Tuesday, 3 June 2014

Wall of Law

And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in. (Isaiah 58:12)

But it came to pass, that when Sanballat, and Tobiah, and the Arabians, and the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites, heard that the walls of Jerusalem were made up, and that the breaches began to be stopped, then they were very wroth (Nehemiah 4:7)

Now it came to pass, when Sanballat, and Tobiah, and Geshem the Arabian, and the rest of our enemies, heard that I had builded the wall, and that there was no breach left therein; (though at that time I had not set up the doors upon the gates;) (Nehemiah 6:1)

One might say that Nehemiah was the repairer of the breach described in Isaiah 58, which would explain why he gets so much more attention than many more significant people described in the Bible. But what Nehemiah did was different from what Isaiah described. Nehemiah built a wall, Isaiah describes God's people during the time of the Day of Atonement doing good for others. The breach that God wants repaired is not a hole in a literal wall, it is the exclusion of one of the Ten Commandments from being observed today.
Nehemiah worked hard and organised people and got government help to repair a literal wall. How much more should we do to repair the protective wall of God's law?

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