Text: Zechariah 3:1-10
Title: When Satan Accuses You Type: Expository
Purpose: Encourage hearer to be confident in their forgiveness and future.
Main Idea: God has given us clean clothes; He has forgiven all our sins.
Opening: Now He Has Something He Can Use Against Me. True story: there was a man in our congregation in Ohio who was very active in the church at large (the larger church in our area). He contributed spiritually to several local churches. Sometimes he had to contribute negatively to these local churches; he had to oppose error, had to stand against false doctrines or practices these churches had fallen into. Because of that, he had enemies in some of these churches; there were people who didn’t like him because he had opposed error in their churches in this way (particularly the proponents of those errors). At some point during my ministry with that congregation, this man’s wife left him. She left him in a real Sleeping With The Enemy sort of way (if you remember that Julia Roberts movie from 1991 or so). She had been secretly planning on leaving him for some time and one day she just implemented her plan; she put a couple things in motion and she was gone, surprising us all. This man, of course, was greatly distraught by her leaving. He was distraught about several things: distraught about her (because he loved her), distraught about what this would do to their kids, distraught about the financial ramifications. He was also distraught about what his enemies would say about this. That is the one I remember best. I remember this man talking about one of his enemies in particular (a former minister) and saying this: “Now he has something he can use against me.” Prior to this moment, this man had an exemplary Christian life; I think he said something like he checked off all the boxes or had all his ducks in a row; he had nothing anyone could pick at, in other words, no moral failure/sin anyone could fault him for. Now he did. Now one of his boxes was unchecked, one of his ducks was out of the row. Now he had a failure (moral failure, sin) that this enemy and other enemies could fault him for, could use against him, could exploit to silence or dismiss or shame him, could take as a reason to shut him up and shut him down. Right or wrong (and it is probably wrong), that was the reality. He saw it was the reality, and he expressed it was the reality. “Now he has something he can use against me.” Now he has something he can pick at. Now he has something he can exploit. Now he has something he can accuse me of.
All of us today are like that man. Whether we know it or not, we have enemies; we have at least an enemy, one particular enemy, a spiritual enemy, an enemy not of flesh and blood but of spirit, an enemy operating not on earth but in the spiritual realms; we call him “the devil”, Satan, Lucifer. And, again whether we know it or not, this enemy has something he can use against us/pick at/fault us for/exploit to silence/dismiss/shame us/shut us up and shut us down. He has something he can accuse us of. I know that very well; I have several such somethings; my failures/sins are numerous and obvious. Yours might not be; they might be very well hidden from all human eyes, even your own. But you have them. This man did (had more than what he thought, actually), and so do you, and this enemy knows and uses them. This enemy uses them not just on earth (though he might do that as well) but in heaven. He uses them in the heavenly temple. He accuses you of these things in the very presence of God with the intent of breaking your relationship with God.
Now that’s a terrible thing, as I’m sure you immediately understand. Fortunately, this enemy is not successful in the making of these accusations. He is not successful in the breaking of this relationship. We see this as God continues His revelations to Zechariah.
Read Zechariah 3:1-10
When Satan Accuses You. That’s what Zechariah is talking about here in Zechariah 3:1-10. That’s what God is telling Zechariah about here and what He is telling us through Zechariah here (Zechariah seems to understand this one better; he doesn’t seem to be as confused here as he was in the previous sections, but this is still what God is telling him here and what He is telling us through him here). When Satan accuses you. What to do/what to feel/what to think/how to understand and respond when Satan accuses you.
By now you probably know what we have here. You know that God gave the prophet Zechariah a series of eight strange visions/audio-visual revelations on one special night (February 24, 519 BC). We call these “Zechariah’s Night Visions”. Each of them has its own message but all of them together have one larger message, a larger message which supports the thematic message of Zechariah’s book, the “return to me” message of 1:1-6. This vision is the fourth of those eight visions. We call it “Clean Garments for the High Priest” (NIV) or “New Clothes for Joshua” or something to that effect (I don’t think there is a standard name for it). The vision focuses on Joshua, who was a real person in Zechariah’s time; he was the priest who came back from the Exile to serve as high priest for the postexilic/restoration community. And as the vision starts, Joshua is on trial. The LORD (God) is there as judge (I think that’s implied). The angel of the Lord/LORD (whom I believe is the preincarnate Jesus) is there as defender. And “the satan” (“the accuser”) is there as prosecutor. And his job is fairly easy because Joshua is obviously guilty. His clothes (that is, his garments, his vestments, his high priestly robes) are dirty, filthy. That dirt/filth represents his sins and the sins of the entire postexilic/restoration community (Joshua, as High Priest, is representing all the people). It represents the shame that they themselves are fully aware of (the people at this time are like the man in my church in Ohio; they are aware/have become aware of what they have done). It represents their guilt. And Satan is using/exploiting/picking at that sin, shame, and guilt. He’s making sure God sees it and he’s telling God what God ought to do about that. We don’t actually hear what he says here; Zechariah doesn’t record that; but we can imagine it. We can imagine he is telling God, “Joshua and the people are not good. They are bad. They are defiled and damaged and you ought to get rid of them. You ought to break your relationship with them.” Satan, here, is like Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. He has discovered that a pound of flesh is owed by law and he wants it. He wants a pound of flesh from Joshua. He wants a vital pound of flesh from the postexilic/restoration community.
Now there is a logic to that. That makes sense. That’s seems right. It is right by law. But that’s not what God does. That’s not what the angel of the LORD allows. God and the angel of the LORD go back to something behind law, to “the deeper magic before the dawn of time” (to switch from The Merchant of Venice to The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe). Instead of giving Satan his pound of flesh, instead of breaking the relationship with the postexilic/restoration community, instead of condemning Joshua, this angel of the LORD/LORD says The LORD rebuke you, Satan! I always thought it was an insult or as close to an insult as Jesus would get (Jesus has no guile in His mouth, so He does not insult; He doesn’t even insult Satan; He just turns people who ought to be insulted over to God’s judgment). I realize now, though, He may be saying, “You are detestable, Satan. What you are doing is detestable. It might be logical and reasonable. You might be owed this pound of flesh. Maybe this relationship should be broken. Maybe this man should be condemned. But your insistence upon it is still detestable.” Then He says Is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire? That is, “This man and this community are something God wants to rescue, to save. Dirty or not, filthy or not, sinful/shamed/guilty or not God has already started to save them and wants to finish saving them.”
Then then angel of the LORD does something else. He says to whoever else in in the courtroom, whatever bailiffs or officials are there, “Take off his filthy clothes.” Joshua’s filthy clothes were what Satan was exploiting; that sin/shame/guilt was the basis of his accusations, so the angel of the LORD does away with them. He has the court officials take off those clothes, thus taking away his and the people’s sin/shame/guilt, and replace them with new, clean clothes, new vestments. The symbolism of that is clear. This is forgiveness; this is, “though your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18); this is “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12). And Zechariah loves it. He understands what he is seeing here, as I said before, and he gets into it. He cries out, “Put a clean turban on his head.”, that is, complete the forgiveness process. And the court officials do that. They give Joshua these new, clean vestments and turban. And with that symbolic act, Joshua and the people are forgiven. They are cleansed. They are pardoned.
With that, the trial apparently ends. Satan apparently slinks away. His accusations, though right and logical and reasonable, are nullified by God’s forgiveness, so he has nothing left to say, no accusations left to make. The vision doesn’t stop there, though. The Lord Almighty says a few things to Joshua before it is all over. He makes a prediction of prosperity, which we’ve already talked about (10; one of my favorites, actually). He makes a messianic prophecy (8-9; a very strange one). Most important to us today, though, is He makes Joshua a promise of reward. He says, If you will walk in my ways and keep my requirements, then you will govern my house and have charge of my courts, and I will give you a place among these standing here. “These standing here” are apparently the saints of the past: Moses is probably there, Joseph, Elijah and Elisha, Abraham, the other Joshua. They are the Faith Hall of Fame, the “cloud of witnesses” from Hebrews 12, and they must have been there in some way watching the trial. And now God says to Joshua and the postexilic restoration community, “You can have a place among them. You can be like them. You can be one of them. You can stand in the Faith Hall of Fame yourself is you just obey me.” Obey there is probably the same thing as return to me, the thematic message of the book; it is probably not, “If you scrupulously obey every jot and tittle,” which is how we are likely to understand it today, but, “If you obey me in general principle; if you turn your heart to Me.” If Joshua and the people do that, they are in the Faith Hall of Fame. It is not just that they aren’t condemned, that they don’t go to Hell. It isn’t even that the relationship isn’t broken. It is not just that they are forgiven, cleansed, pardon (great as all that is). It is that they are exalted. They overcome, triumph, win. That they are enshrined in the story of The Faith among the people of The Faith. It is that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the great ones, that they will be the great ones themselves.
Now that’s a great vision. It is a vision with a great meaning. But that meaning isn’t limited only to Joshua and the postexilic/restoration community. It extends to us today. This vision is a messianic vision; there is a messianic (Jesus) element to it in verses 8-9, as we already said, and that element affects the whole. What happens here is what happens and only can happen under the reign of the Messiah Christ. So we know it isn’t something that applies only to this people at this time. We know that it must apply to all people under the reign of the Messiah Christ at all times. And it does. It applies to us. And it is good that it applies to us because we need it to apply to us. We today are being accused by this “the satan” prosecutor just as Joshua and the postexilic/restoration community were. Accusing the people of God is his primary job; that’s what he does in Job and Revelation 12; that’s what Jesus said he wanted to do to Peter in Luke 22; it’s what his name literally means. And it is what he is doing to us today. The spiritual realms depicted in this vision really exist. The satan is really entering those realms to accuse us before God, to ask God to break relationship with us. And we are going to be affected by that; we’re going to be intimidated by that. It is intimidating to know you are on the enemy’s list. I started reading David McCullough’s book about John Adams a couple summers ago. I remember a part early in the book in which McCullough said that Adams was trying to negotiate with some British general and what he didn’t know was that this general had already been told that the crown wanted to hang him (the general knew that but Adams didn’t). Adams was on the enemy’s list. I would have been scared to know that if I were him. And we, my friends, are on this enemy’s list. We are on the satan’s list. Everyone who claims the name of Jesus Christ, who enters the family of God, is on his list. He is literally accusing us before God, and we are literally giving him plenty to accuse us of; like Joshua, our clothes are dirty; we are guilty; we’ve given him something to use against us. But God is not persuaded by these accusations; God has nullified these accusations. That’s the main idea behind this vision here, what God wanted the postexilic/restoration community to understand then and what He wants us to understand today; it is what He wants us to feel today, what He wants us to cling to today. He nullifies them by His grace made possible through the sacrificial death of Jesus. There is a line in my daily prayer which says, “every claim being made against me is cancelled and disarmed” (Colossians 2:14), and this is true. He doesn’t hold them against us, He doesn’t let the satan hold them against us, and He doesn’t want us holding them against ourselves. He frees us from these accusations; they are true, but He frees us from them and He wants us to live free from them.
Closing: When Satan Tempts Me To Despair. There is a hymn/contemporary Christian song we do here at FCCPH quite often. It is called “Before the Throne of God Above”; I’m sure you know it. I call it a “hymn/contemporary Christian song” because that is what it is. It started life as a hymn written by an Irish minister called Charitie Lees Bancroft. He wrote the lyrics in 1841 and called the hymn “Advocate”. “Advocate”, though, was not often sung in the church; it was pretty much unknown. Then a lady named Vikki Cook wrote a new tune for it in 1997 and called it “Before the Throne of God Above”, which is how we know it today. Now all of the words of that song are excellent; I think there is universal agreement on that. I particularly like the second/middle verse, though. It says this:
When Satan tempts me to despair,
And tells me of the guilt within,
Upward I look, and see him there
Who made an end of all my sin.
Because a sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God, the Just, is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me;
To look on Him and pardon me.
And what Bancroft/Cook describe in that verse of that hymn/contemporary Christian song is what Zechariah saw and then recorded for us in Zechariah 3. It is what God did to/for Joshua and the postexilic/restoration community and what He continues to do for us today. It is what to do/believe/thing/feel/understand when Satan accuses you.
That’s the message of the vision of Joshua’s clean vestments. And it reinforces the thematic message of the book. This is The One who wants us to return to Him. This is the One who gives us clean vestments/clothes. This is the One who offers us a place in the Faith Hall of Fame. The One who rebukes Satan and frees us when Satan accuses us.
