New Temple v Old Temple
Seven weeks have passed. Either they have still not started or they have not much to show for their efforts. Perhaps they are beginning to see that there is no way they can build a temple anything like the one which had been destroyed.
Here we run into dating problems. The temple was destroyed in 586 and on some datings was rebuilt c538. Haggai is usually put towards the end of the century (c520) which means that he is appealing to people with long memories and his call only makes sense if the temple was still unfinished. This has led to suggestions that for Haggai the Temple was not an end in itself but a symbol of the recreation of the community. What mattered was not bricks and mortar but the community, fellowship and worship. People needed encouragement.
Haggai carefully avoids presenting a vision of what might be. Instead, he stirs the recollections of those who remember ‘the days of old’. Inspiration comes from the past, especially from those who can recall it and appreciate the difference between then and now.
V 4 also suggests he is addressing all ‘the people of the land’ and not just the Temple community. Use your imagination. Is he saying, ‘This place is not what it used to be — and those of you who can remember yesterday know it’, but not to chastise so much as to inspire, to draw on the past of which they do have knowledge, awareness and experience as against vague dreams and visions which depend on hope and uncertainty.
The picture then widens further. Not just the temple community or even all ‘the people of the land’ but all nations, sea and dry land, heaven and earth. These people are struggling because their faith is too small. They are too committed to yesterday. They thought the Temple (the past) was wonderful. When it was destroyed they felt they had lost everything. Haggai urges them to think again, to look beyond the details or the physical expression of the past to everything that that past stood for, and then to reinterpret that glorious past in a wider context. No longer an ‘island nation’. No longer an empire with a limited vision, but a bigger, vaster, richer, fuller world.