The second temple

The altar is already in service before the temple has a foundation. Verse 6 makes that order explicit. Restored worship does not begin with a completed building and then find something to do inside it. The returned community establishes the altar at its appointed site and resumes the morning and evening offerings while the larger work remains unfinished.

Fear stands in the middle of the sentence, not safely behind it. The surrounding peoples are a present cause of alarm, and the King James wording connects that fear with the setting up of the altar. The account does not first announce that the country has become secure. Nor does it supply a battle at this moment. It shows a community restoring its prescribed worship under the conditions it actually faces. The repetition morning and evening gives that restoration a daily rhythm, distinct from the feast of tabernacles named next. There will be festival offerings, but the ordinary offerings have already returned. The new beginning is measured not only in stones placed on a site, but in days given their old shape again.

The diminished appearance is admitted in the word from God itself. Haggai is not told to make the new work look grand by describing it more loudly. The address recognizes survivors who saw the house in its former glory, then names the contrast between that memory and the sight before them. In comparison of it as nothing is severe language. It is allowed to stand.

Yet the address still says this house when speaking of its first glory. The destruction and rebuilding have not erased the continuity of the place being discussed. The following verses turn toward the governor, the high priest and the people with a repeated call to strength and work, grounded in God's presence and the covenant associated with the departure from Egypt. The answer to the comparison is not a denial that the earlier temple was magnificent. It is a statement about who remains with those rebuilding now. The Book of Haggai gives the loss its proper scale without granting the loss the final description of the house.

The Spirit does not make Zerubbabel's hands unnecessary. Within three verses of the declaration that the work is not by might or power, those hands are named twice: they laid the foundation, and they will finish the house. The contrast concerns the source of the work's accomplishment, not the disappearance of the work itself. The promise has a builder attached to it.

The great mountain becoming a plain gives an obstacle the scale of a landscape. The passage does not identify one particular hill to be excavated or name the mountain as a specific official. It moves instead toward completion, with the headstone brought out amid cries of grace. The unfinished house is to have an ending, and the same named hands connect that ending to its beginning.

Then the scale changes again. The vision reaches through the whole earth with the LORD's seven eyes, yet gives attention to the plummet in one man's hand. A builder's measuring weight belongs inside this enormous field of vision. The day of small things is not dismissed as a mistake in the project. It is the condition from which the promised completion is being announced. The Book of Zechariah places worldwide sight beside a tool small enough to hold.