Haggai 2 explained: A Small Temple, a Big Promise

Don't compare, keep building (vv. 1-5)

About a month into the work, older people who remembered Solomon's grand temple, destroyed roughly seventy years earlier, felt the new one was nothing by comparison. God tells the governor, the high priest and everyone to be strong and keep working, because he is still with them as he promised when he brought their ancestors out of Egypt.

Greater glory ahead (vv. 6-9)

God says he will soon shake the whole world and fill this plain building with glory greater than the old one's, and all the silver and gold belong to him anyway. The Hebrew of verse 7 can mean either the nations' treasures flowing in, which fits verse 8 and is favored by many modern scholars, or the one all nations long for, which Christians have long read as pointing to Jesus, who later taught in this temple.

Holiness doesn't rub off (vv. 10-14)

Haggai asks the priests two questions about religious law: something sacred does not make ordinary food holy just by touching it, but someone made unclean by touching a dead body does make things unclean. His point, as usually understood, is that having a holy site did not make the people right with God, and their long neglect had tainted everything they offered.

From today, blessing (vv. 15-19)

God reminds them of the thin harvests and crop disease before they started building, when they got half or less of what they expected. It is now late in the year, around December, with no harvest in sight, yet God promises blessing from this day, before there is any sign of it.

Zerubbabel the signet ring (vv. 20-23)

A signet ring was a ruler's personal seal of authority, and Zerubbabel was a descendant of King David whose grandfather had been told by an earlier prophet that God would pull him off like a ring, so many read this promise as a reversal of that. God promises to overturn powerful kingdoms and choose Zerubbabel, though history records nothing of him becoming king, and scholars differ on how this hope was meant to be fulfilled.

Key verse: Haggai 2:4

Where Christians differ

Christians differ on whether the promises of greater glory and a chosen ruler mainly point ahead to Jesus or mainly spoke to the hopes of Haggai's own day, later read in a larger light.

Something to think about

When something you are rebuilding can never match what was lost, what makes it worth doing anyway?