“ Hope” Says Edwin McManus “lifts us out of the rubble of
our failures, our pain and our fear to rise above what at one point seems
impossible. Our ability to endure, to persevere, to overcome is fuelled by this
one seemly innocuous ingredient called hope.”
And in the passage, we had read out to us today, Haggai,
addresses a group of people who are disappointed and discouraged, who are
literally in the rubble of their failure. Facing what seems like a hopeless
situation. Into that Haggai brings God’s
message and that message is hope. He tells them to ‘be strong, build and not to
fear” and his motivation for that is a renewal of hope in God: God’s presence,
God’s providence and God’s purpose. It is the same hope that we can have today
as we face challenges in our life
individually and corporately as the church. Hope because of the presence of
God, hope because of the providence of God, hope because of the purpose of God.
Let’s set the scene.
As we looked at last week… The people had come back from
exile in Babylon, they had come back to Jerusalem, to rebuild the temple and
re-establishing themselves as God’s people. But it had never seemed like the
right time to start the work. There were economic and political reasons for
that. It hadn’t stopped them however from focusing on their own comfort and prosperity.
They had finished their own houses and even started to develop a level of
luxury. Eighteen years after they had come back the work still hadn’t started.
So the prophet Haggai had challenged them about their priorities, he’d asked
them to consider carefully their ways. To refocus on what was at the centre of
their being a community, God’s presence with them symbolised by the temple. They
listened and started to build and they were now the remnant that God had
intended by his grace for them to be.
They started building in the sixth month, and now in the
seventh month they had cleared off the site and re-established the altar and it
was time to celebrate the feast of Tabernacles, when they remembered God’s
provision for them in the wilderness. How God had been with them and lead them
as they had built the tabernacle. It is at the end of this festival on the
twenty fourth day of the seventh month that Haggai bring another word from God.
In Ezra chapter three
we have a record of such a festival which gives us insight into what is Haggai
is facing. It says that at the end of the festival the people were to give a
festive shout. “he is Good his Love endures forever” but as that happens we are
told that those who remembered the old temple started crying as they saw what
it was like now and the impossible amount of work that needed to be done and
wept.
It probably didn’t help that most of those who would have
seen the old temple would have seen it as a child. You know you go to a place
when you are small and it seems so big and wonderful and grand, you go back
later and well it seems a bit smaller and less wonderful. It didn’t help that
the exiles would have been bought up on stories of the wonder of the temple and
how great it was.
The people seemed to be caught up in the idea that those
were the days… the best times were in the past… I went on a surf safari with a
friend of mine way back in the day… and I discovered that the best time to surf
was…yesterday… everywhere we went the locals said… “you should have been here
yesterday, it was going off”. It got a bit discouraging. It is easy sometime to
simply remember the good old days when we are faced with trouble and hardship
in our lives and thing that the best days were in the past. It can sap us of
hope for the future.
In churches it is easy to do that as well. We can look back
to the hey day of the Presbyterian church in the 1950’s and 60’s when pews were
full and the Sunday school was bursting at the seems, it was the baby boom
remember. It is easy to remember that move of God that wave of the spirit, be
it the charismatic movement in the 1980’s when the emphasis was on freedom in
the spirit, or the spring bok tour when social justice and faith seemed to become
so real, Youth group, or the camping movement and Hunua days. It is easy to
think that the best days are behind us, the church has moved from the centre of
community to the fringes.
Haggai starts his oracle by bring the feelings and words of
the people out into the open. Is there anyone who remembers the temple. How
does it look to you now? Does it look like nothing? Haggai however does not
stop there he invites them to look and to see that with God the best is yet to
come… the glory of this present house will be greater than the former.” The
best is yet to come…
Haggai’s motivation comes from a renewal of Hope…
It comes from the presence of God. Haggai can tell the
leaders Zerubbabel and Joshua and all the people to be strong and to carry on
building and not to fear, because God is with them. This was at the festival of
tabernacles and the same God who was with his people, who bought them out of
Egypt and guided them to build the tabernacle in the desert is the same God who
is with them now. They were lead and guided and provide for and defended and
encouraged by the Presence of God, the craftsmen who built the tabernacle were
filled with the Spirit of God as it tells us in Exodus 31. The same spirit is
with them, God promised to be with his people and he is faithful and keeps his
promise. God’s moving in the past is not to discourage us when we are faced
with a reality that seems bleak and daunting it is to remind us that God does
not change.
For us the hope is the same, the very presence of God. Jesus last words to his disciples as he
commissioned them to be his witnesses was and lo I am with you till the end of
the age… In fulfilment of his promise in the book of Joel, and Jesus own
promise God’s spirt has been poured out on all who believe in him, God’s spirit
is not just with us but dwells within us. We can look with hope to the future
because of God’s abiding presence…now. We can face mountains and insurmountable
situations because God is present with us.
Haggai’s motivation for the leaders and the people to be
strong to build and fear not only on God’s presence but also on God’s
providence. God’s acting in history on behalf of his people. Not only is God
present but God is moving. We looked last week at the unstable nature of the
beginning of Darius’ reign in Persia. The Persian empire was at it height, but
there were revolts, where places like Egypt were wanting to break free of
Persian control. New taxes were levied
to pay for putting down these revolts. But God says through Haggai, That God will
soon shake the heavens and the earth and all the nations will come to
Jerusalem, and the desire of all the nations will come.” God is sovereignly
moving in history on behalf of his people. He had raised the Babylonians up to
discipline Israel, the book of Habakkuk wrestles with the fact that God could
use such a violent nation, God had raised the Persians up to overthrow the
Babylonians, and the Persians had changed the Babylonian policy of exiling
people from their native country, so had allowed The remnant to return. Now God
is saying that he is still sovereign and will again move in a new way. The
language used here points us forward to the coming of Jesus Christ and the
establishment of his kingdom. God is active in history and God is in control.
Not only that but the people would have been discouraged by
the fact that to build the temple anything like it was that they would need
massive amounts of money and resources. We can spiritualise the idea of glory,
but in the eyes of the remnants glory meant Gold and silver. So God’s
providence gives them hope because God tells them he is able to provide for
them. When God calls us to do something he is able to provide us with what we
need to do it. The gold and the silver are his. the picture here is of God shaking
the earth and the sky and all the money and wealth coming out of their pockets
and into the temple.
Ezra chapter 5 and 6 reads like the correspondence file of
the government. It is like the first ever email thread. Tattani the governor of
Trans-Euphrates province is opposed to the people building the temple. He
writes to Darius asking him if the Persian emperor had given them permission to
build. If it was todays world it would be asking if they had planning consent.
He was trying to get the people in Jerusalem seen as revolting against Darius.
Darius being a good bureaucrat looks back and sees what his ancestor Cyrus the
first Persian emperor had said, and discovers not only had he given them
permission but that the expense of building the temple would be paid for from
the royal treasury. So in Ezra 6 you have a copy of his decree telling Tattani
to pay all the expenses of the people while they build the temple. God’s
providence and provision. We to can look to god to provide for us as we face
difficulties and situations in our lives.
The third motivation Haggai gives the leaders and the people
to be strong and build and not to fear is God’s purpose. “the glory of the
present house will be greater than the glory of the former house, says the Lord
Almighty and in this place, I will grant
peace,’ declares the Lord Almighty. The people may have simply been
concentrating on a building, but it was the focus of what God was doing to
bring peace to his people. The people can have renewed hope because not only is
God with them and active in history God is for his people as well. His purpose
and plan is for them to have peace.
Peace in the scriptures is the Hebrew word wholeness. It infers a matrix
of right relationships, with God, with ach other, with creation and with our
material possessions as well. It is God’s purpose that the people in Jerusalem
will know God’s presence and Glory and will have peace. In Acts 2 with the
early church after Pentecost we get a glimpse of that. The community were
committed to God, and in their midst no one was said to have a need as they
shared hospitality and shared their possessions, god’s providence for the whole
community.
God’s purpose is still for us may not be that we build a
temple but that work to build the kingdom of God in our world today. To see
God’s peace in the places where we live and serve. Wilbert Shenk, says that the
church has tried to find renewal in many different ways. They have tried to
reaffirm the central distinctives of their denominational tradition, or moved
to recapture a more primitive expression of church, go back to the way it was
in acts. They’ve tried to relive the past. Others try restructuring their
denomination, they rearrange the past( can I say that it is a bit like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic), and others adjust their tradition to the
current cultural trends, they repackage the past, But Shenk says it is only as
they rediscover the purpose of God for the Church what God is doing in the
world at the moment that they will find genuine renewal. It is as we see what
the spirit is doing in the world today and go and align ourselves with it and
work with the spirit that we will see hope for renewal and for the future, we
will see God’s preferred future emerge in our personal lives and as a church.
It was easy for the people to be discouraged and weighed down
thinking those were the days, the glory days are in the past… But Haggai
encouraged them that The best is yet to come.
For those building the temple though they didn’t know it was the coming
of God’s messiah. The temple that the
remnant built was the temple that Jesus was bought to as a child to be
dedicated, it was the temple he came to as a boy and amazed the religious
leaders with his genuine understanding of God, it was to this temple that Jesus
drove the money lenders out of and dead he would destroy and rebuild again in
three days. It was this temple where as Jesus died the veil was torn int two to
signify God no longer dwelt in a building but in his people By the Holy Spirit.
It’s easy for us to have the view that those were the days…
and when we are faced with the difficulties and struggles of today or seemingly
insurmountable odds and the challenge of what lies ahead, it can discourage us
and make us think that the best days, the glory days are in the past… But
Haggai’s encouragement and motivation to be strong, build and not to fear, to
have hope is that the best is yet to come, because God is with us, because God
is active in history, and God is working his plans and purposes out. The
presence, the provision and the purpose of God.
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