Today is the 20th day of December. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is wonderful

to be here with you today as we gather around the global campfire. This little oasis in all

of the festivities is a little calm, serene place for our souls to rest. A safe place,

quiet place to allow the scriptures to just wash over us and into us together in community.

It is fantastic to be in that place with you today as we take the next step forward.

And our next step forward we kind of got a trend going now is to read another complete book

in the Old Testament. His book is called Haggii. And like a lot of the other minor prophets,

we don't know a lot about who Haggii was. We know that he was among those that were able to come

back from the Babylonian exile after the destruction of Jerusalem. And probably he was one of the

first wave of exiles to be able to come back to the ancestral homeland. We know that he had

access to the people that were in leadership because the opening verse of the book of Haggii tells

us that the message was delivered to Zeruba Bell, the governor of Judah. And that name Zeruba Bell

should sound familiar because we got to know Zeruba Bell when we read through the book of Ezra

and the book of Nehemiah. And Haggii's message was also delivered to Joshua, the high priest.

And what Haggii is doing with this message, or maybe better said, what God is doing through

Haggii in this message is to motivate to get the people off their behinds and off themselves

as it related to the reconstruction of the temple. So Babylon, we went through all of the Babylonian

conquest during our journey through the scriptures this year. So when Babylon conquered Jerusalem

and took the people into exile, this was about 586 BC. And then Babylon was conquered by the Persian

Empire in 539 BC. And so the new king, the Persian king Cyrus, allowed the exiles to begin to

return to Jerusalem under Zeruba Bell's leadership around 538 BC. And then comes Haggii, 18 years later

in 520 BC. And we have good authority from the book of Haggii itself. Haggii actually

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