The Blessing of God - Haggai 2:10-19
Do you want to be blessed by God? That's kind of like saying, "Do you want to be a millionaire?" It goes without saying, yes. But what does that mean to be blessed by God? How can we be people who are blessed? Today we'll be continuing on in our study of Haggai and look at Haggai 2:10-19. But before we look into God's Word, let's look to the Lord together, let's pray (pray).
We've been working our way through the book of Haggai and in case you've just joined us, let me give you a little bit of background for this book. The Israelites have been in captivity in Babylon for the past 70 years. Jerusalem was destroyed because of the people's sin and idolatry. The city was burned to the ground and the survivors were taken away to Babylon. After 70 years the Babylonian empire fell to the Persians and a new king, Cyrus invited the Jews to return to their homeland to rebuild the temple. About 50,000 Israelites respond and make the long journey. After a period of settling in, they begin the rebuilding by laying the foundation. But soon after that opposition from the people living in the surrounding area brings the construction to a halt. This stoppage lasts for 16 years and God sends two prophets to encourage the people. Haggai is one of these prophets.
We saw in chapter one how God challenged the people to return to their true purpose, to rebuild the temple. And at the end of the chapter we see the response of the Jews. They begin working and the power of God falls on them. In chapter 2 we see that after about a month of work, the project is threatened by discouragement. The people fight with comparison. The new temple is nothing compared to Solomon's temple. But God redirects the people back to the building project. He tells them to be strong, to work and to not be afraid. Then He reminds them of these three great encouragements, God's presence, God's power and God's purpose.
Now God gives another message to the Israelites through Haggai. Take a look at verse 10 (read verse). This message comes exactly three months after the Israelites restarted the work on the temple. Why did the Lord speak at this time? I think there might be a couple of reasons. First, the message came in the ninth month which would be November or December. That would be the time where the Israelites would sow their crops. Up until that time the Israelites had seen meager harvests. What they sowed turned out to bear crops that were far less than what they expected. Now as they planted again I'm sure the Israelites wondered if they would still have less than expected harvests. The Lord wanted to reassure them. The second reason that the Lord addressed them at this time was that wrong ideas of what it meant to be a blessed people were growing in the hearts of the Jews.
In this sermon this morning I want to look at three points: 1) how not to receive God's blessing; 2) the curses of God; and 3) the blessing of God. If you have your bulletin you can take notes or better yet you can write in your notebook.
First, how not the receive God's blessing. Take a look at verses 11-14 (read verses). In these verses God uses an illustration from the ceremonial law. There are two hypothetical situations here. Let's look at the first. If a person offers a piece of meat at the temple to sacrifice and it becomes consecrated, and if that piece of meat is carried in a cloth, and if that cloth touches something else, like some other food, will it make that food consecrated? The answer is no. The lesson is clear. Holiness is not contagious. It can't be spread by touch or close proximity.
Why did God use that illustration? I think a wrong view was growing in the minds of the Israelites. Their thinking may have gone something like this: They were building the temple. The temple represented the presence of God. Therefore they themselves were made right before God because of their close proximity to the temple. They believed that the temple gave them a sort of spiritual protection and blessing. That's exactly what the people thought right before the Babylonians captured Jerusalem and destroyed the city and the temple. Jeremiah 7:4 says: "Do not trust in deceptive words and say, 'This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!'" The people believed that as long as the temple was standing, then they would never be conquered. Look at what God says to this attitude in verse 9-11: "Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, 'We are safe' - safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the Lord."
The Lord was showing the Israelites that just by having the temple didn't make them holy. It didn't guarantee protection or the blessing of God. Just like a consecrated piece of meat couldn't make anything else holy by touching it, so the temple wouldn't make them holy either.
Today we can have the same sort of attitude. We can think that since we go to church, or we hang around Christian people, or we listen to worship music or we read the Bible that we are right before God. How many of you have grown up in the church? For those of us who have grown up in Christian families, gone to Christian schools, attended youth group and gone to things like TC, this is a great temptation. We can just kind of think we are in right relationship with God because we've always been around God things. But that's not true. We can never become holy through osmosis. We can't just pick up Christianity from hanging around other Christians. O, we can pick up the Christian culture. We can learn Bible verses and have the right answers to questions that people might ask, but we really don't have a vibrant relationship with the living God. No one is born as a Christian. Instead you must be born again. Everyone must make their own personal journey to come to know, to love, to trust in and to follow Jesus Christ. Have you done that in your life?
The second hypothetical situation that God gives in these verses is this: If a person touches a dead body in turn touches something else, does that object become defiled? The answer is, yes. You can think of a contagious disease. If someone who is healthy touches a sick person, does that person become healthy? The answer is no. But what if a person with a highly contagious disease like Ebola, touches a healthy person. Will that person get sick? Yes he will. The healthiness doesn't transfer, but the disease does. That's how it is with holiness and sin. Holiness doesn't transfer by close contact, however, sin does. The Lord goes on and says that up to that point in time, everything the Israelites do is defiled. Even their offerings to God are defiled.
I'm sure the Israelites in Haggai's day thought they were the favoured of God. After all, they were the ones who chose to leave Babylon, where they were safe and settled and made the great sacrifice to travel all the way back to Jerusalem. They were the ones who had to put up with living in ruins and suffer persecution for their faith. They were the ones actually doing the work rebuilding the temple. Isn't it obvious that they should receive some blessing from God for obeying His will?
But that would be wrong thinking. Did you know that our best acts are stained by sin. Isaiah 64:6 says: "All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away." Even when we perform a good deed, it still is flavoured with self-interest. I'll do something nice for Ruth, but in the back of my mind I expect her to be thankful and treat me better. The Israelites in Haggai's time might have thought that they had earned favour before God by travelling to Jerusalem and starting to build the temple again. But God tells them that whatever they do and whatever they offer is defiled. There is no good deed that the Israelites can perform that will make God bless them.
And that's true for us as well. There are no good deeds that can make us holy before God. Every time I share the gospel in with people in the mall, this is a huge misunderstanding. This past Tuesday we were talking to a Muslim woman about what happens after we die. She said that she hoped she would go to heaven. We asked, "How do you get to heaven?" She said that she tried to do good things for others. And she hoped that those deeds that she would have done enough to let her enter into heaven. But that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says that all of us have sinned and stand guilty before a holy God. We can never pay off sin by doing good. The only thing that can pay for sin is death. That's why there were so many blood sacrifices in the Old Testament. They slaughtered sheep, goats and cattle. This pictured the truth that it is only through death that sin is paid for.
But the death of animals could never pay for the sin of people. Either we die or another person has to die in our place. The only problem is that everyone has the debt of sin on them. I couldn't die for Ruth, for my children, for anyone, even if I wanted to. I can't die for anyone else because I already owe myself because I am a sinner and stand guilty before God.
But the good news is that the Lord loves us and He did what we could never do by ourselves. He provided the sacrifice. He gave His very own Son, Jesus Christ, to become a human being, to live a sinless life and then to die on the cross. Jesus died to pay our debt of sin. He died in our place. And three days later He rose to life again, proving all that He said was true, and opening the way to heaven for those who believe and trust in Him.
We have to realize that good deeds can never earn us merit before God. But sometimes I think that we Christians can fall into this trap too. We can start thinking that to receive the blessing of God we must perform some act or obey some command. We understand that to be saved it is by grace alone through faith, but we think that after we receive Christ as our Lord and Saviour, then we have to begin performing good works to receive God's continued blessing. You see that when we think that if we give a tithe of our earnings, we believe that God will bless us financially. You see that when a high school boy starts coming to church right before tryouts because he thinks that God will help him make the basketball team. You see it when a church thinks that they will see numerical and financial growth because they've started to fast and pray one day a month.
Colossians 2:6-7 says: "So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness." That verse tells us how to live the Christian life. It says that just as we received Christ Jesus as Lord, that's how we need to continue to live our Christian lives. How did we receive Jesus Christ as Lord? We did it by faith and trust giving up our reliance on good deeds to earn God's approval. That's exactly how we are to continue to live our Christian lives today. We can never depend on our obedience to God to bring about His blessings and favour.
If we live with this kind of attitude, where we think that we will do something good for God and He'll do something good for me, then God will shake us from that wrong thinking. We've looked at how not to receive God's blessing. Now let's look at the second point, the curse of God. Take a look at the next section in Haggai 2:15-17 (read verses).
The Israelites had travelled to Jerusalem to begin rebuilding the temple of God. They expected God's blessing. After all they were in the holy city constructing the holy temple. They were guaranteed God's protection and presence, right? And they were obeying the Lord. They could expect God to bless them for their good deeds, right? The answer is wrong. They may have been doing the right things, but they had the wrong attitude. They were doing all the right things with all the wrong motives. They thought that by being in a certain place, by doing certain things, then they were guaranteed the blessing of God. Instead all they experienced was problem after problem. The city was even more desolate than they expected. The work was harder than they imagined. And they certainly didn't expect the people around them to start attacking them and harassing them and threatening them. Instead of receiving God's blessing all they got was more and more heartache.
So they stopped the building project. But even then God seemed to be against them. They planted crops and harvested little. They found they were plagued by droughts, blight and hail. Nothing seemed to be going right. We learn in these verses that it was the Lord who brought all of these calamities. Instead of God's blessing the Israelites received God's curse. But we learn an important fact in verse 17. The reason the Lord had brought these curses wasn't to punish the Israelites, but it was to bring them back to God.
You see what God is most interested in isn't what work we can accomplish for Him, but He is most interested in how close we are related to Him. The Israelites were looking to earn God's blessing. God wanted them to come to Him. He wanted relationship. The Israelites wanted a good home, abundant crops to feed their families, and safety from their enemies. Those were the blessings that the Israelites were hoping for. But God had something better for them. The greatest blessing of all is the know and love God, Himself. Instead of trying to win God's approval, the Lord wanted them to long for His presence and to seek Him with all their hearts.
Really when God brings discipline into our lives, that's His ultimate purpose. He wants to draw us back to Himself. He designs problems and hardships and loss in our lives to make us long for Him. God does that when we are living in sin. He'll often bring us to a low point in our lives to back us turn back to Him. But God can also bring discipline into our lives when everything seems to be going all right. We are doing well, we are serving in the church, we are having regular quiet times, but things don't seem quite right. We feel like we are missing something. Could it be that you have let good works creep into your relationship with God? Could it be that you are starting to feel that you're pretty good and God is lucky to have you as His servant? Could it be that you are starting to think you've earned God's blessing? If that kind of thinking has crept into your relationship with God, then you need to repent. I think of Christ's message to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2. This church seemed to be doing well. They had the right doctrine, the people served God and worked hard. But this is what Jesus says to them in Revelation 2:4-5: "Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place."
Jesus tells the believers in Ephesus to repent and to do the things they did at first. What did they do at first? They came to Jesus in absolute faith, trusting in His grace alone to save them. That's exactly what we need to do, whether we are a brand new believer or if we've been following Christ for 50 years.
We've looked at how not to receive God's blessing. And we've looked at the curse of God. Now let's look at the blessing of God. Look at verses 18-19 in Haggai chapter 2 (read verses). The Lord tells the Israelites, from the time that the Israelites returned to Jerusalem and started rebuilding, up to the present day, the Lord had not blessed them. But now the Lord was going to bless them. There was a change in the attitude of the Israelites. This began when the Israelites started building again, which is recorded in Haggai 1:12-15, where the people started to build again and then God stirred their hearts. But after the outward obedience, an internal transformation was happening. It's not recorded in the book of Haggai, but in the book of Zechariah.
Zechariah preached alongside of Haggai to exhort the people to finish the temple. Ezra 5:1-2 says: "Now Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the prophet, a descendant of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel, who was over them. Then Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and Jesuah so of Jozadak set to work to rebuild the house of God in Jerusalem. And the prophets of God were with them, helping them." Listen to Zechariah's first prophesy in Zechariah 1:1-6: "In the eighth month of the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah son of Berekiah, the son of Iddo: 'The Lord was very angry with your forefathers. Therefore tell the people: This is what the Lord Almighty says: "Return to me," declares the Lord Almighty, "And I will return to you," says the Lord Almighty. Do not be like your forefathers, to whom the earlier prophets proclaimed: This is what the Lord Almighty says: "Turn from your evil ways and your evil practices." But they would not listen or pay attention to me, declares the Lord. Where are your forefathers now? And the prophets, do they live forever? But did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants the prophets, overtake your forefathers?
'Then they repented and said, "The Lord Almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserve, just as he determined to do.""
Zechariah prophesied in the eighth month, two months or so after the Israelites started rebuilding and a month or so before the passage were looking at this morning, Haggai 2:10-19. After Zechariah's message the people repented and returned to the Lord. They confessed their sin and acknowledged that God was right and just. No longer did they depend on their own good deeds to earn them approval before God. They realized that they were sinners and they threw themselves on the mercy of God.
When we have that kind of attitude, that's when God blesses us. And that's exactly what God said He would do at the end of verse 19: "From this day on I will bless you."
Now let me stop here for a moment. How does God bless us? What is the sign of His blessing? Well I think for the Israelites in Haggai's time, the sign of God's blessing was clear. It is through material blessings. The crops no longer would experience droughts, disease and hail. Deuteronomy 28 spells out clearly both the blessings of obedience and the curses of disobedience. Look at Deuteronomy 28:1-6: "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. 2 All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God:
3 You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.
4 The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock--the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.
5 Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed.
6 You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out."
In the Old Testament, often material abundance was the sign of God's blessing. Is that true for us today? Some Christians think so. Some churches preach that if you have God's blessing you will be financially well of and physically healthy. They argue that through faith we can claim all of the good things that God has in store for us. This teaching has been called the prosperity gospel or the health and wealth gospel. Is this what God's blessing means for us today?
The short answer is no. In the Old Testament often God showed His favour and blessing through material possessions. But with the coming of Christ we have a much fuller revelation of God's plan. As an illustration, God promised Abraham, the father of the Jews, He promised him physical blessings like having descendants, inheriting the promised land and being blessed by having material wealth. But in the New Testament these promises are fulfilled in a completely different way. Instead of physical descendants, Rom. 4:11-12 tells us that that everyone who believes in Jesus Christ is a descendant of Abraham. These are spiritual descendants. Instead of a physical land to live in, the focus is on heaven. That's what Hebrews 11:13-16 talks about, that we have a better country, a heavenly one. Instead of physical blessings of wealth and prosperity, Jesus points us to a completely different way to be blessed by God.
Jesus gives us a list of ways we can be blessed in Matthew 5:3-12. This famous list is often called the beatitudes. We don't have really any time to look at this list in depth, but listen to this list as I read it:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Now did any of the blessings in those verses talk about material wealth and prosperity? Well, you might point to the meek inheriting the earth, but I would argue that this isn't referring to the present physical earth. The earth this verse is talking about is the new earth to come after history comes to a close and the Lord judges the earth.
For Christians our blessing aren't primarily physical. In fact, as we have seen in the beatitudes, by following Christ we may very well suffer persecution and physical suffering on this earth. But our blessings are the love of God, the mercy of God, having a relationship with God and being promised a place in heaven.
The question is, are you in the position to receive God's blessing? It may be that you know that you don't have a personal relationship with God. You can come to Him today. The Bible says to become a child of God we have to do two things. John 1:12 says: "Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God." First we have to believe in Jesus Christ. We have to believe that He is all that He claimed for Himself, that He is the Son of God, that He died for our sins, and that He rose from the dead. But there is a second thing we have to do. We have to receive Jesus Christ as our Saviour. Not only to we have to believe certain facts, we have to come to a personal relationship with a person, with God, Himself. We do that by repenting, by confessing our disobedience and selfishness to God and turning from our old life. Instead we have to decide to live for Jesus Christ and His purposes, instead of for our own interests. Jesus Christ must become the master, the ruler of our lives. You can do that this morning.
But it may be that you already have a relationship with God. You may be a Christian here this morning and yet you aren't experiencing God's blessing in your life. You don't have the comfort of His love, the assurance of His forgiveness, the vibrancy of His presence, and the leading of the Spirit in your lives. It may that you're living in conscious disobedience to the will of God. Or it may be that you are trying to earn God's approval by doing good deeds. Whatever your situation, the solution is the same. We have to run to Jesus and throw ourselves on His mercy. We have to repent and give ourselves to Him. I'm going to give you an opportunity to do that this morning. Let's pray.
