Haggai 2:18

Compare Haggai 1:13-15 with this scripture. It was exactly three months from the day the people started work on the LORD's house to the day the foundation was laid. That time would have gone into the needed preparation. It is striking that the LORD did not begin to bless them until the foundation was laid. He waited those three months to test His people's hearts and the reality of their restoration. He worked in them a sense of their past condition, and so prepared them to receive the blessing He was about to give... His heart is always to bless. If He holds back blessing, it is only because of their spiritual state... At the end of that time they had reached what was nearest to the Lord's heart: the foundation of His temple. So He announces that from that day He would bless them. Now they were walking in keeping with the place God had put them in.

Sadly, the remnant of Haggai's day had been acting on a false principle. The result: the work of their hands was unclean in the sight of the LORD. So the LORD dealt with them in governmental discipline and struck them "with blight and with mildew."

At this moment God's mind was on the building of His house; their minds were on their own houses. Out of communion with the One who had called them, they were for themselves and not for the LORD. They were taken up with their own things, and not with His. In this way they became defiled in practice... They were unclean themselves, so they polluted everything they touched. Nothing they did was acceptable to God — not their daily work, and not the worship they professed.

The second cause for discouragement, both in the past and today, is the slowness with which blessing comes. ... For the Jews this was a blight on material prosperity. With us the flow of spiritual blessing may not come at once. Lessons on the principle of association have to be learnt. The holy cannot make the unclean holy, but the unclean can make the holy unclean.

Still, we may see this. However great the failure of God's people, if they repent and act in obedience to the word, they will be blessed. So, as soon as the remnant take up the work of the house, the LORD can say, "from this day I will bless you."

Some of us may have proved as much in God's dealing with us spiritually... To many it was simply a practical question of doing the will of God, and so a fixed duty of keeping clear of what dishonours the Lord. But who ever expected what He has given since? The opening out of His word, the recovery of forgotten truth, the enjoyment of His presence, and the blessing of many others far and wide through it, even if indirectly.

The blessings promised here to Israel belonged to this life, in keeping with the system they lived under. But the principle of blessing, as we have often shown, is the same for believers now. Whenever God's people walk with hearts subject to His word, in communion with His own mind, they are on the sure and certain path of blessing and soul-prosperity... And whenever a believer's heart responds through grace to God's call to walk with Him like this, this word — "From this day I will bless you" — will prove as true as it was when the prophet spoke it to Israel.