Haggai 1:2 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, This people say, The time is not come.’ It is very interesting the way this is expressed. The people were saying these things emphatically, and their words seem to be clothed with authority. These are the words of people who appear to have considered the issue, and so they make something of a pronouncement: ‘Now is not the time.’ Implied is: ‘We do intend to get on with this task and to obey God and build a temple. Although we are fully committed to this, we have considered this, and we come to this very sensible conclusion that now is not the time’.Note that it is not, ‘I say’, but ‘they say’, so that God distances himself from their conclusion. They say this not because they had received no clear instruction to start building. The proclamation of Cyrus, recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder stored in the British Museum, had commanded the building work to begin (Ezra 1), and the work had commenced in 536 BC, sixteen years earlier. At that time Zerubbabel and those with him had laid the foundation stone (Ezra 3:8-10). The reason they say this is because of local circumstances that had developed since then. Really, it was their own unfaithfulness that was the problem. The trouble was they had given way to feathering their own nests and adorning their own homes in preference to building the Lord’s house. It did not horrify them as it should have done, that no house was built for the Lord. They hid behind the excuse of the difficulty of the work.