Nehemiah's Mesage to Dads Part II

Hello everyone.

With Father's Day rapidly approaching, I thought that i would go ahead and tell you about the rest of Nehemiah's message to fathers.  Here is what happens:

At some point after Nehemiah has successfully rebuilt the wall, he returns to King Artaxerxes in Susa.  The Bible does not say how long he is away from Jerusalem, but when he returns he finds that in his absence, Jerusalem has a whole new batch of problems that he needs to deal with.  One of the enemies of the people of God, Tobiah, who had created much of the opposition to their work, was now living in a room in the temple.  The people had stopped paying the Levites and musicians of the temple, so they had left the their work in the temple to work in the fields in order to survive.  People were not keeping the Sabbath. 

Nehemiah returns and he starts fixing these problems.  But there is one more issue that finds, one related to fathers, and this one makes him really angry.  This is the issue:  Back in chapter 10, the men of Israel vow that they will not give their sons or daughters in marriage to the people around them.  By chapter 13, in Nehemiah's absence this vow has been broken many times over.  Many men of Jerusalem had wives from among the Ammonites, Moabites or from the people of Ashdod.  Naturally, they have children.  What Nehemiah finds is a number of these children in Jerusalem who don't even speak Hebrew.  They speak only the language of their mothers. This makes Nehemiah so angry that he starts calling curses down on them, beating them and pulling out their hair.  

Warren Wiersbe, in his commentary on Nehemiah, explains it like this:  The men most likely worked in the fields, while their wives stayed at home with the children speaking in their native language.  The children were growing up not knowing Hebrew.  this meant that they could not read the law or participate in the temple worship.  These men were making decisions that were detrimental to their children's spiritual well-being, and it made made Nehemiah hair-pulling mad.  Now, I don't endorse in any way pulling out hair as a means of correcting someone.  (Especially if you've seen my hairline.)  We should recognize, however, that with all of the bad things going on in Jerusalem, the one that made Nehemiah the most angry was the fathers who were looking after their children.

We have ask ourselves then, "if Nehemiah were around today, would he be reaching for my hair?"  This is serious stuff.  Nehemiah's message to dads is that we have to take the long-term spiritual well-being of our children very seriously.  We are fortunate today, in that it doesn't matter what language we speak, God's word has most likely been translated into it.  Our challenges are different.  Dads, we have to ask ourselves if we are doing all that we can for the spiritual well-being of our children.  These guys in Nehemiah's time were just living their lives, working hard to provide for their family and not really giving thought to those little decisions that they made every day that were keeping their children from knowing God, and before they knew they had children who spoke a different language, couldn't read God's word or participate in the worship.  We can't make the same mistake, where we are busy to get our children into good spiritual situations.  Nobody is going to come pull your hair out, but your children will still suffer.  Better that we make every effort for our children's long term spiritual well-being.  God will bless that.

Tom