Articles
Which House Should I Build First?
During the reign of the Persian king Darius, the prophet Haggai said this:
“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 a 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. 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.” (Hag 1:2-6)
At that time, Israel had begun the process of migrating out of their exile in Babylon back to their homeland in the Levant. They had laid the foundation of the temple and restored the practice of sacrifices (Ezra 3:1-13). However, they faced substantial opposition from locals who had taken up residence in the land in their absence. After much opposition and discouragement, the Israelites ceased their work on the temple and it sat desolate for roughly seventeen years (Ezra 4:1-5, 24). Eventually, God sent the prophets Haggai and Zechariah to effectively tell the people “Get back to work!” (Ezra 5:1-2). The temple was eventually finished with the support of the Persian government (Ezra 6:1-19). But the prophets of God were the ones who gave that little push at the beginning.
The people have not been “idle” during the seventeen years that the temple has sat desolate. Far from it! The fact that Haggai describes them as living in “paneled houses” (Hag 1:3) seems to indicate that a good deal of reconstruction has taken place in Jerusalem. The people are recovering nicely from the Babylonian exile. Nebuchadnezzar had burned their city (Jer 52:12-14; 2 Chr 36:19) and the land had been desolate for seventy years (2 Chr 36:21). But seventeen years had been ample time for them to resume normative living and to revitalize the city of Jerusalem.
Yet hard work is not always the right work.
The people’s sin was not that they built their paneled houses. Rather, their sin was that they did so at the expense of the house of God. Motivated by fear, they took the easy path. They weren’t getting any grief from the locals for building their own homes. Rather, the locals wanted to interfere in the construction of Yahweh’s temple (Ezra 4:1-3). And as people so often do today, so back then the Israelites discovered that the easiest “solution” to their problem was just to ignore it and eliminate the conversation altogether. No work on the temple meant no one interfering with the temple. Besides, they had to get on with their own construction. After all, what was the sense in building a house of worship if they couldn’t even get their own house in order? Didn’t they need to “help themselves” before God would help them anyways?
Haggai 1 makes a mockery of the people’s hard work. “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” (Hag 1:6). Again, “You looked for much, and behold it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house” (Hag 1:9). The problem wasn’t that the people were lazy. The problem was that they expended their effort on the wrong thing! They thought they could provide for themselves. But quickly they learned that God could deprive them of any fruit to their efforts, regardless of how long or how hard they toiled in the field.
What the people needed was a shift in priorities. There was nothing wrong with building their houses. But it really needed to be God building their homes (Psa 127:1). And if God was going to bless the work of their hands and build their homes, then they needed to be building the house of God as well.
Haggai’s book is short, but we would be ill-advised to ignore the brief message in his first oracle. For us, it’s not about a physical temple. (Do not be tricked into thinking that the “church building” is equivalent to the temple in this story!) Rather, it is about the spiritual temple, consisting of living stones, which are the people of God (1 Pet 2:4-5). And the lesson Haggai teaches us is this—build up those in the household of God before worrying about the externalities of this life. There’s nothing wrong with having a house, a car, or a job. But those things take a back seat in priority compared to the infinitely more important task of building up brethren in the faith.
May God help us to build the right house first!
