“My Spirit remains among you, just as I promised when you came out of Egypt. So do not be afraid.”
- Haggai 2:5
Something we do not often talk about in depth is the faith of God. Some may better recognize it in saying how God is faithful, that He remains, or that He will never forsake us. From time to time, we may recall those truths, but do we ever sit down and really think about God’s faith in us? That from generation to generation He remains faithful and holds His promises until well after they come true. I know I do not sit around and think about it that often. But God does have faith.
Some of us may have trouble saying, “Faith of God.” After all faith is something, we humans must have in the invisible but present God. Faith is something of trust, not something God needs to have in humanity. After all, the saving work is done by God because He is sovereign, so why would God need to have faith? Sometimes we say faith and hope is all that helps us get up in the morning, is that true of God too?
Haggai:
Let’s set the scene with some context about Haggai. Haggai takes place after the exile in Babylon/Persia. Jerusalem had been ransacked nearly 67 years earlier. With that came the destruction of the first Temple, the walls of the city torn down, and decades of successive ransacking by surrounding nations. Jerusalem was a desolate place, and yet, people returned. Some people have returned and set to work on rebuilding the Temple, it’s been 16 years since it’s start. The work of it have started and stopped frequently. In part because the people have been faithless and self-centered.
In chapter one we see God say this it the people who have returned:
“Why are you living in luxurious houses while my house lies in ruins?”
- Haggai 1:4
These people are self-focused, even when in the following verses we find out they are living with few harvested resources. Yet they do not turn to the Lord for help nor put their attention on rebuilding the Temple. They are a faithless people.
So, Haggai’s job is to motivate the people to rebuild the Temple. His job becomes directing people’s attentions away from their daily needs or even their own comfort and instead prioritize God. They are challenged to be faithful. In the midst of their faithlessness, we see their worries and anxieties about resources, they fear not having enough.
This context helps us see the faith of God. That God will not give up on these people, even as they lack faith, even as they stress about their daily bread. So instead, God calls them to remember His faith in them. Since Egypt, the land of their ancestor’s enslavement and liberation, God has been with them.
Faith:
The faith of God is that God remains near and true and available through all the years, even during our own faithlessness. God remained with Israel throughout it all, and God has remained with the Church throughout these last 2000 years and will remain with it for eternity. I also believe He does the same on the personal scale as well.
There is no doubt we all go through periods of life where our faith is week, sin may run high, and other times we are self-centered. In these, God’s Spirit remains, God’s Spirit waits, ready to be taped into when we repent and return. God does this because He has faith. After all, He knows the destinies of every single one of us and knows perfectly what eternity will be like. The Father alone knows when Christ will return. He does all this believing that we might turn to Him, in our daily needs and in our eternal needs. God is faithful and will see His promises through to the end.
Due to His faith, which far outweighs our own faith in Him, we can come before Him, humbled, repentant, and receive the mercy that He gives by His Son’s death and resurrection.
I believe God has more faith and hope in us than we do. If God saw no hope that many would come to faith in Him, I’m not sure God would have made covenants with us nor even created us in the way He did. We’re talking the entire Biblical narrative and our reality, being altered by God’s faithfulness. I know I for one am grateful for God’s faith in us, that would even make a way for us to be like Christ and join in the Body of Christ to be His representatives to the world that still lacks faith.
Think about that. Because of His faith in us, He entrust that we will join Him in His reconciling work in this world. We preach, build relationships, and serve others because God decides to have faith that we would join in His work and purposes. It is this very faith that He would send His Son to be born, creating the very holiday we will celebrate very soon.
Final Blessing:
God is the same today, as He was for the Exiles, and as He was for the Exodus. He had Faith in us, He is faithful and true to His promises and will not give up on us. He even decides to invite us into His work of reconciling the world to Him. That is the faith of God.
Now may the Lord of Life and Redemption be with you in every step, every breathe, and every heartbeat of your journey.
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