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Actually, this is more of a pamphlet, taking up about one full page of my Bible, no more. Its message is uninteresting in general and completely superfluous; but I found a few interesting tidbits to comment on for your enjoyment.
Hag 1:6-11 - You have sown much, and harvested little; you eat,
but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill;
you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages
earn wages to put them into a bag with holes. Thus says the LORD of
hosts: Consider how you have fared. Go up to the hills and bring wood
and build the house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be
honored, says the LORD. You have looked for much, and lo, it came to
little; and when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? Says the
LORD of hosts. Because my house lies in ruins, while all of you hurry
off to your own houses. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld
the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. And I have called
for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine,
the oil, on what the soil produces, on human beings and animals and
on all their labors.
This passage sure makes God look like the
jealous god mentioned in Exodus!
Only now, he's jealous of shepherds' huts and common hovels. Note
that God's stated reason for ordering that the temple be built is
purely selfish - he wants to feel honored. And if he doesn't get his
way, he takes away the necessities of life. Of course, droughts do
still occur in places where nearly all the people do all they can to
honor God, so what could the problem be? No doubt, your local priest
will have a list of God's specific demands on hand, just for the
asking!
Hag 2:3-5 - Who is left among you that saw this house in its
former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as
nothing? Yet now take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high
priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD;
work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts, according to the
promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides
among you; do not fear.
Look back in the book of Leviticus.
The promise referred to here is the covenant between God and the
nation of Israel. It was a conditional promise - God would dwell with
his people, only so long as they obeyed all the laws. Anyone who read
this would recognize the fact that if the above statement were true,
it would mean that God was satisfied that this was happening. The
theological implications from the Christian standpoint are
interesting, to say the least.
Hag 2:6,7 - For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a
little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and
the dry land; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure
of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor,
says the LORD of hosts.
I wonder about this prophecy. What I wonder,
specifically, is whether the second temple was ever filled with
treasure from "all nations." Could it be that this prophecy turned
out to be as false as so many others we've seen in the Old
Testament?
Hag 2:15-17 - But now, consider what will come to pass from this
day on. Before a stone was placed upon a stone in the LORD's temple,
how did you fare? When one came to a heap of twenty measures, there
were but ten; when one came to the winevat to draw fifty measures,
there were but twenty. I struck you and all the products of you toil
with blight and mildew and hail; yet you did not return to me, says
the LORD.
Yet another example of interesting statements
in the Bible. One way to look at it might be that God is promising
that after building the temple, he will be happy, and help his people
live better, more prosperous lives. But another interesting statement
comes at the end - the common statement that having everything beaten
down, destroyed and rotted by God would somehow make the people love
him!
