The Bible Study Podcast, episode 77. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues to look at leadership and the leadership of Nehemiah.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen.

We started looking at Nehemiah last week, and we made it through the first three chapters of Nehemiah.

And Nehemiah, you may recall, was a Israelite, specifically from Judah, who was in exile.

This was after the Babylonian captivity, after the Persians have come in and they have

defeated the Babylonians. And so he was a cup bearer to the king of Persia. He hears about what's going

on back in Jerusalem, how Jerusalem itself is in ruins, and the wall has been torn down. And he

forms a plan, goes to the king king and gets permission to go back and rebuild

the wall. And we started the rebuilding of the wall last week and amidst some opposition from

the neighbors. And so that opposition continues here in Nehemiah four. When Sanbalat heard that we

were rebuilding the wall, who became angry and was

greatly incensed, he ridiculed the Jews, and in the presence of his associates and the army of

Samaria, he said, what are those feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer

sacrifices? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble, burned as they are?

Tobiah the Ammonite, who is at his side, said,

What they are building, even if a fox climbed on it,

he would break down their wall of stones.

Hear us, O, our God, for we are despised,

turn their insults back on their own heads,

give them over as plunder in a land of captivity. Do not cover up their guilt or blot out their

sins from your sight, for they have thrown insults in the face of the builders. So we rebuilt the

wall till all of it reached half its height for the people worked with all their

...