Perspective

 October 24, 2024

It’s election year; both sides are heating up the rhetoric, accusing the other of lying, filing lawsuits, predicting the end of all things if the other side wins. People are glued to the polls, pundits are making their predictions, and most of us feel rather helpless in the whole affair. After all, as Josef Stalin said, “It’s not the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes.” So here’s some perspective to take you through the next couple weeks.

“But now the Lord says: Be strong, Zerubbabel. Be strong, Jeshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people still left in the land. And now get to work, for I am with you, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.” —Haggai 2:4 NLT

Haggai prophesied toward the end of the Babylonian captivity, somewhere around 520 BC. Israel had been conquered seventy years before, and were now just a shadow of what they had been. Even at their height, they were only a second-rate nation that happened to sit on the crossroads of the great ancient empires of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and eventually Rome. 

But notice what Haggai says about the Lord: He is Lord of Heaven’s armies, or as the old versions put it, the heavenly host. If Haggai had been the only one to address God this way, we could perhaps just write it off as his literary style, but check this out: Haggai calls God “the Lord of heaven’s armies at least six times, and Zechariah does the same twelve times. Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Malachi also use these words to refer to God. 

Here’s my point: Israel—poor, little, beat-up Israel saw God in a majesty far greater than their circumstances would suggest. You can do the same. It may seem like everyone and everything is bigger than you, but our God is the Lord of the Heavenly Armies against which the powers and authorities of this world are weak and helpless.