Daily Devotional | The Wall Is Finished!

Do you remember the last time you successfully finished something you thought could never be accomplished? I remember the moment my wife delivered our oldest son after 48 hours of labor. I held his tiny hand while the doctors attended to him, then stumbled outside to cry with sheer relief that the Lord had brought my son into the world and kept my wife here. (For the record: my wife remembers it all much more happily, but she’s an eternal optimist.)

The rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls had gone astonishingly fast—it took a mere 52 days to complete the project, which was finished in early October of 445 BC (v. 15). Archaeological excavations have proven what God’s Word indicates; the construction of the wall was very rough and uneven, as one would expect from a quickly completed project. And though the new wall did not traverse the entirety of Jerusalem before the Babylonian invasion and destruction in 586 BC, it still enclosed about six acres.

For six chapters we have read of Nehemiah’s faith in the Lord in the face of enormous obstacles. He and the people faced ridicule, death threats, and opposition at every turn, yet they stayed “prayed up” and put their trust in the Lord. They used wisdom and worked hard, and the Lord made their efforts succeed. What’s more, their work testified of the Lord to the unbelievers around them: “When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self- confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God” (v. 16). The rebuilding mattered for God’s people, of course, but it also was a key way for the Lord to show His grace, goodness, and power to the unbelievers who lived near Jerusalem.