. Nobody starts doing drugs thinking that they’re going to die. They start out thinking, “This is great, this is fun, this feels good.” But then as they begin to use more and more, the “fun” quickly vanishes, and without fail, their new habit begins to dominate their lives. It takes them farther than they ever thought they would go and makes them pay more than they ever thought they would pay, on many different levels. And eventually, unless they quit, they lose everything, including their very lives. As the leader of a Narcotics Anonymous group once told me, addicts only have two choices: quit or die. And that’s really the choice we all face when it comes to sin—because, as we see in James 1, sin brings death. It will destroy so many things in your life and, in the end, will destroy you. And don’t think for a moment that Satan’s not involved in all of this. He absolutely is. Satan amplifies and intensifies our own sinful desires to lead us down that path of destruction. That’s why we need the Bible, that’s why we need prayer, and that’s why we need each other. Don’t let Satan draw you in.

Conclusion

So if you’re a Christian, be on guard against Satan’s tactics, and be ready to fight back by ignoring his distractions, identifying his lies, and resisting his temptations. But if you’re not yet a Christian and haven’t yet come to know Jesus in a personal way, there’s something else you need to hear. Satan’s central goal for you isn’t just to cause you to sin more or have a miserable life or any of that. His central goal is to keep you as far away as possible from Jesus. He understands perhaps even better than you do that Jesus is your only hope of rescue from sin. So he’ll do whatever he can to keep you from Jesus. Maybe he’ll try to lead you into skepticism about Christianity. Or perhaps he’ll convince you that God doesn’t really care about your sin and doesn’t take it that seriously so that you give yourself over to it more and more. Or maybe he’ll convince you that religion is the answer to your sin and that you can be good enough for God if you just try really hard and do more good things. But listen to me: whatever lie Satan has you believing this morning, recognize that it’s not true. Your greatest need right now is to be rescued from your sin, and that rescue only comes through Jesus. That’s because Jesus came to this earth as a real human being, lived a perfectly righteous life entirely free of any sin, and then died on cross to take the punishment for the sins we had committed. We should have been the ones to suffer for those sins, but Jesus acted as our substitute and voluntarily suffered the full force of God’s wrath against sin in our place. Then after he did that, Jesus triumphantly resurrected from the dead to conquer Satan, sin, and death once and for all. So there’s actually a sense in which the battle has already been won. Satan is, in one sense, already defeated. And the way we can enjoy that victory in our lives and be forgiven of our sin and come into a relationship with Jesus is by putting our trust in him alone for rescue. We have to humbly look to him as our only hope of being right with God.