Consider Your Ways

In the first chapter of Haggai, God says "Consider your ways" twice within three verses, and the second time He adds nothing to it.

Here is the setting. Years before, the people who came back from exile had laid the foundation of the temple, and then the work had stopped. Their excuse had become respectable by being repeated: "This people say, The time is not come, the time that the LORD's house should be built." Meanwhile, the same people had finished their own houses. So God asks, "Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled houses, and this house lie waste?" Cieled means panelled, the expensive finish on the inside walls. The money and the timber were there, but they had gone into the rooms the people lived in.

Then comes a list of what their year had been like: "Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes."

Now set that beside your own week, carefully, because your situation and theirs are not the same shape. There is no unfinished temple on a hill with your name on it. Haggai's hearers were also told plainly what was causing their shortfall. God said of their harvest, "I did blow upon it," and two verses later He said, "I called for a drought upon the land." You have not been told that. A thin year in your bank account is no proof that God is blowing on your wages. A prophet said those words to them, with God's name on them, and nobody has said them to you.

What does carry over whole is the command itself, and it was always more than information: "Consider your ways." Look honestly at where your time and effort really went this year, and compare it with where you would say it went. Then hear what God said the moment the people turned, before a single beam had been cut: "I am with you, saith the LORD." That is the God you are turning back to.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 112 is Going Out and Coming In (Psalm 121:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two