Albert Barnes Commentary Haggai 2:6

"For thus saith Jehovah of hosts: Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land;" — Haggai 2:6 (ASV)

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.”