Welcome to episode 3.
In the last 2 episodes I explained the heart behind the podcast and did a brief overview of how we’ll approach Bible study together. If you haven’t listened to those episodes I encourage you to pause this right here and click back to episode 1 and 2 before moving on!
If you’ve stuck around through episode 1 and 2, I’m so glad you're here and this week comes the fun part…we get to dive into God’s word together.
I wonder, did you guess what book of the Bible we’re going to study together first? Drumroll please ---- out of all 66 books of the Bible, we’re going to start studying in Haggai! Did you guess that? If you did, please go find me on social media @whitney akin and let me know. I will be thoroughly impressed.
Ok, so, If you’re thinking Haggai? Really? I get it. Haggai is a book you might have read one time. Maybe you don’t even recognize the name. It’s only 2 short chapters which means it’s easy to miss. Haggai is also smack dab in the middle of the Bible right at the end of the Old Testament. And yes, I know, the middle is a strange place to start. Haggai isn’t your go-to Bible study book. But we’re going there on this podcast.
Let me give you my short defense for studying the the book of Haggai:
- I love it. And I’m hoping you will too after a few weeks together.
- It’s smack dab in the middle of the Bible. Which initially might seem like a negative, but actually, I think it’s a pretty great place to start. Here’s why:
- Starting in the middle means we have to look both backward and forward to get a feel for where we are in scripture. This gives us a chance to flex our Bible study muscles and, hopefully, give us a helpful roadmap for the context of biblical history
- Haggai is so super relevant to our world today. If you don’t buy that claim, give me a few episodes to convince you otherwise.
So we’ll start like any good Bible study should start, with establishing some context for the book of Haggai.
- First, who is the author of Haggai? This one is pretty simple to identify. Haggai is written by Haggai the prophet. The book of Haggai records what Haggai heard from God and spoke to the people.
- What is the genre of this book? Haggai is a prophetic book. It’s considered one of the minor prophets of the old testament.
- A couple of notes here: minor prophet doesn’t mean Haggai was a lesser prophet but rather his work is much shorter than other prophets like Jeremiah or Ezekiel.
- Prophets in the bible are men and sometimes women who were given specific messages from God to communicate to God’s people.
- Prophetic literature is it’s own genre and should be should be read with an understanding of the genre it’s written in. Some important things to note about prophetic literature.
- Often it tells us about events that will happen in the future. But this might not be the more important aspect of prophetic literature. Rather it’s the prophet’s job to call out the sin of a people in order to turn their hearts back to the work of God around them.
- We could say that a prophet is willing to call out and correct God’s people with God’s words.
- Prophetic literature is often symbolic and can contain hyperbole (that’s a statement of extreme. We hear these a lot in our culture, like I’m literally obsessed with new face lotion -- would be hyperbole) Prophetic literature can also contain metaphor which is used to describe something with descriptions that are meant to convey feeling, paint a picture, or create deeper understanding but not meant to be taken literally (for example, the trees danced in the wind doesn’t mean trees literally danced, but you get the picture…literally). It’s important as readers to learn to identify when we’re encountering metaphor or hyperbole.
- And yes, I know this podcast now sounds like an English class, but, ahem I am an English major, so sorry…and the truth is the Bible is a book, so we are going to apply rules of studying literature to this book to study it well.
- And one final note on the prophetic genre…I believe the Bible is infallible which means it is incapable of being wrong because it is the inspired word of God. This means I believe the Bible is wholly trustworthy.
- When we use words like inerrant or infallible some people believe this means we must read everything in the Bible from a literal standpoint, and in many instances we should, like creation, the fall, the flood, and so on. But we should also respect and understand the the use of literary technique of the books of the Bible in order to read them well and understand them better.
OK, let’s move on to timeline. Now we’re going to move from English class to World history. Timeline is really important to the book of Haggai. This is designated early on in the text.
Let’s read verse 1:
In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the world of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel the governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest.
Ok, there’s so much good stuff in this one verse for setting the scene Haggai. Obviously from those very specific dates, the “when” of this book is really important.
So let’s look at the first line – in the second year of Darius the king.
Ok, world history time, and just a reminder, world history and biblical history aren’t two different things. They’re intertwined together.
After Solomon’s reign, Israel split into two kingdoms. There was the northern kingdom called Israel and the southern kingdom called Judah. Both kingdoms sinned against God and God sent prophets to both to call them to repentance, to remember the covenant God made with his people through Moses. The prophets reminded the people of the curses God promised would come if they did not obey his commands. They also reminded them of the blessings God promised if his people were obedient.
But if you’ve read any amount of the Old Testament, you know the people didn’t listen to the prophets. Amos and Hosea were prophets sent by God to the northern Kingdom of Israel to warn them of their coming destruction. The Israelites in the northern kingdom did not repent of their ways and in 721 BC they were invaded and defeated by Assyria.
Still the southern kingdom of Judah remained. They had their own prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah warning them of their impending destruction if they did not repent and turn back to the Lord their God. The prophets told of the powerful Babylon coming to capture Judah , and of course, they were right. Babylon invaded Judah and took it’s people into captivity. Though this happened over some time, Nebechanezzar, the king of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC.
Daniel, a popular book we learn as kids in Sunday school with stories like Daniel in the Lions den and Shadrach Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnaces come from this time. Daniel was living in Judah when the Babylonians invaded and was one of the captives taken into exile.
Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, raided the temple, took all the Holy artifacts, and leveled the temple to the ground. This is a very important detail to remember for the book of Haggai.
You can imagine the Jews were devastated, humiliated, and humbled.
But their grief was deeper than their defeat. For the Jewish person living in Judah at this time, the temple represented their central place for worship. The temple was the place they offered sacrifices to God to atone for their sins and the sins of the community. It’s the place God designated as Holy for his presence to reside among his people. This temple was the center of the Jewish religious life. For it to be destroyed and the people displaced meant they had no place to go to experience the presence of God or offer sacrifices for their sins. They had no place of worship.
The destruction of the temple was monumental for the Jewish nation. God made it clear through his prophets that this exile was punishment for his people rejecting his law and loving idols rather than the God who delivered them and set them apart as a nation for himself.
But God is a God of second chances, a God who will keep his covenant promises because of his holy name and so the exile wasn’t the end of the story. God promised through his prophets that a remnant of the people would return again to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. A remnant is a small remaining part of something. God is always faithful to save a remnant for himself, that’s part of the greater storyline of the Bible. God promised that this remnant of people would return after 70 years of captivity.
True to his word, Babylon, the great world power, fell to Persia. Cyrus the Great was the king of Persia. After his army conquered Babylon, he made the residents of Babylon part of the Persian empire. One of his first acts as king was to send the prisoners of Babylon back to their homelands, notably, this included the exiles from Judah.
Can we just stop for a moment and acknowledge something amazing. If you look up fall of Babylon or Cyrus the Great on Google, you can find all this information quite easily. This is world history. What we often don’t hear about is the way biblical history is weaved throughout. The world around us likes to compartmentalize biblical history and world history. But it’s not coincidence that Babylon fell to Persia in 539 BC. Cyrus ordered allowed a group of Jews to return to Jerusalem in 538 BC. The temple was rebuilt in 516 BC. If you’re doing the math, that means between the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 586 BC and the rebuilding of the temple in 516 BC was exactly 70 years. We can’t deny that what God prophesied through Jeremiah and Ezekiel was then played out in world powers unaware of God, his word, his plan, or his purposes. But we get to see the glory of his story unfold.
After Cyrus, Darius became king of Persia.
That’s where our little book of Haggai begins - in the 2nd year of king Darius which was 520 BC. A group of Jewish people had returned to Jerusalem, they had started to rebuild the temple about 18 years earlier, but opposition from surrounding countries arose against their building. So they stopped construction of the temple. All they completed was an altar and a small part of the foundation. For nearly two decades, the rest of the temple sat unfinished.
Again, this is a very important detail to the message of Haggai.
And finally we want to answer who was Haggai’s audience? God sent Haggai at this pivotal moment in world and biblical history with a message to the exiles returned from Babylon 70 years after captivity. Think about it, this is a new generation, most of these men and women had only heard stories of their home country from the parents and grandparents before they returned to Jerusalem. The Jews who remembered Judah before captivity would have been old men and women at that point. A new generation was tasked with reestablishing their war-torn nation.
This is the remnant of the people God promised to save in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. This is the people set apart for God to continue to establish his covenant with his people. This group of people has a hard and holy task to undertake.
There are also two notable people among Haggai’s audience that Haggai will reference several times throughout his book.
They are Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah and Joshua, son of Jehozadak the high priest.
These two men will prove significant for Haggai’s message and God’s plan for this remnant of people. For now, what I want you to notice is that Haggai calls out both the governor who is the ruler of the people, the one in authority over this remnant and the high priest who represents the religious leadership of the people. Haggai is appealing to the authority of this exiled community. Their leadership will remain important as we read and study more.
So here it is: the who, what, when, and where of Haggai.
Ok, friends, we’ve done some English, we’ve done some History, we’ve done the hard work of establishing context for our little book of Haggai. It takes some time, but it’s well worth getting this foundation under our feet as we begin to read Haggai’s words for this people.
Next week we hear Haggai’s first word to the people. You can read Haggai in preparation, especially chapter 1 verses 1-11. Remember it’s short, only two chapters! You can probably read it once a day until next week and not even spend 5 minutes doing it. Repetition creates familiarity and familiarity creates understanding.
I can’t wait to read study more with you!