How is a leader to deal with injustices, particularly when they are practiced by the influential against the uninfluential? How can a person confront evil when the strong have the law on their side? The first thing Nehemiah tells us is that he got angry about these injustices: “I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these words” (Nehemiah 5.6).
Various commentaries on Nehemiah struggle over Nehemiah’s anger. This is because anger seems basically wrong to them. John White wrestles with whether Nehemiah’s anger was just or merely carnal, and with whether, assuming it was at least largely carnal, it was better to express or repress it.
Cyril Barber recognizes the difference between righteous and unrighteous anger and finds Nehemiah’s response to be that of a godly man. But he regards anger as so much of a problem that he interrupts his exposition with a section on “how to handle it.”
There is a great difference between righteous and unrighteous anger, and we are frequently angry only in the second sense, when something is offensive to us personally. But while we need to be warned against such anger, we also need urging to be angry when righteous anger is appropriate.
Some years ago Franky Schaeffer, son of evangelical author and Christian apologist Francis A. Schaeffer, wrote a book entitled A Time for Anger: The Myth of Neutrality. It began, “There are times in which anyone with a shred of moral principle should be profoundly angry. We live in such times.”
The book lashes out only against the secular culture and not against the injustices perpetrated by the Christian community. After all, what are we to expect from the world but injustice? Even Nehemiah was not angry at Sanballat and Tobiah. He simply realized where they were coming from and made whatever arrangements were necessary to oppose them. Real anger should be felt for those who profess to walk by God’s standards and yet compromise those high standards by their actions. Nevertheless, Schaeffer’s title says rightly that there is “a time for anger” and alerts us to it. Nehemiah was angry. The exploitation of Jews by Jews was not right, and he was angry enough to oppose it.
As Nehemiah “pondered” this problem rather than acting precipitously, he chose a response path in which he confronted the offenders privately. He reports this briefly: “I told them, ‘You are exacting interest, each from his brother.’ ” We can assume that in doing this Nehemiah amplified his charge by showing that what they were doing was against the Old Testament. He would have pointed to passages such as Exodus 22:25: “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him.”
Or Deuteronomy 23.19: “You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother.”
According to these verses, Jews were not to exploit their countrymen. They could lend money to outsiders at going rates, but Jews were their own people, and they were not to take advantage of them in any way. Moreover, if a Jew fell into slavery, free Jews were to do everything possible to redeem him and have him set free. Nehemiah refers to this obligation later.
What Nehemiah was doing in this private confrontation with the wealthy was following the first (and possibly the second) principle for dealing with sin among brothers, which Jesus spelled out in Matthew 18: “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” We do not know whether Nehemiah had witnesses along for the first one-on-one meeting with the offending nobles and officials, but he was following the general procedure. Before he made things public, Nehemiah was trying to resolve the problem privately.
Did he succeed? Apparently not. There was no response from the nobles. They seem merely to have dug in their heels and said nothing, as people in the wrong often do. Nehemiah moved to a public confrontation.
Maranatha!
(mar-uh-nath-uh – “Our Lord Comes”)
Pastor Steve can be reached at PastorSteve@MaranathaBibleChurch.org