Part 5, Stability in a Shaky World

...beginning in verse 20. When you get there, if you’re able, would you stand with me as we honor God and the reading of his word?

Haggai chapter 2 and verse 20.

And now hear the word of the Lord.

The word of the Lord came to Haggai a second time on the 24th day of the month. “Speak to Zerubbabable, governor of Judah. I am going to shake the heavens and the earth. I will overturn royal thrones and destroy the power of the Gentile kingdoms.

“I will overturn chariots and their riders. Horses and their riders will fall, each by his brother’s sword.

“On that day, this is the declaration of the Lord of armies, I will take you, Zerubbabable son of Shiel, my servant. This is the Lord’s declaration. And make you like my signate ring, for I have chosen you. This is the declaration of the Lord of armies.”

May the Lord 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.

This week, we have commemorated, we have marked, we have remembered 25 years since September the 11th, 2001.

25 years.

For some of you, that seems absolutely impossible. But for those who are younger who are here, and there’s a great number that are in that category, 9/11 isn’t something they remember. 9/11 is something they read about in their textbooks, they, they learn about at school, or they hear their parents talk about it, but they didn’t get to experience it, thankfully.

But for those of us who are here this morning and we do remember it, there are some moments that happened that day that seem almost frozen in time, that seem like they literally happened yesterday.

We remember where we were. We remember the, the old country song—it’s not an old country song—that came out shortly after: “Where were you when the world stopped turning?”

We remember the first news reports. We remember watching smoke pour from the World Trade Center number one. We remember the second airplane hitting the South Tower and all of us realizing, now this wasn’t an accident.

We are under attack.

We remember.

We said we would never forget. So let’s remember, okay?

We remember the Twin Towers. We remember the Pentagon. We remember Flight 93 and “Let’s roll” and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

We remember the towers smoking, and then we remember the towers falling. And for just a little while, it felt like it wasn’t just New York City. It felt like the whole world was, like in Haggai’s day, being shaken.

Things that we assumed were secure suddenly didn’t feel secure anymore. [clears throat]

Air travel before then, it seemed secure. Ricky, I remember getting on an airplane in January after that September and it being a totally different experience than before.

Skyscrapers, we thought that they were, that they were monuments that would go on forever. Our national security—we felt like we were, um, guarded by the oceans on either side.

Folks, it wasn’t just buildings that shook that day. It was our confidence that shook that day.

And in the days passed, the days afterward, churches were filled. I remember gathering in the old sanctuary, the, the one up the hill there now. And, and I remember our, our service of prayer that we had, and churches all over the country were filled, and people prayed, and, and Congress stood together on the Capitol steps and sang, “God Bless America.”

People who had not given much thought to eternity all of a sudden started thinking a lot about eternity.

Because folks, there is something about a shaking that makes us reconsider what we’re standing on.

Twenty-five years have passed, and in some ways the world feels even shakier today than it was back then.

Wars, political division, economic uncertainty, $7 a gallon diesel fuel, technology changing faster than we can comprehend. Institutions that we once trusted and thought that they were believable and we could trust them, now we no longer trust and they lost credibility.

Government institutions, moral foundations shifting beneath our feet as morality crumbles from what we once knew and believed.

But this morning, as we finish our journey through the book of Haggai, we see our God speaking directly into a shaky world.

And now Haggai, in these last verses, receives the final word from the Lord. It’s the same day that we saw last week, December the 18th, 520 BC. Same date that we saw last week.

And on that day, God speaks, it says, a second time.

But now, where before God had spoke to the entire people, to the entire nation, now God speaks individually, specifically to Zerubbable, the governor.

And what God says to him is about kingdoms being shaken, about thrones that are going to fall, about military power collapsing, and about one man that God has chosen to preserve through it all.

Four short verses we have there, but God gives tremendous truth.

He says to us—and this is the whole sermon in a nutshell—he says, “The world may shake, but God does not. And if your life is anchored in him, you can have stability in a shaky world.”

We begin this morning with point number one, and here’s where our stability and encouragement and hope comes from, is the fact that the Lord speaks in a shaky world.

Verse 20 says, literally, “The word of the Lord came to Haggai a second time.”

Folks, that’s where the stability comes from. It comes from the fact that, that we have a God who speaks.

We listen, we have a God who speaks.

Our God is not some wooden idol or stone statue that has no life in it. We serve a living God with a living message, and he speaks it still today.

Throughout scriptures, God has a remarkable habit of showing up. God has a remarkable habit of speaking when everything around his people seems uncertain.

God has a habit of speaking into a shaky world.

Back in Isaiah, in Isaiah chapter 6, Isaiah says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, and the train of his robe filled the temple,” and come all the way down to about verse seven. And the Lord said—and Isaiah says—“And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Who will go for us and whom shall we send?’”

It was a shaky time for Israel when Uzziah died. He had been a king who had reigned for decades, and he had been a good king. And under his leadership, Israel had had prosperity and they had had peace.

And you didn’t worry about where your next meal was coming from, or you didn’t worry about, uh, spears and arrows being shot over the wall during the reign of King Uzziah.

But then he died, and the people in Judah were wondering what’s going to come next. There was uncertainty. Their world that had been stable has now become shaky.

And into that world, God shows up and speaks.

And he says to, to Isaiah, he said, “The king, lowercase K, the little K king is dead, but the big K King is still on his throne.”

Hey, that deserved amen, folks.

So, he shows up.

Then think about John chapter 20 in the New Testament. Jesus had been crucified. The disciples who had been with him for three years, they had seen the miracles. They had had the, the, the bread and the fish, the, the water, the wine, all these things.

But now these disciples are behind locked doors hiding.

Jesus was dead. They saw him crucified. And they’re confused and they’re afraid. And they’re unsure what is going to happen.

Listen, somebody needs to hear this.

Were unsure what was going to happen next.

Their world had collapsed, and suddenly Jesus appears in the room.

He shows up in a time of shaking and he speaks, “Peace be with you.”

Folks, the Lord spoke in a shaky world.

And friend, he still speaks in our world today.

One of the great problems of our generation is not that God has stopped speaking. God is not silent.

We’re just not listening.

We have more voices speaking to us than any generation in human history. We have news alerts. I finally had to clear some of them on my phone. I had to go to ChatGPT how to learn how to do it. But, and to, to stop getting some of these alerts on my phone because it’s just constant, constant, constant.

We have news alerts, we have podcasts, we have social media, YouTube, political commentators. If you’re not getting them already, you’ll probably start this week getting text messages from campaigns.

We have this new thing in our world today called influencers.

We have experts.

Everybody’s got an opinion, and everybody that’s got an opinion thinks everybody needs to know theirs.

Everybody’s talking.

And sometimes God’s voice gets buried beneath all the noise.

And let me tell you this, friends. Compared to all the, the—and we’ll call it that—noise, compared to God’s voice, everything else in the world is noise.

God has spoken and God is speaking, and he’s given us his word.

So listen to me.

When the world shakes, the first question shouldn’t be, “What is everybody saying?”

When the world around you shakes, the first question should not be, “What is so-and-so’s opinion of this?”

When the world around you is shaking, the question isn’t, “What is everybody else saying?”

When the world is shaking all around you, your question is, “What does God say about it?”

What has God said?

Before you panic, get on your knees.

Before you assume the worst, open your Bible.

Before you let Facebook tell you what the—that the end of the world is like, see what God has said in his word already.

Because circumstances change, folks.

Headlines change.

Governments change.

Public opinion changes.

It does.

But the grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God remains forever.

The Lord speaks in a shaky world.

Number two, the Lord is doing the shaking of the world.

It is he who’s doing the shaking.

Look what he tells Zerubbable in verse 21.

Then God tells Zerubbable, “I am going to shake the heavens and the earth. I will overturn the royal thrones and destroy the power of the Gentile kingdoms.”

God says, “I will overturn chariots and their riders.”

Notice something important here.

God does not say, “Oh, I’m, I’m worried because things are so shaky.”

No, God says, “I’m the one doing the shaking.”

And folks, you can like it or not like it. All I can do is tell you what the Bible says.

Scripture repeatedly presents a God who is sovereign even over the great upheavalss in history.

Think about the Bible.

He shook the ancient world with the flood and Noah. Human wickedness had filled the earth, and God judged it.

At the Tower of Babel, humanity gathered in pride and disobedience and said, “Let us make a name for ourselves and build a tower to heaven.” And God confused their languages and sent them, sent them out and scattered them.

In Egypt, Egypt looked invincible. Pharaoh had chariots and soldiers and wealth and power.

And then God shook Egypt with the plagues.

Babylon became the greatest empire of the ancient world. Nebuchadnezzar was the greatest of them all. And he looked out over his kingdom and he boasted at his glory and all that he had built.

And God humbled him, made him eat grass like a cow.

And eventually Babylon itself fell to the Persians.

God did all that.

Kingdom after kingdom, empire after empire, generation after generation.

And the lesson of history is very simple, folks. Here it is.

Nothing human lasts forever.

And then the book of Revelation. Revelation tells us there is coming an ultimate shaking one day.

The kingdoms of this world will not go on forever.

Friends, the United States of America will not go on forever.

The human rebellion we see will not go on forever.

Sin will not go on forever.

Satan will not go on forever.

Christ will return. Judgment will come. And the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.

It is God who is doing the shaking.

So what does that mean for us?

First, we need to re-evaluate what we call unshakable.

You see, we, we build a sense of security. We can’t help it. We’re just humans, right?

We build a sense of security on what seems to us to be solid, like our portfolio, or our retirement account, our job, or our health, or the government, or the military, or technology.

Folks, you can’t buy enough insurance policies to cover you for everything.

There’s nothing wrong with prudence.

There’s nothing wrong with planning.

I want you to hear this, this phrase right here, okay?

But never confuse something useful as being something eternal.

Just because something is useful does not mean it is eternal.

September 11th should have taught us that two enormous towers seemed impenetrable. They seem permanent, but they weren’t.

Human beings have this tendency to build towers of Babel and then believe they can’t fall.

When some modern tower falls, a market crashes, a political upheaval where we believe an election was rigged, a global crisis, it doesn’t mean that God has fallen off of his throne.

It reminds us that we should never place eternal confidence in things that are temporary.

Your security is not in what cannot shake. Your security is in the God who remains when everything else shakes.

God doing the shaking, folks. That should give us peace in global chaos.

And I’m just going to tell you this.

This isn’t in the notes, Olivia. And we talked about this in the deacons prayer meeting earlier.

We—our world is looking more and more chaotic. I mean, I, I’m just afraid of some of the things we’re going to see this week.

I’m not saying every war or every hurricane or every economic collapse or political event can, can be directly labeled as, as a particular judgment from God.

But we do know this.

Listen, history is not out of control.

God is not sitting in heaven ringing his hands in worry.

History is moving toward God’s appointed end, and it’s going to happen exactly as God determines it.

Sometimes—and this helps us under, at least helps half of our population anyway—sometimes scripture describes this turmoil of history like labor pains.

Have you ever noticed that in the Bible? Things been described as labor pains.

Labor pains hurt, and labor pains intensify, or so I’ve been told.

But labor pains are not meaningless pains.

Labor pains are going somewhere.

All of this is described as labor pains.

Christian, you don’t have to look at a chaotic world with, with panic. You can know that it’s labor pains. It’s going somewhere.

It is, it is purposeful pain.

It’s going to do something.

You can look at the chaos with hope.

Number three, the shaking that God does exposes our idols.

Haggai mentions chariots and their riders. In their world, in their time, chariots and riders meant that you had a strong military. It meant that you had stealth drones. I—it meant that you had undetectable bombers. It meant that you had superclassified secret weapons.

And if you had enough chariots and horses, you felt secure.

Today, our chariots look different. And whether it’s military deterrence and technology and economic power and, and political influence, or our own ability, and, and sometimes God allows things that we think we can depend on, he lets those things shake so we can discover how much confidence we had placed in them instead of in him.

Folks, a shaky world needs Christians who know where to find stability.

Number three, the Lord selects in a shaky world.

In verse 23, the message becomes intensely personal to Zerubbable.

Verse 23: “On that day, this is the Lord’s declaration, I will take you, Zerubbabel, son of Shiel, my servant. This is the Lord’s declaration. And make you like my signate ring, for I have chosen you.”

That’s interesting.

God has just talked about shaking—shaking the heavens and shaking the earth and shaking thrones and kingdoms and armies and chariots.

And then he turns to one man, Zerubbable.

Kingdoms shake.

Empires fall.

Armies are defeated.

But you, one single person, Zerubbable, I’ve chosen you.

Folks, in a shaky world, the Lord selects.

He still has his people.

What did he tell Elijah? “I have reserved for myself 700 prophets who have not bowed the knee of to Baal or Jezebel.”

He still has his people.

He still has his servants.

Even in a shaky world, in, in a shaky world, he still has a purpose for individual people.

Here’s what you need to hear.

Even when the world is shaking all around you, and you have no choice but to live in this shaky world—it’s the only world we can live in—but God still has individual purpose for individual people.

Even in a shaky world, God calls Zerubbable his signate ring.

Very quickly, in the ancient world, a king’s signant ring carried his authority. The king would take that signant ring and he would press it into wax or clay to authenticate a document.

And the impression of that ring upon that wax or that clay, it said, “This belongs to the king,” or, “This is in the authority of the king,” or, “This represents the king.”

What did God tell Zerubbable?

“I will make you like my signate ring.”

And that’s especially important because Zerubbable appears later in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Matthew 1 names this Zerubbable.

God was preserving the family line through which the Messiah, Jesus Christ, would come.

Now, Zerubbabel didn’t see all that.

And folks, how God has chosen you and selected you, and for what purpose God has selected, chosen, you may not see the thing that happens the generations later.

Zerubbabel didn’t have a clue about all that was going to happen after him. All he was doing was trying to build the temple because that’s what God told him to do.

But God was working through his life hundreds of years later to Bethlehem, to Calvary, to a borrowed tomb, to Easter Sunday resurrection morning.

Here’s what I want you to see: that the shaking is not pointless.

Even while nations shake, God is accomplishing his—

Listen, if our whole world begins to fall apart next week, if the stock market crashes, if a meteor hits, if whatever happens next week and this world becomes multiple times more shaky, God can still use you.

Amen.

He chose Noah in the time of the flood.

He chose Abraham.

He chose Moses.

He chose David.

He chose Zerubbable.

He chose 12 ordinary disciples.

And today, if you belong to Christ Jesus, scripture says you are part of a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession.

Don’t underestimate what God may accomplish through one faithful life.

Young people, listen.

Don’t underestimate what God can do through one faithful life in a shaky generation.

You may not be able to stabilize Washington, or you may not be able to stop a war or to change a culture.

But you know what you can do?

You can be faithful in your own house.

You know what you can do?

You can love your spouse.

You can disciple your children.

You can serve your church.

You can share Christ with your neighbor or co-worker.

You can be his signant ring and represent the king.

Represent the king wherever it is that he places you.

Let me wrap this up.

Wrapping up the whole Haggai, no better place to end Haggai than in Hebrews chapter 12, where the writer of Hebrews says—uses the very language we’ve been studying.

He says, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.”

Then Hebrews explains, “This expression, yet once more, indicates the removal of what can be shaken, that is created things, so that what is not shaken may remain.”

And then Hebrews 12 says, “Therefore”—listen—“therefore,” because of everything else before it, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken”—amen—“let us be thankful.”

There it is.

Stability in a shaky world.

Our stability comes from belonging to a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Twenty-five years ago, America watched towers fall. And for a moment, we were painfully reminded that things we thought were permanent weren’t permanent at all.

Twenty-five years later, that lesson is still worth remembering.

Buildings fall.

Markets fall.

Governments fall.

Nations rise, and nations fall.

But Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

So what are you standing on?

That’s really the question.

If your whole life is resting on something that can shake, then eventually you’re—you’ll be shaken with it.

If you’re standing on something that will shake, then one day you’re going to be shaken on it.

But Jesus Christ offers us something better.

He offers us a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

He offers us a Savior that cannot be defeated.

He offers us—listen, my last words in this sermon. Here we go.

He offers us a salvation that cannot be earned and cannot be bought, but can be received by grace through faith.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, oh, thank you for being our Rock of Ages. Thank you for being our solid rock, the rock that will not shake, the rock that will not move.

Father, for the one who is here today that is shaken to pieces, I pray they will find you to be their firm foundation.

Father, I pray that through your Holy Spirit, you would minister in this time of invitation. Let decisions be made, and let them be made public.

For the one who needs to, to be baptized as a believer, let them come. For any decisions that need to be made public, let them come.

We pray in Jesus’ name.

Amen.