Rebuild Your Life - Recognise Your Enemy
- Paul Downie
- 1 hour ago
- 17 min read
Nehemiah 2:10 NIV
[10] When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites.
Some friends of mine recently related the story of a woman they had met at our local drop-in centre. She had become homeless due to unfortunate circumstances. However, to them she seemed to be bright, intelligent, strong, resilient. My friends believed that she was someone who could make it through this bad situation and set herself back on her feet.
The local council put her in a ‘scatter flat’: an apartment in the community designed to help her reintegrate into normal life.
However, bad characters knew that hers was a scatter flat. They knocked on her door, day and night, to try to sell her drugs and entice her into a life of crime.
She was in the process of getting herself out of a very bad situation, but the truth of the matter is that those bad people wanted her to stay in it so they could profit from her.
She was down; they wanted her to stay down so they could raise themselves up by pushing her down.
They say that when you are in a bad situation, you soon find out who your friends are. That is very true. People who might have been your friends if you were from a similar social circle will drop you like a stone. Others will run from you, as if your situation was a virus they don’t want to catch. Still others will simply not want to associate themselves with you in case you drag them down too.
I know. There have been times in my life when I was down.
You also find out who your enemies are, because they are only too happy to profit from your situation.
As David wrote:
Psalms 25:1-2 NIV
[1] In you, Lord my God, I put my trust. [2] I trust in you; do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me.
Nehemiah arrived in a country that had been ravaged by war into a capital city that still lay in ruines more than a century after it had been taken by the Babylonians. It was still in a very bad way.
And, harsh as it may seem, there were people who wanted it to stay that way.
Such people still exist. They are those who try to get recovering alcoholics to drink alcohol, try to sell drugs to recovering drug addicts, seek to take bets from recovering gambling addicts, entice recovering porn addicts back to their addiction. They care little about the people they are luring. They are nothing to them.
Nothing except a source of heartless profit.
When we are seeking to rebuild our lives, it’s important that we know who our friends are.
That much is absolutely clear.
But we must also unmask those who pretend to be our friends, but care little about us and are only concerned with keeping us down to raise themselves up.
In this study, we will cast a determined gaze at these people so they don’t trick us anymore.
Let’s look firstly at Who They Are.
Who They Are
Nehemiah 2:10 NIV
[10] When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites.
In ancient warfare, it was pretty easy to see which soldiers were the enemy: they wore different uniform or clothes and often marched behind banners identifying their battalion.
Nowadays, it’s much harder. Armies have got much smarter. They don’t recruit people who look like them. They recruit disaffected people who look like their prey. Nowadays, infiltration agents don’t even necessarily have a support cell. They are often ‘lone wolves’ whom no-one would ever suspect.
Intelligence services really have their work cut out to identify those who could be a threat.
It is really important to correctly identify our enemy.
Two weeks after the horrors of the 7/7 London bombings in which 53 people were killed, officers of the London Metropolitan Police Force mistakenly identified a Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, as one of the bombers they were still seeking and shot him dead at Stockwell Tube station.
If we identify the wrong enemy, we can cause serious problems.
Here we have two men who exemplify this issue.
They were Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite. Sanballat likely came from Beth Horon, a town in Moabite territory.
The Ammonites and Moabites were from two races related to Abraham. They descended from his nephew, Lot.
However, the backstory of how these races came to be is more than a little unsavoury. Their mothers, Lot’s daughters, lost their husbands as Sodom fell because of its sin. They gave birth to their sons Moab and Ben-Ammi after acts of drunken incest with their father (Genesis 19:30-38).
Both of the nations who descended from them had a somewhat chequered past with Israel to say the least.
When Israel came up from slavery in Egypt, they were banned from taking either territory (Deuteronomy 2:9, 18-19, 37).
However, that was not at all met with kindness, and instead with war (Deuteronomy 23:3-6; Judges 11:4; 2 Samuel 10).
In fact, there had been centuries of enmity between them even right up to the exile and beyond:
Amos 1:13-15 NIV
[13] This is what the Lord says: “For three sins of Ammon, even for four, I will not relent. Because he ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to extend his borders, [14] I will set fire to the walls of Rabbah that will consume her fortresses amid war cries on the day of battle, amid violent winds on a stormy day. [15] Her king will go into exile, he and his officials together,” says the Lord.
There were some bright spots in the relationship between these fraternal nations. King David’s grandmother, for example, was a Moabite woman (Ruth) who had become Jewish (Ruth 1:4,16-17; 4:18-22).
But despite the deprivations all the nations of that area had suffered under Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian rule, their ancient enmity and rivalry continued undiminished.
A third figure is mentioned elsewhere in Nehemiah who seems to have operated in concert with Sanballat and Tobiah:
Nehemiah 2:19 NIV
[19] But when Sanballat the Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite official and Geshem the Arab heard about it, they mocked and ridiculed us. “What is this you are doing?” they asked. “Are you rebelling against the king?”
The Arab race also descends from Abraham’s line, through a further unsavoury relationship, when Sarah’s servant Hagar was exploited to give Abraham a son (Genesis 16) and was then sent away without an inheritance when relations between her and Sarah broke down (Genesis 21:8-21).
These are nations that, on the surface, we might expect to assist the Jews because they are related to them and are suffering with them, but the complete opposite is the case. Instead of building then up, these nations seem to be utterly determined to pull them down and keep them down.
In my experience, when someone decides to change their life and rebuild what was broken, they cannot always count on the support of those closest to them. In fact, it’s often the exact opposite. Repenting, renouncing sin and following Christ can often provoke the ire, or even the hatred, of those who think that, because someone has chosen a different path, they are looking down on everyone around them. This sense of misplaced pride is one of the sources of persecution from those closest to a convert that Jesus mentions here:
Matthew 10:34-36 NIV
[34] “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. [35] For I have come to turn “ ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— [36] a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’
The people who are closest are often those who misunderstand the most.
Decades earlier, the Jews had also encountered resistance to a highly symbolic building project: the rebuilding of their Temple. That opposition came from the Samaritans (Ezra 4), who were a syncretistic, ethnically mixed group who did not believe in one God (2 Kings 17:24-41) and were certainly also seeking undue influence over the project and the religion it represented.
They enjoyed some success. They delayed the project for years, until there was an entire regime change (Ezra 4:24).
Now the rebuilding work was being attacked again, this time by those from the same racial family as the Jews.
But these people did not just hate the Jews, they also had bad intentions. We move now from who they were to What They Wanted.
What They Wanted
Nehemiah 2:10 NIV
[10] When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about this, they were very much disturbed that someone had come to promote the welfare of the Israelites.
Sometimes people’s intentions are not always clear. They come as wolves in sheep’s clothing. They try to tell us that they have our best interests at heart, that they want us to be happy. That’s why the first deal or bet is always free, or their loan fees or interest rates are a little bit lower, or the first drink is on the house, or our site membership is free for the first month.
And many of us fall for it. Time and time again.
Because we believe the hype. We believe the advertising.
We don’t see behind their intentions.
While in Ezra 4, we see people appearing to make a genuine offer of help but concealing their intentions, in Nehemiah they were a little more up front. Nehemiah was absolutely clear that their intentions were to keep the Jews down, to not allow them to rise.
Now, we have to be aware how low the Jews had sunk.
2 Kings 25:10-12 NIV
[10] The whole Babylonian army under the commander of the imperial guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem. [11] Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had deserted to the king of Babylon. [12] But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land to work the vineyards and fields.
All the people who were intelligent, who were leaders, who could make things work, they had either been slain or taken into exile. Only the poorest of the poor were left to farm the land to send their produce to Babylon.
They say that there were around seventy to a hundred thousand people living in Jerusalem before the exile. By the time the Babylonians were finished, there were none.
In the wave of people who returned under Zerubabel, there were just short of fifty thousand (Ezra 2).
In the wave under Ezra, scholars reckon that between four and six thousand people returned (Ezra 8:1-14).
Nehemiah doesn’t say how many returned with him, but we know that the great city was still sparsely populated (Nehemiah 4:19-20).
So Jerusalem was a poor city, with broken walls and sparsely populated.
And the enemies of the Jews liked it that way.
We have to bear in mind that the cities of Israel lay along a trade route from the Babylon and Persia towards Egypt and North Africa. With Jerusalem out of the way, and bearing in mind that Samaria had been resettled first, Jerusalem’s long rival had the upper hand.
Sanballat is listed as a Samaritan leader, one of their nobles, and someone who would gain from Jerusalem’s demise.
We can understand, then, why it is that he would seek to keep the Jews down.
Tobiah is a lesser known official from another ethnic group who would have considered themselves as rivals with the Jews. We know little about him, other than this.
Geshem the Arab was likely a powerful figure, possibly even the leader of an Arab tribe, whose influence would have stretched from the Arab Gulf over Judea and Israel. He would have likely opposed the restoration of Jerusalem as it would have challenged his power and influence.
So what we see here is three people, motivated by personal gain, rivalry and influence, to keep Jerusalem down.
Nothing much has changed. We find when we are down that there are people who seek to keep us down for the same reasons. They gain from our demise. They win when we lose.
They are strong when we are weak.
They may come and offer the earth, the sun and the moon to us, but we must examine their motivations carefully. We must uncover what they are seeking to gain from us. If it isn’t legitimate, we need to walk away.
Apart from who they are and what they want, there is one last aspect that we should examine, which is What They Do.
What They Do
Matthew 7:15-20 NIV
[15] “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. [16] By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? [17] Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. [18] A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. [19] Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. [20] Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
They say actions speak louder that words. That is certainly the case here.
In fact, it was the case in Ezra too.
The officials who spoken with mealy-mouthed words and tried to worm their way among the Temple workers (Ezra 4:1-2) were the exact same people who wrote to the king to get the reconstruction stopped (Ezra 4:4-24). In fact, history tells us that they even built a rival temple at Mount Gerizim (John 4:20 refers to it).
So why bother with the pretence?
It was a power play. It was infiltration. They wanted to gain undue influence over the fate of the Jewish people, and when that wasn’t possible, they resorted to dirty tricks.
In Nehemiah’s day, they were a little more straightforward. Gone was any pretence at being nice. Right from the beginning, they were clear in the opposition to the rebuilding of the Jerusalem city walls.
We see this clearly in what they did. This wasn’t all-out warfare. The mandate Nehemiah bore from King Artaxerxes would have made thar very difficult.
Instead, they resorted to various means of psychological warfare – mind games designed to impeded the work.
Their campaign began with mockery:
Nehemiah 4:1-3 NIV
[1] When Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became angry and was greatly incensed. He ridiculed the Jews, [2] 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?” [3] Tobiah the Ammonite, who was at his side, said, “What they are building—even a fox climbing up on it would break down their wall of stones!”
It often begins this way. That’s why David dispenses with this advice:
Psalms 1:1 NIV
[1] Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers.
If someone – no matter who they are – does not take the time to inquire and learn about the changes you are trying to make to your life and ridicules them instead, you can be one hundred percent sure that this person is not a friend and their opinion is not worth considering.
Do what Nehemiah did: pray about it (Nehemiah 4:4-5) and ignore them.
As the building work progressed rapidly and the wall reached half its height, Nehemiah’s enemies then resorted to intimidation:
Nehemiah 4:7-9, 11-12 NIV
[7] But when Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites and the people of Ashdod heard that the repairs to Jerusalem’s walls had gone ahead and that the gaps were being closed, they were very angry. [8] They all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and stir up trouble against it. [9] But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat.
[11] Also our enemies said, “Before they know it or see us, we will be right there among them and will kill them and put an end to the work.” [12] Then the Jews who lived near them came and told us ten times over, “Wherever you turn, they will attack us.”
Threats of violence are a sure sign that someone has lost the argument and is unable to reason with you anymore. Nehemiah heard the fear from his men. He didn’t ignore this threat. That would have damaged morale. Instead, he had his people on their guard:
Nehemiah 4:13-15 NIV
[13] Therefore I stationed some of the people behind the lowest points of the wall at the exposed places, posting them by families, with their swords, spears and bows. [14] After I looked things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, “Don’t be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your families, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.” [15] When our enemies heard that we were aware of their plot and that God had frustrated it, we all returned to the wall, each to our own work.
Again, their plot failed:
Nehemiah 4:15 NIV
[15] When our enemies heard that we were aware of their plot and that God had frustrated it, we all returned to the wall, each to our own work.
You have to understand how intimidation works. Often it’s not the violence that makes the difference, it’s the threat of violence, the fear of violence. The enemies of the Jews believed that if they could make them fear the physical consequences of continuing with the rebuild, then they could scare them into stopping.
It didn’t work.
All across the world, the Gospel of repentance, faith and salvation is often met with threats and intimidation. I’ve seen it first hand. I was on a team that faced a physical threat from, of all people, an Orthodox priest. We had every legal right to be there. However, we also had to take care of ourselves.
So we left.
But our team leader had a brilliant idea.
As we were leaving the village, heading back on a road through agricultural fields, we stopped each time we passed someone and offered them a Gospel tract.
The Gospel would still get out, even if one angry man had tried to silence it.
Intimidation is the default stance of those who are losing, and fear losing. They act like cornered animals. Threats are all they have. We need to understand this.
They are afraid because they are losing.
And we are winning.
Apart from mockery and intimidation, we also see conspiracy.
Nehemiah 6:1-9 NIV
[1] When word came to Sanballat, Tobiah, Geshem the Arab and the rest of our enemies that I had rebuilt the wall and not a gap was left in it—though up to that time I had not set the doors in the gates— [2] Sanballat and Geshem sent me this message: “Come, let us meet together in one of the villages on the plain of Ono.” But they were scheming to harm me; [3] so I sent messengers to them with this reply: “I am carrying on a great project and cannot go down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and go down to you?” [4] Four times they sent me the same message, and each time I gave them the same answer. [5] Then, the fifth time, Sanballat sent his aide to me with the same message, and in his hand was an unsealed letter [6] in which was written: “It is reported among the nations—and Geshem says it is true—that you and the Jews are plotting to revolt, and therefore you are building the wall. Moreover, according to these reports you are about to become their king [7] and have even appointed prophets to make this proclamation about you in Jerusalem: ‘There is a king in Judah!’ Now this report will get back to the king; so come, let us meet together.” [8] I sent him this reply: “Nothing like what you are saying is happening; you are just making it up out of your head.” [9] They were all trying to frighten us, thinking, “Their hands will get too weak for the work, and it will not be completed.” But I prayed, “Now strengthen my hands.”
They were not only involved in plotting against Nehemiah, they also had the idea of trying to implicate him in a plot against the king. It was a quite insidious idea. Had there been any truth in the matter, Nehemiah, who was leading the Jews so capably, would have been shipped back to Persia and, if the accusations were found to be true, would likely have been imprisoned or executed.
These serious allegations had only one purpose: to distract Nehemiah from his work.
These verses show that Nehemiah was not fooled. He was never fooled.
In fact, a pattern is established throughout the book. Time and time again, the enemies of the Jews try to gain a foothold and an influence over the city of Jerusalem; time and time again, Nehemiah discovers it and brings it to an end (see also Nehemiah 13:4-9, 28-29).
Often we try to convince ourselves that someone is not that bad, that they just don’t understand, that we should just leave them be. But what we need to understand is that it is God’s will for us to be more like His Son (Romans 8:29). That includes being rid of anything that could stop us from reaching this goal (Hebrews 12:2).
If the people around us are trying to distract us from this goal, or worse, are trying to prevent us from reaching it at all, then they are not our friends. They are on one team, we are on the other.
They are our enemies.
Not in the sense of being people who we hate and who hate us, but in the sense of being people who are no longer looking out for our welfare and our wellbeing. They are out for what’s good for them, not what’s good for us.
In some cases, that will mean that we have to separate ourselves from them, if their influence is continually pulling us away from God (2 Corinthians 6:14-18).
In other cases, especially within an already established marriage relationship, we may have to limit their influence on our spiritual life, and set boundaries on things we are no longer prepared to do or say.
On the battlefield, it is crucially important to know who is for you and who is against you.
The danger if you don’t is that you accidentally harm one of your own.
In spiritual warfare, it is just as important.
We need to know who is really for us and who is really against us, even if the answer is a difficult one to take.
Conclusion
1 Peter 4:3-5 NIV
[3] For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. [4] They are surprised that you do not join them in their reckless, wild living, and they heap abuse on you. [5] But they will have to give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.
We cannot assume that everyone around us will understand the changes God is making in our lives.
How can they?
1 Corinthians 2:14 NIV
[14] The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
Neither can we expect them to tolerate it. We have to bear in mind that the changes God is making in our lives also present a challenge to their lives. Naturally, this will result in a reaction:
2 Timothy 3:12-13 NIV
[12] In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, [13] while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
We should not, however, respond to such people with hatred and derision. They are responding to what they don’t know and don’t understand in ignorance.
We can’t blame them for that.
We should pray for them (Matthew 5:43-46).
We should take pity on them. After all, in their ignorance they are headed for lost eternity.
But more than anything else, we should fully realise who these people are. We should understand what they want, and how their desires affect us. And we should judge them purely on their actions, not their words.
And when we realise that they are acting towards us as if they are our enemies?
We should take care and keep our distance.
Chameleons are very clever animals. They are expert predators, able to change the colour of their skin to blend in with the environment. Then, when their prey strays too close, unaware of their presence, their long, thin, sticky tongue snaps out and grabs the insect from the air.
I don’t want to make anyone paranoid, but there are plenty of people who pretend to be something they are not, before taking us as their prey. The Bible gives us a solid basis to identify these people and stay clear of them.
Some of them may even be people close to us.
Nehemiah found that the people who lived close to Jerusalem, who were ethnically related to the Jews, turned out to be his enemies because they wanted undue influence over Jerusalem and the rising Jewish people.
May God give us the wisdom to see who such people are in our midst.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, it pains me to hear that there are people, potentially close to me, who don’t care about my wellbeing and are simply out to have undue influence over me. Expose these people, O Lord. Show me who they are, I pray. Amen.
Questions
Why was it a surprise to know who the enemies of Israel were? Why shouldn’t this have been a surprise?
How can we know who such people are in our midst?
How does the Bible say we should react to them?
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