Follow the MoneyBrad Mills / General
Nehemiah / Oppression / Nehemiah 5:1–13
In his Netflix special, Colin Kaepernick seriously compared the NFL combine to a slave auction. Dressed in all black, wearing a grave countenance, and staring through the camera into your soul, without a trace of cringe, he says:
“What they don't want you to understand is what's being established is a power dynamic. Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance. No boundary respected. No dignity left intact."
As he is speaking the scene transitions from NFL players being measured and examined by medical professionals, to slaves at an auction.
Let me get this straight, Kaepernick voluntarily slaved for the NFL in order to make almost $50M. When he was set free by the 49ers, he spent several subsequent seasons trying out for every other slave owner’s team and then complaining that they had blackballed him. The comparison is simply absurd.
When everything is racism, nothing is racism. We need to be able to separate genuine slavery from the modern trend of finding counterfeit examples everywhere in order to stoke rage and division.
Slavery is a topic in this mornings passage but we need to set aside our emotional reaction to that phrase so we can read the passage without imputing all of our cultural baggage into the context. Admittedly, that is hard for anyone to do.
We know that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and that power tends to corrupt. The two oftentimes work in conjunction. The corruption that results from the combination of money and power can wreak havoc upon nations for generations.
So far in Nehemiah, all of the threats against the Israelites have come from outside the city. Nehemiah had managed to develop a unified defense against those outside threats, but now he must deal with a mounting division developing between those within the city.
Although the injustice of oppressing the weak exists in every society of fallen humanity, that doesn’t excuse the practice. Therefore, it is alwaysappropriate to respond to injustice with righteous anger and/or true repentance.
Read https://ref.ly/logosref/BibleESV.Ne5.1-13 (Nehemiah 5:1-13)
The Outcry of the Poor (1-5) Just as Nehemiah finds a way to strategically get back to work he hears “a great outcry” (1). All we know from this first verse is that the strife is among one another (“the people” + “their wives” against “their Jewish brothers”).
Nehemiah mentions the involvement of their wives in the outcry to highlight the severity of the situation. Even those who were quiet and typically out of the picture on civil matters were raising their voices. Private tensions are now exploding in public. We see why they were so upset in the following verses. They were losing their children to slavery and didn’t see any way of escaping their predicament.
No doubt, these internal struggles did not arise upon Nehemiah’s arrival. This strife had been building over decades. But the stress and tension of their present work was beginning to boil—causing lingering frustrations to surface. Having just dealt with external strife, the last thing Nehemiah needed was to deal with complicated internal strife.
People were growing desperate because of a famine. The famine was likely one of judgment due to the corrupt ways in which they were treating one another (https://ref.ly/logosref/BibleESV.Dt11.16-17 (Deuteronomy 11:16-17)). Some of the poor families were desperately trying to purchase grain for their daily sustenance (2). Some were having to mortgage their fields, vineyards, and homes in order to buy grain (3). While another group was borrowing against their fields and vineyards in order to pay the king’s tax (4). And, finally, some have even resorted to selling their own children into slavery—to their own kinsmen—because they no...
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