SERMON VIII. THE BLESSING OF CALAMITIES. HAGGAI II. 20-23. Again the word of the Lord came to Haggai in the four and twentieth day of the month, saying, Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I will shake the heavens and the earth; and I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms; and I will destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the Heathen; and I will overthrow the chariots, and those that ride in them; and the horses and their riders shall come down, every one by the sword of his brother. In that day, saith the Lord of Hosts will I take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant, the son of Shealtiel, and will make thee as a signet; for I have chosen thee, saith the Lord of Hosts. THESE are the concluding words of the prophecies of Haggai; and they are the only portion of his writings which still remain for us to consider. For, though the last sermon did not come down beyond the fourteenth verse, the five which follow are little else than a repetition of what had already been declared in the first chapter in nearly the selfsame words. There, as here, the prophet sets forth that close connexion between temporal and moral evil, which God was pleased to manifest so especially and so wonderfully in the whole history of the children of Israel. He again tells the people how the lifeless powers of Nature, the barrenness of the earth, the scantiness of the harvest and of the vintage, the blasting and the mildew and the hail, had all been ordained to shew forth God's displeasure, when they turned aside from their appointed work of building His House. On the other hand he promises them that, from the very day on which they laid the foundation of the Lord's Temple, God would bless them. For it was thus, by punishments and by rewards, following close upon the acts which were displeasing or pleasing in God's sight, that He vouchsafed to teach His people in those ages of the childhood of the world. He taught them to eschew evil and to do good, by shewing them how, according to the course of the world, as appointed by Him, evil straightway brought forth woe, while obedience brought forth blessings; even as we in these days are wont to teach children, by punishing them when they do wrong, that pain is the natural and sure consequence of all sin. This lesson is taught in word in almost every page of the Old Testament; and it was taught to the Israelites in deed continually, from the very birth of their nation to the end of their existence. In fact the Old Testament is one continual declaration and shewing forth of this truth, that Sin, when it has conceived, brings forth Death. And though we, under our more spiritual dispensation, wherein we are taught and assisted to set our hearts continually on that which is unseen and invisible, do not so frequently receive the same outward visitations of judgement, yet the word which God spake at the beginning is still as true as ever: Sin of its own nature brings forth Death, and all the family of Death. Barrenness and leanness and discontent, the blasting and the mildew and the hail, wait upon the ungodly, and blight their hoped for enjoyments; and when they come, as the prophet says, to a heap of twenty measures, they find there are but ten; when they come to the pressfat to draw out fifty vessels, they find that there are but twenty. Yes, my brethren, assuredly, this is so still, as it was in the days of the prophet; and you all know that it is so. Your own hearts have borne witness to this truth time after time, whenever you have turned away from the service of God to gather up the pleasures of the world. You have lookt for twenty; and they have dwindled to ten : you have hoped to get fifty; and they have shrunk up into twenty. Nay, often the crop you have reapt will have proved to be the very opposite of what you expected. You have gone in chase of pleasure, and have only laid hold on pain, have sought strength, and have only found weakness and fear,—have gathered poison, instead of sweetness and nourishment,-repining and remorse, instead of joy. On the contrary the godly, they who give themselves up to their appointed work of building the House of the Lord, in whatsoever manner, to doing the Lord's will, still find that God blesses them, as He promises by the mouth of the prophet Haggai to bless the Israelites. God blesses them with peace. He blesses them with all manner of spiritual graces. He blesses them with the light of His countenance. Nay, under His blessing, they often find a change in their store, the very reverse of that which befalls the ungodly: they look for ten, and behold twenty: they come for twenty, and draw forth fifty. They look, as we look up to the heavens after sunset; and, lo! star after star comes forth; and whithersoever they turn their eyes, new stars, without number, appear. Even when the seed is yet in the barn, when the vine and the figtree and the pomegranate and the olive-tree have not yet brought forth, when their schemes are still in the bud, when their VOL. II. L wishes are unfulfilled, when they are casting their eyes forward into that future, which to all others is blank and - dark, they have the assurance that God will bless them, and will do far more for them than they can deserve, or even desire. On these points I spoke to you more fully, when we were treating of that part in the first chapter of our prophet, which answers almost word for word to the five verses just before our text; and I have merely toucht on them now, for the sake of explaining why I pass over these verses in this course of sermons, in which I have been endeavouring to lead you through the whole book of this prophet, and to help you in discerning how the words of the ancient prophets, though meant in the first instance to bear on the state of the Jews in their own times, do yet apply, and are full of spiritual instruction, to Christians in our days, and in all ages of the Church. To come now to the words of the text, -they also agree in the main with some which have come before us already in this chapter. For already had the prophet been commanded to announce God's purpose, how He would shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land, and how He would shake all nations, and the Desire of all nations should come. These words in the former part of this chapter are nearly the same as those in the text, in which the prophet declares the Lord's message: I will shake the heavens, and the earth; and I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms; and I will destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the Heathen; and I will overthrow the chariots, and those that ride in them; and the horses and their riders shall come down, every one by the sword of his brother. Now these words agree in their purport with those which stand immediately before them, and of which I have just been speaking, so far at least that they speak of God as executing judgement. They declare that God will shake the heavens and the earth, and will overthrow the throne of kingdoms, and will destroy the strength of kingdoms. All these are works of judgement, works of wrath; and whenever God executes judgement, it must be against evil. Nothing but evil can move the wrath of God. Nor does God ever shake, or overthrow, or destroy anything, except by reason of evil. He did not make this grand and beautiful world, in order to destroy it. He did not set the sun and the stars in the heavens, in order to cast them down from thence. Still less did He make man, in order to destroy him. When the natural man indeed looks at the manifold processes of destruction, which are ever going on in all parts of the earth, at the various works of ruin, of desolation, of slaughter, of death in all its forms, at one time trampling out the life of an insect, and the next extinguishing nations and empires,―his reason and his fancy combine to make up an image of a god, who cares not about the life or death of his creatures, who merely creates them to shew forth his power and skill, and who ever and anon, as it were, turns over the leaves in the great book of Fate, whereby one generation is cast into nothingness, and another starts into view. This image of god however, which the natural man frames for himself, is very different from the true God, as He has revealed Himself to mankind in His word, and by the Incarnation of His Onlybegotten Son. The true God has no pleasure in the ebb and flow of life and death. He wills life, not death. He Himself has told us that He has no pleasure in the death |