A word of concern and a promise
10 On the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of the LORD came to the prophet Haggai: 11 “This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘Ask the priests what the law says: 12 If a person carries consecrated meat in the fold of his garment, and that fold touches some bread or stew, some wine, oil or other food, does it become consecrated?’”
The priests answered, “No.”
13 Then Haggai said, “If a person defiled by contact with a dead body touches one of these things, does it become defiled?”
“Yes,” the priests replied, “it becomes defiled.”
14 Then Haggai said, “‘So it is with this people and this nation in my sight,’ declares the LORD. ‘Whatever they do and whatever they offer there is defiled.
This is the third word of the Lord. Once again the date is listed. It was the 24th day of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius.
The Greek philosopher Socrates was known for his use of questions to lead people to make statements of truth. He taught them in this way. The Lord uses this method here. He asks questions. He deals with something known and leads to the unknown or, if not unknown, at least not something that has been confessed.
The people knew the facts, but they were not in the habit of applying them to themselves or to their situation. In this, times haven’t changed. God’s Word sounds so good when applied to others, but we miss the point in our own lives. The Lord comes to us with his divine rhetoric. If we hear him out, we have to confess what is right. We have to confess that he is right.
“Ask the priests what the law says,” the Lord challenges. The priests knew. They were able to answer the questions that follow here. The people knew the answers too.
The general principle established by the Lord’s questioning and the priest’s answering in verse 12 is that bad makes something good turn into something bad more easily than good makes something that is bad into something good. In other words, “a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough” (1 Corinthians 5:6). After the battle of Jericho ( Joshua 6), it was not the people’s rightness that made Aachan’s sin right; it was instead Aachan’s sin that polluted the whole camp of Israel (Joshua 7). A little badness quickly leads to big badness.
So here in our verse, because of the general attitude, because of a present evil and slackness in the people, the Lord says through Haggai, “So it is with this people and this nation in my sight. . . . Whatever they do and whatever they offer there is defiled.” We can hear the Lord musing to himself, “These people draw near to me with their mouths but their hearts are far from me."