Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Consider your ways.
Ver. 7. Consider your ways] See Haggai 1:5. Do it early and earnestly. Excutite vos, iterumque excutite, as Tremellius rendereth that in Zephaniah 2:1 "Search you, search you, O nation not worthy to be beloved." So Lamentations 3:40 "Let us search and try our ways." Not search only, but try, and, as it were, sift them to the bran. So 2 Corinthians 13:5 "Examine yourselves whether ye be in the faith: prove your own selves," as it were, with redoubled diligence, in a most needful but much neglected duty, of dealing with your own hearts. But if ye will not, see that flaming place, Ezekiel 16:43. If men will not judge themselves, God will; as, though scholars will not scan their verses, their masters will. Men are as loth to review their actions, and read the blurred writings of their own hearts, as schoolboys are to parse their lessons and false Latins they have made. But as he who will not cast up his books, his books will cast up him at length; so those that will not consider their ways, and take themselves to task, shall find that sparing a little pains at first will double it in the end; and that the best that can come of this forlorn negligence is the bitter pangs of repentance. Oh, therefore, that, with Solomon's wise man, we had our eyes in our heads, and not in the corners of the earth! Ecclesiastes 2:14. And that our eyes were, like the windows in Solomon's temple, broad inward, that we might see our sins to confession, so should we never see them to our confusion, 1 Kings 6:4. The Israelites confessed their murmuring and stubbornness when God sent evil angels among them, that is, some messengers of his wrath and displeasure. The prophet Haggai here would have their posterity consider, and better consider, since the hand of God was so heavy upon them, and that he came against them, as it were, with a drawn sword, how they might disarm his just indignation by a speedy reformation. To which purpose he addeth,