First Things First (Haggai) Series

In a Christina Parenting Magazine, Jill Brett, describes the difference between fantasy and reality when it comes to parenting preschoolers.

The Fantasy: As your little ones sit quietly at the kitchen table and hum along with Beethoven, they absorb their age-appropriate encyclopedias. Meanwhile, you recreate the map of the U.S. using homemade sugar cookies. Ahhh, you think to yourself. This is what life's all about.

The Reality: Your little darlings simultaneously shriek, "Mine!" as they rip the latest Bob the Builder coloring book in two. Between loads of laundry, you smell smoke. You rush to the kitchen to find the slice-and-bake cookies burning in the oven. Fed up, you stand at the counter and remember the days when you thought you'd actually spend your life doing something worthwhile, like being a brain surgeon by day, and lawyer for the poor by night (Jill Eggleton Brett, "Help! I'm Surrounded by Preschoolers," Christian Parenting Today, Summer 2004; www.PreachingToday.com).

Such is life, not only for the mother of preschoolers, but for all of us. So what do you do when fantasy crashes into reality? What do you do when life gets messy and your world falls apart?

That’s what happened to 50,000 Jews when they returned to their land from Babylonian captivity. After 70 years of suffering in a foreign country, they looked forward to going home, but their reality was far worse than their fantasy.

Kenneth Quick, an adjunct professor at Grace School of Theology, describes the situation: “They returned to a totally devastated country—think of New Orleans after Katrina, only let it remain untouched for an additional 70 years! What would happen to the street where you live if it were deserted for 70 years? What would you find when you returned? What would houses, yards, and farms look like? No economy, trade, or markets existed, no working farms for food, no infrastructure, no military or police, no government services, and no Temple. Just wreckage—piles and piles of it, overgrown with weeds, brush, and trees. The tasks were overwhelming, even with an army of motivated people” (Kenneth Quick, Preaching on Haggai, www.PreachingToday.com).

It is to these people that the prophet Haggai comes with a message from God. So, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to the Old Testament book of Haggai, just three books from the end of the Old Testament, the book of Haggai, where God speaks not only to those ancient Jews, but to anyone whose fantasy has crashed into reality.

Haggai 1:1-6 In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest: “Thus says the LORD of hosts: These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the LORD.” Then the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins? Now, therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. 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 (ESV).

It’s August 29, 520 B.C., over 16 years after the exiles returned from Babylon and laid the foundation of the temple, but that’s all the further they got. They stopped work on the temple and worked on building their own homes. That’s when God sent Haggai to encourage the exiles to resume their work on the temple.

He urges them, “Consider your ways”—You have put your own houses above God’s house with the result that you lose more than you gain. Despite your hard work, you harvest meager crops, you never have enough to eat or drink, you’re cold all the time, and your money goes as fast as it comes. So, “get back to work on My house,” God says.

Haggai 1:7-11 “Thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. 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. 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. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. And I have called for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine, the oil, on what the ground brings forth, on man and beast, and on all their labors” (ESV).