Mining the Minors: Zechariah (2)

Two months before Zechariah began to receive messages from the Lord for the people of Judah, the prophet Haggai received his first recorded revelation, a message to the two men who represented civic and religious authority among the returned exiles, the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua. The Lord instructed these two to lead the people in rebuilding the temple, a project they had abandoned almost two decades prior.

Twenty-four days later, work began at the new temple site. Slightly less than a month after that, the Lord sent a word of encouragement to them through Haggai. Ten days later, Zechariah received his first message.

The people of Judah had shown their willingness to obey God when they realized obedience was the only alternative to unrelenting economic misery and personal frustration, but their hearts still needed serious spiritual work.

I. Eight Visions and Explanations

Introduction

Zechariah 1:1-6 — Return to Me

“In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, son of Iddo, saying, ‘The Lord was very angry with your fathers. Therefore say to them, Thus declares the Lord of hosts: Return to me, says the Lord of hosts, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. Do not be like your fathers, to whom the former prophets cried out, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, Return from your evil ways and from your evil deeds.” But they did not hear or pay attention to me, declares the Lord. Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? So they repented and said, “As the Lord of hosts purposed to deal with us for our ways and deeds, so has he dealt with us.” ’ ”

Not Like Your Fathers

As pointed out in our series on Haggai, the people of Judah were now working away on the temple, but their spiritual issues were not limited to the selfishness and materialism Haggai rebuked. The brazen idolatry for which the Lord sent Judah into Babylonian exile was long in the rear view mirror. Seventy years without a national home had taught Judah a lesson about God’s judgment it didn’t wish to revisit. From then on, any idolatry the people engaged in would appear in more subtle forms. And yet, Judah had still not completely returned to God. The hearts of the men and women of Israel were still not in the right place even if their hands were busy doing the work the Lord required of them. As we know, no amount of service performed in God’s name can make us holy. That’s a separate issue.

Ezra and Nehemiah provide historical detail absent from the prophetic books that helps clarify the post-exilic spiritual problems in Jerusalem and throughout Judah. Ezra’s account of the first Passover celebrated in the rebuilt temple includes the statement that “It was eaten by the people of Israel who had returned from exile, and also by every one who had joined them and separated himself from the uncleanness of the peoples of the land to worship the Lord, the God of Israel.”

Judah celebrated this Passover almost four years after the Lord’s message to Zechariah. In between, the influence of the uncleanness of the peoples of the land posed a major problem.

Peoples of the Land

The “peoples of the land” from whom the worshipers separated themselves were a genetic mixture of the dregs of the former northern kingdom left behind by the king of Assyria after the fall of Samaria some 200 years earlier, and exiles from other nations conquered by Assyria who were forcibly settled in the north to work the land. These were the ancestors of the Samaritans of the Gospels, and many of them were displeased to see the Jews rebuilding their homeland to the south. In addition, other nations subject to the Persian Empire surrounded the tiny province of Judah and were even more uninterested in seeing Jerusalem and its temple rebuilt. Ezra lists eight of these for us: Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites.

The impact of these foreigners on the spiritual state of Judah in 520 BC was not trivial. They were worshipers of “abominations”. Many of the returned exiles of Judah had intermarried with them, including many of the officials and chief men. This was probably not accidental. Israel had been tempted in this way many years before, and the sin of Baal-Peor is described in Psalm 106 and elsewhere. Foreign wives meant foreign children. This is the rabble confronted by Nehemiah, who spoke the languages of their mothers and inherited their false religious beliefs. A return to full-blown idolatry in Judah was imminent if something did not happen.

In addition, Tyrian merchants were tempting the Jews to break the Sabbath, rich Jews were oppressing their poor brothers and selling their daughters into slavery, charging their fellow Jews interest and stealing their property. This too was likely a product of foreign influence forbidden in the Law of Moses.

A Motive to Return

Most or all these forms of corruption were going on at the time Zechariah received his message to “return to me”, and later on as well. True repentance would require a change of lifestyle on the part of the returned exiles, not just a willingness to go through the religious formalities by rebuilding their temple.

The prophecies of Zechariah unpacked God’s program for the future of Israel, including the coming of Messiah and the nation’s millennial glory. They were given to provide the people of God with a motive for true reform, to show them that the Lord was still working in their midst and had not given up on them, and to encourage them to continue a work that probably initially didn’t look like it would amount to much.

The message was hopeful, but only in the event its hearers received and responded to it.

Before the Hope

But before we can get to the hope, Zechariah gets them to look backward. The stick comes before the carrot. “Do not be like your fathers,” he says, going back, for most Jews, two or three generations to the final days before the fall of Jerusalem. The book of Jeremiah is concerned with this period. He was one of the last prophets to rebuke Israel on the Lord’s behalf prior to the Babylonian exile. The men of Jeremiah’s day did exactly as Zechariah describes: they refused to hear the prophets and to give up their evil ways.

So now comes Zechariah’s question: “Your fathers, where are they?” It’s rhetorical, and has three possible answers, none of them good: (1) slaughtered in the fall of Jerusalem, (2) consumed by sword or famine after fleeing to Egypt, or (3) buried under Babylonian soil. Life ended tragically for the last group of Judeans to reject the word of the Lord. All that had been prophesied through the pre-exilic prophets had come true, to the very letter. God’s word and statutes overtook the fathers.

Thankfully, at least initially, Zechariah’s listeners paid greater attention to his warning than their forefathers had to the warnings of Jeremiah and his contemporaries. They responded humbly to correction and acknowledged their guilt: “As the Lord of hosts purposed to deal with us for our ways and deeds, so has he dealt with us.”

It was a beginning at least, a sufficient show of repentance that the Lord would provide them with a series of revelations through Zechariah, which we will begin to explore next week.