God’s Desire to Rebuild the Temple (Haggai 1:1-15)

The Exile of Judah and the Historical Background of Haggai

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There we go.

Good morning, everyone.

Good to see you all. As one of my teachers used to say, all the A students are in their seats. This morning, we're going to begin a study through the Old Testament prophet Haggai. Haggai, the minor prophet.

And there is a set of notes for this, and some of them have been passed out, but I'm pretty sure there's gonna be enough. Does everybody get a set of notes? If not, I think there's still some. Yeah, right over here, there's some.

So help yourself to those,.

And maybe find your way to Haggai in the Old Testament. Haggai, the minor prophet. One of the 12 minor prophets. And as you know, they're called minor prophets, kind of an unfortunate term. It's not like American baseball, you know, where you start in the minors and work your way up to the majors.

The 12 minor prophets were, of course, they're just shorter in length. That's all, really, they're all there is to it. And so we're gonna be working our way through Haggai over the next several weeks, starting today, and for, it'll be a total of four weeks, because there's only 38 verses.

He's a minor prophet, and it's relatively short, but it's also very powerful, very powerful part of God's word, as we're going to see. So we're going to approach it today. We're going to go through the first chapter, but also we're gonna wanna set up the context, and its historical context, and hopefully we'll see it too, in its theological context, and place this really important prophecy in its historical setting a little bit.

So we're gonna be looking first at Ezra in the Old Testament. So you might find your way to Ezra, and we're gonna start there, because Ezra was one of the returned exiles who came after Haggai did, and he also wrote the history of this period of time.

And so it's gonna be, I think, profitable for us to go and spend a little bit of time in Ezra to set the context for our study through Haggai. So we're gonna be looking at both Ezra and also Haggai this morning, Haggai chapter one.

And before we do, let's commit our time to our Lord and ask his blessing on our study this morning. Our Father, we do thank you for the privilege that we have to be able to gather here, to be able to gather in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

And now, Father, to study your word. We know we are totally dependent on you to be our teacher by your spirit, and so we would just ask your blessing on our study over these weeks. We ask that you would show us what you would have us learn, that you would apply these great truths to our lives, help us to be eager to hear, quick to obey, and then we will give you all glory in Jesus' mighty name, amen.

Well, if you found your way to Ezra, the historian way deep back in the Old Testament, and as you're gonna see, one of the challenges in studying these Old Testament books is, of course, trying to set them in their proper timeline.

At least it is for me. I'll confess that right now. Sometimes it's a little confusing, the way the timelines work. And they are also giving us time stamps, and we're gonna see that Haggai has been called the most time-sensitive of the prophets.

He dates his oracles or his speeches down to the day, and we're going to see that as we get there. So if you found your way to Ezra chapter one, turn to the left to 2 Chronicles chapter 36. I tricked you a little bit.

If we're gonna look at the history, we also need to know what happened to Judah. What was going on? Why were they taken captive for 70 years? And so we're just gonna go through this last part of 2 Chronicles chapter 36 and set the stage a little bit for the prophet Haggai.

Haggai, of course, came back after the exile and ministered to the people who returned from the exile, but why were they taken into the exile in the first place? It's important for us to know that. And in 2 Chronicles 36, which is also a post-exilic history or chronicles of the history of the nation, first and second kings are pre-exilic, we're gonna just get a taste here.

We're gonna start in verse five of chapter 36. And remember now, this is just kinda coming down to the end. This had been a long-term decline in the nation of Judah. A whole series of kings. There was a few bright lights in there, here and there.

Some tried to make some reforms, but for the most part, it was a series of wicked kings in power in Judah. And the prophets were prophesying this whole time, especially Jeremiah. He's just banging away at this nation, calling them to account, rebuking them for their sin.

Not only the kings, but also the spiritual leaders, the priests. They had a corrupt priesthood. They had false prophets that were giving false prophecies to the people. All the while, they are engaged in idolatry and all kinds of perversions.

And the business practices were corrupt. And the kings themselves, for the most part, were very corrupt. And one of them was Jehoiakim, kinda coming down to the last few here. Verse five of 2 Chronicles 36.

And I'm just gonna kinda move quickly through here. And this is sort of a condensed timeline of these events. So we're gonna be around 605 BC here. And I already made up my mind. Because I know how I feel when I just get peppered with dates.

You're studying history. Pretty soon, it's like, oh, I got all these dates. And especially when you're studying the Old Testament. I mean, we are in 2021. And so we sort of have that timeline that even the first century Christians were on.

We're in the 21st century. But once you get into the Old Testament, the timeline flips around, right? It's a mirror image. And so it goes the other way. And that can get a little bit confusing. They didn't have that timeline.

They still counted time based on who was the king. So you might see in the first year of King Nebuchadnezzar, in the ninth year, and then in the 19th year, King Nebuchadnezzar. So even though we're looking at it, and the timeline's going the opposite way, they're counting time back in the other way.

So it can get a little confusing. So hopefully, we can sort of set this in its proper perspective. But in verse five of 2 Chronicles 36. Jehoiakim was 25 years old when he began to reign. And he reigned 11 years in Jerusalem.

He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, his God. Now, at this point in time, Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian army were in occupation. And they had been probably since around 605 BC, four years before the Babylonian Empire came into power when they defeated the Ninevites, the Assyrians, right?

And so their presence as a power in the area pretty much starts at 609. But they were just in occupation now. They had probably taken a few people captive at this point in time. There was a series of deportations back to Babylon.

Daniel would have been one of those early ones, also the prophet Ezekiel. But here we are, these evil kings, and he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, his God. Against him came up Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and bound him in chains to take him to Babylon.

He gets deported. And what follows is very interesting. Nebuchadnezzar also carried part of the vessels of the house of the Lord to Babylon and put them in his palace in Babylon. Remember in that day, when one army besieged another country, it wasn't just my army defeating your army, and now we got you and we've occupied you.

It was also my God has defeated your God. And so they just would go into the temple, which he did, and they would take their God's stuff. And in this case, it was the sacred vessels that God had set aside way back when, and set them aside and made them holy for the purpose of worshiping Yahweh, okay?

And he deports them back to Babylon and puts them in his temple. Daniel 1 .1 also mentions this. You can look that up when you have time. And then verse eight, now the rest of the acts of Jehoiakim and the abominations that he did and what was found against him, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah.

So that would be the pre-exilic history of the book of the kings. And Jehoiachin, his son, reigned in his place. Jehoiachin was 18 years old when he became king, and he reigned three months and 10 days in Jerusalem.

He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And as you might expect, in the spring of the year, King Nebuchadnezzar sent and brought him to Babylon with the precious vessels of the house of the Lord and made his brother Zedekiah king over Judah and Jerusalem.

Zedekiah did what was evil in the sight of the Lord his God. And then there's a whole list of his transgressions. It gets very detailed. And as you might expect, it was wholesale. As the leader goes, so goes the country.

And it's just an absolute spiritual political train wreck. Verse 14, all the officers of the priests and the people likewise were exceedingly unfaithful, following all the abominations of the nations.

And they polluted the house of the Lord that he had made holy in Jerusalem. The Lord, the God of their father, sent persistently to them by his messengers because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place.

But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people until there was no remedy. Jeremiah had probably been prophesying at this point for around 22, 23 years.

And he just persistently called the people to repentance, called the kings to repentance. And he just confronts the false prophets and the corrupt priesthood over and over and over again, warning about the judgment of God that's going to come on them, even prophesying the 70 year captivity that's going to happen.

But all spurs to through there, and we're going to see some of these passages, he also promises them God's restoration.

Why?

Because even though they were violating the Mosaic covenant that God had given, the Mosaic covenant, as you know, was a covenant of law. It was a bilateral covenant. Not only when that covenant was made was the blood of the sacrifice poured out on the altar, which represented God's part of it.

They were also spattered, remember that? They had a basin of blood and they put the hyssop branch in it and they spattered the people with the blood. That would have been a clear audio visual representation of their responsibility, but they failed.

That covenant promised blessing for obedience, cursing, chastening for disobedience, and that's exactly where they were at this point in their history. But there was another covenant that had been made centuries before the Abrahamic covenant.

That covenant was a unilateral, unconditional covenant in which God promised that nation perpetuity as a nation and as a people. It also promised them land, a seed line, and we're going to look at that, but also blessing.

Blessing through them to the nations. And that covenant is not conditioned upon their behavior. It is not conditioned upon their obedience. It was all of God to take care of that. He takes all the responsibility onto himself in that covenant.

Repeatedly, Genesis 12, he says, I will, I will, I will, I will. And so when Jeremiah refers to the promises of God, the restoration of God, that's what he's referring to. That's what saved them from total annihilation was the Abrahamic covenant.

But right now, they're under the consequences. We come up to about 586 BC in verse 17. By this time, Nebuchadnezzar has pretty much had it. He's the occupying force, the occupying army. It says, therefore, he brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, none of the he there is God.

This is God carrying out his judgment that he had warned them about, prophesied about. Who killed their young men with a sword in the house of their sanctuary and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or aged, he gave them all into his hand.

And here we go again. All the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king and his princes, all these he brought to Babylon. And they burned the house of God and broke down the wall of Jerusalem and burned all its palaces with fire and destroyed all its precious vessels.

There were other structures in the temple, some big brass columns, bronze columns. They had this big bronze basin, the labor that was sitting on the back of bronze bulls. Well, they just broke all that stuff apart and hauled the bronze back to Babylon, tore everything down, destroyed the walls of the city, made it desolate.

And here's why. He took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the king of Persia. And when you see that word until in scripture, you're bumping up against an endpoint, okay?

Until. This period of time came to a stop and it came to a stop in 539. This is Daniel chapter five, right? Remember the handwriting on the wall that night? And the Babylonians were inside that great walled city.

They felt really secure because it was a tremendous fortification. And they were having a drunken orgy, worshiping their false gods in a religious ceremony, which was nothing more than a carnal drunken orgy.

And they were getting drunk using the vessels from the holy temple from Jerusalem that night. Remember that? This guy's name was Belshazzar. And then remember the handwriting on the wall? And he had to go get Daniel, who had been taken captive to interpret it for him.

And I like that story because his knees were shaking, you know, as he saw and Daniel interpreted it for him. You've been basically, you've been weighed in the balance and you're a lightweight. And that very night, the city was taken from the inside by the Medo-Persian coalition.

They stormed up through the Euphrates River, which they built the city over the river and they had gates. Well, the Medo-Persians went upstream and diverted the river that night. And the river dropped down to the point where that marshaled army just swarmed right into the middle of that city, took it from the inside out.

And in one night, that entire city fell. That's why this chronicle says, until the establishment of the King of Persia. And it was over for the Babylonians. From 609 to 539, that empire came to a terrible end that night.

But here's verse 21. This is a purpose statement. To fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah.

Okay?

God's word comes to pass. Until, here it is again, an end point. Until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths, all the days that it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years. What is this about fulfilling Sabbaths?

Well, Leviticus 25, back in the law, Leviticus 26 had required that they had their land, they were in their land, but they were required to let that land lie, old King James term, fallow or desolate. Don't plant the land periodically.

They didn't do that.

And they had actually accumulated over several centuries, 70 Sabbath years that that land had to lay desolate or fallow. That was part of their violation of the law. And God is actually now going to implement it for them.

They go out of the land in captivity. Everything is desolate and it stays that way for 70 years. Now that's the background for what we're going to look at next. 70 years later, in 538, and this is verse 22 and 23, the King Cyrus, the Persian King, who's now in power, he issues a decree to let these people go, let the Jews go back and rebuild their temple.

God had promised to bring them back into the land. Now, verse 22 and 23, I'm not going to read through that because it virtually is identical to the first three verses of Ezra chapter one, okay? Now we arrive at Ezra chapter one, the history of the people back in the land.

And it says, in the first year of Cyrus, King of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled. He keeps coming back to, this is fulfillment of God's word. Jeremiah was right, basically he's saying, and God is going to fulfill his word through Jeremiah.

The Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, King of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing. This is fascinating to me. Here you have a godless pagan king of a major kingdom.

He's just wiped out the Babylonians. He's in power now. The Jews are there in this land in captivity, and yet God stirs him up to let them go back in fulfillment of his prophecy. It's amazing. A pagan king.

Did you think God couldn't use an unbeliever? God can use whatever he wants. He's the sovereign Lord of this universe. One of the great themes all the way through the Bible. And so it says in verse three, whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord.

This is very important. Cyrus knew why he was letting these people go back to Judah. It was for the purpose of rebuilding the temple. This is very important to remember. He knew it, and eventually they forgot it.

And he says, let each survivor, in verse four, in whatever place he sojourns, be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, besides freewill offerings for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.

Not only is he issuing a decree to let the Jews go back and rebuild their temple, it's going to be paid for by the kingdom. It's an amazing thing. They're gonna have an all-expense paid trip back to be able to build their temple back.

Why?

Because the worship of Yahweh is important to him. And that's what the temple was for, to reestablish the worship of God. And the temple was also the place where God dwelt with them in that point in time.

One Old Testament scholar, Dr. Eugene Merrill, said, the real tragedy of the exile was not the removal of the people, nor even the utter destruction of the city and the temple. It was the departure of their God from their midst.

An absence symbolized in one of Ezekiel's visions by the movement of the Shekinah, that was that brilliant, blazing representation of God that dwelt over the Ark of the Covenant in the temple. You remember the vision of Ezekiel, Ezekiel 10 and 11.

He saw that glory move off of the top of where it dwelt in the Holy of Holies to the threshold of the temple and out the door, and then eventually over the Mount of Olives, and then it was gone. And that represented, because of your sin, because of your idolatry, the glory has departed.

Sad and tragic event. Another scholar says this concerning the removal of objects from a temple. Taking temple objects was common in times such as this as it represented the complete military and religious conquest of a city.

Again, it's not just my army is gonna beat your army. My God is better than your God and is gonna dominate your God. That's an important issue here. But here he is, issues the decree. They're going to even pay for it.

And what follows in verse seven through 11, I find absolutely fascinating. Remember all the vessels that were taken back? After 70 years of captivity, they're still there. And they're not just there. They're there down to the very vessel.

In verse seven, Cyrus the king also brought out the vessels of the house of the Lord that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and placed in the house of his gods. Cyrus, king of Persia, brought these out in the charge of Mithridat, the treasurer, who counted them out to Sheshbazar, the prince of Judah.

Sheshbazar, as some scholars would say, well, there's two different people there that are leading the return. One is Zerubbabel, who is mentioned in Haggai, and then the other one was Sheshbazar. Probably the best way to see that is Sheshbazar was his Chaldean name.

When they got taken captive into Chaldea, they would give them new names, just like Daniel was given another name and the three young men as well. It's the same person, I think, is the best way to see it.

He's the one who's gonna lead them back. This whole passage reads almost like a forensic chain of evidence, right? Carefully being delineated out. He even gets a treasurer, probably had a pencil behind his neck and a clipboard, you know, and he's counting these things out.

And this was the number of them. Now they're even numbered and recorded. 30 basins of gold, 1 ,000 basins of silver, 29 censers, 30 bowls of gold, 410 bowls of silver, and 1 ,000 other vessels. All the vessels of gold and silver were 5 ,400.

All these did Sheshbazar, or Zerubbabel, bring up when the exiles were brought up from Babylon to Jerusalem. He's making a real point of these vessels that have survived not only the destruction of Jerusalem and the city and the temple, but taken into captivity 900 plus miles away in Babylon.

They survived 70 years in the hands of these pagans. And here they are being carefully counted out so they can go back to Jerusalem, be put back in the temple for the worship of Yahweh. That's an amazing thing.

But God is superintending this whole thing. Well, those are even enumerated before the people are. In chapter two of Ezra, if you see there from verse three all the way down to 39, see all the people listed there in the numbers?

Okay.

How about I volunteer to read through that this morning so that, no, no, no, no, we won't do that. You can just see, though, how many people are there. They're counting out the people after they count out the sacred vessels.

And then it moves on through, and they're talking about all the different people that were going to come back. We get all the way down to verse 64, and it says the whole assembly together was 42 ,360, male servants, female servants.

They have horses and mules, camels and donkeys, and so on. And then again, a mention of all of the money and silver and everything and gold that they were taking back in order to finance the rebuilding of the new temple, the rebuilt temple.

It's about a 900-plus mile trip from Babylon all the way back down into Judah, and it would have been quite an undertaking for these people to do this. Well, that's kind of a real race through the background here, and let's look in your notes.

I'm gonna let you go through, for the sake of time, the first page. They're page two, and then I just wanna look at one thing. I hope you can find some time to read through this, and find some time, if you can, to read through Ezra, like the first six chapters, because that's gonna give you a real sense of what's going on as we move through Haggai.

The Need to Rebuild the Lord’s House

The overarching theme, this is page three under theological emphasis, and we wanna highlight this a little bit. The overarching theme of Haggai is the need to rebuild the Lord's house, the need to rebuild the Lord's house.

God moved Cyrus to do that, and he specifically says, here's the reason you're going back. It's just not you're gonna be free to go do your own thing now that you're free after 70 years' captivity. No, no, the specific purpose is for you to go back, rebuild the temple.

Why?

Because God wants to be worshiped. He deserves to be worshiped, and the worship of Yahweh was their top priority, and Yahweh dwelt in the temple, and that was where he was worshiped, and so it was so important to rebuild the Lord's house, but it's in the context of Israel's messianic hope and the promise that he will rebuild the house of David.

There's a stream of truth running through here, and it's the seed line of the promised Messiah.

Why?

Because Zerubbabel, the governor at the time, is in the messianic line, okay, and so that line, he is a descendant of King David, and he's an ancestor of Joseph, as Matthew says, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who was called Christ.

In all of the movement of the nations all over the place and the wars and the destruction and all this, remember, God made a promise through Abraham. He's gonna provide a seed line. He's gonna provide a Messiah, and this is part of the picture, and as we'll see as we go through Haggai, the address of the oracles, the four messages, start out fairly broadly, and then it narrows down at the end to addressing just one person, and that's Zerubbabel.

Why?

Because he is in the seed line, okay? So I'm gonna let you read through the rest of three. There's the outline that we're gonna use is basically just the outline that's given in the book itself. So let's look at Haggai, and I think we'll have time to get through this first chapter.

Okay, so Haggai chapter one. Now you see the background. Here they are back in Judah, and when Haggai opens up, remember, they've been in Judah probably around 18 years, and we're gonna look next time a little bit more at the history, but for the first year they were back, they didn't do much except for rebuild the altar and have a lot of sacrifices, probably because they thought, we better get busy obeying the word of God now or the Old Testament, which is what they did, but they didn't start the temple until at least a year later, and all they did was build the foundation, and once they built the foundation, they stopped, and they stopped because there was opposition from the indigenous people there, probably the Samaritans and other people groups.

They probably got, it was hard work rebuilding a temple. The smallest stones in that temple were anywhere from two to five tons, and they've actually found one existing stone, archaeologists calculate it to be 50 tons, and so they were probably anywhere from 10 to 20 tons, these stones they had to build a foundation with, so it was hard work.

They had opposition from the people that were living there, and they probably also got discouraged, but as we're going to see, they also got concerned with their own lives. So Haggai, this is probably around 520.

It has been 16 years since they finished just the foundation of the temple, and Haggai is called by God to confront them, to rebuke them for their laziness, for their lack of work, and to call them to rebuild the temple.

Haggai’s Timestamped Prophecy and the Command to Rebuild

So chapter one, verse one of Haggai, in the second year of Darius the king, at this time, the king is now Darius, in the sixth month on the first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel, the son of Shaltiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua, the son of Jehozadak, the high priest.

In that first verse, we have the very interesting timestamp. When you see a timestamp like that, it is really God's way of saying, this is anchored in history, okay? Much like Isaiah's call in Isaiah chapter six.

He has five verses, five chapters, kind of leading up to that, to sort of give you a preview of that great prophecy, but when he gets to the call of Isaiah in chapter six, there's a timestamp in the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord, and he had that great vision.

And so these timestamps are God's way of anchoring this in history. All sound theology is anchored in history. It has to be. If it's not, it's merely the musings of men. Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?

The foundation of that is what? The historic resurrection of Jesus Christ. And you can just go down the list. All sound doctrine is anchored in history. When you listen to somebody who does not have an historical foundation for what they're trying to teach or propound, it's probably because it didn't ever happen, okay?

All sound theology, all sound doctrine is anchored in history. And this is what Haggai does at this point in time. So in your notes, the repeated date formula, anchor it in history, and Haggai is the messenger or the prophet, but the words are the words of God.

Very important. Remember what they were indicted for was rejecting the prophets, abusing the prophets, scoffing at the prophets. Well, in doing that, since the prophets taught the word of God, proclaimed the word of God, they were rejecting God.

The recipients are Zerubbabel and Joshua, the governor. One of the comments that I found really pretty important to note to refuse to build the Lord's house was at best saying that it did not matter whether the Lord was present with them.

At worst, it was presuming on divine grace that the Lord would live with his people, even though they willfully refused to fulfill the condition of his indwelling that he had laid down. They have a priority to rebuild the temple because God wants to be worshiped.

Another commentator said this, the need to rebuild is urgent because temples in their world are the center for administering the political, economic, judicial, social, and religious life of the nation.

In other words, rebuilding Yahweh's temple would symbolize his rule over the life of his people and his prophesied rule of the world. Very important. When you wanna take down another country, you not only go after their army and their fortress, you go after their temple, why?

My God's better than your God. And in this case, Nebuchadnezzar's God was not. He's gone. God's still carrying out his plan. Well, in verse two, we have this confrontation and the command to rebuild. It says, thus says the Lord of hosts.

And you're gonna see this repeated prophetic utterance, they're called, in various forms. In 38 verses in this little short prophecy, that occurs 29 times in various forms. So one of the main themes here is the word of God.

The word of the prophet is the word of God and it's important to listen to it. So thus says the Lord of hosts. These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord. Then the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet.

Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses while this house lies in ruins? Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, consider your ways. And this is repeated through this prophecy.

Consider your ways. The Hebrew word heart is actually included in this. Examine your heart. Stop, think deeply about your life, about how things are going in your life right now. Consider your ways. And he just details how things have gone for the last 16 years since they stopped working on the temple.

You have sown much and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough. You drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.

Commentators usually stop at that point and say there's inflation, okay? Thus says the Lord of hosts, consider your ways. And this is repeated. And what does he call them to do? Get back to work, go up to the hills and bring wood and build a house that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the Lord.

They're called these people, okay? There's distance there. There's insulation. Normally God calls his people my people. It's almost a term of endearment. But they're disobedience. And now he calls them these people because of their excuses and disobedience.

Why?

They misused God's resources, resources. What are the resources? Time, treasure, and talent. They have time. They say, well, it's not time. We don't have time. They had time. That's why they were there.