The Lord’s Day Evening
March 30, 2008
Ezra 5:1-2
“Encouragements and Warnings from Haggai and Zechariah”
Dr. Derek W. H. Thomas
Now turn with me once again to the book of Ezra. And let me remind you (as we begin this evening in chapter 5) just a little bit of what has been happening in the fourth chapter, because the fourth chapter took us on a grand history tour that spanned almost a century.
At the beginning of chapter 4, we are about a year or so after the return from exile. That return took place in 538 or so, B.C., and so this is 537. The work had begun on laying the foundations of the temple, and then treats and persecutions have begun. The “people of the land” – a euphemism for a conglomerate of Samaritans and others who had been transplanted to the regions round about Jerusalem 150 years before, during the reign of the empire of Assyria under King Ahasuerus – these people were syncretistic in their worship. They worshiped the God of Israel, but they worshiped a whole host of other gods, too. They had offered to help in rebuilding the temple. That offer had been summarily rejected and as a consequence, you remember, these people of the land begin a two-pronged attack of discouragement to the people of God. They obviously infiltrate the supply lines of materials that were necessary for the rebuilding of the temple that would make their way from the northern territories of Lebanon via the Mediterranean Sea, and perhaps the port of Joppa, but they also paid men to speak to rulers and those in authority in Persia itself, no doubt spreading lies and innuendo and conspiracy about what it was that the Jews were ultimately attempting to do in Jerusalem—sufficient that this work of rebuilding the temple came to a stop. It came to a stop right up until the second year of King Darius. Cyrus was on the throne when they came back from Babylon; Cambyses (Cambyses II, to be precise) then took over the Persian rule. After Cambyses is dead, then Darius comes to the throne. Darius comes to the throne in 522 B.C. That’s sixteen years of inactivity. The temple, the reconstruction of the temple, was abandoned for sixteen years.
Now in the rest of chapter 4, we are given a tour down through the next sixty, seventy, perhaps ninety years of recurring periods of discouragement and persecution right through to the reign of Xerxes and Artaxerxes (who was the ruler, you remember, in the time of Nehemiah. Nehemiah was the cup bearer to King Artaxerxes). That is probably somewhere around 445, 446 B.C., so we’ve gone forward eighty or ninety years. And then in the final verse of chapter 4, we’re brought all the way back again to 537:
“Then the work on the house of God that is in Jerusalem stopped, and it ceased until the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia.”
Now we’re going to jump ahead to the second year of King Darius, so we’re jumping ahead sixteen years—sixteen years of inactivity, as far as the building of the temple is concerned—and we have something of a summary statement in the opening two verses, and I want us to plant, as it were, on these opening two verses of chapter 5 tonight. Before we read these two verses together, let’s look to God in prayer. Let us all pray.
Our Father in heaven – and You are in heaven, and we are on earth. You dwell in light inapproachable. What we know of You we know only because You have been pleased to reveal it to us. We would be scrambling about in the dark if it had not been for Your special revelation to us in the Scriptures. We thank You, O Lord, for the Bible. We thank You for the truth that all Scripture is given by the out-breathing of God and is profitable for doctrine and reproof and correction, and instruction in the way of righteousness, that the man of God might be thoroughly furnished unto every good work. We want and desire tonight that we might be furnished to every good work. We want to be Your servants. We want to be obedient servants. We want… as a result of grace that we have tasted and seen and felt and known, we want now to follow in the footsteps of our Lord. We thank You for a great high priest who has died for us and forgiven us our sins, and because of that we want to follow after Him with all of our might. We want Christ to have everything there is of us, and we pray tonight as Your word searches and penetrates and convicts and enlightens and encourages and challenges, as Your light shines like a torch into the inner recesses of our hearts, have Your way with us, we pray, Sovereign Spirit. Make us more like the One You love, our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
This is God’s word:
“Now the prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, the son of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem, in the name of the God of Israel who was over them. Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak arose and began to rebuild the house of God that is in Jerusalem, and the prophets of God were with them, supporting them.”
Amen. And may God add His blessing to the reading of His holy and inerrant word.
Sixteen years have gone by. That’s a long time. It’s longer than I’ve been here in the United States—and I think that’s a long time. A lot of things happen in sixteen years. Your children are no longer children after sixteen years: they’re either teenagers, or they’re married, or they’ve left home. You know, if you can think back now sixteen years, what were you doing sixteen years ago?
Things have happened in these sixteen years, but they haven’t happened in the temple. No doubt weeds have begun to grow again in the foundations that have been laid sixteen years ago, less than a year after they had returned from Babylon. And in the second year of King Darius…this is the year 520…Darius takes over the throne in 522. Cambyses was murdered, killed, and a pretender came to the throne who pretended to be Darius’s brother. And Cambyses is killed. He dies in an extraordinary way. He’s in battle in Egypt at the time when he hears this news. And so the story goes (by Herodotus the famous Greek historian – the father of history, we know him as), the sheath of his sword fell to the ground as he was mounting his horse. And the sword penetrated into his thigh as he was mounting his horse. Gangrene set in, and three weeks later he was dead. And Darius is now on the throne. Rulers come and rulers go…an encouraging thought in the time that we live in. God is on His throne.
It’s the second year of Darius, the year 520 B.C., and two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah…. [We know these prophets. We know them because we have books from these prophets. They’re called minor prophets, but to call Zechariah a minor prophet is a stretch. There are things in Zechariah that would baffle the profoundest theologian in our midst.] God raises up preachers. That’s what they are, servants of the Lord. They are God’s gift to the church in 520 B.C. to speak to Zerubbabel, to speak to Joshua, to speak to the men and women of Israel. God raises them up to motivate, to challenge, to bring the word of God, to expound the truth of God, to lay bare the sin of God’s people. Let’s spend the next few moments reminding ourselves of the ministry of Haggai and Zechariah.
I. Haggai.
Let’s think about Haggai for a second – an extraordinary prophet. We have a book, the third book from the end of the Old Testament, the book of Haggai. It’s a couple of chapters, a very short book. And the whole of Haggai’s ministry (as far as we know, as far as is recorded in Scripture) takes place over a period of four months, from the middle of August to almost the end of December. That’s all we know of him.
We have four of his sermons, recorded in three days. Two of the sermons are preached on the same day. Imagine for a moment that someone is writing your biography. You think of yourself as having contributed in some way to society, or you’ve contributed to the city of Jackson, or you’ve contributed to state or national politics, or you’ve contributed in the realm of science or literature or art, or something. And they’re writing your biography. They’re telling your life story, and all of it is summed up by something that you did in four months of your life. You’d feel cheated! You feel cheated – “There’s more to my life than four months!” And yet God raises up some extraordinary men and women to do a single work for Him, to do one thing: to be that man, that woman, in that place in God’s time, for God’s work, for God’s service, for God’s ministry. And if Haggai had not been willing, if Haggai had not been obedient in the year 520, his ministry would never have been recorded. That’s what God raised him up to do.
There was a very famous (famous in Wales, that is) preacher by the name of David Morgan. And in the year 1860, there was a revival in Wales. It was a revival that had actually begun in the previous year. I don’t mean the kind of revival, now, that you see when you drive up the Trace and go off to some of these highways and byways and you see a little sign that says “Revival Next Week” – beginning at such-and-such a date, and it will last for two weeks. I don’t mean something that man makes. I mean a sovereign outpouring of God’s Spirit where extraordinary things are done: tens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are converted and brought into the kingdom of God all of a sudden. I’m speaking of something like the Great Awakening in 1739-1740 that lasted for just a couple of years or so. Or in 1860, there was a revival in Wales. There was a similar period of revival elsewhere…in New York, for example, in 1857. It’s the same period of revival, an outpouring of God’s Spirit in an extraordinary way. Well, this man David Morgan, it’s said of him that he went to bed as a lamb and woke as a lion. And for the space of about six or seven months or so, his ministry was attended with extraordinary power. Biographers say his preaching wasn’t any different in 1860 than it had been in 1859 or than it was in 1861, but in that period in 1860 it was attended with extraordinary power. He went to bed as a lamb and woke as a lion. And there was a day in 1860 when he went to bed as a lion and he woke as a lamb.
And that’s what we have in Haggai. All of a sudden Haggai’s purpose for being here is made evident. He was here, God had placed him in this world, in this Earth, in Jerusalem for this thing: to preach the word of God – four sermons.
The first sermon that Haggai preaches is an extraordinary sermon. If Haggai had been given to sermon titles, he might have called his first sermon “Tell God He Can Wait.” Tell God He can wait. God has given to him a word. He’s a prophet. God has spoken to Haggai in a way that He doesn’t speak to you and me now. And God said to Haggai, “Tell these people this word.”
What have these people been saying? That the time for building the house of the Lord is not yet. That’s what they had been saying. The time for building the house of the Lord is not yet. What a pious thing to say, to have that kind of discernment! You know, in 530 or 529 or 528 B.C., they would go about saying, ‘You know, it’s not yet, this work. This rebuilding of the temple, the time for it…it’s not the right time.’ They seemed to have this tremendous sense of spiritual discernment that the time for building the house of the Lord was not yet. Of course it was just an excuse. That’s all it was. It was just a pious façade for what was in actual fact sin.
And Haggai in that first sermon – and you wouldn’t like Haggai as a preacher, because he meddles. That’s the word. That’s the verb you people use here. It’s a Southern word; it’s a Mississippi word for “preaching.” When it gets under your skin and begins to expose things that you don’t want to be exposed, you’re meddling! Well, Haggai was a meddler with a capital “M”! And he doesn’t mince his words: “Tell these people…” – what? And what does Haggai tell them? That they have no right living in their paneled houses when the house of the Lord is in ruins. You could have heard a pin drop. You understand what Haggai is saying to the people of Jerusalem. They have…what had they been doing over the last sixteen years? They had been building their own houses…nice houses…grand houses…paneled houses. The insinuation, according to the commentators, is that the houses’ walls were lined with the very wood meant for the temple. Imagine it! And they’re going about saying that the time for building the Lord’s house is not yet. And he calls upon them to repent of their sin, because they’re not putting God first. They’re not putting the house of God first.
He talks about what it is that they’re beginning to experience, and what it is that they’re beginning to experience is that they’re earning money to put in bags with holes in. They never seem to have enough. For all the fact that they were seemingly living for themselves and living for material gain and living for material prosperity, it was never enough. All that they earned and all that they got they put into bags, and there were holes in these bags. And they had this terrible experience that life was empty. Because outside of the service of Jesus, life is empty. It has no meaning. It has no purpose. And we experience what Paschal calls that “God-shaped void” that lies within each one of us, because “only that which is done for Jesus will last,” says the old hymn.
And he preaches another sermon, and it’s a sermon now in the face of opposition because after he preaches that first sermon, there is tremendous result. There is a tremendous result. They begin to rebuild the temple. Haggai’s first sermon, his very first sermon, initiates in Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the people of Jerusalem a repentance, and they begin to build the temple of God. And his second sermon is a sermon of great encouragement in the face of opposition. It’s one of those sermons that encourages; it’s one of those sermons that motivates and challenges, and tells the people of God to keep on building despite the opposition, and despite the trial. It has this visionary ending, and you’ll be familiar with these words because they’re from Handel’s Messiah:
“Yet once more, in a little while, I shall shake the heavens and the earth and the sea, and the dry land, and I will shake all nations so that the treasures of all nations shall come in. The silver is mine and the gold is mine.”
And there’s a visionary quality to it, and he’s saying in the sermon what in fact happened: that this opposition is going to eviscerate because God is going to step in, and God is going to provide.
There’s the ministry of Haggai. It lasts for four months, and God pours out His Spirit. God pours out His Spirit on the preaching of this man, and there’s repentance, and there’s faith, and there’s work, and there’s evidence of work. It’s an extraordinary thing. God steps into the ministry of Haggai the prophet. I find that very interesting, that God would use the means of grace to bring about this extraordinary result. He doesn’t do it sovereignly, as it were, outside of the means of grace. He employs prophets, he employs the teachers of the church to motivate and challenge. He employs those…and what was Haggai? He was just an instrument in the delivery of God’s word. And in the end it wasn’t Haggai, you see, that brought this about. It was God’s word that brought this about. It was the word of the living God.
But you notice how the author of Ezra seems to want to point that out to you, because when it says in verse 1 about Haggai and Zechariah, who prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel who was over them. And He was over those in Jerusalem, but He was just as much over Haggai and Zechariah, too. The ministry of Haggai.
II. Zechariah.
And then there’s the ministry of Zechariah, a very different kind of prophet. If Haggai is the straight-talker…. He is Pastor Straight-Talker; Zechariah is Pastor Visionary.
There are deep things in Zechariah. There are things in Zechariah I don’t understand. I’m moved by them; I’m not sure why I’m moved by them, but I’m moved to look to God and I’m moved to expect great things, but I’m not always clear as to what it is I’m supposed to be expecting. His name, by the way, is wonderful. It means “the Lord has remembered.” Remembered what? Well, the children’s address…covenant. God remembers His covenant. God remembers His promise. Zechariah, this man…and when Zechariah appears you wouldn’t need somebody to translate what his name means in Jerusalem; they’d hear him. His name means “God has remembered.” The Lord has remembered His word. He’s remembered His promise.
Zechariah has a book and it falls into two parts. In the first eight chapters are eight visions, night visions. It’s a different kind of writing to the writing of Haggai. It’s sometimes called apocalyptic. He uses numbers and colors and visions in much the same way as the book of Revelation does. Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, says of Zechariah, the final section of Zechariah,
“We pass from the obscure to the more obscure, and with Moses we enter the clouds and darkness. Deep calls to deep in the voice of the floods of God, and the Spirit goes hurling round in coils and turns back on His own paths. We endure labyrinth and wanderings, and we are directed in our blindness to the footsteps by the thread of Christ.”
And that’s a fascinating statement by Jerome. Throughout the book of Zechariah, yes, there are infinities and immensities, there are perplexities, there are visions of things that are hard to make out. He, as it were, is speaking not so much about what Haggai is speaking about, motivating them to build the temple; but he wants to talk about what the temple means, and what is the real temple. Not the temple of bricks and stones and beams of wood and curtains and cloths – not that temple. But understand, people of God, what the real temple is, what the significance of the real temple is. Understand the nature and function of what God is really doing.
What is the temple? The temple is God’s way of manifesting His presence. It’s God’s way of manifesting His presence. It’s the guarantee of security.
Now in chapter 2 of Zechariah, in one of his visions he has a vision of a man, a young man. And this young man has a tape measure. It’s a rule of some kind. Maybe it’s a rod that’s calibrated with various lengths. It’s a bit like the opening of The Marriage of Figaro, if you know your opera. That’s how it begins. It’s measuring. It’s a man with a measure, and he’s going around the foundations of the old temple, and he’s measuring. And the vision seems to be saying this man is measuring according to the measurements of the old temple, but you need to understand that God is going to do something new and something extraordinary, and something far bigger.
Doesn’t Ezekiel say something very similar? Who’s been in Ezekiel recently? [You know, you’ll get to heaven and you’ll meet Ezekiel one day! And you’ll have to say to him, you know, ‘I know that you wrote a book, and it was a long book, but I just never finished it.’ I’ve got four books on my desk, and they’re novels that I pick up in airports. And I’m a quarter of the way through all four of them, and I know I’ll never finish any of them.] Well, you’ve got to finish the book of Ezekiel, because the closing chapters of the book of Ezekiel are a vision of the temple, the new temple. Not an earthly temple, but through pictures and symbols Ezekiel, and now Zechariah, is depicting something far bigger and far grander than the minds of these people in Jerusalem 500 years before the coming of Christ could possibly take in.
Zechariah was actually speaking to our own time. He was, as it were, pulling back the curtains and saying ‘I need you to catch a glimpse of the grand purposes of God. They are not about just this temple. Yes, you need to build this temple, but you need to see that God has a grander purpose than this physical temple.’
It’s in Zechariah, isn’t it, that we have some of the great prophecies about Jesus: the triumphal entry – it’s in Zechariah; the fact that Jesus would be pierced in His side – it’s in Zechariah; the fact that He would be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver – it’s in Zechariah.
Now whatever the people building the temple understood of what Zechariah was saying (and it’s hard to know what they understood), they understood this much: that God has a purpose and God has a plan, and God has a covenant, and that covenant finds its fulfillment in the coming of a Messiah, of a Redeemer.
You remember one of the great statements in Zechariah? It’s perhaps the most wonderful thing in the book of Zechariah: that there is a fountain open for sin and uncleanness. Imagine…they’re building a temple, and what are they going to do in the temple once it is built? They’re going to reintroduce sacrifices. They’re going to reintroduce the sacrifices of lambs and bulls and goats. There are going to be special holy utensils to catch the blood. Once that artery is slit in the side of the victim, they caught that blood. There were rituals to be performed with the blood of sacrifice. But it could never…
“Not all the blood on Jewish altars slain
can wash our guilty souls,
and cleanse them from their stain.”
It’s not by the blood of calves and bulls, or the sprinkling of the ashes of an heifer; it’s how much more shall the blood of Christ cleanse our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
That’s what Zechariah is pointing to. He’s pointing to what the book of Hebrews is talking about. In the coming of Jesus, there is a fountain that is open for sin and uncleanness in which you may wash and be cleansed. We sing about it. One of our favorite hymns is an offense to many, but it’s not an offense to us:
“There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.”
What a Savior! What a marvelous, glorious Savior we have! And Zechariah is pointing to that. Oh, there are visions in Zechariah that would blow your mind away about the new Jerusalem, about things that lie in the future…and not in the future so much of this world, but in the future of the new heavens and new earth, I think.
III. God’s desire for us to become holy.
It may have been a while, so let me tell you how Zechariah ends. Right at the very close, the very closing verses of Zechariah are about a vision of the new temple. It’s a vision about priests in the temple, and utensils in the temple. And there is this indication right at the very end of Zechariah that everything in it is holy to the Lord…everything in the temple is holy to the Lord. ‘God is doing something,’ Zechariah was preaching and teaching.
God is doing something. And it’s about holiness. He’s building, you see, not just a new Israel, not just a physical temple, but He’s building a kingdom. He is restoring what the little boys and girls were learning this evening about the covenant of works: that Adam had failed to comply to the terms of the covenant of works. We live in a fallen world that’s under the curse. Creation itself groans and travails in pain, waiting for what? The regeneration of all things. And if you turn right to the very end of Zechariah, there are things there that you won’t understand, but you’ll get this much at least: that God is doing something that will transform this sinful world into a world that is altogether holy, where everything is holy.
It’s what we are looking forward to, isn’t it? ‘Why do you think you will like heaven if you don’t like holiness now?’ That’s what Zechariah is saying. These people had such compromise. They had spent sixteen years building their own houses instead of the house of God. They wanted holiness, but only that much…you know, a bit like Augustine: “Give me chastity, but not yet.” Not yet.
Zechariah was saying to them, why do you think you will like the new heavens and new earth if you don’t like holiness now? If you find it burdensome and irksome, and inconvenient now?
Oh, my friends! Praise God for meddlesome preachers! And I want you to enter into a little covenant tonight, that every preacher who ever preaches from this pulpit will be a meddlesome preacher, no matter who he is. Oh, for men like Haggai and Zechariah, who seemingly turned the whole world upside down in the year 520, and wrought, for a short time at least, a little glimpse of heaven: zeal and determination and courage, and men and women who are on fire for God! And that’s what we need. May God grant it.
Let’s pray together.
Father in heaven, we thank You for this little glimpse of a year long, long ago…that we need intervention in our own time. We feel ourselves to be so weak and often so compromised, and often taken up with the trivial. And we pray that we might be men and women who love God more than we love anything else or anyone else, and grant it, we pray, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Please stand and receive the Lord’s benediction.
Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.