In the last chapter the wall was completed. This chapter should at the most be a celebration and that is it. From our perspective the mission was complete. Nehemiah set out to rebuild the wall. The wall has been rebuilt. Now it is time to party and move on. The bad guys have lost and the good guys have won. Now it is time for our hero to ride off into the sunset. That is the Hollywood version. So now is time for, in the words of the great Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story.”
The first thing Nehemiah does in chapter seven is to appoint people to take care of his work. It seems in our society that leaders fail at this point in one of two ways. First, they fail to care for the work that has been created. In the engineering world this is called maintenance. If we fail to care for those things that we have worked so hard to create then we have wasted our time in creating them and soon we will be doing it all again. The second way that they fail is by not empowering other people to care for the creation. Notice I did not say that they fail to appoint people to care for the creation. I said they fail to empower them. I have seen many leaders appoint people to care for the creation only to cause extreme frustration and hurt by not empowering them. They want a worker not a caretaker. In short the leader goes from creator to micro-manager. Nehemiah instead appoints two men. He gives some simple rules and then he moves on. At this point Nehemiah has every confidence that the men will do what they have been appointed to do. Enough said; they are caring for his great work.
The second thing Nehemiah does in chapter seven is to take a record of the people. I struggled with this. Then again it seems that I always seem to struggle when there are very long lists of names in the Bible. I get so bogged down with all of the names and pronunciations that I can miss the forest for the trees. So what is the point of all of these names? Well, my thought is that Nehemiah needed to know. He needed to know how many people were in the area and where they lived. Why is this important? I will give a couple of reasons. The first is because he needed to know for safety sake. They had just finished rebuilding a wall that had been destroyed by war. As a leader you need to know who your people are in case disaster strikes so that everyone can be accounted for. The second reason is because it takes people to continue a work. Nehemiah was called to rebuild a wall but in reality it was much more than that. They were rebuilding their society and their culture. In order to do this it takes people. This will become more apparent in later chapters.
There is one final thing to note. Earlier I said that once Nehemiah put men in charge he “moved on”. In verse 5 he talks about how God put it on his heart. It is amazing to me how some people can achieve so much while others can do so little. He had already built a wall. He had done in 52 days what could not be done for hundreds of years. Now he was taking a census? He wasn’t a carpenter, a mason, or a census taker, but he was willing to do what needed to be done.
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