Albert Barnes Commentary Haggai 2

In the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month—This was the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles (Leviticus 23:34; Leviticus 23:36; Leviticus 23:40–42), and its conclusion. The eighth day was to be a Sabbath, with its “holy convocation,” but the commemorative feast—the dwelling in booths in memory of God’s bringing them out of Egypt—was to last seven days.

The conclusion of this feast, then, could not fail to revive their sadness at the glories of their first deliverance by God’s “mighty hand and outstretched arm,” and their present small numbers and poverty. This depression inevitably brought with it heavy thoughts about the work in which they were engaged in obedience to God, all the more so because Isaiah and Ezekiel had prophesied of the glories of the Christian Church under the symbol of the temple.

Haggai is sent to relieve this despondency, plainly acknowledging the reality of its current basis, but renewing, on God’s part, the pledge of the glories of this second temple, which were to come.

Who is left among you? – The question implies that there were those among them who had seen the first house in its glory, yet only a few. When the foundations of the first temple were laid, there were many (Ezra 3:12): Many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundations of this house were laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice. Fifty-nine years had elapsed from the destruction of the temple in the eleventh year of Zedekiah to the first year of Cyrus, so that old men of seventy years had seen the first temple when they themselves were eleven years old.

In the second year of Darius, seventy years had passed, so that those who were 78 or 80 years old might still remember it well. Ezra’s father, Seraiah, was slain in the eleventh year of Zedekiah; so he must have been born at the latest a few months later, yet he lived until the second year of Artaxerxes.

Is not such as it is as nothing? – Besides the richness of the sculptures in the former temple, everything that allowed for it was overlaid with gold. For instance (1 Kings 6:22, 28, 30, 32, 35), Solomon overlaid the whole house with gold, until he had finished all the house; also the whole altar by the oracle, the two cherubim, the floor of the house, and the doors of the holy of holies. The ornaments of it also included the cherubims thereon and the palm trees he covered with gold fitted upon the carved work.

The altar of gold and the table of gold, on which the showbread was, the ten candlesticks of pure gold, with the flowers and the lamps and the tongs of gold, the bowls, the snuffers, and the basons, the spoons, and the censers of pure gold, and the hinges of pure gold for all the doors of the temple were also of gold (1 Kings 7:48–50).

Furthermore, according to 2 Chronicles 3:4–9: The porch that was in the front of the house, twenty cubits broad and 120 cubits high, was overlaid within with pure gold; the house glistened with precious stones; and the gold (it is added) was gold of Parvaim—a land, of course, distant and unknown to us. Six hundred talents of gold (about 4,320,000 British pounds) were employed in overlaying the holy of holies. The upper chambers were also of gold; the weight of the nails was fifty shekels of gold.

Yet now be strong ... and work – They are the words with which David exhorted Solomon his son to be earnest and to persevere in the building of the first temple (1 Chronicles 28:10). Take heed now, for the Lord hath chosen thee to build an house for the sanctuary: be strong and do (1 Chronicles 28:20). Be strong and of good courage, and do. This combination of words occurs only once elsewhere (2 Chronicles 19:11), in Jehoshaphat’s exhortation to the Levites and priests and chiefs of the fathers of Israel (2 Chronicles 19:8), whom he had set as judges in Jerusalem.

Haggai seems then to have adopted the words, with the purpose of suggesting to the downhearted people that there was need of a similar exhortation, in view of the building of the former temple, whose relative glory so depressed them. The word “be strong” (elsewhere rendered, “be of good courage”) occurs commonly in exhortations to persevere and hold fast, amid whatever obstacles.

The words which I covenanted—The words stand more forcibly, because abruptly.

It is an exclamation that cannot be forced into any grammatical relation with the preceding. The more exact idiom would have been “Remember,” “take to heart.” But the prophet points to it the more energetically, because he casts it, as it were, into the middle, not bound up with any one verb.

This would be rather done in speaking to the people, as David to his followers (1 Samuel 30:23), which Ewald compares (Lehrbuch, number 329a, page 811; Exodus 8:0; and in his Die Propheten, volume 3, page 183).

Only Ewald, not very intelligibly, makes it a sort of oath: By the word, By that which the Lord has given us. But he suggests the like broken sentence (Zechariah 7:7): “That which the Lord has given us and has preserved us and given the company against us into our hands!”

That is, “Would you deal this way with it?” The abrupt form rejects it as shocking. So here, “The word which I covenanted with you,” that is, this, “I will be with you,” was the central all-containing promise, to which God pledged Himself when He brought them out of Egypt.

He speaks to them as being one with those who came up out of Egypt, as if they were the very persons. The Church, ever varying in the individuals of whom it is composed, is, throughout all ages, in God’s sight, one; His promises to the fathers are made to the children in them.

So the Psalmist says, “There” (at the dividing of the Red Sea and the Jordan) “do we rejoice in Him,” as if present there; and our Lord promises to the Apostles, “I am with you always even to the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20), by an ever-present presence with them and His Church founded by them in Him.

My Spirit abides among you—as the Psalmist says, “they (the heavens) perish and You abide” (Psalms 102:27); “The counsel of the Lord stands forever” (Psalms 33:11); “His righteousness endures forever” (Psalms 111:3).

The Spirit of God is God the Holy Spirit, with His manifold gifts. Where He is, is all good. As the soul is in the body, so God the Holy Spirit is in the Church, Himself its life, and bestowing on all and each every good gift, as each and all have need.

As Paul says of the Church of Christ, “There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God, who works all in all” (1 Corinthians 12:4, 6, 11).

“All these works one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as He wills.” But above and beyond all gifts He is present as the Spirit of holiness and love, making the Church and those in whom He individually dwells, acceptable to God.

Special applications, such as “the Spirit of wisdom and might;” a spirit such as He gave to Moses to judge His people; the spirit of prophecy; or the spirit given to Bezaleel and Aholiab for the work of the sanctuary—these recognize in detail the one great truth, that all good, all wisdom, from least to greatest, comes from God the Holy Spirit, though one by one they would exclude more truth than they each contain.

Yet once, it is a little while - This, the rendering of Paul to the Hebrews, is the only grammatical one. “Yet once.” By the word yet he looks back to the first great shaking of the moral world, when God’s revelation by Moses and to His people broke upon the darkness of the pagan world, to be a monument against pagan error until Christ should come; once looks forward, and conveys that God would again shake the world, but once only, under the one dispensation of the Gospel, which should endure to the end.

It is a little while - “The 517 years, which were to elapse until the birth of Christ, are called a little time, because to the prophets, ascending in heart to God and the eternity of God, all times, like all things of this world, seem, as they are, only a little thing, indeed a mere point,” which has neither length nor breadth. So John calls the time of the new law, “the last hour” (1 John 2:18), “Little children, it is the last hour.” It was little also in respect to the time that had elapsed from the fall of Adam, when God promised the Savior Christ (Genesis 3:15), little also in respect to the Christian law, which has now lasted above 1,800 years, and the time of the end does not yet seem near.

I will shake the heavens and the earth, and the sea and the dry land - It is one universal shaking of all this world and the heavens over it, of which the prophet speaks. He does not speak only of (Luke 21:25) “signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars,” which might be, and yet the frame of the world itself might remain. It is a shaking such as would involve the dissolution of this system of ours, as Paul draws out its meaning (Hebrews 12:27): “This word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of the things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”

Prophecy, in its long perspective, uses a continual foreshortening, speaking of things in relation to their eternal meaning and significance, as to that which shall survive when heaven and earth and even time shall have passed away. It blends together the beginning and the earthly end, the preparation and the result, the commencement of redemption and its completion, our Lord’s coming in humility and in His Majesty.

There is scarcely a prophet who does not exhibit things in their intrinsic relation, to which time is merely an accident.

It is the rule, not the exception. The Seed of the woman, who should bruise the serpent’s head, was promised at the fall: to Abraham, the blessing through his seed; by Moses, the prophet like him; to David, an everlasting covenant (2 Samuel 23:5). Joel unites the outpouring of the Spirit of God on the Day of Pentecost and the hatred of the world until the Day of Judgment (Joel 2:28–32; Joel 3).

Isaiah unites God’s judgments on the land and the Day of final judgment (Isaiah 24), the deliverance from Babylon and the first coming of Christ (Isaiah 40–66), and the glories of the Church, the new heavens and the new earth that will remain forever, with the unquenched fire and undying worm of the lost (Isaiah 66:22–24). Daniel unites the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes, of Antichrist, and the Resurrection (Daniel 11–12). Obadiah unites the punishment of Edom and the everlasting kingdom of God (Obadiah 1:18–21). Zephaniah unites the punishment of Judah and the final judgment of the earth. Malachi unites our Lord’s first and second coming (Malachi 3:1–5, 3:17-18; Malachi 4:1–6).

Indeed, our Lord Himself so blends together the destruction of Jerusalem, the days of Antichrist, and the end of the world, that it is difficult to separate them to say what belongs exclusively to either. The prophecy is an answer to two distinct questions of the Apostles:

1. “When shall these things be?” (namely, the destruction of the temple).
2. “And what shall be the sign of Your coming and of the end of the world?”

Our Lord answers the two questions in one. Some things seem to belong to the first coming, as (Matthew 24:15–16) “the abomination of desolation spoke of by Daniel,” and the flight from Judea (Matthew 24:24), “into the mountains.”

But the exceeding deceivableness is authoritatively interpreted by Paul in 2 Thessalonians (Matthew 5:2–10) of a distant time. Moreover, our Lord Himself, having said that “all these things,” of which the Apostles had inquired, should take place in that generation (Mark 13:30), speaks of His absence as of a man taking a far journey (Mark 13:3), and says that “not the angels in heaven knew that hour, neither the Son” (Mark 13:32). This precludes the idea that He had just declared that the whole would take place in that generation.

For this would be to conclude that He declared that the Son did not know the hour of His Coming, which He had just (on this supposition) declared to be in that generation.

So then, here. There was a general shaking on earth before our Lord came. Empires rose and fell. The Persian fell before Alexander’s; Alexander’s world-empire was ended by his sudden death in youth; of his four successors, two only continued, and they too fell before the Romans. Then there were the Roman civil wars, until, under Augustus, the temple of Janus was shut. “For it greatly befitted a work ordered by God, that many kingdoms should be confederated in one empire, and that the universal preaching might find the peoples easily accessible who were held under the rule of one state.”

In the heavens, there was the star that led the wise men, the manifestation of Angels to the shepherds, the supernatural darkness at the Passion, the Ascension into the highest heaven, and the descent of the Holy Spirit with (Acts 2:2) “a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind.”

“God had moved them (heaven and earth) before, when He delivered the people from Egypt, when there was in heaven a column of fire, dry ground amid the waves, a wall in the sea, a path in the waters; in the wilderness there was multiplied a daily harvest of heavenly food (the manna); the rock gushed into fountains of waters. But He moved it afterward also in the Passion of the Lord Jesus, when the heaven was darkened, the sun shrank back, the rocks were rent, the graves opened, the dead were raised; the dragon, conquered in his waters, saw the fishers of men, not only sailing in the sea, but also walking without peril. The dry ground also was moved, when the unfruitful people of the nations began to ripen to a harvest of devotion and faith—so that “more were the children of the forsaken, than of her which had a husband,”—and (Isaiah 35:1) “the desert flourished like a lily.” He moved earth in that great miracle of the birth from the Virgin: He moved the sea and dry land, when in the islands and in the whole world Christ is preached.”

And yet, whatever preludes of fulfillment there were at our Lord’s first coming, they were as nothing compared to the fulfillment that we look for in the second, when, as stated in Isaiah 24:19-20, “the earth shall be utterly broken down; the earth, clean dissolved; the earth, moved exceedingly; the earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a hanging-cot in a vineyard and the transgression thereof is heavy upon it; and it shall fall and not rise again;” after which follows an announcement of the final judgment of men and angels, and the everlasting kingdom of the blessed in the presence of God.

Of that “day of the Lord,” Peter uses our Lord’s image (Matthew 24:43), that it shall (2 Peter 3:10) “come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works therein shall be burned up.”