Year 2, Day 52: Nehemiah 5

Greed

Nehemiah 5 is another great chapter on persecution, but this persecution isn’t an external ridicule.  The persecution found in this chapter is a persecution based on greed.  There is a worldly greed demanded from the Persian king.  But even worse is the worldly greed demonstrated by the wealthy Jews as they preyed upon the other Jews who had returned from exile.

Let me explain what Nehemiah is really reacting to here in Nehemiah 5.  The Persian king had a demand for tribute.  Typically, this tribute had to be paid in precious metal – often gold or silver coin.  That gold or silver coin was brought back to the treasury where it was melted down and formed into bricks (sometimes called ingots).  These ingots were easy to store so when it came time for the king to want something made of a precious metal then the metal smiths could melt the ingots down and make the statue, wall ornament, or whatever the king desired.

Here’s where the problem begins.  The Persian king was inherently rooted in greed.  After all, how much tribute does a person need before they have enough?  Unfortunately, “enough” is not a concept that most human beings do very well.  We always want more.  We always want bigger and better.  The more we get, the larger our thirst for more becomes!  There was never “enough,” so the demand for tribute continued.  {For anyone looking for a modern equivalent, this would be a great place to begin a conversation on government size, programs provided, effectiveness of programming, and the taxation required to support it.}

But that is only where the problem begins.  Everyone expects the king to be an egomaniac and have an insatiable appetite for wealth.  That doesn’t make it right, but it is expected – unfortunately.  Where the problem gets really bad is when the Hebrew people begin fleecing each other in order to follow the example of the king.  So let me explain that a little.

Each year, the tribute needed to be paid.  But not everyone had ready access to money.  So a typical Jewish person who was struggling to make ends meet would have to go to their rich neighbor and ask if they could borrow some of the rich neighbor’s “cash on hand.”  The rich neighbor would do what we commonly accept – hand out the money and charge interest.  Well, you know where this is going.  If the poor person didn’t have access to enough money to pay the tribute to begin with, they aren’t ever going to have enough money to pay back the loan.  And usually when people pay with chickens and goats they never catch up.  Wealthy people simply don’t value chickens and goats as much as they appreciate gold and silver.

So the working poor would fall behind.  The interest would pile up and soon they were under an enormous pile of debt.  {Sound familiar to anyone out there?}  They would have to sell their land (and thus they become rentors – responsible for paying a rent that they can’t afford!). They would then be forced to sell themselves into slavery.  Then they would have to sell their children into slavery.  Pretty soon we have a land where the rich have everything and people who should be free find themselves enslaved.  We have a land where if you are not independently wealthy you are a slave to someone who is.

The sad part is that the Jews did it to themselves.  Their desire to store up earthly wealth was more important than relieving the burden of their neighbor.  Let that sentence sink in, because I’m pretty sure that this sentence applies to a good number of Americans – even a good number of American Christians today.  Our desire to store up wealth for ourselves is far more important than releasing our neighbor from their burden.  {Of course, this is a great place to start a conversation about the difference between helping someone in genuine need and enabling poor decision making to continue.  And that is a very important conversation to have.  We don’t want to be enablers.}

But that isn’t even the whole story.  Are you ready for the saddest statement on this chapter?  The saddest fact in this chapter is the realization that there is no record of any kind of building going on!  Yesterday – when we had persecution of an external ridicule in nature – we saw how Nehemiah was able to use it and band the people together and spur the work on even more!  Today, as we are dealing with internal greed and self-mongerism, we see that the work of the Lord comes to an absolute crashing halt.  There is not one sentence about the work of the Lord advancing one step.  External persecution is hard, but internal persecution and greed is absolutely deadly.

Oh how the Enemy of the Lord loves nothing more than to come in and disrupt the internal functioning of God’s work.  Any opportunity that we give to Satan to come into our midst and disrupt us from the inside is an opportunity that He will readily accept.  I’m not saying that we can’t have discussion and different opinions – or even wealth.  But when our discussions, our differing opinions, and our desire to increase our wealth lead to the pursuit of different agendas than God’s agenda, then Satan has won.  As we see in this chapter, when Satan wins and we are divided internally the work of the Lord stops.

This chapter has a lot to say on greed.  It has a lot to say about self-mongerism.  It has a lot to say about how we treat our neighbor.  It has a lot to say about generosity and hospitality.  It has a lot to say on whether we are genuinely willing to reflect God’s love or not.

Nehemiah gives us a great counterpoint to the rest of this chapter.  Nehemiah doesn’t even take what is rightfully due to him as a governor of the land.  Nehemiah takes care of the people around him without demanding anything in return (outside of being willing to follow God and assert God’s agenda, of course).  We can be really inspired out of Nehemiah’s example today.

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