I believe that a crucial principle when applying God’s word to our lives today is that wherever we are in the Bible, we make the application in and through Christ. The temptation, especially with Old Testament literature is to take what happens with God’s people, what God says to them and what they do and we lift it straight into our lives in the 21st century. That way lies legalism and prosperity teaching.
In the case of the post exile books, especially Haggai and Nehemiah, this results in application along the lines that God’s people were meant to rebuild the temple and the city walls. They at times failed to do this, so they suffered drought and famine. We need to obey God or else we will suffer. At its crassest this ends up focusing on things like church building projects. The members need to give in order to make the building work happen so that God will bless them. Even without that, it can sound like an instruction to do all kinds of more spiritual sounding things in order to enjoy God’s blessing.
Applying through Christ means I think three steps. First, we see how the people in Haggai’s time were unable to fulfil the requirements of God’s covenant with them. As hard as they tried and with all the second chances, they still fell short. The result was that they were always going to be subject to the curses and not the blessings of the covenant. They needed someone to come and take the curse of sin and death upon himself.
Secondly, the covenant promised God’s people, God’s provision and blessing under his rule and reign in his presence and place (the land). For post-exile Jews this meant a return to the land and a rebuilding of the temple and the city walls.
Jesus represents all three of these things. Jesus is God himself and he provides and protects for his people. So, Jesus is the wall around his people, in the New Testament, at the end of the book of Revelation, there is a New Jerusalem coming out of heaven, it is the bride of Christ, the church. Christ is the one who encompasses us and protects us from danger. Jesus also identifies himself as the Temple meaning that he is God’s place, his presence with us. We enjoy God’s blessing in Christ.
However, the whole point of Christ’s coming is that we cannot build the temple or walls ourselves. God does all of this for us but it is Christ himself that does this and as fully man, Jesus is obedient to his father so that he is not only God’s presence/place and God’s provision/protection. He is God’s people. It is through union with Christ and justification, his imputed righteousness that we become God’s people.
Thirdly, having seen how the words of the post exile books couldn’t apply to the people then and having applied the words to Christ, we then apply Christ to us. It is he himself that we need. This starts with thankfulness and acceptance for what he has done for us. We receive salvation. We know that he has taken our sin, curse, penalty on himself and then we receive his righteousness imputed to us.
However, Scripture is also about sanctification and about growing in Christ, becoming Christlike. I think there are two aspects to this from the post-exile literature. We become the temple of the living God as we are filled with the Holy Spirit and we become the wall, built up into one another so that we care for and protect each other.
This means that the application of the post exile books is all about the Gospel, about what Christ has done for us and it is all about what it means to grow into him and the closeness of our relationship to him both corporately and individually. Finally, it is about how we relate to each other, are we edifying (building up) one another as the church are we seeking the protection and care for one another in the church? If not, then what might be distracting us from these things? Or, what might be distracting us from Jesus?
Faithroots 