In Haggai 2:10-14, God asks two questions of His priests. First, “If a man carries holy meat (meat offered in a sacrifice) in the fold of his garment and touches bread (or other food) with this garment, will that food become holy?” The priests correctly answer, according to Levitical law, “No.” The meat would make the garment holy, but the process stopped there.
The second question was, “If one who is unclean through contact with a dead body touches any of these things, will it become unclean?” The priests correctly answer, according to Levitical law, “Yes!”
The point is threefold. First, holiness is not contagious, but corruption is. It’s like health and sickness. If a healthy person comes into contact with someone who has the flu, the healthy person can’t make the sick person well, but the person with the flu can make the well person sick.
Sin is like that! We don’t become holy by hanging around holy people, but we do feed our sinful nature by hanging around sinful people. We must personally get right with God by repenting of our sins and trusting in Christ.
Then, God will not bless a cause (the rebuilding of the temple) unless the people involved in it are committed to His holiness. These people were offering sacrifices and going through the prescribed rituals, but their hearts were not right. To live sinfully throughout the week and then come to worship was like dragging a corpse into the temple. It defiled everything.
We are God’s temple, where God dwells and makes Himself known (Ephesians 2:21, 22). But Haggai’s word to us is, “If our hearts are not clean before God, we’re defiling everything we touch!”
Finally, Holiness that pleases God must be inward. We look on outward activity, but God looks on the heart. Motives are important to God; our thought life matters to God. Let us seek to be awesome weapons today by submitting ourselves—body, mind and spirit—to God’s holiness.
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