Haggai 2:10-19

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Intro:

We come now to the third of Haggai’s 4 messages to the people of Israel who had returned from captivity and had now set themselves, in obedience to Haggai’s previous messages, to the building of the temple.
it is important that we continue to hold in the forefront of our minds what we have seen to be the focal point of this book. The principle theme, what you could call one of the most central themes in the entirety of scripture, and that is that what God is doing in this world centers in large measure around His people worshiping Him rightly. This is one of the primary reasons that He had chosen the people of Israel and lead them out of slavery in Egypt and had provided abundantly for them to build the Tabernacle, that they might worship Him rightly and then when they had settled into the land He had provided mightily through David and his son Solomon that the people might be able to build a beautiful Temple where, again, He might be worshiped rightly. And now we have seen that here in the wake of the exile and the people’s return to the land God is concerned that they follow through in obedience in building the Temple again.
These people had grown satisfied with the worship that they had settled into as they offered sacrifices on the renewed alter and kept feasts and celebrations, some of which had not been celebrated since the days of Joshua, and it seems in general that they had contented themselves with what they thought was satisfactory worship and had begun to focus on rebuilding their own houses, they had committed themselves to their own cares and desires, and had failed to realize that they were actually finding themselves again under the judgement of God because of their failure to fully commit to rebuilding the entire temple and doing all that He had commanded them to do in worship.
We have reminded ourselves over the past few weeks that this is directly comparable to what we see around us and even in our own lives when we are more concerned with our preferences and pragmatism in worship rather than committing ourselves to all that God has commanded to do and to prioritize in worship.
We have seen that we are to be committed to the task of being built up together into the living Temple of God with a group of local believers who together seek to carry out the right worship of God together as He has commanded us to do so.
Now there are a wide variety of ways that the right and proper worship of God can be applied to various cultures and places, none of this has been to assert that this is all about styles and such. We learned recently that Tim Challies a Christian author and blogger with whom many of us are familiar is actually working on a documentary where He is going to go around the world and document how churches in various countries and cultures are committing themselves to these core commands of worship even in the midst of their differing cultural contexts. But these will be churches that despite culture and context are utterly committed to forming their worship, as we seek to do here, around the clear commands and principles found in God’s word not what might seem to work just to get as many people as possible through the doors!
Again, as we turn now into our passage for today the call of Haggai to us is to be committed to being built up together into the living Temple of God and worshiping Him together rightly! This is when we will truly experience what it means to be the people of God!

PRAY

Now as we have done in our previous messages we first have to seat the delivery of this message into the time when it was delivered. Our last message was delivered:

2 In the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month,

This was about 1 month after the people had gathered to begin building the temple in obedience to Haggai’s first message which had been delivered:

In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month,

This in our dating would have been in late August and now we read that it is:

the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius,

Or according to our calendar, December 18. And so we see that for these people almost 4 months have passed.
Much has changed about these people. Primarily they have been obedient. They have begun preparing for the building of the Temple anew and we have seen God send Haggai to them to encourage them in this task even though the Temple itself was not seeming to live up to the expectations that they had had when they had come back into the land. The people have learned though to focus on their own obedience and let God be the one who determines the outcomes of their efforts.
And so here we are again two months later and Haggai comes with another message, this message is again to be of encouragement and motivation to these people as they set themselves to this task and this time it takes the form of two questions for the priests and then a divine application to the people and their situation. We read (Haggai 2:10-19)

First Question

Haggai brings two questions here to the priests. Now this really doesn't read like some sort of quiz, in fact this was the general expectation that surrounded the priesthood and their duty to teach the people and lead them in understanding and applying the law. The people were to approach the priest with these types of questions. And so just remember as we work our way through this that this is not God seeking a “gotcha” moment with the priests, rather this is a typifying of what was supposed to take place using two questions whose answers will then form the heart of the message.
And so the first question is:

‘If someone carries holy meat in the fold of his garment and touches with his fold bread or stew or wine or oil or any kind of food, does it become holy?’

Now in order to understand this question we need to know some of the law behind it. If you have any familiarity with the law then you will know that clean and unclean or holy and unholy feature prominently in the law and knowing whether you were clean or unclean was utterly important in being able to approach God in worship rightly!
Now there are several options for what particular law might be central here. Some think that it is the law about freewill offerings which would permit the person offering the sacrifice to take part of the sacrifice and eat it but when you consider the focus specifically on “becoming holy” I think it best to reference the laws surrounding the sin offering in Leviticus 6.
We read there starting in verse 24:

24 The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 25 “Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, This is the law of the sin offering. In the place where the burnt offering is killed shall the sin offering be killed before the LORD; it is most holy. 26 The priest who offers it for sin shall eat it. In a holy place it shall be eaten, in the court of the tent of meeting. 27 Whatever touches its flesh shall be holy,

So we see that the priest was allowed to take a portion of this offering and eat it and that in addition to this that anything that the sacrificed meat touched was to be considered holy. In fact if you read on you find that special care was to be give to garments that were stained with the blood of this sacrifice and if you cooked the meat in an earthen pot that you actually had to break the pot so that it was not used for any other uncommon task now that it had held this holy meat.
The principle here is that contact with the sin offering made the thing contacted holy. Now we know that this means symbolically or ceremonially holy, we know from the NT that sacrificed animals and their blood didn't really have any power to provide cleansing from defilement but that the blood stood in the place of the blood that would one day be shed by Christ, the blood that actually has the power to make holy. And so here anything that comes in contact with this sacrifice is to be considered holy or set apart and therefore requires special care.
Now the question that is posed to the priests is this, “is this holiness transferable another step outward?” “Does an item made holy by contact with the sacrifice now have the power to pass that holiness on to another object?” If the garment that has been made holy by contact with the holy meat now touches something else does that item receive that imputed holiness?
The answer from the priests?
“No”
Holiness is only acquired by contact with the sacrifice it can not be passed on through an intermediary.
Now you might be able to sense where we might go with that!
However for Haggai he follows this up with an immediate and similar question:

“If someone who is unclean by contact with a dead body touches any of these, does it become unclean?”

Now the background for this question is Numbers 19:11-13
Numbers 19:11–13 ESV
“Whoever touches the dead body of any person shall be unclean seven days. He shall cleanse himself with the water on the third day and on the seventh day, and so be clean. But if he does not cleanse himself on the third day and on the seventh day, he will not become clean. Whoever touches a dead person, the body of anyone who has died, and does not cleanse himself, defiles the tabernacle of the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from Israel; because the water for impurity was not thrown on him, he shall be unclean. His uncleanness is still on him.
There is more that we could read of the laws of uncleanliness but the principle is that uncleanliness spreads. This is why the people were to take such great care to rid uncleanliness from their midst and to follow rituals to become clean if they had become unclean. If there were people in the midst of the people of Israel who were unclean then the people as a whole would eventually become unclean. God does not and will not tolerate uncleanliness!
And so the priests answer correctly:

“It does become unclean.”

If someone was unclean and they wanted to make you dinner you had to decline because everything they touched would become unclean and then you could become unclean if you partook of that.
Now it is important to note that this is not some Pharisaical thrust here in the priests. They are interpreting the law correctly. Uncleanliness spreads and holiness does not. This is one of the big picture principles that we can see in the law and one that we will take hold of and apply in a moment.
First though we see Haggai utilize these questions to drive home a point for the people. First we read:

14 Then Haggai answered and said, “So is it with this people, and with this nation before me, declares the LORD, and so with every work of their hands. And what they offer there is unclean. 15 Now then, consider from this day onward. Before stone was placed upon stone in the temple of the LORD, 16 how did you fare? When one came to a heap of twenty measures, there were but ten. When one came to the wine vat to draw fifty measures, there were but twenty. 17 I struck you and all the products of your toil with blight and with mildew and with hail, yet you did not turn to me, declares the LORD.

Importantly here first I think we need to see the direction in this text in verse 15 to be the other direction. The language there can mean either backward or reward or onward and I am not sure why the ESV takes and translates it as it does but it is best to hear Haggai saying from this day backward meaning not this specific day but from this general time backward these people have in actuality been unholy.
And now the thing that we need to realize is that what was making the people unholy is in actuality the very thing they thought was making them holy. The dead body you might say in this text is the unfinished temple. Their worship was unclean and as a result they themselves were unclean before the Lord even though they were doing all of these worship practices that they thought were pleasing to God.
This uncleanliness had then spread throughout the people as they drifted farther and farther into their focus on their own houses and livelihoods all the while thinking that they were doing pretty darn well spiritually when in actuality each and every time they came to worship at this temple that was not pleasing to God they were in effect touching a dead body.
The result is that God had punished them!
Now this text also gazes farther back to and sort of builds on all of the times when in Israels history they had done similar things. Its not saying that every offering or every Israelite that had come before from the day the Tabernacle had been built to this day had been unclean and had taken part in this cycle, there had been times of faithfulness but the days before Haggai’s day were certainly marked with this kind of unfaithfulness.
This would have hit home again as the people had not that long ago finished harvesting a crop that had grown poorly under this same judgement of God and what is even more interesting and likely draws us to the intent of this text is that the people would have also just recently completed the planting of another round of crops. This is actually the winter planting season for these people and so they have set their hearts to be obedient and have started to build and we can gather have even heeded the encouragement of Haggai’s last message and continued to build and yet here they have also just finished planting the next round of crops and the question that was likely on everyone's mind was “Will they grow?” Will the crops grow?
To this the Lord now answers through the prophet:

Consider from this day onward, from the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month. Since the day that the foundation of the LORD’s temple was laid, consider: 19 Is the seed yet in the barn? Indeed, the vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate, and the olive tree have yielded nothing. But from this day on I will bless you.”

God has not blessed them and that reason is now clear. Their worship, far from pleasing God and making them ritually clean, has actually been the equivalent of touching a dead body, they have been unclean because they have not sought to worship God fully and rightly and the crops have suffered and God has not blessed their land but now they have turned back toward God in obedience and committed themselves to building the Temple even in the midst of planting the next round of crops and the promise from God now is; from this day onward:
“I will bless you!”
And immediate touch point of application between these people and ourselves is that sometimes the results of obedience aren't immediate. The turning of God toward the sinner in grace to shine His face of blessing on them is immediate. We saw that in the previous chapter when the people immediately went from being “these people” to being described as the remnant of God’s people upon their obedience.
However, as it works out in this world the crops are planted bu they now have to grow and the people have to now trust and lean on this promise that God is indeed going to bless them, He is going to cause the land to yield its fruit for them. God is going to come through! Its not immediately obvious, they are building and the seed is in the ground but God says:
“I will bless you!”
Such a wonderful thing to keep in mind as we seek to live our lives in obedience to His will as well, especially as it relates to seeking o be built up into the Living Temple and worshiping Him rightly and faithfully as He has commanded. The results of that may not immediately be obvious but the promise that stand over those efforts remains the same:
“I will bless you!”

Closing:

Now as we come to a close this morning I want us to take a moment to think about that contrast between the transmisability of holiness and of uncleanliness. Remember it is much easier to spread uncleanliness that it is to transmit holiness. In fact according to the law holiness can only be transmitted by coming into contact with the sacrifice itself.
Now we can learn a lot from that and I know that many of you can already tell where this is going but it is an important truth and one that we see is now intentionally enshrined in the very law of God that was given to the people, the law that included these sacrifices and other provisions that were intended always to point the people forward to the One who would come as a fulfilment of all of these things.
In Hebrews 8 we read this about the earthly priesthood and the sacrificial offerings involved:

3 For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. 4 Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. 5 They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.”

These sacrifices, this holy meat that Haggai has brought to our attention it and the priests who offered it were but a shadow point toward that which was to come. As we mentioned earlier we know that while the sacrifices made the people ceremonially clean and able to for a time enter into God’s presence , the sacrifices all needed to be done again and again and again because the cleanliness, the holiness didn't last, sin was not finally dealt with but we still see that when something or someone came into contact with the meat from that sacrifice it could for a time make them to be accounted as a holy thing.
In Hebrews 9 though we read:

11 But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) 12 he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. 13 For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, 14 how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

And finally in Hebrews 10 we read:

10 For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. 2 Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? 3 But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. 4 For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

5 Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,

but a body have you prepared for me;

6  in burnt offerings and sin offerings

you have taken no pleasure.

7  Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,

as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’ ”

8 When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), 9 then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. 10 And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

11 And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12 But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, 13 waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. 14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

“We have been sanctified, (Made holy, set apart) through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ.”
He is the sacrifice and when we are by grace brought into contact with Him we, just as that garment in Haggai are made holy, justified, clothed in the pure righteousness of Christ imputed to us , just as our unrighteousness was imputed to Him there at the cross as He gave His life for us.
And this all draws back to worship as well. You see the issue in Haggai’s day was worship, these people need the right place prepared and sanctified with the right sacrifices so that they could worship God in the way that was pleasing to Him.
Well as we come now to worship together, to be built up into this living Temple we no longer come to offer sacrifices, we have been united as it were to the very one who gave His life for us, we have been eternally covered by the blood of Christ if we have out faith in Him. And so we don't need to offer a sacrifice and yet we still incorporate into our worship as Christ commanded this memorial feast of the Lord’s Supper where we remember the sacrifice that He has become so that we might be saves and commissioned with the task of being built together into this Temple. The right worship of God still includes this sacrificial element now as we honor and remember that sacrifice as He has commanded us to do.
Now, we also ought to be sober about the warning in this passage. While there is great power in coming into contact with the sacrifice and made holy there is also a great warning that simply doing churchy things doesn't have the power to make us holy. That holiness cant spread through a secondary agent! Coming to church, reading your bible, listening to worship music, growing up in some form of a christian home, hanging out with christian friends, none of this has any power to actually make you holy, you might feel like you are doing lots of good things just like Israel did, but in reality you are unclean! Only contact by faith with the savior Himself and with His blood shed for us has the power to make a sinner clean!
And finally we would do well to head the warning of the second question. Unlike holiness uncleanliness spreads like wild fire. it can even spread among God’s people for a time so that they may experience just as Israel did, the experience of being these people, now having the face of God turned toward them in blessing but rather in discipline!
This means we have to be very careful how we live our lives out in this world. And we have to be especially careful again, as this passage is primarily concerned with right worship, we ought to be especially wary that we are not bringing uncleanliness into our worship by failing to be concerned in our worship primarily with what it is that is most important to God, how it is that He desires that we worship Him. We don't want to turn our very worship, this living temple, into a dead body that defiles!
And the last note here is that wonderful promise which is in reality the whole reason for this message to the people through Haggai.

But from this day on I will bless you.”

From this day on, from the day that you commit yourself to this task I, that is God, has promises that He will be with us to bless us. Now that doesn't mean we might not have to plant the crops and wait for them to grow trusting in His promise, no, obedience and the fruits of obedience are sometimes separated by a great deal of time, the full fruit of our obedience we know wont even be made manifest until that great day when Christ returns. However we can lay all of our hopes on that precious promise as we set about this great task of faith:
“from this day in I will bless you!”
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