Text: Zechariah 2:1-13
Title: Where There Ain’t Enough Coming In Type: Expository
Purpose: Encourage hearer to see that they will live/are living in God’s great prosperity.
Main Idea: We live/will live in a city without walls.
Opening: Ain’t Enough Coming In. One of my best friends became a DJ at CD101, a popular Columbus radio station, after high school. As a DJ, he had access to all sorts of music; companies sent him promotional CDs of all kinds for free. On one occasion, he sent some of these CDs to me (he just wanted to share the wealth, I guess, or get rid of some junk; I don’t know which). I was in Bible college at the time, two or three years in at least, and out of the blue I got a box in the mail from him containing about ten CDs. They were very strange CDs; they didn’t have all the packaging or artwork a store-bought CD has (they were in paper sleeves), and most of them were marked with a statement claiming that the CD was the property of the music company and must be returned to the music company upon request. One of those CDs was this one right here (show picture). This is a CD by a blues artist named Otis Rush. I didn’t listen to this one. I did see the name of it, though. I saw the name of that CD and I never forgot it. That name, as you can see, is Ain’t Enough Coming In.
Beyond doubt, what Rush is talking about in the name of that CD is resources of some kind. When he says Ain’t Enough Coming In, he means “ain’t enough finances coming in”. He means he doesn’t have and isn’t getting the money he needs to pay his bills, to keep him out of the red/out of debt, to stay afloat. Not only so, but I think he is implying that he will never have or get that money. I think he is implying that there will never be enough coming in for him. The situation he is describing there is the sad and scary situation of not just being poor/broke/impoverished (which is one thing) but being hopelessly poor/broke/impoverished. The state he is describing there is the state of someone who is not only in poverty but has no chance of escaping poverty.
And if we could go back to the time of the postexilic/restoration community, the community of Israelites who had returned to Israel from the Babylonian Exile and were attempting to rebuild it, we would find many of them saying the same thing, expressing the same sentiment, struggling with that same feeling. We would find that many of them apparently thought or believed or felt they were in that same situation or that same state. Many of them apparently thought or believed or felt that there wasn’t enough coming in and never would be enough coming in. Many of them apparently thought or believed or felt that they were not only poor/impoverished but were going to be perpetually poor/impoverished, always poor/impoverished, forever poor/impoverished.
Now the first half of that was true (somewhat true). This postexilic/restoration community was poorer in every way than the nations around them. They were poorer in every way than the Israelites before them (the Israelites of the past). But the second half of that was not true. They were not stuck in perpetual poverty. They were not going to be forever poor/impoverished. God Himself told them that this was not true, that they were not going to be stuck in perpetual poverty/forever poor or impoverished, as He continued His revelation to the prophet Zechariah.
Read Zechariah 2:1-13
When There Ain’t Enough Coming In. That is what the prophet Zechariah is telling us here in Zechariah 2:1-13. That’s what God is telling the prophet Zechariah here (again, as was the case last week, Zechariah was as confused by what he was seeing and hearing as we are, so this is what God is telling the prophet Zechariah here and what He is telling us through the prophet Zechariah here). When there ain’t enough coming in. What to do/what to believe/what to think/what to feel when there ain’t enough coming in (or when it seems like there ain’t enough coming in). Maybe even what not to do/what not to believe/what not to think/what not to feel when there ain’t enough coming in (or when it seems like there ain’t enough coming in).
What we have here in Zechariah 2 is the third of the prophet Zechariah’s eight night visions, the eight visions he received on one special night, February 24th 519 BC, the eight-fold vision which supports his thematic message of returning to God. (Last week we looked at the first two of those visions, the man in the myrtle trees and the four horns, and now we are moving on to the third.) We call it “the man with a measuring line” (that is, a line used for measuring distance; we have measuring tapes today; we even have measuring lasers, I think; but in Zechariah’s place and time they had lines or strings; same principle). Zechariah sees a “man” (really a heavenly being of some sort) who has a measuring line and is going to measure Jerusalem, going to measure it’s width and length. And when he says find out how wide and how long there, what he really means is, “Find out just how small Jerusalem is.” This man is not expecting the measurement to be impressive, to reveal that Jerusalem is large. He is expecting it to be disappointing, to reveal that Jerusalem is small. This man is going out to measure Jerusalem with a negative expectation. I imagine most of us have felt that kind of negative expectation. I know I have. I know I’ve been afraid to check the mail because I wondered what kind of bills were in there and how much they were. I know I’ve heard people tell me they “can’t bear to look” at their income tax forms or check their bank account balance. I even found an article about this: (show picture). That’s “negative expectation”. And that’s how this man was going to measure Jerusalem. He is going out with the expectation of discovering that Jerusalem is small and poor and weak (much smaller and poorer and weaker than it was in the past, much smaller/poorer/weaker than the cities of other nations). He is going out with the expectation of discovering not that there ain’t enough coming in but of discovering just how much there ain’t enough coming in.
And then something wonderful happens. The angel who is taking Zechariah through these visions meets and talks with another angel (apparently; who is talking to who gets a little confusing here). This second angel tells the first angel to tell the man with the measuring line something. This something is clearly good news because it is urgent; it is to be delivered urgently; the angel is to run to deliver this message, is to deliver it before the man can measure Jerusalem and confirm his negative expectations. And that good news is prosperity, future prosperity, that there will be prosperity for Jerusalem and its people in the future (a fact which affects their present). You see that in verses 4-5. The LORD declares in those verses that Jerusalem is/will be unmeasurable, that it won’t be able to be measured because it will be too big/rich, that there will be no wall (which is apparently what the man was going to measure/how he was going to judge the city: the outer wall) because it would be too large for a wall and that God Himself would be a wall of fire around it.
Now that a great message. It is indeed good news, something worthy of running with. That great message/good news continues to the end of the chapter with more promises of similar prosperity (all the statements in all the verses that follow further express this same good news). And what I want us to notice is that there are at least two types of prosperity promised/discussed. The first is physical prosperity. And I know that whenever we talk about physical prosperity, we are rubbing up against a false teaching that is very popular in our day called “the prosperity gospel” or “the health and wealth gospel”. I call it “the American dream gospel”. It is the idea that God wants you to be and will make you rich. This is a false teaching; I’m no proponent of it, as you know; some of the past proponents of it aren’t proponents of it anymore; a fellow pastor told me this week that one of the modern preachers of this gospel has publicly stated that it is wrong. And it is. But that doesn’t mean that prosperity is wrong. You see, there is a difference between luxury-based prosperity and necessity-based prosperity. I think the one is clearly wrong/bad; we are warned against it in 1 Timothy 6. But the other is a legitimate blessing God does indeed give His people. You see that blessing in the book of Ruth. Boaz owned an estate; he didn’t just work a job or make an income; he owned an estate. And he was able to use that estate to not only benefit himself but others; he was generous to the poor and especially generous to Ruth and Naomi. That’s a good kind of prosperity. And that’s the kind of prosperity God is promising the people here. Your city will be big. It will have wealth. It will be notable among the nations (have a reputation). Indeed, the nations will be attracted to it and come to it (verse 11). There is no doubt that physical prosperity is here to some degree.
But there is also and even more so spiritual prosperity here. That’s the second kind of prosperity. And that really gets the emphasis here (as it should). God being a wall of fire around the city is spiritual prosperity; it is physical, too, implying protection, but it also spiritual as it further implies presence (God’s presence). That presence is reinforced in verse 10 when God says I am coming and I will live among you. God says that again in verse 11 (I will live among you). He says His people are the apple (or pupil) of His eye, that is, He loves them to a great degree. He says they will be His portion and He will choose them. He says that this spiritual prosperity will be so great that all His people should flee the Daughter of Babylon/the land of the north and come to Jerusalem to participate in it. And that kind of spiritual prosperity is great. We’re so materialistic here in America that it might not seem great to us; we might not see the value of it. But it is great. Think about George Bailey at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. The town comes and shows their love and appreciation for him; sure, they give him some money, but that was based on their love and appreciation. And then his brother Harry says, “A toast to my big brother George: The richest man in town.” He was rich because he had these relationships. Relationships are riches. Having relationships is being prosperous/prosperity. It stands to reason, then, that a relationship with God is the greatest of riches, that this spiritual prosperity is the greatest prosperity. And that prosperity is what God was promising these people.
It is also what God is promising us. What God promises here through the angel and through Zechariah was somewhat fulfilled in this Jerusalem that the people were rebuilding; it was somewhat fulfilled for these people (this postexilic/restoration community). But I believe it has a greater fulfillment than that. I believe it is still applicable to us today (the followers of Jesus, the Church) and is still being realized in us today. I believe there is a physical prosperity for us today. There certainly will be in the life after this life/the new earth; we know that we will live in a city there which has streets made of gold and walls made of precious stones. But I think there is still some physical prosperity for us in this life; I think God wants us to be Boazs and I think He will make us Boazs to some degree (I haven’t starved yet). I also believe there is spiritual prosperity for us today. I know there is. I know we today are the apple/pupil of God’s eye, that God is living among us through His Son and His Spirit, that God has chosen us and we are His portion. I know we have this relationship with God and thus are the richest people on the planet (George Baily was the richest man in town but we are the richest people on the planet).
And I further know God wants us to live into this prosperity. I know God wants us to live as prosperous people (that’s the whole point of this vision). So often we don’t. When I was in Bible college, I went to see southern comedian Jerry Clower (he was doing a show near campus and I went). Clower told a story during that show about a new truck he had bought. He drove this truck off the lot and tooled around the countryside. Unfortunately, he ran out of gas when he was in the middle of nowhere and had to push the truck to the nearest gas station. When he got there, he told the attendant to fill up the tank. At this, the attendant said, “Both of them?” There were two tanks on that truck, and Clower didn’t know it. The entire time he was pushing that truck there was a full tank of gas that he wasn’t using/utilizing/availing himself of. He was living as if he was poorer than he really was. We often do the same thing. We’re pushing the truck when there is a full tank. We’re saying and feeling and believing, “There ain’t enough coming in” when there are riches both physical and spiritual, present and future, all around us. God wants us to see those riches, to be aware of them, to account for them in our believes and feelings and behaviors. He wants us to realize there is a full tank (to realize that intellectually and emotionally). He wants us to live into the prosperity that it is ours. He wants us to live like prosperous people, like people who have been prospered and will be prospering and are being prospered. He wants us to live that way because that is what we are.
Closing: Give Me Your Eyes. I heard a song on the Xfinity Christian station (935 on our TV) this week. It is by a guy named Brandon Heath, and it was called “Give Me Your Eyes”. In it, Heath asks God to give him His eyes. He asks for the ability to see things, in other words, as God sees them. He says it like this:
Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so I can see,
Everything that I keep missing,
Give me your love for humanity.
Now Heath seems to be particularly asking God for the ability to see people as God sees them (which is an excellent idea in its own right). I think we can legitimately take his words, though, and apply them to the ability to see all things as God sees them, including this thing we are talking about here: our situation, our state, our resources, our finances, our money, our size, our strength, our future and our present, our reality. God sees all of that as being pretty good. God is pretty optimistic about all those things. And that’s what He’s encouraging us to see as well (this is an encouragement). That is our reality, and that’s how He wants us to see our reality.
This is who is asking us to return to Him. The One who makes our city great and who is a wall of fire around it. The one who has us as the apple/pupil of His eye. The One who calls us out of Babylon and makes His dwelling among us. The One who grants us prosperity of every kind and tells us to live/see accordingly. The One who makes sure that there is always enough coming in.
