A L M A C I A S

IS GOD FIRST IN YOUR LIFE?

Today we are living in a world that has become very competitive and materialistic. We as a society have become so involved in trying to have a nice house that we forget about the home. We sometimes become so caught up with the temporal that we forget about the eternal. We become so concerned with the physical that we forget about the spiritual. The Bible relates example after example of how easy it is to forget God when we get so involved in "this, that, and the other." In Haggai chapter one, we find such an example of how the people of God had forgotten Him because of other things they had put first in their lives.

The people of God had been taken into Babylonian captivity during the years of the prophets Daniel and Ezekiel (around the years 606, 597, and 585 B.C.), because they had become so rebellious toward God. At the end of the 70-year captivity in Babylon, God stirred the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, to sign a decree permitting the people of God to go back to Jerusalem and work on the temple which laid in waste (Ezra 1:1). The temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar back in the year 585 B.C., in one of the attacks against the city of Jerusalem. When Cyrus signed his decree, only a remnant decided to go back and work on the temple, and they actually began to work as soon as they got back to Jerusalem. But almost from the beginning, they encountered opposition from others. Thus, they stopped working on the temple for awhile.

When Darius became king of Persia, the Jews were allowed to continue working on the temple, but they had become disinterested, because they were too involved in working on their own houses. When God¹s people talked about resuming their work on the temple, they said, "The time is not come that the Lord¹s house be built." God was not pleased with their attitude, and communicated to His people through the prophet Haggai: "Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie waste? ...Consider your ways." (Haggai 1:4,5) The Lord wanted His people to examine their lives and take notice that things were not going so well for them with their crops, with their food, and with their wages. They were not being blessed by God, and why? They were losing out on God¹s blessings because they had become so wrapped up in themselves and had forgotten God and His temple. How involved are we with ourselves? Let us never become so self-centered that we forget God altogether.