Amidst the threats, corruption & confusion: Be like Nehemiah - Keep building!

There is a new reality that can no longer be ignored. Ideas don’t remain in the realm of thought; they spill into history. COVID revealed it. Oct. 7 exposed it. And the assassination of my dear friend Charlie Kirk made it undeniable. We are living in ideologically consequence-driven times.

Do you feel it?

It’s as if the game is on—the kind that will shape the future with global consequences. It is an ideological knife fight: a brutal struggle drowned out by background noise, distraction, and confusion that disorients and deafens.

King Solomon was right: there is nothing new under the sun. Because what we are seeing today, we’ve seen before. And the Biblical leader, Nehemiah, has shown us what to do.

In 445 B.C., Nehemiah spearheaded the effort to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem that had been destroyed by the Babylonians, motivated by the belief that Israel had a future based on the promises and plan of God.

He led one of the greatest comebacks in history, preserving the line and setting through which the Messiah would come—the King who, through His death, rescued the world and will rescue the world yet again when He returns to Jerusalem to reign.

But Nehemiah’s work was not without intense opposition.

Nehemiah 4:8 says, “They all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion in it.” Confusion about Jerusalem’s identity. Confusion about its purpose. Confusion about its future. Confusion about its role in God’s plan to reveal His glory to the nations. Confusion about its King.

Sound familiar?

The same pattern persists today: efforts to sow confusion over God’s purposes for Israel and Jerusalem.

Narratives have skyrocketed that seek to delegitimize Israel’s existence and dismiss its place in the biblical story and, without bullets or bombs, promote an “erase and replace” ideology that claims the “New Israel” is the Church.

Then there is the MAGA movement’s “America First” policy, which has triggered the deconstructive commentary from conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, questioning aspects of Jewish identity, including, at times, the legitimacy and authenticity of ethnic Jewishness itself, even to the point of bringing into question the Jewish identity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

More recently, a popular conservative U.S. podcaster, at a time when the United States and Israel are partnering in a war against the Islamic apocalyptic death cult of Iran, and as Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), stated, “Israel is the best ally we have, together we are the two greatest air forces in the world,” rants that Netanyahu ought to be “banned from the White House.”

Then, of course, there is podcaster Candace Owens, who, on one hand, is not worth mentioning—other than to turn the lights on what evil looks like in our time. She has called Israel a “demonic state,” gaslighting the world and providing cover fire for her own constant false accusations, while embodying the meaning of “Satan,” which means accuser and liar, and making millions of dollars off it.

It’s all the noise of corruption and confusion.

But Nehemiah did not get pulled into the noise. He kept building because his conviction, courage, and course were fueled by covenant—the belief in God’s unfolding plan in and through Israel.

So, what do we do?

Like Nehemiah, we refuse to allow the background noise and confusion to distract us.

We too stand on covenant: the New Covenant, guaranteed by the death of Jesus on Passover, which brought forgiveness of sins, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the unfolding of God’s purposes, including the preservation of Israel and the glory of God on earth.

And we keep building! How so?

We “pick up the stone” that the gospel is not a political platform, up for grabs every four years like the MAGA movement. The gospel is rooted in an eternal covenant, guaranteed by God, who cannot deny His character.

We “pick up the stone” of rightly handling Scripture, refusing to erase Israel from His story, and instead honoring the full narrative of God’s covenant faithfulness from beginning to end.

We “pick up the stone” of clarity in identity, rejecting interpretations that detach Jesus Christ from His Jewish context, and affirm Him as Messiah, the King, from the line of David.

We “pick up the stone” of courage, standing against antisemitism in all its forms—overt or subtle—and refuse to participate in narratives that distort or dehumanize.

We “pick up the stone” of whole-Bible faithfulness, embracing both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament as one unified story of redemption, not fragmented or competing narratives.

We “pick up the stone” of Romans 1:16–17—holding fast to the truth that the gospel is “to the Jew first and also to the Greek,” not as preference, but as divine order.

We “pick up the stone” of prayer, echoing Psalm 122, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, aligning our hearts with what God has declared significant.

We “pick up the stone” of endurance because building, just as in the days of Nehemiah, will invite spiritual opposition, misunderstanding, and resistance—and we never give up!

In short, we “pick up the stone” of a different weapon—not a knife like the Sicarii of old, zealots who in their political power plays struck in the shadows and even against their own people—but “the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God,” revealing God’s covenant plan to inform and transform our lives.

Where confusion seeks to undermine God’s purposes and the noise becomes disorienting and deafening, the call remains the same: build anyway—grounded in covenant and unshaken in the kingship of Jesus Christ who will rule from Zion, Jerusalem!

Like Nehemiah, we stand declaring: “The God of heaven Himself will prosper us; therefore, we His servants will arise and build…” (Nehemiah 2:20).