Sermon Tone Analysis

Rule of 3s

I know why you are here.

You want to know what to do if you find yourself suddenly lost in the wilderness.

In survival mode.

Maybe it’s the zombie apocalypse, maybe you got lost at camp.

Let me tell you what I learned back in Cub Scouts.

You can live:

3 minutes without air

3 hours without warmth.

3 days without water.

3 weeks without food.

So this determines your priorities when in survival mode.

Step 1: build some shelter.

Step 2: find clean water.

Step 3: then get yourself some food.

And it’s important to do this in order… or, you know, you die.

If you followed those steps, and you started under water, you’re dead now.

Breathing is important.

This is why, if you’re going to survive, you have to do first things first.

So, forget surviving in the jungle.

how do you survive as a refugee.

Now a returning refugee, returning to your “ancestral” home to find a city in ruins, livable buildings taken over by other foreign refugees as conquering armies resettled everybody everywhere.

What do you do first?

Breathe?

Clean water?

Food?

Shelter?

These are important things.

We are picking up the book of Haggai, another of the “minor” prophets, and here is the 2nd shortest book in the Old Testament.

Just behind our friend Obadiah.

Haggai writes after the first return to Jerusalem.

Recall from Daniel, the writing was on the wall, and then Cyrus, named in prophecy 150 years earlier, Cyrus becomes King, the Persian/Media empire overthrows Babylon, and Cyrus decrees that Jews can return and he is actually going pay for most of the rebuild and sends the treasures of the temple back.

Amazing.

Here comes the procession.

Zerubabbel (that’s fun to say).

Descendant of David, now governor of Judah.

Yeshua, the high priest.

How awesome is that?

A little heavy on the foreshadowing… but well done God.

That will definitely play in later.

And in the second year of Darius.

This is the king that threw Daniel in the Lion’s den, not the first king, this is 14 years after the first return.

The people have been back for awhile now.

Let’s check in and see how the returning refugees are doing?

Have they followed the appropriate steps for survival?

They obviously have oxygen, water and food.

They must have shelter by now, though Israel has pretty mild water.

What’s missing?

Some GREAT excuses here.

(See story in Ezra).

There are letters to kings involved, Samaritans drama.

We Really Tried

They did, actually.

They started all full of fire and they laid out the foundation.

You can read the beginning of the story in Ezra.

They start building the foundation and gathering free will offerings for the temple… but the Samaritans are there in the land.

And they actually ask to help.

But the returning Jews say “no” because of God’s command to Joshua and the Israelites not to mix with the “people of the land” and Samaritans are descendants of Israelites intermarried with other peoples.

I… feel weird about them saying “no”… but that’s what they did.

History, not necessarily “command of God.”

And so the Samaritans were ticked, and they write to one of the kings (they call Artaxerxes) and say Jerusalem has a history of rebellion so you shouldn’t let them build anything and the king writes back and says “yup, put a stop to it!”

So… king says “no” now, or at least some functionary or governor writing in the name of the king says “no.”

So they stop.

They really tried.

Oh well.

No big deal

Besides, the new temple isn’t really going to be that great.

It’s going to be WAY smaller

The old men weep because they remember the old temple.

And it was 10 times the size.

“Oh, it’s going to be so small.”

What’s the point?

Hard to get up enthusiasm for a project that is uninspiring and unimpressive.

Little baby temple.

Sad.

So… it’s hard.

The king said no, the Samaritans are blocking us.

And it’s a little baby lame temple.

Let’s just do something else.

For 14 years.

Let’s see how the God who has miraculously returned a remnant of His people to the land of their inheritance in fulfillment of 100s of years of prophecies… let’s see how He thinks about this:

No Excuses

“Paneled houses.”???

“Wainscoted and roofed with costly woods” This is the same word used in 1 Kings when describing the beautiful paneling in the temple, cedar panels, maybe even the same wood King Cyrus sent along for the rebuilding of the temple in Ezra.

It isn’t just that they have shelter, they have beautiful polished, perfected houses.

They are meticulously laying a new deck off the backyard… and there is the temple still lying in ruins, a rough foundation barely laid out.

So he says this, I love it:

Just… think about that for a second.

Consider it.

Ponder it carefully.

Do you know what you’ve done???

I imagine the near disbelief of someone searching in their pack for beef jerky… while trapped under the ice.

Dude, you have WAY misjudged the priorities here!!!

They done messed up.

And, really by the grace of God, he is going to show them just how unfulfilling this is.

Again.

Think, think, think about it!

Instead, it’s time now to fix this.

They better.

They start building.