The difficulties connected with the translation of verse 5 need not concern us here.  For my purpose, the general sense resulting from any translation is clear enough.  The covenant made of old, when Israel came from an earlier captivity, is fresh as ever, and God’s Spirit is with the people; therefore they need not fear.  ‘Fear ye not’ is another of the well-meant exhortations which often produce the opposite effect from the intended one.  One can fancy some of the people saying, ’It is all very well to talk about not being afraid; but look at our feebleness, our defencelessness, our enemies; we cannot but fear, if we open our eyes.’  Quite true; and there is only one antidote to fear, and that is the assurance that God’s covenant binds Him to take care of me.  Unless one believes that, he must be strangely blind to the facts of life if he has not a cold dread coiled round his heart and ever ready to sting.

The Prophet rises into grand predictions of the glory of the poor house which the weak hands were raising.  Verses 6-9 set things invisible over against the visible.  In general terms the Prophet announces a speedy convulsion, partly symbolical and partly real, in which ‘all nations’ shall be revolutionised, and as a consequence, shall become Jehovah’s worshippers, bringing their treasures to the Temple, and so filling the house with glory.  This shall be because Jehovah is the true Possessor of all their wealth.  But the scope of verse 9 seems to transcend these promises, and to point to an undescribed ‘glory,’ still greater than that of the universal flocking of the nations with their gifts, and to reach a climax in the wide promise of peace given in the Temple, and thence, as is implied, flowing out ‘like a river’ through a tranquillised world.

‘Yet once, it is a little while.’  How long did the little while last?  There were, possibly, some feeble incipient fulfilments of the prophecy in the immediate future; for, after the exile, there were convulsions in the political world which resulted in security to the Jews, and the religion of Israel began to draw some scattered proselytes.  But the prophecy is not completely fulfilled even now, and it covers the entire development of the ‘kingdom that cannot be moved’ until the end of time.  The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews thus understands the prophecy (Hebrews xii. 26, 27), and there are echoes of it in Revelation xxi., which describes the final form of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem.  So the chronology of prophecy is not altogether that of history; and while the events stand clear, their perspective is foreshortened.  All the ages are but ‘a little while’ in the calendar of heaven.  In regard to the whole of the prophetic utterances, we have often to say with the disciples, ‘What is this that he saith, a little while?’ Eighteen centuries have rolled away since the seer heard, ’Behold, I come quickly,’ and the vision still tarries.