We are continuing our series called The Story. God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. Last week, we talked about the story of a guy named Daniel and the Lion’s Den. This week we are going to continue the story about the Babylonian captivity. Specifically, we are going to talk about the return home; the Jewish people being able to go back to their homeland after almost 70 years in captivity. You may recall that the Jewish people were basically in trouble, specifically the kings were in trouble, because they were involved in idol worship. God basically decided I am going to have to pull you away from you kingdom to learn a lesson. So he allowed wicked King Nebuchadnezzar to come in and pretty much destroy Jerusalem and leave their beautiful temple in ruins. But God, in his sovereign grace and mercy, came in and allowed the people to come back into Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. It was a very important thing. This temple idea was something where the temple was like our church. It was the center of worship of God. But more than that it was really the center of their identity and where people really believed that the spirit of God was housed in the temple. So the temple was very important for the Jewish identity at the time. God is going to allow the people to come back to Jerusalem and he is going to do it in a very unorthodox way. He is going to do it through a guy named Cyrus. A Persian king named Cyrus. We are going to be looking at some readings today. We are going to be looking at primarily two books, the Book of Ezra and the Book of Haggai. Those are books that you might not be familiar with. If you are using the red pew Bible, it is about page 460 and Haggai comes about 500 pages later. We are going to look at chapter 1 of Ezra and chapter 1 and 4 of Haggai. They are both starting in the first chapter. I am going to read through Ezra starting at verse 1:1. (Scripture read here.)
This is a big deal because this is a pagan king who God placed on his heart to release the people that had been placed into captivity for about 70 years. You wonder why did God use a pagan king to accomplish his will. We really don’t know. But we know that again God is an illustration that God can use anybody he wants to accomplish his will. As the story goes, the people were released. They had to travel approximately 900 miles through the desert back into Jerusalem, back into the Promised Land. As that opening verse tells us, he did not leave them without supplies. In fact, he gave them gold and silver. He gave them animals. He gave them food and water. He even gave them the various worship items that King Nebechudnezzar had actually taken out of the temple when he ransacked it about 70 years ago. That was a pretty amazing thing. God was supplying the needs of the people.
There is actually a passage, I think it is in Philippians chapter 4 around verse 19 that just came to mind. Paul was talking about how God would supply all our needs according to his riches in Christ Jesus. That is what he does. He provides us all our needs. So again, the people are going back to Jerusalem. They have all this enthusiasm going back because they are going to build the temple. The first thing they do when they get back is decide to build the altar first. The altar was a little bit in the outer courts of the temple, and it was a place where they would offer up the animal sacrifices to God. So that is what they did. Then they slowly began to, stone by stone, build the beautiful, glorious temple back. Just as they got started, about two years into the project, they began to hit all this opposition. These people started coming up against them. Mostly the people in the surrounding areas. Particularly in Sumaria they came in and began to have opposition against the Jews coming back and trying to build their temple. We don’t know exactly why, but there were probably some ideas that when you build the religious temple, it means you are going to be strong spiritually, which is a good indicator that you are probably going to be strong in military might and you are going to be strong in power. They were a little bit nervous about that situation. They went in and began to oppose the building project. They began to insight fear and discouragement in the people. The passage goes on to say in Ezra chapter 4 “The peoples around them set out to discourage the people of Judah and make them afraid to go on building. They hired counselors to work against them and frustrate their plans during the entire reign of Cyrus of Persia and down to the reign of Darius king of Persia.” They were there and they just wanted to stop the Jewish people from the rebuilding of the temple and ultimately of the whole city of Jerusalem.
Rather than fight against that resistance, they chose just to say maybe it isn’t a good time to do this. Maybe we will just scratch this whole plan about rebuilding the temple. That is what they did. They pretty much folded to the resistance. It is easy for us to look back and say what is wrong with those guys. How can they start a project and then stop it? It is easy because I think we all start projects and set goals. I imagine a few of us have home projects that we started and have since stopped. We have people that maybe decided they wanted to go back to school and they get to a certain point and they stop. Or they want to learn how to play an instrument or possibly even write a great American novel. For some reason, they hit resistance and they stopped. That is just part of human nature. You have to remember that these people were not involved in an earthly project. They were involved in a heavenly project. A heavenly project that God had given the green light to and said go for it. I have cleared the way out. The first time they hit resistance they folded the project and the temple became dead in the water. It wasn’t going to happen.
It was about this time God decided to call up some new prophets. Particularly the prophet Haggai and a prophet named Zechariah. We are just going to look at the prophet Haggai today. You might recall that the prophets, we looked at them a few weeks ago, they were the guys that were the mouthpiece of God. The guys that were called up to speak for God. God would speak through these people. A few weeks ago, we saw how he called up certain prophets to challenge the kings who were basically dabbling in idol worship. He said if you don’t straighten up your act, I am going to have to do something drastic, which he did. He pulled all the people into captivity. This time, we see with the prophet Haggai that God is calling him up to be an encouragement to a people that were discouraged. To be encouragement to a people that were afraid. To be an encouragement to people who were frustrated in the project. God comes in and speaks through Haggai. He starts off sounding almost a little bit sarcastic. Haggai 1:2 says “This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘These people say, ‘The time has not yet come for the LORD’s house to be built.’” He is saying “These people say”. God is saying I hear what you guys are talking about and you are saying because we have all this resistance, maybe it is just not time to build the temple. Maybe it will be time down the road but right now it is not time to do this sort of thing. So God I think is being a little bit sarcastic through Haggai. Then it goes on to say you might not have time to build the temple but you sure enough have time for other things. He goes on to say “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses while this house remains a ruin? Give careful thought to your ways.” He is saying you have time to live in nice houses. You have time to take care of your buildings and your homes. You don’t have time for me? My temple is still in ruins. This idea of paneled houses is really a picture of comfort and luxury is what God is trying to paint through Haggai. You have time to live in your fancy houses and take care of your needs. In the meantime, my glorious temple, my house is lying in ruins. What is up with that? What he is talking about is an issue of misplaced priorities. He is letting the people know you have your priorities messed up. So much so that your lives are out of whack. Your lives are fruitless. I like how the book The Message says it. It goes on to say “Think it over. You have spent a lot of money, but you really don’t have much to show for it. You keep filling your plate, but you never get filled up. You keep drinking and drinking and drinking, but you are always thirsty. You put on layers and layers of clothes, but you can’t get warm.” He is saying you are spinning your wheels out there. The problem is that you have misplaced your center. The temple was the center of their religious identity. It was where the very spirit of God was housed. Basically, by ignoring the temple, they were pretty much living back in Babylon. They might as well have been living back in Babylon. God’s word through Haggai must have had some sort of an impact because the people responded to it. The people began to do the work. They picked up the shovels and began to work back on the temple.
I guess just to make sure that they were sincere, God allowed another oppressor to come in by the name of Tattenai to come in and oppose them again. This time it was different. Tattenai comes in and asks the people “By what authority do you have to work on the temple?” The people say we were given authority about 20 years ago or so by one of your kings. King Cyrus gave us permission to build the temple. If you don’t believe us, go write a letter to the current king, King Darius, and find out if it is true. Sure enough that is what Tattenai did. He sends off a letter to King Darius talking about these people say they have authority to do this. What do you think? Darius had his scribes dig through the archives and he comes up with this original decree by King Cyrus that authorized the work on the temple. That is what King Darius says to Tattenai. They have every right to work. I want you to help them in their work. I want you to actually take money out of the treasury and pay the people. I want you to provide the oil and the wheat and everything they need to build it. All the supplies they need. I want you to do that. If you don’t do that or if anybody doesn’t do that, I am going to impale them on a stake. So he was serious about it. As the story goes, Tattenai ends up helping them build the temple. The temple gets completely finished and they hold this huge celebration with all the sacrifices going on. It was just a great celebration to celebrate the completion of the temple. That is pretty much the main story that I wanted to get across. It is the story of the people that have been released back from Babylonian captivity to go back to Jerusalem and be able to rebuild their temple.
I was thinking about illustrations. I thought I wish I could save this sermon because it is a sermon that would go well if we were in the middle of some sort of massive building or remodeling project. Some of you have been in churches where they are doing these massive constructions and then the people start fighting. You get opposition and people want to shut down and stop the thing. The whole thing becomes dead in the water. It would be a great sermon for that. I can come in and act like I am Haggai. I can even dress up like him or something and give you a little kick in the pants. We really don’t have anything major going on at this time. The place is pretty much completed. Thanks to the handy people around me, this temple is doing pretty well. We need to be concerned more with the physical temple because it also involves the work that goes on inside the temple throughout the year. Really it is the work that goes on in the kingdom of God, which never stops. The work that basically involves every single person that would call themselves a kingdom child or child of God. I forget the passage, I think it is Ephesians 2:10, where Paul says “You are my workmanship created to do good works in Christ Jesus.” He is talking to every one of us who would call ourselves Christians. We are God’s workmanship created to do good works in Christ Jesus. That means the work never stops. Here we are, June 1, it is not the first day of summer but it is the first day of June and people are thinking about summer. There is nice weather outside and that sort of thing. There is a lot of opposition to the work inside the kingdom of God. In the building and out in the community. The opposition doesn’t come really from enemies of God. It comes from a lot of the stuff we create. The busyness that we create during the summer. The sun comes out and we have to do the yard work. You have to pull the weeds. You have to start on these new building projects in your home. You have a thousand things to do. Your kids are off, so they have a thousand different activities going on. You have all these family reunions and picnics you have to go to and you have to go on vacations. Those things become competition to the work that is supposed to be going on inside the temple. What happens, as we see, is that the temple work takes a backburner to the other work. Everything suffers. Finances suffer. Finances go down every summer. Why is that? Because people think if they are not here, they don’t have to give. Immature people do. The mature ones know that even if they are not here, the work continues. We still have to pay for this nice air conditioner you are feeling. We have to man the various ministries, especially the children’s area. We have all these things that are happening. I think we have more happening in the summer than we had in the winter. All that happening takes time, talent, and money. It doesn’t stop. I am appreciative that you are here. I am not trying to lay a guilt trip on you. I am just saying, like Haggai says, consider your ways. Consider where you are spending your time. Consider whether or not you are giving the appropriate time you need to give to the temple building project, God’s kingdom-building project in this church and in the world.
But more importantly, I think we have to make sure that we are not only caring for this physical temple, but that we are caring for the temple of our heart. It is Paul in 1 Corinthians who says “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s spirit lives in you?” I don’t know if you ever give that any thought, but that is pretty heavy stuff. You are God’s temple and God’s spirit lives in you. From a theological perspective we know that that is true or we should believe it is true. When Christ ascended up, the comforter, the spirit of God, came down and filled the church. Specifically filled the body of believers, the body of Christ on earth. So if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you are God’s temple. That is a scary thing. If you were to take that seriously and begin to think about the idea of you being a temple, just imagine that you are the temple, what would your temple look like? Would it be this glorious temple that King Solomon built or would it be the temple that the Jews found when they came back from Babylon in total ruins? What would that temple look like? That is a scary thought when you think about what condition your temple might be in. We have a responsibility and it is not Chuck’s responsibility. It is you responsibility, if you are a Christian, to care for your temple. It is. It is totally your responsibility. How do you do that? You do it by the spiritual disciplines or the habits of the spiritual life. Things like Bible study. Things like prayer. Things like fasting and silence and solitude. Memorization of scripture. All these things or habits that help maintain the temple. They are really not you maintaining the temple. When you go through these spiritual disciplines what you are doing is creating space for God inside your temple so that he can do the work in you. You really don’t have to do anything. You just use the spiritual disciplines and get out of the way. I look around and many of you have been Christians for a number of years so this shouldn’t be any foreign idea this idea of the spiritual disciplines. Just in case it is, I highly encourage a couple different books. There is a book called Celebration of Discipline. It has been out for about 30 years. It is like a classic in the spiritual disciplines. It is a pretty easy read. If you are trying to understand what are some of the more common disciplines, I would highly recommend that you pick it up and begin to understand what are the things that you need to be doing on a regular basis to make sure that your temple is kept clean. If you have even read this, I would highly recommend another book by Ruth Haley Barton. It is called Sacred Rhythms. Really it is just a book that basically takes a lot of those same disciplines and helps you to develop a personal rhythm in your life of the disciplines so that you make sure that you are staying on pace with God and keeping those disciplines going forever. That they are a part of your regular life daily, weekly, quarterly, monthly, yearly. The disciplines move beyond just simply I am going to read five minutes from The Daily Bread or I am going to read a verse today or say a quick prayer. You are not going to keep your temple clean that way. I guarantee you are not. It takes regular discipline to do it.
I speak to you but I speak to me because I am just as guilty of not following regular habits of the discipline. I am getting better at it. But when I hit the summertime, especially when I hit vacation, a lot of times the disciplines go right out the window. I experienced it a few weeks ago. We were on vacation having a great time. I decided I am not going to allow myself to slip from my spiritual disciplines. I am not going to sleep in every day. I am going to get up at 5:30 in the morning and read my Bible. I am going to meditate. I am going to be in silence. Then I am going to take a nice long walk on the beach and pray and praise God. I did it for two days. Then pretty much all heck broke loose because we ended up getting a stomach flu of some sort. First Natalie was sick then Austin got sick and then Natalie got sick again. By Friday morning when we were supposed to be checking out, we are calling an ambulance to pick up Natalie and take her to a local hospital. Praise God, she is fine now. It pretty much through a whole loop into my sacred rhythms. When you are out of your regular context, it is very hard to stay disciplined. I think most of you know if you have tried to do that. You want to maintain the disciplined life but something comes along and opposes it. The enemy of your soul doesn’t want you to have those disciplines. He wants you to sleep in. He wants you to miss church. He wants you to miss your quiet time. He wants you to miss your prayers. Because he knows that those are the things that keep you pure. Those are the things that keep the temple clean. When you are going through and you are having discipline, you should almost anticipate that something is going to try and disrupt your day from being in the spiritual discipline. What happens if you yield to it and allow yourself to just be taken over by this oppression, pretty much the project shuts down. The temple maintenance shuts down. Before you know it, you are not living any sort of a fruitful life. Basically what you find is you are living back in Babylon.
Going back to those verses where you think you are earning money, but you don’t have enough. You are eating food, but you never feel satisfied or drinking whatever you drink and you are never satisfied. And you wonder what is going on in your life. It really boils down to Christ is not at your center. I don’t know what else to tell you. Some of you people are like I want to get closer to God. No you don’t. You really don’t. If you did you would do something about it. Again, I can’t make you do anything. You have to decide if you want to be close to God. Do you want God at the center of your reality? Do you want God at the center of your heart? He is there ready and waiting for you. Anytime you are ready, but you have to decide how bad you want it. How hungry are you really for God? Or do you just want to play Christian? Come on Sunday. Give your money. Do you really want to grow? Do you really want God to be at the center of your life? I say this not to lay guilt on people. People don’t need any more guilt. All I am saying is, like again in the story, consider your ways. Consider the avenues you are taking in life. Look at those ways and say are they very fruitful? Am I really living out as a Christian or am I still kind of living out there in Babylon acting no different than the people in the rest of the world? If that is the case, it is time you clean up your house. It is time that maybe you do spend more time in this physical house, helping out in this physical ministry. But it is also important that you would begin to maintain this house. Maintain your heart. When you maintain your heart and this house, what you begin to realize is that God is going to feel right at home whether in this building or in your heart. I like how the book The Message summarizes it. It summarizes it like this “God is building a home. He’s using all of us – irrespective of how we got here – in what he is building. He used the apostles and the prophets for the foundation. Now he is using you, brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day – a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.” Let us pray.
