Every morning I spend precious time with my Lord in reading and praying His Word. I have been blessed this week in reading the book of Haggai. This little book has strengthened my faith and has brought me such comfort during a very trying time of my life. As a result, I thought that I would devote the next few weeks to gleaning some of the precious truth's from this small but powerful book.
"In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest." (Haggai 1:1)
In 586 BC the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and took most of the Jews into exile. About 50 years later Cyrus, the Persian, took Babylon, and brought the Babylonian Empire to an end. The next year (538 BC) he allowed 50,000 Jews to return to their homeland under the leadership of a man named Zerubbabel and rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. All of this was owing to the sovereign hand of God fulfilling the prophecies of Jeremiah (Ezra 1:1). There they found shocking devastation. Nothing had changed since the defeat some 50 years earlier. Immediately the returnees set about to rebuild the temple in about 536 B.C. They re-laid the foundation amid a great celebration (see Ezra 3 for details). Then suddenly the Samaritans (who hated the Jews) began to oppose them. After all, the Samaritans had no reason to want the temple rebuilt or for the Jews to return to prosperity.
Because of their constant opposition, the Jews stopped the rebuilding the process and never got started again. After all there was plenty of other work to do—they were trying to restart a nation from scratch. As the years passed slowly but surely Jerusalem came to life again. Homes were built, stores opened, commerce established, fields planted, crops harvested, and life began to resemble something of a normal pattern. There was only one problem. The temple foundation still lay in ruins—overgrown with weeds. Every time the Jews passed it, it stood as a mute reminder of their failure to take care of God’s house. Sixteen years pass.
Now we come to the summer of 520 B.C. Enter Haggai, about whom we know nothing except what is in this book and a few verses in Ezra. God raises him up to deliver four brief messages in five months—from August to December, 520 B.C. When I say brief, I mean really brief. The whole book is only 38 verses long. You can easily read it in less than 10 minutes. The message of this little book is clear: It’s time to finish rebuilding the temple. The way Haggai motivates the Jews to build the temple of God has a powerful application to our own efforts to build our lives and our Church.
Haggai’s words are blunt, plain-spoken, direct, and vivid. He pulls no punches and wastes no words. In my mind, Haggai is the foreman of the Old Testament. I see him with a hardhat and a tool belt walking around the construction site giving orders left and right. He has only one goal in mind: Get that temple rebuilt and do it now!
The first lesson of Haggai: God Speaks to Misplaced Priorities- “The time has not come, even the time for the house of the Lord to be rebuilt” (Haggai 1:2).
The book begins with the Jews simply making excuses. They truly intended to build God’s house, but they just had not got around to it yet. They were frozen by fear, stifled by selfishness, and paralyzed by presumption. They were afraid of the Samaritans so they selfishly built their own homes-and not just simple houses, but luxuriously paneled buildings, and then presumptuously claimed to know better than God when the temple should be rebuilt.
The problem was not building homes, taking care of families, etc.; the problem was perspective and priorities. Perspective in that they lost focus on what was important to God; priorities in that they put building homes as their first priority, the driving force and vision for their lives. Thus they did all of these things with no regard to the most important thing; the temple of God which is in ruins. Instead they are full of excuses.
Let’s think of some excuses they might have offered for their delay: God wants us to take care of our own families, doesn’t He? The job is too big. We’ll never finish it. Not our fault so it’s not our job. Someone else will do it if we don’t. We need to pray about it some more. I don’t think we need a temple anyway. The time just is not right. Our motives are good, but we’re just too busy! They were looking for a better time and an easier time. But the result was the same in every case: delay, delay, delay.
Someone reading this story might wonder why the temple was so important. Just remember that in the Old Testament the temple represented God’s presence on earth. Just as in the New Covenant you and I are called the temple of the Holy Spirit and the church is also called the temple of God. Thus God’s reputation was at stake in the rebuilding. The pagans would draw wrong conclusions if the temple were never rebuilt. They would assume that the Jews did not care about their God. How could they if they left his temple in ruins?
At the same time the Jews were also teaching their children that God does not matter by the way they put their energy into lesser things, even good things, at the expense of God’s greater thing. As a result, they were saying and manifesting thus drawing attention to the reality that self enhancement and self preservation and ease, comfort, and security were the priorities of their lives. Oh how we see that we demonstrate to our children, our spouses, our neighbors, and the world who and what is most important to us by how we spend our time, our money, and our energies. Thus rebuilding the temple was a major issue to God—and should have been to the people.
So God responses to the procrastination of the Jews by asking His first question- “Then the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” (Haggai 1:3-4)
God hits the jugular! He gives a reality check on how He has seen the past 16 years of indifference and misplaced priorities. God was accusing His people of having plenty of time for themselves while pleading a lack of time for Him. It was an accusation of having plenty of time and money to spend on their comfort and pleasures while claiming to not have enough for God and His work and service. The people were prospering. How could it be that they were unable to get involved with God and the work He had given them to do? It showed where their heart was. In short, their priorities were wrong. Any priority that puts anything above or over God is idolatry. God says, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” (Exodus 20:3); He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:5).
Indifference to the spiritual growth and spiritual prosperity of your life and our Church and its mission is always a sign of failure to love God and is utter foolishness.
God’s asks a second question in verses 5–6 and 9-11 He challenges these attitudes and excuses with a second argument-with a reality check of what their lives looked like because they did not put God first:
"Now, therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes… You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? declares the LORD of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. And I have called for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine, the oil, on what the ground brings forth, on man and beast, and on all their labors."”
God gives them and us the great challenge: Consider your ways. It is found five times in this book; twice here in chapter 1(verses5, 7), and three times in chapter 2(verses15, 18). In a certain sense, this is the message of the book and God’s message to us . To consider means to stop long enough in your busy schedule to evaluate your life in the light of God’s Word. God asks, “What is the return of your time, energy, money, activity put in other things over Me? Of building your lives instead of building your souls? Of building your houses but neglecting building God’s church?
Here we come to a sobering reminder that what happens in your heart effects every other part of your life. Because the people had pushed God out of the center of life, they were now suffering in every other area. They had fields without produce, action without satisfaction, labor without profit. Fruitless toil, fleeting riches, unsatisfied hunger. This is the Law of the Unproductive Harvest. I do not know any passage that better describes the busyness yet ineffective activity of our own times. Like the rat in the cage, spinning but getting nowhere; frustrated, dissatisfied, empty. It happens to us over and over until we learn to put God first in our lives.
Why would God do this? He allows us to suffer the results of our wrong choices in order to get our attention, to convict of sin, and to lead us back to repentance, and put first things first! We can't pass over this lesson easily. It's for us, too. If you devote yourself to sowing and eating and drinking and clothing yourselves and earning wages, but neglect your soul and your ministry in the body of Christ (both of which are the New Covenant temple of God, 1 Corinthians 3:16, 17), you will live in constant frustration, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, emptiness, and discontentment.
To be continued...
Pastor Bill
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