Haggai 1:9

"Ye looked for much, and lo, it came to little; and when ye brought it home, I did blow upon it. Why; saith Jehovah of hosts. Because of my house that lieth waste, while ye run every man to his own house."

"When ye brought it home, I did blow upon it ..." In his youth, this writer knew a man who reaped an abundant harvest of wheat and built a large new granary to store it, whereupon a tornado touched down and scattered wheat all over Callahan County! His first name was Newt; and, shortly afterward, while reading this passage, he accepted the disaster as a personal judgment against himself and promptly became a Christian. Of course, we cannot believe that God provides an individual determination and judgment upon every man by any such events during this whole dispensation. Nevertheless, the judgments are general and abundant enough to allow any perceptive soul to get the message, whether the judgment falls upon him individually, or upon another. The judgments are clearly of God, being a part of the primeval curse (Genesis 3:17-22), and they are very much in the world until this very hour.

The great impact from this verse is the truth that God simply will not bless a people determined not to do his will. The returnees were having a very hard time; the message of the Lord was simply this: "If you would have better times, turn to your God." The message is perpetual and eternal.

"Doubtless, as Dr. Pusey observes, they ascribed the meagerness of their crops to natural causes, and would not see the judicial nature of the infliction; but Haggai brings the stern truth home to their conscience by the stern question, `Why?'"[11]

Modern man has a great deal to learn in the context that appears in these verses. No matter what kind of disaster may descend upon mankind today, it is usually ascribed to "natural causes," which more and more tend to be written off as things which men know all about. Well, do they? Do men know all about the vicissitudes that plague our existence upon earth? Alas, the answer is negative, whether men are willing to have it so, or not. These passages emphatically declare:

Back of the loaf is the flour,

And back of the flour the mill;

And back of the mill is the wheat

That waveth on yonder hill.

And back of the hill is the sun

And the rain and the Father's will.