[Verse I]
The people say the time has not come,
The house of the LORD can wait.
Yet cedar lines their private rooms,
While holy stones lie at the gate.
[Pre-Chorus]
You sow much grain and gather little,
You eat, but hunger stays.
You drink, but thirst keeps walking,
Your wages fall through fraying bags.
[Chorus]
Consider your ways,
Look hard at the road you have made.
The house lies waste while every household
Builds comfort where obedience delayed.
Consider your ways,
Go up to the mountain for wood.
Build the house, and let the LORD take pleasure;
Give first place to what is good.
[Verse II]
You looked for much, and little answered;
What came home scattered in the wind.
The heavens withheld the morning dew,
The fields withheld what should have been.
[Refrain]
Grain, wine, oil,
Ground and men,
Cattle and labor
All feel the drought again.
[Bridge]
Not chance alone, not empty weather,
Not merely soil that failed to yield.
A ruined house exposed the order
That turned the heart from holy field.
[Final Chorus]
Consider your ways,
Count every harvest that vanished away.
The house lies waste while private ceilings
Hide the cost of long delay.
Consider your ways,
Go up to the mountain for wood.
Build the house, and let the LORD take pleasure;
Put first what covenant requires of you.
[Outro]
The road to repair
Began with honest accounting.
About the passage
Haggai 1: The house that never reaches the right time
The Book of Haggai opens by exposing a delay that has become easier to defend than to examine. The people can find time and material for their own finished houses while the LORD's house remains waste, and the chapter sets that selective calendar beside a pattern of labor without sufficiency. Seed, food, drink, clothing, and wages all fail to reach their expected end. The LORD identifies the neglected house as the reason and answers the problem with concrete work: go up, bring wood, build. The closing movement is just as exact as the opening charge. Zerubbabel, Joshua, and the remnant obey, the LORD tells them "I am with you," and their spirits are stirred. Twenty-three days after the first dated word, the chapter records the return to work.
Study Haggai 1 in depth →