Consider Your Ways

Consider your ways is said twice in three verses, and the second time nothing has been added to it.

Here is where it lands. The foundation of the temple had been laid years before and the work had stopped, and the reason had become respectable through repetition: 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 building projects. Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled houses, and this house lie waste? Cieled means panelled, the expensive interior finish. The money and the timber existed. They had gone into the rooms people lived in.

Then the audit, item by item. 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 the two situations are not the same shape. There is no unbuilt temple on a hill with your name attached. Haggai's hearers were also told outright what was causing the shortfall. I did blow upon it, God says of the harvest, and two verses on, I called for a drought upon the land. You have not been told that, and a thin year in your accounts is no evidence that God is blowing on your wages. A prophet said it to them, with his name on it, and nobody has said it to you.

What comes through intact is the command, and it was never information. Consider your ways. Look at where the effort actually went this year, against where you would say it went. And then the sentence Haggai was given the moment they turned, before one beam had been cut: I am with you, saith the LORD.

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