Zechariah 1:1-6

For some reason, I am almost a bit nervous (for lack of a better word) about delving into the concept of blogging through a book from the Old Testament. As Christians, sometimes it seems as though we spend so much time in the New Testament that we tend to overlook the Old. It is easy to understand. After all, the New Testament is all about Jesus. However, according to Jesus, so is the Old Testament.

Therefore, I will see if I can go through the Old Testament and write a bit about my thoughts and understandings, and maybe even see if I can find the references to Jesus (which I will surely point out whenever I find them...and I am equally as certain that I will miss a good number of them). We will see how this goes and, at the very least, it is that much more of the Bible that I will have gone through.

Why am I starting in Zechariah? Isn't t hat the second to the last book in the Old Testament? Isn't that like cheating? No, not really. That's actually just where my personal reading plan has gotten me. Had I started this sooner, I would not have started in 2 Timothy and I would not have started this series in Zechariah. It just worked out that way.

With that, let's get going...

In the eight month of the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah the prophet, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo saying, "The LORD was very angry with your fathers. Therefore say to them, 'Thus says the LORD of hosts, "Return to me," declares the LORD of hosts, "that I may return to you," says the LORD of hosts. "Do not be like your fathers, to whom the former prophets proclaimed, saying, 'Thus says the LORD of hosts, "Return now from your evil ways and from your evil deeds." ' But they did not listen or give heed to me." declares the LORD. "Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? But did not My words and My statutes, which I commanded My servants, the prophets, overtake your fathers? Then they repented and said, 'As the LORD of hosts purposed to do to us in accordance with our ways and our deeds, so He has dealt with us.' " ' "
 - Zechariah 1:1-6

If you got a little lost with the quotes inside of quotes inside of quotes, I understand. Rather than just copying and pasting from this passage from bible.com, I hand-typed everything and had to go through the passage about six times to make sure I opened and closed all of the double and single quotes properly...and I'm still not sure I did it correctly.

In any event, we can start at the beginning and look at the opening verse. Who is Darius? To give us a time frame of when this was written, it is believed that Darius was a governor or Babylon, appointed by King Cyrus around 601 B.C. In Hebrew, the word for "king" could mean an actual monarch or it could mean a more localized governor. In this case, Darius appears to be the latter.

Now, to try to break down these quotes. From what I can tell, Zechariah is being told by God to remind the people of Israel that, in the past, prophets exhorted the people to return to the Lord and to repent from sin. They did not listen, however, and God reminds them that His promises to bring consequences on them ended up being fulfilled. They were invaded, conquered and taken captive into foreign lands.

He says that after they were punished, they finally repented and recognized that it was because of their own sin that God had punished them. So, now, God is saying through Zechariah the same thing He told their fathers; repent and turn back to God and leave their lives of sin. But He is reminding them to not be like their fathers who heard these words from previous prophets but did not listen.

Now that they are in captivity, God wants them to see that He keeps His promises, for good or for ill. Their fathers found out the hard way that God really will allow Israel to be conquered when they don't listen to Him, and is now giving them another opportunity to try the other side of that coin...being obedient so that God can bless them, just as He promised.

This illustrates the fact that God is a just God. He does not merely turn a blind eye to the Israelites when they do wrong because they are "His people." When folks call God genocidal for having Israel drive out the Canaanites from the Promised Land, this shows the problem with that line of thinking. It was not that God just didn't like Canaanites and wanted to just wipe them out because of their ethnicity. It was judgement pronounced on them for things they had been doing. That becomes clear when God had promised Israel that He would do the same thing to them if they did the same things. When Israel did those same things, God drove them out, too.

At the end of the day, it is important to remember that God is loving, but He is also just. He built this world, therefore, He gets to say how things should be. If we violate those principles, we incur God's wrath because we broke the law. Obviously, He would prefer that we did not break the law. But we do. When a person breaks the law and is convicted, they are separated from the rest of society. In the same way, when we break God's law, we are separated from Him. Ultimately, God provides the means to reconcile us to Himself and allows us to come back to Him. He had to do it in a way that still allowed wrong to be punished while at the same time, grace is available.

That is a pretty amazing thing, and we will get more into that in future posts. For now, have a great week and until next time, grace, love and peace.