Haggai 2:22 Commentary and Bible Study

Israel was a small nation and as such might fear that its interests or even its existence as a nation might be threatened by the convulsions of the bigger nations around. TV Moore comments, ‘They feared that so feeble a nation as Israel would be crushed amid the dashing and grinding of these floating and agitated masses against each other.’ The Lord assures them through Haggai, that this will not happen. He yet has a purpose for Israel, and that ensures that they will be kept by him until all is fulfilled. Greater people than themselves will be uprooted and displaced, and those that caused others to tremble will in turn feel great terror of their own, and all the time Israel will continue in its place. Nations that are better armed, whom Israel would be unable to face militarily, will find their war chariots overthrown. Israel’s enemies will be brought down violently in warfare fought against nearby nations. ‘I will have them destroy each other’, says the Lord.In Isaiah’s prophecy of the destruction of Babylon he had said, ‘Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the LORD of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger’ (Isaiah 13:13). Haggai uses the same language to speak of the destruction of the remaining world empires. The dispensationalists say this is about the millennium, but the context demands that it has a much nearer fulfilment. It refers rather to the first coming of Christ, though it is true that the prophets tended to speak of the first and second coming as if they were the same. It refers to the removal of the Medo-Persians, the Greeks and finally the Romans, after which, just as Daniel had foretold, ‘the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him’ (Daniel 7:27).