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Oct 03, 2021

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Passage: Habakkuk 2:20

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Rebuild - Haggai

Keywords: servant, destroy, shake, lord of hosts, signet ring, overthrow

Life is full of disappointments--hopes and expectations dashed. With each we feel the metaphorical wind knocked out of us. And then we either look for ways to get back up or resign ourselves to hoping for nothing. Israel had been called to rebuild its common life after decades in exile. It took Haggai loosening his tongue before Israel would repent of its spiritual inertia and recover its sense of identity, community, and purpose. But it didn’t do so merely to keep busy, for fear of losing hope. It was the hope of the story they were in that kept them in the work. Disappointment will hunt you, and often find you. What’s to keep us from being swallowed by it?

Readings & Scripture

PREPARATION: Based on Lamentations 3:21-26
LEADER: Let us call to mind the reason for our hope: Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”

ALL: The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

CENTRAL TEXT: Haggai 2:20-23
The word of the LORD came a second time to Haggai on the twenty-fourth day of the month, 21 “Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, 22 and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms. I am about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations, and overthrow the chariots and their riders. And the horses and their riders shall go down, every one by the sword of his brother. 23 On that day, declares the LORD of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel my servant, the son of Shealtiel, declares the LORD, and make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, declares the LORD of hosts.”

BENEDICTION: adapted from Revelation 22:21-22
LEADER: He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.”
ALL: Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
LEADER: The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all.
ALL: And also with you!

Related SCRIPTURES:

  • 1 Chronicles 28:6
  • Song of Solmon 8:6
  • Daniel 2:44
  • Jeremiah 22:24 / Ezekiel 28:12
  • Matthew 1:12-13 / Luke 3:27
  • Matthew 24:7
  • Luke 23:35
  • 1 Peter 2:6-8
  • Revelation 19:20-21

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. A question to make you lean back, place your hands behind your head, exhale deeply, and ponder: How might the world have been different if we’d never heard of Jesus--if Jesus had never been?
  2. In these last four verses of this last of Haggai’s four sermons, what’s the gist? What’s being promised? What significance might that have held for those who heard it? Why would it have been a surprising claim?
  3. Extra Credit question: The text doesn’t say, so any thoughtful answer will do: why focus this last sermon to Zerubbabel, and not include Joshua the High Priest (in a departure from earlier passages)?
  4. What sets Zerubbabel apart for the promise made to him? That is, how is he described that would furnish him to be what Haggain envisions for him?
  5. What if any connection are you aware of between Zerubbabel and Jesus? (This is an open-book quiz, so you can check.) In keeping with how Jesus becomes the interpretive key to the whole bible (Luke 24:26-27), how are we perhaps supposed to see that connection?
  6. Another question from the deep end: how might the fact of Jesus’s life, and of the biblical storyline of which He is the center, “donate” to us some of the deeply entrenched beliefs we take for granted–e.g. Human rights, the dignity and concern for the poor, the sanctity of the body, the virtue of forgiveness? If you have time, watch the interview with historian Tom Holland, and then return to the first question: how would the world have been different if Jesus had never been?
  7. How then has Jesus both already “conquered” and has work still to do?

QUOTES:

  • That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths … The truest and ultimate seedbed … was the book of Genesis. Tom Holland
  • [Christianity ventures] the notion that … [all] men were equal in dignity – an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance. Luc Ferry
  • To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it – the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilisation to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross. Tom Holland
  • Heaven is full of people with nothing to prove. Steven Vicchio, Ivan & Adolf: The Last Man in Hell

BOOKS / DOCS

SERMONS / TALKS: