Open Thine Eyes, O Lord!
Let thine ear now be attentive, and thine eyes open, that thou
mayest hear the prayer of thy servant, which I pray before thee now,
day and night, for the children of Israel thy servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which
we have sinned against thee: both I and my father's house have sinned.
Nehemiah 1:6 (Spoke 16, Cycle 1)
Nehemiah's opening prayer also contains the primary elements of the
Alphabetic KeyLink between the Ayin verse of AV Psalm 34 and 1 Peter discussed in
The Eyes of God. The shared word set is surprisingly rare;
searching the KJV for all verses containing the set (ear*, eye*, open*, cry/prayer*) [Verify]
yields only five hits; two from Solomon's dedication of the Temple in 2 Chronicles (6:40, 7:15),
two from Spoke 16 (Neh 1:6, 1 Pet 3:12), and one from the Ayin Verse of AV Psalm 34.
This reveals a strong thematic link between two Books on Spoke 16 with the corresponding Alphabetic Verse
from AV Psalm 34, with all of this being based on the literal meaning of the Sixteenth Letter!
The Lord answered Nehemiah's prayer and opened the way for him to go to Jerusalem to re-build the city.
He and his fellow workers met opposition so severe they had to work with one hand on a tool and
the other on a weapon (Neh 4:17). But it was God who was really doing the work, as Nehemiah's
adversaries soon realized (Neh 6:16):
And it came to pass, that when all our enemies heard thereof,
and all the heathen that were about us saw these things, they were much cast down in their own eyes (ayin):
for they perceived that this work was wrought (asah) of our God.
This work that was wrought by God links directly to two more Ayin Alphabetic Verses:
- AV Lam 2:17 The LORD hath done (asah) that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he
had commanded in the days of old:
- AV Ps 119:126 It is time (et) for thee, LORD, to work (asah): for they have made void thy law.
If ever there were a work of God in the history of the Jews,
it was the rebuilding and restoration of Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile.
It never could have happened without Him. But
the Lord's time had come, so the Lord's work was done.
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