The Real Shepherd

On occasion in the Old Testament, the Lord calls His prophets to “act out” the message. Ezekiel was told to lie on his side for 390 days and make a dirt map and dirt walls and put an iron skillet in the middle (Ezekiel 4). Isaiah walked around naked and barefoot for 3 years (Isaiah 20). Hosea was told to marry a prostitute (Hosea 1). And here, in Zechariah 11, our prophet is no different he is instructed to act out the role of a good shepherd and then a few verses latter to take on the role of a bad shepherd. 

Ultimately, we see the picture of Christ in these verses. Jesus tells us in John 10:11 "I AM the good shepherd..." Zechariah 11 would have been and still is an essential text for the early church’s understanding of Christ’s ministry. Christ was God’s intended shepherd, who set out to care for the flock, protecting them from poor shepherds and abusive owners. For thirty pieces of silver, he was removed from his leadership, rejected by the flock (Jews), shepherds (priests), and owners (Romans).  Yet, God used this rejection to bring salvation for his flock… Thank God for that! 

Take some time this weekend and read Zechariah 11:1-17 in preparation for Sunday! 

Open your doors, O Lebanon,

    that the fire may devour your cedars!

Wail, O cypress, for the cedar has fallen,

    for the glorious trees are ruined!

Wail, oaks of Bashan,

    for the thick forest has been felled!

The sound of the wail of the shepherds,

    for their glory is ruined!

The sound of the roar of the lions,

    for the thicket of the Jordan is ruined!

Thus said the Lord my God: “Become shepherd of the flock doomed to slaughter. Those who buy them slaughter them and go unpunished, and those who sell them say, ‘Blessed be the Lord, I have become rich,’ and their own shepherds have no pity on them. For I will no longer have pity on the inhabitants of this land, declares the Lord. Behold, I will cause each of them to fall into the hand of his neighbor, and each into the hand of his king, and they shall crush the land, and I will deliver none from their hand.”

So I became the shepherd of the flock doomed to be slaughtered by the sheep traders. And I took two staffs, one I named Favor, the other I named Union. And I tended the sheep. In one month I destroyed the three shepherds. But I became impatient with them, and they also detested me. So I said, “I will not be your shepherd. What is to die, let it die. What is to be destroyed, let it be destroyed. And let those who are left devour the flesh of one another.” And I took my staff Favor, and I broke it, annulling the covenant that I had made with all the peoples. So it was annulled on that day, and the sheep traders, who were watching me, knew that it was the word of the Lord. Then I said to them, “If it seems good to you, give me my wages; but if not, keep them.” And they weighed out as my wages thirty pieces of silver. Then the Lord said to me, “Throw it to the potter”—the lordly price at which I was priced by them. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the Lord, to the potter. Then I broke my second staff Union, annulling the brotherhood between Judah and Israel.

Then the Lord said to me, “Take once more the equipment of a foolish shepherd. For behold, I am raising up in the land a shepherd who does not care for those being destroyed, or seek the young or heal the maimed or nourish the healthy, but devours the flesh of the fat ones, tearing off even their hoofs.

“Woe to my worthless shepherd,

    who deserts the flock!

May the sword strike his arm

    and his right eye!

Let his arm be wholly withered,

    his right eye utterly blinded!”

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Permanent Text Edition® (2016). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Two Burdens, Three Shepherds...

Two burdens and three shepherds sounds like the start of a really bad joke. But it is an apt description of Zechariah 9-14.  Sunday we will begin working our way through what has been deemed by many as the most complex six chapters in the entire Bible. It is also six chapters which contain the greatest concentration of messianic truth found anywhere in the Bible.  In these pages we see the Prophet Zechariah reveal two burdens. Zechariah unveils the Messiah to his listeners and to us as the humble King, the loving Shepherd, the mighty Warrior, the gracious Savior, and the righteous Ruler who will reign on earth as King and Priest.

It will be quite the journey and may at times seem overwhelming but I promise you it is worth it to simply begin the process of sifting through these crucial verses.

The first of the burdens we will explore begins with a promise of judgment against Israel's enemies and ends with Israel's hope for the future. A hope rooted in the coming Messiah. A Messiah who will bring about judgment but also restoration.

Finally, we see three shepherds illustrated in Zech 11, wailing shepherds (or the rulers of the nation who have led the people astray and are now paying for their sins), the true shepherd who was rejected, and the false shepherd.

Make sure take the time this weekend to read Zechariah 9-11 so it won't be so new come Sunday!

Fast or Feast

One of the most common roadblocks facing a church is tradition. Now don’t get me wrong tradition is a useful and necessary part of society. It helps tie generations together and keeps us moving forward in a united way or at least it should. Every one of us has various traditions to which we hold to. They may involve the way we eat, the way we dress, our family hierarchy, how we treat our families. Tradition helps to stabilize things for us, guiding us in the choices that we need to make. Unfortunately, too often tradition gets in the way, it creates problems especially when times have changed, and people are unwilling to adapt.

Zechariah faced this same obstacle in the rebuilding process of the temple. Two years into the work project, the people are in an uproar over whether to fast or not to fast.  You see the Law of Moses only required one national fast, that was on the annual “Day of Atonement” (Lev. 23:16-32). Individually they were free to fast as often as necessary, but the requirement wasn’t there on the national level.

In Zechariah 7-9, however, the people were up in arms because to commemorate the events surrounding the destruction of the temple there had been four new fasts added to the religious calendar. One in the tenth month, when the Babylonians had begun their siege, one in the fourth month, when the walls were broken through, one in the fifth month when the temple was burned, and one in the seventh month when the Jewish governor Gedaliah was assassinated.

The question was now that the temple was being rebuilt, “was it necessary to continue the fast in the fifth month?”

I love Zechariah’s response to their inquiry. He didn’t tell them yes or no, he answered a question with a question. Smart man! He was trying to get them to draw their own conclusions. He asked them “when you fasted, did you do it for the Lord or for yourselves? And when you feasted, as it for the Lord or for yourselves? What was in your heart?”

Zechariah wasn’t condemning their traditions, rather he was imploring them to search their hearts for the reason behind the action. The prophets had long taught (dating all the way back to Samuel in 1 Sam 15:22) that the Lord wanted their obedience, not their sacrifice.

Zechariah wanted them to understand that a true spiritual walk is not simply switched on or off at our convenience.  Zechariah is trying to get the people to understand that if they fast let it be for God if they feast let it be for God. Ultimately, we see in Zechariah 8:19 all four fasts one day will be turned into feasts.

So, how does this impact us? How does this lesson affect us in the church today?

Well, the danger of tradition is that it can easily turn into traditionalism. Traditionalism is going through the outward motions instead of honoring the Lord with our hearts. Far too often in Christianity today we allow traditionalism to take hold, we do things one way because we have always done them that way, we sing songs because those are the songs we grew up with and our parents or grandparents sang them.  

We outwardly take part in a religious event but fail to have an inner spiritual experience.

We attend church, sing the songs (or don’t), might even drop whatever change that is in our pocket in the offering plate, but we aren’t doing it because we love the Lord we are doing it because it is what is expected of us as a good Christian. Notice I say we here a lot? That’s because I must examine my motivations just as you do each and every day!

I love the way Warren Wiersbe phrased it that “it's easier to have a religion of habit than a religion of the heart.”[1]  

We need to ask ourselves that important question of “why.” We collectively, be it in the larger church body, our family, or our own heart, need to examine the heart of why we do what we do. As you are inwardly questioning your heart and asking yourself why you believe what you believe and do what you do, I beg of you don’t try and lie to yourself. Be brutally honest. Because God will be brutally honest with you in the end when you face him in judgment.

Are there any cherished traditions in your life that need to be turned from a fast to a feast?

See ya Sunday!

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[1] Warren Wiersbe, Bible Exposition Commentary – Be Heroic (Haggai, Zechariah), (Colorado Springs, CO: Victor, 2003), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 463.

Four Down... Four To Go...

Just a short blurb today.... This week we will resume our study of Zechariah. When we left the young prophet last, he had received four visions and their meanings. Each designed to motivate the people in the completion of the temple. We also saw that as God revealed these visions, Zechariah, he also revealed greater things to come pertaining to the Messiah.

The next three chapters reveal four more visions, a gold lampstand with two olive trees, a flying scroll, a woman in a basket, and four chariots. These visions are capped with a command to Zechariah to crown Joshua, the High Priest.

While this symbolic crowning was intended to bolster and encourage Joshua and those captives who had returned to build the temple, there is a clear correlation to the coming Messiah.  While to the children of Israel this was something they were still looking forward to, we have the great fortune to be able to look back and be reminded of our Lord's role as both king and priest. Thus we need to ask ourselves, are we submitting to the Kingship of Christ? Are we making proper use of His intercession as our High Priest?

Your response to His gospel is telling in answering those questions!

Take a few minutes and read Zechariah 4-6 today as you prepare for worship this week!

Spiritual Duct tape?

What a great week! I know I am exhausted but it was totally worth it! For those that might not know we had Vacation Bible School this week and while they were not all here every day we had 41 children registered! That isn't counting the ten teens that were here as helpers throughout the week!!! And we aren't done yet as the kids will be singing and sharing on Sunday so plan to be here to hear and be blessed.

All week the kids were challenged to memorize Colossians 1:15-16

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by Him, in heaven, and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him.

This week as I was preparing to preach I just kept being drawn back to these verses, so this week we will deviate from our regular routine and spend the morning looking at Paul's explanation of the Gospel in Colossians 1. So much you could glean from these verses that we will come back and spend a few months walking through the book after we finish the Minor Prophets series.

One thing that really struck me as I was reading actually came in verse 17: He is before all things,
and by Him all things hold together. The longstanding joke is that Duct tape fixes everything right? But here we are told that it is Christ who holds it all together - not some super spiritual duct tape...

As I meditated on this verse I was struck by the complexity of it - I mean stop and think about it. There is nothing in this universe that is held together apart from Him. Let's think on that for a moment. This rock we call Earth is roughly 196.9 million square miles weighing in at an estimated  13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds hurling through space in a nearly circular orbit at 67,000 miles an hour around a huge flaming ball of gas and plasma. Yet we are at the perfect distance from the sun to support life. A little wobble here or there and we burn up or freeze and life is gone. "By Him all things hold together."  

Or let's make this a bit more personal. Consider the human body. If the blood vessels in one adult human body were stretched out, they would cover approximately 60,000 miles – enough to circle the earth’s diameter two and a half times! Or take for instance our synapses, the connections between neurons, which snap together like thinky Legos to create the immense network that is the human mind. The total number of these synapses is a mind-boggling 100 trillion. A number that's 1,000 times greater than the total amount of stars found within our Milky Way galaxy. "By Him all things hold together."

Today let's just sit back and ponder that, can we? We serve a great God whom, "by Him all things hold together"  We might try to use duct tape but duct tape for all its greatness it can't mend the rift between us and God. For that God used the cross upon which His Son redeemed us.

See you guys Sunday!