Haggai 1:13

What follows teaches us this. If the Lord disciplines, or if He speaks words of warning and correction, He does it only to remove every barrier to His people's blessing. He had watched the effect of the prophet's words. The moment the signs of repentance and self-judgment appeared, He sent them a message of comfort — "I am with you, declares the LORD."

When God sends a messenger, He is pleased to identify Himself with His servant... This is a solemn thing for the people of God, because the opposite is true too: if someone who is really sent by the Lord is refused, it is the Lord who is refused in the person of His servant... The Spirit of God, it seems, expands the description of the prophet — the LORD's messenger, with the LORD's message. This identifies him with his Lord. It gives the people certainty that his message is true.

It is very gracious, I think, to see how God provides with special care for a day of weakness. As far as I know, no earlier prophet ever carried the title "the LORD's messenger." Of the prophets after the captivity, Haggai's book is the shortest and the earliest. Yet he is the one given this unusual name of honour. Men would never have chosen him for it. Critics would call him the flattest in style, the plainest of all the prophets. He was the LORD's messenger for all that. He deals with the commonest things — their panelled houses, their sowing much, their bags with holes. They seem the most ordinary appeals. Yet he was the LORD's messenger.

"I am with you" is the saving principle for faith in the weakest possible day. And let me repeat it: what better did they have in the brightest day? Indeed, what else is so good as having the Lord with them? To have the most blessed servants would be a small thing if they did not have the Master Himself. This was the great safeguard and the unfailing source of supply and counsel when Israel came out of Egypt. How gracious to have His presence assured again after Babylon, when everything seemed gone and broken! The words were few, but they carried every help and blessing. They sank deep into devout hearts.

As we have seen, fear of their enemies kept the people from building the LORD's house. Now He gives the antidote... Nothing drives away fear like the assurance of the Lord's presence. But if it is comfort, it is also encouragement. It reminds the people that if the Lord called them forward into danger, He Himself was among them. He would go before them, as He had done in the wilderness, to show them the way.

And the place where power comes is most instructive. It is not before but after obedience... This would clear away the mistake often held, and sometimes spoken, that we must wait for power before we obey. It is not so; on obedience the Lord gives power. For example, the Lord said to the man with the withered arm, "Stretch out your hand." The man might have replied, "I have no power." Instead, in a spirit of obedience, he hurried to obey. He received strength, and was made whole.

They did not start building again because the king's decree reached them. They started because they feared the LORD and did not fear the king's command, seeing Him who is invisible. God was no more to be feared under Darius than under Cyrus or Artaxerxes. The source of their weakness was that they had forgotten God. This makes clear the great grace of God in waking them by the mouth of Haggai.