Text: Zechariah 5:1-11
Title: When There Is Sin In The Camp Type: Expository
Purpose: Encourage hearer to let sin go.
Main Idea: God is taking sin out; we must let that sin go.
Opening: Sin In The Camp. During my first few years of Bible college, I spent my summers working at a Christian camp (Christian Acres). I was the groundskeeper and general maintenance guy of this camp. It was a hazardous job; there were lots of hurtful things which could and did happen to me as I did this work. I got poison ivy quite often (eight times one summer). I got all sorts of bumps and bruises and cuts (I still have the scar from one of those on my right hand). I wrenched my back terribly on one occasion; that took years to fully heal. I got stung by every kind of bee there is (honeybee, bumblebee, yellow jacket, hornet, wasp). The most hazardous thing about this job, though, the most potentially-harmful thing on the campgrounds, was people. For eight hot weeks, the camp staff spent all day every day with each other (much more than just eight hours; often fourteen or more hours (6 AM to 8 PM or so). As you can imagine, this resulted in us having enough of each other/getting sick of each other and thus becoming short-tempered with each other. There were a lot of short-tempered incidents which occurred, but there is one I remember in particular. There was some sort of exchange between the head lifeguard and somebody else (I can’t remember who). Now I did not witness this exchange, but I heard about it. The head lifeguard came into our dining room after this exchange and told us all about it. She told us with great emotion what this person had said to her. But then she told us that she had not responded to what this person had said to her. She said that she did not respond because any response she would have given would have been angry, insulting, unlike Jesus. She put it this way; she said “I didn’t respond to him. If I did, there would be sin in the camp.”
That was the phrase she used: sin in the camp. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that phrase or not. It is a phrase used to describe some sort of sinfulness in God’s family, some sort of transgression in the church, some sort of iniquity in the Body. And this is the phrase the head lifeguard used after that incident/exchange. This is what she was trying to avoid when angered by that person. This is what she knew would have happened if she had responded to that person. There would be “sin in the camp”; she would be bringing sin into the camp. It is a phrase that fit us perfectly, as we literally were a camp (I didn’t realize that until I typed it out, but that idea fit us particularly perfectly; it works for the church at large but it really worked for us).
It is fit/worked for the postexilic/restoration community, the community of Israelites who returned from the Babylonian exile to restore Jerusalem, as well. There was sin in that camp, too. You would think there wouldn’t be (I would think that, anyway). You would think these people would not sin, would be the holiest people there were, bona fide saints (sinless, pure, perfectly righteous). After all, they were the ones accepting hardship in order to do the will of God. And yet they weren’t perfectly righteous. They were sinful to some degree; there was sinfulness among them, iniquity in them, transgression in their midst. They were a camp as well, far more of a camp than Israel had even been since the days of Joshua, and there was sin in that camp.
And God turns to address that sin in the camp as He continues speaking to the people through the prophet Zechariah.
Read Zechariah 5:1-11
When There Is Sin In The Camp. That’s what the prophet Zechariah is telling us about here in Zechariah 5. That’s what God is telling the prophet Zechariah here (I don’t know how confused Zechariah is here, but he certainly seems surprised) and that’s what God is telling us through the prophet Zechariah here. When there is sin in the camp. What to do when there is sin in the camp. Maybe what to let happen when there is sin in the camp.
Again, you know by now what we have here in Zechariah 5. These are more of those “night visions” Zechariah received from God on February 24, 519 BC. Zechariah received eight visions on that night, each of which had its own message but all of which together had a larger message about God blessing the postexilic restoration community, a larger message which further supported the thematic message of the book, “Return to Me.” These are the sixth and seventh of those eight night visions. The NIV calls them “The Flying Scroll” and “The Woman In The Basket”, which are good enough names, I guess. And they really go together or at least complement each other (I thought the first and second went together, and I think these two go together as well). They go together or complement each other because they both deal with something that hasn’t really been dealt with in the night visions yet (not this directly, at least). They both deal with sin. They both deal with that sin in the camp idea.
They deal with that idea in slightly different (but again complementary) ways. The first one, The Flying Scroll, deals with that idea of sin in the camp logically via an appeal to The Law. That is what is on The Flying Scroll: The Law of Moses, right and wrong as God revealed it to Moses. Zechariah says he looked again which is a transitional phrase, a phrase moving us from one night vision to another, and there before him was a flying scroll. And that seems like a rather lame vision in comparison to the others. It seems lame, that it, until you consider this scroll’s dimensions. Zechariah says the scroll was thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide (twenty cubits by ten cubits, NASB & KJV). That’s the size of a billboard. There is a billboard floating in the air in front of the prophet. That becomes even more impressive when you consider that neither the prophet nor anyone else had ever seen a billboard before. It must have looked and felt something very much like this picture here (background image). But that’s just the appearance of the scroll. The content of the scroll is even more impressive. The angel who is guiding the prophet through these visions says the scroll contains the curse. Without a doubt, he is referring to the curse of The Law there. You will remember that there were blessings and curses associated with The Law; blessings for those who kept it and curses for those who did not. That’s what the angel is talking about here: the curse or the penalty for not keeping The Law. He then mentions two laws in particular: theft and swearing falsely. Those were things forbidden by the law; they were the 8th and 9th commandments, actually; they were sins. They may have been sins that the postexilic restoration community were particularly susceptible to; it seems to us that this community was not idolatrous like their ancestors but was instead quite materialistic (I’ve told you this before). When you are materialistic, when you are trying to acquire and hold on to material things, theft and lying are specially tempting. Whether that is the case or not, it remains that the angel and the scroll aren’t talking about just these two sins/commandments. These two really represent the whole Law. These two represent all ten. They represent all sin. God is saying through this vision, “The Law is still in effect. Right is still right and wrong is still wrong. Sin is still sin and the consequences of sin (which are unavoidable; which are not divine punishments but natural and inevitable results) are still the consequences of sin.”
The second one, The Woman In The Basket, deals with that idea of sin in the camp emotionally via an appeal to health. In this vision, a measuring basket (ephah, NASB & KJV) appears. It isn’t that big; it is like a bushel (show picture). Nonetheless, there is a woman inside it. And this woman represents sin; the angel first refers to the basket as being the iniquity of the people throughout the land, that is, the sin in the camp, and second refers to the woman as wickedness; so she clearly represents sin. As such, she tells us a few things about sin. She is bigger on the inside than the outside (the woman being in this small basket may be another example of vision logic which does not match reality, or it could be an reference to the deceptive nature of sin, that sin is more than what it initially appears to be and does more than initially seems to do). She is strong, so strong that she has to be restrained/kept in the basket by a 60-pound lead cover (talent, KJV). She wants to be loose; she tries to get out when that cover is removed and has to be pushed back in. And she doesn’t belong among God’s people. She comes from Babylon, the ungodly people, the anti-godly people, and as Zechariah watches, two heavenly beings with wings like those of a stork (birds who could traverse long distances) pick the basket up and carry it off to Babylon, carry the woman back to the place she came from. That is sin (iniquity, wickedness): bigger than it appears, strong, wanting to be loose, and not belonging among God’s people/coming from God’s enemies, needing to be taking out of God’s people/sent back to God’s enemies. In short, sin is not healthy. It is not beneficial. It is not productive. It is not good and thus should not be desired. I think that’s implied in this vision. I think this vision is at least in part asking the postexilic restoration community, “Do you really want this woman around? Do you really want her in your midst? Do you really want her in your community/city/country? Do you really want to let her out of the basket?” Any rational person would answer those questions, “No.” Any rational person seeing this vision along with the prophet (as we are through his written account) would pretty quickly realize that sin is unhealthy and would react to it as unhealthy.
So those are these two visions: The Flying Scroll and The Woman In The Basket. These are the two visions about sin. And together they make a challenge, the first challenge in the night visions. Everything up to this point has been invitation, has been God comforting the people. He’s told them He’s going to take care of their enemies, going to prosper their country, going to forgive their sin, going to empower them to complete the rebuilding project. Everything up to this point has been, “Here’s what I’m going to do for you.” And now we have a challenge, God pushing the people. Now He’s saying, “Here’s something I need you to do for Me,” or really, “Here’s something I need you to do for you.” “I need you to realize sin is sin, still wrong according to The Law, still wrong according to the timeless absolutes behind The Law. I need you to want to let sin go, to allow Me or even help Me root it out from among you and send it away.” That’s the challenge here. That’s the challenge God is giving the people here. Realize what sin is and get rid of it/allow it to be gotten rid of.
And He is giving us the same challenge today. He is showing us that same flying scroll and the same woman today. He is telling us there ought to be no sin in the camp/church today. We get that by simple extension of this passage, of course (this passage does extend to us in the church). We get it from other Scriptures as well. For example, in Ephesians 5:3-5, Paul says, “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving. For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.” “Not even a hint,” Paul says. “Not even a hint of these things.” That’s the way it should be in the church.
But that’s not the way it is. We have a hint of these things in the church. We have more than a hint of these things in the church. Pre-exilic Israel had idolatry. Postexilic Israel (these people) had materialism. I think we have it all. There is a movie called Serenity, based on the TV show Firefly (a cult hit, I think). At the climax of the movie, the good guy and the bad guy are having their final battle. While they do that, the bad guy asks the good guy, “Do you know what your sin is?” (It is a line he had used with others earlier.) In reply, the good guy says, “I’m a fan of all seven.” I think we Christians are as well. You can go by the traditional “seven deadly sins” they were talking about, or the list of seven we get in Proverbs 6:16-19 (a different seven), or the three John gives us in 1 John 2:16 (the cravings of sinful man, the lust of the eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does), the three represented in the temptations of Christ (appetite, approval, ambition; consumption, celebrity, competition). We fare badly on them. I fare badly on them; I could point the finger at others today (I had the data to do so), but really I have to point it at myself; I fail by any of those lists; if I am honest, I have to fess up to just about everything on those lists. We’re not free of sin. We’re fans of sin. And I think some of us want it that way. I remember reading a line in some book in Bible college which said, “Christianity would have done okay in the ancient world [i.e., not been persecuted] if it hadn’t insisted on sexual purity.” I heard a young lady (believer) recently ask, “Why is the church so obsessed with my sexuality?” Let’s admit it. We’re fans of sin.
And God is challenging us here not to be fans of sin. He’s challenging us here not to be fans of sin and He’s telling us why He’s challenging us not to be fans of sin, why we shouldn’t be fans of sin. He’s telling us that sin brings a curse; not that He curses sin but that sin by its nature brings a curse. He’s telling us that sin is a powerful being that is more than what it appears to be and stronger than it appears to be and wants to get out to create havoc. At the men’s advance this year (just a few weekends ago), we showed the men a movie called The Heart of Man (it’s on Netflix if you’re interested). It is a retelling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. At one point in this movie, the son sees a woman bathing in a pool in a tropical forest. He strips down and gets in the water with her. He approaches her and she is willing so he kisses her. But when he pulls back from that kiss, he sees that the woman who looked so beautiful and desirable a minute ago is actually a corpse. I even have a screenshot for you (show picture).
That is what I imagine this woman is as well. Either a corpse or a zombie or a wild woman. She’s not what she looks like at first. She’s not as attractive or good as she looks or feels at first. She’s bad and bad for you. And God is challenging us to escape her. He’s promising to banish her, actually (the banishment happens whether the people cooperate or not, so this is a promise; she will be banished). And that makes this part invitation (it is challenge, but it is also part invitation). That makes this a blessing. What God is talking about here is freedom. What God is talking about her is not losing anything but gaining everything. So this is a blessing. It may not look like it at first (because we don’t see correctly), but it is a blessing.
Closing: Something Beautiful. As you know, one of the reasons I am a man of faith is that my mother and grandmother sang songs of The Faith to me when I was an infant. They sang several songs of The Faith to me. One of those songs was a little chorus which would have been brand-new at that time. It is called, “Something Beautiful”, and it says this:
Something beautiful, something good;
all my confusion he understood;
all I had to offer him was brokenness and strife,
but he made something beautiful of my life.
All I had to offer Him was sin, in other words, but He took that sin out of me and patched up the holes it left behind and thus made me beautiful, something beautiful. That’s what Bill Gaither was saying when he wrote that song in 1971. That’s the possibility Mom and Grandma were promising when they sang it to me. And that is what Zechariah is describing here. He is describing something beautiful here, the making of something beautiful out of us here. It might not seem like it; this talk of curses and women shoved into baskets might be intimidating and seem ugly. But it really is something beautiful; a community of people living in the blessed way rather than the cursed way, a community of people who have let that unhealthy woman be taken out of their midst and back to the place she came from, a camp without sin, is something beautiful. And that is what Zechariah is saying we can have and be here. That is what God is challenging us to have and be here.
And that is also the One who is calling us to return to Him. The One who has given us that scroll. The One who has captured and constrained that woman. The One who has gotten sin out of our camp.
