Year 5, Day 52: Nehemiah 5

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Appetite

• Appetite: We all have needs that need to be filled.  When we allow ourselves to be filled with the people and things that God brings into our life, we will be satisfied because our In will be in proper focus.  But when we try to fill ourselves with our own desires we end up frustrated by an insatiable hunger.

Appetite is a funny thing.  The more we have, the more we want.  Logic would tell us that if we have a craving and we get what we are craving then the craving should stop.  Here’s the problem.  Our beings are not logical.  When we have a craving and we get what we are craving, the feeling of satisfaction is such that we want it again and usually in greater quantities.

We have a profound illustration of this here in Nehemiah 5.  The Jews are less than 100 years free of exile.  Many can probably still remember leaving Babylon – or at least know someone who once was captive in Babylon.  You would think that they would remember how much they loathed captivity.

Yet, less than a century away from their national captivity we see the Jews enslaving one another.  We see rich people extorting the poor people with respect to paying interest.  We see families in a position where they have to sell their own land, good, animals, and even themselves in order to pay things like tributes and taxes.  The rich among the Jews are extorting the poor just because they can.

It was one thing for Babylon to come and conquer the Jews.  It is another thing for the Persians to inherit a captive population when they conquered Babylon.  But the Jews were doing it to themselves!  The Jews were making slaves of their own people just because they had an appetite for money, wealth, power, and prestige!

I find this a sad chapter today.  It makes me sad to see the depths to which we fall as human beings in the pursuit of our appetite.  It makes me sad to read a chapter that tells us that Nehemiah had to be so focused on stopping the internal issues of the Jewish people that we have no report of God’s work being done.  This is the problem with appetite and sin in general.  When we focus elsewhere, God’s work stops.

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