The people listened to the voice of their God

The Word of God changes us. In Haggai 1:12 we read something that is rather startling in Haggai’s prophecy. In the first 11 verses of Haggai’s prophecy, we basically have rebuke and correction and criticism and exposure of Judah’s laxity and slackness about the public worship of their God. But what was their response to that word? And this is such an unusual thing because you hardly ever read anything like this response you hear of Israel or Judah to the Word of God. It almost unbelievably says, then Zerubbabel and Joshua and all the remnant of the people listened to the voice of Yahweh, their God. Well, that you might say would be the normal thing: that if God speaks, his people obey and they listen. But it is so unusual. It is like you saying to your son or daughter, I want you to go and make your bed, and that child says to you, Yes, of course, and runs up the stairs and gets right to it! Come on, how often does that happen? That is the kind of thing you have here. If Jeremiah, the prophet, were reading Haggai’s prophecy and he came to Haggai 1:12 and read there Zerubbabel, Joshua and all the remnant of the people listened to the voice of Yahweh, their God, I think he would say, You have got to be kidding! People don't do that. You speak the Word of the Lord for years and years and years and they don't do that. Jeremiah might not be able to understand that; it was so unusual.

What was it maybe that explains this obedience and this response? You see, I think we ought to be encouraged by this. Haggai spoke the Word and God's people listened to that as the Word of God, and it ought to give us something we can easily neglect. It ought to say this to us: God's people can obey God's Word. We ought to agree to that, but sometimes it sounds so unusual that we tend not to think of it. Sometimes God's Word / Haggai’s Word, may be a word of correction and they can respond to that correction and repent, and they can be restored. God's people can obey God's Word. We are not locked in to hopeless disobedience. What explains their obedience? I think we might find it in their attitude in the last part of Haggai 1:12: then the people feared before Yahweh. To translate it more literally, it says, then the people feared from before Yahweh. It is not just a fear in the sense of reverence or respect, it is that, but it is a little more, it is a fear from before. There is a little bit of a touch of the right kind of terror in it. There is a touch of trembling in it. Now, not all fear is bad. That is a kind of an American cultural myth that all fear is bad. Not all fear is bad. It must have been that perhaps the Word of Haggai produced this fear in them, and at the same time it may also explain why they accepted Haggai’s criticism, because there was this attitude of genuine fear and a sense of trembling before the authority of God's Word. Because it was God's Word. If you do not have that respect and that right kind of fear, it is not likely that you will get obedience.

For example; when a father tells his child to do something and the child defies the authority of the father and disobeys, what kind of response might the child get? Well, maybe there will be threats laid on or the father may launch into a verbal tirade. But if the father never backs up his words or his commands, it does not take long for that child to say, Aha, it does not really matter if I disobey because he may get angry and he may go into a rage even, but he does not follow through on it. I can do what I want! There's not going to be any proper fear leading to obedience. But if after three times in the face of such defiance you turn your child over your knee and you spank it with your hand so that it stings, then soon things begin to percolate. And when you say to do or not to do something, there is a certain healthy fear, trembling, knowing that, yes, there are consequences if I don't listen. And it is that attitude that can foster obedience, a proper kind of fear. Now perhaps it is not a very good, rough analogy, but if there is this atmosphere, this attitude of a proper fear toward God and toward his Word, that is in place in a believer’s life, it will lead him or her to respond obediently to God.

Isaiah 66:2 says, the Lord said, this is the man to whom I will look; he who has a humble and contrite spirit and who trembles at My Word. I do trust that you know something of what it means to tremble before God and before his Word. And that you know that that trembling is not something that is divorced from joy. Do you know what it is to have joy and trembling at the same time, and that they are not mutually exclusive? But the thing I want you to see is not so much the particular attitude that they had when they obeyed this Word, but primarily that this Word of God did change God's people. It worked obedience in them. They listened to this Word and they responded to it obediently, and perhaps we need to pick up that cue.¹

Dale Ralph Davis