Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

One of the funnest things about team preaching is figuring out how to do a Christmas series together, when everybody just picks his own text instead of having an assigned text.

We’ve titled this advent series the War on Christmas — I’m sorry I couldn’t italicize the slide — with the aim of bringing us all some much-needed encouragement.

2022 has been a hard year around the world, with economic uncertainty, lingering effects of the pandemic, continued political strife, increasingly damaging natural disasters, and growing antipathy to Christianity setting the backdrop of all our own personal suffering as well as our church’s corporate trials — losing Kyle, whose last sermon as a pastor here will be next Sunday and who has served this church faithfully for nearly two decades, just one of many difficulties we’ve weathered together since about 2019.

Life is already hard enough with all these external factors going on, and throw in each of our personal remaining fleshly desires and sins into the mix and it just becomes pretty overwhelming.

If you’re like me, you don’t just need a million peppermint shakes from Chick-fil-A, although that’d be a good place to start — no, we need a rock-solid hope that there’s purpose to all of this.

My part in this series is to help us consider who exactly went to war that first Christmas and why, and the way I’m going to do this is by looking at a text you didn’t know was a Christmas text until this morning, Zechariah 13:7-9.

Zechariah 13:7-9: The Shepherd Stricken and the Sheep Scattered

Zechariah 13:7–9 (ESV)

7 “Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me,” declares the Lord of hosts.

“Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered; I will turn my hand against the little ones.

8 In the whole land, declares the Lord, two thirds shall be cut off and perish, and one third shall be left alive.

9 And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested.

They will call upon my name, and I will answer them.

I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’ ”

First, I want to give a little background to Zechariah.

It’s important for us to note that the man Zechariah prophesied during the time Jerusalem was being rebuilt after the edict of Cyrus; he’s a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah and actually gets a shoutout from them alongside Haggai, another post-exilic prophet.

His literature, that is, the book of Zechariah which contains some of his spoken prophecies, also stands near the end of the book of the Twelve minor prophets (which we’ve been diligently studying in the GBCGBC Friday mornings at 6:30).

All this means that diving straight into Zechariah, especially near the end of his book, might be a little jolting for us who haven’t even made it to the conquest, let alone the kingdom and the subsequent exile.

But don’t worry; we’re not going to get too deep into the weeds today because this particular section of Zechariah is both self-contained and used by Jesus himself, part of the reason I was drawn to it in the first place.

Hear Jesus’ words to his disciples on the night he was betrayed prior to his crucifixion, in Matthew 26:31:

All right, let’s get going.

First off, we’ll take a look at verse 7, the Shepherd Stricken.

v. 7: The Shepherd Stricken

I want to point out three things in this verse: the identity of the shepherd, the judgment against the shepherd, and the judge of the shepherd.

First, his identity.

God calls this shepherd “my” shepherd — not just any old shepherd, but one whom God has raised up for the specific purpose of tending God’s flock.

This shepherd is also, as the ESV translates “the man who stands next to me”.

Your Bible may have something a little different, like the CSB’s “man who is my associate”, the KJV’s “the man that is my fellow” or even the ISV’s “the mighty one who is related to me.”

This term only shows up elsewhere in Leviticus, where it usually means “neighbor” or, essentially, “fellow community member of equal standing” — in other words, this shepherd is inescapably a man — that much is explicit in the text — and inescapably God’s equal.

The shepherd, simply put, is a God-man, chosen by God to be punished by God.

Let’s consider the judgment against the shepherd.

Zechariah gives no indication that this shepherd has done anything wrong — indeed, it’s not clear how God’s equal could do anything wrong, and this makes the judgment all the more striking — the shepherd is stricken by the sword.

Paul says in Romans 13 that the government wields the sword to judge the evildoer and protect the righteous, as God’s appointed instrument in the world to execute justice.

But this raises a critical question: why is the sword being wielded against this shepherd?

That’s incredibly unjust if he’s done nothing wrong.

And this question is exactly right.

If we’ve been following Zechariah, we might be tempted to identify this shepherd with the shepherd spoken of in Zechariah 11:15-17:

Zechariah 11:15–17 (ESV)

15 Then the Lord said to me, “Take once more the equipment of a foolish shepherd.

16 For behold, I am raising up in the land a shepherd who does not care for those being destroyed, or seek the young or heal the maimed or nourish the healthy, but devours the flesh of the fat ones, tearing off even their hoofs.

17 “Woe to my worthless shepherd, who deserts the flock!

May the sword strike his arm and his right eye!

Let his arm be wholly withered, his right eye utterly blinded!”

But that simply won’t do.

This shepherd is not worthless, and has not deserted the flock.

Indeed, since we know that this shepherd is Jesus himself, we have grounds to consider one of the central questions of the entire Bible: how can a perfectly just God forgive sinners? and its related question: how could a perfectly just God punish the one righteous person who ever lived?

The answer?

Substitution.

In Zechariah 13, this shepherd receives the treatment due for a worthless shepherd; the worthy shepherd is stricken by the sword — not only to have his arm withered and his eye blinded, but to have his very life ripped from him as is fitting one under God’s curse.

More clearly stated, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21,

Now let’s consider the judge of the shepherd.

The quotation in Matthew 26:31 sheds some light on this, where Jesus says it is written, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered”.

It’s implicit in Zechariah and explicit in Matthew that God is the one striking the shepherd by means of the sword.

It’s so easy for us to gloss over this because we may be familiar with the Gospel, but we must never grow bored of the fact that God is the single most unfair person who exists.

If he were fair, we would all remain dead in our sins and trespasses and be separate from God for all eternity.

If he were fair, the Son of God would never have taken on flesh to experience the misery of life on a cursed earth, the humiliation of being stripped naked and beaten to within an inch of his life, or the horror of crucifixion on a Roman cross.

Jesus’s death at the hand of the Romans — the wielders of God’s sword — is the single most horrific miscarriage of justice to have ever occurred in all human history.

Yet it is the one means by which God took away sin, the one place where judgment against sin occurred completely and finally so that he might remain perfectly just and forgive sinners like me and you.

We’ve considered the shepherd’s identity, judgment, and judge — let’s see the results.

We’ve seen the Shepherd Stricken.

Now let’s look at the Sheep Scattered in verses 8-9.

v. 7: The Shepherd Stricken

vv.

8-9: The Sheep Scattered

Zechariah 13:7–9 (ESV)

I will turn my hand against the little ones.

8 In the whole land, declares the Lord, two thirds shall be cut off and perish, and one third shall be left alive.

9 And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested.

They will call upon my name, and I will answer them.

I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’ ”

I want to talk about two things here: the identities of the scattered sheep and their final destinies.

First, the actual identity of the sheep is not quite clear.

It could be ethnic Israel, it could be the first-century disciples, it could be the totality of humanity, or it could be something else.

In its context, ethnic Israel seems to be most likely — they were all scattered, with the righteous remnant returning to the LORD after Jesus’s coming, but the difficulty with this interpretation is that Jesus applies this text to his 12 disciples.

The difficulty with the first-century disciples interpretation is that it’s not clear that two thirds of Jesus’s followers abandoned him and one third returned, constituting the true faithful remnant.

Usually, the faithful remnant motif refers to ethnic Israel as a stand-in for the truest, purest form of humanity — after all, this is going on in the whole land, which is sometimes used in prophetic literature to speak of the entire earth, not just the entirety of Israel’s borders, which by Zechariah’s time were the borders of another country because of the exile from which Zechariah would have been returning to just Jerusalem.

Of these options, I think ethnic Israel is probably the best option, with the 12 disciples standing in for the 12 tribes of Israel (a common NT motif) in their scattering and then leading the faithful remnant when they return to the LORD after his resurrection.

Whatever the identity of the sheep, though, one thing is clear — their destinies are quite different.

The two-thirds who cut off end up perishing, a common way of referring to the destiny of the wicked and unrighteous, while the one-third thrive and live happily ever after.

Whoops, I misspoke there.

The one-third who remain are “put into the fire and refined as one refines silver” then “tested as gold is tested”.

Simply put, God’s little ones, God’s remaining sheep, don’t just get to graze and live fat and happy lives.

No, they are thrown into the fire until everything that God doesn’t want is burnt off.

You may say, “Hey, that sounds a lot like sanctification!” and you’d be right.

Hear 1 Peter 1:6-7,

and Psalm 66:10:

If you are God’s sheep and you are in the midst of a fiery trial, do not despair.

The fiery trial, whether external or internal, whatever its cause, is for your good.

God, the perfect metallurgist, knows exactly how hot the fire needs to be to melt off your dross to turn you into the perfectly crafted masterpiece he intends you to be.

Your destiny is nothing less than sheer perfection, a piece of work at which God gazes, kisses his hands like an Italian chef, and says, “It is very good.”

Furthermore, Jesus, who needed no refining whatsoever, went through the fieriest trial conceivable in his death — it is only fair that we who are being conformed to his image likewise experience trials and suffering.

All right, we’ve heard about the Shepherd Stricken and the Sheep Scattered.

But this is supposed to be a Christmas sermon.

Let me read at length from another one of the prophets who speaks more at length concerning this shepherd of God’s.

Please indulge me and read along as I read from Ezekiel 34:11-24.

Ezekiel 34:11–24 (ESV)

11 “For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out.

12 As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.

13 And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land.