In Nehemiah, chapter seven, verse two, the scriptural principle of selecting leaders and overseers for God’s work is to appoint those who have persevered in faithfulness to God and His Word and have demonstrated a godly fear of sin and its consequences.
Nehemiah gave his brother Hanani a charge over Jerusalem. Nehemiah was contemplating a return to Shushan according to his promise. It was natural that he should wish to entrust the custody of Jerusalem and the management of its civic affairs to men on whose ability, experience, and fidelity he could confide. Hanani, a near relative, was one, and with him was associated, as colleague Hananiah, “the ruler of the palace,” the marshal or chamberlain of the viceregal court, which Nehemiah had maintained in Jerusalem. High religious principles and patriotic spirit recommended them as pre-eminently qualified for being invested with an official trust of such peculiar importance.
The devotion of Hananiah is the ground of his eminent fidelity in the discharge of all his duties and, consequently, the reason for the confidence Nehemiah reposed in him. For he knew that Hananiah’s fear of God would preserve him from those temptations to treachery and unfaithfulness, which he was likely to encounter on the governor’s departure from Jerusalem. Hananiah chose not magistrates and officers out of any partial or carnal respects to his kindred, acquaintance, or favorites but from true piety and prudence, such as were fittest for and would be most faithful in their employments.
Nehemiah knew Hananiah feared God as the ground and reason, both why he was faithful and why he put such trust and confidence in him because that would keep him from yielding to those temptations to faithlessness which he was likely to meet with when Nehemiah was gone, and against which a man destitute of God’s fear hath no sufficient fence.