A Warrior’s Love
July 13, 2008 Zechariah 1:7-21
Intro:
Our view of ourselves and the world around us is, by necessity, quite limited. We are finite creatures, what we know comes from what we have seen and heard, from the things we have been exposed to, from the choices we make about what we will watch or read or listen to. And yet, we have been adopted by the God of the Universe – we have been welcomed into a new, different, spiritual Kingdom as full citizens. And we are aware that there is so much more to our existence than only those things that we can perceive – there is an entire spiritual world, of which we also are a part, yet which are not always tangibly aware.
So, then, it should not surprise us when some of our experiences with God, who is Spirit, are a little strange – unusual – some might use the word “weird”. Two weeks ago we heard Mike Duff’s testimony of a bat coming and landing on his arm while he was asking questions about whether God was real, and how he wasn’t afraid, and in that moment Mike knew God was real and he wanted to spend his life serving God. We hear other stories, and in many of them we smile and say “some people might call it coincidence, but we know that is God.” Sometimes people hear strange words – once I was at a conference, and some people with some prophetic gifts were praying for me and one of them asked me, does the word “Bellamy” mean anything to you? I said, “um, no.” But then as I drove home that day past a jazz club a block from my house, the sign said “performing tonight: DC Bellamy”. So I went, listened to some great blues, and afterwards met the artist and shared this story with him, and we talked about God and faith for about half an hour.
Other people, including Zechariah, the author of the book we are studying, see visions. This is fairly common in our Bible, there was even a name for this group of people – they were called “seers”. We have the written record of these visions – words describing pictures, with all the limitations that entails. So as we read them we have to use our imaginations to try to envision, re-imagine, re-create in our minds the description we have. I need you to do that as we read Zechariah’s first two visions.
Zech 1:7-21
7 Three months later, on February 15, the Lord sent another message to the prophet Zechariah son of Berekiah and grandson of Iddo.
8 In a vision during the night, I saw a man sitting on a red horse that was standing among some myrtle trees in a small valley. Behind him were riders on red, brown, and white horses. 9 I asked the angel who was talking with me, “My lord, what do these horses mean?” “I will show you,” the angel replied. 10 The rider standing among the myrtle trees then explained, “They are the ones the Lord has sent out to patrol the earth.” 11 Then the other riders reported to the angel of the Lord, who was standing among the myrtle trees, “We have been patrolling the earth, and the whole earth is at peace.”
12 Upon hearing this, the angel of the Lord prayed this prayer: “O Lord of Heaven’s Armies, for seventy years now you have been angry with Jerusalem and the towns of Judah. How long until you again show mercy to them?” 13 And the Lord spoke kind and comforting words to the angel who talked with me. 14 Then the angel said to me, “Shout this message for all to hear: ‘This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: My love for Jerusalem and Mount Zion is passionate and strong. 15 But I am very angry with the other nations that are now enjoying peace and security. I was only a little angry with my people, but the nations inflicted harm on them far beyond my intentions. 16 “‘Therefore, this is what the Lord says: I have returned to show mercy to Jerusalem. My Temple will be rebuilt, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, and measurements will be taken for the reconstruction of Jerusalem.’ 17 “Say this also: ‘This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: The towns of Israel will again overflow with prosperity, and the Lord will again comfort Zion and choose Jerusalem as his own.’”
18 Then I looked up and saw four animal horns. 19 “What are these?” I asked the angel who was talking with me. He replied, “These horns represent the nations that scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem.” 20 Then the Lord showed me four blacksmiths. 21 “What are these men coming to do?” I asked. The angel replied, “These four horns—these nations—scattered and humbled Judah. Now these blacksmiths have come to terrify those nations and throw them down and destroy them.”
The Setting:
The vision begins with “a man sitting on a red horse that was standing among some myrtle trees in a small valley. Behind him were riders on red, brown, and white horses.” These details are actually quite important, as most things in a vision from God are… Myrtle is a dense bush native to the Mediterranean, and the word translated “small valley” is the same word which in other places is translated “the depths” and has the feeling of being stuck at the bottom, being surrounded, not in a safe and happy way but in a dangerous way. So this is actually a dark picture - a deep valley, dense bush, and an army on horseback. In the time, horses were almost entirely creatures of war, and the nation with the best cavalry dominated the world. It’s a vision of a council of war.
The “People”:
In the vision there are a number of participants. It can be a little confusing, but when I sift through it all I come up with these:
• Zechariah – on the outside looking in
• the “angel who was talking with me”(ma’lak dabar) – this angel is sort of a go-between, in the vision but also explaining it to Zechariah
• the “angel of the LORD” (ma’lak Yahweh) – I’m pretty sure this is the “rider on the red horse” out front, to whom the others report, and who talks to God in the prayer in vs. 12. A number of scholars actually identify this as Jesus, an interpretation I would agree with for a bunch of reasons I won’t take the time to get into this morning…
• the rest of the angel army on horseback
• and, of course, the “LORD of Heaven’s Armies” (Yahweh tsaba’) – This is God. The NIV translation uses “Lord Almighty”, the old KJV says “Lord of hosts”. Ours (NLT) says “LORD of Heaven’s Armies”. It is a picture of God as commander/warrior.
The First Vision:
Ok, so Zechariah has this vision of a council of war, including Yahweh tsaba, Jesus, an angel army, and an angel who is helping Zechariah make sense of it all. So what is actually going on, and what does this have to do with us today?
Remember last week’s history lesson. The God’s people had been crushed by the Babylonians and carried off into slavery, God’s temple was destroyed and the city of Jerusalem reduced to rubble. Then the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, and the Persian king allowed the slaves to return home. Many Israelites returned, began rebuilding the temple, but then settled into their own homes and lives and now, finally, 18yrs later, are getting back to work on God’s temple. That is all happening in the physical realm, Zechariah’s vision is of what is happening in the spiritual realm.
And the point was this: the people had felt abandoned by God. Left alone, discarded, like God had forsaken them when He allowed them to be carried off to Babylon. We saw last week how the prophets had explained that God was going to use these other nations to punish God’s people for their sin, and now we are on the other side and we hear what is happening in the war council among the myrtle trees. And the point – the amazing, incredible, life-changing point is this: God is back. God is here, the army is on the move, things are about to happen.
The angel army reports: “We have been patrolling the earth, and the whole earth is at peace.” When I first read this, I was excited, I thought this was a glorious picture of the future when everything would be made right and be “at peace”. I assumed the word “peace” was the word “shalom”, a rich Hebrew word you might be familiar with which has wonderful connotations of the reign of God and everything being right. Well, I was wrong… it isn’t that at all, it isn’t even the word “shalom”, it is a different word which means something more like “quiet”, or “still”. In the vision, it means that the angels return and the enemy is resting, has gotten comfortable – there is a world full of injustice, and they aren’t doing anything about it.
So the “angel of the LORD” (Jesus), turns to the “LORD of Heaven’s Armies”, and prays, intercedes, pleads for mercy. Verse 12: “for seventy years now you have been angry with Jerusalem and the towns of Judah. How long until you again show mercy to them?”
How long?? Let’s pop out of the ancient vision for a moment. Can you relate to this at all? Jesus asks the question – “How long?” How long, Lord, before you act? Before you rescue? Before you heal? Before you set us free? Before you keep Your promises? Before we see Your mighty hand act against the evil and the pain around us, before You do all the things that only You can do? It is ok to ask that question. It is ok to express our desperation, our frustration, our longing. In fact, it is more than ok – we see it here, in many other places as well. Sometimes in our modern faith we don’t think we can ask these hard questions, we don’t think we can express our feelings of loss and abandonment and wondering when God is going to act, but in fact we can and we should. In the Bible this is called “lament”, the Psalms are full of lament and we even have a whole book of the Bible called “lamentations”. This is a spiritual discipline we need to recapture – a discipline of complete emotional honesty before God which is always expressed alongside our faith that God will do all He has promised, in His time.
And God answers, and the answer is incredible. Remember the picture – the mighty warrior God, surrounded by the angel army, powerful, scary, more than a little intimidating. And this Lord Almighty speaks “kind and comforting words”. He speaks them to Zechariah’s interpreting angel, who then turns to Zechariah and says, “Shout this message for all to hear: ‘This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: My love for Jerusalem and Mount Zion is passionate and strong.” Wow. Remember the people who felt abandoned? Who felt alone and deserted? Who asked that “how long??” question as they lay on their beds at night, wondering and waiting and desperate, with nowhere else to turn? God says, “shout this message!! make sure every one of my people hear it – my love is passionate and strong!!!!!” Notice the emotion – passionate, strong – this is not a picture of a stately old grandpa, this is a picture of a mighty warrior who is fired up for battle: fierce, terrifying, preparing to lead His troops into battle to fight for the people He loves with a love that is “passionate” and “strong”.
And my friends, not a single thing has changed between then and now as it relates to this picture. This is the God we worship, and His love for you and I remains the same. This God does battle for us, and with us, and there is a lot at stake. Sometimes we as Christians look more like the other nations who are “at rest” – sitting around, while all around us there is evil and injustice and a world full of people who are spiritually dead and who desperately need to know the love of God for them, and we have been commissioned and sent and given the Holy Spirit, and we do little with it. We are maybe too busy, or too tired, or too immersed in ourselves and our hurt. And yet the truth is that we serve and love this Almighty God, who leads an awesome heavenly army, and who invites us into His Kingdom to live and to love and to serve and to fight, who says “my love for you is passionate and strong!”, and then asks us to love Him back. To love Him more than our sin. And to live our lives in complete surrender to Him, complete obedience to Him, and thus lives of significance and power and joy.
The Second Vision:
So what are we to do? Where do we start?? How do we respond??? Let’s jump down to the second vision, in vs. 18ff. There was more in what God said to Zechariah in the first vision, and some of it dovetails quite nicely into this second vision.
This one is pretty weird also. Zechariah sees four horns – most likely animal horns, which were symbols of power, and which the angel explains represent the nations that have come against God’s people – the nations which went “too far” in acting out the punishment of God on His people as God said in the first vision. So picture these four mighty symbols of great power, the power of military nations like Babylon and Persia, who ruled the whole world. And it is time to pull them down, to terrify them, to destroy them. So who does God send? The mighty army on horseback? The awesome “angel of the LORD” (ma’lak Yahweh), whom I think is Jesus??
Verse 20: “Then the Lord showed me four blacksmiths.” This is a poor translation – the word translated “blacksmith” is actually a more generic word for “craftsmen” and could be any tradesman who worked with wood, stone, or metal. Our translation chooses “blacksmith” because they see a need to choose the craftsmen that might appear the most fierce, the most powerful. But I think there is something more profound going on here, and so let’s replace this with the word “craftsmen” which other translations (such as NIV) use.
So what is going on? Against the mighty nations, the “LORD of Heaven’s Armies” sends four craftsmen – stone masons or blacksmiths or maybe even a lowly carpenter. What is this? Remember our historical background – the big push of the day from Haggai and Zechariah was what? Rebuilding the temple. By simple craftsmen, doing simple jobs, stone by stone, nail by nail, wooden beam by wooden beam.
The tangible world connects here to the spiritual world, and makes a profound and powerful point. In the tangible world, it is the simple acts of obedience by craftsmen building God’s temple that “terrify those nations and throw them down and destroy them.” That is how it works – our simple acts of obedience in the tangible world have huge implications in the spiritual world. Sometimes we glamorize ministry, thinking the only people that are really spiritual and impactful and powerful are the Billy Grahams, the Mother Theresa’s, the Desmond Tutu’s. And then we underestimate the importance of our acts of obedience, thinking them not really so significant.
You see, every time we obey, like the craftsmen in Zechariah’s second vision, we are building God’s Kingdom. Every time we feel the nudge of the Holy Spirit to pray for a friend we build God’s Kingdom. Every time we buy a loaf of bread for a friend, we build God’s Kingdom. Every time we resist sin, we build God’s Kingdom. A couple hours painting in our little church sanctuary, we build God’s Kingdom. It isn’t just the grand and costly, like two weeks in Bolivia or writing a sacrificial cheque, though those are important: every single, little act of obedience matters. The opposite is true also – every single act of disobedience matters too.
Conclusion:
God is “on the move”. The “LORD of Heaven’s Armies” wants His message shouted out loud, a message that says “My love is passionate and strong.” Our choice is crystal clear: are we on God’s side or are we against Him? The proof is not in our words, but in our actions: “if you love me, obey my commandments” (John 14:15), and it comes down to this: God’s love for you and me is “passionate and strong” – what about our love for Him? Is it “passionate and strong”, or lukewarm?
Like us, the people in Zechariah’s day were being called back to the God who loved them. And the promise in it was earlier in chapter one, which we saw in the first message back in June, which creates the framework for the whole book, and which I leave with you this morning: “This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.” (Zech 1:3).
