Getting Your Priorities Straight: Haggai
What if your home was decimated and no one was concerned with rebuilding it?
What if instead of your home, it was God’s home?
Haggai is an extremely short book about an extremely important task: rebuilding the Temple. After the Babylonian exile, God’s people were allowed to return to their homeland by the Persian king Cyrus. They immediately set to laying the Temple foundation and reconstructing their houses, but for one reason or another they neglected to finish the Temple.
Many years passed before God finally spoke to his people through the prophet Haggai.
From chapter 1 verses 4-6:
“Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?”
Now this is what the LORD Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”
He continues in verses 9-11:
“You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?” declares the LORD Almighty. “Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with his own house. Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops. I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the oil and whatever the ground produces, on men and cattle, and on the labor of your hands.”
After that, God’s people hurried over the next five years to finish the Temple, and as a result God’s blessing returned to them.
We know very little about Haggai other than that he was willing to be used by God in a time when many weren’t. Take a few minutes and read this inspiring book of the Bible.
[The above image of Haggai is from a sculpture at the Sienna Chapel.]
