Haggai 1 - Work resumes, and God does actually cause droughts

Chapter 1 contains the first message of Haggai, giving the precise date. He directed his message to Zerubbabel, the governor, and to Joshua the high priest. The civic and religious authorities were meant to work together. It is popular today to say that state and church should be separated. There is reason in this, but it is wrong to say that the church should have no influence on the state. A successful state needs a godly church speaking both to it and to the nation.

The people had abandoned the temple building in the face of opposition and were devoting themselves to cultivating the land and building their own houses. This is entirely understandable, but it is also wrong. We need to beware of the same temptation in our own lives. Time and time again we will be tempted to give up on the church, or to neglect the church, so we can focus on our own lives. 

We need to beware of this temptation. God then gives a very practical reason why such a course is foolish, it doesn't work!  You see, we think that the ground just yields its harvest, we subconsciously adopt a materialistic view of life, thinking that things just happen automatically. This is not so, and this is not a Biblical perspective. It is God who causes the land to yield a harvest. So we need to devote ourselves to God first.

So God commands the people to go and get timber for His house.  Verses 7-11 make it abundantly clear that the reason the people were suffering, never getting enough, was because they had neglected the Lord, and it was the Lord who caused the drought. We need to take much more seriously God's continual intervention in the world.

The people responded properly by obeying the word of the Lord. 

In return Haggai gave a simple message to the people "I am with you". It makes all the difference to us when we know that the Lord is with us. The spirit of the leaders and the people were stirred up to begin the work of the Lord, and so work on the temple resumed. Note the action of God in stirring people up.

The people are both held responsible, they took a decision to obey the Lord, yet at the same time the Lord was stirring them up to do so. We make a mistake when we choose to look at things from only one perspective. Ie just the human perspective, or just God's perspective.