Haggai prophesies in 520 BC, eighteen years after the first wave of exiles returned from Babylon. The foundation of the second temple has been sitting half-finished while people panel their own houses. The old men who saw Solomon's temple have wept at how small the new one looks (Hag 2:3). Haggai's audience is a discouraged, distracted, downsized community of survivors. Into that smallness God speaks an absurd promise: the latter glory of this modest, unimpressive building will outshine Solomon's. The word arrives before any visible reason to believe it — which is exactly when Israel needs to hear it.

From the writers we read together

BibleProject

Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, biblical scholars and creators of the BibleProject animated theology series

Mackie and Collins read the temple as the load-bearing image of the whole canon. Eden is the first temple, where God walks with humans. The tabernacle is a portable echo of Eden. Solomon's temple is a stationary echo. The second temple — the one Haggai is staring at — is a smaller, sadder echo still. And yet Haggai says this house will hold a greater glory. The trajectory is not downward; it is bending toward something the returnees cannot yet see.

What they cannot see is that one day a Galilean carpenter will walk into this very building's expanded courts and say, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19). The latter glory turns out to be a person. And after him, Paul will tell the Corinthians that they are the temple. The overlap of heaven and earth keeps expanding. If you belong to Christ, Haggai's promise has landed on your shoulders. The shalom God promised "in this place" is now promised in you.