Consider Your Ways

A family sits down to supper in a house with smooth wooden panels on the walls. The bowls are only half full. Outside, the fields are dry. And a few streets away, weeds are growing through the stones of God's house.

It is about eighteen years since the first exiles came back from Babylon to Jerusalem. They had arrived full of hope. They laid the foundation of a new temple, and the old people who remembered the first one wept while the young ones shouted for joy. But then the neighbours made trouble, the work stopped, and the years drifted by. Now Darius is king of Persia. In the second year of his reign, on the first day of the sixth month, a man named Haggai stands up with a word from the Lord. He speaks to Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah, and to Joshua, the high priest. And through them, to everybody.

God begins by repeating what the people have been saying. “This people say, The time is not come, the time that the Lord's house should be built.” Not yet. Maybe next year. Then comes the question that stings. “Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled houses, and this house lie waste?” Cieled means panelled, finished with fine wood. You found time to make your own homes beautiful, God is saying. But my house is still a ruin. Then Haggai says the words that give this story its name. “Consider your ways.” Stop. Think. Look at your life honestly.

And what would they see if they looked? Haggai lists it. You have planted a lot and harvested little. You eat, but you are never full. You drink, but you are still thirsty. You put on clothes, but nobody is warm. And the one who earns wages puts them into a bag with holes. Every coin seems to fall straight through. God tells them why. They had looked for much, and it came to little. They had been running to their own houses while his house lay in ruins. So he had called for a drought on the fields, on the hills, on the grain, the new wine and the oil. Then the instruction, simple and practical. Go up into the hills. Bring down timber. Build the house, and I will take pleasure in it, and I will be glorified.

Here is the surprise. They listen. Zerubbabel listens. Joshua the high priest listens. And all the rest of the people listen too. They obey the voice of the Lord and the words of Haggai, and the Bible says the people feared the Lord. Then Haggai brings a second message, the shortest in the book, and perhaps the sweetest. “I am with you, saith the Lord.” That is all. Four words in our language. And God stirs up the spirit of the governor, and the spirit of the high priest, and the spirit of everyone left in the land. Twenty-three days after Haggai first spoke, they come and begin work on the house of the Lord of hosts, their God.

Haggai dates his messages very carefully, down to the day of the month. That makes his book one of the most precisely dated in the whole Bible. Using records of the Babylonian and Persian calendars, historians can match his first message to late August in the year five hundred and twenty BC. The book of Ezra confirms the story from another angle: it tells us that the prophets Haggai and Zechariah spoke to the people, and that Zerubbabel and Joshua rose up and began to build the house of God in Jerusalem.

Consider your ways. You'll find this in the book of Haggai, chapter one. A busy people who kept saying not yet, until a prophet asked them to stop and look. And when they did turn back, God's answer was simple: I am with you. So here is a question to carry with you. Is there something God has asked of you that you keep putting off until later?