Haggai 1 – 2
Haggai is a short book yet interesting to read. The basic message is “don’t put off today what you can do tomorrow.” Verse 1:6 starts us seeing the Israelites trying to fill their lives with things:
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.
When we fall into a time where we focus on stuff, we never seem to be satisfied. We walk away from God’s word and intentions for our lives and nothing seems to work out. We may save 10% and live on 90%, but that missing tithe seems to change our perspective. We go from learning to live within a budget to fudging and not following God’s financial principles.
We don’t follow God’s farming techniques and allow the land to rest every 7 years and the land becomes over farmed. We then add the “nutrients” into the soil that we think the food needs to grow. We get “healthy” looking food that lack many of the minerals that have been leached from the soil.
Verse 1:9 continues with Haggai pointing out that the people put themselves before God:
You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? declares the LORD of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house.
The saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” comes to mind. We think it’s best to keep our house in order, and then focus on God. The tithe is a classic example of this lack of obedience where we try to get our financial life in order so we can then tithe, when what God wants is us to tithe and then get our house in order.
We live like this and then somehow think that living outside God’s bounds will somehow result in blessings. We think if we get our house in order, then we can get God’s, will work better than the other way. People of all times seem to miss this message that “good intentions does not equal (!= for you programmers) obedience. Putting off your willingness to obey ends with us missing out.
And believe me I am struggling with this today. I have stopped tithing for a few months trying to get my house in order. The resulting chaos has been less than fun. For some reason the extra money vanished into daily expenses instead of going into debt as intended. My heart was in the right place, but my resulting actions went outside God’s plan. I need to become obedient again! (and note NOT tithing is not a sin, it’s just puts us outside God’s guides for living).
Verse 2:17 explains why we have hardship and what we should NOT do:
I struck you and all the products of your toil with blight and with mildew and with hail, yet you did not turn to me, declares the LORD.
Often our response to “hardship” is to pull closer to God, yet other times we turn away or ignore God. We should not turn away from God or his guides no matter the situations. We are to remain focused on Him first no matter if we are in good times or bad. Heck the world is ever changing, some for the good and some for the bad. We cannot look at every hiccup as God’s thumb coming down on us.
We need to understand that people’s evil is often the cause of our pain. Many of us are “floundering” through this latest financial melee, it’s not God causing it but other men. Sure if we had followed God’s 10/10/80 principles we would not be suffering as much but it would still be hard. Often we look at natural events as God’s thumb coming down on us. I have heard more often God “punished” New Orleans or Japan, rather than that’s the way the earth was designed. To keep the swamps clean or to have the “purple mountains majesty” we need some significant natural occurrences.
The key is that it doesn’t matter if its God made, manmade or just a natural occurrence, we need to honor God today. Don’t fall on Him when things are bad!! In our own lives the friends we keep and live with are often the ones who are there for us in a time of need. It’s the same with God, the better we know Him when things are good, the more He will be available when times are bad.