Introduction: Haggai is the first of the three post-exilic prophets, Zechariah and Malachi being the other two. Apart from the book of Obadiah, the book of Haggai is the shortest book in the Old Testament. The book tells of the prophet’s preaching to God’s procrastinating people to promptly return to their postponed rebuilding of God’s temple in Jerusalem.
The original temple, built by Israel’s King Solomon, was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, in 586 BC. Afterward, Cyrus the Great, the king of the Babylonian conquering Persians, allowed 50,000 Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem from Babylon to rebuild the house of God. However, the returned Jewish exiles soon became apathetic and indifferent about the reconstruction of God’s house. Therefore, God called the Prophet Haggai to awaken His people from their spiritual apathy and to return in earnest to the rebuilding of His temple.
Haggai 1:1 — One of the most notable characteristics of Haggai’s prophecy is the repeated and emphatic claims that his message is of divine origin. No less than twenty four times in two short chapters, Haggai claims to be God’s messenger proclaiming God’s message.
As long as we preach the infallible and objective oracles of God as our fallible and subjective opinions, we are impotent messengers preaching an impotent message. After all, the Ten Commandments are not suggestions and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not optional, but obligatory!
Haggai 1:2 — By calling His people “this people,” God insinuated that He had renounced them over their refusal to rebuild His house. Rather than prioritizing it, by urgently getting right on it, the people felt they could postpone it, until they eventually got around to it.
God’s people should be busy building God’s house all the time, not just sometime.
Haggai 1:3-4 — God’s people were grilled by God over their rebuilding and refurbishing of ritzy houses for themselves, while His house remained in rubble and ruins.
The instant we fail to put God first, our fellowship with God is immediately fractured.
Haggai 1:5-6 — Whenever we fail to prioritize God in our lives, we'll live in a self-imposed spiritual poverty. Estranged from God, over our deprioritizing of God, we'll never be satisfied in this life apart from God, no matter how many earthly things we are able to accumulate.
To live for worldly things is like putting hard earned wages in a purse with holes. While you’ll never be satisfied in the here-and-now; what’s worse, you’ll end up broken-hearted and bankrupt in the hereafter, having nothing eternal to show for your time on earth.
Haggai 1:7-8 — The fact that God instructs the people to “go up to the mountain” to get “wood” to “build [His] house,” suggest that the wood initially given to rebuild God’s house for His glory had been stolen by His people to build their own houses for their glory. (Ezra 3:7)
We often steal, for our own selfish ends, what God has given us to use in His service, even our God-given lives, which we often live for ourselves and our own glory rather than for God and His glory.
Haggai 1:9-11 — The people’s meager pickings and miserable plight were both the result of their misplaced priorities, their running to their own houses, while God’s house remained in ruins.
There is no guarantee of divine provision apart from devotion to God, as Paul taught the Philippians, it was their faithfulness to God that guaranteed God would furnish them with all they needed. Unfortunately, the promise—“God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus”—is often divorced from its preceding prerequisite; namely, that we've been and are being faithful to God. (Philippians 4:14-19)
Haggai 1:12-15 — The success of the prophet's preaching was immediate and incredible, for in response to it, the people feared before the Lord, obeyed the voice of the Lord, and went to work in the house of the Lord. O that preachers today were so tremendously successful.
The secret to the success of Haggai’s sermons was a Holy Spirit stirred enthusiasm, which explains why Haggai’s contemporary, Zechariah, preached that the house of God could not be built by man’s might and power, but only by God’s Spirit. (Zechariah 4:6)
Unfortunately, most so-called houses of God today are not built on the power of God’s Spirit, but on their pastors’ Spiritless sermons, their church programs, their praise bands, and their coffee shops.
Haggai 1:13 — The Lord's messenger must be in the Lord's message to preach it to the Lord's people. In other words, he must be living it before he begins to preach it.
When it comes to practitioners of their own preaching, their seen sermons are much easier to remember and harder to forget than their spoken ones.
BACK TO TWEETS BY THE BOOKS
