I was
in the shower getting ready to go to high school when the 1971 San Fernando Valley earthquake shook the Los Angeles area. I was just bounced around a little. Then I pulled on some pants, and our family got outside to avoid anything falling on us. In our city of Santa Monica, the shaking was hard, but not devastating. Things fell off shelves and a hanging light fixture in our garage crashed to the floor. North of us in San Fernando and Sylmar, many were not so fortunate. People died in falling buildings, freeway overpasses collapsed or were damaged, and transportation was snarled for months.
Years later, visiting us in California from the Midwest during Christmas vacation before we were married, my wife was frightened one night by a much smaller earthquake that shook her bed on our pullout sofa. The rest of us slept right through it. Now here in Oregon she reminds me that the whole Pacific Rim is due for a big one sometime. She took a CERT (Community Emergency Response Training) class a few years ago. We have earthquake insurance on our home.
The people of Israel to whom the prophet Haggai spoke would have been almost as familiar with earthquakes as we were in southern California. The region sits on and between various faults and rifts and seismic activity is common. Josephus records an earthquake during King Uzziah’s time. Modern Israeli geologists fear that the area, like the Pacific Rim, is overdue for a “big one.”
So it is interesting that, in our text from Haggai 2:1-9, even as he exhorts the returned exiles to return to work on rebuilding the Temple (abandoned for almost twenty years), he records God’s word that “In just a little while I will again shake the heavens and the earth, the oceans and the dry land. I will shake all nations…” Fans of Handel’s “Messiah” will remember the bass aria that begins with that text. The music itself forcefully vibrates to picture the shaking to come.
It’s clear enough that the “shaking” in this text is metaphor for the tremors of war and violence, but the citizens of Jerusalem could not have escaped the association with the literal shaking of earthquakes. Whether earthquake or war, the warning seems a strange part of a message aimed to further a building project.
The tricky part of the text is what immediately follows the shaking. In the NLT translation we’re reading in Prophets, it’s “and the treasures of all the nations will be brought to this Temple.” In this translation’s interpretation, it’s a promise that the wealth of surrounding people’s will support and finance the project and make the Temple even more glorious than its destroyed predecessor.
Yet there’s an ancient interpretation and translation which takes that sentence about “treasure” in a different direction, translating the word more literally as “desire.” So in “Messiah” the bass sings, “and the desire of all nations shall come.” That phrase in English “desire of nations” finds its way into at least three of the hymns of the season: “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” which we’re singing every Sunday this Advent, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” The understanding throughout is that what will come to the Temple, even as the world is shaken, is what all nations truly desire, the Lord Himself as He became incarnate in Jesus Christ.
There are some good linguistic and contextual reasons for the more mundane NLT translation of “the desire of nations,” but when the writer of Hebrews in the New Testament takes up and quotes Haggai 2:6 about the shaking of earth and heaven, he says clearly that the purpose of shaking created, temporal things, is “so that what cannot be shaken may remain.” That seems to fit with the sense that the prophesy is not in the end driving at a construction project which will be subject to fault lines and shifting tectonic plates. Instead, something better, more long lasting, more glorious, which all the nations do in fact desire, is in sight. That is the arrival of Christ the Lord.
The message for us is that God does and will shake things up for us, whether it’s the ground under our feet or a comfortable way of life. That shaking is a call to turn our eyes from that which is so easily shaken and even broken, and to seek that which is truly most desirable in this world. May that great desire of nations come quickly to us.