It’s easy to look back and decide the best days are behind us. The church was stronger, life was simpler, and whatever we’re doing now will never measure up.
That’s where God’s people were in Haggai 2:1-9. Gathered for the Feast of Tabernacles during a drought, they looked at a rebuilt temple that seemed like nothing next to Solomon’s. Into that discouragement, God tells them three times to be strong, and he gives the reason: he is with them. Then he promises that the latter glory of this house will be greater than the former.
In this sermon, First Reformed (EPC) looks at how the temple pointed ahead to Jesus, why the greater glory is a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation brought near to God, and why the God who keeps his promises can be trusted to keep them still.
Read the sermon transcript
Thank you for joining us for this week’s sermon from First Reformed Church in Edgerton, Minnesota. Each week we dig into God’s word, trusting that the Holy Spirit will continue the good work of sanctification in us.
Weddings are a pretty big deal. They’re obviously an important event in our lives. And some weddings are really big productions and others are more plain. But even the most simple of weddings are, for lack of a better word, fancier than our everyday lives. Weddings are one place where the radical informality of our times hasn’t overtaken. Gentlemen who rarely ever, if at all, get dressed up are going to get dressed up however their daughters tell them at the wedding. That’s just how it works. But looking around the room at a wedding, you find that it isn’t just the family of the bride and the groom who have stepped up their fashion game for that day. It doesn’t matter how far back into the closet you need to dig to find some nicer clothes, you dig them out and you dust them off.
And the reason we do this is because of the substantial weight that we put on that day. It’s more than just a ceremony. I’m guessing that as I talk about weddings here, your mind has probably already gone to your own wedding or one of a friend or family member that was a great day of celebration.
But I want to move our minds from that day in the past to years down the road from the fancy wedding celebration. Because each year we celebrate anniversaries. Sometimes we do something special, but most of the time an anniversary is spent with just the couple going out for supper or maybe even having a meal together at home. On your anniversary each year, you don’t send out invitations to your family and friends to come to an event venue to celebrate in expectation of them bringing you gifts again, do you? No. People don’t get dressed up and come and celebrate with you. In fact, you might be to the point where you don’t even get dressed up to celebrate your anniversary anymore. And you probably don’t bother to give one another gifts.
But does that say anything about the significance of marriage? Does a quiet, casual night out together mean that the relationship has degraded since the wedding? Well, not at all. The simple anniversary meal together holds significance because it looks back on the promise made on the wedding day and it’s filled with the years of faithfulness and growth together in marriage. The wedding may have been the bigger, more elaborate day, but nobody would say that the marriage is less at the anniversary. Sometimes what looks smaller is actually greater.
And today, as we move into the second chapter of Haggai, and we see that the people are concerned about the temple lacking the splendor of the temple that was before, God assures them that this temple will exceed the splendor of the previous temple. And so as we come to our passage for today in Haggai 2, we see that Haggai is coming with another word for the people from the Lord.
Now, as we read this, it doesn’t mean much to us. But this information about the date isn’t just there for us to mark time and figure out how much time is it taking to build the temple. That’s not why this information is here. The reason this information is here is to inform us that this is the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. So this feast was given by God to the people to rejoice in the provision that God had given them in the wilderness when they were wandering and also as a celebration of the blessing of the harvest for that year. So this was a significant part of the ritual and religious life of the people. And so there would have been a lot of people gathered to hear this word that was coming from Haggai. It isn’t just for a handful of people. This message is meant for the masses.
And it’s important that we note a couple things as we consider these words and we progress through the passage. The first thing is we need to remember that there isn’t much to celebrate in regards to the harvest for the people this year. Think back to the previous chapter where we’re told that they aren’t harvesting very much. There was a drought on the land. So the second thing we need to remember is that the people would have been very aware that Solomon’s Temple was dedicated at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles. They would have known this. It would have been an important connection. They’re working on this temple. It needs to be rebuilt. But the old, more glorious temple was dedicated probably on this feast day, on that last day of the feast, many years ago. And so this is the music playing in the background as we read this passage. It’s this feeling of having a meager harvest and a meager temple. There isn’t much to be celebrating because the glory of the past is so much greater than what they are experiencing in their lives right now.
And so I think we get this sentiment. We naturally sentimentalize over the past. Things were so great in the past, and we feel like our circumstances now will never allow us to have it as good as it used to be. And we see this so much in our own time. Social media is overflowing with people saying that they’ll never have it as good as their grandparents and with statements that, statements like, “We didn’t know we were living in the good old days when we were kids.” This is just a common thing. And my point in bringing this up is not to say that there is a promise of better days, but that we tend to romanticize times past. And we tend to also have a sense of hopelessness about the future. I don’t think we struggle at all to understand the attitude that these people in Haggai’s time would have had as they gathered during a drought at a temple that was but a pale reflection of the glorious stories that they had heard about the previous temple.
So this word here now, as we move to verses two and three, has God telling Haggai to speak to the governor, the high priest, and the remnant of the people. And it shows us that this was in fact the attitude that they had as they gathered. And honestly, like I said before, you can understand their discouragement. Not only would it be hard to imagine a bright future in the midst of a drought, but they most surely would have also felt the weight of the difficult task that was before them. They were going to labor over the temple, and they know it’s not going to be anything like the glory of the past. There’s no way it can be as good. And on top of that, they would have heard the stories of the prophet Ezekiel and how the glory of the Lord departed from the temple before God used the armies of Babylon as his instrument of judgment, and they brought the temple to ruin, the one they’re trying to fix.
But still, the word of the Lord has come to the people for more than just to name their despair and their feelings of hopelessness. He tells them to be strong, and these two verses here, verses four and five, are powerful because God comes to a people in despair, and he makes it clear that he is their God and he is with them.
And notice that this command to be strong is declared three times. He speaks this command to the governor, the high priest, and to all the people. If we were to stop with the repetition of be strong and then the command to get to work, this really wouldn’t be a comforting passage at all, would it? It would come across as stop being so weak and get back to the task that I’ve told you that you need to do. But God is coming to them, not just to tell them to get on task, even though they’re tired and discouraged. His command to work is accompanied with a reminder of his presence, and he connects to more than just what they’ve been up to recently. He doesn’t say, “Be strong and work, because I showed up a while back by sending you a prophet.” No, the reminder of his presence goes beyond the moment, the season, or even the lifetime of the elderly people who remember the previous temple. He goes back to the covenant he made with them when he brought the people out of Egypt.
I want to point out something important for us here in verse five. It says, “The covenant that I made with you when you came out of Egypt.” Most of these people probably weren’t alive when the people were taken into exile a few generations prior. They weren’t alive when the Temple of Solomon was dedicated many years before, and they most assuredly weren’t in Egypt. Yet when God speaks to them, he speaks as though they themselves were the ones who came out of slavery in Egypt. And the point here is his faithfulness. He made a covenant with them, not just the people who were coming out of Egypt, not just the people in the wilderness, not just with David, not just with Solomon. He made a covenant with them. He is the God who makes a promise, and he keeps it. Remember, he promises to be a God to him and/or he promises to be a God to them and their children. The message to them is, “I’ve been faithful throughout the generations, even when the people haven’t been faithful.” And he says, “I’m with you. My spirit is in your midst. Fear not.”
And as the people are feeling the inadequacy of what they’ve done and the weight of responsibility of what they need to do in building the temple, God comes to them with this command to be strong. But notice that he’s not telling them to stir this up within themselves. Just like the end of chapter one, he promises to be with them. They are strong not because of what they do. They are strong because he’s with them. They don’t need to live in fear. Why? Because he’s in their midst.
And this hits home for us today as well. While we don’t have the burden of building the temple, we are prone to looking back on the past and feeling as though we will never live up to the legacy that came before, that our spiritual lives or the church will never be what it was in years gone past. Instead of despair, we need to press into God’s calling to us. We need to live as faithful disciples in trust that he is persistent in his faithfulness to his people. He is with us and the Spirit guides us just as he has throughout the ages. And the people of Haggai’s day were called to look at past faithfulness to press on. And God tells them that a greater time is coming.
Here the Lord informs them that he will shake the heavens, the earth and the sea and the dry land. And from that, treasures of all nations will come in and the house will again be filled with glory. God is going to do something. They simply need to be faithful to the command he has given them. The temple currently is not what it once was, but the glory that is coming to it will exceed the past glory. And like so much of prophetic language in Scripture, the way this is said compresses ideas together. So you get a sense of there being something that is going to happen in the relatively near future. But you also know that something is going to happen that is going to be a greater, more ultimate fulfillment down the road. This isn’t just a word of prophecy telling them that the temple is going to be back to being significant for the Hebrew people the way it used to be. Because it says that all the nations will be shaken and all the treasures of the nations shall come in. It isn’t just one people group that will be involved, but all nations. That lets us know that this is speaking of a deeper, greater, promised fulfillment.
And so verse 8 tells us that the silver is his and the gold. So whatever resources are needed are God’s. They don’t need to worry about how the temple will be restored. And in fact, its glory will exceed what was before. So here they sit, feeling as though what they are doing is never going to reach the level of the past. And then God comes and tells them that it is actually going to exceed what it was before from ruin to greater glory. God is the one who brings this about. The call on them is to be faithful because they serve a faithful God who is with them and has more than enough resources to do beyond what they expect.
And because we know of the faithfulness of God to his promises, we know that this was pointing to more than just a big building filled with gold and silver. Ultimately, the temple was nothing more than a type and shadow of the Lord Jesus Christ. A shadow is real, but it isn’t the real thing itself. It points to something bigger and more substantial standing behind it. And so the temple showed the presence of God among its people. But it was always pointing to a day when God himself would come and dwell with them once again.
Remember that the festival that they’re celebrating as they’re gathered here is the Feast of Tabernacles. It took place each year in the seventh month, and the people would live in temporary shelters. They’d live in tabernacles, tents, for a week to remember how God sheltered and provided for them in the wilderness after the Exodus. That feast had a forward-looking focus, and it anticipated a time where they would dwell with God forever, just like it was intended in the garden originally. These festivals and the temple were pointing to the fact that eventually Jesus would come, and he would be the fulfillment of all of this.
The glory that comes in Christ is greater than the glory filling the temple, where only a few people of a particular family could go into the Holy of Holies. When the promise comes to its fullness, it’s God the Son coming and dwelling among us, coming in a manger and dying on a Roman cross. For the people remembering the first temple and lamenting that the second temple wasn’t as big, they probably would have thought that Jesus was something smaller still. But the latter glory is far greater than the former. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is greater than the glory of Jesus giving himself for sinners, because that is where we find our ultimate peace.
And this is peace for more than the city where the temple resides or the nation that that city is in. Remember verse 7. God says he will shake the nations and what belongs to the nations will come in. This was never just about the people in Jerusalem. The Apostle Paul is speaking of Gentile believers in his epistles, and he says that those who were once far off had been brought near through the blood of Christ. He also says that they were being built together into a dwelling place for God by his Spirit. One people of God, regardless of ethnicity, every tribe, every tongue and nation before the throne. In the old covenant, only the Hebrew people were able to draw near. Now in the new covenant, we all draw near because the Lord Almighty and the Lamb are the temple. That’s the greater glory. That’s what was being pointed to here in Haggai. We expect bigger and better buildings. But people of every tribe, tongue and nation finding peace with God is far greater than anything our human minds would ever imagine.
The discouragement the people in Haggai felt heard this promise. And they were called to hold on to this promise, even if they could not see it. And that brings me back to the anniversary celebration I started out talking about.
So that dinner, that anniversary celebration between a couple 30 or 40 years on into the marriage, it doesn’t look like much. It’s quiet. People are throwing, people aren’t throwing bird seed at you and giving you gifts. Imagine going to a restaurant on your 40th anniversary and you leave and people are throwing bird seed. No, that’s not what happens. What makes that meal together significant is that the promise was made and the promise was kept. And the same is true in this passage. The people in Haggai’s day looked at what they had, and though it was small and insignificant, they were told to look to something greater. But the importance of the temple never rested on what they could build or were building. The significance of the temple rested on the God who made the promise. He made a covenant with his people and he kept that promise even when the people were unfaithful. In good times and bad, when they were in the land and when they were in exile, God was faithful. In times of plenty and in times of drought, God was faithful. And it all led to the greater glory that came in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Our faithfulness can often feel small. We struggle with sin or we feel as though our spirituality isn’t up to what it used to be. But God is the one who holds us near. So hold fast to his promises. Press on in faith. Hear the word. Trust that the Holy Spirit is at work in you. Believe the gospel, my friends. Believe. God is faithful. And he will keep you until the end and he is working in you to make you holy. He is working in you to conform you to the image of Christ.
Years from now, a life of faithfulness may not look like much. Quiet things rarely do. But the God who made the promise is keeping it every day. And one day we will stand with people from every tribe, tongue, and nation and see just how great that kept promise of God was. So each day, hear the word of the Lord. Be strong. He is with you. Amen. Let us pray.
Great and merciful God, we praise you for your faithfulness. That we see in your word how you are faithful to your people even when your people are not. We pray that this great truth would lead us to obedience. That we would hear your word. That we would believe your word. And that we would desire to conform our lives to it. That it might glorify you. And that we would be a witness to the ends of the earth that you are a God who saves. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Thank you for joining us for this week’s sermon. For more information about First Reformed Church, head to our Facebook page or website, edgertonfrc.org.
Keep Listening to God’s Word
If this message was a help to you, there is more waiting. Browse the full sermon archive, or follow along with the rest of the Consider Your Ways series through the book of Haggai.
