1. Haggai knew the people had no right to encourage themselves in the Lord their God, as young David did (1Sa_30:6), unless they were at the same time doing something for His glory. Those who expect great things from Him must attempt great things for Him. The most courageous and sanguine men in the world are the fellow-workers of God, who come to His help against the mighty, espousing His cause, fighting His battles, maintaining His honour. And like every other true prophet, Haggai addresses himself to the urgent need of the present hour. His eyes are not in the ends of the earth or in the far-off unknown future. He sees his own and his nation's immediate duty as clear as noonday. He has learned the great lesson, to act in the living present, “heart within and God o'erhead.” He knows, of course, that when God's Kingdom comes it will be in His own time and way. But he also knows that He uses the energies of men and makes them an integral part of His own mighty plan.
God's all, man's nought:
But also, God, whose pleasure brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were a handbreadth off, to give
Room for the newly-made to live,
And look at Him from a place apart,
And use his gifts of brain and heart,
Given, indeed, but to keep for ever.1 [Note: R. Browning, Christmas Eve.]
2. Haggai sees that God had given the people of his day gifts of brain and heart for the plain task of building in the Holy City a new temple for His worship. He rebukes their lack of public spirit and devotional feeling. While they build for themselves cieled houses, while every man runs to his own house, they can look without shame and without pain upon God's house still lying waste. And he assures them that it is for their disregard of the urgent necessity of the hour that the heaven is withholding its dew and the earth its fruit.
For ourselves Haggai's appeal to the barren seasons and poverty of the people as proof of God's anger with their selfishness must raise questions. But we have already seen, not only that natural calamities were by the ancient world interpreted as the penal instruments of the Deity, but that all through history they have had a wonderful influence on the spirits of men, forcing them to search their own hearts and to believe that Providence is conducted for other ends than those of our physical prosperity. Haggai, therefore, takes no sordid view of Providence when he interprets the seasons, from which his countrymen had suffered, as God's anger upon their selfishness and delay in building His House.2 [Note: G. A. Smith, The Book the Twelve Prophets, ii. 239.]
3. It is sometimes levied as a reproach against Haggai that he makes no direct reference to moral duties, and it is doubtless true that his treatment of his theme, practical and effective as it was for the purpose in hand, moves on a far lower level than the aspirations of the prophet who wrote the closing chapters of Isaiah. To the latter the material Temple is no more than a detail in the picture of a work of restoration eminently ideal and spiritual, and he expressly warns his hearers against attaching intrinsic importance to it. To Haggai the Temple appears so essential that he teaches that, while it lay waste, the people and all their works and offerings were unclean. In this he betrays his affinity with Ezekiel, who taught that it is by the possession of the sanctuary that Israel is sanctified.
The time is still far distant when a Greater than any of the prophets taught that a material fabric is not necessary for the service of God, who as a Spirit is worshipped in spirit and in truth. The greatest of the prophets-Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah-might well have understood such a reasonable service-a worship of God without altar and sacrifice-and directed their efforts to making it a reality in Israel. But Haggai's inspiration moved him in a different direction, and impartial historians contend that he took the only right, because the only possible, course, due regard being had to the circumstances of his time.
In point of fact the practical issue of the prophetic reformation sketched in Deuteronomy had been to make the Temple the national centre still more than formerly. The hagiocracy towards which Ezekiel had already opened the way was simply inevitable.1 [Note: Wellhausen, History of Israel, 494.]
