Bible Commentaries
Haggai 2

Verse 5

THE SPIRIT AND THE MINISTRY

( A Whit-Sunday Sermon)

‘My Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.’

Haggai 2:5

The Spirit of God is God the Holy Ghost, with His manifold gifts; where He is, is all good, there is life, and light, and fire of Love. He is the Lord, the Giver of Life; as the soul is in the body so God the Holy Ghost is in the Church, Himself its life, and bestowing on all and each every good gift as each and all have need.

I. For us who are spared to give thanks again another year to Almighty God for the fullness of His great Pentecostal gift, it might be enough that we repeat our great hymn of faith, and testify our unchanged belief steadfastly in that faith once delivered to the saints; for it is a chief use of the recurring festivals of the Church, that year by year, in spite of the discordant utterances which we may have heard, we testify that our faith is still unchanged, so we give thanks to God and say ‘the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one: the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, yet not three Gods but one God.’ God is one and yet three, three Persons and one God, God the Holy Ghost is one, yet are three diversities of gifts. We cannot speak of them all; but of one point in reference to all we should make sure, that the Holy Spirit is the author of them all; so varied, so wonderful, so beautiful are the manifold Divine intricacies in which we live, that it is in some sense not wonderful if man becomes absorbed and confounded in his researches and discoveries in the things which he sees. We are reminded of the Author and Giver of life. He is the finger of God, giving as it were the last touch to all the perfection and beauty which we see around us. Of all His varied operations let us confess again that He is the Perfecter and continued support. And yet while we cannot speak of all, or of many of the operations of the Holy Spirit, one, and that a most principal one, the Church brings again prominently before us to-day; to-day is Whitsuntide and also the beginning of Ember week, the week that is set apart by the Church, with special prayer and fasting, in preparation for the ordination next Sunday. Next Sunday our Archbishops and Bishops will again begin the hymn, ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,’ singing it as a solemn prayer while the candidates are kneeling waiting for admittance into the holy office of priesthood. It would be a blasphemous mockery and impudent imposition to use the words ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost, for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands,’ unless the ministry is intended to be a peculiar channel of Divine grace, and to be regarded as the appointed instrument for singular operations of God the Holy Ghost; unless, in fact, it claims Divine authority and power. On Whitsunday, the Sunday which begins the Ember week, the week of special preparation for the Christian ministry, we may well again repeat our belief in the old teaching of the Christian Church: that the ministry which we have is according to the will of Christ our Lord, and actuated by the Divine Presence of God the Holy Ghost. ‘My Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.’

II. An apostolic ministry does not mean merely a ministry springing out of the earth at the date when the Apostles lived, but a ministry which through the Apostles has the Divine sanction of the will of our Lord Himself. It is this ultimate resolution of the ministry into the Divine will which is at once the cause of the contention, and which is alone worth contending for. Our Blessed Lord forewarned us that it would be so when He asked that vital question regarding the ministry of the Baptist, ‘The baptism of John, was it from heaven or of men? answer Me.’ The Pharisees felt the danger of saying definitely it was from men, for the people still believed in the supernatural and in God; all men counted John as a prophet, but far more did they see the importance of committing themselves to a statement that the ministry was Divine, ‘If we shall say from Heaven, he will say, Why then did ye not believe him?’ To believe in the minister would involve them in a belief in Christ, belief in Christ must imply confession of sinfulness and absolute self-surrender. They felt the pressure of the Divine Presence in the question of the origin of the ministry: they adopted a consistent Agnostic position, and withheld their confession both of the ministry and of Christ. The same warning is implied in other words of our Lord regarding His own ministry. ‘I am come in My Father’s name, and ye receive Me not; if another should come in his own name, him ye will receive.’ To come in one’s own name is to come to the world as one of its own, and the world will receive its own. The greater the ability the more flattered does the world seem by the greatness of one of its own; it is but a part of itself after all that it is called upon to obey. But if a man come in the name of another, and that other not of this world but from above, then the whole relation becomes changed, and the sinful creature feels instinctively a shrinking at the Divine authority and Presence, which through the messenger is drawing men. ‘I am come in My Father’s name, and ye receive Me not.’ Such a ministry could not, of course, be taken up and laid aside like a mere civil appointment. This Hooker has admirably expressed: ‘They which have once received this power may not think to put it off and on like a cloak as the weather suiteth: to take it, reject and resume it, as oft as themselves list, of which profane and impious contempt these later times have yielded, as of all other kinds of iniquity and apostasy, strange examples; but let them know who put their hands unto this plough, that once consecrated unto God they are made His peculiar heritage for ever. Suspensions may stop, and deprivations utterly put off the use or exercise of power before given; but voluntarily it is not in the power of man to separate and pull asunder what God by His authority coupleth.’ And this was evidently the teaching of the Church at the close of the second century, for Tertullian rallies the heretics of his day with their ‘careless, capricious, and inconsistent ordinations,’ wherefore he says,’ One man is Bishop to-day, another to-morrow; to-day deacon who to-morrow will be reader; to-day Presbyter who to-morrow will be layman, for even to laymen,’ he adds, ‘they commit the priestly offices.’ Such a system he well calls ‘futilis, humana, terrena.’ It tells nothing against this Divine origin and power of the ministry that it borrows names and outward form from organisations existing in the world in which it works; this is nothing more than the taking of the dust of the ground to make the first Adam, or taking of the flesh of the Blessed Virgin to accomplish the Incarnation of the Son of God. This was done, ‘not by the conversion of the Godhead into Flesh, but by taking the Manhood into God.’ He was very God, and He became very Man, and the Spirit of God dwelt in Him without measure. We see Him in the tabernacle of His human flesh, full of grace and truth. The common thornbush of the desert, burning, yet unconsumed.

III. We may, then, on this festival of the Holy Spirit, acknowledge our thankfulness and encourage ourselves by the words of the Lord, ‘My Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.’ But the whole context of the passage teaches us that the possession of a ministry with Divine authority, and empowered with the Divine energy of the Holy Ghost, should be no mere substitute for human energy, or for the exercise and development to the uttermost of the human faculties. The message of the prophet Haggai conveyed indeed the essential assurance of the Divine Presence, ‘My spirit is amongst you,’ but it was also an earnest exhortation to work: ‘Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel! saith the Lord; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Josedech, the high priest, and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the Lord, and work.’ It is an exhortation, not only to work, but to combined, united work. We have, in this Ember week, been vindicating the special claim of the Christian ministry to a peculiar share in the supernatural gifts of Pentecost; but this implies no monopoly. When our Saviour ‘ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and received gifts for men.’ Not only Joshua the high priest, but also Zerubbabel the governor, and all the people are exhorted to take their part in the restoration of Jerusalem and work. It should be the same with us now. The clergy are not the Church, but the laity and clergy, the whole body of the faithful together.

Bishop Edward King.

Verse 9

THE LATTER AND THE FORMER GLORY

‘The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of Hosts.’

Haggai 2:9

The old men, whose memory could stretch back some seventy years, saw in their fond imagination the wonderful pile of Solomon’s Temple shining in gold, which borrowed richer hues than its own from the heart that had treasured during all these years the holy vision. How poor and prosaic and shrunken the walls of the new Temple seemed to them! Yet God assures them that the glory of the latter house should far exceed that of the former. As regards material splendour that would never be. Even regarding sacred relics and symbols, the second Temple would never approach the glory of the first. Where was now the ark with its wondrous treasures? Where the Shechinah and the Urim and the Thummin? All have passed away; and yet, says God, ‘The glory of the latter house shall be greater than of the former.’

I. The latter house recorded a fuller history of God’s working than the former.—The latter house was heir to all the stirring and wonderful memories of the former, and had its own great repository besides. The songs which were sung within its walls not only celebrated the Exodus and the other great deliverances for which their fathers praised the Lord, but the sorrows and hopelessness of Babylon, followed by the glorious restoration which filled their hearts with laughter, and their tongues with melody. And as the ages rolled over them, a richer accumulation of God’s wonderful works to His Chosen People inspired the praises of the sanctuary. The ‘latter house’ is ever in this respect more glorious than ‘the former.’ Of what a history of God’s providence and grace are we who live in these latter days cognisant! With what wonder and trust and joy should we, beyond all former ages, praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!

II. The latter house was the house of a purer worship than the former.—One great sin the Jews were cured of by their captivity in Babylon; that was the sin of idolatry. Before that time they were ever lapsing into it; and reformers, such as the good King Josiah, had to purge the very Temple itself of idols and idolatrous altars. God has said that His glory He will not give to graven images; and as a small cloud can hide for a time the glory of the sun, so the dark sin of idolatry obscured to a great extent the glory of God in His own house. When we serve God, Who is a Spirit, in spirit and in truth, the humblest cabin in which we may worship is lighted by purer and richer glory than the first Temple in its palmiest days.

III. The latter house received a greater Guest than the former.—The house is honoured by those who dwell in it and visit it. The poorest cottage is an incomparably more sacred and honoured place than the most celebrated and costly structures reared for any creatures other than man. In the former house more powerful kings, and grander choirs of singers, and more richly attired priests with costlier sacrifices, worshipped and served than in the latter; but the Lord, Whom true worshippers had ever sought and longed for, suddenly came to it, and so gave it a glory which the former had never known. A greater glory still may be ours. What! know ye not that ye are the temples of the Holy Ghost? Not as a casual guest does Christ seek to enter our hearts; He seeks to come in and abide with us—to be with us always, even to the end of the world.

IV. The latter house resounded with a clearer and grander message than the former.—In the former the worshipper spelt out the message of reconciliation and restored communion with fallen man by the help of bleeding victims and emblematic feasts; in the latter, the Saviour Himself cried—‘If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.’ And the apostles went thither and ‘preached all the words of this life.’ And to us of these latter times is the word of this salvation sent; and this is a message which makes the rudest barn more truly glorious than the first Temple in all its magnificence.

Illustration

‘There must have been something connected with the former Temple as compared with the latter Temple, constituting it a more fit representative of the Church of Christ. The cardinal distinction must have consisted in the more spiritual character which life, and faith, and worship assumed in the best times of Judaism after the Restoration, the Temple being of course understood to represent then, as of old, the theocratic community of which it was the centre. Rites and ceremonies retired more into the background; and prayer began to assume its true place in public worship. The religious knowledge of the people was kept up through the regular public reading and distribution of the Scriptures, which were early collected into their present canonical form. Synagogues were established, the people having learnt at Babylon that God’s Presence might be enjoyed in their assemblies in any place or circumstances. Thus there was kept alive throughout the nation a higher and purer type of religion than it had known in the days when the first Temple with its outward splendour and gorgeous ritual excited the admiration of the people, but too seldom led their thoughts to the contemplation of the truths it expressed and prefigured. These we regard as some of the characteristics of the second Temple, which on the one hand exalted it above its predecessor, and on the other assimilated it to the Church of Christ, of which it thus became the fit representative in the Divine promises. This was the true glory of the second Temple.’