In the year 586 BC, the Babylonians destroyed the city of Jerusalem, toppled the temple King Solomon had built, and took the people of Judah into exile from the land of promise. About fifty years later, in 539 BC, the Persians conquered the Babylonians and became the major power on the world stage. Shortly thereafter, King Cyrus of Persia issued a decree that Jews in exile could return to their land and rebuild their temple with funds from the royal treasury. Some Jews did return, and the foundation of a second temple was laid in 536 BC. But quickly the work of rebuilding encountered difficulties due to local opposition, and it eventually moved to the back burner for the people of Jerusalem.
Fast-forward almost two more decades, to the year 520 BC. No progress has been made. Apparently, the people of Jerusalem have become comfortable practicing their religion without a temple. I believe the biblical scholar Pieter Verhoef is correct when he writes about this situation, “The real danger for the postexilic community . . . was that they could have become accustomed to being without a temple and thus could have ‘spiritualized’ their religion.” In the modern world, we might ask, what’s wrong with that? In fact, modern people tend to despise institutional forms of religious practice tied to physical structures and embodied rituals. There seems to be some attraction among modern people to a vague, individualized spirituality apart from formal religious practice. As Yoda said to Luke when speaking about the Force: “Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” Does not a spiritualized religion represent evolution to a higher stage, beyond the “crude matter” of temples, the priesthood, and the sacrificial system? Isn’t it a good thing for Israel to progress beyond the stage where the temple is central to their religious life?
Into this situation, God sent a prophet to answer that question with a definitive “No!” In fact, such a way of thinking is profoundly anti-biblical. The temple does not represent for Israel a primitive stage of misguided religious practice. Rather, it represents two profoundly biblical truths about God: first, that God delights to dwell among his people. God cannot be contained in any temple, and he does not need us in the least, so his presence of blessing in the temple in Jerusalem is by his own free decision. He is fully self-sufficient, and yet he has chosen to be God for us forever. The most profound truth of Scripture I believe is given to us in Revelation 21:3, where John sees a vision of a new heaven and a new earth and hears a loud voice saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” God, needing nothing from us, has nevertheless chosen in sovereign grace to be God with us and for us for all eternity. The temple represents God’s sovereign grace in choosing to dwell with Israel, his covenant people.
But second, the temple represents the biblical truth that God’s presence is mediated. Spiritualized religion seeks to encounter God directly. But the temple, with the priesthood and sacrificial system that go with it, represents God’s ordained means by which his people will find forgiveness of sins and, on that basis, approach him. And by establishing this system of mediation, God dwells with man, but he does so on his own terms. He condescends to fellowship with a sinful people, but in doing so he does not compromise he holiness one iota. He remains ever true to himself. The temple represents God’s commitment to be God for us while remaining God for us.
Christianity is not a purely spiritualized form of the Old Testament religion. Our faith is every bit as tied to physical reality as was Israel’s temple worship. Does that mean that God’s presence is now mediated to us through our church building? No. The Bible does not take the temple idea in that direction. So in what sense is our faith tied to physical realities? Hold that thought, and we’ll return to that question later.
For now, it is important to understand that God’s desire to dwell among the returned exiles in Jerusalem in a rebuilt temple is an expression of his love for Israel. When Haggai comes on the scene, he enters a situation in which the people have priorities out of order. They are far more concerned about improving the looks of their own houses than they are about rebuilding the temple of the Lord. Their lack of energy for the rebuilding effort indicates the general apathy of their hearts toward God. As the years have worn on, so has their devotion atrophied.
Do you know that feeling? Has your desire to know God, to worship God, to serve God, been stronger before than it is now? If you honestly assess your heart at this moment, can you say that your priorities are in the correct order—that God comes first and your own desires second? I want to invite you to do what Haggai invited the Israelites to do in verses 5 and 7: consider your ways. And if you find yourself in a similar situation as Haggai’s audience, what can you do about it? I have found that nothing revives a lagging desire for God as much as meditating on the love of God for us in Christ. Just as a child instinctively loves her parents simply because, from the day she was born, she has experienced the love of her parents, so do we love God because he first loved us. In some pagan stories, needy gods create human beings to serve them as slaves. In the biblical story, the self-sufficient God who is love creates human beings to be his covenant partners, so that he may give himself to them forever. Consider your ways this morning, and as you do, I invite you to meditate on the love of God for his people.
I see at least three indications from this text of the love of God for his people. First,
There are numerous references to God’s speech in this text. Verses one and three speak of “the word of the LORD” that “came by the hand of Haggai.” Verses 2, 5, 7 and 9 say, “Thus says/declares the LORD of hosts,” (Lord Sabbaoth, as we sing in “A Mighty Fortress,” a title that indicates his supreme power). Verse 12 speaks of “the voice of the LORD their God,” and verse 13 refers to Haggai as “the LORD’s messenger” who spoke “the LORD’s message.” The passage is saturated in references to God speaking through the prophet Haggai.
The words we read here are human words in the sense that they were spoken and eventually written down by a man in human language. But the sovereign Lord of Hosts, who holds all things under his power, exerted his power in such a way to ensure that the human words Haggai spoke were exactly what he wanted to say to his people. And thus, the human words of Haggai are also divine words. And this is the case for all of Scripture. All Scripture is breathed out by God, Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16. This identity between the human words of the biblical authors and God’s words is what theologians call the doctrine of inspiration. This doctrine assures us that when we read the Bible, we are reading the very words of God, and because they are God’s words, they are fully authoritative, infallible, and without error. Scripture, as God’s own Word, is the very standard by which all truth is to be judged.
We should never take for granted what we have in Scripture. I enjoy reading essays by the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. And though he is politically and culturally conservative, like a number of such columnists he is also very secular in his worldview. In 2013 he gave a radio interview to The Daily Caller in which he described his view of God in this way: “I feel like a snail on the side of a great ocean and the idea that I can understand a notion like God or humans can [is] as if we’re expecting a snail to understand the motion of the tides through calculus and physics. That’s not possible. So I see the same kind of intellectual gap in the capacity of humans to understand in any deep sense about theology of God as for a snail to figure out how the tides work.” There is a certain sense in which you could say this is a high view of God. He is so far beyond us that there is no way we could ever expect to know him. But it’s not high enough. Krauthammer’s god is either unable or unwilling to make himself known to us. True, a snail could never figure out how the tide works. But the tide is an impersonal process that has no will to be known. God, on the other hand, is a thinking, feeling, choosing, personal being. And he created us so that he might make himself known to us!
That is what he did for Israel through Haggai. It is significant to note here that Haggai’s words are the first words God has spoken to his people since their return from exile. There were times when God, in his displeasure with Israel due to her sin, withdrew his word from among them. One example is the latter part of the Judges period. First Samuel 3:1 says of this time, “The word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” And that is how it was for the returned exiles until God broke the silence. God didn’t wait for the people to get their act together and then start speaking to them again. He spoke into a context of selfishness and general apathy for the work of rebuilding the temple. In sovereign grace, his Word always goes before our obedience. He speaks, not because we are eager to seek him, but so that we might become that way. And his Word does not return to him empty. May it do so in us today, as a testimony of his unfathomable love.
We come then to a second indication of God’s love in this passage:
Through Haggai, God addresses the leaders of the people: Zerubbabel the governor of Judah, who is a descendant of David and whose grandfather Jehoiachin had been a king of Judah, and Joshua the high priest. He notes in verse two the general attitude among the people with respect to the temple at this time: “These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the LORD.” Why were they saying that? There may have been a number of reasons. Perhaps they excused themselves by saying they were waiting for the Messiah to come and lead the rebuilding effort. Almost certainly they pleaded economic difficulties as a reason to postpone the work. But God is not impressed. When at least some of the people have gone to some expense to improve their own houses with decorative paneling, the excuses regarding the temple ring hollow. The bottom line is that the people’s hearts have become disordered.
When God tells them in verse four, “Consider your ways,” I imagine the psychiatrist Dr. Phil speaking to one of his patients about the patient’s foolish patterns of behavior, asking, “How’s that workin’ out for you?” In essence, God is saying to Israel: “You are running around, busying yourself with concern for your own homes and neglecting my temple. How’s that workin’ out for you?” Verse 6 indicates that Israel’s labors have been frustrated: they have sown much, but harvested little. They never have enough food or drink to be satisfied. Even their clothing does not provide sufficient warmth. And the man who has to reduce himself to selling his labor for wages finds that his money won’t go very far. Verses 9-11 describe much the same situation, only God takes explicit credit for these difficult economic conditions in verse 9, where he says he has blown away their crops, and in verse 11, where he says he has called for a drought on every aspect of this agrarian society. How’s that workin’ out for you, Israel? Not well at all.
God has made Israel suffer. And this is an act of love? Absolutely! The Lord disciplines those whom he loves. So long as the people’s hearts remain turned in on themselves, they are cut off from knowing the joy for which they were created. So God intervenes to awaken them to their need for repentance. The alternative would be to leave them in their sin and allow them to walk that path to its destination at the final judgment, where they would fall under the wrath of God forever. That would not be loving. It is clear from this passage that God’s deep desire is to bless Israel, and that is why he disciplines in love and calls them to repentance.
It is true that Israel was experiencing divine discipline as a consequence of her relationship to God through the Sinai Covenant, and we are no longer under that same covenant today. So is there any sense in which our situation might be parallel to theirs? Yes. The New Testament indicates that God disciplines his children under the new covenant as well. A few weeks ago we saw from 1 Corinthians 11 that some of the members of the Corinthian church had become sick, and some had even died, because of their abuses of the Lord’s Supper. Paul declares that this is an act of mercy in verse 32: “But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.” Also, when James commands the sick to call the elders of the church to come and pray over them for healing, he says in James 5:15-16, “And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” The implication is that at least some sickness is the result of specific sins that we commit. Certainly, we cannot say that about all suffering. That was the error of Job’s friends. There is much suffering that we endure that cannot be traced to a specific sin we have committed. But it is worth searching our hearts in times of suffering to ask ourselves if we have any need to confess our sins and repent of something specific.
But I also believe that all suffering that we endure as children of God is disciplinary in some way. Even if it is not the result of a particular sin, it still comes to us from God for the purpose of forming and shaping us more into the image of Christ, which is a form of discipline. The author of the book of Hebrews told his audience not to regard lightly the Lord’s discipline, which he saw evident in their sufferings for the gospel. He does not mention suffering for any sin in particular. The New Testament indicates that all suffering of God’s children comes from the hand of a loving heavenly Father whose design is to wean us, little by little, from dependence on this present age and prepare our hearts to be full of joy in his presence forever in part because of the sufferings we have endured. How else can we make sense of Romans 8:28: “Now we know that for those who love God all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose.” That is another way of saying that our loving Father disciplines us for the purpose of making us eternally glad in him. Whatever you have endured in the past, are enduring now, or might endure in the future, never doubt that it has come to you from the loving hand of your Father, whose purpose is invariably good for you, though you may never understand how in this life.
One more particular point of application here: the Israelites were suffering economically because they had not dedicated themselves to rebuilding the temple, and yet they seemed to use their economic hardship as the primary reason not to get to work on the temple. Have you found yourself in that conundrum? Do you struggle financially, and then say, “I can’t give to the church at this time in my life,” or, “I can’t give much to the church right now. Finances are too tight.” Have you ever considered that one reason your finances may be tight is because God will not entrust you with more until you show better stewardship of what he has given you? Is God disciplining you with respect to finances, urging you to step out on faith, and withholding his blessing until you do? I think too many Christians think of giving as something they will get to once everything else is taken care of. But God doesn’t want your leftovers. He wants your heart, expressed in the joyful giving of a noticeable portion of your resources to the work of his kingdom.
God’s love is expressed to us in his speaking to us and in his fatherly discipline. Finally,
God Shows His Love for Us by Empowering Us.
Verse 8 is the heart of this passage, expressing God’s desire for the people: “Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the LORD.” God delights in a temple that represents his condescension to his make his presence known to his sinful people without compromising his own holiness. And by the end of this passage the process of making that happen again has begun. The narrator notes for us that Zerubbabel, Joshua, and all the people obeyed the voice of the Lord because they feared him (v. 12). Verses 14b-15 tell us that they began working on the temple on the twenty-fourth day of the sixth month, as though to mark on the calendar a definitive turning point for the nation from disobedience to obedience, or from disordered priorities to properly ordered hearts. What made the difference? Verse 14 tells us: “And 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.” The people were moved from disobedience to obedience by the internal work of divine grace. The people obeyed because, as verse 13 declares, the Lord was with them.
There is a profound truth here. In the fifth century, a controversy erupted in the church over the nature of man’s ability to obey God. The great theologian Augustine had written a famous prayer in which he said to God, “Give what you command, and command what you will,” implying that God must not only command us but also enable us to obey his commands, or we won’t obey them. A British monk by the name of Pelagius, who was deeply concerned with rampant immorality that he observed among many professing Christians, was outraged at such a prayer. According to Pelagius, if God commands us to do something, we must have the ability to do it. Otherwise, how could we be held responsible for not doing it? And if we are able, in our natural state, to obey God, it must follow that the sin of Adam has not essentially affected our nature. For Pelagius, the sin of Adam presented us with a bad example of disobedience, but it didn’t render us personally unable to obey God.
Against this view Augustine articulated a doctrine of sin that affirmed that when Adam rebelled, he cut all of us off from the life of God and plunged us into bondage to sin. We are utterly unable to obey God and render any works pleasing to him on our own. And if that is the case, it follows that our only hope is divine grace. Our hearts have not merely been damaged by sin. They have been totaled. What is needed is not a fix-up but a completely new heart. And this God gives in the miracle of the new birth. When this controversy erupted, the very gospel itself was on the line, but praise be to God, Augustine’s view prevailed, and Pelagianism was condemned as heresy.
Few things are more clear to me than the fact that Augustine had Scripture on his side in that debate. Paul says in Romans 8:7-8: “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” From Jeremiah’s declaration that the Lord will one day write his law on his people’s hearts, to Ezekiel’s promise that God would remove the heart of stone from Israel and give them a heart of flesh, to Jesus’ plain declaration to Nicodemus that unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, to Paul’s constant references to believers as those who are “called” by God, Scripture declares repeatedly that it is God’s grace that does it all. It is as though God is saying, “I bless those who obey, and I am determined to bless you, even if I have to produce the obedience within you myself.” That is what he did for Israel, and it is what he does in every one of his children. Even our ability to obey God comes from God, and it does so because he is a God of love who delights to see his glory shine through in his own obedient children.
Our standing before God is not based on anything we do. It is based on the righteousness of Christ counted to as we are joined to him by faith. Nevertheless, at the final judgment our works of obedience will be evaluated, honored, and rewarded. Our master will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and reward us for the things we have done. But in doing so, God will actually be crowning his own work in us. Such is the dynamic of the relationship in Scripture between God’s working and our working: God’s working does not obliterate ours. We are active participants, and we are treated as such at the final judgment. They are, indeed, our works. And yet the fact that they are ours does not mean they are in any way carried out apart from God. God will rightly receive all glory for every good thing you and I have ever done or will ever do. We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph. 2:10). This too is an expression of his deep, deep love for us.
Consider your ways. Where is your heart today? Is it properly ordered toward God, or is it turned in on yourself? Consider how God has loved you: in speaking, he has made himself known to you; in his fatherly discipline, he works all things together for your eternal good; in his empowering grace, he enables you to walk in the good works he has prepared from the foundation of the world for you to walk in, and that he will one day commend you for with the sweet words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
But I would say, most of all, God’s love is expressed in his desire to dwell with us forever. And that bring us back to the temple itself. Contrary to a “spiritualized” religion wherein man seeks to ascend directly to God, the Bible presents God as one who condescended to Israel in providing mediation through the physical structure of the temple. But even the second temple is gone now, so where do we go for mediation? We go to Christ himself. The eternal Son of God added a human nature to his deity, becoming a real, physical, flesh-and-blood man so that he might dwell among us for a time, live the obedient life that we should have lived, and let his body be broken and his blood spilled so that our sins might be atoned for. The sacrifices, the priesthood, and the temple itself were all shadows pointing to a greater reality: the mediatorial work of Jesus Christ, crucified for our sins and raised for our justification. Truly, he is God with us.
You will never ascend to God on your own. You cannot run to him around Jesus. Jesus is the “place” where God has made himself known. So if you have never looked to Christ for forgiveness of sins and reconciliation to God, do so now. Believe the good news that he offers himself to you, and be baptized to identify yourself with his death and resurrection. He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through him.
If you are a baptized believer in good standing with a local church, here is one more reminder that our faith is not a purely “spiritualized” one. We have real, material elements of bread and the fruit of the vine here today, as tangible reminders that we approach God through his Son who took on flesh for us. So eat, drink, and marvel again at the love of God, who, at the highest cost to himself imaginable, has made his dwelling place with us forever in Christ.