It has been observed that if you want to know what shapes a culture, you just need to look for its largest and tallest buildings. Find it and you will get a sense of what holds and shapes and organises their society, their culture, their thoughts, their intentions, their rhythms. In times past these would often be religious places of worship — go to Athens and the largest building would be the temple of Athena, go to ancient Jerusalem and the highest point would be God’s holy temple.
What about today? Most of us know that the largest structures in our cities are skyscrapers housed in the Central Business District, where building upon building of offices upon offices churn industry, generate value, and get the economic engine going.
Put simply, we live in a culture shaped by work and its rewards. Singaporeans know it well. We are some of the most overworked people in the world, clocking in an average of 45h/week!
What hope is there for us in a cultural context where work wields a vice-like grip? We turn to Nehemiah. It is the last of the history books in the Old Testament. How will the Holy God bring about His spiritual purposes in this world?
(A) This is My Father’s World
Throughout much of church history, the book of Nehemiah was considered the second half of the book of Ezra. This single Hebrew book, Ezra–Nehemiah, was translated into Greek around the middle of the 2nd century BC.
The two came together and for good reason. They both occupied the same historical context. They both revolved around the same central event: the rebuilding of Jerusalem as as exiles return home. And they give us an interesting picture of “spiritual” work! You might think that for God's people and for God's spiritual purposes to be accomplished to his people, He would simply send them more priests, more scribes, and more ‘Ezra’s. But God sends them Nehemiah.
The table below details their respective identities, time period, and activities.
Notice the timeframe. Nehemiah’s account began in the twentieth year of Artaxerses’ reign – that’s 13 years since the exiles first departed for Jerusalem! For at least 13 years he faithfully laboured on in his position as a Cupbearer to a pagan king, growing in proximity and trust. That’s 13 years of toil in a pagan land while his people dwelt in their spiritual homeland.
And God uses that mightily. His years of work and faithfulness commends him to the king, who then commissions him to serve as Governor for his own people. Notice the skills he deploys throughout the book of Nehemiah. Wisdom and skill is deployed in enacting justice (Neh 5:1-7), resource management and financial budgeting is conducted in city building (Neh 5:15-18), leadership and ‘business’ continuity is instituted (Neh 7:1-5), law-making and reform is set in place as national policy (Neh 13:10-14). The list goes on.
So how does a holy God accomplish His spiritual purposes for His people? We identify it clearly in Ezra with the priests and the scribes who organise religious life and teach God’s Word. I hope you are also starting to identify it clearly through Nehemiah the civil servant, administrator, finance manager, human resources executive, and reformer.
This happens because Nehemiah was given unto his work. It was 4 months from the time that he heard of his people’s plight (1:1-4, 2:1), and 4 months that the burden of God’s people laid on his shoulders. Yet, Nehemiah continued on in his ‘secular’ work.
Why would someone be like that? How can someone be like that? The text does not give us insight into Nehemiah’s inner thoughts, but the rest of Scripture lays out how we can approach secular work in a similar light. We do so by living with God’s design for work in mind.
At creation, we read in Genesis 1:27-28 and Genesis 2:15 that God blesses us to work and keep the earth (subdue/have dominion over it). We are called to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth with God’s own image.
After the Fall (and in Exile), we read in Jeremiah 29:4-7 that God sends us, even as exiles, to continue our fruitfulness and multiply in exilic land. We are to seek the welfare of the city, and pray to the LORD on its behalf.
Work was God’s design to bless our world at creation. And work continues as God’s design to bless this world after the Fall, and even for His people while they were in exile. They were to pursue homeownership and contribution – to seek the welfare of the city they were in and pray for its welfare. And the command to pray reminds us that God hasn’t given up on blessing this world through work, so we shouldn’t give up either.
Much of our disillusionment and burnout with work comes from a sense of dissatisfaction and loss of purpose. And so much of that can be traced to either a transactional view of work where it is here to serve our other needs (i.e. money for vacations), or a self-actualising view of work where it is here to define our identity and fulfil our sense of accomplishment.
How would your work change if you went into it remembering the words of an older hymn:
This is my Father's world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world:
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas —
His hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father's world:
The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their Maker's praise.
This is my Father's world:
He shines in all that's fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass,
He speaks to me everywhere.
Perhaps it would look like a businessman or corporate manager recognising that profit, stewarded wisely, helps to serve customers with better products and reward employees who work well. Perhaps it would look like a company culture that seeks to build up persons, and not simply maximise them as resources. Perhaps it would look like the everyday civil servant recognising that their “business-as-usual” is God’s way of ordering society for the flourishing of a nation.
(B) The Battle is not Done
While a God-ward vision of work helps us to go about our everyday work with a deeper sense of purpose in mind, it is prayer that actively broadens our secular horizon with spiritual reality. In many ways, this is a natural follow-through from our recognition that we live in our Father’s world: Why wouldn’t we go to our Father in prayerful dependance for the needs of the day?
Do you see Nehemiah’s focus in prayer before he springs into any action? Read Nehemiah 1:5, 8-10. Nehemiah petitions God’s covenantal purposes for His people (Neh 1:5).
In many ways, all of the activity in Nehemiah can be traced back to this petition. Why does Nehemiah go about his finance and budgeting, governing, and HR efforts with such industry? Why do God’s people have the strength to muster together in unity against fierce and wicked opposition? And how do we end up in Nehemiah 8, where the people are gathered “as one man”, the Law is taught, and worship is restored?
These things happen because Nehemiah casts himself upon God in prayer, on the basis of God’s covenantal promises. And God is good to fulfil His promises. This should make us rethink the significance of ‘secular’ work. Without Nehemiah the civil servant, Ezra the priest and scribe would have nowhere to perform function his spiritual functions.
Prayer matters in this equation, because it reminds you that God has a great and marvellous plan for your life. At the same time, it reminds you that God’s great and marvellous plan is so much larger than your life. His great and marvellous plan is to fold you into His plan, and establish the humble works of your hands according to His ways – not just the thoughts and intentions of your heart.
In this sense, prayer works opposite to social media. Social media breeds a slavish love for the spotlight. It stirs up desire for the big, splashy, and fulfilling. It throws us into endless cycles of comparison. It disciples our hearts to chase material milestones that promise the world but only deliver more discontentment. But prayer reminds us that there is a greater and more glorious plan. There is One before whom we will live our lives and give an account, whose eyes matter more than the sum total of every para-social gaze. This is the One who made us and moulds us, and His plan is so much greater.
Have you ever wondered if Nehemiah knew? Do you think he knew that in time to come, God's covenantal purposes would be fulfilled, such that One would come riding on a donkey through the very gates that Nehemiah had established. Do you think he knew that One would tread on the very roads he paved, One of whom John the Baptist said “His sandals — I am not even worthy to stoop down and untie.”
The chances are that Nehemiah did not know the exact manner in which his secular work would bear great spiritual fruit. But we know now. God accomplished His covenantal promises, that all of us have been lost in spiritual exile would return home to God Himself: God made flesh, entering our world, dignifying our work, and securing our redemption by giving His life for helpless sinners.
We are to think of the closing stanzas to that same old hymn:
This is my Father’s world.
Now closer to Heaven bound,
For dear to God is the earth Christ trod.
No place but is holy ground.
This is my Father's world:
The battle is not done:
Jesus who died shall be satisfied,
And earth and Heav’n be one.
Friends, if Jesus accomplished God’s covenantal purposes in our world, and even through the worst of human ‘work’ and injustice, then we can have hope in our everyday secular work. We can go to our good God in prayer, asking that asking that God would use whatever place, position, time, opportunities we might occupy for His covenantal purposes.
Who knows God will do with your prayer? Who knows how God will make His name great and great and great again? Who knows how many souls He will save and call back to Himself? That many who are in exile, lost and wondering, will see real hope and hide themselves in Him.
While we, like Nehemiah, might not know the exact manner in which God will unfold His plans, we know something more than Nehemiah. The words of Acts 17:24-27, that Paul preaches to the people of Athens are words that all of us should bear in mind.
They tell us that the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by men, nor is He served by human hands as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives all mankind life and breath and everything.
And they tell us that He determined our allotted periods — the time in which we are alive — and the boundaries of our dwelling place, so that we would seek God and perhaps feel their way towards Him and find Him, for He is not actually far from each one of us in Christ.
Friends, rest yourselves in such a thought. The everyday times and dwelling places of our lives and our work have been determined by God, so that we would seek Him and know Him. And so we pray and pray that His covenantal purposes will be unfolded in our little lives, even through our work, and we rest knowing that this would be enough.