This book is a witness how rapidly declension sets in, and fresh corruption follows upon restoration and blessing.
Haggai: Background to the Book
Return to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon was made at the opening of the Book of Ezra, with great brightness and promise. Thousands left Babylon; and they who remained behind helped them with their goods; and a general awakening of the national heart and energy was known.
The first business of the returned captives was to build the house of the Lord; and they laid the foundation of it in the midst of such mingled and diverse affections, as showed how thoroughly and personally they had set themselves to it. Tears and joys, shouts and wailings, told the living realities of the moment, and gave promise that an earnest-hearted work, then begun, would find its way happily and prosperously to the end. But it was not so. The promise was not made good. Is man’s pledge, and promise, and stewardship ever realized? The Gentile seed which had been planted in the lands of the ten tribes became the occasion of hindrance and difficulty; and the building of the house is suspended, and that, too, for so long a time as fourteen years; during which interval, self-indulgence and consultation about their own things marked the moral ways of the people, of that people who had started so earnestly and so single-heartedly.