Haggai: Consider Your Ways
Haggai: Priorities Make a Difference • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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I’m not a hunter. Never have been. I am not opposed to it; in fact, I love to eat venison and rabbit and turkey and just about anything else the hunters here might shoot.
I just never got into hunting as a young person, and now that I’m older, I don’t want to be the one shooting at Bambi. I’ll leave that to others.
But I know that some of you are hunters, and some of you are — or were — married to hunters, so you might appreciate this story I heard recently.
A group of men had gone out hunting for the day, pairing up in twos, and at the end of the day, as they were gathering back at their trucks, one of the hunters returned alone, staggering under the weight of a six-point buck he had slung across his shoulders.
“Where’s Harry?” he was asked.
“Harry had a stroke of some sort. He’s back up the trail a couple of miles.”
His friends were incredulous. “You left Harry stranded on the trail and carried that deer all the way back here?!”
“Well,” said the hunter, “I figured nobody was going to steal Harry.”
Everybody’s got their priorities.
For some of us, it’s that six-point buck.
And priorities are the focus of today’s message from the book of Haggai.
Some of you will recall from last week’s historical introduction to the book of Haggai that the prophets of Israel would have been unnecessary if that nation had been serving God as they were supposed to do.
Some of you will recall from last week’s historical introduction to the book of Haggai that the prophets of Israel would have been unnecessary if that nation had been serving God as they were supposed to do.
Today, as we begin our study of the book itself, we are going to take a look at what, exactly, had gone wrong with this remnant of Jews who had returned to Jerusalem from exile under the decree of Persian King Cyrus II.
Remember that about 50,000 people had returned to the land of promise and that they had started out well — rebuilding the altar and starting the foundations of the temple that had been destroyed when Nebuchadnezzar had ransacked the city and taken the people into exile nearly 70 years earlier.
But they had faced opposition from the Samaritan people who had lived in the land in their absence. Slanderous letters had been written to at least two different Persian kings warning them that the Jews would rebel against them if they were allowed to rebuild the temple and the city of Jerusalem, and the kings had stopped the work.
But a new Persian king had come onto the scene, King Darius. So what would this returned remnant of believing Jews do with this new opportunity?
Let’s take a look. We’re going to be studying the first chapter of Haggai today. You’ll find this shortest of Old Testament books near the end of the Old Testament, the third from the last — so Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.
1 In the second year of Darius the king, on the first day of the sixth month, the word of the Lord came by the prophet Haggai to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, saying,
Let’s stop there.
Darius the Great ruled over the empire of Persia from 522 to 486 B.C., and Haggai’s opening verse allows us to date his prophetic period with great accuracy. The events of his book begin in September, 520 B.C., after the king had been in power for two years.
The other thing to note from this verse is that Haggai’s first message from God is directed to Zerubbabel and to Joshua. Zerubbabel was the governor appointed by Persia to be in charge of the political affairs of this Persian province, and Joshua was the high priest, the one who was over the religious affairs there.
In other words, God is speaking through Haggai to the political and religious leaders of this Jewish remnant.
God is holding these men responsible for the status of their people.
But what was that status?
2 “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘This people says, “The time has not come, even the time for the house of the Lord to be rebuilt.” ’ ”
Remember that the presence of prophets among the Jews suggests there is something wrong in their relationship with the God who had made a covenant with them that He would be their God and they would be His people.
And if there’s any question about the status of the relationship, God settles the matter right off the bat.
“THIS PEOPLE says.” Not “My people say” or even “THE people say.” There is a note of derision here that is also present in other prophetic writing when God is chastising His people for their waywardness.
And here we see also the reason for God’s displeasure with the returned Jews. They have not been working to rebuild the temple.
“The time has not come,” they have said.
They had allowed a temporary setback to become an excuse to turn to other things.
temporary setback to become an excuse to turn to other things. “There is an aptness in us to
Writing about this verse, Matthew Henry said: “There is an aptness in us to misinterpret providential discouragements in our duty, as if they amounted to a discharge from our duty, when they are only intended for the trial and exercise of our courage and faith.” [Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 1564.]
Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in
One Volume (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 1564.]
misinterpret providential discouragements in our duty, as if they amounted to a discharge from
Sometimes God allows us to face difficulties in doing His will simply as a means to test our faith.
Will we press on through the difficulty, knowing that He will provide the resources and the means for us to be successful doing what He has given us to do? Or will we give up, demonstrating the weakness of our faith in Him?
In the case of this returned remnant, their failure to work to rebuild the temple didn’t just show that they lacked faith that God would enable them to overcome their adversaries. It also showed that they had a low view of obedience to His commandments.
our duty, when they are only intended for the trial and exercise of our courage and faith.”
There are 613 commandments for the Jewish people in the Torah and in Jewish tradition. Nearly 200 of those commandments cannot be kept without a temple. The people simply could not worship God in the way that He had commanded if the temple remained unfinished.
Furthermore, “the temple was more than a building. It was the site of the people’s meeting with the living God, the symbol of the abiding presence of the Creator of the universe. If the people ignored the physical ruin of the temple, they were ignoring the spiritual wreckage in their souls as well.” (Radmacher, Earl D., Ronald Barclay Allen, and H. Wayne House. Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary. Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1999.)
The temple was more than a building. It was the site of the people’s meeting with the living God, the symbol of the abiding presence of the Creator of the universe. If the people ignored the physical ruin of the temple, they were ignoring the spiritual wreckage in their souls as well.
Radmacher, Earl D., Ronald Barclay Allen, and H. Wayne House. Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Commentary. Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1999.)
God’s priority for His people was that they rebuild His temple so they could walk in obedience to Him.
But their priorities were different.
3 Then the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet, saying, 4 “Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses while this house lies desolate?”
They had given up on building God’s house, but it seems that they had continued right along with building (and, perhaps, beautifying) their own houses. Their priorities and their energies were focused on themselves and not on the things of God.
So God calls them to think about the results of their misplaced priorities.
had given up on building God’s house, but it seems that they had continued right along with
building (and, perhaps, beautifying) their own houses. Their priorities were focused on
5 Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, “Consider your ways!
Consider your ways.
Think about what you’ve been doing, and think about the results you’ve been seeing.
6 “You have sown much, but harvest little; you eat, but there is not enough to be satisfied; you drink, but there is not enough to become drunk; you put on clothing, but no one is warm enough; and he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes.”
The people had been planting much but harvesting little. Their vineyards were unproductive. Their clothing was insufficient. And even the money they saved seemed to disappear.
These people must have felt that they were cursed, and indeed they were. These curses come right out of , in which God had laid out for His nation, Israel, the blessings they would experience for obedience and the curses that would follow their disobedience to the covenant they had made with Him.
15 “But it shall come about, if you do not obey the Lord your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
17 “Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. 18 “Cursed shall be the offspring of your body and the produce of your ground, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.
17 “Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.
24 “The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust; from heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed.
38 “You shall bring out much seed to the field but you will gather in little, for the locust will consume it.
Famine and locusts and failing crops were three of the curses that nearly all of Israel’s prophets had pointed to as evidence of the nation’s disobedience to God.
30 “You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.
39 “You shall plant and cultivate vineyards, but you will neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes, for the worm will devour them.
An abundance of wine was one of the signs of God’s blessing on His people.
That’s the point of Jesus’ first miracle, changing the water to wine at the wedding in Cana. He was demonstrating that the Kingdom of Heaven had come and calling the people of Israel to enter that Kingdom through humble repentance.
But these people to whom Haggai prophesied seemed to be laboring in vain. They surely were not experiencing the blessings of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The very hardships the people had pointed to as evidence of the need to focus on their own needs were a result of their misplaced priorities.
“It was no surprise to Haggai that for all their hard work the people found no satisfaction, and that their money disappeared like flour through a sieve. God was speaking to them through such circumstances as rising prices and inflation.” (Baldwin, Joyce G. Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: An Introduction and Commentary. Vol. 28. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1972.)
their own needs were a result of their misplaced priorities.
These were religious people. They knew the Scriptures from Deuteronomy. They had given up the worship of false gods that had been the mark of disobedience for their fathers before the exile. They had returned to the land of promise, and now they were expecting the blessings of Deuteronomy. But instead they were still experiencing the curses.
“It was no surprise to Haggai that for all their hard work the people found no satisfaction, and that their money disappeared like flour through a sieve. God was speaking to them through such circumstances as rising prices and inflation.”
You see, God doesn’t call us to be religious. He calls us to love Him and to demonstrate that love by showing His image to the world, by sharing His priorities.
It was no surprise to Haggai that for all their hard work the people found no satisfaction, and that their money disappeared like flour through a sieve. God was speaking to them through such circumstances as rising prices and inflation.
And although these people might have said differently, their actions demonstrated that they did not share God’s priorities.
Baldwin, Joyce G. Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi: An Introduction and Commentary. Vol. 28. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1972.
So God called them through Haggai to think about their situation.
These were religious people. They knew the Scriptures from Deuteronomy. They had given up the worship of false gods that had been the mark of disobedience for their fathers before the exile. They had returned to the land of promise, and now they were expecting the blessings of Deuteronomy. But instead they were still experiencing the curses.
You see, God doesn’t call us to be religious. He calls us to love Him and to demonstrate that love by showing His image to the world, by sharing His priorities.
And although these people might have said differently, their actions demonstrated that they did not share God’s priorities.
So God called them through Haggai to think about their situation.
7 Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Consider your ways!
But simply recognizing that we are not on the same page with God is not enough. Remember, faith without works is dead. Our actions must match our words.
Annette and I recently watched a movie about my favorite philosopher, Winnie the Pooh. Now, Winnie the Pooh may be a bear of very little brain, but he always had great insights into life, and he had something to say about this matter in the movie we watched:
It was no surprise to Haggai that for all their hard work the people found no satisfaction, and that their money disappeared like flour through a sieve. God was speaking to them through such circumstances as rising prices and inflation.
“We can only get to where we’re going by walking away from where we’ve been.”
You can’t just THINK about walking away. And you can’t say, “The time has not come for walking away.” You have to start walking away from where you’ve been if you want to get where you are going.
So God calls His people to walk away from where they’ve been.
8 “Go up to the mountains, bring wood and rebuild the temple, that I may be pleased with it and be glorified,” says the Lord.
Here was the answer to their problems. Do the work that demonstrates your faith. In the case of this returned remnant, that meant, rebuild the temple.
Now, we should recognize that the people who had come back to Jerusalem from exile were probably the devout Jews. Unlike those who had remained in Persia, they recognized that their promise was in the Promised Land, that their worship was to be in Jerusalem, the place of which, through the psalmist, God had said "This is My resting place forever; Here I will dwell, for I have desired it.”
These were religious people. They knew the Scriptures from Deuteronomy. They had given up the worship of false gods that had been the mark of disobedience for their fathers before the exile.
They had returned to the land of promise, and now they were expecting the blessings of Deuteronomy. But instead they were still experiencing the curses.
You see, God doesn’t call us to be religious. He calls us to love Him and to demonstrate that love by showing His image to the world, by sharing His priorities.
And although these people might have said differently, their actions demonstrated that they did not share God’s priorities.
Thus, their expectations of blessing were misplaced.
9 “You look for much, but behold, it comes to little; when you bring it home, I blow it away. Why?” declares the Lord of hosts, “Because of My house which lies desolate, while each of you runs to his own house.
Hagg
10 “Therefore, because of you the sky has withheld its dew and the earth has withheld its produce.
11 “I called for a drought on the land, on the mountains, on the grain, on the new wine, on the oil, on what the ground produces, on men, on cattle, and on all the labor of your hands.”
Now, please understand that we are not the Jews of the Old Testament. We are not called to build a temple where we can worship God.
We have been called to worship God through His Son, Jesus Christ, who has taken the place of the Old Testament temple as the focus of New Testament worship.
We are called to worship Jesus, who is the perfect image of God and whose priorities were perfectly aligned with those of His father, by aligning our own priorities with His.
His heart should be our heart. His desires should be our desires. His priorities should be our priorities.
Do you claim the name of the Christ who sacrificed Himself on a cross for your sins? Have you followed Him in faith? Have you received Him as your Lord and Savior?
Then your actions should match His commandments — to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.
Your priorities should align with the heart that He revealed, a heart that was willing to give up everything He had in order to show compassion and mercy and to serve those who could not hope to repay.
It’s good that you’re in church today, just as it was good that the 50,000 religious Jews returned to Jerusalem from exile.
But just as God withheld His blessing from them for not making His priorities their own priority, He will withhold His blessing from you and even from this church if we do not start walking away from where we’ve been.
Here’s a funny thing: Being a prophet to the people of Israel was a thankless and often fatal occupation. If they had judged their success by the number of people who responded to their messages by turning to God, the prophets were almost universally failures.
But Haggai was an exception. Haggai’s word from God had made a difference.
12 Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God had sent him. And the people showed reverence for the Lord.
They listened, and they changed their ways.
And then they “showed reverence for the Lord.” One other translation is that they “showed fear before the Lord.”
They had been so afraid of their adversaries and of not having the resources they thought they needed to do God’s work that they had left it undone.
We get ourselves so wrapped up in our own priorities — both as individual believers and as a church — that we neglect the work that would show we share the heart of the Christ into whose image we are being made.
We fear that we will not have enough money to do the things that Jesus Christ has called His church to do while we carefully sock away funds to pay for things that have nothing to do with His Kingdom.
But the truth of the matter is that if we feared the Lord more, we would fear everything else less.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Those are the words of Jesus, not Pastor Res. That’s His promise, not mine.
And so, the returned Jewish remnant turned their hearts back to God; they aligned their own priorities to match His.
And His response to them was swift and sure:
13 Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke by the commission of the Lord to the people saying, “ ‘I am with you,’ declares the Lord.”
As soon as they put their hearts into a right relationship with God — as soon as they changed their priorities from focusing on themselves to focusing on the Lord, He promised them that He would be with them.
And then He made good on His promise.
14 So the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the people; and they came and worked on the house of the Lord of hosts, their God,
15 on the twenty-fourth day of the sixth month in the second year of Darius the king.
Just a little more than three weeks after the message from God through the prophet Haggai, the people began working to rebuild the temple.
God stirred up their spirits through the work of His Holy Spirit.
They changed their priorities, and they began to make their actions match their words.
On September 21, 520 BC, they began adding to the temple foundations that had been abandoned nearly 20 years before.
Friends, we have not been called to build God’s temple. We have been called to build God’s Kingdom.
God’s Kingdom is His priority here today. We do not build it by paneling our own house — by focusing on our own comfort and our own history. We do not build His Kingdom by reaching in. We do it by reaching OUT.
But as long as our efforts and energies are directed inward, we will fail to experience the blessings that we so wish to experience. We will continue to be tired; we will continue to find that even the money we save seems to fall through holes in our pockets.
I keep hearing the time has not come to do the things that God is calling us to do.
I beg to differ.
The time has, indeed, come for us to show fear before the Lord and to stop fearing everything else.
The time has come for us to start making the Kingdom priorities our own priorities.
Consider your ways, says the Lord!
Consider your ways.