Yeshua Explored
30th May 2022
Times of shaking?
How can the Church move forwards after COVID?
(This series of articles was written a year after the first lockdown in March/April 2021)
Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored – (until they finally pull the plug!)
There are two possibilities. It’s all down to how we have responded (or will respond) to what I have termed God’s Plan A.
We either carry on as before … or we look for new beginnings. Let us think more on this Plan A. It’s time for some theology, or rather some Scripture. It is time to revisit the Book of Haggai, to the passages that I believe are essential to our understanding of our times.
Let me set the scene. Judah was in exile in Babylon, because of their idolatry and corruption. It wasn’t the worst place they’d been and were now, seventy years later, living comfortable lives. Yet God had told them that it was time to go back to Jerusalem, to rebuild the walls … and the Temple.
“Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your panelled houses, while this house remains a ruin?” (Haggai 1:4)
And, despite that, they weren’t exactly thriving. God made sure of that.
“You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.” (Haggai 1:6)
Flockdown sees the Church in exile, separated from its ‘places of worship’ and not exactly thriving. God is insistent as to what the problem was:
“Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build my house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honoured,” says the LORD. (Haggai 1:8)
Build My house, not yours!
“You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?” declares the LORD Almighty. “Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with your own house” (Haggai 1:9)
So, while there’s a job to be done – returning to the foundations to build up God’s House – God continues to remind us that, until we take this seriously, our Church “systems” are not going to always do the job.
“Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops.
I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the olive oil and everything else the ground produces, on people and livestock, and on all the labor of your hands.” (Haggai 1:10-11)
It seems so clear, if we persist in building our own houses, rather than His house, the very basics for life would be withheld. Haggai’s message was heeded and the Temple was rebuilt.
So the LORD stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest, and the spirit of the whole remnant of the people. They came and began to work on the house of the LORD Almighty, their God, (Haggai 1:14)
So that’s our mandate, to rebuild God’s House. But, unfortunately, many failed to grasp the implication that God may have been speaking through Flockdown and demanding a new thing from His Church. We are called to build His House. But He doesn’t just leave us there. I must confess that I had little to add in terms of how this can be achieved and how it will pan out. And then I allowed the next chapter of Haggai to speak into the situation …
“Speak to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, to Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people. Ask them, Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing?” (Haggai 2:2-3)
There was a lot of work to do on the Temple to knock it into shape, to bring it to how it was when it was first built. Similarly with the Church, a reminder of the work that is still needed. And to remind us, He brings a threat:
‘I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the Lord Almighty. (Haggai 2:7)
Flockdown and the other effects of COVID-19 were undoubtedly a shaking of the heavens and earth. The evidence is overwhelming, you don’t have to be an eschatologist to come to that conclusion! But now He states that once again there will be a shaking, this is just a beginning of troubled times! Again, it is not difficult to imagine the repercussions of the virus providing shakings in all areas of society, from economics, to politics, to social unrest, to the flexing of nationalistic muscles.
So, we are well and truly shook up and the Church needs to acknowledge its role and responsibility here. I suggest that we are living in a “great shaking” because of the shortcomings of God’s people. Something needs to be done, otherwise the shaking will continue. So, what should the Church be doing? We have already seen what it thinks it has learned through the crisis, but that doesn’t seem to have stirred up any need for change.
Something has to give. Surely?
This is an extract from the book, Flockdown Church: Back to the drawing board?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-church-278-p.asp
