Wider Horizons
Haggai’s picture of wider horizons beyond the limitations of temple and ritual, walls and community, with a universalism embracing all nations, all tribes and the whole of the created order, is a sign of a God who sees himself as being at the heart of a truly prophetic community.
Preoccupied with their particular god (or understanding of God) people have too often tried to relate him to everything that is happening and found difficulty in the process, especially when stepping outside their own environment. Earlier expressions of ‘covenant’, as here in Genesis, suggest a change of direction. Instead of beginning with God and trying to relate him to life, this covenant begins with life and through life allows our concept of God to mature.
Does this mean then that God accepts other nations and races, including even such people as the Samaritans? The question must have been very much alive in the time of Haggai, bearing in mind the way in which Sanballat and the people of Samaria had poured scorn on Nehemiah’s efforts (Neh 4). Perhaps some Jews were beginning to feel that he did and years later Jesus had no hesitation in confirming the point. Others perhaps were asking whether God accepts (and indeed works in and through) people of other faiths. Some prophets had suggested as much, even citing Cyrus, king of Persia, as one of his servants (Isaiah 45: 1), and Jesus again underlined the point.
So does God also have control over nature, the sea, the wild beasts? Some writers, like the author of Job, were not afraid to say that he did, and by Haggai’s time at least one ancient passage suggested that this was all firmly written into the text before anybody thought of Sinai or Jesus talked about the beauty of the lily and demonstrated a world of nature subservient to the will of God. What then about the rejects and undesirables of society? Isaiah 35 had already suggested that they all had a place and Jesus paid more than limited attention to the leper, the lame and the mentally disturbed.