Hag. 1:1.—In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, in the first day of the month, came the word of the Lord by Haggai.
WILLIAM ALDIS WRIGHT, M. A.—The prophecies of Haggai were delivered in the second year of Darius Hystaspes, that is, B. C. 520, at intervals from the first day of the sixth month, to the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month in the same year.—Smith's Dict., p. 979.
The Desire of All Nations
Hag. 2:7.—And the Desire of all nations shall come.
PROF. R. C. TRENCH, M. A.—There was in the heathen world, all along, an implicit expectation—yearning—for a redeemer. The nations yearned, and knew not for what. But still they yearned: for as the earth in its long polar night seeks to supply the absence of the day by the generation of the northern lights, so does each people in the long night of its heathen darkness bring forth in its yearnings, after the Life of Christ, a faint and glimmering substitute for the same. From these dreamy longings after the break of day have proceeded oracles, priests, sacrifices, lawgivers, and the like. Men have nowhere given up hoping; nor acquiesced in the world's evil as the world's law. Everywhere they have had a tradition of a time when they were nearer to God than now, a confident hope of a time when they should be brought nearer again. No thoughtful student of the past records of mankind can refuse to acknowledge that through all its history there has run the hope of a redemption from the evil which oppresses it; nor of this only, but that this hope has continually linked itself on to some single man. The help that is coming to the world, it has ever seen incorporated in a person.... “The DESIRE of all nations shall come," was an expectation as deeply graven on the heart and mind of the heathen as of the Jew. —Hulsean Lectures for 1846, p. 186.
The Latter House
Hag. 2:9.—The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of hosts.
REV. CHARLES BRADLEY.—The first temple was splendid in its gold and silver; its main glory, however, lay in the traces it bore, the indications it held of the divine presence. But here, in this second temple, is that God himself manifest in our mortal flesh; no shadowy, indistinct resemblance of him, but, incarnate before us, One whom he himself calls by his Spirit, “The brightness of his glory and the very image of his person." The long waited for “Consolation of Israel," the” Light that was to lighten the Gentiles," “the Desire of all nations," is here, and his mere presence throws a splendor around this building the earth never saw before.—Practical Sermons, No. IX.