A Change in Perspective - Zech 7-8

Opening

Opening Illustration

One day, just after I had moved to Australia 13 years ago and was living in Sydney’s Inner West, I set out to do some shopping in the next suburb of where I was staying. It was a modest walk of a k or two. I headed out confidently knowing that I simply needed to walk north to get to the shops. But if you have visited the Inner West, walking due north or due anywhere is not straightforward, literally and figuratively. After walking for a reasonable length of time, I suddenly found myself right back outside the house I was staying without having passed the shops. Despite having a good internal sense of direction, I have somehow ended up walking in a big circle. You see, where I grew up, all the streets were laid out on a north-south and east-west grid. To go north, you just walked north. What I hadn’t appreciated about the Inner West is that if you want to go north, you go in just about any direction except north to get there. This is because the streets wind all over the place and rarely finish in the same direction that they started in. So, in order to get to the shops that day, I needed a different and fuller perspective on my surroundings than I possessed. I needed the authoritative perspective that a map or GPS would have provided.

Opening Transition

Have you had a similar experience where a different or fuller perspective would have been useful?

Maybe it was a time when more perspective would have changed the course of an argument.

Or maybe it would have helped you make a better decision.

Maybe you would even had turned in a completely new direction.

Introduction

This morning we are looking at a passage in the Old Testament book of Zechariah. Zechariah is one of those tiny books taking up residence right at the end of the Old Testament section of our Bibles. In our passage, the characters are offered a fuller perspective on their history and a new perspective on their future and are then called to live today in light of these.

For those of you unfamiliar with the book of Zechariah, a little background will help us grasp what God is saying here. For 500 years King David’s family had been ruling Israel. Throughout that time, the general trend had been towards rebellion against God’s ultimate rule, so God sent the Babylonian Empire to destroy Jerusalem and the Temple and to carry the Israelite people into exile. Roughly 70 years and a new empire later, God encouraged the Persian overlords to begin allowing some of the Israelite people to resettle in Israel and to rebuild God’s Temple of God there. This met with some serious opposition, but two years before our passage this morning, the Temple building started in earnest. Zechariah was influential during this time, encouraging diligent work to continue on the Temple and preparing the people for its completion, which occurred two years after our current passage. Life was a struggle for the Israelites and there was little certainty that any of this would succeed. With this, let’s turn to Zechariah 7, starting in verse 1 and read through to the end of chapter 8. I am reading from the ESV and I have lightly abridged the passage to reduce its length for us this morning.

Read Zechariah 7-8

Thesis

Here in Zechariah 7-8, we are given a fuller perspective.

And the perspective that we will discover is that

because of God’s zealous love for his people, he will make fantasy reality, turning fasting into feasting, and draw all types of people to himself as long as his people do not harden their hearts like many have done in the past but rather live lives of all-encompassing peace and justice.

Perspective on the Past - Zech 7:1-14

Our passage opens, v2, with a delegation from the Jewish city of Bethel arriving in Jerusalem to ask the seemingly innocent and pious question about whether they should continue fasting on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple 68 years earlier and especially now that the Temple is nearing completion. This all seems fair enough. These people are feeling a little gun-shy after 70 years of exile, a little fragile since God sold them up the river to the Babylonians, and they are unsure of how things work now. So, they do the obvious thing and ask the religious experts to ask God what they should do.

God’s response, starting in v 4, starts with a discussion about fasting. However, it quickly goes in directions that would have left the Bethel crew’s heads’ spinning. Instead of answering the seemingly simple question about whether they should commemorate the destruction of the Temple, God takes them back 70 years and more to broaden their perspective. He does this by discussing two primary features of the past.

The first feature is their fasting and feasting, or in another words, their religious activities (v5). Here God pointedly asks them several questions in return, summing to: what has been the real purposes of their feasts and fasts? Here God throws in a second fast which commemorated the murder of Gedaliah, the governor of Judea after the destruction of Jerusalem which you can read about in 2 Kgs 25:25 or Jer 41. God asks them whether they were really being religious out of love for God or whether it was really just religiosity - a love of religious observances over God. The implied answer is sobering. No, love of God was not really the motivation, but rather the ego-stroking, feel-good practices of weeping and mourning while continuing to ignore God’s word. Pious virtue signalling in other words. God had told them through the prophet Jeremiah and others, v7, that exile was coming as a consequence of their abandoning the special relationship they had with God and that God was in turn abandoning them for a long 70 years of exile. Yet even now, 70 years on, they were still not really listening to him or the prophets he had sent. In essence, God was saying that HE was not mourning the destruction of the Temple because HE had decreed its destruction all along, so why were they mourning, if not for their own reasons.

The second feature of the past Zechariah discusses, v8, starts as an admonition to live as the people of God - living justly, showing compassion, love, and mercy, and avoiding evil - the same basic traits scattered across the Bible that define God’s people. But these very same things that God had been asking his people over and over again to live by since Moses some 1,000 years earlier, were continually ignored by God’s people. Wait ‘ignored’ isn’t strong enough. In v11, God uses the vivid imagery of his people essentially telling God to ‘talk to the hand’, covering their ears, and sing-songing “nah, nah, can’t hear you”, and then aggressively turning their faces away to continue going their own way. They made their hearts “diamond-hard”, v12. Diamond-hard. Wow!! This phrase is unique to Zechariah, but captures just how stubborn and defiant the Israelites had been - and possibly still are - the passage leaves that possibility hanging thick in the air. God had sent prophets filled with the Holy Spirit to speak his exact words to them, but they had thrown up their hand to God and made their hearts like diamonds. And God wants these people, and us today, to sit with that hanging possibility. Are we diamond-hard hard-hearted people?

The Israelites had believed that they could live however they wanted and God would still bless them. They had thought they could cheat, steal, extort, deprive, demean, and take advantage of others without recompense and still show up at church on Saturday and receive all the promised blessings from the Lord. That was their perspective.

But what about God’s fuller perspective? The answer is clear - in his righteous anger he blew them away in a violent cyclone.

So, when we look at our own lives, what is the fuller perspective that we need to see? Have we stopped up our ears to avoid hearing God’s Word and turned our shoulder to do our own thing or are we stopping to hear from God’s words, turning in repentance, and seeking to live life from God’s perspective? It’s worth taking a moment to think about that question.

Perspective on the Future - Zech 8:2-8, 18-23

But a fuller perspective that only takes in the past is only half of what God wanted the ancient Israelites, and us, to understand. God also gave Zechariah glimpses into the future of God’s people. God understands that our sinful hearts are always drawn down into the limited perspective of now. So, God continuously throughout Scripture provides little windows into what the future really does actually hold.

Here in Zechariah 8, God gives us 5 glimpses that would have seemed like a fantasy to the Bethel delegation. In fact, God anticipates this reaction, vs 6, and says the even though they may find it a marvel begging belief, it is a part of his plan for them; it’s business as usual in his eyes. But for us, these 5 marvellous glimpses are:

• That God himself will come and dwell among his people and centre his perfect kingdom where his people are (v3,8)

• That God’s home will be such a place of peace, safety, and joy that both the elderly and the young will fill the streets with games and laughter and their very presence (vs4-5)

• That God will turn our fasting into joyous feasting (v19)

• That God will bring his people who are spread to the edges of the planet home to dwell with him in his city (vs7-8)

• And lastly, that God’s presence and kingdom will be so desirous that people from all over the world will trip over themselves to come and see and be a part of it (vs20-23).

This may or may not seem like much of a fantasy to you, but it is huge. To a people who had lost everything - their home, their country, their identity, and even, to their eyes, their God - to glimpse a future where God actually comes and dwells among them, a future where they have a place to call their own in safety and peace and prosperity, a future where the kingdoms of the world come to them seeking favour instead of them seeking favour from foreign despots. This is huge. This glimpse is nothing short of reversing what was lost in the Garden when Adam and Eve rebelled. God dwelling amongst his people.

Christmas was only just a month ago, but do your recall the words of the famous carol, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”? And what does the first verse say - that Emmanuel, which means ‘God dwells with us’, will

‘ransom captive Israel

that mourns in lonely exile here’

and then,

‘Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel - God dwells with us - shall come to you, O Israel’

This is the same message that Zechariah is proclaiming. Rejoice because God has come to dwell with his people. And this is because, v2, of God’s great love for his people - his jealous, his, not wrathful as in vengeful, but wrathful as in burning with passion love for his people. And do you realise that we, you and me, we are included in this too. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel “is not really speaking about ancient Israel in exile but rather about all of us who are still living in a type of exile - still burdened by sin, still not living in God’s fully realised kingdom, still beholden to the hostile powers of this world. Yet we, you and me here today, we are those people glimpsed by Zechariah who are called from the east and the west. We are those who people who are clamouring to grab hold of an Israelite, tripping over ourselves to get into God’s kingdom. At least I pray that this is true for you.

So, what we see in this new, fuller perspective is that the future crescendos with us dwelling with God himself and living in joy, and in peace, and in prosperity.

Our Perspective Now

So, with God’s fuller perspective of the past and the future, how are we to live in light of this fuller perspective now, today, in our real 21st Century lives?

We must live as people who don’t conform to what is fashionable, powerful, or opportunistic. Rather, we must test all our motivations against the Word of God because the temptation to fit in, wield power, or take advantage of others is deeply enticing. We cannot be like the ancient Israelites who, as we saw in chapter 7, continuously defined for themselves what was right, yet ignored, neigh shunned, the Spirit filled people sent by God who consistently warned them otherwise. Let us not fall into the same trap, but instead heed the wisdom of faithful and godly friends and pastors when they seek to steer us right.

We are also to live justly (vs16-17). This means that we seek what is good and true and right in our community. We don’t seek our own advantage at the expense of others’, but rather seek to make others’ lives better - and especially those who are most vulnerable to the power players in our world. This includes the unborn, like in yesterday’s march, and the Uyghur people suffering in China, but it also includes other people whose voices are not strong enough to gain the media’s attention, the polies, or anybody else’s, but yours.

But even more, this passage calls us to live lives of shalom, or all-encompassing peace (Zech 8:12, 16). We are to be people whose very presence brings peace, life, and blessings to those around us. We are to be the safe people in our families, at work, at school, at our clubs, in the community - the people who others know will welcome them, hear them, care for them, and seek their good. The people who break down divisions, who settle disputes, who shine truth, who forgive, who heal, who give shelter, who share freely. This is shalom, this is exuding all-encompassing peace.

Because of God’s great Love for his people - and all people - what can you do, what can we do to live shalom and justice within all the circles of life that we each live in?

And lastly, we are to start feasting. This is one facet of the communion table we just shared. It is a dress-rehearsal for the great banquet found in Revelation 19. For Jesus himself alludes to this passage in Zechariah when, in Luke 5, he says that his disciples didn’t join in on all the Pharisees’ various fasts because how can one fast when the bridegroom is in your midst. And the bridegroom is truly already in our midst even now. O Come, O Come Emmanuel!