As I have mentioned here recently, our Senior Bible Fellowship Bible study group at Faith PRC is studying the prophecy of Haggai this winter. Our last study focused on the first prophecy of this prophet of Jehovah found in chapter 1, and this coming week we will be entering chapter 2 and the other three prophecies the Lord gave His servant to proclaim.
Pastor R. Kleyn has been doing a series on this prophecy in his congregation, Covenant of Grace PRC in Spokane, WA. Last week he preached on the last part of Haggai, chap.2:10-19. Tied to that was some quotes placed in the church bulletin from Rev. Ron Hanko’s commentary on Haggai, The Coming of Zion’s Redeemer, which we are also making use of in our Bible study. It is a marvelous exposition and application of the gospel revealed in Haggai.
In this blog post, we repeat these quotes here, adding at the end one of John Calvin’s prayers following his lectures on this section of Haggai 2. May it serve for our spiritual profit.
God tells the Jews to look back to the time four months before when they were still neglecting the house of God and work of building the house, to the time before one stone had been laid on another in the temple, when only the foundations had been laid and nothing more done. He is telling them, not only to think back but literally to “lay it to heart. He is going to remind them once more of the judgments they had experienced and suffered through drought and crop failure, and is going to give them these things once again as signs of his blessing.
He wants them to know that disobedience brings wrath and that his favor and blessing come only in the way of obedience. That is a perennial problem with God’s people, who think they can have it both ways. They think they can enjoy the blessing and favor of God while continuing in ways that are displeasing to God. They think that their salvation and status as people of God guarantee them uninterrupted enjoyment of God’s goodness.
It is not so. Salvation itself cannot be lost, but the enjoyment of it can and is lost when we disobediently and hard-heartedly go our own way and refuse to hear the warnings of God’s Word. The lack of true happiness and peace that are the lot of so many Christians today, the terrors of conscience they suffer, their troubled lives, mental anguish and coldness are more often than not the result of the fact that they do not lay to heart what God says here.
…Let us, then, labor faithfully and diligently, each in the place God has given, in prayer, in the preaching of the gospel, in the reading and studying of God’s Word, in the instruction of our children, in missions, and in all the others ways in which God’s spiritual house is built, its stones gathered and shaped and fitted into place, and it built up as an habitation of God through the Spirit. We have the promise of God’s blessing to encourage us and to show that he is pleased with the labors of our hands. We have that blessing in the outpouring of the Spirit, who comes as rain upon dry ground, to refresh our souls, we have in the great harvest of the blessings of salvation, in the fields white for harvest, in shelter from the winds of change that blow in church and state, and in protection from the enemies of the church.
Prayer of Calvin after lecture number 132 (on the minor prophets, Haggai 2:10-14):
Grant, Almighty God, that inasmuch as we come from our mother’s womb wholly impure and polluted, and afterwards continually contract so many new defilements, – O grant that we may flee to the fountain, which alone can cleanse us. And as there is no other way by which we can be cleansed from all the defilements of the flesh, except we be sprinkled by the blood of thy only begotten Son, and that by the hidden power of thy Spirit, and thus renounce all our vices, – O grant that we may so strive truly and sincerely to devote ourselves to thee, as daily to renounce more and more all our evil affections, and to have nothing else as our object, but to submit our minds and all our affections to thee, by really denying ourselves, and to exercise ourselves in this strenuous effort as long as we are in this world, until we attain to that true and perfect purity, which is laid up for us in thine only-begotten Son, when we shall be fully united to him, having been transformed into that glory into which he has been received. Amen.