Whose Voice Are You Following? (2)
Notes
Transcript
PRAY
Every day, we're being told things.
What to wear, what to think, who to be, what's true.
Your phone, your friends, the internet — everyone's got an opinion and an answer,
and some of it's obviously rubbish,
and some of it sounds so confident you'd never guess it's rubbish.
That's actually the exact problem Zechariah 10 and 11 are about.
God's people had the same issue three thousand years ago — just with different technology.
They had little household idols they'd ask for advice,
and people who claimed to read dreams and see the future.
Actually, some people today still claim to do exactly that.
None of it worked then. None of it works now.
Here's what makes this tricky, though:
they didn't think they'd stopped listening to God.
They thought these were legitimate ways to hear from him.
That's the real danger they and we face — not obviously fake voices,
but something that feels spiritual and claims to speak for God, when it doesn't.
Zechariah asks them — and asks us — one big question:
whose voice are you actually following?
Who is Your shepherd?
Not in theory. In the actual decisions you're making this week.
We're going to answer that in three steps:
Ask the Lord — and stop chasing the fakes;
Confess the cheap price we've put on the Lord;
and refuse every voice that isn't the Lord's.
And encouragingly,
we’ll see that even though God's people rejected their true Shepherd — the one with the true voice —
the Shepherd didn't reject them back.
He gave his life for them,
and he gave us his sufficient word,
so we'd never have to guess again whose voice we're hearing.
1. Ask The Lord — Not the Fakes (10:1–12)
Think about the last time you needed advice.
Maybe you asked a group chat what they thought.
Maybe you watched a video where someone told you to ‘trust the universe’ or ‘manifest’ what you wanted.
Maybe you checked your horoscope.
Zechariah 10 starts with God giving his people some very direct advice about that.
Zechariah 10:1
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Ask the Lord for rain in the springtime; it is the Lord who sends the thunderstorms. He gives showers of rain to all people, and plants of the field to everyone.
Back then, no rain meant no food. It was that serious.
And God's first instruction is simple: ask me.
Why does God even need to say that? Verse 2 tells us:
Zechariah 10:2
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The idols speak deceitfully, diviners see visions that lie; they tell dreams that are false, they give comfort in vain. Therefore the people wander like sheep oppressed for lack of a shepherd.
God's people had other places they went for answers.
Little household idols they'd ask for advice.
People who claimed they could read dreams and tell the future.
‘None of it was real.
None of it worked.’
And Zechariah says the result was a people wandering around lost — like sheep with no shepherd.
Ironic, isn't it — even though they had plenty of ‘voices’ telling them what to do and where to go, they were lost.
Also we see throughout Zechariah, — these weren't people who'd given up on God.
They were trying to hear from him.
They just went to the wrong places to listen,
and never checked what they were told against what God had already said.
That's exactly the trap today too. It's not that we stop looking for answers. It's that we look everywhere except the one place that actually has them.
Verse 3 gets specific: the leaders who were supposed to guide God's people had let them down badly.
Zechariah 10:3
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‘My anger burns against the shepherds, and I will punish the leaders;
But then, in the very same verse, God says:
Zechariah 10:3
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for the Lord Almighty will care for his flock, the people of Judah, and make them like a proud horse in battle.
Human leaders and human voices fail. God, and his voice, doesn't.
Hold onto that — we'll come back to exactly how and where we hear God's voice once we've seen the whole story.
But first comes one of the best promises in this whole chapter:
Zechariah 10:4
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From Judah will come the cornerstone, from him the tent peg, from him the battle-bow, from him every ruler.
That's four pictures of one person:
the cornerstone — something that holds a building up,
a tent peg — something that keeps a tent secure in a storm,
a battle-bow — something that defends,
a ruler — something that leads.
In other words — God promises a Shepherd King who is strong enough to build, secure, and protect his people, and trustworthy enough to actually listen to and follow.
The whole Bible is building toward that King.
Jesus.
The rest of this chapter is God promising to bring his scattered people home from all over the world — like a shepherd whistling for his sheep, and them actually coming.
It’s a vision of God’s people listening to God’s Word as he calls his people home.
It's described like a new exodus:
they escape slavery, as they did in Egypt;
they cross the waters, as they did at the Red Sea;
and they finally enter the promised land — home.
Zechariah 10:11
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They will pass through the sea of trouble; the surging sea will be subdued and all the depths of the Nile will dry up. Assyria’s pride will be brought down and Egypt’s sceptre will pass away.
And it ends with this:
Zechariah 10:12
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I will strengthen them in the Lord and in his name they will live securely,’ declares the Lord.
Now feel the weight of that opening command in light of everything that follows.
“Ask the LORD for rain” isn't really about rain.
It's a picture:
if you want life — which is what rain and crops represent here — ask the right person for it, not your false substitutes.
God alone is the one who can actually gather his scattered people, put a strong King over them, and get them home safely through every enslaving Egypt and Assyria life throws at them.
Here's something worth noticing, though.
For verse after verse, this chapter has been about places — Egypt, Assyria, Gilead, Lebanon, coming home to the land.
Then right at the end, it changes.
Verse 12 doesn't finish on a place.
It finishes on a name: ‘in his name they will live securely.’
Real security was never actually about where you live.
It's about whose name you belong to.
The Bible later tells us in Philippians, there's a name above every other name — that's Jesus — and in Colossioinas, that whatever we do, we do it in his name.
Zechariah didn't have a name to put to that promise yet.
We do. Jesus.
So — whose name are you living under? Whose voice are you listening to?
Who do you ask for rain?
When you're worried about a friendship, a test, what people think of you, or what's coming next —
When you realise life is more than just this life,
where do you actually go first to ask for help?
A group chat? An app? A feeling?
Those all promise the same thing the idols and diviners promised:
an answer you can get right now, on your own terms
— instead of the security that only comes from trusting a name that isn't yours to control.
So, Ask God,
who's already told you he's listening,
he's strong enough to help,
and he's never once lied to you?
God has made you, in Christ, a home for himself, for good.
Listen to Him, Ask Him, not any false voices around us.
We'll come back to exactly how and where we hear God’s voice.
For now, just know this: there are real, dangerous, wrong places to go looking.
Our second point:
2. Confess the Cheap Price We’ve Put on the Lord (11:1–14)
Chapter 10 ended with that huge promise — God himself will look after his people like the best shepherd ever.
Chapter 11 opens like someone's just smashed that promise on the floor.
Zechariah 11:1–2
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Open your doors, Lebanon, so that fire may devour your cedars! Wail, you juniper, for the cedar has fallen; the stately trees are ruined! Wail, oaks of Bashan; the dense forest has been cut down!
It's a sad, angry poem about disaster.
Whatever good chapter 10 promised, chapter 11 says: something's gone badly wrong.
Israels strong holds will be destroyed by God!
But why, after all the promises of a rescuing ruling shepherd in Chapter 10?
To make the reason clear, God then gets Zechariah to actually act this out — like a drama, using real props.
He becomes a shepherd holding two wooden staffs. He calls one Favour and one Union.
Zechariah 11:4–5
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This is what the Lord my God says: ‘Shepherd the flock marked for slaughter. Their buyers slaughter them and go unpunished. Those who sell them say, “Praise the Lord, I am rich!” Their own shepherds do not spare them.
The flock's own leaders are using them, not protecting them — exactly the kind of confident, sure-of-themselves voices chapter 10 already warned about.
Zechariah steps in as the shepherd who actually represents God. But the flock turns on him too — they grow to hate the very voice sent to care for them - despite their own abusive leaders.
So Zechariah acts out exactly what that rejection costs.
He breaks his first staff, the one called Favour:
God will no longer shield his people from the nations around them,
because they've simply refused to listen to him.
Then he does something even more pointed — he asks the flock to pay him for his time as their shepherd:
Zechariah 11:12–13
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I told them, ‘If you think it best, give me my pay; but if not, keep it.’ So they paid me thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter’—the handsome price at which they valued me! So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them to the potter at the house of the Lord.
Thirty pieces of silver may have been a decent wage. The value isn't really the point.
It's the specific amount that would have spoken volumes to the people watching Zechariah act this out.
In the law, that was the exact payment owed if your ox killed someone else's slave — the cheapest, most insulting price you could put on a person’s life.
That's what the flock decided their God given shepherd was worth. God's representative, valued like a dead slave.
Here's why that matters so much: hundreds of years later, someone did the exact same thing to Jesus.
Judas betrayed him for — you guessed it — thirty pieces of silver.
Zechariah wasn't just telling a story about the past. He was describing exactly what would happen to Jesus,
God's true Shepherd, when his own people decided he wasn't worth listening too, was sold to death for the price of a slave.
God's word made flesh — despised and rejected.
This is what all of us have done, at some level.
We have ignored the true word of God that saves (chapter 10).
We have failed to listen to his true voice revealed in the Good shepherd (chapter 11).
And we have followed other voices instead.
In short — we have treated the very Word of God, the Lord Jesus, like a slave,
and handed him over to death on a cross.
Not that any of us were there with a hammer and nails — but our sin is exactly the kind that put him there, and exactly what he came to carry.
Every time we treat what Jesus says as less important than:
a feeling, a friend group, or an influencer,
we're doing a smaller version of exactly what this passage describes — putting a cheap price on the Shepherd.
It's why we should confess this every day — because every day, we're tempted to listen to the wrong voices, and reject our Shepherd's voice instead.
So we confess. We say sorry.
Because as the verses that follow remind us, following any shepherd, any voice, that isn't Jesus, will not end well.
3. Refuse Every Voice That Isn’t The Lord’s (11:15–17)
Here's the next point:
if we reject Jesus as our shepherd, we don't just wander off happily on our own.
Rejecting a good leader never leaves an empty space — we will always end up following something.
So God tells us exactly what fills that space when we don't follow Jesus:
Zechariah 11:15–16
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Then the Lord said to me, ‘Take again the equipment of a foolish shepherd. For I am going to raise up a shepherd over the land who will not care for the lost, or seek the young, or heal the injured, or feed the healthy, but will eat the meat of the choice sheep, tearing off their hooves.
This is the total opposite of the good Shepherd from chapter 10. He doesn't feed the flock — he feeds off them.
And God has given us these foolish shepherds to feed us the evil we desire.
And this isn't just an ancient problem. It's exactly what happens whenever people stop trusting God's voice — something else rushes in to fill the gap.
Here's the tricky part: this isn't just about obviously worldly stuff like horoscopes or influencers.
Sometimes the fake voice shows up wearing God's name — dressed up, sounding like him - just as Zechariah here is told to dress up in the foolish shepherds equipment.
Maybe it's someone saying, ‘I had a dream, and I think God's telling you to…’
Maybe it's a strong feeling in the moment that gets treated like a direct message from heaven.
Maybe it's a ‘Christian’ video or post claiming a special ‘word’ just for you.
None of that is automatically true just because someone says God's name over it confidently.
If it doesn't match what God has already, clearly said in the Bible - His Word, His Voice, it isn't him
— no matter how spiritual it feels,
no matter how kind or confident the person sounds,
and no matter how much you want it to be true.
There are countless warnings in the New Testament about people within the church leading others astray.
We have to be careful to trust the one sure, true, unquestionable voice of our Good Shepherd:
Jesus, and his all-sufficient word, revealed infallibly, in the Bible.
This is where we come back to what I promised earlier — how, and where, we actually hear God’s voice.
John 10
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‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep… My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.’
That's it. That's how. Not a feeling. Not a dream. Not someone else's “word” for you. His voice — the one he's already given us, in writing.
God didn't go silent after the cross.
The Bible tells us,
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.
Everything we need, we already have, in Jesus as revealed in Scripture.
We're not stuck guessing, wandering around hoping for a sign. We have his actual voice, in writing, whenever we want it.
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
So here's what that means for you this week: you don't need a special feeling, a dream, or someone online to tell you what God thinks.
You already have his voice — settled, complete, and written down.
It didn't come cheap. It was paid for with his life. That's worth trusting completely.
So — are you asking the Shepherd who's already spoken?
Or are you out there checking horoscopes and group chats for answers that are never going to come and will lead you to God’s utter destruction?
If that is you, then let us confess our sin and remeber:
God's people rejecting their Shepherd didn't get the last word.
Not when they wandered off after fake idols.
Not when they paid him like he was worthless.
God kept coming after them anyway — and he sent the real Shepherd knowing exactly how he'd be treated, because that's how much he loves his people.
So this week - ask God for rain - ask him for life.
Open your Bible instead of your phone.
