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Haggai |
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| Chapter 1 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 2 | Prayer | Devotional |
Prayers
Lord God, we must seek first Your Kingdom. We are busy with our own affairs, but nothing has seemed to work out according to our plans. We have looked for much, but our efforts have not been very fruitful. We recommit ourselves to Your Word and we give ourselves to Your service. Be with us, O Lord. Fill Your servants with holy boldness for the glory of Your Name. Build up Your house, O God! Help us to see the part that You have for us and to give our lives for Your wonderful purposes.
Father, give us a vision for the glory of Your house. Grant to us strength for the work that You have called us to do. Forgive us when we consider the remnant of Your Kingdom as something too small for our most fervent desires and efforts. Touch us day by day by Your Spirit. Take away the unclean impulse of inner rebellion within us. Make us clean. Bless us from this day forward. Shake the heavens and the earth to accomplish Your perfect purposes. May Your Son be greatly desired by all who call upon His Name.
Devotionals
God’s people had received the curse of His covenant. As promised long ago, if they would not obey His voice He would send them far off into exile. This happened first to the northern kingdom of Israel by the hand of the Assyrians. Some years later the Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and many in Judah were sent into exile. Yet according to the plan of God the people were given something of a new beginning in the days of Zerubbabel, a descendant of David whose name is included in the genealogies of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. This time of restoration, though in some ways difficult and disappointing to those who lived through it, was used as a metaphor for a much greater renewal that will come for all the people of God when the greatest Son of David returns. It was during this earlier time of restoration in the sixth century before Christ that the prophet Haggai was given a special message from God for Zerubbabel and for the high priest Joshua.
This message from the prophet Haggai was instrumental in calling the people of the restoration back to the task that God gave them. It was time for them to rebuild the temple that was destroyed in the attack of the Babylonians against the city. Somehow they had convinced themselves that this was not the time to focus on that great task. They certainly had faced opposition from others in the land when they were doing what God sent them back home to do. We can understand how they might have been attracted to the idea that they should wait for a safer time or for some other period in their lives when they might have decided that they had everything they thought necessary for this great endeavor. Yet in all their hesitancy, they had managed to move ahead with their own home building projects. Were they really so destitute? Then why were some of them living in such nice houses when the temple was still in ruins?
God called them to consider their ways. It is a very challenging thing for us to understand the Lord’s providence in our lives. Some of this difficulty has to do with the fact that a single action on God’s part may admit to more than one meaning. This is the interpretive challenge. The more formidable problem is the sin challenge. Are we willing to see the obvious? Are we willing to see that our efforts are not being blessed as they might be? Is it that we have been lacking in diligence? Not always. In this case, they planted much, but they harvested little. They worked and earned wages but they could not keep their coins in their pockets. What little they brought home, God blew away. They seemed unwilling to see the reason for their troubles. They were not seeking first the Lord and the place of His presence. It was His love that would not let them prosper in their current pursuits. He was calling them back to Himself because of His love for them. He knew that they needed to rebuild the temple as a matter of first importance, because they needed His presence with them for this new beginning.
This message was appropriately received. Zerubbabel heard it, Joshua agreed with it, the people believed it, and they all obeyed the voice of God that had come to them through the prophet Haggai. They saw God’s point. They respected His message, and they respected Him. God’s Word came back to them through the same prophet. God said, “I am with you.” These were good words. With that encouragement and with the power of the Lord stirring up the spirits of their leaders and the spirits of all the people, they set about their work on the house of the Lord.
We are so senseless about the Lord’s presence that we hardly notice when He is not there with us. It should have been an obvious thing that being slow to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem during the age of the Old Covenant would be detrimental to the congregation’s experience of the presence of Almighty God. Somehow they did not seem to realize what a great need this was. Perhaps we are not so very different from them. Our issue is not necessarily buildings. Our great need is for the Spirit of the Lord to fill His people and for the Lord Jesus Christ to be present in and among His church.
Could it be that God might still refuse to allow us prosperity in His service if we want to do our version of the Christian life without Him? God has chosen us for relationship with Him. When Christ came, He came in person. He chose disciples, and served and taught them personally for three years. He calls us to life through the ministry of people, and He brings us into the church, but He brings us real spiritual growth only by the work of His Spirit. Our Lord wants us to attend to all those things that He tells us are necessary in order for Him to be present with us. More than that, the One who gave His life for us wants us to desire communion with Him.
The resurrection world that Jesus Christ has won for us is not loaded with prosperity while being devoid of the presence of God. It is the place where we will fully know the glory of God’s presence with us and experience all the bounty that comes from Him. We are stretching toward that resurrection world now, and we should long for the presence of God in our lives more than any other thing. Let us build up the temple of the Lord in His worshiping people. Let us seek the Lord while He may be found that God might be magnified in the hearts and lives of all His children.
The restoration of a small group from the people of Israel and Judah out of the land of captivity in the days of Zerubbabel was a wonderful gift, but could it really be the fullness of the kingdom that Isaiah spoke of at the end of his book of prophecy? It is not even yet the New Covenant of which Jeremiah spoke. It certainly cannot be the marvelous temple with a stream of living water flowing from it that we learn about at the end of Ezekiel. It is always challenging for those who are trying to follow the Lord’s will in their day to see the small blessings around them and to keep these in perspective. It was a marvelous new time of life for God’s people to have this opportunity to rebuild the temple building in Jerusalem, but surely this was not yet the new heavens and the new earth that the Lord had spoken of. It would not even match the glory of Solomon’s day. When would the age of the lion lying down with the Lamb come?
The temple was the place of God’s presence with His people since the days of Solomon. Prior to that, the Israelites had a tent called the tabernacle that the Lord had instructed them to build and to move according to His command. Toward the close of Christ’s earthly days as He was preparing to go to the cross, He spoke to His disciples about the coming destruction of the building temple in Jerusalem and the building of a temple of people in the gospel age. Through the preaching of Christ, His cross-death, His resurrection from the dead, and His promise of a general resurrection age at His return, this temple is being gathered now. God is dwelling in His temple still today, but it is no longer a building temple where He dwells. Christ Himself came as the temple of the Holy Spirit. All who are united with Him have a communion in this Temple. The Lord is with us. But there is something still more glorious that is coming. We are yet mortal. When Christ returns there will be a great resurrection to immortality. It is then that we will experience the fullness of the glory that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others wrote about. This is our hope. We have this hope in Christ. He is the glorious Temple of God. When Haggai writes about the treasures of the nations and the glory of the temple, these promises find their final fulfillment at the return of Christ and the resurrection age. Any sense of fulfillment that we have now in the gospel age, while very real, is still quite small compared with what will be. Then God will grant to us perfect peace, not just a personal internal sense of composure, but also an external environment completely without the warfare that characterizes this age.
The temple has always been about the presence of God with His people. In every era we are to work on the building up of the temple of the Lord with the fullness of His presence in and among us. The Lord has made big promises to us. We are to seek Him that He might fulfill them in some way through our lives. He is with us now, and we should love to see Him do whatever He wishes to do in our day, however large or small, as long as He is still with us, and His Spirit is in our midst. We need not fear the attacks of others. There is no point in being depressed about this era of the church as opposed to some earlier day of blessing. It should be enough for us that the Lord God Almighty is with us, and that He bids us to build up His temple.
In the final age that is coming, nothing in the living temple of the Lord will be unclean. In the Old Covenant era, the people were to live with a constant consideration of the difference between that which was ceremonially unclean and that which was clean. When someone was clean, they became unclean through contact with someone or something that was unclean. When Christ the Messiah came, He touched the unclean and made them clean. This is the power of the presence of God. What matters to the church now is the new creation that begins in us in this age, and that finds perfect fulfillment in the life to come when God says, “Behold, I make all things new.” In our sin, we are defiled, just as the people of the restoration had sin and were defiled. But Christ, our sinless Substitute, makes all things new. We have been touched by Him, washed by the blood of the Lamb, and we are being prepared for the life of the fullness of His presence as we seek Him eagerly now and work according to His kingdom designs.
The Lord is able to bless us now in this work, and we should not think that He will bless us now if we ignore Him and His people or if we are not diligent to seek His presence. Before the people of the restoration heard the call of God through Haggai things were not going well for them. After they heard the call for the building of His temple, things eventually did go well for them. This is presented to us as here as a promise to believe. There is no reason for us to resist the application of this to our day. We are not seeking worldly prosperity, but we do need godliness with contentment. We certainly are hoping for fruitfulness in our labor in the Lord, and there is an abiding principle in our relationship with God that we will reap what we sow. There is no virtue that comes to us by ignoring our need for God’s presence or resisting His commandment to build His temple.
The central figure in the building of the eternal resurrection temple is Jesus Christ Himself, the descendant of the Davidic leader Zerubbabel who received these messages in the day of the restoration. Just as the building that they would build in that day would be nothing compared with the resurrection temple that Jesus brings, the man Zerubbabel was a divinely appointed place-holder for the glorious Messiah. If this son of Shealtiel was made to be a signet ring chosen by God in His day, what will be the chorus of men and angels in the Day of resurrection when we see the greatest Son of David, Jesus Christ, in all His resurrection glory? He is the one who will destroy kings and kingdoms at His coming. It is this Jesus who calls us now to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. We cannot do that without Him.