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"Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse and prove Me now HEREWITH, saith the
Lord of Hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing,
that there shall not be room enough to receive it" (3: 10).
The mere tithe of that already given by the Lord, rendered back in grateful service,
would open the flood gates of blessing, and the cup would run over. The locust had been
ravaging the crops, the fruit of the vine had been prematurely cast, and the people may
have said that to take a tenth even from the failing stocks was wrong, unwise and foolish.
God challenges worldly wisdom and fleshly economies. Prove Me now HEREWITH.
The devourer shall be rebuked for your sakes, the vine shall not cast her fruit before the
time.
Haggai, another prophet of the restoration, has much to say upon these same lines. "Is
it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie waste?" He calls
upon them to consider their ways, to notice the results of their self-seeking policy.
"Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but
ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth
wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes" (Hag. 1: 6).
The God of the widow's barrel and cruse is also the God of the leaky purse. Little is
much with His blessing, but even blessings may become curses (Mal. 2: 2). The people
looked for much, and it came to little. Why? "Because of Mine house that is waste, and
ye run every man to his own house." This spirit shuts up heaven. "Therefore the heaven
over you is stayed." Yet did this people but bring the tithes into the storehouse, and think
of God's house instead of their own, the very windows of heaven would open. Not
merely a falling dew, but a very flood of blessing. Cease to run to your own houses, run
instead to Mine, cease to trust to the arm of flesh, and trust in Me, so seems to run the
Divine argument. If Hag. 1: contains a parallel with Mal. 3:, so also does Hag. 2:
Again the people are urged to Consider:--
"And now, I pray you, consider from this day and upward, from before a stone was
laid upon a stone in the temple of the Lord: Since those days were, when one came to a
heap of twenty measures, and there were but ten: when one came to the pressfat for to
draw out fifty vessels out of the press, there were but twenty. I smote you with blasting
and with mildew and with hail in all the labours of your hands: yet ye turned not to Me,
saith the Lord.
Consider now from this day and upward, from the four and twentieth day of the ninth
month, even from the day that the foundation of the Lord's temple was laid, consider it.
Is the seed yet in the barn? yea, as yet the vine, and the fig tree and the pomegranate, and
the olive tree, hath not brought forth: from this day will I bless you" (Hag. 2: 15-19).
God's HEREWITH in Haggai is the laying of the foundation stone of the temple; in
Malachi it is the ordinances of His service, in both it is the spirit that puts God first, the
Old Testament parallel with Phil. 2:, "The mind of Christ".
Do not we lose by withholding from the Lord? Have we never experienced the purse
with holes in it? Shall we not rather seek the spirit of the Lord's words, "Seek ye first the
kingdom of God and His righteousness", knowing full well that our small loss will be