You looked for much,
and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it
away. Why? declares the Lord of hosts. Because of My house that
lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house. – Haggai
1:9 (ESV)
These words of the
prophet Haggai were spoken to the band of Israelites, and their offspring, that
had returned from their exile in Babylon, with the charge to build the Temple
of God. They had been allowed to return under the Persian king Cyrus, and
here it is, in the second year of Darius, and the people were still saying “the
time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord” (1:2b).
God, clearly un-amused and unconvinced by the people’s decision making prowess,
responded through His prophet by saying, “Is it time for you yourselves to
dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” (1:4) With
that, the people were asked to reflect on how things had truly gone for them,
in their return to the land, while they failed to attend to what it was that
God had stirred up Cyrus to encourage His people to return to do.
God says, “You have
sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you
drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is
warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes”
(1:6). Because His people had failed to be about their God’s business,
turned inward and attending to their own needs first and foremost, those needs
were never truly met. The prophetic warning links the fact of their lack
with their failure to rebuild the Temple.
Apart from the
obvious encouragement to give so as to be able to participate in God’s covenant
purposes as a gracious gift of God, what is it that we can take from the words
of the prophet? Does this force us to consider our own, modern sense of
Christianity, in which this life of faith is perpetually directed
inwards? Israel’s concern with only their own, individual needs can be
likened to the proliferation of an existential, me-centered Christianity, that
has turned the movement of the Spirit of God that was designed for the
extension and establishment of the kingdom of God through the Lordship of
Christ over all peoples and things, into little more than a private, religious
experience in which we find ourselves concerned with my salvation, my faith, my
walk, my holiness, my avoidance of what my church and pastor has defined as
sin, and my personal relationship with Jesus. Even our outward service to
our fellow man is generally based on the confluence of “my” factors, rather
than with an understanding of God’s pressing concern about His kingdom and the
responsibilities that He bestows upon those with whom He shares His covenant.
While we can say that all of those “my’s” are fine, because they serve as
a component of the life of the Spirit, they are only a small part of a much
larger and more important whole.
This is where we can
learn from the example of Israel. While they would eventually rebuild the
Temple (concerning themselves with God’s business for a time), it did not
change the fact that the people, individually and corporately, were still
turned inward. Through the years that followed the Temple’s
re-construction, leading up to the time of Christ, as they were ruled over by
the Persians, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and then the Romans,
Israel was thoroughly concerned with maintaining their marks of identity as
God’s covenant people, above all else. They determined that this was
God’s business and carried it out exactingly. Their primary concern was
their city (Jerusalem), their Temple, their land, and their rituals, while an
entire world and an entire creation continued to languish in a lack of light,
as those people that were to be the stewards and revelators of God’s covenant
blessings to the world busied themselves in building impenetrable walls between
themselves and the Gentiles by which they were surrounded.
This was not God’s
intention then, and it is now God’s intention now. If we find ourselves
in isolation, purposely cutting ourselves off from other members of this family
of God’s kingdom, pronouncing judgments, ridiculing sincere servants of Christ,
creating dualistic scenarios in which we elevate ourselves or our group,
fostering an “us versus them” mentality, awaiting God’s action to judge the
wicked and reward the righteous, we put ourselves in the position to be
recipients of God’s ongoing wrath, along with continued exile from His promised
blessings, much like we find to be the case with Israel.
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