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The people said this, because they thought the undertaking too great, too arduous, too expensive for a nation circumstanced as they were. These returned captives were but a small remnant of the population of the land. They had not yet fully established themselves in their own habitations. They had formidable enemies around them, bent upon impeding their work. They were labouring at present under extraordinary distress, from the failure of their vintage and their crops; and therefore, though they admitted that the work was one needful to be done, they said, "Not yet; not in these days." How many good works are put by by being put off! How much of the business we are sent into the world to do is not done, under pretence that it is too soon to set about it. But the prophet shows this people that their present poverty and distress were sent by God as a chastisement for their past negligence, and a warning as to their future course. The poverty which they thought to prevent by not building the temple, God brought upon them for not building it. Having thus opened to them the nature of God's dealings with them, he calls upon them to reflect upon them.Consider your ways. Then he urges upon them the immediate duty of amending their ways — "Go up to the mountain and bring wood, and build the house"; and adds also the promise of encouragement — "And I will take pleasure in it, and I will be glorified, saith the Lord." The message and exhortation of the prophet were not in vain. The message was given on the first day of the sixth month, and on the four-and-twentieth day of the month the people were at work. When the Jews were led, on account of feebleness and poverty, to neglect their duty in the restoration of the temple, God visited and chastised them with the increase of that very distress which was the excuse for their sloth; and though they misunderstood the lesson, He withdrew not His hand till, under the teaching of the prophet, they had learnt its meaning. Has no similar working of Almighty wisdom developed itself in our case? When we have been led to forgetfulness of our duty to God, not by distress, but by the full-fed arrogance of worldly prosperity, has not He drawn for us lessons of chastisement out of that which has been the very cause of our sin? Our great manufacturing and commercial towns are the offspring, the development, the very characteristic embodiment of the sort of prosperity which God has permitted a careless nation to work out for itself. And if such prosperity he a blessing, may we not well question whether the Almighty have not brought upon us the last and worst denunciation of prophetic word, and "cursed our blessings because we have departed from His ways" Now at length the conviction seems to he slowly forcing itself upon us that our disabilities are so great because in building up our social fabric we have omitted the temple of God. These are the providential chastisements with which God corrects a nation, which has allowed a population to grow up estranged from Him — untaught in His Divine law. And as yet we seem to be in the state of the Jews when God first visited them with dearth and poverty for their forgetfulness of Him and His temple. We are making the consequences of our sinful neglect reason for its continuance. We need all of us to have our spirits stirred within us to do the work of God, yea, even those who may think that they are already awakened to a sense of their duties. When the foundation of the second temple was laid amid general joy and congratulation, "the elders, who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice." — They were afflicted at the thought of the humbled state of the Church of God. But if man in his niggardliness now builds meanly, God can give to His temple a splendour of its own. The glory of the latter house may be greater than the glory of the former. Into the second temple came the glory of the incarnate Son of God. And into our temple now may come that spiritual presence which will give it even greater glory. Then be strong in that which your duty calls you to do, and strong in that self-denying devotion by which alone it can be done. And doubt not that God will prosper and bless the work so taken in hand.

(Bishop E. Denison, D. D.)

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KJV: Then came the word of the LORD by Haggai the prophet, saying,

WEB: Then the Word of Yahweh came by Haggai, the prophet, saying,