Haggai 1:1-11 “Don’t prioritise the wrong house.”
The applause of this world lasts a brief time, but the approval of heaven goes on forever. I like the motto of the person who suggested that we should aim to, “love God, die and be forgotten.” “Consider the path your heart is on” (verses 5 and 7). Think of your priorities.
Chad Bird’s life fell apart, in part because his priorities were messed up. He writes, ‘I went astray for two decades in the pursuit of my ambitions. I drove myself to be an accomplished person. My life had to be awesome. I chased down the career I wanted, and clawed my way up to the position I coveted. I pursued a degree, then another degree, the still another, until I knew more about my PhD studies than the details of my children’s everyday lives. I could tell you Rabbi Oshya’s exegesis of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1 … but I had no clue what my daughter’s favourite stuffed animal was. When my dreams came true, when I reached the fabled end of the rainbow, I found a pot of gold – fool’s gold.’
Are you putting yourself first?
Previous generations thought that it was wrong to put yourself first. This one thinks it’s a virtue. The following is a meme I read: ‘You’ll learn to put yourself first after you notice that other people are constantly putting you last.’ I remember a children’s story from when I was a child. It suggested J.O.Y. was found by putting Jesus first, others second, and yourself last. That doesn’t come naturally to me, but it is both counter-cultural and satisfying.
Haggai opens, verse 1, on 29th August 520 B.C. About 66 years earlier the Babylonians had overrun Jerusalem, destroyed the temple and taken people into exile. Yet 18 years earlier, the new superpower, the Persians had permitted the people to return and rebuild the temple. But, despite the fact that they have now been back eighteen years, the temple still lies in ruins.
This is not because the people weren’t capable of building things. They say, ‘the time has not come to rebuild the house’ (2), but they have been building houses. Their houses! Fine-panelled home (4). What does that say about their priorities? It says that comfort and impressing their neighbours mattered more to them than fulfilling their calling to the glory of God!
What are our priorities? What comes first for us? What building projects occupy our minds most? Are we primarily into protecting our comfort, establishing of career, or earning a reputation? Even our relationships will be unbalanced if we don’t put God first. Put Jesus before people and you will actually love people better than if you put them before Jesus. For Jesus is the source of Christian love.
We are no longer being called to build a temple in Jerusalem. In the gospels Jesus says that he is now our temple—where we go to meet with God—and so temple building involves showing the world how great he is. Is that our first priority in life!
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7 Encouragements in the Christian Struggle for Perseverance
God has not called us to endure for nothing. There are eternal rewards which accrue to our accounts based on our perseverance. “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17). One moment in glory there will make up for the hardship we endure here.
Growing up, I remember hearing an ad on the radio for tyres. The advertisers argued that these tyres had a peculiar quality about them. They could go on for long without wearing out, so it was claimed. These tyres had endurance.
To keep at something for decades is widely recognised as remarkable. Think of the reverential clapping that erupts when a husband and wife announce that they’ve been together for 30 years. Note also how one generation feels the need to remind the next one of how tough things were when they were growing up. “You’re soft,” they say, “in our day, we had to kill a lion with our bare hands and use its skin to make our shoes!”
Endurance, with its synonyms (perseverance, long-suffering, or patience) appears throughout the Bible as a Christian virtue. It is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22). Christians have a duty to endure. How, then, do we ready ourselves for it? Below I offer seven suggestions in the fight for perseverance.
1. Expect Hardship in Life
Jesus promised that there would be trials (John 16:33). So we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that all will go swimmingly. This is the kind of mindset the whole Bible seeks to instill in us. It teaches that our first parents sinned and plunged the world into darkness. Toilsome labour became a part of human existence. Thus we function in a creation that has been “subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20).
We also have an enemy. The same one who acted to subvert God’s creation in tempting man to sin continues to resist us. He established a kingdom whose culture rigorously opposes all that is godly. Yes, the gates of hell will not prevail against us, but they do resist us. Therefore, forward spiritual progress of any kind requires overcoming a futility weaved into existence because of sin and a mighty foe who is against us. We must thus not be surprised by hardship.
2. Understand God’s Purposes in Hardship
By this, I don’t mean special insight into every instance of hardship. I mean developing a theology of what God seeks to do through it.
Consider Paul’s use of the word “knowing” as it relates to hardships. He writes: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces hope” (Romans 5:3).
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The Afterlife
After death comes the judgment. So, when unbelievers die, their souls go to hell, where they await the resurrection of their bodies, at which point they will experience the final judgment: the “lake of fire” (Rev. 20). Until the second coming, believers too must experience the painful separation of death. In this intermediate state between death and resurrection, the souls of believers are “away from the body” but are consciously “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). They “depart” the “flesh” in order to “be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23-24). But this disembodied state is not the final word.
Is there life after death? Will I live on in a state of eternal bliss or in a state of eternal torment? Or will I simply cease to exist? These questions have intrigued and haunted human beings from our origins. Every world religion and philosophy has had some answer or other to these most pressing questions, from the ancient Egyptians, who mummified the dead and gave them provisions for the netherworld, to modern atheists who reject any notion of personal existence after death. The answers to these questions shape not only a one’s hope for the future, but they also give purpose and meaning to life in the present. From a Christian perspective, the answers to these questions are woven throughout the whole fabric of Christian theology: what we believe about God, the person and work of Christ, the identity, destiny, and constitution of human beings (body and soul), the meaning of salvation, the mission of the Church, and the end of history.
So, what does the Bible say about the afterlife? The best place to begin is not at the end but at the beginning. In the creation account, God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life, constituting our first father as a “living soul” (Gen. 2:7). Likewise, Eve was taken from Adam’s side (Gen. 2:21-22), as a co-equal divine image bearer (Gen. 1:27), and Adam’s posterity share in that same image as well (Gen. 5:3). Thus, all human beings possess dignity and goodness as ensouled bodies (or embodied souls). The tragic sin of our first parents, however, introduces the sentence of death to the human race. Now, after the fall, the unnatural state of death is our common human lot. Death introduces not only a spiritual separation from God, a relational separation from one another, and an existential separation from our own selves; it also introduces a separation of the soul and the body.
Sometimes the Old Testament can speak of death as a definitive end (Psalm 6:5; 30:9; 88:10-12; 115:17; Isa. 38:18), but this is only from the perspective of life on earth. In other places, the Old Testament speaks of some kind of ongoing personal existence after death. The righteous dead are said to “go to [their] fathers in peace” (Gen. 15:15) or to be “gathered to [their] people” in death (Gen. 25:8, 17; 35:29; 49:33; Num. 20:24; 27:13). Echoing the creation language of Genesis 2, the Preacher writes that “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecc. 12:7). For the unrighteous, a more sobering prospect remains after death. Those who participated in Korah’s rebellion were swallowed up by the earth and went “down alive to Sheol,” the place of the dead (Num. 16:30, 32). Elsewhere, the Old Testament speaks about the possibility of “going down to Sheol” in “mourning” (Gen. 37:35). Sheol (the Greek term was Hades) was the abode for all of the dead in the Old Testament, but it appears that there were at least two possible outcomes in that netherworld: the righteous dead experience the peace of being gathered to their people and the unrighteous dead experience Sheol as judgment. The calling up of Samuel from the dead by the medium at En-Dor, though an illicit attempt to communicate with the dead, is further evidence of this teaching in the Old Testament (1 Sam. 28).
But the Old Testament also points to another, more glorious state of life after death: the resurrection of the body. There are hints of this teaching in multiple places in the Old Testament. After all of his suffering, Job waxes poetic about the prospect of an embodied afterlife: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25–26). Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones being restored to life also points in this direction (Ezek. 37). But the clearest teaching on the resurrection of the body in the Old Testament comes in Daniel 12 in his vision of the end of history:
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan. 12:2-3).
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Your Excuses are Exhausting
Jesus called people out for their sin and their lack of belief. He didn’t make excuses. He called on people to take responsibility. And then, Jesus took responsibility for our sin. Jesus took our sin and shame and punishment. No excuses.
I am an expert excuse generator. It is part of my nature. Not my spiritual, redeemed nature. Excuse-making comes from my sinful, flesh nature.
We offer excuses because we do not want to take responsibility. Just consider the way that they are explained. You give an excuse. You take responsibility.
An excuse is that which you offer others to hide your sin, your shame, your insecurities, your weaknesses, your guilt. Responsibility is the mantle that you take upon yourself so that you can relieve others of the burden.
When we make excuses, we work to shift blame. We work to burden someone else. When we take responsibility, we own the blame. We carry our own burden.
Adam was the first excuse-maker. When God questioned Adam in the garden, “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Adam answered,
The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate.
Adam, unwilling to own responsibility for his failure to protect his wife and for his failure to obey the Lord, seeks to shift blame. Who does Adam blame? God and his wife.
Since that time, we have all imitated our first father. We are not only sinners, we are excuse-makers and blame-shifters.
Like Adam, we look for someone else to blame. We avoid mirrors and point fingers.
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