Any study of the Old Testament is of great value to Jewish and Gentile Christian believers today for it gives an insight into how to approach and relate to God.

Real faith, which is trusting God even in the most-dire of circumstances, is learned through personal experience, but the account of the lives of real people as recorded in the Old Testament has the potential to greatly assist us.

The God inspired return of the Jews to their homeland initially to rebuild the temple and later the city wall and gates gives us as complete a lesson on faith as we need.

The initial group of returning exiles, under the leadership of Zerubbabel as Governor of Jerusalem and Joshua as high priest, had the task of rebuilding the temple. But first they had to rebuild houses to live in before starting to work on rebuilding the temple.

Laying the foundations of the temple triggered opposition from the surrounding pagan nations which had themselves been exiled by the Assyrians from their original homeland to fill the vacant space left by the exiled ten tribes of Israel which caused Satan to think that he now had complete control of the land God promised to give to His chosen people.

A letter to the then king of Persia caused a halt to the rebuild which was only restarted when God spoke to His people through the prophet Haggai who, along with the prophet Zechariah, inspired the people to return to the work through what they said and by joining in the work.

This is where faith was displayed for in defiance of the order from the king of Persia they proceeded with the work trusting God to keep them safe.

Ezra finally came to the city sixty years after the first group had built the temple only to find that they had returned to their default position of lapsing into paganism, with even the priests and Levites marrying pagan wives which was against the laws of Moses.

Not only that but Nehemiah was to find that some of the Levitical princes were in the pay of the regional pagan leaders who were totally opposed to the building of the temple and the outer wall and traitorously keeping their paymasters informed of all that was going on in the city, even seeking to put Nehemiah in a position of defying God by trying to get him to enter into the temple, and then trying to entice him into a meeting which would have inevitably brought about his assassination.



What is so interesting about these events is the political and positional scheming and the way in which God provided the right leaders at the right time, along with the faithfulness of those leaders to the call of God, and the manner in which they handled themselves in difficult situations. After all they faced spiritual warfare at its ugliest and most intense.

It really is an instructive and intriguing narrative that has taught me a considerable amount.

Meet the Author

In hindsight Peter realised God had chosen him from birth and personally trained and directed him throughout his life. A Jew asked him to write on Genesis, and his rabbinic brother to write on Moses’ Tent of the Meeting.



Peter writes purely by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and has the gift of leading people into a deeper spiritual understanding of the word and a closer union with God. He led the rabbi to a personal meeting with his Messiah through his writing. See A Tale of Three Men.

A Malawian believer said, “Your books have changed my life.”