Year 5, Day 58: Nehemiah 11

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Identity

• Identity: Our true identity comes from the Father.  Only when our identity comes from God can we be obedient in ways that satisfy our person to our core.

I was intrigued by my thoughts on this chapter from three years ago.  When I studied this chapter three years ago, I confessed to skimming the list of names in the chapter – much like I did this year when I read it.  However, I remembered the discussion that I put up on the blog about what it meant in an ancient context to live in a city.  Yes, there were benefits: protection provided by the walls and geographical location, social rank from living in an important place, proximity to important people, or even easily felt community.  However, I had forgotten about the negative aspects of living in a city: unable to own land, unable to live off the land, necessity to depend on money to buy things.

In the modern world, we accept all the negatives as a simple assumption in life.  We understand that we work for money and use the money to buy the things in life we can’t make ourselves: electricity, cars, gasoline, computers, cell phones, etc.  Money and economics are a way of life to us.  But to the ancient mind, living in a city was a big risk.  If you owned land, you could farm and raise animals for your livelihood.  You could use the trees and rocks in your land as building materials.  Owning land meant you could get by without money, especially if you were willing to barter.  In the ancient world, depending on having access to money was a huge risk – a risk that could easily end up in starvation and death if a few things went poorly for you.

All of this leads me to identity.  Those people in Nehemiah 11 who went to live in Jerusalem were living in faith.  They were living upon a promise that God would remember them.  Voluntarily giving up their land to live in Jerusalem was an act of faithful submission.  It would have been a humbling experience for each of them.  It would have been an experience that was either a source of frustration from being forced into doing it or a source of satisfaction of doing it because one’s identity is in the Lord.

Winning – or losing, as the case may actually be – the lottery and being selected to live in Jerusalem would have been a trial.  It would have been a moment of finding out where one’s identity really is located.  It would have been a gut-check moment of asking whether I lived to provide for myself or if I was willing to live where God would provide for me.  That’s the fundamental question of identity.

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