Missing The Whole Point

Seems To Be A Trend
Line By Line - Zechariah 7:1-14
Post 088

Historical Background with Present Application
For those completely void of Christian education, it should be understood that those who accept Jesus as the Messiah are as Christians adopted into Abraham's faith of the Creator God (Colossians 3:11). We study the history of the Jews recorded in scripture as well as modern history to learn how God moves among men. We learn by their successes and their failures then apply that learning to our own lives. Our founding fathers were richly educated in this study. Now lets look at just such an example:

Zechariah 7:1 “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;” Historically this was in 420 BC *1.

Zechariah 7:2-3 “When they had sent unto the house of God Sherezer and Regemmelech, and their men, to pray before the LORD, 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?”
Before we look at the answer to their question, we need to review the first declaration of God through Zechariah, found in chapter 1:1-6
…“The LORD hath been sore displeased with your fathers, Therefore say thou unto them (the children of the fathers), Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Turn ye unto me, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the LORD of hosts. Be ye not as your fathers,…”
Zechariah did not appear until 100+ years after the Babylonian return in the second year of the second Darius just before the second temple was finished *1.
Now the temple was near completion and the people wanted to know if they needed to continue the ceremonial weeping which they had done in the 5th month of every year while in captivity and for 100 years after while the temple was being built. Notice the emphasis on; “as I have done these so many years”, you can just hear the self-absorbed heart here in this question. But before we criticize them, can you not see your own negotiations with God; “How long?” or “Have I not…?” We tend to assume somehow that our actions of letter-of-the-law-obedience, earns us some respect from God just as they did. Let’s see how God answers them and apply it to ourselves:

Zechariah 7:4 “Then came the word of the LORD of hosts unto me, saying, 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?”
Notice that God told him to speak to everyone openly, not just to the rulers who came asking. The message from God was not to the rulers alone but to all the people. The failure was not that of the leaders alone, the failure was by everyone. “Failure? What failure?”
Clearly they had done the letter of the law; They did fast, and weep, and mourned twice a year, every year as instructed. But was that good enough? No. They were accountable for their lack of heart unto God in their performance. Remember, this was a whole generation after the return from Babylon, Not a person alive remained from those who had been captive in Babylon. Their fasting and weeping over the years had become generationally traditional and actually directing their actions toward really beseeching God had been long forgotten!
Do you go to church every week? And somehow you think by fulfilling this generational tradition that God is pleased with you though you party every other night of the week? Are you seeing the relation? Ouch! I know.
The perspective we can glean is that the Jews were not released from captivity because they had repented, or reformed, or fasted and wept enough. They were released because their sentence was up. 70 years was the price for the sins against the land. Simple as that.

Zechariah 7:6 “And when ye did eat, and when ye did drink, did not ye eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves?”
They were asking about their fasting, and God was questioning their eating! This is the same concept as Proverbs 21:4 “An high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin.” If your heart is wicked everything you do is wicked, even the good stuff like plowing your fields for planting; i.e. going to work to support your family. God is holding them guilty of their heart while they are performing their duties or not. Duty is not the goal; a right heart is the goal.
Everything they did was for themselves; eating and drinking or fasting and weeping. In your heart it is all about you. Then he drives the point home showing them they are missing the entire point!

Zechariah 7:7 “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?”
God through Zechariah is saying to them; You are not hearing me yet! Your fathers failed to hear me before I sent them into captivity, and now that you are returned from captivity you also turn a deaf ear to what those prophets were saying just as your fathers did. The question they asked was not even related to what they were supposed to be seeing. Now of course we can throw stones at them but still miss our own application of this answer from God just as they also missed their application of their fathers missing theirs. Through history the problem is the same and the consequence is the same and the solution is the same. God does not change; “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.” I Corinthians 11:29. The eating and drinking is not the focus of the communion cup, and if I eat and drink with myself as the center of the action, I too am missing the point. The heart before God is the topic God is interested in from us just as it was from them. Their weeping on a specific day every few months was a lot of show but lacking serious contemplation, which was supposed to be the point of the scheduled weeping. No different than us going to church on Sunday then heading down to the bar on Monday night but appealing to God; “Didn’t we got to church every Sunday?” So in answer to their question, God tells them what ought to be on their minds;

Zechariah 7:8-10 “And the word of the LORD came unto Zechariah, saying, Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother: 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.”
Septuagint: “…and let not one of you remember in his heart the injury of his brother.”
Failing to execute judgment is not the accusation here; failing to execute true judgment is. For a people who do not need this list of very clear “rules”, it seems obvious; Of course we should not do these things. But to the people who need these guidelines, their actions and excuses make perfect sense to them; To have no compassion on your brother because of something he did to you? To oppress the widow because you can, or the fatherless because they have no defense? To take advantage of the stranger because he means nothing to you personally, or to abuse the poor because he is such an easy mark? Even for the crass it might be hard to lack mercy for your own brother, but we can overcome this weakness if we just “feel” he is evil. Then we can have lack of mercy without feeling bad, heck he deserves it! All these are showing judgment for the ulterior motive of self-centered gain. And the Judgment is false.
The Septuagint here makes even more clear the concept that your brother may indeed have done you wrong, but to be merciless because of it is retribution which God does not allow from his followers. The best example of the right perspective I know of is found in Genesis 50:20 “But as for you, (my brother) ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring it to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”
This verse is speaking about the vast difference between the imagination of our heat as we see reality, and true judgment according to God’s perspective. It has been said; “There is no sin so great, that the human mind cannot rationalize it away.” The scripture says it like this; “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9
It is easy for the heart to rationalize why your actions are Just, but that rationalization does not make it Just. Sometimes true judgment might be hard to find because our own interests are in the way. But we are accountable to find the truth so that we can exercise true judgment and not what we imagine or simply want truth to be. This instruction to the Jews at that time is very applicable to the world today.
George Bernard Shaw wanted everyone to come before a board to provide evidence that they are beneficial to society. If not they should be terminated *2. This seemed reasonable to him and there are many signs this will soon seem reasonable to our present Administration. There is no end to the wickedness resulting from judgment without God. But God is not talking to the wicked heathen in this passage, he is talking to his own children the Jews and he is talking to us the nation that has until now claimed to stand “Under God” (Pledge of Allegiance).

Zechariah 7:11 “But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear.”
Again we need to remember that God through Zechariah is speaking to the Jews after the Babylonian captivity. He was talking about their fathers who gave cause for them to go into captivity.
Picture your young son who doesn’t want to hear your council and he jerks away his shoulder from your touch… And you thought he invented that! The clear image here is that they did not want to hear due to their own stubborn will conflicting with God’s. God through Zechariah is showing this returned generation their own dangerous heart is not so different from that of their fathers. Our application shows us that our dangerous heart is no different either.

Zechariah 7:12 “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.”
This is not a description of ignorance. This is not a description of inadvertent slippage into sin. This is pure stubborn, willful, rebellion.
This is the sin of American Christians today. We have no time to earnestly seek God, we rarely crack open his book, we drink to excess, and speak with unbridled tongues, we deal deceptively in business and cheat those whom we don’t love and even those we do. We openly fill our minds with utter abominable filth from the TV and fornicate without apology. We live so much like the heathen that we are welcome in their circles and hide our faith so even those closest to us don’t see it. Yet we are offended when a fellow believer makes a gentle suggestion this is not Christ-like (James 1:14-16, Mark 8:38, I John 1:6 Ephesians 5:3-7).

Zechariah 7:13-14 “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: 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.”
Their father’s refusal to listen cost them 70 years of captivity, and then a return to a destroyed land. The rebuilding actually took longer than the captivity, and the end result was not even as good as the original (Ezra 3:12), showing that sin always has a permanent consequence even after restoration. This is evidenced by Jesus’ wounds of crucifixion even after the resurrection (John 20:27).
But this passage has more to it than what we see on the surface. The wording of this passage is a bit awkward, indicating some hidden meaning. So lets have a look at the original Greek translation wording to see if this has a more explanatory wording:
Septuagint: Zechariah 7:13-14 “And it shall come to pass, that as he spoke, and they hearkened not, so they shall cry, and I will not hearken, saith the Lord Almighty. And I will cast them out among all the nations, whom they know not; and the land behind them shall be made utterly destitute of any going through or returning: yea they have made the choice land a desolation” *3.
The tenses in this original translation shows clearly this verse was speaking of a time not yet fulfilled at the writing but the original Hebrew words used allow for application when it was written as well.
About 550 years after this prophesy to the returned Jews, they would again fully reject all the efforts of God to lead them right. All the scriptures, all the prophets, all history past, and present at their time was showing the arrival of the Messiah. But while performing the actions of the letter, they like their fathers, missed the whole point and rejected the Messiah though he fulfilled hundreds of prophesies, and presented himself on the exact day (Daniel 9:25) in the exact way which was prophesied (Zechariah 9:9). This rejection is like after 3000+ years of loving yet volatile courtship the bride does not show up to the alter on the day of their wedding because she is looking for another man!
Jesus made it clear that what happens after that was a direct result of this rejection; “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” Matthew 23:37-39
The following 2000+ years of scattering (its still not over) abuse and horrors was not unjust, it was the punishment which was due for their rejection of the very center of all their faith; the Messiah (Ezekiel 4:5-6, + Leviticus 26:27-39 a multiplier). God has not forgotten them even though they began to cry in earnest when the horrors began but they got no relief. This verse applies from then to this time today. It applies to them and it applies to us. God is not mocked (Isaiah 28:22, Galatians 6:7).
This 2000 years of apparent abandonment by God should be an additional strong sign to the Jews that the Messiah was indeed Jesus whom they rejected, otherwise it would seem God has failed them for 2000 years without cause, which of course they rightly believe he cannot do, but did (Hebrews 13:5-6).
Even back when Jesus was born they should have know he had come, because Genesis 49:10 was apparently proven wrong when in 7 AD the Romans took the power and authority from the Sanhedrin and yet the messiah had not come as promised.
He had come, as a child, but he was rejected outright because of their preconceived expectations *4. The Jews would rather believe the scriptures were proven wrong than to accept Jesus as the messiah. They were demanding scripture to fit their interpretation, and all this time later they still are. How stubborn, how foolish, but can you not see yourself in this? How long have you been trying to make Christianity work in your own life, fully convinced that it can, but constantly failing to achieve the goal? Somehow you are satisfied with tiny and periodic markers of success that do nothing more than keep you perpetually chasing that carrot on the stick. But we look at Jewish history and wonder at their blindness?
Now the recent historical Diaspora is officially over, the Jews have miraculously returned to their homeland, but as before, the rebuilding is still a long and difficult struggle… And there will yet be another falling and punishment because they still have not figured it out!(Daniel 12:1, Matthew 24:21).
* * *

So how does this passage apply to America today?
Our government is made up of individual people making decisions. So the application fits both nationally and individually just as it did for Israel.
America, Do not pull your shoulder away from the Holy Spirit as he speaks to us about some things in our nation we need to deal with. Do not automatically turn to blame others for the situation. Train your heart to listen and immediately obey in humility. But first you must come to terms with the truth shown by history; That God is, and he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him (Hebrews 11:6).
It is important that we listen to God while life is still good and comfortable, because after our life crashes in on us and we then come to God hat-in-hand for relief, we will find the heavens brass and God’s ear not hearing. We then wander lost and aimless for the duration of our “captivity” until our sentence is paid, when by God’s grace we may be allowed the motivation to seek Him again and begin the restoration of the wasteland of our lives.

In my own life, after realizing I had wandered away for some time while thinking I was OK with God, I eventually began an earnest seeking of God again. I returned to all the right ways and cleaned my life diligently of all ungodliness… and still the curse would not leave. For 2 years I was diligent and determined, and for 2 years there appeared to be no relief.
I was quite confused by this but through diligence, eventually after I had stopped seeking “so that my problem would go away”, and found myself seeking because I desired God’s presence, I finally began to see the slow and gradual changes of restoration taking place.
Likewise, although the sentence of 70 years had been paid by the Babylonian captives, that did not mean everything was all good again for the Jews. God was making clear to this new generation the reason for the captivity in the first place and warning them they tended to the same problem that caused it.
The Jews today are still incapable of recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, thus making it impossible for them to say; “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” (Matthew 23:39) which will end their suffering as promised *5.
Israel’s present state of “lostness” even though they have again been returned to their land is the result of the years of punishment no different than a convict being released after serving most of a life-sentence of incarceration; There is a difficult transition back into freedom. The Jews today, though having not personally experienced the horrors of the holocaust, are still so skittish they are often accused of having a “persecution complex”, this is fulfillment of Leviticus 26:36-37.
The miraculous restoration of the destroyed nation of Israel on May 14, 1948 was done on the exact day their sentence was paid. But because in their “incarceration” they failed to turn back to God in earnest since he refused to hear their cries, now thy find a lack of faith in their new freedom unable to really trust a God who seems to have abandon them long ago. So they begin additional crimes against God by their additional lack of faith. This lack of faith is because instead of searching for the cause of their incarceration, they choose instead to bang their heads on the ruins of their temple-mount begging God to come around as if he was neglectful. This has delayed the fulfillment of Ezekiel 36:25-31.
Over and over the scriptures show that Jesus the Christ is the very core of all things, and the rejection of him is very costly. The Jews will not get it right until they recognize this. America knew all this history and its meaning at one point, but has now forgotten it too. All this background is vital to understand prophecy related to current events.

My next post will address how it applies specifically to America, but in the mean time have a look at the History of the Jews and take it as a warning for what is coming on America for the same reasons.
* * * * * * *

*1 When in time?
We know that the first temple was destroyed in 597 BC and that the Jews were released to return and begin construction on the second temple in 536 BC, that is 61 years. Ezra 3:8 tells us the laying of the foundation began in the second year of the return (535 BC) and that the foundation was laid most probably in that same year.
Ezra 1:12 Tells us there were very old men present at the laying of the second temple who had seen the first temple, so how do I come up with another 100+ years until the temple was complete? Ezra 4:11,23 tells us that after a period of cessation from the work in the time of Artaxerxes, the Jews again began to build in the days of Darius (Ezra 5:5). This means that the Darius here had to be the one that came after Artaxerxes which means it was Darius II (Ochus) who ruled in 423-404 BC. Ezra 6:15 tells us the temple was finished in the 6th year of Darius making it 418 BC.
597 - 418 = 179 years from temple to temple. 179 - 61 = 118 years from end of captivity unto temple completion. Ezra 5:1-2 tells us it was in the time of the re-energized effort to completion that Zechariah prophesied.

*2 George Bernard Shaw speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQvsf2MUKRQ

*3 Note: the future tense and the presence of Jesus in this Zechariah 7:13 prophesy; “And it shall come to pass, (later) that as he (God) spoke, and they hearkened not, so they shall (future) cry, and I (“I” Jesus, not “he” God) will not hearken,” This passage was written regarding a still distant event. Being sent into “all the nations” was not actually fully fulfilled at the time of the writing. This verse has since been fulfilled by the Diaspora, and the years of Jewish weeping, while the LORD would not hearken.

*4 Luke 19:11 "...because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear."

*5 Hosea 5:15 “I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me earnestly.”

*6 Leviticus 26:36-37 “And upon them that are left alive of you will I send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth. And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies.”
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