Haggai 1:3

So when they said, "The time has not come for the LORD's house to be built," the word of the LORD comes through the prophet and says, "Is it a time for you yourselves to live in your panelled houses, while this house lies in ruins?" In this there was a serious forgetfulness of the glory of the LORD. It was all the more painful because they had begun better.

Judging only by the history, we might conclude that the enemies' words stopped the building of the house. The word of the LORD through the prophet teaches us something else: the true reason lies in what the people said. So the message opens with the words, "This people say, The time has not come for the LORD's house to be built." For twelve years they had stopped doing the one thing God had brought them out of Babylon to do.

David planned to build a house for the ark of God, a house of cedars, costly and lasting. But the word of a prophet forbade him; the time had not come... In the day of Haggai we find the opposite. A prophet rebukes Israel for not building the house of the Lord. David was wrong in saying the time had come for such a work; the returned captives are now wrong in saying the time has not come. And the Spirit of the Lord knew the times, and what Israel ought to do, whether to build or not to build.

And what led them to this conclusion? There were enemies, and the times were not peaceful. As if enemies to the Lord's work would ever stop! As if the time would ever come when the natural eye would see the right moment to work for the Lord! Ah, we all have to learn the lesson. The Word — the mind of the Lord — is our warrant for service. When He speaks, we have only to go forward, whatever the circumstances and however many the enemies.

God was no more to be feared in the reign of Darius than in the reign of Cyrus or Artaxerxes. The source of their weakness was that they had forgotten God. This shows the great grace of God in awakening them by the mouth of Haggai.

The building of the house, as I noted, had stopped for about fourteen years. It is a happy thing to find that the work started again — not by force of a decree from the great Persian king who ruled the Jews at that time, but by the voice of God's prophets, Haggai and Zechariah. The Lord did move the heart of the king; but not until His prophet had moved the heart of Israel... The Lord turned the heart of the king, their master, to favour them, when they had taken again the place of faith and obedience.

The people took a fatalistic attitude, saying, "the time has not come… for the Lord's house to be built"; and started to build up their own affairs. Some sixty years ago we heard Christians saying, despite the Lord's words in Acts 1:8, that the time had not come to take the gospel to distant nations. They settled down to build up their own spiritual affairs, as they saw them. It was not wrong for these Jews to build themselves houses. It was wrong to settle down to that and leave the house of God in ruins.