When we refuse to learn the lesson...

At the church where I serve, we are in the middle of a sermon series entitled When God speaks. During this series we are spending our time together looking at these letters that we often have a tendency to skip over, which are referred to as the prophets. We are discovering who these letters that we have a tendency to skip over were written to. We are discovering what these letters that we have a tendency to skip over reveal about who we are. We are discovering what these letters that we have a tendency to skip over reveal about the nature of God and God’s activity in history. And as we go through this series, our hope and prayer is that God would move by the power of the Holy Spirit in our heads, hearts and hands so that we understand and embrace the timeless and timely truths that these letters that we often skip over have for our lives.

This week I would like for us to spend our time together looking at a letter that is recorded for us in the Old Testament of the Bible called the book of Zechariah, which is the next letter that was written by a prophet chronologically, which is not necessarily the order that they are found in the Bible, where they are organized by size. So let’s look at the man and the message of the Book of Zechariah.

Now, as we discovered last week, after the Lord removed the Jewish people from the Promised Land and destroyed the Temple through the Babylonian Empire, the Jewish people lived as a conquered people in captivity in the nation of Babylon from 586 to 538 B.C..  Then, in 538 B.C., as predicted and proclaimed by the prophet Isaiah, the Persian Emperor Cyrus, after conquering the Babylonian Empire, began to allow the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.

Under the leadership of a man named, Zerubbabel, who was the governor of the Jewish people, and Joshua, who was the high priest of the Jewish people, some 50,000 Jews returned in 538 B.C. and began to rebuild the temple. However, after some immediate opposition, work on the Temple ceased. And, for the next eighteen years, the Temple remained in ruins. And it is in the context that God raised up two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah to deliver His message to the Jewish people who had returned from exile to the Jewish nation.

In Zechariah 1:1, we discover that Zechariah was both a prophet and a priest. Zechariah then explained that, “in the eighth month of the second year of Darius”, which was in November of 520 B.C., Zechariah was sent by the Lord to deliver a message from the Lord to the Jewish people. This means that Zechariah’s message from the Lord would have been given between Haggai’s 1st and 2nd messages, which we looked at last week. Thus, the Lord sent both Haggai and Zechariah to confront the Jewish people, when it came to how they were living their lives in relationship to the Lord after the Lord had brought them back to the Jewish nation.  

While Haggai focused on the Jewish people’s misplaced priorities, Zechariah was sent by the Lord to deliver a different message. As a matter of fact, the book of Zechariah contains more predictions concerning Jesus Christ than any other minor prophet. So let’s jump into this letter that is found in the Old Testament of our Bibles, because it is in this letter that we will discover a timeless truth about the nature and character of the Lord and His activity in history that has the potential to powerfully impact how we view the Lord.

In December of 518 B.C., a little over two years after proclaiming his original message to the Jewish people, we see Zechariah respond to a question that he was asked by the Jewish people that described the state of the Jewish people. So let’s look at that question and Zechariah’s response beginning in Zechariah 7:1-4:

In the fourth year of King Darius, the word of the LORD came to Zechariah on the fourth day of the ninth month, which is Chislev. ² Now the town of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regemmelech and their men to seek the favor of the LORD, ³ speaking to the priests who belong to the house of the LORD of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, "Shall I weep in the fifth month and abstain, as I have done these many years?"

Now to fully understand the question that was being asked Zechariah, we first need to understand something about the Jewish people and how they lived while in exile during their 70 years in Babylon. While living in captivity in Babylon, the Jewish people practiced four days of fasting to commemorate the major disasters connected with the fall of Jerusalem.

In the 4th month, the Jewish people fasted to commemorate the walls of the city being breached. In the 5th month the Jewish people fasted to commemorate the day that Jerusalem was conquered. In the 7th month the Jewish people fasted to commemorate the assassination of the appointed governor, Gedaliah, which led to the Jewish people fleeing to the nation of Egypt. And in the 10th month, the Jewish people fasted to commemorate the day that the siege of the city of Jerusalem had begun.

However, now the Jewish people were back home in the Jewish nation, having returned after spending 70 years in captivity. So the question being raised was “Shall we continue these observances now that we are back in the land?” We see the Lord’s response through Zechariah, to this question in verse 4-7:

 ⁴ Then the word of the LORD of hosts came to me, saying, ⁵ "Say to all the people of the land and to the priests, 'When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months these seventy years, was it actually for Me that you fasted? ⁶ 'When you eat and drink, do you not eat for yourselves and do you not drink for yourselves? ⁷ 'Are not these the words which the LORD proclaimed by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and prosperous along with its cities around it, and the Negev and the foothills were inhabited?'"

In other words, the Lord basically said to the Jewish people “when you fasted those 70 years while in Babylon, were you actually fasting to create space to hear from Me? And now that you have returned to the land that I promised to give you, when you feast and celebrate your return, you feast and celebrate yourselves and not Me. Is this not exactly what you were warned about by all the previous prophets who I sent to you before I sent you into captivity by the hand of the Babylonian Empire? How you acted when in captivity was no different than how you acted before I sent you into captivity”. We then see what else the Lord had to say through Zechariah in verse 8-14:

Then the word of the LORD came to Zechariah saying, ⁹ "Thus has the LORD of hosts said, 'Dispense true justice and practice kindness and compassion each to his brother; ¹⁰ and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.' ¹¹ "But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder and stopped their ears from hearing. ¹² "They made their hearts like flint so that they could not hear the law and the words which the LORD of hosts had sent by His Spirit through the former prophets; therefore great wrath came from the LORD of hosts. ¹³ "And just as He called and they would not listen, so they called and I would not listen," says the LORD of hosts; ¹⁴ "but I scattered them with a storm wind among all the nations whom they have not known. Thus the land is desolated behind them so that no one went back and forth, for they made the pleasant land desolate."

Here we see the Lord proclaim to the Jewish people “What I have to say to you now that I have brought you back into the land that I promised you is the same thing that I said to your parents and grandparents before I removed them from the land. As I have always said, what I require of you is to demonstrate your love for Me by how you love and treat those around you. You are to demonstrate your love for Me by promoting justice and kindness towards one another. You are to demonstrate your love for Me by refusing to exploit the poor and marginalized among you. However, your parents and grandfathers refused to listen to my spokesman the prophets who I sent to warn them. Instead, the hardened their hearts and refused to listen to Me or obey Me. Therefore, I treated them in the same way that they treated Me. Just as they refused to listen to Me, I refused to listen to them and instead exercised my right and just response to their rebellion by sending them into captivity in Babylon.”

However, in the midst of the rebellion of the Jewish people; in the midst of the Lord exercising His right and just response to the selfishness and rebellion of the Jewish people by sending them into captivity in Babylon, the Lord still had a plan for the Jewish people.

A plan that Zechariah reveals in Zechariah 8. A plan that we will look at on Friday...