You Can't "Catch" Holiness Series

ENGAGE

Would you agree with me that health is not contagious, but that disease is?

If I’m healthy and you have the flu and I cough on you or shake hands with you or Sneeze on you, I am not going to make you well, am I? On the other hand, If I have the flu and I do any of those things to you, I might very well make you ill. That is one of the main reasons that it is much easier to get sick than to remain healthy. Those of you who send your kids to school for the first time certainly find that to be true, don’t you?

TENSION

Even though we know that and it makes sense to us, for some reason when it comes to our own personal holiness and spiritual growth, we somehow lose sight of that. It seems like there are a lot of Christians who think that if they just come to church and hang around with holy people each week that somehow they are going to develop “holiness antibodies”. And conversely, there are those who think that they can hang around with godless people without any adverse impacts. But as we will see this morning, they are wrong on both accounts, because…

Holiness is not contagious, but sin is

TRUTH

This morning as we continue in our series title “Little Books with a Big Message” we’ll take a look at the second chapter of Haggai.

As I mentioned last week, the book of Haggai consists of four precisely dated messages that come from God over about a four month period from September to December in the year 520 BC. Last week, we looked at the first of those messages, which comprised all of chapter 1.

Since chapter 2 contains the other 3 messages and we won’t have time to look at all three in detail, I’m going to briefly summarize a couple of those messages and then focus most of our time on the one that I believe is most relevant for us today.

The second message in found in the first nine verses of chapter 2. It comes nearly 2 months after the first message. In this message. God is addressing those in the community who are longing for the “good old days”. There are a few of the remnant who had apparently seen the temple before it was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and now what they are rebuilding doesn’t even come close to the magnificence temple that Solomon had constructed. So it seems that some of them were questioning whether what they were doing was worth the effort.

I think we, too, often have a tendency to look back and long for things to be what they were once like and wish that God would take us back to a time when more people attended church on a regular basis, when there was prayer in our government meetings and in our schools, when Biblical marriage was held in high regard.

So I think it’s worth considering how God responds to those people who wanted to make the temple great again. Three times He commands them to “be strong” and then He tells them to “get to work”. He then reminds them that He is still in control and that one day He is going to fill the temple with even greater glory than before. We could paraphrase what God commanded them like this:

Quit looking back and reminiscing about the past. Remember I’m in control here so get busy with kingdom work and watch and see what I’m going to do as you serve Me. It will blow your mind.

The next message begins in verse 10 and that is the one I am going to spend most of our time on today, so go ahead and follow along as I read.

[Read Haggai 2:10-19]

This message comes a little over two months after the second one, in the month of December, 520 BC. By that time the people would have planted their winter crops, but they would not know yet whether it was going to be a productive crop or if they would experience another drought. As we see in verse 19, the seed is not in the barn and the vines and trees have not yielded their fruit.

Haggai tells the people to ask the priest two questions. This might seem a bit strange to us, but it was actually quite normal in that culture since one of the important roles of the priests was to instruct the people on how to live holy lives as we clearly see in this passage in Ezekiel:

They shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the common, and show them how to distinguish between the unclean and the clean.