Haggai
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Two months after Haggai’s first message, on the twenty-first day of the seventh month, the word of the Lord comes to him again. The temple work has begun, and the people have gathered at the site for the Festival of Tabernacles, a joyous feast. The younger generation, the ones who came back from exile and have never known anything else, are happy simply to have built something with their own hands. But Ezra records something else happening in the same crowd. The older generation, the few who were there when they last saw Solomon’s temple standing in its full glory,…
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Haggai belongs to the very first group that returned to Jerusalem under King Cyrus’s decree, some fifty thousand Jews led by Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest, about fifty years after the exile began. Their stated purpose was simple: go home and rebuild the temple. But between local opposition from governors and Samaritans who did not want to see Jerusalem restored, and their own drifting attention, the project stalled. For sixteen years, the returned exiles forgot why they had come back at all. They stopped building God’s house and started building their own, and building them well, with…
