The Glory of This House

On a building site in Jerusalem, a group of old men stand looking at a half-built wall. Some of the young workers are cheering. But the old men are crying, and they cannot stop.

About seventy years earlier, the Babylonians burned Solomon's great temple to the ground. Now the Persians rule the world, and some of the exiles have come home. They laid foundations for a new temple, then stopped for years, discouraged and busy with their own houses. But in the second year of King Darius, a prophet named Haggai stirred them up. Get building, he said. And they did. The governor Zerubbabel, of David's royal line, and the high priest Joshua led the work. Now, less than a month later, it is the seventh month, the season of the Feast of Tabernacles, when Israel remembered God's faithfulness in the wilderness.

On the twenty-first day of that month, God gives Haggai a message, and it begins with a question. Who is left among you who saw this house in its first glory? And how does it look to you now? Is it not like nothing in your eyes? God is not pretending. He knows exactly how small this new temple looks. The book of Ezra tells us that when the foundations were laid, many of the older priests and leaders who had seen the first temple wept aloud, while others shouted for joy. You could not tell the weeping from the shouting. The old ones remembered gold-covered walls and cedar from Lebanon. What they saw now was plain stone and hard work.

But God does not leave them there. He speaks to each leader by name. Be strong, Zerubbabel. Be strong, Joshua the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land. And work. Why? “For I am with you, saith the LORD of hosts.” God reminds them of the promise he made when he brought their ancestors out of Egypt. My Spirit remains among you. Fear not. Their temple might be small, but their God was not. The same God who split the sea was standing with them on that dusty building site.

Then God speaks of the future. In a little while, he says, I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and the treasures of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord. Do not worry about what you cannot afford. And then the promise that must have made the old men stop crying. “The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace.” A plain little temple, greater than Solomon's? It was hard to believe. But God had something in mind they could not yet see.

Scholars who study the Babylonian and Persian calendars have worked out that the twenty-first day of the seventh month in Darius's second year falls in October of the year five hundred and twenty before Christ. This rebuilt temple was finished a few years later. Long afterward, King Herod the Great enlarged and decorated it on a huge scale, as the historian Josephus describes. That second temple was the one where the baby Jesus was presented, where he taught as a boy, and where he later walked and taught as a man.

This promise is in Haggai chapter two, verses one to nine. The builders could not see it, but the glory of that house would be greater because one day the Son of God himself would stand in its courts. So here is a question to carry with you. When something you are doing for God looks small, what would it mean to hear him say, be strong, and work, for I am with you?