In the prophecies of Zechariah, chapter 4, verse 10:
For who hath despised the day of small things?
In the prophecies of Haggai, chapter 2, verse 3:
Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory?
And how do ye see it now?
Is it not in your eyes as nothing?
And in the prophecies of Malachi, chapter 3, verses 16 and 17:
Then they that feared the Lord spake one with another:
And the Lord hearkened, and heard,
And a book of remembrance was written before Him,
For them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon His name.
And they shall be Mine, saith the Lord of hosts,
Even Mine own possession, in the day that I make;
And I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.
“Who hath despised the day of small things?”
This is among many matters which it is very necessary for us to have made clear in our hearts and in our minds. We need a mentality adjusted.
After a long going, a compass has to spend some time being adjusted because of interferences and variations. So it is with us on our way. It does become necessary, from time to time, to stop and think again, to get our minds corrected, and to be free from those influences which upset the balance, the poise, and the right appreciation.
This matter of greatness and smallness is an important matter. There is a good deal of confusion about it, and that confusion can result in our missing the way entirely, being found altogether in a false position.
We need to know what we mean by greatness and what we mean by smallness. It is evident from the Scriptures which we have read that a certain kind of appraisal, a certain kind of observation, resulted in a false judgment which brought the people perilously near to calamity.
The Lord, reading their hearts, used this word as to their attitude and their reactions: “despise”—“Who hath despised the day of small things?”
If you look carefully into these prophecies, you will see that, from God’s standpoint, it was not as small as they thought. He had an altogether different point of view about the matter.
You see, we have a way of confusing bigness with greatness, and they are two entirely different things.
Bigness may be in outward dimensions and bulk, and in the impression that a thing makes upon the senses. Greatness may have none of those characteristics at all. You may not even be able to take its measure, or see any measure in it from human standpoints, but in God’s eyes it may be very great.
There is a lot of difference between bigness and greatness from God’s standpoint, just as there is a great deal of difference between littleness and smallness. I know that is going to give our friends who are not familiar with the English language a good deal of trouble.
You know, a person can be little. Things can be so little, so petty, so mean, so despicable. But they can be quite small and tremendously great.
You would sooner have an ounce of gold than a ton of something else. It is this difference.
Some of you may have read the life story of Madame Curie, the discoverer of radium. You remember the tons and tons and tons of by-products from the gas works, unloaded in her backyard, and her working upon this mountain of stuff. Out of it came the smallest particle of radium.
There is your comparison: bigness and greatness. An almost imperceptible speck of radium—its immense quality, value, and potentiality—all set against this great mass of stuff.
That is the difference between bigness and greatness, is it not? Well, you see what I mean. I say it is so necessary for us to get adjusted in our mentality about things, lest we go astray.
Smallness may be judged merely in an objective, outward way. We say, “It is so small,” and despise it. Yet this day of small things may be a tremendously potential day.
Fear not, little flock;
For it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
There is something little that is immensely potent. You have “the little” running through the Bible again and again; but God made much of apparently little things that would, at one time, have been set aside, overlooked, and scorned by those who always have this mentality of bigness.
Now look at these passages, and you will see that there is something here which is very precious to God, although in their natural judgment the people are calling it so small.
The last passage which we read is at the end of the Old Testament. In another translation and version, God is saying:
They shall be Mine, saith the Lord, in the day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure.
There appears alone just that little company who feared the Lord, thought upon His name, and were occupied with Him. Something so precious.
Our translation does not convey how valuable it was to the Lord. There are two words: “The Lord hearkened and heard.” God has a repetition of the same word in two different forms. The first word signifies that the Lord inclined His ear. Here is something to take note of; here is something to which to listen.
Here is something to hold God’s attention. The Lord inclined, listened, and heard. The picture is of the Lord saying, “Get the book—the great book, the book of life—and put this down. Put the names of these people in.”
A book was kept, a book of remembrance, for those that feared the Lord and thought upon His name. “They shall be Mine, saith the Lord, in that day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure.”
And that was right in this same setting, as you know: this section of the Bible, including Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. That is greatness over against a people who are calling it little and despising it as such.
What does the Lord look for?
This little company, comparatively, was a disciplined and chastened company. They had come out of the fires of Babylon. They had been through all the discipline of those years in exile.
They were among those who had hung their harps upon the willows and said:
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
In a strange land?
See where their hearts were. Then the day came when the proclamation was made: “You can go back. You can all go back to Zion.”
The vast majority decided that their position was very much more comfortable than it would be back there in Zion, and decided to stay.
This little company, with all the hardships, the difficulties, the suffering, the toil, and much more involved in going back, went back because their hearts were there. There was a heart relationship to the Lord and to that which was dearest to His heart.
So they were always thinking upon His name, talking together about Him. They were a little company comparatively, a despised people. I expect all those who stayed behind thought they were fools.
Well, this was precious to the Lord. That was the matter; that was the point. This is what the Lord looks for: a chastened, disciplined people whose hearts are for the Lord.
Small? If you like.
Read the prophecies of Jeremiah. What a book that is! What a time it takes, and what patience it takes, to work your way through the whole of Jeremiah’s prophecies. What a big book! And what little books these are—Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. We call them the minor prophets.
What have you got for the Lord in Jeremiah? A major prophet, if you like, but there is nothing for the Lord in it. Little minor prophets, but something very precious to Him. The discipline has taken place, the chastening has been carried out, the heart has been searched, and the Lord has got something.
You say, “Small.” Oh no, not in the eyes of the Lord—something very great. That is what is precious to the Lord. That is what He is looking for, and that is what He calls great, though, looking at it with natural eyes and the eyes of men, always judging by outward size and appearance, it seems small.
From the Lord’s standpoint, there is much intrinsic value, and with Him everything is a matter of intrinsic value, not bulk.
Well, Jesus has put His finger upon that principle in another connection. If the salt has lost its savour, what is the good of it? Tons of it—useless. You had better throw it out into the street.
A teaspoonful of salt with its savour in it is of more value than tons of savourless salt. It is intrinsic value. It is the divine element—the thing of God, the vital quality.
And under that, there has to be something. There has to be chastening; there has to be discipline. The heart has to be searched. The work has to go very deep.
A people in line with God’s abiding intention: God was there, in figure and in type, in the temple. It represented God’s heavenly and age-long thought—the place of His dwelling amongst His people.
It is an eternal thought. Before the world was, it was in God’s mind to dwell with men. All the way through the Bible, it is just that: God with us. Right on to the end of the Bible, “the tabernacle of God is with men,” and He shall dwell with them and be their God.
God’s everlasting thought concerns His house, His dwelling place in the midst of His people. There is the figure; there is the type. We know the spiritual reality.
Here are people in line with God’s thought. In Babylon, God’s thought had not been realized; that was not His place. Here it is.
And the Lord always calls that spiritually great: when you are wholly centered upon the thing that He has ever had in view—a people right in line with God’s eternal purpose, a people right in touch with Himself as to that which He ever desires.
You have got that. Let that people be small by outward standards, and despised by men of distorted judgment, and God says, “That is great, and do not you despise that.”
“Who hath despised the day of small things?” It is a rebuke. That interrogation is a correction. Adjust your judgment, your standards.
These were people still with the vision in their hearts of what God intended and would have. They may have been discouraged, greatly disheartened, perplexed about it all as to the possibility of it, and very tried as to the realization of it. Nevertheless, it was in their hearts.
Look at the context: they wept over this situation. They were distressed because the project was so much less than what they knew the Lord wanted. They were a troubled people about this.
Their perplexity and distress even led them sometimes to drop their hands in despair, and sometimes to suspend operations. There was plenty there as a ground for discouragement, plenty to give point to the saying, “It is hopeless.”
But, you know, people do not feel hopeless if they have never had hope. Those who have never known hope have no part in hopelessness; they are just dead.
These people were troubled, heartbroken, distressed. Even if they did, for a time, say, “No use, no use,” that was simply because in their hearts they were troubled about it—if you like, disappointed. And you cannot be disappointed unless you have had some kind of appointment.
Deep in their hearts was this vision, and they were suffering in relation to the vision. That is what God is looking for: people who, in their hearts, through trial and testing, still have the vision of what God is after and are suffering in their hearts concerning it.
That is something precious. He might say, “Take note of that. Put that down in the book. Do not let that be forgotten. Have that in remembrance. It is going to come up in the day that I make. I will have that.”
So we must revise, must we not, and get away from these temporal ways of viewing things to the eternal standards and standpoints?
Yes, for all this brings us to the Lord Jesus.
This Zechariah, chapter 4, has a recurrence in the book of Revelation: the two olive trees standing before the Lord of all the earth. You know, when it comes into the book of Revelation, there is something here of eternal significance.
The Lord Jesus is brought into view in these prophecies. It is there in Haggai that the prophecy is first uttered:
Yet once more, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth;
And the desire of all nations shall come.
That is quoted in the Letter to the Hebrews. Things which can be shaken—the temporal things, the big things according to man’s mind—are to be shaken to their foundations; but the things which cannot be shaken shall stand.
And you know that the Letter to the Hebrews is all centered upon the Lord Jesus and His heavenly kingdom: receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken.
As for Malachi, Malachi dwells much upon the Lord Jesus: the very Messenger of the covenant and His forerunner. Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, introduces the Lord Jesus in a very real way. It is all focused upon Him.
And you know that when God sees things focused upon His Son, He is all ear and mind, listening and watching and recording.
It amounts to this: value from God’s standpoint is always a matter of how much of His Son is in a thing.
There was not much of Christ in the major prophets as they looked on toward the captivity. There is much of Christ in the prophets who look beyond the captivity. These minor prophets are beyond the captivity, and Christ is in full view. God is all alive again about this matter.
So we sum it all up by saying: the test of everything is how much it represents Christ. How much of Christ is there? Not how big and impressive it is from man’s standpoint.
Let us get our balance again. Of course, God is a great God, and we expect a great God to do great things.
A slogan was introduced at the great Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910: “Attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.” Yes, all right, all right.
But be sure you know what greatness is from God’s standpoint, and that you are not confusing greatness with bigness, intrinsic value with outward bulk.
See what the Lord is after: the values of His Son. They are the eternal values.
For who hath despised the day of small things?
For these seven shall rejoice, when they see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel.
From that point, you are moving on the positive line.