This afternoon, if you have your Bibles, will turn with me to Zechariah chapter 7.
And it came to pass in the fourth year of king Darius, that the word of the Lord came unto Zechariah in the fourth day of the ninth month, even in Chisleu;
2 When they had sent unto the house of God Sherezer and Regemmelech, and their men, to pray before the Lord,
3 And to speak unto the priests which were in the house of the Lord of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these so many years?
4 Then came the word of the Lord of hosts unto me, saying,
5 Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye at all fast unto me, even to me?
6 And when ye did eat, and when ye did drink, did not ye eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves?
7 Should ye not hear the words which the Lord hath cried by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity, and the cities thereof round about her, when men inhabited the south and the plain?
8 And the word of the Lord came unto Zechariah, saying,
9 Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother:
10 And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.
11 But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear.
12 Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the Lord of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets: therefore came a great wrath from the Lord of hosts.
13 Therefore it is come to pass, that as he cried, and they would not hear; so they cried, and I would not hear, saith the Lord of hosts:
14 But I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations whom they knew not. Thus the land was desolate after them, that no man passed through nor returned: for they laid the pleasant land desolate.
Let’s just bow in prayer. Heavenly Father, as we come before you this afternoon, Lord, as we look at your word, help us to understand the question and the answer.
And Lord, help us to realize that oftentimes we want to go through motions, but we don’t want to really change our hearts. And Lord, I pray that you just speak to us through your word this afternoon. This we ask in Jesus’ name.
Amen. At the time of Zechariah, the nation of Israel, specifically Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel, had been taken into captivity. The Lord said under Jeremiah that they would remain in captivity for 70 years.
And during this 70 years of captivity, they began to have this ritual that they would go about doing, which we see in the second verse, when it says that they sent these men onto Zechariah to ask him this question. In verse 3 we see, And to speak unto the priests that were in the house of the Lord of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these so many years? So during this time, they had separated themselves during the fifth month, and they fasted and prayed and wept. And they fasted and prayed and wept, that the Lord would bring them back into the land, that the Lord would once again bless them, that the Lord would remove them from the captivities.
And so they were wondering, do we continue to do this? And so they asked this question. Well, Zechariah, the Lord reveals to Zechariah an answer. Why are you doing it? is really what he’s saying.
Why are you fasting? Why are you praying? Why are you weeping? The main reason that they would do that is if they wanted to change their hearts and have God return and bless them, and they would want to walk with the Lord. However, this wasn’t the real reason. Zechariah mentions in his response to them, When you eat and drink, don’t you do it for yourselves? And the answer would be yes.
But the thing is, what was happening is, they were fasting and praying, and they would say that they were doing it for the Lord, but really, again, the whole purpose of it was that they were doing it for themselves, trying to get God to once again bless them the way that they had once been blessed. However, there still was an issue. And the issue was their disobedience and sin.
And we see that really, this can always be a problem with God’s people. What we tend to do is go through motions, and even our prayers, go through prayers, wrote prayers, thinking somehow God will hear us and bless us for what we say and do. But our heart, really, once we leave the fellowship and go about our daily tasks, our heart is far from God.
And that’s exactly what we saw here. The people would set this particular period of time apart for fasting and prayer and weeping. And once it was done, then they’d done their duty.
They expected God to hear and answer, but then they’d go about their normal lives. Now, when they were in the land of Judah, prior to being taken away into captivity in Babylon, prior to that, they would oftentimes go through the motions, religious motions at the temple. Now, there as well, but they did it in such a manner that it was an abomination to the Lord.
They didn’t do it seriously, nor did they do it from the heart, but rather they just went through the motions. Many Christians today have this same issue. Why do we come to church? What’s the main purpose of walking through these doors on a Sunday morning? For some people, it’s a social activity.
It’s where we get together and see friends once a week. It’s where we can maybe have the pastor tell us a heart-wrenching story or a funny story or be entertained, or maybe we go because of music, because we like the music and we like the program. But why do we come? The Scriptures tell us the main and only purpose that we should come and gather together.
Jesus said we’re to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth. Now, what does that mean? Well, first of all, in spirit means that our spirit should desire to commune with His Spirit and that we should desire to be directed by His Holy Spirit in our attitude of worship. And so when we come, the focus is not on us, but it’s really looking to Him and desiring to worship Him in spirit and also in truth.
Do we come to worship God in His character, which is the character of truth? Do we come to worship in the manner in which He tells us we should worship? Do we come to bring praise to His name? Do we come to exalt Him in the eyes of all who will be there, that He may be lifted up, that the Lord may be focused on, that He may receive our blessings of praise and worship? And that’s why we should come through the door. It should be a focus on God, not on us. However, as I mentioned just a few moments ago, the biggest problem that we have oftentimes in churches today is that when we come through those doors, the focus is not on God, nor do we really come to worship God, but the focus is on me.
What’s in it for me? How can I be entertained? How can I have the music I want to have? How can I have the message I want to hear? And Paul tells us, and told Timothy in the last days, this is exactly what would happen. In the book of Timothy, he tells us, as he wrote this letter to Timothy, he says, in the last days they shall desire to have their ears tickled. What does it mean to have your ears tickled? It means you do not want to hear that which is truth, and you don’t want to hear that which is strong, but rather you would want to hear that which is light and that which is pleasing to you and that which will make you feel good, not necessarily what is the truth.
Now, if you look at even some of the things that have been happening in our nation, today I was listening as I was actually coming to church, I had the radio on, and this person was talking about how it’s unbelievable how all of these wicked individuals that want to do all these nefarious things in our nation got elected and it’s like nobody cared. And now all of a sudden everybody is wringing their hands because of what happened. Well, if you look at the fact of what has happened and transpired in our country, there’s no good reason not to expect to have what happened in the last election.
This is really what Zechariah is saying here. If you come to God and expect Him to deliver you when you don’t want to change yourself and you don’t want to really walk with Him and worship Him, He won’t hear you nor answer your prayers. And if you look at what’s happened in our country, we embrace Islam.
We don’t say it’s wrong. If you say it’s wrong, you’re chastised not only by those that claim to be non-Christians but those that claim to be Christians as well. You can’t do that.
We can’t be honest about what’s wicked and evil. We allow what’s wicked to come into the churches. We endorse the very things that are an abomination to the Lord and rather begin to promote them in our fellowship.
And when we do that, what happens is why should God listen to our prayers? And why should God hear us? And it doesn’t matter if… Let’s hold, for example, a few years ago there was a man who had a radio program and he started his 40-day spiritual adventure. And really it was modeled after the period of Lent that the Roman Catholics and many of the mainline denominations have where you take 40 days and you give up something and you say you’re giving it up for the Lord. And really that is all modeled after going back to the Tower of Babel when Tammuz, the son of Nimrod, was killed and the people lamented for Tammuz for 40 days.
And so now we’re going to lament for 40 days and we say it’s 40 days lamenting for Jesus. But really we incorporate all these pagan things with it. We don’t acknowledge that they’re pagan and we do it anyway.
And now that’s coming into the evangelical church and the people are beginning to do the very things that God abhors. He doesn’t tell us to lament the death of Jesus. He tells us to look to the cross and realize our hope lies there as Jesus, as we mentioned this morning, paid the penalty for our sin that we in turn could be forgiven and have His righteousness imputed or placed upon us when we did not deserve it.
It’s the very center of the grace of God. And we are not to downplay the grace of God and go through religious gyrations thinking that that somehow will get us closer to God. If someone truly does broken and repentant and fasts and prays, the Bible tells us that that is something we should do.
But it has to be from the heart. When you’ve got the people coming in and they’re saying, okay, do we continue to do this at this time of year? That’s what they came to ask the prophets and the priests. We’ve been doing this for a number of years now, the same time, same way.
Are we supposed to keep doing it? That was their question. Well, if they don’t know, if they haven’t heard from God, what’s the purpose of their doing it? Well, the purpose of their doing it was, well, it’s become this religious practice and we’ve done it so long, do we need to continue to do it? It shouldn’t be a religious practice if we’re having communion with God. It should rather be a relationship that’s occurring and we’re going to the Lord, crying out to Him for His help and deliverance and it’s from the depth of our heart because we want Him to truly do that for us, not because we’ve set up a certain day and a certain month to do it for the last many years and do we continue to do it? Well, Zedekiah gets right to the heart of the matter.
The real heart of the matter is the people’s hearts. And he says, Speak unto all the people of the land and to the priests saying, When ye fasted and mourned the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye all fast unto me, even to me? That’s the question. Was it just to put on a show or were they truly crying out to God? Now remember, Jeremiah prophesied that the nation of Judah would be in captivity for seventy years.
At the end of the seventy years, God would bring them back into the land. And it’s interesting to note, when they came back into the land, as we were doing studies earlier in the book of Zechariah and also earlier in the book of Ezekiel, one of the things that we mentioned is that in the initial migration back into the land of Israel, only about 50,000 people came. There had been many, many more than that taken into captivity.
If you go back into history and look at what was going on at this time, many of the Jewish people had lived in Babylon, some for 40 years, some for 50 years, some for 60, some for the full 70 years. And they developed businesses, they developed communities, they felt comfortable, they were comfortable with the Babylonian culture and with the Babylonian economy. And now all of a sudden, they’re to go back into the land of Israel where everything lies in ruins.
And does that sound like a great deal to you? I’ve got all this great business going, I’ve got family and friends here, I’ve got a good house, and yet God’s telling me, calling me back into the land of Israel so that I should go back there because my time of chastisement is done and He’s calling me back. Most of the people didn’t go back and most of them stayed. Why? Heart issues.
Their heart was really not after seeing and pursuing God and allowing God to work in their lives and really allowing the Lord to see how He was going to answer prayer in the face of something that seemed impossible to answer. The land was desolate, the city was ruined, the walls were down, the temple was destroyed, and yet God said, I’m going to bring you back into the land, I’m going to make the land prosperous again, the walls of the city are going to go up, the city’s going to be rebuilt, the temple’s going to be rebuilt, and the worship’s going to be reestablished. Most of the people said nonsense to that, it’s not true, but should we continue to weep and pray and fast asking God to do that for us? In other words, we want to come back and everything’s ready, but if it’s not going to be ready, we’re not going back.
That was their attitude. Well, what drove that? Because their heart was really not worshipping the true God, it was worshipping the gods of their own making. Now, they may have even used the names, the biblical names of God in their worship, but their heart wasn’t worshipping Him.
People today say, well, I worship Jesus, I’m a follower of Jesus, but I hate Israel. Well, can you be a follower of Jesus and hate Israel? Can we follow the Lord and be His child and hate that which He loves? The Bible tells us that’s kind of impossible. We need to love what God loves.
And if we don’t love what God loves, we’ve created in our minds a different God, even if we claim that it’s the God of the Bible. We’ve changed His character, we’ve changed His words, we’ve changed who He is, even though we still call Him by the same name. And so consequently, this is what was happening to the people, the Israelites that were in the land of Babylon.
And they’re asking, well, do we continue to do this or don’t we? And He says, well, you’ve got a problem. Get your heart right. Get your heart right.
He says, should ye not hear the words which the Lord hath cried by the former prophets, even when Jerusalem was inhabited in prosperity and the cities thereof round about her, when men inhabited the south and the plain? He says, okay, now I want you to remember back something that happened. And that was prior to the captivity of Babylon, prior to Nebuchadnezzar even coming against in any of his three invasions. And Jerusalem was prosperous.
And the activity was going on in the temple. The small towns around Jerusalem were active and the villages were active. The land appeared to be prosperous.
And you remember that. But what happened? What changed it? And he goes on and he says, And the word of the Lord came unto me, unto Zechariah, saying, Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compassion to every man to his brother. And oppress not the widow, and the fatherless, and the stranger, and the poor.
And let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart. But they refused to hearken and pulled away the shoulder and stopped their ears that they should not hear. What did he do? God told them what they needed to do.
This is what you need to do and you’ll reign in the land. I won’t take you out of the land. Well, he said, you’ve got these real rebellious sin problems because you’re not living the life that I’ve called you to live as my people.
You’re not showing the unbeliever who I really am. Because the very things that I’ve asked you to do, you don’t do. And the things I told you not to do, that’s what you do.
He said, I said, oppress not the widow. Well, what did they do? They oppressed the widows. They took the widows’ money.
And this was again at the time of Jesus. The Pharisees did the same thing. They would take money from the widows.
Then they’d also oppress the fatherless and the stranger. And they oppressed the poor. And they imagined evil against their brothers in their hearts.
And those of you who went through the books of the kings and we looked at the kings of the southern kingdom, Judah, although there were good kings in the southern kingdom, we saw that even during the time of the good kings, there were still these underlying attitudes of rebellion against God that people would suppress it as the leadership directed them to worship the Lord. But the minister of leadership would be gone and the direction from on high was removed. Then they’d go back to their old sinful ways.
And God’s saying it was because of an attitude of the heart. They really didn’t desire not to do those things. They wanted to do those things.
Why? Because it was beneficial to them. They perceived it was beneficial to them. They did not understand that God’s judgment was attached to this and His chastising hand was going to come upon them.
The nation of Babylon was going to be used as His chastising hand to take them out of the land. If you couldn’t do it when you were still in the land and you possessed the wrong attitudes when it was prosperous and then you continued to sin so they had to chastise you, what makes you think that unless you change your heart, simply crying out to me and fasting and praying is going to change things if your heart isn’t changed? When they had to ask the question, do we continue to do this? That’s because they didn’t understand the real answer. You only continue to fast and pray as you are calling on the Lord that He would be glorified and He would be uplifted through your life and your life would be changed so that His glory could be seen.
That was not the attitude of the people. They wanted it the way it had once been. Now, he goes on and says, but they refused to hearken and pulled away their shoulders.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anybody where you’ve had a young couple that are supposedly in love and they’re going and all of a sudden the woman pulls away her shoulder from the man and you can tell there’s something wrong here. There’s something wrong here. She doesn’t want to be with this guy.
I remember seeing a picture of a world leader one time where he was walking with his wife and all of a sudden she pulled away her arm and shoulder and began to walk about two feet away from him instead of he was trying to hold her hand. What was that telling you? When you observe that, it tells you that the woman really wasn’t in agreement with what the man was doing at that time. We don’t know what it was.
I don’t know what it was at that particular time. But there was some disagreement there and it was fairly strong because she was pulling away. She didn’t want to be close to him.
Well, Israel did that to God. God is there. He’s trying to hold their hand.
He’s trying to give them direction. And they are pulling away the shoulder. They’re pulling away from Him.
They’re saying, oh, we want to be with you. We’re going to cry out to you. God, help us.
God, deliver us. God, be there with us. But I’m going to pull the shoulder away because I don’t agree with the direction you want me to go.
I don’t agree with what you want me to do. You know, there are many people in America today that are upset. I was just listening to, again, I mentioned on the radio, on the way here, there’s a guy who’s got a gun talk show on Sunday afternoons and I was listening as I was coming and he’s saying all the gun people in the United States are just in total distress and despair after this last election because the first thing that those that got elected to the Congress and the Senate are going to do is pass gun laws and begin to take away all the guns in America.
And they can’t figure out what happened. Well, I can tell you part of what happened. Just loving a gun isn’t enough.
You’ve got to love God. And so, you know, they’re distressed because they don’t know what happened, but they pulled the shoulder away a long time ago. Where is your love for God? Where is your love for the One who redeemed you through His Son Jesus? Where is that exaltation coming? And you can see many other areas of people.
Some of the churches are all distressed. Well, examine your relationship with the Lord as a fellowship of believers and as individual Christians and see does God not have the right to chastise those He loves when you pull the shoulder away and when you say, I’m not going to do what you want me to do. And so it says that they came and pulled away the shoulder and stopped their ears.
I just have this picture of this little kid and his mother telling him what to do and he sticks his fingers in his ears and then he hums and whistles or does anything so he doesn’t have to listen. God says that’s what they were doing. I told you what you needed to do, but nobody listened.
You stick your fingers in your ears and you pull your shoulder away, but yet you say you want to be with Me. Yet you say you want to worship Me. Yet you say you want to hear My words.
But how can you hear them when you’ve got your fingers in your ears and you’re pulling your shoulder away? How do you have fellowship with Me? And so this is the issue that the nation of Israel had to come to grips with. And this is the same issue, the same problems that we can have today. Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone.
Now that’s a hard stone. And lest they should hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts had sent in His Spirit by the former prophets, therefore came a great wrath from the Lord of hosts. Well, if you pulled your shoulder away, stuck your fingers in your ears, made your heart turn to stone so you did not want to hear, did not want to respond, did not want to listen, yea, God’s anger is going to come.
Therefore it has come to pass that as He cried, and they would not hear, so they cried, and I would not hear, saith the Lord of hosts. So He’s saying, okay, you can go through the motions, but I’m not going to hear you. It’s not the weeping.
It’s not the fasting. It’s not the crying out to the Lord that’s going to do it. It’s the desire of your heart.
If you’re crying from the heart and you really want to see God work in your life, God will hear. But if you’re not willing to listen to God and what you’ve got to do, why should God listen to us? You know, you often hear times of people of foxhole conversions and they’re in the service, and they used to have, I don’t know if they still dig foxholes that often, but they used to have big foxholes when they fought, and they’d dig a hole, and they’d go down in their hole. And as long as they kept their head down, the bullets would usually whiz over the top.
But the great danger was if you stuck your head up to fire your gun, you could get hit in the head. And so oftentimes the people that were in the foxholes, they’d make these prayers like, Lord, if you get me out of this, I’ll serve you the rest of the life. Lord, if you get me out of this, I’m going to give up whatever horrible habit I have.
Lord, if you get me out of this, I’m going to be totally changed and transformed and I’ll follow you forever. Well, those were called foxhole conversions. Because oftentimes it was made because of the circumstances, not because your heart was repentant.
And oftentimes these guys, God would miraculously and mercifully save them, and they’d get home and nothing would change. Because they forgot their words they shared because they were shared when the pressure was on, but the pressure is removed. Then all of a sudden, well, why do I want to do that? I enjoy my bad sins.