God will shake heaven and earth

Darius was an enterprising army officer and he thought it was a good time to get the throne, and he got the throne. But for the first year of Darius’ reign as the Emperor of Persia, he had to fight battles everywhere. It looked like the whole empire was disintegrating. He tells us in an inscription that he had to fight nineteen major battles and capture nine rebel leaders. The whole empire seemed to be shaken. And so Haggai’s hearers would have known what shaking was about. And in Haggai 2:22 God says to the believing people, I will overthrow chariots and their drivers, and the horses and their riders will fall, each by the sword of his brother. Now for those who listened to Haggai, that would have reminded them of something. If you know your Bible, when were God’s people attacked and chased by a very powerful king, with chariots and horses and they all went into the sea and perished? Do you remember the Pharaoh of the exodus? It`s the same language here, and so God is saying through Haggai, I have done it before! I guess in the old days they thought Pharaoh was very impressive and powerful. But he was not as strong as he looked, and God says, - I have done it before and I can do it again.

The application of this to us seems very far away and long ago, but we are surrounded by powers and influences that are seeking to squeeze us into their mold. So when an employer, those of us who are in paid employment, says to us, as they often do nowadays, You really have to make your career top priority, and—they do not use the word worship but they mean it—you have to worship your career. That is how it is to get on in the world. When they say that, they are setting themselves up as a throne that God will need to shake. It is not as strong as it seems and we need to have the confidence to resist it. When our peer group, the kind of people we belong with, whose affirmation we want, says to us you must adopt our society’s attitude to money—to borrow, borrow, borrow, and spend, spend, spend, because that is how people live nowadays—then we need to have the confidence to say that actually, it is not as strong as it looks; it is deceptively strong: these things, in the ways in which our society seeks to squeeze us into its mold.

We need to be able to resist, and it is very hard, isn’t it? My guess is that if we were honest with one another about our workplaces, or schools; the kinds of places where we belong with other people and where we are with non-Christians, if we were honest with one another we would say, I really want to be a consistent Christian, but I find it very hard; the pressures on me are incredibly hard to resist. I am sure we would admit that if we were honest. And the message of these first two verses 21–22 is that God is going to shatter and shake and overthrow these thrones, these authorities, these things that seem so powerful and impressive. They are not as grand as they look.¹

Christopher Ash