Was It Really For Me?
August 31, 2008 Zech 7
Intro:
One of the really healthy, but challenging, things about preaching through a book of the Bible is that I don’t get to just preach the words of encouragement and promise that make us feel good. Preaching right through a book forces us to take note of the words that are confrontational and challenging and convicting. This morning’s passage, Zech 7, is that second kind.
Zech 7:1-3
1 On December 7 of the fourth year of King Darius’s reign, another message came to Zechariah from the Lord. 2 The people of Bethel had sent Sharezer and Regemmelech, along with their attendants, to seek the Lord’s favor. 3 They were to ask this question of the prophets and the priests at the Temple of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies: “Should we continue to mourn and fast each summer on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, as we have done for so many years?”
The Setting:
The first six chapters of Zechariah have recorded a series of visions, most related to the work of rebuilding the temple of God that had been destroyed when the Israelites were conquered by the Babylonians. The date at the beginning of those visions was late fall, 520BC. Those visions ended with chapter 6, and we are now entering a new section of the book, and the date on these is 518BC – two years after the series of visions, and about half-way through the temple reconstruction.
A delegation arrives in Jerusalem with an important question about the way the Israelites had been worshiping. The question tells us that the people had created a new annual worship ritual, where they would fast and mourn on the anniversary of the temple’s destruction. And now, with the temple on the way to being completely restored, and already functioning as a temple, they wanted to know if it was time to end that annual practice.
So far, so good, right? A legitimate, understandable question about something important. Should be a fairly straight forward reply. Except for one thing: God has a way of always slipping past the things that we think are important and confronting us with the things He thinks are important. God has a way of caring far more about the attitude and motivation than the form, and perhaps, if that had been foremost in the minds of the people, they wouldn’t have needed to ask about the external form. Perhaps, if they had been focused on the heart of that annual worship time they would have found ways to remember the heartbreak of the destruction of the temple but couple that with celebration at the progress being made on reconstruction, and thus have been in touch with God’s heart on the matter. God’s answer is revealing…
Zech 7:4-7
“The Lord of Heaven’s Armies sent me this message in reply: “Say to all your people and your priests, ‘During these seventy years of exile, when you fasted and mourned in the summer and in early autumn, was it really for me that you were fasting? And even now in your holy festivals, aren’t you eating and drinking just to please yourselves? Isn’t this the same message the Lord proclaimed through the prophets in years past when Jerusalem and the towns of Judah were bustling with people, and the Negev and the foothills of Judah were well populated?’”
Ouch…
How’s that for an answer to a simple question about whether to end the annual fasting and mourning on the day of the temple’s destruction? “Was it really for me?”
See what I mean about God having a way of slipping past the things we think are important and confronting us with the things He thinks are important? The question that came was about the form, the externals, and God’s response was all about the heart.
God is continually calling us away from self-centeredness, and it is a battle we continue to fight. A battle we must be diligent in. We all have this tendency to slip back to thinking about ourselves, putting ourselves first, looking at the world as if we are the centre of it. And it seems that is exactly what the Israelites had been doing: “even now in your holy festivals, aren’t you eating and drinking just to please yourselves?” That is a convicting question.
I suppose we could look at the Israelites in this passage and shake our heads at them. We could wag a finger, thinking “you Israelites… you just never seemed to get it right did you… God had been telling you all along this “same message proclaimed through the prophets in years past” and you still haven’t gotten it…” We could respond to them with a smug superiority.
But to do so would be doing exactly the same thing – focusing on the external and missing the heart.
You see, I believe Scripture still speaks to us, and the questions and confrontations we find in the stories that are 2500 years old are fresh and relevant and applicable to us, if we’ll let the Holy Spirit breath life into those words today. And so, as uncomfortable as it may be, I want to let this passage question us.
We might sometimes have questions about the externals, the forms of worship. For us it isn’t about fasting and mourning the destruction of the temple, for us the questions might be, “why do we sing “x” type of songs so much?”, or the flip side of that, “why don’t we sing more of “y””. Maybe it is, “should we stand for so long?”, or “do we need so many announcements?”, or “how come that sermon time has to be so long and boring?” How about this one: “why does church have to start at 9:30am?? Don’t they know that is way too early for someone like me that likes to sleep in and make pancakes on Sundays???” You maybe have other questions, and like the Israelites they are (mostly) legitimate questions.
But I wonder if God’s response is not identical today to what it was then. “Is this really for me, or are you doing this for yourselves?” I don’t like that question personally. I don’t like examining my heart and wondering if I care more about the externals than about the heart, seeking whether I am putting myself in the middle or God in the middle. But I know God is right. Worship is not about me, what I like or dislike, am familiar with or comfortable with. The services and the activities are not about meeting my needs, or feeding me, or nurturing me, or making me feel something. Worship is something completely different, which the passage takes us to next.
But just before we go there, what about you? Has worship become about “eating and drinking just to please yourself?”, or is it “really for God”?
Zech 7:8-10
“8 Then this message came to Zechariah from the Lord: 9 “This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: Judge fairly, and show mercy and kindness to one another. 10 Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. And do not scheme against each other.”
A Better Way:
God rarely makes an indictment without providing the right alternatives. And again the response here might be a little surprising. We might expect that in confronting empty external forms of worship which had become self-serving, God would instead call them to true, heart-felt expressions in their current forms. We might expect God to say, “come to worship and just think about Me, focus your heart on Me, make this an expression of your love for Me”, but God doesn’t do that. God repeats here a message that has been consistent throughout Scripture – which I’ll paraphrase by saying that the kind of worship God desires is not an occasional activity (regardless of the external form or the amount of “life” in it), it is rather an entire way of living.
That is what God is saying here. The forms, the activities, the dates and times and structures and music choices and sermon lengths, those are not nearly as important as how we are living our lives, every day.
God gets a little more specific here with four commands that shape a life of worship. The words in these commands are, as one commentator writes, “from some of the richest theological vocabulary” (George Klein, New American Commentary). The first says, in our translation, “judge fairly”. Better is the NIV, which says “administer true justice”, but the deep sense of the command is that we are to live faithfully, always doing that which is right. It is not really about people in authority passing judgment, but rather that all of us live day by day doing the right thing – not the easy thing, or the thing that makes us comfortable and happy, but the right thing. “true justice”.
The second command is to “show mercy and kindness to one another”. The word translated “mercy” here is a Hebrew word we have come across before, hesed, which describes the covenant love God has for His people. It is the idea of us in genuine relationship with one another, it is about faithfulness and mercy and love and loyalty within those relationships. It is an incredibly strong, deep word, much more than you and I usually think of when we think of “mercy”. It is followed by the word “kindness”, better translated “compassion”, and is the picture of tenderness like that of a mother to her unborn child.
So when God is talking about how He wants us to worship, He chooses to describe lifestyles that are characterized by always doing right, and by being in deep relationships with one another that are loyal, faithful, tender, and compassionate. That is the kind of worship God desires!
Verse 10 echoes those same ideas but in more concrete ways. First is the specific command about how we are to treat the vulnerable in our society – in those days it was the “widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor”. Here the intention is not just to address our reactions, but our concrete actions as well. This echoes James 1:27, “Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.” The command demonstrates God’s special concern for the poor and vulnerable, and our responsibility to be His hands and feet in meeting their needs. Verse 10 finishes with the fourth command, to “not scheme against each other”, again calling us to relationships based on truth and fairness and compassion rather than manipulation that attempts to exalt ourselves.
Zech 7:11-14
The rest of the chapter describes how God had spoken these things before, but the people had not listened or obeyed, and so they were punished. The obvious implication is that obedience to these commands is not optional. It says,
“11 “Your ancestors refused to listen to this message. They stubbornly turned away and put their fingers in their ears to keep from hearing. 12 They made their hearts as hard as stone, so they could not hear the instructions or the messages that the Lord of Heaven’s Armies had sent them by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. That is why the Lord of Heaven’s Armies was so angry with them. 13 “Since they refused to listen when I called to them, I would not listen when they called to me, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. 14 As with a whirlwind, I scattered them among the distant nations, where they lived as strangers. Their land became so desolate that no one even traveled through it. They turned their pleasant land into a desert.”
Conclusion:
Chapter 7 is a strong passage, calling us to examine our lives to see if we are living for God or living for ourselves. It begins with questioning our motivations, our hearts, as we come to worship, and quickly expands to recognize that God requires us to a lifestyle of worship that is far, far larger than any of the things that we do when we gather for a worship service. God requires us to live a lifestyle of worship that is expressed every moment of every day, is reflected in our choices to do what is right, to live in deep relationships of loyalty and faithfulness with one another, to exercise special concern for the poor and vulnerable, and to always put others ahead of ourselves.
How are we doing? I know that some of you here are trying to live that way with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and may God bless you. But others of us, not so much… We’ve drifted. We’ve gotten selfish. We’ve let ourselves be concerned about the externals and ignored the real state of our heart. We’ve wandered away from our first love, put God in the back seat, been living for ourselves rather than others, and ignored the needs of the vulnerable.
And my friends, that is not ok! That is a dangerous way to live. It leads us to lives of loneliness and rebellion and lack of purpose, to lives that reject God and thus miss out on so much of what He has for us to enjoy.
So I leave you with a question, and then an opportunity for repentance (which means turning 180 degrees and then going in the opposite direction), and then a chance to celebrate new life and forgiveness.
The question is this: Is Jesus first in your life? Is it all about you, or all about Him? Have you lost your first love, been living for you, turned your back to Him? God looks at all of our lives, and He asks, “Is it really for me??”
