Part 4, The Beginning of Blessings

It’s a little short book. So, uh, it is—it’s before Matthew, and then before Malachi, and then before Zachchariah. And it’s just one little page in the Pew Bible like I’m using.

Haggai chapter 2. Haggai chapter 2, beginning in verse 10.

When you find it—may, I’ll give you a little bit extra time—when you find it, if you’re able, you’ll stand with me as we honor God and the reading of his word.

Haggai chapter 2, beginning in verse 10.

And now hear the word of the Lord.

On the 24th day of the ninth month in the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Haggai. This is what the Lord of armies says: “Ask the priest for a ruling. If a man is carrying consecrated meat in the fold of his garment and it touches bread, stew, wine, oil, or any other food, does it become holy?”

The priest answered, “No.”

Then Haggai asked, still asking the priest, “If someone defiled by contact with a corpse touches any of these, does it become defiled?”

The priest answered, “It becomes defiled.”

Verse 14. Then Haggai replied, “So is this people, and so is this nation before me. This is the Lord’s declaration, and so is every works of their hands. Even what they offer there is defiled.”

Now, from this day on, think carefully. Before one stone was placed on another in the Lord’s temple, what state were you in? When someone came to a grain heap of 20 measures, it only amounted to 10. When one came to the wine press to dip 50 measures from the vat, it only amounted to 20.

I struck you, all the work of your hands, with blight and milled you in hail, but you didn’t turn to me. This is the Lord’s declaration.

Verse 18. From this day on, think carefully. From the 24th day of the ninth month, from the day of the foundation of the Lord’s temple was laid. Think carefully.

Is there still seed in the grainery? The vine, the fig, the pomegranate, then the olive tree have not yet produced? But, but from this day on, I will bless you.

May God add his blessing to the reading, the preaching, and your hearing to understand his holy word. May our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ forever be praised.

And all of God’s people say, “Amen.”

Amen. You may be seated.

Title of this message this morning is “The Beginning of Blessings.”

The beginning of blessings.

Let me begin this morning by putting in a just a little advertisement, um, for, uh, for the Wednesday night Bible study. And many of you are coming to that. If you’re not coming on Wednesday evenings, you’re missing out on some of the extra details and the deeper study.

I see some of you nodding your head. Yes, the deeper study that we just don’t have time to get into on Sunday morning, but on Wednesday night, we do.

Wednesday night this past, we talked about the relationship between Ezra, the book of Ezra, Haggai, and Zachchariah. Uh, I gave you a simple way to remember it.

Ezra gives us the bones—the, the hard facts, the names, the dates, the kings, the decrees, the timeline.

Haggai gives us the breath—the conviction, encouragement, the spiritual life that moved God’s people to action.

And then Zachchariah.

So Ezra, Haggai, Zachchariah.

Zachchariah gave us the blueprint, the great picture all the way into the modern day, all the way up to the end of where God is ultimately taking all of this that’s going on here in the book of Haga.

And one of the things I want you to understand, folks, as we study these books, we’re not studying myths. We’re not studying legends or fairy tales.

These are real people living in a real place, experiencing real events, and they are identifiable as points in our human history.

Real.

The passage we read this morning, we, we got the date there. The date was given to us. If we translate that into our modern calendar, what was happening here was said on December the 18th, 520 BC.

That’s pretty amazing that we can get that specific, isn’t it?

Think about the timeline.

Okay, Jerusalem had fallen to Babylon. 586 BC. Solomon’s temple, that great and glorious edifice, had been destroyed. The people were carried off into exile.

That’s where Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—that’s how they end up in the story stories in Daniel.

Babylon then falls to Persia, and King Cyrus of Persia issues a decree allowing the Jewish people to come back and rebuild their temple. The altar was restored. The foundation was laid.

Opposition rose, and they quit.

Years passed by. Darius becomes king after Cyrus. In 520 BC, God raised up Haggai. Two months after that, God raised up Zachchariah to preach to these people.

And on August 29th—we’ve even got the date—August 29th, that’s when Haggai began to preach, “Consider your ways. Think carefully about your ways.”

And when he did, the people responded.

By September 21st, sort of around the same time of the year that we’re in, right? By September 21st, they had gone back to work.

October 17th, God spoke to their discouragement: “Be strong, for I am with you.”

And now we’ve arrived to December the 18th. And how many of you know it’ll be December the 18th here before you know it?

Three and a half months have passed since Haggai preaches his first sermon. The people are working. The temple is rising course by course, and the tide is beginning to turn.

That’s where we get to in the, the timeline of where we are in Haggai.

Now, if you’ve been been here Wednesday night, you would know the timeline that takes them from there all the way up to Jesus standing in the courts of that same temple 500 years later.

Friends, our faith—and I want you to understand this—our faith is grounded in history.

Christianity is not a once upon a time in a land far away and they live happily ever after.

That’s not Christianity.

Our faith rested upon God’s actions in real history, in the lives of real people, with real kings, real cities, real prophets, real events, and ultimately a real Jesus who was crucified by a known Roman governor, buried in a real tomb, and then really rose from the dead.

Amen.

Real. Our faith is based on real historical events.

Now when Haggai begins preaching, go back another 500 years. Go back. These people were in dire straits.

Remember from the first sermon. They were planting much, harvesting little, eating, never satisfied, drinking, never filled, earning wages, putting their money in a bag with a hole in the bottom of it.

Drought had affected their crops. Their economy was struggling.

And had you—I told them why. Because they had put themselves ahead of God.

Amen.

They had neglected the house of God. They had refused to think carefully about their ways.

But then, praise God, Haggai preaches, and the word records that the Lord roused the spirit of the governor, and the Lord roused the spirit of the high priest. The Lord roused the spirit of all the people.

The God stirred them up.

They listened.

They repented.

They obeyed.

They went back to work on the temple.

And now we come back to December 18th, and God essentially says things are about to change.

The past had been difficult.

The present didn’t look like very much.

But God was making them a promise about the future.

Folks, what we see here today, this is the beginning of blessings.

And with that theme in mind, I want us to consider three ideas from this passage.

Number one, consider the purity of our position.

Verse 11 says, “This is what the Lord says: Ask the priest for a ruling.”

And then it gets sort of squirly here. I’m going to explain it, okay?

Had ye asked the priest two questions that—the questions themselves sound strange to us. Here’s the questions.

All right, sir priest.

If somebody carries consecrated holy meat that has been given to, to the priest, and he’s carrying it in the fold of his garment, and that garment then touches bread or stew or wine or oil or some other food like that, does that then make—does that holy—does that holy brisket, let me put it that way, does that holy brisket then make bread, wine, cheese, Coke Zero that it touches holy as well?

The priest say no.

All right. Then Haggai asked a second question.

He says if somebody becomes clean and unclean themselves—say they touched a corpse, that was Old Testament Levitical law—they touched a corpse, and then they touch those other things, the, the holy brisket and the holy Coke Zero.

Then does that make that unclean?

The priest say, “Yep, sure does. Makes it unclean.”

Now, unless—just stay with me just a minute—unless you spent some time studying Leviticus, you may be thinking, “What in the world is this all about?”

Well, under the Old Testament law—and they are here in Haga—under the Old Testament law, God gave Israel regulations distinguishing things that were holy from things that were common, and things that were ceremonially clean from those things that were ceremonially unclean.

Now the—was not primarily a statement about how good or bad somebody was. You could be a good person trying to do everything right and, and, and following all the rules and, and accidentally still become unclean.

But if it—that happened, it affected how you could participate in Israel’s worship until you did some cleansing process, some ritual to make yourself clean again.

So here’s what Haggai is doing.

Haggai gives the priest a theological examination.

His first question essentially asks—can—and draw back in here, okay? If you checked out for the last four and a half minutes, I forgive you, but come back to me here.

All right, here we go.

His first question essentially asks, can holiness be casually transferred from one thing to another?

What’s the answer to that?

No.

Second question asked, can uncleanness casually be transferred from one thing to another?

Yes.

Then Haggai springs the trap.

Verse 14, he says, “So is this people, and so is this nation before me, and so is every work of their hands. Even what they offer there is unclean.”

In other words, we’re not really talking about meat and brisketss and bread and Coke Zero and wine and oil.

We’re talking about you.

The people were rebuilding the temple.

That’s good. That’s what they were supposed to do.

They were bringing offerings.

That’s good. That’s what they were supposed to do.

They were participating in worship.

All good.

But God was reminding them that simply doing religious things does not automatically make a person right with God.

You can touch holy things without having a holy heart.

That’s an important word for church people.

Amen.

Because being around Christianity doesn’t make you Christian.

Coming into a church building doesn’t make your heart right with God.

Singing hymns in the right notes and key doesn’t make your heart right with God.

Giving money doesn’t make your heart right with God.

Even teaching a class doesn’t make your heart right with God.

Even preaching a sermon does not make—automatically make your heart right with God.

God is concerned with the work of our hands. He is.

But he is also concerned with the condition of our hearts. And for the work of our hands to be acceptable to God, our hearts need to be right with God.

Now, Israel has struggled with this now for generations, going all the way back to the time of David, going all the way back to the time of Solomon, even going all the way back to before then into the time of Saul.

Same thing’s been repeated.

Listen to what Isaiah says in Isaiah 1. The people were bringing their sacrifices to God, and they’re, they’re observing the religious practices, and they’re saying the prescribed prayers.

And then in Isaiah 1:11, God says, “What are all your sacrifices to me?”

And then to verse 15, Isaiah 1, God says, “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I’ll refuse to look at you. Even if you offer countless prayers, I will not listen.”

Why?

Why did God say that?

It was because they were going through the religious practices, but their lives were full of rebellion, and their lives were full of injustice, and their lives were full of oppressing their neighbors and wickedness.

They had the actions of worship, the outward appearance of worship, but not the heart of worship.

Centuries later, Jesus confronted exactly the same problem.

Matthew 23:25-26, Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.”

Somebody told me not, not too very long ago—and, and, uh, and he recently died, and, um, so I won’t say who it is—but he said, I was telling him, “You need to go to church. Going to church ain’t going to save you, but you need to go to church.”

“Well, I’m not going to church because it’s full of hypocrites.”

And I said, “Well, there’s room for one more.”

Bless his heart.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and indulgence.”

Jesus compared them to whitewashed tombs. Beautiful on the outside, dead inside.

Friends, religion is very good at polishing the outside.

We can learn the church language, and we can learn when to stand and when to sit, and we can know the songs and carry the Bible and say the right things, and everybody around us can even say, “There’s a fine Christian.”

But folks, God sees past the whitewash.

God sees the heart.

Titus 1:15 says, “To the pure, everything is pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. In fact, both their mind and conscience are defiled.”

That’s New Testament saying the same thing Haggai is saying in the Old Testament.

The problem wasn’t merely with what their hands were doing. The deeper problem had been who they were before God.

The purity of their position.

Now, let’s be careful. I got to say this.

This does not mean that we make ourselves pure enough for God to accept us. If that’s the message that’s being said here, none of us have any hope, because we can’t do it.

The gospel says exactly the opposite.

We can’t scrub ourselves clean enough. We cannot perform enough good works to save us. We can’t attend enough church services or give enough money or memorize enough verses. We can’t straighten ourselves up enough to erase our sin.

We need God to make us clean.

Amen.

Like David prayed. David prayed, “Oh God, create in me a clean heart.”

The gospel tells us that through Jesus, sinners can be washed, forgiven, justified, and made new.

So here’s the question.

What is the condition of your heart behind the work of your hands?

Why do you serve?

Why do you give?

Why do you sing?

Why do you come to church?

Why do you do whatever it is you’re doing?

Is it out of love for God? Is it gratitude for God saving you? Is it genuine faith and obedience?

Or are we trying sometimes to use religious activity to cover a heart that we know isn’t right?

God wants our hands, but first he wants our hearts.

That’s the purity of our position.

Number one.

Number two, I just finished reading the book of Job this morning, and I’m always struck by this phrase that God says to Job. Three times—two times he says it in that one chapter that closes the book of Job—God tells Job, “Brace yourself. I’m about to talk to you like a man.”

Brace yourselves. I’m about to talk to you.

Number two, the penalty of our past.

Look at verse 15.

Because there’s a little word here, and listen, there—this is where the grace comes in. So you got to get through this to get to the grace, okay?

This one word turns the whole passage.

Verse 15, he says, “Now from this day on, consider your ways. Think carefully.”

And then he says, “Before one stone was placed on another, before one stone was placed on another, at the Lord’s—”

There’s that word.

You missed it.

It’s the word before.

Before.

God’s telling them to look backwards to what was before. He says, “Remember what it was like before. Before you started obeying. Before you got your priorities right. Before you went back to work and obeying God.”

Verse 16 then says, “What state were you in? You expected 20 measures, and there were only 10. You went expecting 50 measures, and there was only 20.”

And God reminds them. He says—God says, and we need to do this—God says, “You remember what that was like, right? You remember what it was like before you got right, got your heart right with me. You remember that?”

Of course they remembered.

We’ve been talking about this since chapter 1, verse one. Nothing was working out for them.

Verse 17, God said, “I struck you, all the work of your hands, with blight, milled you in hell, but you didn’t turn to me. You didn’t turn to me.”

And that’s the tragedy, because the hardship was meant as discipline, loving discipline.

The hardship, though, was not producing repentance.

God was trying to get their attention, and for years they simply kept on with their hard hearts and stiff necks.

But now, but now something has changed.

Back to that date.

Y’all remember what the date was?

And I can imagine somebody standing there on December 18th. Their Christmas decorations weren’t up yet.

Their Christmas decorations wouldn’t be up for another 500 years.

December 18th, somebody’s standing there, and, and they’re seeing all the work that’s being done, and they see how the tide is changing, and they ask themselves, Ricky, they say, “Why didn’t we do this sooner? Why did we wait so long?”

Have y’all ever asked that question of yourselves?

I have.

You finally do something that you knew you won’t have to do all along, and afterwards you think, “Why in the world did I wait so long?”

Maybe somebody—I’m just, some practical stuff, and I try to do this—maybe somebody finally gets serious about getting out of debt, and they, they fight at it. They do Dave Ramsey all the way and the snowball and everything.

And I mean, they pour everything they can, and six months go by, and they see the amounts going down, and they see their checking account going up, and, and they say, “Why didn’t we do this years ago?”

Maybe a husband and wife finally get some help and begin working on their marriage, and it starts getting better, and they look across the table at each other.

“Why? Why didn’t we do this before it got so bad?”

Maybe somebody finally broke down and forgave somebody, or apologized to somebody, or started getting back in church, or started giving.

Maybe finally, finally, somebody deals with an addiction.

And they’ve known for years that this has got to stop, that this has got to change, that it’s not going to keep on like this forever. It’s got to be a change.

And they finally deal with that addiction.

They finally open their Bible every day and read the Bible every day. And they get in the habit of it, and they say, “Why haven’t I been doing this all along? Why did I wait so long to start reading my Bible? Why?”

And that’s why—why, why didn’t I do this?

That’s a human experience.

Amen.

And there’s a painful answer here. And this is why I told you, brace yourselves.

Because folks, disobedience cost us something.

Sometimes sin leaves scars that are healed. The scar is healed, but never fully goes away.

Folks, do you know there’s scars in heaven?

Revelation chapter 5.

The wounds on Jesus’ hands and side and head are healed, but there’s scars that will go on forever.

Here’s what I’m trying to tell you.

Young people, listen to me. If you’re a teenager that’s checked out, draw back in.

Some foolish instantaneous choices have consequences that cannot be undone.

They can be forgiven, but not undone.

Sometimes this is not something—this is every time you go back and you look at years that are wasted. The wasted years.

Folks, you cannot get back the wasted years.

You can be forgiven. Praise the Lord. Forgiven for what you did in the—or didn’t do in the wasted years.

But you can’t get the wasted years back.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean the past never happened.

And folks, that is the penalty of our past.

But praise God, here’s where the grace comes in.

Amen.

God tells them to remember what it was like before because he’s about to show them something about how things are going to change now.

The past explains how we got here.

But it does not have to dictate where we go from here.

Folks, listen to me.

Your past is real, and it details how you got here, but it does not have to determine where you go from here.

You cannot—you cannot go back and obey God last year.

We don’t have time machines.

You can’t raise your adult children all over again.

You can’t unsay the words you wish you hadn’t said.

You can’t unspend the money you wish you hadn’t blown.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

You can’t reclaim every wasted opportunity.

You cannot rewrite the past, but you can start over today.

These people, they, they had wasted six years. They laid the foundation and quit.

The people couldn’t go back and rebuild the temple during the years they had neglected. It had already been done by now. It had been done by now. If they had done what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it, they couldn’t go back and change the past.

But they could start today.

And that’s exactly what they did.

And may—I got to go more quickly.

Maybe you’re sitting here today thinking, “I wish I had done this sooner.”

Fine.

There’s 17 of you that have had that thought this way. I wish I—I can go back and change it.

Fine.

Learn from it.

Repent where you need to repent.

Receive God’s forgiveness.

And then stop looking backwards and start pushing forward, because Haggai is about to move from the before—what things were before—to but now.

But from this day on.

And number three, that is the prosperity that was promised.

The last words in verse 19, God says, “But from this day on, I will bless you.”

We arrive at the last sentence.

After everything we’ve seen in this book, the whole, uh, two chapters in Haga, when you hear these words, it ought to be like music to your ears.

“From this day on, I will bless you.”

The beginning of blessings.

God says, “Is there still seed left in the grainery?”

It’s December 18th.

Remember the vine, the fig, the pomegranate, the olive tree, they’ve not produced.

In other words, they couldn’t see the blessing.

They couldn’t—I can preach f-fast if you listen faster, okay?

They couldn’t see the blessing yet.

It’s not there yet.

The crops weren’t hanging on the vines. Figs weren’t on the tree. It’s December 18th. The olives hadn’t appeared. There wasn’t a great harvest sitting in the barn proving that everything had changed.

But God gave them a promise before God gave them the produce.

The promise of God came before the prosperity of God.

God says, “From this day on, from this day on, I will bless you.”

And is historically—again, we can look in history—God did it.

The rebuilding continued until it was completed.

Opposition did not have the final word.

King Darius confirmed the earlier decree ordered. And he ordered—listen to this, and we’ve got the decree, it’s written down—that the rebuilding expenses be paid for by royal revenue.

The same pagan empire that had ruled over God’s people was now helping to finance the rebuilding of God’s temple.

Only God can do the things that only God can do.

Amen.

Ezra tells us that the temple was completed in the sixth year, 516 BC.

The rubble became a temple.

What had stopped had began again.

What seemed hopeless was finished.

God kept his word.

Amen.

And then, and then through the generations, God brought Jesus.

And Jesus stood in that temple, and Jesus on that cross on Calvar’s hill saw that temple, and in that temple, when Jesus cried out, “It is finished,” the veil of that temple was torn from top to bottom.

In that place, in that temple, he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.

Here’s where all three points come together. I’ll wrap it up.

The purity of our position.

We need a purity that we cannot produce ourselves, but Jesus can.

The penalty of our past.

We have a past that we cannot undo, but Jesus paid it all.

The prosperity that was promised.

Our greatest blessing isn’t crops or money or health or an easy life.

Our greatest blessing is Jesus himself.

And Jesus is offered to you today if you’ll receive him.

If you’ll receive him today as Savior and Lord, you can leave here today knowing that your sins are forgiven, that your name is written in his book, and that you will have a home in heaven.

Amen.

And that can be your beginning of blessings.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank you for this word recorded for us.

And Lord, we thank you for having a faith built on real events, not fairy tales. And we thank you for a faith that transforms lost sinners into saved saints.

Father, bless this invitation.

We pray as people make decisions for you. For we pray it in Jesus’ name.

Amen.