-There was a movie that came out in 2004 that no one expected to take off like it did! It was a classic “coming of age” story of a guy who was trying to figure out life in high school and family dynamics that go along with that. I saw it in theaters and I haven’t been the same since! It was a movie called Napoleon Dynamite, and I feel like it’s one of those movies that only worked in a certain time period, because I know people who have tried introducing it to their kids and the kids thought the parents were crazy. One of the funniest characters is a guy named Uncle Rico, who claimed to be able to (and I quote) “throw the pigskin a quarter mile.” Look at that form! I doubt he could throw that a quarter yard! But part of the reason he was so funny is because we all know someone like him, someone who is always pining for the “glory days” of the past. And what’s craziest is their interpretation of the past doesn’t always line up with reality!

-Haggai is a message of encouragement for God’s people who were discouraged about not living during the “glory days” of Israel. They look around them and are living as a remnant, a shadow of the former glory of the nation. They’re subservient to a different nation, they don’t have a temple to worship in, and they don’t even have enough food to eat! What are they hoping in? Let’s read the first chapter and find out:

READ/PRAY (pg. 839)

1. The Message of Haggai: The Presence and Blessing of the Lord

-We have more information about what’s leading up to this event in Ezra and Nehemiah. We sometimes miss the connection between books in the OT because of the ordering of them. Ezra & Nehemiah are prophesying and writing at the same time, and some people believe they were the people who compiled the OT together for God’s people. But Ezra tells us that because the people faced opposition to the building of the temple, they stopped working on it, and that stopping remained for 16 years, while the people focused on building homes and raising crops, getting the rest of their lives in order.

-Then the Lord sends Haggai and Zechariah to light a fire under the people and call them to begin building the temple once again, and Ezra 6 tells us the celebration they had at the completion of this new temple. So Haggai tells us the message the Lord gave to get the people going. Just to give some perspective, Ezra 5 also includes these prophets as part of his description of what was going on, and he tells us that Haggai helped rebuild the temple! 

-Not a ton of information about this prophet (apart from the note that he is a prophet!). But we have VERY explicit information about when these words came to him, allowing us to date this book to a 4-month period in the year 520 BC. Here’s where all the dates are listed throughout the book, and what they correspond to in our Gregorian calendar! 

-Who was this word give to? Zerubbabel and Joshua: civil and religious leaders. We’ll learn more about Zerubbabel throughout this book, so for now just note that these are supposed to be the recipients of this prophesy. And right away, we see the problem God is addressing:

-This house is in ruins. The problem is they had stopped building the temple. They had faced some difficulty with it, but instead of persevering, they gave up and focused on building out their own homes.

-God draws attention to these issues by saying “think carefully about your ways” which he repeats 3 other times in the book (1:7, 2:15, 18) It’s a way of telling the people to learn from these things and draw near to God through them. Honestly, I think this is a picture for us of how we’re supposed to respond to difficult seasons in our lives. If God is sovereign (in complete control) than we can trust Him even when things don’t feel like they’re going to work out, or we don’t feel like we’re flourishing. God isn’t the author of evil, but He’ll allow evil in our lives to grow and stretch us, just like any parent has to sometimes let their kids fail in order to help them grow.

-God has prevented His people from flourishing in their work. They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, their clothes are wearing out. And this isn’t an accident or incidental thing, God is still in control, including over the times and the seasons, and He has prevented their crops from flourishing. And why is that? Look at vs. 8-9. The reason the people were living in ruin was because it was meant to be a picture to them of the ruin God’s house was in.

-The answer is: build God’s house, if you do, He will be pleased and glorified. Sounds easy enough, right? Put this building up, be done, and watch the wealth come in! But it’s never that simple, especially (I would think) as the people are struggling.

-I don’t know about you, but if I heard that God was the one that was preventing my flourishing, I don’t think I’d be very happy about it. Think about how many stories you hear or read about people who get angry at God for things not working out how they wanted them to. It’s such a common story! But that’s not how the people responded here! Look at vs. 12.

-The entire remnant obeyed and feared the Lord. This is the description of a revival! A particular season of repentance and turning to the Lord, and many times it comes after particularly difficult seasons.

-Have you ever had a season in your life where it felt like God was intentionally leaving you in a desert place? Where you kept crying out to Him and asking for some level of relief, but it never got better. Where you were reading the Bible, but it felt like it didn’t make sense, where you pray but it feels like you’re praying to the wall, where you go to church but it feels like a waste of time. It doesn’t take long in your journey with Christ to reach some level of crisis. And sometimes it’s God stretching and challenging you to grow through it. It hurts, in the middle of it, it feels like it will never end, but God’s call to His people is to continue trusting Him and persevere.

-And look how God responds to them: “I am with you.” That’s basically a summary of the whole story of Scripture. What is God’s plan from the beginning? To be with His people! That’s why He doesn’t ever give up. Even when the entire world was in rebellion against him (except for the family of Noah), He still moved toward His creation and created a way for them to be redeemed through the floods. Friends, this is the best news in the world! God’s first move is always towards, not running away which is why God came down to Earth.

-So the people obey, and the work on the temple began again.

-God (through Haggai) asks the people who saw the old temple. This new one wasn’t going to be as nice or as beautiful or even as big. Here it even says, “Doesn’t it seem to you like nothing in comparison?” God doesn’t even try to be “MN nice” about it!

-There is a human temptation to live like Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite and pine after your “glory days,” to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and the people of the Lord are no exception. Ezra 3:13 tells us exactly what the response of the people was to this event: half were thrilled and excited that this work had begun, and the other half were weeping because it was so bad in comparison. Even though those former days had idolatry and sin, and there was the impending destruction of the nation coming, they wanted to go back, instead of celebrating what God was doing here and now. We see this today, too! There is a church I drove by in Rochester that has a giant billboard that says, “We sing hymns.” Technically, EVERY church sings hymns, because I’m going to assume that every church is singing songs to God! And there’s nothing wrong with singing hymns, but there’s also FANTSTIC new songs that are being written all the time! If you want to talk about my thoughts on music, send me an email! And it goes beyond music that too, I’ve had people tell me that they wish they could go back to the morality in our country of the 50s. I wasn’t alive then, but I’ve read enough history to know that the 50s was the time of MASSIVE segregation in our country, a time when the color of your skin could have prevented you from voting. Do you really want to live in that time period? That doesn’t mean today is any better! While the color of your skin doesn’t prevent you from voting, our culture is debating what it means to be male or female. Friends, the reality is whatever time you live in: people are still people, sin is still sin, and God is still sovereignly ruling and reigning, so the call for His people hasn’t changed, look at what God goes on to say:

-What’s interesting is this is the same exhortation that Joshua got when they were about to cross into the Promised Land, encouragement to be remain strong and faithful because even though the temple wasn’t done, His Spirit was with them. It’s hard to persevere, it’s hard to remain faithful, so God exhorts His people to continue pushing through, to not give up.

-I will shake: there’s allusions to Ex. 19:18 here that shows that when God comes, the earth can’t stay still. Someday in the future, God will judge the nations, and what will they do? They’ll bring their treasures into this house. And I think we see this in 2 places, first when the wise men “from the east” bring their gifts to Jesus, and second and more explicitly in the new heavens and earth. Rev. 21:24 says the kings of the earth will bring their glory into this new Jerusalem. The external glory of the temple is meant to reflect the inner glory of the Glorious One.

-The final glory will be greater than the first. You haven’t seen ANYTHING yet, because for a Christian, the best is ALWAYS yet to come. One thing I’ve been trying to do more since preaching through Revelation is spend time contemplating heaven, and just how wonderful that will be. I heard someone onetime say he ended his devotions each day thinking about heaven until it brought a smile to his face! One of the most amazing things about heaven is the joy and happiness is unending. Each day is a new opportunity to try something new, to get to know someone in a deeper way, to taste a new food, to go on a new adventure. And each day we’ll grow in our awareness and understanding of God, which will never leave us bored because God is infinite (which is why I think we get eternity to spend with Him). 

-Then Haggai is asked to go to the priests and ask him a couple questions about Levitical law (vs. 10-19), and the summary of these questions is: defiling is contagious, while holiness is not. And you can kind of make sense of that with sickness, you can “catch” a cold (or the flu, or COVID), but you can’t “catch” health, can you? And God says that because the people aren’t holy, even their offerings are defiled by their sin.

-Which is some of what makes Jesus’s arrival so amazing, because the opposite is true with Him. Jesus comes along and sickness flees from Him! So now under Jesus, suddenly holiness is contagious. Mark 1 tells this story of a leper. Under the law, lepers were completely segregated from everyone else, and if anyone got too close to the leper, they were unclean. But do you notice how Jesus heals this leper? Mark is explicit: he reaches out his hand and touches the man, a man who likely hadn’t been touched by another human in YEARS because they didn’t want to catch his leprosy. And what happens when Jesus touches the man? Instead of Jesus becoming unclean, the unclean man is made clean (which Mark explicitly says). God says in Haggai that this is coming, blessing instead of cursing, and it’s dependent on God, not anything the people can do.

-The final word to Haggai comes on the same day with a promise to once again “shake the heavens and the earth.” The purpose of this shaking is to overthrow the Gentile kingdoms, with allusions to the Exodus when they overthrew the Egyptian army (Ex. 14), and the conquest of the promised land, when the Midianites killed each other in their confusion (Judges 7:22).

-Who’s going to be sitting on the throne? It says Zerubbabel, but one of the issues at this time was that Darius was the king, even though Zerubbabel was the descendant of David.

-First, a signet ring is the marker of royal authority, think of it like an official stamp. But the reason that’s significant is because of something God revealed to the prophet Jeremiah about Zerubbabel’s grandfather. In Jer. 22:24 God says that even though Coniah was (past tense) God’s signet ring (that is, bearing God’s authority), God was going to rip him off, cast him away, and the prophesy ends by the Lord saying his offspring will be cast off, which leaves in doubt whether or not David’s line would continue.

-But then we see here at the end of this book that God will renew His covenant with the Davidic line and make Zerubbabel His signet ring, promising that the David’s line would continue. And Zerubbabel comes up again in Matthew 1, do you know why? Because he is the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandpa to Jesus (yes, I counted). This is just a reminder to us that Jesus is the main point of the whole Bible. It all centers on Him, it all points to Him, and He is the answer to every promise that God makes. Which also means we need to talk about what this future temple is that God tells Haggai about.

• The Temple of the Lord

-What was God talking about here that could be better than the temple Solomon built? What’s amazing is He’s talking about what we’re doing today. Now, I’m not saying that this building is the new temple, but God is talking about this new temple that exists worldwide, that is too big to fit in one building, and it’s called “the church.” Let me show why I think that.

-First, Jesus literally changes everything! So we need to think about the reason God has his people construct a tabernacle, then the temple to begin with. It was so He could live with His people. In fact, the ordering of the nation while they were traveling through the wilderness put the tabernacle in the middle of them, signifying that God had the primary place among them. But what’s fascinating (at least to me) is that God was living with His people before then too, but He was living with them as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. My reason for bringing this up is because of the way John describes Jesus in John 1. I don’t usually leave the footnotes in my slides, but it says it right on there: Jesus is the better tabernacle, the place where God’s full glory dwells (Col. 1:19). The reason God had His people build the tabernacle and then temple was because people would die if they were given unmediated access to God’s glory, but that changed with Jesus.

-Next, and a subset of this, is that Jesus says He is building something new with His disciples. So we begin with the reality that Jesus is the new and better tabernacle, but then He goes on to build something brand new which He talks about with Peter (Rocky! If you’ve read or watched Project Hail Mary yet). He affirms Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah, and that confession is the foundation for the church. So Jesus’s new idea for the place where God’s glory will dwell is in the church. But hold on, it gets even better than that!

-Paul continues this idea about what’s being built together in Eph. 2. Building up to this part, he’s been talking about the death we all lived in because of sin, and the separation we had between each other (Jew and Gentile) but how that division has been broken down by Jesus. Then he goes on to say that because of what Jesus has done, we are no longer foreigners and strangers, instead we’re citizens and members of what? God’s household. Turns out this has been God’s plan from the beginning! God living among His people, not in a temple built by human hands (Acts 7:48)

-But it gets even better. Look at what this house is built on: the apostles and the prophets. So we’re supposed to think back to prophets like Haggai as the foundation God was building 600 years before Jesus. And who’s the cornerstone, who’s the one who began the construction? Jesus. Paul is saying there is continuity from the beginning to the end. The tabernacle, then the multiple temples were in place to point to this reality that’s taking place today, because if you are in Christ, you are now a part of His holy temple. 

-And Peter talks about this reality as well. Not only are we the temple, we’re also being built to be the priests, the ones who can approach God to offer spiritual sacrifices through Jesus Christ. Friends, this means ALL of us are priests, this isn’t referring to some special “class” of Christians who act as a mediator between humans and God, there’s only 1 mediator: the God-man Jesus Christ. But Peter continues just a few verses later with a long list of descriptions of the church, all of which are direct quotes from God to Israel in the OT. God’s plan has always been to live among His people, not be constrained by a temple. God’s plan has also been to be the God of every tribe, and tongue, and nation, not just 1 ethnicity. 

-As I was studying this week, a verse from Psalm 27 came to mind. Think of what David asks the Lord here. The one thing he wants is to dwell in the house of the Lord and seek Him in His temple. Friends, we don’t just dwell in the house of the Lord, we ARE the house of the Lord, and where do we go to seek Him in His temple? We go here, because together we make up the temple of God. But just as the people during the time of Haggai had left the temple in ruins, there are ways that we today can leave the church in ruins. 

-An early church father, writing in the 3^rd century, Cyprian of Carthage, wrote a treatise titled ‘On the Unity of the Church’ where he said: 

-There are 2 key issues I see today where we can leave the church in ruins. First is by treating it like a consumer, where we sit in judgment on what takes place, or we pick and choose the areas we want to be involved. I’ve seen people who would go to 1 church because they liked the music, then hop in a car when the music was done and drive down to another church because they liked the preaching there. That’s like a husband going over to the neighbor’s house because he doesn’t like his wife’s cooking (or the wife going over, I don’t know all your cooking arrangements). Pick a church and plug yourself in and don’t give up when you get offended or hurt. People are sinners, and when you throw a bunch of people together in close proximity, the sin is going to come out, we can’t help it. I wish I could say the church is immune from that, but until Jesus returns the church will continue being made up of a bunch of sinners. Which gets me to the second key issue:

-Don’t marginalize or belittle the church. The church is the 1 earthly institution that Jesus paid for by shedding His blood, and when you either speak poorly of the church, or complain about the church, or even worse if you just ignore the church completely, you’re dismissing the thing that Jesus loves the most. Picture this: my kids are starting to get a little older, which means they’re getting harder to correct. They’re using logic and reasoning to point out our inconsistencies. But the other thing they’re doing is starting to talk poorly about us, and I’m fine if they’re upset with me, but I don’t have much toleration for talking bad about Cara. When we are upset about the church or complain about it, it’s complaining about Jesus’s bride, and I don’t think He appreciates that. See, the call for all of us who claim to be Christians is in the name, it just means “little Christ.” We’re supposed to work to be like Him in every area of our lives, including the things that we love, and Jesus loves His church with every ounce of His being, so we should love the church with every ounce of our being.