Sermon Tone Analysis

Every day of your life, you exchange it for something.

Picture a machine that dispenses and coin for you each day to use.

You can’t see inside it to see how many you have, but each day you get this coin to use as you wish, and you may not get one the next day.

You take your day’s coin and spend it on things like work, school, spending time with family or friends, doctor appointments, or just relaxing and doing nothings.

At the end of the day, you have nothing left of that coin because it has been spent on various things.

Every day, we have 24 hours to use at our discretion.

We don’t know if we will get another 24 hours the next day or not, but we have this 24 hours right now.

Many of us live by a calendar.

We plan, we schedule, we look ahead to the week, the next week, the month, and some of us even look ahead in the year.

The question we must all face is, “How do we really spend that 24 hours we are given?”

This morning I want to challenge each of you to look at a typical day in your life (because it is different for each of us) and see how you spend those hours.

Where do you spend the majority of you time?

Do you spend it tending to issues for other people, sleeping, watching TV, or just simply nothing?

The next question I want to pose to you is, “Where does God fit in all of that?”

We all have priorities in our lives, but the ultimate realization we all must come to at some point is, “do we spend more time tending to our own personal needs and desires as opposed to what God has put us here for?”

We live in a generation that carves out time for everything that is important to them, yet many of them do not see the importance of God in their lives.

While we cannot make others see the importance of God in their lives, we can each learn where God stands in our own lives personally, and that is precisely what God called the nation if Israel to do in the book of Haggai.

The Historical Setting:

The book of Haggai takes place after the exile to Babylon.

Basically what happened was, God created everything, and His creation disobeyed, and God started to unfold a plan that would take His chosen people into slavery in Egypt.

God delivered them from that bondage and led them to the land He had promised them.

Due to their disobedience, they wandered around for forty years and then were able to enter the promised land.

Once they entered the promised land, they were directed by God to occupy the land and were given specific instruction on how to take that land over.

Again, they disobeyed and became corrupted with the beliefs of the other pagan nations that occupied the land, and they would fall into a cycle of sin that caused God to raise up Judges to deliver the people from the outside oppression.

Once the era of the judges ended, the people cried out for kings like the other nations.

God granted their request for kings, and during that time, the kingdom split into two different kingdoms (the northern kingdom consisted of 10 tribes of Israel and the southern kingdom that consisted of the remaining two tribes of Israel).

During this time the northern kingdom became so disobedient that God used the Assyrians to completely obliterate the northern kingdom (effectually dissolving 10 tribes).

After Assyria lost prominence, and Babylon started to become a world power, the southern kingdom was eventually destroyed and the people were carried off into an exile situation in Babylon for the next 70 years.

About 583 BC, King Cyrus of Persia made a proclamation that would allow the Israelites to return to their home with his blessing in order to rebuild their nation (cf.

).

They are led by Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua.

This first groups was approximately 50,000 people that returned, and in about 536 BC, they start to rebuild their temple.

During the rebuilding process, they are faced with much opposition.

They are attacked quite often, and eventually they start to lose heart in the rebuilding of the temple.

Once indifference set in, they returned to working on their own homes and lives and abandon the rebuilding of the temple completely (cf.

).

16 years pass, and Haggai and Zechariah (both minor prophets) are commissioned by God to stir the people up to do two things: (1) get back to rebuilding then temple, and (2) get their spiritual priorities straight.

Canonical Setting:

Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra, and Nehemiah are all very closely related in time frame.

Haggai and Zechariah take place in the first seven chapters of Ezra (during the first group of returners to Jerusalem).

Ezra appears in chapter 7 of his own book and leads into Nehemiah (who was the governor working with him) who led the second group to return to Jerusalem, so Haggai and Zechariah are related Zerubbabel like Ezra is related to Nehemiah (prophets to governors).

Overview of Haggai:

Haggai is the second shortest book of the Old Testament behind Obadiah, and just two chapters in length, so if you read along as I give this short overview, you will have probably read it in the same amount of time (5 books down, 61 left to read).

In this book, Haggai preaches four separate sermons:

Sermons 1 (1.1-15)

The first sermon is directed to Zerubbabel and Joshua (Governor and high priest - the spiritual leadership).

God is calling them to look at what is going on with them, and He diagnoses the situation they find themselves in and tells them how to fix it.

The leadership then take that back to the people and everyone acts in obedience immediately.

Sermon 2 (2.1-9)

The second sermon s directed once again to the leadership and god adds the nation to this one, and He uses it give encouragement to finish the task at hand.

God then asks a series of questions in 2.3: “Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory?

How do you see it now?

Is it not as nothing in your eyes?”

Then He gives them encouragement by saying directly to each recipient to “Be strong” and addresses Himself as the “Lord of Hosts” calling people’s attention to His sovereignty.

Sermon 3 (2.10-19)

Sermon three is directed back to the priests (the spiritual leadership) and calls them to examine their holiness and how it relates to the law.

God basically tells them that their work had been defiled because they never cleansed themselves before they started their work and the works became defiled as well because it was not done with the proper motivation.

Sermon 4 (2.20-23)

In the closing verses of the book, Haggai delivers the fourth sermon in his series and it is and encouragement to the people.

This sermon gives them hope in the Messiah to come that will redeem the people for good.

The sermons take place over the period of about three months with sermons three and four coming in the same day.

Sermons one and three are very similar in content in that they are diagnoses, and sermons two and four are calls to be encouraged and persevere in God’s work.

Haggai 1.1-15

God’s Evaluation and Challenge (1.1-6)

The date of this prophecy is very specific.

Scholars would agree by calendar calculations would be August 29, 520 BC.

Notice the progression of the prophecy here.

It goes from God to Haggai who is to pass it on to Zerubbabel who is the governor.

This was how the prophets worked.

They were given a message to specific people and the recipients were to do with it as God instructed.

In the end, those messages were supposed to motivate the people, but this is a prophecy of diagnosis instead of a warning of impending judgment.

Here we notice that Haggai works with Zerubbabel in the same manner that Ezra worked with Nehemiah (who would be the governor to oversee the rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem).

The date becomes important because we know that it too the people the better part of 20 years to rebuild the temple versus the 52 days it took the people to rebuild the walls under the supervision of Nehemiah which is a big contrast.

We see God’s diagnosis and challenge in verses two through six, and this is where Haggai’s prophecy differs from many of the other prophets.

God diagnoses the issue with the people and the presents a challenge.

The prophecy begins with the well-known phrase, “Thus says the Lord...” and God begins to diagnose the issue.

God says in verse two by saying, “These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord” which tells us that He has notice they have shifted their focus.

God notices where their priorities are and he lets them know where they should be.

God then asks them a rhetorical question that is designed to get them to internalize their priority shift in verse 4 by saying, “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” and then He issues the challenge to them to “Consider your days.”

This statement can be more specifically translated, “set to heart.”

God is really challenging the people here to really think about what they are (or in this case aren’t) doing, and He closes out this section by calling to mind that they have done a lot of work and have very little to show for it.

What they are experiencing is a shortage of resources.

In spite of all of their “busyness” that they have been taking part of.

God is calling them to understand why they have nothing to show for their labors because their priorities are misplaced.

God’s Command (1.7-11)

Verses seven and eight bring us to the thrust of this first sermon to the people.

The phrase “consider your ways” is again used to call the people to take to heart what God is about to say to them, and then he follows it with a command:

God calls the people to get to work on the temple simply for the reason that God may be glorified in their work.

In verses nine through eleven, God calls them back to the problems they are facing.

Everything that they had been working for had produced little, and God tells them exactly why in the last part of verse 9, “Because of my house that lies in ruins while each of you busies himself with his own house.”

The People Respond and the Lord Blesses Appropriately (1.12-15)

Pay attention to what happens in verse 12.

All the people, “obeyed the voice of the Lord their God, and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God sent them.

And the people feared the Lord.”

They immediately obeyed the word of the Lord, and went to work on rebuilding the temple, and look what happens next in verse 13: God promises to go with them because of their obedience.

What it all means:

God recognized misplaced priorities

This story revolves around the rebuilding of the temple.

This is the same temple that had been destroyed just seventy years ago.

Some of them probably remember the glory of the old temple (the glory days if you will) and seeing it flattened was perhaps a blow to the soul for these people.

The temple for them was the place where they came to meet God.

This is where the glory of the Lord dwelled with them.