Nehemiah prayed, "Hear, O our God, for we are despised," and asked God to turn back their taunt on their own heads; he asked God not to cover their guilt or let their sin be blotted out from His sight, for they had provoked the builders to anger (a paraphrase of Nehemiah 4:4–5).

Do these words not sound "un-Christian"? Does Jesus' teaching, "Love your enemies" (cf. Luke 6:27), not apply to Old Testament saints? Both Jesus and Paul taught us to bless and not curse (Luke 6:28; Romans 12:14). So when we read Nehemiah's imprecation — a calling down of curses on his enemies — how should we understand its application to our lives?

I am open to correction here, but this is my understanding so far. When we read imprecations in the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms (for example, Psalms 7, 35, 55, 58, 59, 69, 79, 109, 137, and 139), and even possibly in the New Testament (for example, 1 Corinthians 16:22; Galatians 1:8), they are not to be imitated. These are descriptive, not prescriptive. They record what a prophet, a servant of God, or an apostle said, but they are not instructions for believers to follow. The instruction for believers is to bless and not curse (Romans 12:14), to treat everyone well, and to leave judgment to God (Romans 12:17–21).

Was Nehemiah wrong to call down curses on his enemies? Was the psalmist wrong to do the same? Was Paul wrong to pronounce a curse on those who do not love the Lord? This is hard for us to judge, since they may have been prophetically reflecting God's judgment on His enemies. Yet which of us can make such a claim?

Paul instructed, "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1). While Jesus declared the awful fate of the unbelieving religious leaders of His day (Matthew 23:13) and foretold Judas' end (Matthew 26:23–24), these cannot be considered imprecations, for He did not wish evil on His enemies so much as declare their self-chosen end. Instead, Jesus' life was characterized by love for His enemies, evident even on the cross, where He prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). We should have the same attitude and do likewise.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The imprecatory passages are among the hardest in Scripture, and the comment's careful, humble approach is a good model. Several observations are commonly offered alongside it. First, these prayers hand vengeance to God rather than taking it — which is precisely what Romans 12:19 commands ("leave it to the wrath of God"). The psalmist who prays "repay them" is refusing to repay them himself. Second, many of the imprecations arise from real oppression and cry out for justice, a longing Scripture honors; Revelation 6:10 places a similar cry in the mouths of the martyrs: "O Sovereign Lord... how long before you will judge?"

Third, the New Testament does quote imprecatory psalms — Acts 1:20 applies Psalm 69:25 to Judas, and Romans 11:9–10 quotes Psalm 69:22–23 — indicating that they retain a place in Christian Scripture. Many pastors counsel believers to pray such psalms by directing them against evil itself and by asking God to judge, while simultaneously obeying Christ's command to pray for and bless their personal enemies. The two are not opposites: Jesus both pronounced woes on hypocrisy and prayed for His executioners. The comment's conclusion — that Christ's example governs the believer's own practice — is where nearly all Christian teaching lands.

Nehemiah had a great deal of opposition and many obstacles to overcome in building the walls of Jerusalem. So how did he find the resolve to finish the work? I believe his reservoir of strength came from the Lord. Throughout these chapters are Nehemiah's private prayers, and I believe they reveal his source of motivation and strength. He believed that God would not only help him complete the work but would also reward him for his part in faithfully bringing it to completion:

• "Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people" (Nehemiah 5:19).
• "But now, O God, strengthen my hands" (Nehemiah 6:9).
• He asks God to remember Tobiah and Sanballat for what they had done, and the prophetess Noadiah and the other prophets who tried to intimidate him (a paraphrase of Nehemiah 6:14).
• He asks God to remember him and not wipe out the good deeds he had faithfully done for the house of God and its services (a paraphrase of Nehemiah 13:14).
• He asks God to remember him in this also, and to spare him "according to the greatness of your steadfast love" (a paraphrase of Nehemiah 13:22).
• He asks God to remember those who defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priests and Levites (a paraphrase of Nehemiah 13:29).
• "Remember me, O my God, for good" (Nehemiah 13:31).

Friends, I remember that even before my dad came to faith, he told me he used to pray to God in the car right before he entered the dojo. He did not know who he was praying to, but he knew he needed God's help. I would like to believe that the spiritual foundation of our martial arts organization was laid through those early prayers.

I need to pray more than I do. But for many years my daily habit has been to pray to God in the first hour before I get out of bed. While I am awake, I pray whatever is on my heart. While I pray for various things, my constant refrain is that I might bring Him the highest glory that day, and that whatever else I experience, His glory and what pleases Him would be my intention, motivation, and ardent pursuit.

Sometimes I pray only a few minutes; other times it extends to over an hour. I try not to be bothered by the anxieties that may bombard me that day, and I can testify that, with only my daily quiet time in the Bible comparable to it, nothing else so brings me peace and strength to face the day. Nothing else supplies the kind of wisdom and perspective that keeps me from rash decisions, foolish behavior, and misplaced pride.

So I encourage all of you who read my posts here not to neglect this gift God has given us: personal prayer. By it we learn to align our wills with His perfect will. It is certainly an act of humility, for prayer expresses our dependence on God. In prayer we are reminded that God is in control.

We are comforted in every possible distress because, when we pray as Christians, we are also trusting in God's promise that our eternal hope of glory has been irrevocably written in the Lamb's Book of Life by the blood of Christ from the foundation of the world (cf. Revelation 13:8; 17:8). Therefore we will not be anxious about anything, for what in our brief earthly experience can compare to such a wonderful, eternal, and unshakeable hope?

AI-Expanded Reflection

Nehemiah's brief prayers are distinctive in the Old Testament. Most biblical prayers are presented as set pieces; Nehemiah's are woven into the narrative as interruptions — spoken mid-sentence, mid-crisis, sometimes mid-construction. His prayer in 4:9 is paired with action in the same breath: they prayed to God and "set a guard as a protection against them" day and night. Dependence on God and practical diligence were never alternatives for him.

The prayers against his enemies (4:4–5; 6:14; 13:29) belong to the tradition of the imprecatory psalms. Nehemiah hands his opponents over to God rather than taking revenge himself, which is the same pattern Paul commends in Romans 12:19. Readers sometimes find these prayers uncomfortable; it is worth noticing that the man who prayed them never lifted a hand against Sanballat or Tobiah.

The refrain "remember me" also has a long echo. It is the thief's request on the cross — "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42) — and Jesus answers it with a promise far beyond what was asked. The comment's closing confidence, that our names are written in the Lamb's book, is the New Testament's answer to Nehemiah's plea.

Then I explained to the nobles and officials and all the people, “The work is very spread out, and we are widely separated from each other along the wall. When you hear the blast of the trumpet, rush to wherever it is sounding. Then our God will fight for us!” (Nehemiah 4:19, 20 NLT)

For some Nehemiah's words appear almost contradictory. First, he is encouraging preparedness in the event of an attack. But then he says that God would fight for them. Can you both trust God and also prepare? Yes! While there are occasions when God tells the people to just stand and watch Him achieve the victory, there are many more occasions where He commands them to fight and then He would give them the victory. This was certainly the case throughout the Book of Joshua where Israel fought many battles to conquer the Land of Promise. Trusting the Lord does not mean sitting on our duffs and waiting for the Lord to do something or move us to do something. It means to (1) live in obedience to what we know, (2) pray for providential guidance, and then (3) pursue a course of action in keeping with the wisdom He has given us. People usually fail in one of these three things. When they fail to obey what God has already revealed, they should not expect God to do anything for them. They need to first repent and then obey. This was the case in the battle against Ai in the days of Joshua. When people fail to pray, then they should not expect any guidance or protection from deception. This was the case when the Gibeonites deceived the Israelites into making a treaty with them. When people fail to act, then we find the situation in Nehemiah, where the walls of Jerusalem remained in ruins.

AI-Expanded Reflection

Nehemiah's trumpet plan assumes both human responsibility and divine help. The builders are scattered, so a coordinated signal will bring them together when one section is threatened. His declaration that God will fight for them does not make the signal redundant. It gives courage to the people who must respond. Earlier, the narrative states the relationship just as directly: they pray and post a guard (Nehemiah 4:9). The chapter neither divides the work into a spiritual portion and a practical portion nor treats practical action as an admission that prayer has failed.

The original's threefold counsel—obey what is known, pray for guidance, and act with wisdom—captures that integration. The examples from Joshua show why discernment cannot be replaced by confidence. At Ai, the nation's covenant breach requires attention before another military strategy can solve the problem. In the Gibeonite episode, persuasive appearances conceal information Israel fails to seek from the Lord (Joshua 9:14). These narratives concern particular divine commands and should not become a promise that every obedient person's project will succeed. They do show that apparent efficiency cannot compensate for disregarding what God has already made clear.

There is also a necessary distinction between responsible preparation and an attempt to control every contingency. Nehemiah makes a workable plan suited to an identifiable threat. He does not wait for exhaustive certainty or demand that each laborer solve the whole city's vulnerability independently. The trumpet turns scattered individuals into a mutually responsible community. Some continue building, others protect, and everyone knows how to respond. Trust becomes visible not only in personal courage but in cooperation and an honest acknowledgment of limits.

The application may be ordinary: a church safeguarding vulnerable people, a household planning for an interruption of income, or a ministry preparing carefully for difficult travel. Prayer should shape both the purpose and manner of preparation; preparation should express care rather than self-sufficiency. If circumstances prevent the desired outcome, the community need not conclude that faith was necessarily absent. God promises his presence and ultimate faithfulness, while particular strategies remain fallible. We can act diligently, revise a plan when needed, and entrust what we cannot control to him without confusing dependence with inaction.

Nehemiah responded to those trying to discourage and distract him from rebuilding Jerusalem's walls by saying, "I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down" (Nehemiah 6:3). Andy Stanley's application commentary on Nehemiah, Visioneering, first opened my eyes to the depth of that response. Many of us are discouraged and distracted because we've either lost sight of, or never engaged in, a "great work" of our own — something important, meaningful, and enduring enough that other concerns take a backseat to it, demanding the lion's share of our focus, resources, and energy. By definition, such a work is God-centered and tied to His will for our lives, which is precisely what allows us to entrust everything else into His care. People talk about having "peace," but that word means different things to different people — for some it's really apathy, for others resignation, for others a false assumption that God approves of whatever they're doing, and for still others a genuine, focused conviction to trust and obey God's Word. I see Nehemiah as belonging to that last group: his peace didn't come from being unconcerned about many things, but from being intensely concerned about just one thing — doing God's will. Isn't this the same heartbeat found in Jesus's teaching about seeking first the kingdom (Matthew 6:33–34; Luke 10:41–42) and in Paul's teaching about contentment and pressing toward the goal (Philippians 3:8, 13–14; 4:6–7, 11–13)? This is the peace I want: to bring everything I do, think, say, and feel into submission to God's will, so that in any given moment I could say, with Nehemiah, that I too am doing a great work that I cannot leave.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The framework this comment borrows from Andy Stanley — that genuine peace flows from singular focus on one God-given priority rather than the absence of competing demands — has a striking parallel in Nehemiah's actual circumstances worth adding: he faced four separate attempts at distraction in this chapter alone, escalating from a meeting invitation that was actually an ambush plot to a forged letter accusing him of rebellion and a false prophet urging him to hide in the Temple (Nehemiah 6:1–14). That Nehemiah gave essentially the same answer to all four suggests the "great work" clarity this comment admires wasn't a single decision made once, but a resolve he had to keep re-choosing under mounting and increasingly personal pressure.

In Nehemiah 5:14–19, Nehemiah recounts that during his twelve years as governor in Judah, he never took the governor's usual food allowance. I understand why he records it, but it almost comes across as boastful — how different is that, really, from other great leaders whose pride eventually tripped them up? I recognize I might be reading it a bit cynically today, but it struck me as an odd note to include.

Yujin responds... I don't think this is Nehemiah being proud, since he isn't parading it before the people — this appears in his private memoirs and in a personal prayer asking God to remember what he sacrificed for God's people (a reference to Nehemiah 5:19). The text specifically says he acted this way because of the fear of God (Nehemiah 5:15), meaning he was seeking credit from God, not from people. Consider, too, the context: the people were suffering famine, so it would have been wrong for him to indulge in luxury while they scraped for food — a striking contrast with government officials who have been known to raise their own pay during hard economic times.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The tension this comment raises — where does legitimate record-keeping end and self-congratulation begin — is worth extending with a detail from elsewhere in Nehemiah's memoir: he uses nearly identical language, asking God to "remember" him favorably, at several other points in the book (Nehemiah 13:14, 22, 31), suggesting this wasn't an isolated slip but a consistent pattern in how Nehemiah processed his own service. Read as a pattern rather than a single verse, it looks less like boasting to an audience and more like a leader privately anchoring his sense of worth in God's approval specifically, rather than in the public credit that a project this significant would ordinarily invite.

When Sanballat heard that the Jews were rebuilding the wall, he grew furious and mocked them in front of his associates and the army of Samaria, scoffing that these "feeble Jews" could never finish the work or bring the burned stones back to life (a paraphrase of Nehemiah 4:1–2). What Sanballat didn't grasp is that while the Jews themselves might seem powerless, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is more than capable. John the Baptist made a similar point to the Pharisees and Sadducees, warning them not to rely on ethnic descent, since God could raise up children for Abraham "out of these stones" (Matthew 3:9). When people mock God-fearing believers, they're really mocking God Himself, and don't realize the judgment they bring on themselves — yet we can rest secure, resting on the precious cornerstone God laid in Zion, tested and sure, on which whoever trusts will never be put to shame (a paraphrase of Isaiah 28:16).

AI-Expanded Reflection

The wordplay this comment notices in Matthew 3:9 — God raising up children for Abraham "out of these stones" — likely isn't accidental on John the Baptist's part: in Aramaic, the words for "stones" and "children" sound remarkably similar, meaning John's original hearers may well have caught a deliberate pun that English translation obscures entirely. If that's right, the mockery Sanballat directs at literal building stones in Nehemiah and John's wordplay about spiritual "stones" becoming children of Abraham share more than a coincidental image — both turn on the same underlying claim, that God can bring life and identity out of what looks, by any human measure, like inert and worthless material.

What a great man Nehemiah was! He wasn't only a strong leader but also showed real compassion for the poor, leading the post-exilic Israelites according to God's law (a reference to Nehemiah 5). Yet the nobles' attitude stood in stark contrast — sharing the same opposition toward God and His servant as Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, and the people of Ashdod. Nehemiah had already noted this same attitude earlier, observing that the nobles of Tekoa refused to put their shoulders to the work under their supervisors, even while the ordinary people of Tekoa did (a paraphrase of Nehemiah 3:5). Their real interest was likely maintaining their own social status and wealth — a reminder that social and financial standing isn't necessarily a sign of God's blessing, whatever some prosperity-gospel preachers claim. We should instead pray for our needs as Jesus taught us, and seek first His kingdom and His righteousness (a reference to Matthew 6:33).

AI-Expanded Reflection

The specific contrast this comment draws — between the ordinary people of Tekoa working diligently and their own nobles refusing to join in — is worth sitting with as an unusually blunt biblical example of leadership failing the people it's supposed to serve. Nehemiah doesn't soften this criticism or explain it away; he simply records it as fact, immediately after praising the enthusiastic work of colonists, priests, and craftsmen nearby. That juxtaposition suggests Scripture doesn't treat social rank as automatically correlating with spiritual diligence — sometimes, as here, it's precisely those with the most to lose in comfort or reputation who prove least willing to get their hands dirty for a shared cause.