The Desire Of All Nations Shall Come: A Sermon For The First Sunday In Advent

The Desire of All Nations Shall Come

Haggai 2:6–7 NKJV

“For thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Once more (it is a little while) I will shake heaven and earth, the sea and dry land; and I will shake all nations, and they shall come to the Desire of All Nations, and I will fill this temple with glory,’ says the Lord of hosts.

We now come to season of Advent which is the beginning of the new Christian year. We ended the last year with the Feast of Christ the King in which we are reminded that the LORD shall return and establish His eternal Kingdom. This is the end of history as we know it and the beginning of eternity. Advent, on the other hand, it a time of reflection and preparation for this return. From beginning to end, our gaze is fixed upon the return of Jesus and the establishment of His Kingdom.

It would be good to understand that the season of Advent is not preparing for the arrival of the Christ child in Bethlehem. This happened long ago and was prepared by God for us and our salvation. The life of Christ, His death, and resurrection stands in the center of human time. It lies between creation and Advent. Our sense of time until the recent attempts of secularists divides this time into BC and AD. The world has substituted B.C.E. (before common era) and C.E. (common era). The question I would ask is what event divides B.C.E. and C.E.? Even the secularists cannot get away with removing Christ from the center of history. The life of Christ from the Incarnation to the Ascension is center to out world. This should be celebrated, and it is. Christmas and Easter form the bookends of the center of the Christian year. Advent is the ultimate goal to which we press. The rest of the Christian year from Pentecost to Christ the King Sunday focuses on the life and mission of the Church.

Advent is commonly broken down into four themes. These are hope, peace, joy and love. In the First Sunday of Advent, the theme is “hope.” The passage I have selected for us to read is from the Old Testament Book of Haggai, chapter 2, verses 1 through 10.

Haggai and the Prophet Zachariah were prophets of the restoration of Israel to Israel. Seventy years earlier, in 586 B.C., the first Temple built by Solomon had been burnt to the ground. The people of Judah had been taken into exile in Babylon starting in about 607 BC in several deportations. This was done because the people of Judah had committed rebellion and wickedness in the sight of the LORD. The LORD had warned all of Israel including Judah that if they committed apostacy, they would be carried off captive. The LORD fulfilled His promise, and for seventy years, they languished in captivity. For many who longed for Israel, this captivity was bitter. We see this in the 137th Psalm where the Babylonians mocked the captives and asked them to sing to songs of Zion. They just could not sing these songs in a strange land and hung up their harps on the willow branches and prayed that Yahweh would dash the heads of the children of their Babylonian captors against the rocks.

We should also remember through Isaiah and the other prophets before this exile that this judgment would not be permanent. We see in Isaiah 40 words of comfort and hope for the Jews, It was this hope that sustained the Jewish believers during this bitter time until the Land of Israel had seventy years of Sabbath rest. Then in 539 B.C., God raised up a conqueror named Cyrus who overthrew the Babylonian kingdom. Cyrus allowed the Jewish exiles to return to their homeland and even provided resources to help them rebuild. Psalm 126 records their exuberant joy when they were told they could return home. Unfortunately, many of the exiles were more comfortable in their new home in Babylon and remained. Ezra and Nehemiah record that a relatively small remnant returned in several batches. The LORD had promised that He would bless the captives in Babylon. They seem to have multiplied greatly, so few sought to return.

Psalm 126 also shows that reality for the returned captives was hard and discouragement set in. They asked the LORD to restore the joy they once had when it was announced that they could return. The results of this discouragement could be seen more than twenty years later when Haggai and Zachariah came on the scene, Haggai called out the Jews who had built nice homes for themselves while the house of the LORD, the Temple remained in ruins. They put their own comfort ahead of the faith. Haggai urged the people to resume the building. Apparently, this message was accompanied by judgments from the LORD, one of which was runaway inflation. Haggai uses picturesque language to describe this as putting their wages into a bag with holes in it.