Haggai 1:7-9 - Consider your ways

1:7,8

In v 5 God called on the people to “consider your ways” in order to realise the failing of their present approach (ie seeking first their own needs, rather than the kingdom of God). Now He calls them to consider their ways  in terms of how to put things right, how to do the right thing. So God calls on them to go up to the hills and collect wood so that the temple, God’s house, could be built. This was so that the Lord could take pleasure in it and that He would be glorified. Now part of us may react, and the atheist almost certainly would react, against God’s desire to be glorified, thinking it was rather selfish and self-centered! But let’s look at this more closely. Let’s use my rough and ready definition of “glory”, which means moral excellence, significance and splendour. Who or what was the most important, the most significant, thing in life for the Israelites? They were acting as if getting their own needs was the most important thing, and they could best do this by their own efforts. The truth was that this was not working, and it is actually God who supplies all our needs. So only if they gave glory to God would life work out. And the same applies to you and me.

1:9

Their present ways were not working, but look at what it says “I blew it away”. It was not just that things were not working, God was actively frustrating their plans. We can think that if only politicians follow the correct policies and methods then things will work out, but if a nation is in abject rebellion against God it may be that God is actively frustrating the plans of a nation, and only when that nations repents will things start to work out. This is not to say that policies and methods don’t matter, they do, but our moral state matters as well. At present the West, including the UK, is a moral mess and the seeming inability of anything to work (eg Brexit?) is at least partly down to this. In Israel the people were focused purely on their own lives, not on God’s house.