But Haggai was a prophet who
conducted his prophetic ministry during the time that, by the
way, did you hit the record button, dear? Okay, good. He conducted
his ministry during the time right after the Babylonian captivity. The Jews, at least some of them,
had been sent back with all the articles of the old temple and
some wealth. And they were told to go back
and rebuild the temple and rebuild Jerusalem. So they went back
and they got started. But soon after they got started,
the people in Samaria, that's the northern part of Israel,
but they asked if they could help. Well, these people were
not Jews. They were the folks that this
was the practice back in those times. If you went in, conquered
a country, and took the people out of it, you found foreigners
to come in and replace them. And so these weren't Jewish people
that were living in that northern section of the area of Israel.
And when they came and asked if they could help, Zerubbabel,
who's the one who had been charged with getting the temple rebuilt,
He told them no. He says, you don't have any part
in this. And that offended them. So they started creating trouble
and discouraging the Jews so that they wouldn't build. And
they even got to the point, they sent a letter to the king of
the empire up there and said, they're causing trouble and they're
going to be nothing but trouble to you. So the king issued an
edict that they were to stop working on the temple. So they
did. And after about 10 years, God
spoke through the prophet Haggai, and his message essentially came
to this, start building a temple again, finish what you've begun.
Now, I say that was the message, that was the general exhortation.
The message was designed to stir him up to do that. And so Haggai
heard from the Lord four times, at least four times that he recorded.
In the space of almost four months he heard from God four times
and this little book is a condensed version of God speaking to him
and him in turn speaking to the people. And last week we looked
in chapter one and that was the first message that God sent to
them and it was You could summarize that message in give careful
thought to your ways. Now let's look and read the second
time God spoke to Haggai. Chapter 2, verse 1 of Haggai,
on the 21st day of the seventh month, the word of the Lord came
through the prophet Haggai, speak to Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel,
governor of Judah, to Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest,
and to the remnant of the people, ask them, who of you is left
who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you
now? Does it not seem to you like
nothing? But now be strong, O Zerubbabel,
declares the Lord. Be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak,
or Jehozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of
the land, declares the Lord, and work, for I am with you,
declares the Lord Almighty. This is what I covenanted with
you when you came out of Egypt, and my spirit remains among you
Do not fear. This is what the Lord Almighty
says, in a little while, I will once more shake the heavens and
the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations
and the desired of all nations will come. And I will fill this
house with glory, says the Lord Almighty. The silver is mine. and the gold is mine, declares
the Lord Almighty. The glory of this present house
will be greater than the glory of the former house, says the
Lord Almighty. And in this place, I will grant
peace, declares the Lord Almighty. Now that last statement makes
up the title of this message. I will grant peace. Now what is the prophet speaking
of here? What is God saying through Haggai
the prophet? Well obviously there's some sense
in which that was to be immediately applied, that is, it was to be
applied to the historical situation in which he spoke he was saying
you need to get busy and finish rebuilding the temple but we
know this and I don't know that anybody knew this until by his
spirit God made it known to the writer of Hebrews but this is
really not about rebuilding Solomon's Temple. Certainly that's not
its most important application. You say, well, how do you know
that? Well, verse six says, this is what the Lord Almighty says,
in a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the
earth and so forth. And whoever it is that wrote
the book of Hebrews quoted this verse and then made this comment
on it. God says he's once more going
to shake things, and it's for this reason, that those things
that can be shaken will fall, so that only that which cannot
be shaken will remain standing. And what he was referring to
was the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Because when our Lord
Jesus Christ came, do you remember, what he said, and they thought
he was crazy for saying it. He says, tear down this temple,
and in three days I'll rebuild it. Well now, eventually the
temple was torn down, but that didn't happen until long after
what our Lord was talking about happened. Because he rose from
the dead, and it wasn't for about another 40 years that the temple
got torn down. He wasn't just talking about
the temple. He was talking about that whole system of Judaism
that's called in the Bible the Old Covenant, that is called
in the New Testaments referred to as the Old Covenant. It involved
all those things that God said to Moses on Mount Sinai. He brought
them down from the mountain and Moses says, and he's quoting
the Lord, this is the covenant that I make with you. Now this is not the same thing
as the promises made to Abraham. The old covenant is something
that came after the gospel promises given to Abraham. The book of
Galatians says that the law, and by that Paul meant that entire
old covenant, the law came in alongside the promise. Not to alter the promise, not
to be a permanent part of the promise. Rather, it was brought
in for this purpose, to preserve the Jews until such time as the
seed to whom all the promises were really given would come.
People think that when God made the promise to Abraham and to
his seed, that that meant that that promise was to every Jew
that ever lived. The truth is, it was to one other
Jew, the Lord Jesus Christ. And the law was given to those
natural descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in order to
preserve them from being as corrupt as the nations around them, lest
they fall to the same judgments, because God's just. And if he's gonna punish the
Gentile nations for the things they did, and then the Jews turn
right around and do the same thing, God'll deal with them
too. So he gave them the law to restrain them somewhat, but
in particular, the law regarding all the building of the tabernacle
and later the temple and all the sacrifices and the priesthood,
all of that was designed to picture what was to come. The book of Hebrews says it's
a shadow of good things to come. Of course, the good things have
already come, but from the perspective of the old covenant, they were
yet to come. And so, when it, according to the writer of Hebrews,
when Haggai quotes the Lord saying that, once again, I'm gonna shake
the heavens and the earth, he wasn't talking about anything
that was gonna happen in their day. He was talking about our
Lord Jesus Christ coming, and by fulfilling the law both in
its demands for righteous living and fulfilling all the pictures
and illustrations of temple worship and doing all those things which
please the Father and then fulfilling all of it by his substitutionary
death on the cross and then his resurrection from the dead and
his ascension on high. When he did that the Bible says
that he had done God's will and And by accomplishing that will,
he abolished the first that he may establish the second, meaning
the old covenant. He abolished the old covenant
to establish the new covenant. And that's the shaking that's
being spoken of here. Yes, God did some remarkable
things among the Jews, and God even did some interventions on
behalf of the Jews here in Haggai's day, because when they started
building right away, their neighbors to the north tattled on them. But by then there was a new king
in place, and the Bible says that the heart of the king is
in the hand of the Lord, and he turns it, he turns it as a
stream of water. And so he worked in the heart
of the king of that time, not only to countermand the edict
from 10 years before, but also to command those people in the
northern section of what was Israel that the tribute that
they were supposed to give to the, by this time, the Persian
Empire every year, they were to give that to the Jews to help
them finish building the temple. So yeah, that was kind of a remarkable
thing, wasn't it? A little bit of shaking things
up, but it was nothing like the shaking
of heaven and earth that went on. When Jesus Christ bore our
sins in his body on the tree, Paul says he took the written
code of regulations, and by that he was referring to the old covenant,
and he nailed it to the cross. That's a symbol that we wouldn't
identify with unless somebody explained it, but often when
people were crucified, Whatever crime it was they were being
crucified for, they wrote it down and nailed it over top of
their head. So people, you know, oh, he's
being crucified because he killed somebody. Or he's being crucified
because he led an insurrection against Rome. Remember, they
did this with the Lord Jesus because they took a, they wrote
over his head, Jesus Christ, King of the Jews, and wrote it
in several languages. Well, what Paul is saying is
that when Jesus Christ died on the cross, he was not just dying
under Jewish law or Roman law, that what was really going on
there was a transaction between him and God, that he was dying
in a way that we could not perceive. He was dying in a way that none
of us have ever seen anybody die. He was dying that eternal
death which befalls anyone who comes into the presence of God
bearing sin. And he came into the presence
of God bearing the sin of his people. And God visited on him
everything that an infinite God can do in reaction to sin against
him. And most of the people had no
clue what was going on. But what was he bearing? Well,
Paul says that whole handwriting of ordinances, the whole law,
which was against us, which revealed to us our sin and made us to
know sin. and to know within our hearts
that because of our sin we deserve condemnation, to feel the fear
that comes from that and the alienation from God that comes
from that. That's what it is to know sin. But that whole covenant
and all the laws and regulations which were written there and
which we had broken in one fashion or another, it's all nailed up
there. Therefore, that whole system
having been fulfilled by Christ in his death, came crashing down. Nobody saw it. And the temple,
which is the temple they were building here, and then Herod the Great had spent 40
years fixing it up and making it an even grander temple than
what it had been. That temple didn't fall then.
Why? Because that temple wasn't the
issue. It was the covenant that was
the issue. It was the way of approach to God that was the
issue. Now no one has ever been able to approach God on the basis
of old covenant demands and live. Nobody. Because the Old Covenant demands
is simply this, the man that does these things will live by
them. And there's nobody that's ever been able to do those things.
The reverse of it is this, cursed is everyone who does not continue
in every point of the law to do it. And so if you're going
to have life by the law, If you're going to establish righteousness
by the law, what's the standard? You always do everything written
in the law. And none of us have ever done
anything written in the law. So I never killed anybody. Well,
you may never have picked up a gun and shot somebody, but
you've wanted to. And according to our Lord, that's the same
thing. Now, if you're my neighbor, I'll
appreciate you restraining. from what your heart says if
you want to shoot me. And I'll think that's a good thing. But
God sees no righteousness in your restraint of what's in your
heart. Because God doesn't look on the
outward appearance. He looks in the heart. And there's none
of us that have ever done anything that is the slightest bit righteous. Everything we've ever done is
sin, complete and utter sin. And our Lord approached God. I know he's God, but he also
approached God. Bible says he offered himself
without spot to God. He himself was without spot,
but he came before God bearing our spots, bearing our blemishes,
bearing our sins. And even though this was God's
only begotten beloved son, God's wrath fell on him to the full,
which is why he could say when it was over, it's finished. People suffer in eternity in
hell because they're never finished. They are forever dying because
they never get the job of dying done. The Lord Jesus did. And when he did, he had fulfilled
the will of God. And by that will and the fulfillment
of it, the old covenant and all that this do and live came crashing
down. And now it is believe and live. As I say, in truth, it's always
been believe and live. But in speaking to the Jews,
They had so twisted the message of the old covenant that they
were trying to obtain a righteousness by their own works. And therefore
that whole system of righteousness by works came crashing down as
God shook the heavens and the earth. And it came crashing down and
you and I I don't imagine there's anybody here that's got enough
Jewish heritage in themselves that they would call themselves
Jews. We're Gentiles, we never were under the law like the Jews
were, and yet we have always, by nature, by just the nature
of things, we've always been under obligation to God to be
righteous or suffer the consequences. And yet the testimony concerning
us is there is none righteous, no, not one. There's none that
does good. There's none who seek after God.
They're all gone out of the way. They have all together become
a worthless thing. That's what Paul says about us.
He's saying not only is each one of them a zero, you put them
all together. You add up the righteousness
of everybody, you still get zero. And we are therefore also under
the same condemnation that any Jew might have been, for we have
sinned against the Lord. And by nature, we are under a
system, that is by our birth in nature, we're under a system
that says the way to get blessing from God is to please him by
your works. And the only way that we'll ever be rescued from that is to be
removed from that system that says, gain blessings by works. Now how is all of that illustrated
in this story? The Lord's message in verse two,
he says, speak to Zerubbabel, he was more or less the king,
the governor, and then to Jehozadak, he was the high priest at that
time, and speak to the people, and asked them this, who of you
is left who saw the house in its former glory? Now, whoever
that was, they had to be very old at this point. Because they
had been in captivity for nearly 70 years, and then 10 more years
have passed since then. So that's 80 years. And they had to have been old
enough when they left Israel to have seen the temple and remembers
what it looked like, Solomon's Temple. And it was a grand and
glorious building, what Solomon built. So there must have been
some 90 plus year old people here. He said, who of you is
left that remembers that temple? He says, how does it look to
you now? Evidently the temple they were
in the process of building. The foundation had already been
laid, maybe, Some stone, I don't know, a couple of courses of
stone. I don't know how far they got before it got stopped. But
they could tell this isn't going to be anything like Solomon's
temple. In fact, we read in the Ezra
and Nehemiah story that when they saw the foundation, they
wept because it was so small. How does it look to you now?
Does it not seem to you like nothing? And it did. And you know why it seemed like
nothing? Because it was nothing. It was so much stone. The Lord was teaching them something.
I don't know who may have caught on. He's saying, yes, I want
you to rebuild that temple, but understand when you're done rebuilding
it, it's nothing. It's not the way to God. It's
not the way to me. In fact, not even that temple
that Solomon built. And Solomon knew that. When Solomon
was done, when they were done building that temple and Solomon
was praying his prayer of dedication, he said, the heaven of the heavens
cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.
And I'll tell you, you and me, even now, with all that we've
seen of the fabulous architecture and rich things that can be built,
if we had seen Solomon's temple, we would have been impressed.
Very impressed. I think they had drained Fort
Knox, getting enough gold to do what Solomon did. And now
they got this smaller one that's being built, not nearly as ornate,
you know, all that. He said, doesn't it seem like
nothing to you? Well, it is. It's nothing. But be strong. Be strong. O's are rubble. And oh, Joshua,
and the people, be strong and work, for I am with you. Now, if the Lord is giving a
message of the gospel, why would he use the word work? When we
know full well it is by grace you have been saved through faith,
And that's not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. It is not of works, lest any
man should boast. And so why would he use the word
work here? What were they working to do?
They were working to build the temple. And what was the temple? The temple was an illustration,
a picture of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In that temple
were many illustrations of Christ himself. The sacrifice, the high
priest, the table of showbread, the golden golden altar and the censer on
it and the lamp stand and then in the back there was that Ark
of the Covenant and the high priest who pictured Christ would
go in there once a year taking the blood of the sacrifice which
represented Christ and taking some coals off of that golden
altar in a golden censer and he would put that smoke in there
because he couldn't confront the glory of God between the
cherubim and survive it. So he'd go in there and he'd
pour that blood out on the mercy seat. And all of this pictured
salvation through the work of someone else, salvation by the
righteousness and death of our substitute, the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so he was not saying work in order to keep commandments,
in order that by keeping those commandments, I can bless you.
He's saying work to see the gospel by which I
will bring everything else down. And it's the only thing that's
going to be left standing. Once again, we go to the book
of Hebrews and we find that the writer of Hebrews used the word
work or labor as a description of faith. So that's strange. He said labor to enter that rest. And that's what the Lord is talking
about here. In illustration, it was just
the outward symbolic illustration, but there was no rest for them
until that temple was built. labor to rest. And he says, work, for I am with
you. Were there ever more blessed
words said to a sinner? To somebody broken down under
a sense of guilt, under a sense of despair, And the Lord comes
to him and says, believe me, labor to believe me and rest
in me. I am with you. You know, if the
Lord is with us, it doesn't matter where we are. People talk about
going to heaven. I don't know. that that's ever
stated in those words in the scriptures. Paul didn't say,
for I desire to depart and go to heaven. He said, I desire
to depart and be with Christ. Our Lord didn't say, I go to prepare a place in heaven
for you. He said, in my Father's house
are many dwelling places. I go there to prepare a place
for you. And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come and get you and receive you unto myself,
so that where I am, there you may be." It's rest that we need. Our Lord said, come unto me,
you who are weary. and burdened and I will give
you rest. And then he said, once again,
this thing that just sounds like it's contradictory, take my yoke
upon you. Well, a yoke is what you put
on an animal to make it work. Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me and you will find rest for your soul. We lay down the labor of trying
to be good enough to please God. And we take up the work of denying ourselves. And while that may involve things,
and normally that's preaching away, that means you can't have
what you want anymore. That's not what he's talking
about. He didn't say deny stuff, he said deny yourself. Dump any confidence you have
in yourself. Leave off any thoughts about
yourself. Take up your cross. What's our cross? His cross.
He said, follow me. And it's only labor to do that
because it is completely against our fleshly nature. Now let's go down to verse six. This is what the Lord says, in
a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth,
the sea and the dry land, I will shake all nations, and the desired
of all nations will come. And I will fill this house with
glory, says the Lord Almighty. Now, one thing I know, that the
building that they built was never as good as Solomon's temple. Nor did the Lord ever fill it
with His glory. He's talking about another temple.
Another temple that's built by the preaching of the gospel.
In our series that we did on First Peter here recently, remember
when he said, you also as living stones are being built and into
a habitation of the Lord. That's the glorious temple. in
which God dwells. There isn't a building in the
universe, not even the universe itself could contain God. But he is in and among his people. They are his temple. Our Lord Jesus said, where two
or three are gathered together in my name, there I am. There I am. That is God among
us. Say, well, I don't see any bright
glory. It's a good thing. You wouldn't be able to deal
with it. We don't need to see God that way right now, but we
see him in the glory of his grace. We see him in the glory of his
son and the work that he did. The desired of all nations will
come. I don't think that this means
the one desired by all the nations. What he means is the one whom
the nations should desire, the one that all the nations need.
And he wasn't just coming for the Jews. the natural Jews. He was coming for, in the book
of Revelation, he says they come from a people, he came for a
people, from every kindred, tongue, tribe, and nation. And they He
sends his gospel to them, the Spirit of God gives them spiritual
life so that they can understand the message they're hearing.
And they come to Christ, and as they come to Christ, God is
taking them like stones and building them on the foundation stone,
Christ, and building up his temple. And he's still building his temple.
Someday he's going to lay in the last stone. And when he does,
the heavens shall open. and the trumpet of the Lord shall
sound, and Christ shall descend from heaven with a shout and
with the voice of the archangel of the dead, and Christ shall
rise, and we, whoever of the Lord's people still remains in
that day, they'll be changed, and we will all go with Him to be forever with Him. That's the temple the Lord is
building. That's the temple that's filled with His glory. He says
in verse eight, well, he says, the desired of all nations will
come. That's our Lord Jesus Christ. I will fill this house with glory.
How did he fill it with glory? By the coming of Christ. Christ
is the glory of God. He is express image of his person. And he is in his church. Verse
eight, the silver is mine and the gold is mine. So wait a minute,
we brought that back with us from Babylon. What do you mean
the gold and silver is mine? He's not talking about the gold
and silver that they were gonna use in that stone temple they
were building. He was talking about the glorious
things that would be in this temple of the living God, which
is the living church of the Lord Jesus Christ. He said, I look around the church,
I don't see much silver and gold. That's because you're not looking
at it from God's viewpoint. He says, I will refine them as
silver. He says, your faith, which is
much more precious than gold, even if it's refined by fire.
He said, these things are mine. When our Lord builds the temple,
it's built out of things that he provides, not that which we
provide. Verse nine, the glory of this
present house, the house he's really talking about, will be
greater than the glory of the former house. Why? The glory
of the former house was just an illustration. It's just a picture. I've got a picture of my family
in my wallet. I use it so that I keep it with
me. If I ever talk to somebody about
my family, I say, well, here's a picture of them. But that picture is not my family. When I'm on a trip, I can look
at a picture of Bonnie. I still want to go home. Picture
can't come anywhere near the reality, can it? And that temple? built with human hands could
never be glorious like the temple that God's building with his
own hands. And lastly, and in this place,
I will grant peace. Not in that stone temple. The Jews never did have rest.
Yeah, they were down there in the land, but there was always
people pestering them. And they themselves had many occasions
of going off into idolatry. And when Christ came, they were
probably at just about the lowest state they'd ever been in, filled
with people who hated God, that big fancy temple that Herod the
Great had built, or the reforms he had done to it after they
built it here back in the 500s, I think it was, B.C. In what place does our Lord grant
peace? Paul wrote, therefore, being justified by
faith, we have peace with God. Christ offered himself in behalf
of his people as a sweet-smelling savor unto God, as a sin offering. And having borne in himself the
penalty of our sin, God's wrath was put away. And
the message of that comes to us And when it comes to God's
elect, you know what it does? It changes their heart. And they
quit despising God and God's way. They quit despising grace. They give up the works. They
give up trying to establish their own righteousness before God.
And they say, God, you're right. I'm nothing but sin. I give up. I call upon your name and ask
for your mercy in Christ Jesus. That's what it is to be reconciled
to God. There can only be peace when
two sides agree. And since God's never going to
change his mind, all the mind changing is on our part, isn't
it? That's why Paul says that the
general description of preaching the gospel is this. Be ye reconciled
to God. Quit fighting. Come to this temple,
this magnificent display of the grace of God, accomplished by
the Lord Jesus Christ in him alone. He said, well, I thought
we were the stones in the temple. That's all we are, stones. We're
just rocks making up a building. It's not the rocks that made
the way to God. It was the priest and the sacrifice,
the Lord Jesus Christ. And in that place, there is peace,
peace with God. Brothers and sisters, if we have
peace with God, We have peace. The world will be at war with
us, but what difference does that make? What is the world
compared to God? The worst the world can ever
do to you is kill you. That's why the Lord said, don't
fear him who can kill you and do no more. Fear the one that
can kill your body, and when you're done with that, kill your
soul too. And if we have peace with him,
what does it matter whether we have peace in this world? Our
Lord said in this world, you'll have trouble, but be of good
cheer. I have overcome the world and
my peace. I give to you not the kind of
peace the world gives. I give you real peace, peace
with God, everlasting peace. In this place, in Christ and
Him crucified, in there and only there does God grant peace.