Overview of Nehemiah, Adult Discipleship Class

in Nehemiah. Now, who can tell me what the theme is for the book of Nehemiah? It’s the God who what? Anyone remember? I’ve got my little cheat sheet here. Yes, thank you, Sarah. Reconstructs, absolutely. The God who reconstructs. The focus of Nehemiah is reconstructing Jerusalem. Nehemiah, governor of Jerusalem. And the theme that we have proposed for the book, one that I have not come up with myself, but one that I think is helpful is the God who reconstructs. The book of Nehemiah can be split into two different sections. The first section is the reconstruction of the wall, which is chapters 1 through 7. And the second section is the restoration of the people, chapters 8 through 13. We made it through chapter four of Nehemiah, and we remembered the context of Nehemiah was what’s known as the post-exilic community and time frame of the Jews, which means the Jews were in exile.

Why were the Jews in exile? Sin, absolutely sin. And they transgressed a certain covenant, a very important one. They made with God at Sinai. What was the name of that covenant? The Mosaic Covenant, right? And in the Mosaic Covenant, Israel was promised blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, absolutely. So Israel went into exile because of their disobedience to the Mosaic Covenant.

We talked earlier about how under the reign of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, Israel as we knew it as a nation was split into two different sections, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. The northern kingdom was called Israel. And did Israel have any good kings? No, they didn’t. And so they went into exile first. Assyria came and brought them into exile. And the southern kingdom, Judah, stayed around a little bit longer, but they eventually were taken into exile by the Babylonians. The Babylonians remained in power for about 70 years or so, fulfilling the word of the Lord, as God disciplined Israel, curses for disobedience. But after the 70 years, The Persian Empire came and destroyed Babylon or took over. And Cyrus, the king of Persia, permitted the Jews to come back into the land. And so we saw in Ezra the beginning of Cyrus’s decree and the excitement building that the Jews could come back to Jerusalem.

And in Ezra, before Nehemiah, they built the temple. There’s a major focus in the book of Ezra with the people and their worship with God, the importance of obeying God in the way that they worshiped and focus on rebuilding the temple and its foundations. And then eventually, we get to the book of Nehemiah. Ezra and Nehemiah were originally one book in the Masoretic text, viewed kind of together as one continuous narrative. There’s only a little gap between the end of Ezra and the beginning of Nehemiah, maybe 13 years or so. And throughout this post-exilic texts that we have, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, we see God’s faithfulness to his people, Israel, even though they have been unfaithful to him, he still is faithful to his promises. We began in Chapter 1 last week about Nehemiah being introduced to us as the cupbearer of the king, Artaxerxes.

And I want to make a slight correction to what I said before. There actually were six kings total in Persia’s history, from the beginning of Ezra to the end of Nehemiah, beginning with Cyrus and ending in King Artaxerxes. There was an interesting one after it went.

So it went Cyrus, and then after that, Cambyses, who was Cyrus’ son. And then after that, there was another one, and his name was like Berdia or something like that. He was another son of Cyrus, but there was some confusion of whether or not he was legitimate. Some people thought that he was an imposter and really wasn’t Cyrus’ son. That’s a totally different story. But then after him came Darius I, and after Darius I came Xerxes from Esther, and then after Xerxes, Artaxerxes.

And so Nehemiah’s the cupbearer to this guy Artaxerxes. And Nehemiah is upset. And in chapter one, he’s upset and he’s worried that his demeanor is going to get him in trouble with Artaxerxes. Because Artaxerxes, if you remember from Ezra chapter four, was the one. who had received a letter from the enemies of the Jews that they needed to stop, that they would just rebel against Artaxerxes. And so, Artaxerxes needed to stop the progress of rebuilding of Jerusalem. And so, Nehemiah is a bit worried. He finds out in verse three that the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, its gates are burned with fire.

He prays to the Lord and recognizes that in verse five, he’s the God who keeps the covenant, loving kindness for those who love him and keep his commandments, that God had promised even in the Mosaic covenant, though they had disobeyed, God promised that after the time of exile, so he’s appealing to God’s promises. It says that in verses 8 and 9 as well, appealing to God’s promises in Deuteronomy. And so, he asks for God’s favor and he receives it before King Artaxerxes in chapter 2. He ends up telling… that he wants to go to Jerusalem, and he says in verse 5, if it is good for the king and if your servant is good before you, send me to Judah to the city of my father’s tombs that I may rebuild it.

And we talked about last week about how there was no logical reason for Artaxerxes to show him this favor, right? We see in the following verses, that there was a letter that was to be given to Asaph, or Asaph in verse 8, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he would receive timber to make beams for the gates of the fortress, which is by the house of God. So basically, the resources for rebuilding Jerusalem were supplied by Artaxerxes and the Persians. So was protection as well.

Artaxerxes appoints Nehemiah as governor, but there’s no logical reason for why he should show him favor. And this goes to show, as Nehemiah brings up again and again, it’s the hand of the Lord on the situation. God moves the heart of the king, and it’s because he’s faithful to his promises that the king shows him this amazing favor.

But, as we see and we saw in Ezra, the enemies of the Jews are not happy with this. We see in chapter 2, verse 10, that Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about it. And it was a very great evil to them that someone had come to seek the good of the sons of Israel. Now, I want you to go back to a different covenant that we talked about, back all the way to the book of Genesis, the Abrahamic covenant. And there were three components of that. Who can remember the three components? Land, seed, blessing. Good job, everybody. Land, seed, and blessing, right?

So, Abraham’s descendants were promised a future land. They were promised many descendants that they would be a great nation, nation among the nations. But also, this is the component that I want you to focus on here for a second that should help us sort of see where the narrative is going. It was blessing. And there were multiple elements to this.

They were, in Abraham’s descendants, all the nations or families of the earth would be blessed. That’s fulfilled in Christ. But also, those who blessed them would be and those who cursed them would be cursed. So when we see these enemies of the Jews seeking to set themselves up against the Jews in rebuilding Jerusalem, we can expect that they will not succeed based on the Abrahamic covenant.

We talked about the identities of Sanballat and Tobiah. It’s really fascinating in Nehemiah chapter four, Sanballat is listed as having some sort of relation to the powerful men in Samaria. There’s a, I’m trying to remember the specific artifact. I think it’s the Elephantine Scrolls or papyri where Sanballat is mentioned as the governor of Samaria, the former governor.

So sort of setting himself up as the antagonist to Nehemiah being the governor of Jerusalem. in which of the two kingdoms of the Jews before the exile, the northern, right? And so now Samaria represents the syncretistic group of people. When Assyria took out the northern kingdom, they brought in peoples that were foreign to the land, that would bring in their false worship. And what ended up happening is the people that were left in the land started mixing their religions with the peoples that were put into the land, so that now by the time of Nehemiah, their worship is far from the worship of the true God. So, It’s highly problematic to be involved religiously with Samaria.

And the other one was Tobiah. We talked about him and that he was an Ammonite. And the Ammonites were friends or enemies of Israel. enemies, right? If we remember, their history can be traced all the way back to Lot’s daughters. Lot’s daughters had Moab and Ammon, right? The Moabites and the Ammonites descended from them. And what’s so fascinating, though, about Tobiah is his name. We talked about this, I believe, last week, that Tobiah means the Lord is good.

And so, I think, again, it goes to show there was this syncretistic practice of mixing the worship of the true God with false gods. And so, there’s these enemies of the Jews, but even though they set themselves up against the Jews, the Lord is faithful and his plans will not be thwarted. So, Nehemiah ends up going to Jerusalem. We see that in verses 11 through 20 of chapter 2. And Sanballat and Tobiah again seek to thwart his plans, and he responds to them in verse 20 by saying, in Jerusalem.

He’s trying to get back to that kingdom of priests and holy nation designation. They’re trying to be faithful to God, to separate themselves from the idolatrous worshipers that were all around them. They wanted to get things right. And so he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Sanballat from Samaria, or Tobiah the Ammonite, because they care about obeying God. And he believes the Lord will give him success because of God’s promises. God’s promises about bringing Israel back into the land, not just… just because he just emoted enough faith or something like that.

We talked about that last week. And so in chapter three, they were building and repairing the walls, the title of the chapter in my Bible, I don’t know about yours. And I didn’t go into the specifics of all of the different places. Part of it is because we don’t really know a lot of what these particular places were. Some of it’s left to speculation and archeological evidence. We know they existed because they’re in God’s word, but we just don’t know the specifics.

But it started, if you see in verse one, with the Sheep Gate, and it ended in verse 32 with the Sheep Gate, showing a completion of the entire wall of Jerusalem. That’s the important part of chapter three. And so chapter four comes around, Sanballat and Tobiah begin seeking to mock the Jews, chapter four, verse one says. I like what Tobiah said in verse three, it’s sort of funny and humorous, that if a fox should jump on the wall, that it would break the stone wall down.

But then in verse four, we see sort of a transition to Nehemiah praying to the Lord. And like I said before, it’s very likely that Ezra was the one who compiled Nehemiah. Ezra and Nehemiah were originally seen as one book, but this is from Nehemiah himself. He prays to the Lord. and the Lord continues to strengthen him. The people end up fearing because of the enemies of the Jews that want to thwart their attempts at rebuilding the wall.

In Nehemiah 4.14, he says that he saw their fear, and he arose and said to the nobles, the officials, and the rest of the people, do not fear them. Remember the Lord, who is great and fearsome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses.

He was an amazing leader. In a time of crisis, great leaders are those who are able to rally the people in spite of their fear. He doesn’t start by saying, look at how strong we are. He doesn’t start with the focus on them. Instead, he says to remember the Lord who is great and fearsome, and also to fight for their loved ones. Yeah, that’s not the main point of Nehemiah, but I do think it’s certainly worth noting that Nehemiah was a fantastic leader.

And so then in verses 15 through 23, there’s a section about how they were building the wall, and in one hand, they sort of had like a tool for building, and in the other hand, they held a weapon to try and defend themselves against their enemies. As mentioned last week, Spurgeon’s newspaper was called The Sword and the Trowel, building up while simultaneously fighting back the enemy, which is what he was seeking to do. And once again, demonstrating great faith, verse 20, that our God will fight for us, trusting in his promises, and the people even brought their weapons to the water, verse 23. We get to chapter 5, and this is where we didn’t get to last week, and I do think this is important.

There ends up being a great outcry of the people against their own fellow Jews. And it’s this that’s taking place in Nehemiah’s time. If in Ezra, the focus is primarily about the people’s worship and getting that right with God, the focus in Nehemiah tends to be a little bit more about the right relationship with the people. Many other people have said that before. That’s not unique to me. And those two things are inextricably linked.

One’s relationship to God and having a right understanding of true worship and loving one’s neighbor or one’s brother or sister. is all involved, and here Nehemiah is addressing the corruption of the people. What ends up happening is there’s this thing called usury, and that’s just adding a certain amount of interest to loans taken. And the people end up saying in verse three that they were mortgaging their fields, their vineyards, their houses, that they might get grain because there was this famine. And it ended up becoming so bad that they had to force their sons, or I guess they didn’t force it, the famine forced their sons and daughters to be slaves, verse 5, and their fields and vineyards belonged to others.

This is highly problematic because of the Mosaic law. Now, God cares about the helpless. He’s the helper of the helpless. He cares about the widow, about the orphan, cares about the poor. And because of that, in the Mosaic covenant, God himself put certain protections in place so that the poor wouldn’t be taken advantage of in Israel.

One of them is that the Jews were commanded to not take interest from fellow Jews. They weren’t allowed to do that. If they were to offer a loan, they couldn’t do it at interest, and that’s usury. So this is disobedience to the Mosaic Law. It also was commanded that on the seventh year, all loans were forgiven, and people in Israel were forbidden refusing loans because it was close to the seventh year, because again, God cared about the poor. And so the people have been disobedient to the Mosaic covenant, and Nehemiah is very much perplexed about this.

And so he ends up confronting them about this usury in verse seven, that they were exacting usury, this interest that they were taking. And he ends up saying the reason for why they shouldn’t do that is that they should walk in the fear of God, verse nine. Just obeying him and his commands in the Mosaic Covenant. And… And Nehemiah himself then talks about his own example about how he could have required more from the people as the governor, but he decided to surrender that because of the famine.

He was once again a great leader. Back in the Great Depression, there were leaders of businesses that took pay cuts or pushed away bonuses. One that I was reading about was the president of Procter & Gamble. He took a pay cut and also let go of his bonuses so that he could pay his workers in the midst of the Great Depression. Another one was Hershey as well. He, with his own money, paid for projects so that people could continue working in the Great Depression.

And in a similar way, though different, Nehemiah is not seeking to take advantage of the poverty of the people or his position in their poverty, but instead is trying to help them out, again, showing he was a great leader. And so, Nehemiah is explicitly named as governor, or at least it’s mentioned that he was governor at this point in verses 14 through 19. And this is kind of like what I was talking about before. He said in verse 15, the former governors who were before me laid heavy burdens on the people and took from them bread and wine besides 40 shekels of silver. But I did not do so because of the fear of God. And his servants, rather than the servants of other governors before, having a more prominent position than the rest of the people, ended up helping the people build the wall.

Nehemiah isn’t a hypocrite. You know, sometimes you have people that are telling people to go away from their sin, but are practicing those same sins themselves, don’t remove the plank from their own eye, but Nehemiah is practicing what he preaches. And so, and he’s doing well, and the Lord is certainly blessing this effort. And he says in verse 19, he asks the Lord to remember him for these things.

In chapter six, Sanballat and Tobiah, And this other enemy, Geshem, the Arab, sought to stop Nehemiah. And they have several different approaches. One is to lure him into a trap. One quick thing about, we’ve already talked about Sanbal and Tobiah, but I want to talk a little bit about Geshem. He’s an interesting character. Wasn’t in the narrative before.

It says not much else is mentioned here other than the fact that he was an Arab. And if you were to go to the Brooklyn Museum today, you could see they have these silver bowls that were given to the rulers in Egypt. And one of them was from the son of a man named Geshem, who was known as a Kedarite, which would have been one of the Arabs. So it’s very possible that Geshem was a king of the Kedarites and Kedar was the second son or second listed son of Ishmael. I just think that’s significant and it’s cool how Even extra-biblical archaeological evidence confirms the biblical narrative.

So anyway, they try to lure him into a trap. Verse 4 says they did it four times in this manner, and he responded to them again. He’s like, I’m doing a great work. I cannot come down. I’m not going to speak to you, not going to meet with you. And he ends up being spared from their trap. They end up slandering him in verse 7. They said that he had set up prophets to call out in Jerusalem that a king is in Judah. In other words, that he’s trying to rebel against Artaxerxes. That wasn’t true. And he says so in verse 8.

He prays to the Lord that he would strengthen his hands in verse nine. Sometimes it’s, you know, when we’re in times of extreme pressure, it’s nice to have little encouragements that can remind us to trust in the Lord in those times, and I think this prayer is an amazing one. Oh, God, strengthen my hands. Yeah, it’s, yeah, very, sometimes, yeah, very much needed and very neat.

So they end up trying to get him to go into the house of God within the temple, the sanctuary itself, because the supposed plan was that some people were coming to kill him. And that would be to disobey, because he was not a priest. He couldn’t go into the sanctuary. And so he ends up saying, I’m not going to compromise. And it turns out that was a trap as well. And they were trying to trap him by showing that he was disobeying God’s commands, and then sort of a character assassination to try and thwart his attempts at rebuilding Jerusalem. But it failed. The wall ends up being finished in verses 15 through 19. I love verse 16, it says, now it happened and all our enemies heard of it, Nehemiah’s writing here, and all the nations surrounding us saw it, their confidence fell. And they knew that it was from our God that this work had been accomplished.

I think this is really significant. It’s sort of demonstrating to the rest of the peoples that the Lord is the true God. It’s like the kingdom of priests and holy nation thing. They were the nation among the nations to point the nations to God. And it’s clear there’s no logical reason for why they receive this favor other than the fact that God was fighting for them. Chapter 7, we see a census of the first returned exiles. They’re caring a lot about Jews being in Jerusalem and not having foreigners in there because of their false worship, trying to be a holy nation set apart, other and different.

Chapter 8, we get to a section where Ezra is reading from the book of the law, and this is one that I’ve heard preached many times because much of our understanding of preaching today is founded upon Ezra. There certainly was preaching before this. We can think of Deuteronomy. Moses essentially gave a very long final address that could be understood as a sermon, but there are several things. There’s like a wooden podium, verse 4, that Ezra preaches from. They end up explaining what the meaning of the text.

We see in verse 5 that when he opened the book and all the sight of the people, all the people stood up. So often you’ll go to churches and they’ll say, please stand for the reading of God’s word. It comes from this, sort of as a reverence for God’s word based off this practice. And verse 8 says, they read from the book, from the law of God, explaining and giving insight, and they provided understanding of the reading.

This is important. And this is most likely talking about the law of God. It’s most likely Deuteronomy that they’re reading from. Once again, seeking to conform to the Mosaic law, even though we’ll see the people are certainly still in need of a major change.

So then they set apart the day as holy in verses 9 through 12. They also restored the Feast of Booths. One thing I want to explain that might be a little bit confusing is in verse 17 of chapter 8, it said, the sons of Israel had indeed not done so from the days of Joshua, the son of Nun, to that day. The Feast of Booths was when they would voluntarily stay in tents to remember their time in the wilderness. And this specific feast had been celebrated before even in the biblical narrative. 1 Kings 8, close to the dedication of the temple, Israel observed it. Ezra chapter 3, they observed it.

But I think the point of the text here is saying the extent of which hadn’t been observed since Joshua’s time. And it’s significant too because Joshua was the leader that brought the people into the land that God used to bring the people into the land of Canaan. And now, Nehemiah is the leader that God has appointed to sort of establish the people back into the land. I think that’s significant, but that’s kind of sort of reading between the lines.

Israel ends up confessing their sin in chapter 9. They separate themselves from foreigners in verse 2. And again, it’s not because of some sort of racist reason. It’s because of their religion, not ethnicity. They confess their sins, the iniquities of their father.

They continue to read from the book of the law. This happens for probably about a three-week period. And they ended up praying this amazing prayer that we read from verses 5 all the way through verse 37. And there’s, I’m not gonna go through all of this, but there are some things that are important to point out.

They start off with the supremacy of God. You alone are the Lord, you have made the heavens, the heaven of heavens with all their hosts. They spoke about his faithfulness in verses seven through eight, and really throughout the whole thing, about choosing Abraham, or Abram, and establishing the Abrahamic covenant.

Talk about the unfaithfulness of Israel, verse 16. Our fathers acted presumptuously, they became stiff-necked. And I do think this designation is significant. It’s also mentioned in verse 17, stiff neck, because they made, in verse 18, a molten calf.

And there’s a common theme throughout the Old Testament that you become like what you worship. G.K. Beale wrote a book about that, and it was pretty good. And it’s true, like Israel, when they worshiped the golden calf, ended up becoming like the golden calf. They worshiped the holy God, they would be made holy. They were to be holy because he is holy. goes through the history of Israel and how Israel was unfaithful, but God was faithful.

One thing I want to point out in verse 29, speaking about the law and his judgments and commandments, that if a man does them, he shall live. That’s something that Paul ends up quoting in the New Testament. And this is not speaking about eternal life. It drives me bonkers sometimes when people think that people were saved by following the law in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, it’s just God’s grace. No, everyone was saved by God’s grace, Old Testament and New Testament.

I think what this means, if a man does them, he shall live, it means you’ll live in the land. You’ll live and you’ll prosper under the Mosaic Covenant if you do them. And when Paul uses that and he uses it to contrast with the gospel, what he’s doing is he’s showing how the Mosaic Covenant is conditional. Blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience.

Whereas the gospel is unconditional. It’s not to say that we have some sort of antinomian idea that we can just do whatever we want now. But what I mean by that, it’s not because of what we have done or what we will do, but what Christ has done. And I think that’s what Paul is trying to do when he contrasts the two is Mosaic Covenant was conditional, whereas the gospel is not conditional because we would fail, but is ultimately grounded on Christ’s atoning work and also righteousness.

So I think that’s significant. Verse 36, the people recognize that they are slaves today. Though they are back in the land, they are still under the rule of the Persians and Artaxerxes and pointing to that the land promise and God’s promise in the Mosaic covenant hasn’t fully been fulfilled yet. There’s stuff to still look forward to. And they ended up making an agreement trying to sort of have this physical representation of wanting to follow the Mosaic Covenant again. Chapter 10 talks about the signers of this document and the people themselves. The title, at least, in verses 28 through 39 in my Bible says, enter into an oath, and that summarizes it really well.

Actually, before we get to chapter 11, the end of verse 39, they promised that they would not forsake the house of God, which we’ll end up seeing they’re actually unfaithful to that when Nehemiah goes back to Persia briefly. We see the leaders in the provinces of Jerusalem in chapter 11.

There’s villages outside Jerusalem as well. It wasn’t a convenience to live in Jerusalem because the city had been torn down, and there might be more resources outside the city, so people sort of had a sacrificial mindset of living in Jerusalem, contrary to what we might think. And so then, in Chapter 12, We have a repeat again of the priests and Levites who came up with Zerubbabel, a very similar list to what we found in Ezra. This is important in Nehemiah to say, hey look, we’re trying to preserve the right worship of God just as was in earlier and as listed in the book of Ezra when Cyrus’ decree brought Zerubbabel into the land.

That’s why they have the heads of the Levites in verses 22 through 26. They end up dedicating the wall and speak more about their worship throughout the rest of Chapter 12. Verse 43 says, they offered great sacrifices and were glad because God had given them great gladness. They were just grateful and seeing God’s faithfulness in bringing them back into the land. Foreigners are separated in Chapter 13. Again, this is a continual problem. Even those who were in the former Northern Kingdom would still be considered foreigners.

And what’s crazy is in verses four through nine, we end up seeing that Tobiah, one of the enemies of Nehemiah and enemies of the Jews had a place or at least a room in the temple that he had been, it’s not specific of whether he stayed there, but he had belongings in there because he was related to Eliashib the priest. So was Sanballat as well and so there’s a lot of political implications of these relationships. But it’s bad, they end up taking out, Nehemiah ends up taking out all of Tobiah’s goods from the house of God.

There was a storage room, but still, it was pretty bad that he was in there, and so, wants to restore proper worship. And so then he ends up saying, asking in verse 11, why is the house of God forsaken? And this is because verse 10 says that he came to know that portions of the Levites had not been given to them, so the Levites and the singers who did the work had fled each to his own field. The tithe hadn’t been given to the Levites, and because of that, they had to end up working the field rather than supervising the worship of God, which goes to show Israel had disobeyed this oath that they had made in chapter 10, verse 39, that they would not forsake the house of God. Israel is in massive need of spiritual change.

It ends up ending within the importance of keeping the Sabbath and not intermarrying with foreigners, wanting to separate from the nations around them because of their corrupting influence, religiously speaking. And at the end of Nehemiah, this is sort of the end of the narrative history, if we will.

We jump backwards a little bit in Esther and Job. But the end of the narrative history that we have of the Old Testament, we think back to the old men weeping, seeing the foundations of the temple in Ezra, right? And God’s prophets encouraging them that the second temple would be greater than the first. And that’s because that the Lord would come suddenly into his temple. and we’re sort of left with this cliffhanger that ends up being fulfilled in the New Testament in Christ coming into his temple and points to his ministry in redeeming Israel. They would be in a very different place one day than they were in subjugation to the Persian Empire.

Let’s pray. Lord, thank you for your word. It’s firmly fixed in the heavens. The grass withers, the flower fades, but it stands forever. And Lord, we know it’s certainly easier said than done, that we just need to trust your promises, but we pray for your grace.

We pray for your grace to trust in those promises, regardless of our circumstances. And Lord, though we aren’t rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall, we know, Lord, in seeking to proclaim your word and the gospel of your son, that Satan, the world, and even our own personal sin, as was mentioned before, often like to rage against that. And so we just pray that you would protect us, that you would keep us as you have promised to do so, that you would give us continued strength to be faithful. We know that, Lord, apart from you, we can do nothing, and that if you don’t keep us, we most certainly won’t be faithful. But we do pray for your grace. And we thank you for these examples of your people in the Old Testament recognizing, Lord, that we would be no better than them in their disobedience were it not for your grace.

We love you and praise you. It’s in your name we pray these things. Amen. So that’s the end of Nehemiah. Lord willing, Esther, maybe not next week because we have Shepherdology next week, is that correct? So plan on Shepherdology next week. And yeah, looking forward to studying Esther with you all. You’re dismissed. If any of you have any questions or anything, I know I normally want to have time for questions.