Text: Zechariah 1:7-21
Title: When World Peace Isn’t God’s Will Type: Expository
Purpose: Show hearer God is overcoming their oppressors.
Main Idea: God is determined to overcome our oppressors.
Opening: World Peace. Sometime, somewhere, somehow I saw the Sandra Bullock movie Miss Congeniality. That’s not the kind of movie I would normally choose to see, so I’m not sure when/where/how I ended up seeing it (or why, for that matter), but I did. I really don’t remember much about the film except one scene. In that scene, Sandra Bullock’s character, a tough-nosed cop who has been put undercover into a beauty pageant to catch a potential murderer, is asked by Stan the pageant’s host, “What is the one most important thing our society needs?” Now all the other contestants answered that question, “World peace.” (I guess this is how most beauty pageant contestants answer that question in real life.) But Bullock does not. Instead, she says, “That would be harsher punishment for parole violators, Stan.” Hearing this, the crowd goes silent. After waiting in that silence for a moment, Bullock then adds to her answer, “And world peace.” At that, the crowd goes wild with applause and cheers. (I thought that was the funniest joke in the movie.)
As we see in that scene/movie and in countless others I could tell you about this morning, and in countless songs I’ve heard, in countless real life statements and actions I’ve experienced, “world peace”, that is, the entire world being at peace, all nations/peoples of the world having absolutely no conflict of any kind with any other nations/peoples, is a value that a lot of people have. It is such a value that it even has its own Wikipedia page (show picture). A lot of people want world peace. A lot of people hope for world peace. A lot of people work for world peace (I don’t think as many people work for it as want it, but still). A lot of people think world peace is good, right, what ought to be (absolutely, inviolably so).
Interestingly enough, though, God isn’t one of those people. God doesn’t think world peace is good/right/ought to be, at least not all of the time. God doesn’t have world peace as an absolute, inviolable value. And He has good reasons for not having world peace as an absolute, inviolable value. We see that God doesn’t have world peace as an absolute, inviolable value and we see the reasons He does not when we return to the book of Zechariah.
Read Zechariah 1:7-21 (Church Bible page #939)
When World Peace Isn’t God’s Will. That’s what Zechariah is telling us about here. That’s what God is telling Zechariah about here (if you notice, Zechariah is about as confused about what is going on and what is being said as we are, so this is what God is telling Zechariah about here and what God is telling us through Zechariah here). When world peace isn’t His will. That world peace isn’t always His will.
Now that’s a weird thing for God to say (at least on the surface). That’s a (seemingly) weird message for God to be bringing to the prophet and through the prophet. Before we can get into that seemingly weird message, though, we have to get into the background of that message, the background of this text that we have read, this section (Zechariah 1:7-21). This text/section is the first quarter of what are often called Zechariah’s “night visions”. Sometime in Oct/Nov 520 BC, Zechariah received the thematic message “Return to me” and delivered that message to the postexilic/restoration community of his day. A few months later, on the night of February 24, 519 BC (the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month, the month of Shebat, in the second year of Darius, God gave the prophet Zechariah a series of eight visions which reflect and reinforce that message. The prophet is walked by an angel through eight very strange audio-visual revelations (not all revelations to the prophets were audio-visual, and not all of them were strange, but these ones are; these are Revelation-ish, very much like what we find in The Revelation). This series of eight visions takes up the first six chapters of the book (a good bit of it) and really is the most notable part of the book (before I started studying Zechariah a few months ago, this was all I really remembered about it).
What we have here in 1:7-21 are the first two of those eight visions (that’s why I called it “the first quarter”; we have not one but two visions here). The first and longest is the vision of “the man among the myrtle trees”, and the second is the vision of “the four horns” or “the four craftsmen”. And they really do go together; they have messages that build upon each other. In the first vision, Zechariah suddenly sees what he calls “a man” but what may be the Angel of the Lord or even a pre-incarnate Jesus. This man is on a red horse in a ravine filled with myrtle trees. Behind this man is a herd of other horses (red, brown, and white). Zechariah is told that these horses are the ones the LORD has sent to go throughout the earth; that is, they are angels or some sort of heavenly beings that God uses to monitor the world. These beings have monitored the world, they have come back from monitoring the world, and they report that it is at rest and in peace; the whole world is at rest and in peace. And that’s where we come to this idea I’m sharing with you this morning, this idea I’m calling “When World Peace Isn’t God’s Will”. Those words the whole world [is] at rest and in peace sound great to us; that’s the “world peace” we all love and long for so much. But the man/Angel of the Lord/Jesus doesn’t react to those words/that idea as if they/it are great. He reacts to them as if they are terrible. He cries out to God, LORD Almighty, how long will you withhold mercy from Jerusalem and from the towns of Judah, which you have been angry with these seventy years. That’s how he/He sees the whole world being at rest and in peace. He sees it as mercy being withheld from Jerusalem and Judah, from God’s people. He sees it as God’s people (and thus God’s mission in the world) failing, losing, getting the short stick. He sees it as the ungodly people who have oppressed God’s people (which is what most of the nations were at this time) winning; winning and enjoying the spoils of winning. In the eyes of the man among the myrtle trees, this world peace is not right/good/what ought to be; it is wrong for these ungodly oppressors to be at peace while the godly/God’s people are not, are oppressed, are threatened, are weak and small and poor and vulnerable, are losing/have lost. And God agrees. God responds to the man with three comments, saying that He is angry with the nations and will return to Jerusalem with mercy and will bring prosperity back to His people (all of which will be discussed in the following visions). He tells the man that He sees the same thing, in other words, that the whole world should not be at rest and in peace and won’t be allowed to remain at rest and in peace.
That then leads to the next/second vision, the four horns/craftsmen. This one is shorter and simpler. Zechariah says he suddenly sees four horns (and you can hear the shock in his voice). We don’t know what these horns are. We know what they stand for; in the Old Testament, horns stand for strength or power or “world powers” and four stands for “totality”. That is the case here. These horns stand for not just four world powers/nations but all world powers/nations who have oppressed and are oppressing and will ever oppress God’s people. We know that. What we don’t know is what those horns looked like. Were they biological horns (animal parts) or were they artificial horns (metal recreations)? Were they connected to something (an animal) or were they free-floating? I’ve always just thought they were four floating metal horns that the craftsmen who then appear beat on anvils (which I now realize is not what the text says). But then I found this picture (background image). I just Googled “Zechariah four horns” and this popped up. Here the horns are these huge spikes standing over the prophet. I like that. I think that’s likely. I think that fits the message of this vision. The LORD (perhaps the angel of the LORD) tells Zechariah these four horns are what scattered Israel, Judah, and Jerusalem, again, the nations that were at rest and in peace, the nations that oppressed the people of God past-tense and are still oppressing the people of God present-tense as we just said. And those nations weren’t small nations; they were big ones, far bigger than this postexilic/restoration community Zechariah is ministering to. They were big and intimidating. So I think it likely that these horns were big, intimidating horns. Whatever they looked like, though, the point is clear: God was taking care of these horns (taking care of them in the negative sense, taking care of them with extreme prejudice). He had said He was angry with the nations in the previous vision, and now we see Him acting on that anger in this vision. Just as the craftsmen in this vision threw down these horns in some way (maybe beating them on an anvil, maybe chopping them down; I don’t know), so God would throw down and was in the process of throwing down the big, intimidating nations who had attacked/oppressed His people. He was not going to allow them to remain at rest and in peace; He was going to disturb them. He was going to stir things up. He was going to start conflict and continue conflict until that conflict had completely destroyed the oppressors of His people, until His people were freed and free from those oppressors. He was, in other words, going to end the world peace which existed at that time for the benefit of His people (the world peace which existed at that time wasn’t benefitting His people, so He was going to disturb it). He cared less about the world peace which existed at that time than His people. World peace wasn’t His will in this particular case; the good of His people was His will, and He was willing to sacrifice world peace for that good.
And I believe He is still doing this today, still doing this for His people today, still doing this for us today, for the followers of Jesus Christ/the Church who are/which is His people today. That might not make a lot of sense to us at first, particularly to us American Christians who have lived our lives in a nearly-untouchable state between two oceans far removed from any foreign attackers. We might not feel we need this. We might not even like this; this might seem like that “bloodthirsty Old Testament God” that we try to edit out of our “kinder, gentler” modern practice. But it is necessary. It is necessary because there are still horns out there like these four, still ungodly nations which seek to attack and oppress the people of God. There are still “enemies” and “those who hate us” as the Zechariah of Luke 1 mentioned in the passage we read earlier (we’ve gone from one Zechariah to another this morning). That is obvious in other countries; if you read any Christian news, you will repeatedly hear about Christians in China and Indonesia and the Middle East who are physically and politically persecuted. These countries are largely “at rest and in peace”, and they are oppressing and opposing the people of God. Now that may or may not happen here in America (opinion is divided on that). But we do have horns/ungodly nations/oppressors/enemies/those who hate us of our own. We have them in our workplaces and our social spaces. We have them in our homes and maybe even our churches. I took a class on C.S. Lewis when I was in college. One of the things I remember the professor saying in that class is that Lewis’ contemporaries often voted against his being made a don of Oxford because of his faith; I even found an article which confirmed this. Around that same time, I watched the manager of the book warehouse where I worked part-time being berated by management; this guy was one of the hardest, most genuine workers I ever met, yet for some reason management had it in for him and gave it to him whenever they could. I found a book on Amazon.com from a woman who claimed to have been oppressed by the leadership of her megachurch; I won’t show you the book or name the church because I don’t know who is telling the truth in that situation, but this much is certain: either they were a horn to her or she was a horn to them. And you have that in your own life, don’t you? There is some person or some power somewhere oppressing you in an ungodly, anti-godly way, attacking you and frustrating what God is doing through you. They may be doing that intentionally or unintentionally. They may be doing that personally (they have something against you as an individual) or un-personally/generally (they have something against what you represent). It may be physical, it may be political, it may be emotional or financial or mental. It might be fists or it might be words or it might be actions. But it is. It is and it needs to be dealt with for your sake and for God’s sake.
And God is going to deal with it. He may deal with it with extreme prejudice, as He dealt with these horns. He may deal with it with significantly less prejudice than that (if the people opposing you are church people in error, God’s wayward children, He might deal with them with a lot more gentleness). But He is going to deal with it. He sees how you are oppressed and He is dealing/has plans to deal with your oppressor because He values you. That is what Zechariah is telling the postexilic/restoration community and us in these first two visions: God is dealing/has plans to deal with our oppressors because He values us even more than He values world peace.
Closing: Defender. Heather and Aubrey went home to Ohio the day after Christmas, as you know, and left me alone for a while (a week and a half or so). Before they went, Heather did something wonderful for me. She gave me a song. She texted me a YouTube link to a song I had never heard before. She believed it would comfort me, minister to me. And it did. The song is called “Defender”. It is written and performed by a lady named Rita Springer. It is about how God defends us, how we don’t even need to defend ourselves because God defends us so well. Springer starts the song by saying this:
You go before I know
That You’ve gone to win my war
You come back with the head of my enemy
You come back and You call it my victory.
Now I listened to that song I-don’t-know-how-many times while Heather was gone. I’m still listening to it now. I’m listening to it and a whole lot of versions of it (live versions, other people’s versions). It might be a little violent for us American Christians; I was really surprised when she says in the third line “You come back with the head of my enemy”; I had to back that up when I first caught it and ask myself, “Did she really say that?”; turns out she did. But it is also true. It is beautifully true. The ugly truth is that there are horns out there; there are ungodly nations/forces/people that want to oppress; that’s not God’s truth; He didn’t create that or want that; but it is truth. The beautiful truth is that God defends us from those horns/nations/forces/people; God breaks peace, not because He is violent (He’s not; He’s not this “bloodthirsty Old Testament God” we imagine) but because He loves His people and in that love breaks peace to whatever degree He needs to break peace in order to overthrow those horns/nations/forces/people to whatever degree they need to be overthrown.
This is who is calling us to return to Him. Our Defender (“Great Defender”). The one who has listened to the report of the horses He sent throughout the world and who sends out his craftsman to throw down the horns that scatter His people (big though they may be). The one for whom world peace is not an absolute/inviolable value, the one whose will is not always world peace, the one who values His people even more than world peace.
