The Earth is the Lord's

I love the book of Haggai and I think its messages are timeless.  The counsel to “consider your ways” is always relevant, and I think one of the main principles taught is that we need to realize that the earth is the Lord’s and not ours.  The people were asked to “consider” the fact that they were focusing only on their own temporal well-being and coveting their own possessions as they built their own houses and not the Lord’s.  The Lord emphasized that “the silver is mine, and the gold is mine”—in other words, the things of the earth ultimately belong to God and not man, and so we should use them for God’s purposes (Haggai 2:8).  It’s so easy in our day to be focused on what is “mine” as we accumulate worldly goods, but they are really the Lord’s and they will not go with us.  When Job lost nearly all he had, he said wisely, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).  We don’t enter life with possessions and we don’t leave life with possessions, and in the middle what we might accumulate belongs to God anyway. 

                Many other scriptures emphasize this same principle.  The Psalmist taught, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein” (Psalms 24:1).  Moses taught Pharaoh what may have been the original source for the Psalm: “Neither shall there be any more hail; that thou mayest know how that the earth is the Lord’s” (Exodus 9:29).  The Law of Moses itself taught, “Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord’s thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is” (Deuteronomy 10:14).  In our day the Lord said something similar: “It must needs be that the riches of the earth are mine to give” (D&C 38:39).  Not only are the riches of the earth the Lord’s, but everything on the earth belongs to God.  For example, King Benjamin taught that the “dust of the earth… belongeth to him who created you” (Mosiah 2:25).  My children often get concerned about toys or other things that they claim are theirs, especially when another sibling is threatening to take that item.  I know that it all belongs to me ultimately, but I sometimes forget that the same relationship holds for me and the Lord.  He looks down and smiles when I claim something as my own, for He knows who it really belongs to.

                James E. Talmage said this about our materials goods: “Material belongings, relative wealth or poverty, physical environment—the things on which we are prone to set our hearts and anchor our aspirations, the things for which we sweat and strive, oft times at the sacrifice of happiness and to the forfeiture of real success—these after all are but externals, the worth of which in the reckoning to come shall be counted in terms of the use we have made of them” (see here).  If our hearts and aspirations are first on the possessions of things as he discusses here, then surely the Lord is pleading with us: “Consider your ways.”