Living in the Day of Small Things

In the face of discouragement and growing darkness, God calls us to keep building and hold fast to the hope of His coming Kingdom. ✨👑

In their days…

The days of the prophet Haggai were difficult times for God’s people. We must be careful not to be too quick to condemn them for failing to see the obvious. Would they have needed a Haggai if the circumstances were so obvious? They were dealing with circumstances that brought discouragement from every direction!

There had been discouragement from the moment they set foot back in their land:

Solomon’s temple had been built with the finest materials available and by some of the most skilled men in the world. How could this handful of unremarkable people hope to construct anything near the glory of the former House of God?

When they began this work sixteen years earlier, they had encountered an almost steady stream of opposition from their neighbors. In the true spirit of multiculturalism, their neighbors pressed them to be part of their grand plans to build a temple to their God. You can imagine how, once admitted into this project, they would soon be clamoring for changes here and changes there to make this temple more welcoming to those whose view of God was a little different, a little broader, than these Jews!

It wasn’t this that was so discouraging, nor when these Gentile neighbors turned hostile. No, what discouraged them most was that God had allowed these neighbors to succeed! They finally concluded they must have had the dates all wrong, that the seventy-year desolation didn’t start in 606 BC, but it must have started in 586 BC. If so, then this meant that they had four more years before God would bless their work:

Thus speaks the LORD of hosts, saying: This people say, “The time has not come, the time that the LORD’s house should be built.” (Haggai 1:2).

Even in those days, they had prophetic dates nourishing their faith that came and went without the fulfillment they sought.

Finally, there was the discouragement that came from everyday life: They found it very difficult to make ends meet. When they thought they would have a good harvest, insects or diseases seemed to take the “good” out of it. What they had left was never enough to provide for the year; they were always running short.

Is it any wonder that some, because of overwhelming discouragement, began to question the work, maybe question the prophecies, maybe even question God’s care for them, or worse, His existence?

For who has despised the day of small things? For these seven rejoice to see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. They are the eyes of the LORD, which scan to and fro throughout the whole earth. (Zechariah 4:10).

In Our Days

How close are we to the same despair? Aren’t the same discouragements there as we attempt to rebuild the House of God in our day? The same hostility from the world around us only seems to grow and prosper. We may experience the same struggles with daily living. Perhaps the same reproof given to that generation centuries ago fits our needs?

I don’t believe any of us have gone so far, as Peter says, to question the “promise of his coming,” though the lengthened wait for our Lord’s return must ultimately bring that test to us, too. For these reasons, I wish to share some reflections by way of encouragement, to hold fast to the Faith we have professed as the Body of Christ.

In 1967, many of us in the Christadelphian community were galvanized by the Six-Day War in Israel. The re-taking of Jerusalem was a prophetic landmark, only equaled by the birth of Israel as a state twenty years earlier. In another twenty years, a generation for those who saw 1948, surely all our prophetic expectations would be realized!

That was a long time ago. 1988 came and went, as did all our other pre-2001 prophecy expectations. In 2006, though, something did emerge that provided another remarkable step towards fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel 2.

Days Of Change

For years, I have pondered Daniel’s image:

Whereas you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, the Kingdom shall be divided; yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so the Kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile. As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, they will mingle with the seed of men; but they will not adhere to one another, just as iron does not mix with clay. (Daniel 2:41-43).

The iron fragments were clearly the remnants of the Roman world and culture. As far as I could readily discern, these spoke of the powers in the Mediterranean and European areas. Indeed, it has always been a marvel to me that for almost 2,000 years, Greco-Roman ideas have guided the political, cultural, and intellectual shape of the Western world!

But who was the clay? Bro. Harry Whittaker argued it to be the Arabs. If this were true, how would Arabs and Europeans ever combine to form a united entity from which would emerge ten kings?

In 2006, an answer began to emerge: For the first time, the Arabs had succeeded in invading Europe. In 2020, the Muslim Arab population was 6% of Europe. Very much per Daniel’s prophecy, they do not mix with Roman iron!

So, what holds them together? Consider this lengthy quote from one political commentator in 2002:

After the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil blackmail in 1973, the then-European Community [EC] created a structure of Cooperation and Dialogue with the Arab League. The Euro-Arab Dialogue [EAD] began as a French initiative composed of representatives from the EC and Arab League countries. From the outset, the EAD was considered as a vast transaction: The EC agreed to support the Arab anti-Israeli policy in exchange for wide commercial agreements. The EAD had a supplementary function: the shifting of Europe into the Arab-Islamic sphere of influence, thus breaking the traditional trans-Atlantic solidarity. The EAD operated at the highest political level, with foreign ministers on both sides, and the presidents of the EC—later the European Union (EU)—with the secretary general of the Arab League. The central body of the Dialogue, the General Commission, was responsible for planning its objectives in the political, cultural, social, economic, and technological domains; it met in private, without summary records, a common practice for European meetings.

Over the years, Euro-Arab collaboration developed at all levels: political, economic, religious and in the transfer of technologies to education, universities, radio, television, press, publishers, and writers’ unions. This structure became the channel for Arab immigration into Europe, of anti-Americanism, and of Judeophobia, which, linked with a general hatred of the West and its denigration, constituted a pseudo-culture imported from Arab countries. The interpenetration of European and Arab policies determined Europe’s relentless anti-Israel policy and its anti-Americanism. This politico-economic edifice, with minute details, is rooted in a multiform European symbiosis with the Arab world. (Bat Yeor, October 2022, “EU and the Arabs”.)

There is the glue, rightly styled a “symbiosis” with the Arab world of the old Roman iron. Arab and Western Europeans are united on one thing: Hatred of all things Jewish. The iron and clay are gradually now becoming one element. All that remains is for Ten powers to emerge from this “symbiosis”!

2006 also marked the year when we began to see the beginning fulfillment of Ezekiel’s powerful Last Day’s prophecy:

Because you have had an ancient hatred, and have shed the blood of the children of Israel by the power of the sword at the time of their calamity, when their iniquity came to an end, … Because you have said, “These two nations and these two countries shall be mine, and we will possess them,” although the LORD was there. (Ezekiel 35:5, 10).

Therefore, O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD! Thus says the Lord GOD to the mountains, the hills, the rivers, the valleys, the desolate wastes, and the cities that have been forsaken, which became plunder and mockery to the rest of the nations all around—therefore thus says the Lord GOD: “Surely I have spoken in My burning jealousy against the rest of the nations and against all Edom, who gave My land to themselves as a possession, with wholehearted joy and spiteful minds, in order to plunder its open country.” (Ezekiel 36:4-5).

It was on August 15, 2006, that Israel began its fateful withdrawal from Gaza, and as Ezekiel prophesied, this has become both a “plunder” and a “mockery” to the nations around about. How long before “the rest of the nations” and these descendants of Esau give God’s land to themselves as a possession, with whole-hearted joy and spiteful minds, to plunder its open country?

Days Of Darkness

We are living in a post-Christian world. Pockets in the US hold out against the forces that would bury Christian morality under the godless philosophies of evolution and tolerance. Accepting these philosophies in our culture, the enshrinement in our laws, and the inclusion in our educational curriculum guarantees a day of darkness unparalleled on this earth. Men and women will no longer know good from evil, right from wrong. I never could quite conceive how, in the free United States, as a believer in Christ, I could actually be harassed, persecuted, or even jailed for giving voice to my Biblical beliefs. Now I do.

Time does not permit a fuller treatment of this critical reflection, but I urge you to stay alert to the forces of darkness that use “tolerance” as an excuse to shut down anyone whose moral values come from God’s Word. We have now passed the threshold into the darkness of night, but it cannot be the dread of darkness that holds our attention, but the light of dawn that shines beyond. When that Light returns, the Kingdoms of this world will become the Kingdom of our LORD and of his Christ. This hope is what anchors us when our world turns upside down.

Ted Sleeper,
San Francisco Peninsula Ecclesia, CA