One of the things that I assume about you, and I think I rightly assume this about you, is that you are an excellent interpreter of stories and of culture. It's a skill that we don't really know that we have, we don't notice it developing, but we're around stories all the time. Advertisements are stories. Sports are stories, politics is stories, our friendships and relationships, school, institution, whatever. It's all stories. And then of course you get the overt stories, books, movies, things like that. It's the thing that we practice maybe as much as anything in life is interpreting, is reading what a thing means. And I would submit to you, my friend, that even if you've never sat down with a sheet of paper and a pen and then thought about your favorite story and written down all of the prominent themes, I bet that even if you've never done that, if you were to go and pause this right now and get a pen and a sheet of paper, you could write down quickly five themes from your favorite story ever, and you would be spot on. You could write an academic paper practically about that just off the cuff because the themes come through and you internalized it, and that's part of why you love and resonate with that story so much. Every book in the Bible works the same way. There's the overt stuff in these books of the Bible, the nuts and bolts, the guts of it, and like then so-and-so did this, and then they did that, and these are the events, and these people fought and argued, whatever it is. But then there's the thematic stuff, and we've talked about this a lot, and along the way through all of that, a bunch of different themes have come up. What I want to do in this little episode right here at the end of it, as we look back on Nehemiah, is to think about some of those themes that I believe have popped the most that will stick with me. This is not a comprehensive list because something might pop a little differently for you, but here's what stands out to me. Theme number one of the book of Nehemiah, remember. I'm not going to revisit all of that because we have talked about it a lot, but the theme of remembrance is multifaceted. It means a lot of different things in a lot of different ways. And as we discussed yesterday, there's some ambiguity at the end of this book as to whether this is even a success. Did it really work? Or were there just flashes of success in ultimately nothing more than a holding of the status quo? I don't know. Here's another one that comes up all over the place in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, the three books that cover this hundred-ish year span from roughly 540 BC to roughly 440 BC. And that is Providence. The idea that even in the absence of a lot of obvious, glaring, miraculous stuff, God is still very actively at work. Now, in the book of Esther, this is super accentuated because God doesn't even get a mention in the original version of that book. But it's almost like the author is trying to say in the book of Esther, I don't even have to say God's name, because how could all of these things have worked out the way they did without a providential hand guiding them? Ezra slash Nehemiah, it's more overt in pointing toward God's control of history and his unlimited power. His providence is really spelled out in these two books. But in all three of these books, God's providence, weirdly almost, seems to work through kings of various quality. And none of the kings who come up are Jewish. They're all outsiders. None of them convert. None of them become Jews or Christians. I understand that's anachronistic, you know, a little tongue in cheek there. None of them have this epiphany moment. We get a little glimpse of maybe that happening with Nebuchadnezzar in some of the Bible stories about him losing his mind and having it restored and acknowledging the one true God of Israel. But I don't know, both from in the Bible and outside the Bible, we know that the Achaemenid Persian kings in this era, they believed in all the gods. They were hedging their bets, right? They didn't have some sort of exclusive conversion thing to the God of Israel. Yet all of these books hold out their actions as being providentially guided by a hand even more powerful than the great Persian king of kings, the most powerful men who had ever existed on the planet up till this point in history, pale in comparison to God's mastery over history. And maybe that leads us to a third theme, which I will call opportunism. So we got remembrance, we got providence, now we got opportunism. The most revered characters in these three books, Ezra, and Nehemiah and Esther, are not necessarily the most moral. They're the most shrewd. They're the most willing to take what a Gentile king who doesn't believe any of the same things they believe is willing to give them. They're willing to latch on to that and seize the moment, even though it's a pretty compromised moment with all of these guys. We don't see it as much with Arta Xerxes, but Cyrus, we know a lot about Cyrus, and I mean, dude is a mess. He died being a bloodthirsty mess, even though he had redeeming qualities as well. Xerxes is presented biblically and extra-biblically as just a comical clown king. Artaxerxes, the record's a little bit more ambiguous there, but none of them are held out as these perfect exemplars of virtue. Yet all the characters who see the opportunity to exploit their favor or take advantage of the momentary favor of the king, they are held out as being virtuous and smart and shrewd, and even to be emulated or regarded as a role model. The tone of these three books is subtly, we kind of got one over on the Persian kings. They thought they were just making policies that would help them, but they were accidentally bilked into doing something really good for us, and we'll take it because all of that is by the shrewdness of the people who accepted this gift that fell into their lap. And all of these good things are a result of the providence of God. Okay, so we got the remembrance, the providence, the opportunism. We got the set of partedness theme. Ezra's reforms to make everybody divorce the foreigners with whom they'd created entangling intermarriage alliances, Nehemiah's reforms to the same effect, and the wall itself all tells the story of the leaders in Ezra and Nehemiah realizing we're weird. We're unique historically. We're not like any other group ever. We have to be set apart in our covenant and our relationship with God, or we're going to get everything wrong. Okay, so we got remembrance, we got providence, we got opportunism, we got set apartedness. Then we have right response or shrewd response to enemies. Because it's not just about how these characters in these stories work with the kings, it's also about how they work with the people who are also subjects of the king and are also trying to be opportunistic and win favor with the king to hurt the Jews. And again, in the book of Nehemiah, Nehemiah comes off looking great because he won't get bogged down by this nonsense. He doesn't want to fight anybody, he doesn't have to fight. He's content to play defense when it is shrewd to play defense. But the number one thing that Nehemiah does with his enemies is just power through. There's a concept, I I don't remember what it stands for, but uh my buddy Destin uses this concept. OODA loop, I think is what he calls it. And it's an acronym, I think, but it stands for the idea of being able to quickly go through an entire decision-making cycle faster than your enemies, and as a result, you're always ahead of your enemies in combat. The quicker the oodaloop, hope I'm using the right term there, the more likely you are to achieve victory. Nehemiah's decision-making cycle was shockingly quick because he knew exactly what his objectives were and he didn't lie, so he had didn't have to calculate all the lies up to figure out what he was doing. That enabled him to power through stuff and respond to his enemies in a way that I think is brilliant and exemplary, and it's perfectly reasonable for anybody who believes in God or doesn't to read this book of the Bible and be like, hmm, I kind of want to adopt some of his strategies. I think he did a great job there. But additionally, we see Nehemiah at other times take matters into his own hands when responding to his enemies and even put hands on them. I'm a little more hesitant to say that might be exemplary. But within the context of the cultural and religious values of the day, Nehemiah seemed to have a really good sense of when to do what and how not to become his enemy in trying to defeat his enemies. Right response to enemies would seem to be one of the big themes of Nehemiah. Remembrance, providence, opportunism, set-apartedness, responding to enemies. How about this one? God answering prayer. The whole book of Nehemiah opens with a prayer. Nehemiah prays for a thing to happen, and God seems to answer the prayer. Nehemiah prays, oh, let the king respond well, paraphrases mine. And the king responds well. Nehemiah prays for God to remember. Well, we're going to talk about how all of this plays out, but it kind of looks like that prayer gets answered as well. And of course, Nehemiah prays for the ability to just do this job and get it done, and it would seem that he does. I still do not understand the physics, the quantum physics, the relationship between an all-powerful God and finite people, and prayer happening in and out of time, and God knowing everything that's going to happen in advance. And if he knew that we were going to pray, then why do we pray? There's a ton of questions about how prayer literally works, what the mechanics of it are, and I understand it and very sympathetic to people who scratch their head about that a little bit. But it is woven throughout all of scripture and logic that prayer is something that makes infinite sense as a thing to do, even if you don't exactly get the mechanics of it. If there is an all-powerful being who made everything and is interested in the affairs of men and women in this world, even the affairs that aren't giant and world-chattering like what we get in Nehemiah, but the little things that go on in your life, then it would make infinite sense to talk with that all-powerful deity about that stuff now and regularly instead of waiting until you solve the riddle of prayer to ever try to engage with that God. I'm not sure that all the prayers in the book of Nehemiah are exactly perfect. I don't think it needs to be, but there is a strong exemplary theme in Nehemiah of pray to God and God hears prayer. So we got remembrance, providence, opportunism, set apartedness, responding to enemies, God answering prayer, and I had a couple more. Yes, worship being at the hub of all of culture, of everything. Think about what they're trying to build here in Nehemiah and in Ezra as well. The whole idea is that the temple and all the people who make the temple go and the religious ceremonies and the reading of the law and all of that stuff, these were supposed to be the defining characteristics of the people. It wasn't that economics were to be the hub, as it is in most modern cultures, or politics, as it also is in most modern cultures. Rather, the corporate relationship with God and individual obedience to God and the sacrificial and religious life around the temple. That was supposed to be the centerpiece of culture that would radiate out and affect everything about this culture and the people involved. Remembrance, providence, opportunism, set-apartedness, responding to enemies, God answering prayer, worship being at the hub. And oh yes, finally, failure is easy. Entropy is easy. It's easy for things to go wrong. A while back, a couple of boys, my son and his buddy, they were goofing around. My wife had just planted all of these beautiful pots in the spring. And in a moment of carelessness, they knocked one over and destroyed this lovely flower arrangement that had taken hours to put together and think through. And so I didn't yell at the kids, but I brought them out, I sat them down, and as we're putting it back together, I explained that it only took a moment of thoughtlessness to destroy that beauty and flip it from something beautiful to a mess. But it took unbelievable care and thoughtfulness to make it beautiful in the first place. Boys, ugly is easy, beautiful is hard. Wrecking things is easy, but redeeming things is hard. Deconstructing things is easy, but building things is hard. And they were very receptive to that, and that's not like something I thought up. People taught me that, and they were right. The point is, cultural collapse and failure is easy. It'll happen. We don't need any help, and we're no different than the people we see in the book of Nehemiah who came unraveled. We're great at coming unraveled, and not everybody else, like me, I am great at coming unraveled and contributing to things getting worse. It takes tremendous intentionality to make a beautiful, redemptive culture that values things like life and justice and care for others and honesty and integrity and art and beauty and redemptiveness. That isn't natural. What is natural is weird, broken down, violent tribalism where there isn't time to make art or to build a robust economy that provides riches for everybody up and down the economic spectrum. I think it's easy to totally take for granted how hard it is and how much buy-in it takes from everyone to really build something beautiful culturally. And Nehemiah was swimming against that current. Things wanted to fall apart in Nehemiah, and he was duct taping them back together as quickly as he could, with momentary great results, and lastingly, well, we'll talk about that over the next few days. Whatever the case, final theme for me. Failure is easy, building something beautiful is hard. We need to talk about why this book is in the Bible and the legacy of how everything plays out after this, leading up to the time of Jesus, and then boom, we're into Galatians. Crazy. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.