Chaos and end times

God is shaking us! We live in a chaos everywhere in the world. God does this to change us because we have become only flesh, desire, violence, grid, and have forgotten our Creator and His commandments. But He still loves us and does everything to make us awake up and change for our own good.  

A poem from a Nazi Germany Victim Pastor Niemoeller:

‘First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out – 

because I was not a Jew

Then they came for the communists

and I did not speak out – 

because I was not a communist

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out – 

because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for me

and there was no one left to speak for me’

Haggai’s encouragement to rebuild the temple in the face of the Jews’ neglect brings to mind the apostle Paul’s exhortation to Christians to build our lives on the foundation of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:10–17). Are you building a life that reflects your status as a temple of the Holy Spirit, leaving a legacy that will stand the test of time? Find encouragement for that construction project in the four passionate sermons from this Old Testament prophet.

Most people are too glutted on selfishness to even notice the dire situation we are in and how it mirrors the prelude to World War i and World War ii. But even for those who do see the danger—who are racing around the world trying to create peace—who among them talks about God? Who says anything about looking to His house and serving Him? Even the ambassadors of peace are just trying to use human reasoning and pressure to stabilize things so everyone can get back to luxuriating inside their ceiled houses.

Where is God in this world crisis? Where is His will, His wisdom, His input, His reason? Man is trying to solve his own problems and telling God, Just stay out of it! We’ll take care of it ourselves! But human beings can’t solve these conflicts. After millennia of war and two world wars in the past century, that ought to be obvious to anybody!

Our entrenched problems and conflicts are of such great magnitude that only our Creator can solve them. But we leave God out of the picture. So He tells us, Consider the way you’re living. The Hebrew in Haggai 1:5 means to set your heart on your ways. God is telling you to ask yourself, Am I really thinking the way God wants me to? Or are all my efforts just directed toward myself?

God is shaking the nations! And He is just starting. Conditions are going to get a hundredfold worse.

Notice: God repeats this to drive it home to us: “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. Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Consider your ways” (verses 6-7). God is reasoning with people who are focused on themselves and their possessions—people who are working harder and harder yet have less and less. He points out to us: You’re not being blessed. We’re not receiving prosperity and peace and happy marriages and families. Yet all of those are blessings God wants to give us! So why are we not experiencing those blessings? God says, Consider your ways. You’re not living the way that causes these things you desire! Consider your ways!

God wants to give these blessings to us—to the whole world. And the Bible promises He will do it—within the next few years! Can God just take us as we are—selfish, evil, godless, ungrateful, greedy, violent—and pour all these blessings on us? Or does He need to shake us and correct us first?

Correction

“Ye looked for much, and, lo, it came to little; and when ye brought it home, I did blow upon it. Why? saith the Lord of hosts. Because of mine house that is waste, and ye run every man unto his own house” (Haggai 1:9).

What does that mean? God’s “house” is His work of proclaiming His message of warning and repentance and hope. That message ought to be going out to the world with power! But the people God is addressing are not concerned about that! God says, You are concerned aboutyour house and your work, your ideas, your thoughts.

And when you try to acquire more for yourself, you are just putting those earnings into a sack with holes. That way of life never works out.

“Because of mine house that is waste, and ye run every man unto his own house. Therefore the heaven over you is stayed from dew, and the earth is stayed from her fruit. And I called for a drought upon the land, and upon the mountains, and upon the corn, and upon the new wine, and upon the oil, and upon that which the ground bringeth forth, and upon men, and upon cattle, and upon all the labour of the hands” (verses 9-11). God called for a drought upon the land. Do you think God wouldn’t do that? Do you think God’s job is to only send blessings of wealth and peace, and to never send you the blessing of punishment and correction?

God is going to get our attention one way or the other, and if we are so stubborn that He has to use deep horror to do it, He will. In fact, He has already prophesied it. God is shaking us out of our selfish little empire!

Another Way

But there are some few people on Earth who have a totally different lifestyle. God discusses them too. Haggai 1:12 describes more about Haggai’s end-time prophecy: “Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God, and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God had sent him, and the people did fear before the Lord.”

These people do something different: They fear God. And look what happens to their lives: They are blessed at every turn. God wants to give the rest of the world such blessings, and He will! That is what this is all about—that is why the nations are being shaken! God is going to insist that they have these blessings and have their desires for peace and joy filled.

“Then spake Haggai the Lord’s messenger in the Lord’s message unto the people, saying, I am with you, saith the Lord” (verse 13). I, God, am with you! That is why you’re being blessed! I am with you! He is not with those in the nations who need to be shaken from rank selfishness and rebellion and sin. They don’t want God with them! They want to build their own empires, not God’s. But they still want Him to give them rain and crops and peace and safety—and then to stay out of their business.

This tiny minority is not that way, and God says: “I am with you.” “And the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the people; and they came and did work in the house of the Lord of hosts, their God” (verse 14). That effort just prospered and prospered and prospered. That is amazing.

Jeremiah 8 tells a similar story. It shows how God is going to bring His judgment upon our peoples because, as verse 9 says, “they have rejected the word of the Lord.” Verse 11 describes how people are going around “saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.” They want so desperately to believe that they can solve the world’s problems—but those false hopes are going to explode in their faces!

Isaiah 59:8 says, “The way of peace they know not”! This world’s ambassadors, diplomats, presidents and prime ministers don’t know the way of peace! Soon the chaos that this world is descending into will grow so fierce that they will have to acknowledge that truth!

God wants to show us how to have peace. All these prophecies of the troubled time we live in show us, in spectacular detail, where this is all leading. At the end of these crises, Jesus Christ is going to return! Though chaos will engulf the nations for a few short years—tribulation so severe it will shake mankind to its knees—Christ will come to put an end to all that trouble, those who will die without repentance will be lost forever and those who will live and change and return to Him will live with Him forever in Peace, Love and Joy.   

Oh! Lord Jesus Christ come fast we need you!

A humble messenger of God