Nehemiah 4 – Sanballat mocks the Jews saying, “What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore things? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish it in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish—and burned ones at that?” (4:2)

Sounds like a passage that might have inspired “will these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37)

Tobiah the Ammonite mocks the soundness of the stone wall, which at this point is up about half-way (4:6). The mocking turns to anger as the walls go up; they begin to plot against Jerusalem and “cause confusion in it” (4:8).

The strength of the builders is also beginning to wane—“The workers are getting tired, and there is so much rubble to be moved. We will never be able to build the wall by ourselves” (4:10).

Nehemiah stations people all along the open places in the wall and tries to encourage everyone. When the threat of attack is passed they go back to work. “From that day on, half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and body-armor; and the leaders posted themselves behind the whole house of Judah, who were building the wall” (4:16-17). They work with a sword strapped to their side. They worked from dawn to dark, never taking off their clothes. “[E]ach kept his weapon in his right hand” (4:23).

“Friends and Scripture”
Introduction: This article is one I wrote some years ago and it was eventually part of the book I wrote called Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through Quakerism. My plan here is just to include a few paragraphs of the chapter each day.

Part10
 

It is the spirit of repentance that is brought forth by that pure law, which the prophets and John the Baptist testify to; and it must be passed through before one can come to a participation in the cross of Christ.  Going through the judgment due under the pure law of God is a painful time for Fox as it is for all men, but as he permits God to exercise his just judgment over all that denies or kills his spirit, he passes through the ministration of the law to the ministration of the prophets and of John the Baptist, who sees to the fulfillment promised in Christ:

“I saw this law was the pure love of God which was upon me, and which I must go through, though I was troubled while I was under it; for I could not be dead to the law but through the law which did judge and condemn that which is to be condemned.  I saw many talked of the law, who had never known the law to be their schoolmaster; and many talked of the Gospel of Christ, who had never known life and immortality brought to light in them by it . . . as you are brought into the law, and through the law to be dead to it, and witness the righteousness of the law fulfilled in you, ye will afterwards come to know what it is to be brought into the faith, and through faith from under the law.  And abiding in the faith which Christ is the author of, ye will have peace and access to God” (Fox’s Journal 17).
 
In this passage, we see one of the difficulties Fox’s approach sometimes engenders; for even though he sees the ministrations as leading only gradually to the knowledge of Christ, he tends to mix and mingle Old Testament references with New Testament Christology throughout – as did the earliest Christian writers!!

The reason is because having passed through all the ministrations himself, Fox sees in all of them the Johannine Christ who is with God in the beginning and active throughout the entire story even when his face is hidden: He is in the promise to Eve in Genesis 3: 15--the seed of the woman who will bruise the head of the serpent; he is the voice that leads Abraham away from his ancestral land; the manna that feeds the Israelites in desert and the law Moses transmits to his people.  Finally he is the Word that speaks through the prophets and prepares the way for the incarnate Christ. Fox was not really a systematic thinker or writer either, so that one must also admit that the boundaries between the various ministrations sometimes blur in Fox’s retelling.  But these elements of potential confusion do not detract from the power of Fox’s insights when we remember that he was trying to communicate about things not really susceptible to clear and logical explanation.