Haggai 2

From the very beginning, when God first chose to reveal Himself, He warned consistently: What He would promise to do for humanity was conditional. God’s blessings in this life have always been bound up in the moral fabric woven into Creation. Prophets seldom said something would happen in any absolute sense, but offered divine contingencies. Haggai brings such a contingent message in this chapter. The time is a month after the previous message.
First, we probably have a tiny few who survived the full seventy years of exile and could dimly recall Solomon’s Temple. While much had been lost during the reigns of evil kings in Jerusalem who succeeded Solomon, the size and grandeur had remained. During this time of reconstruction, it was painfully obvious the Returnees had little of the resources and equipment Solomon used. Instead, it was a much smaller undertaking laid out in the first outline of stone work. You can be sure those who remembered would have despaired of seeing the likes of the First Temple again. God’s answer was, in effect, He wasn’t insulted. The issue was obedience, not man’s measures of architectural glory. He told them not to fear He would be angry with a smaller Temple.
Did they want to see a grand and glorious Temple again? Trust in God. He could do it, would do it if they only believed and obeyed. Haggai declares God can shake all human governments loose, turn things upside down and make Jerusalem the center of the world. Every nation would bring their finest treasures, if these people building the Temple would simply embrace the vision of taking the Covenant path before them. It could happen!
Two more months pass, and it’s around the first of December 520 BC by our reckoning. Time for another message wrapped in symbolism. Was ritual holiness contagious, or was defilement? It was the latter. The people had been bringing their offerings during that time when they refused to obey God. Therefore, they were unclean, and their offerings were unclean. It’s not the amount of the offering, any more than it depends on the size of the Temple building, but it depends on the obedience of the people under the Covenant. So now, as the last food from a bad time was consumed during these winter months, God promises obedience will bring such a harvest as to wipe away the memory of the current hunger. Today they were walking in obedience, and everything they touched was blessed. Just you wait and see, says the Lord.
One final message came to Haggai at that time. The Lord told Zerubbabel he was the man. Because he had taken seriously God’s command through Haggai, the Lord was prepared to raise him up as the next real King of Judah. And instead of being some petty regent in a backwater pile of rubble, he could be the ruler of a revived Kingdom of Israel. It could happen!
We know these things didn’t happen literally, but the principle of promise did not fail. Because the obedience flagged and their trust failed, much of what could have been did not come in their time. Instead, it waited for the Messiah for fulfillment. In Him, the literal meaning was left behind as too paltry, and the grand unspeakable blessings of these promises in the Spiritual Realm came instead.