The House Too Small for the Glory

When the exiles laid the foundation of the second temple, the sound that went up was strange: the young men shouted for joy while the old priests — old enough to have seen Solomon's temple before Babylon burned it — wept aloud, until the weeping could not be told from the shouting (Ezra 3:12–13). They were grieving a comparison. What was rising now was smaller and plainer, and against the remembered gold it looked like almost nothing.

Years later the work had stalled, the walls barely risen, and the LORD sent the prophet Haggai to a discouraged remnant. He does not scold them for the smallness of the house; he says their disappointment out loud for them: "Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes?" (Haggai 2:3). Then one word, three times, to three sets of tired hands — "Be strong … Be strong … Be strong" — and under it the only reason that could hold: "Work, for I am with you" (Haggai 2:4). "My Spirit remains in your midst. Fear not" (Haggai 2:5).

Then the promise turns strange. The LORD says he will "fill this house with glory," and that "the latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former" (Haggai 2:7, 9). But the second temple never out-shone the first — no ark, its stone humbler, not grander. So where was the greater glory? The next line refuses the answer we expect: "The silver is mine, and the gold is mine" (Haggai 2:8). The glory would not be weighed in metal. It would walk in on its own two feet. "The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple" (Malachi 3:1) — and one ordinary morning old Simeon took a poor couple's baby in his arms in those courts and called him "a glory to your people Israel" (Luke 2:32). The glory of the house was never a thing kept in the house. It was a Person, the Word who "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).

He would teach in that temple, clear its courts, and finally say what no one could yet carry: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" — "he was speaking about the temple of his body" (John 2:19–21). Every house God had asked us to build for him — the tabernacle in the wilderness, Solomon's gold, this plain second temple — was a shadow thrown forward, waiting for the day the true dwelling would arrive in flesh, be torn down on a cross, and rise on the third morning.

The oracle ends with one more line: "And in this place I will give peace" (Haggai 2:9). More than calm weather, this is shalom — a broken relationship set right, the peace the angels would one day announce over that same country.¹ We know now what it cost: peace made "by the blood of his cross" (Colossians 1:20), so that "he himself is our peace" (Ephesians 2:14). Which leaves the old men's tears looking almost like prophecy. They wept because the house was too small to hold the glory they remembered — and no house could. The glory came instead as a child small enough to be carried, a body that could be broken; and so the too-small thing in front of us — our half-built faith — turns out to be just the kind of place he has always chosen to fill. Be strong, and work. He is with us still.