THE message of God through Zechariah is always applicable when we consider the circumstances of the condition of Israel at this time when Zechariah wrote. Israel had been excluded from their land for 70 years, and had been under the dominion of a foreign power in exile. They had now started to come back according to the promise of God, and to commence the rebuilding of the temple of God, but the scene before them was very daunting indeed. The temple and Jerusalem was in ruins. The land was in a state of decay. The people living in the land were hostile. Israel was faced with daunting difficulties which would discourage anyone. It was all too tempting to give up and feel God had forsaken them. It was all too easy to drift back into a godless way of life. This sort of situation face God’s people very much in the western world. The forces of godlessness are strong and rampant, and the people do not seek God. Satan is very active to create despair and faithlessness in the church. This prophecy comes with a real message to inspire us, which starts in this opening chapter.

In these first six verses we see God addressing his people in their discouragement, and it ends with the heartening words, “Then they repented and said, ‘The Lord almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserved, just as he determined to do.’” What we see here is the people heeding God’s call which is seen in their repentance, and acknowledgment of their sin, and the rightness of the judgement which God had visited on the nation through the exile. Let us see the graciousness of God revealed here which brought about this response, so that we might feel the same in our day. Response to God must always be through repentance and faith.

GOD SPEAKS.

God comes to the Israelites in their discouragement and temptation to drift from the Lord. God’s coming to Israel is seen in the fact that he spoke to them these encouraging words by the prophet Zechariah. This is an act of grace. God does not wait until we have reformed and proved ourselves before he comes to us, but takes the initiative. God’s act in this way is one of grace, because our sin demands that we should repent before God moves in grace. The obligation is all on our side, yet God comes to us in love and speaks to us and calls to us.

This is a wonderful thing to take hold of. So often when we read these Old Testament books, all we tend to see is God’s judgement, but fail to see how gracious God is in coming to us first, and calling to us in love.

It shows that God does not want to have to exercise his holy anger against us, but wants us to respond to him and be loved by him, and he wants to bless us and prosper our way. This was true even before the exile. It was seen in the continual way he sent prophets to Israel to call them back to himself, and it was only after several hundred years that he exercised his just anger.

What also is revealed in this call is the fact that God’s call is one we can trust. God would not call to mock us, so the call reveals his every intention and desire for us to respond and so be blest by him.

GOD’S GRACIOUS OFFER.

The next thing that moves us to respond to and heed God’s call is to consider how gracious this call is. God calls Israel to return to him. This in itself is gracious, Why should God want Israel to bother him again. Why should God desire to bless Israel when they had been so rebellious and rejecting of him for so long, yet God comes and makes his call to them to return to him.

The great thing is that God attaches to his call to return a wonderful promise. If you return to me, I will return to you. There is all the wonder here of the meeting of the prodigal son with his father in the parable recorded in Luke 15:11ff. The prodigal returned to his father after wasting all his father’s wealth and inheritance, and he expected no welcome, yet as he approached his old home, he finds his father had been watching out for him every day, and as soon as he saw him, the father ran and met him, and embraced him, and blest him, and reinstated him. All this is in the promise of God to return to Israel if Israel would only return to him.

How can anyone say that the God of the Old Testament is simply a God of wrath. The God revealed in the Old Testament is the same God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we meet in the New Testament, and here we see, if only we will impartially consider, a God who yearns that his people might return to him, and who does not want to show anger towards them, longing for them to repent.

We need to notice how God reveals himself to Zechariah in this call. God reveals himself as the Lord Almighty. This revelation of God is repeated 5 times in these six verses. What is this revelation of God telling us.

Firstly, it reveals the foolishness of ignoring or rebelling against this call from God. The Israel of old ignored the call of God, and what happened. Could they stand against God. History proves they could not because history proves that God is the Lord Almighty. No one can stand against the Lord Almighty and win. Satan knows this at his heart and knows his doom is sealed. History proves this truth, because all great powers, which God may have raised up to carry our his judgements, have fallen eventually, and will continue to fall. God is the Lord Almighty, and none can stand against him and win. How wise it is to respond to his love.

Secondly, what a revelation we have in the description of God as the Lord Almighty which must turn away all our fears, and calm our anxieties, and bring us certain hope when we look at the difficult tasks which lie before us. If God is the Lord Almighty, then when we return to him we place ourselves under the hand and protection of omnipotence. Nothing can stand against God, so nothing can stand against God’s people who obey his will. Is the task too daunting so that we can’t see how it can be accomplished? As we look out on the world and our task to witness the Gospel to the world, does the task seem so hopeless that we feel we can’t be effective in the winning of people for Christ? The revelation and reminder that the Lord whom we serve is the Lord Almighty assures us that all things are possible with him, and if he wills something, no task is beyond his power to achieve. In this faith we can go forward with courage and assurance. We do not trust in our own weak strength and smallness of wisdom, but in the Lord Almighty.

GOD’S WINSOME CALL.

God stoops to argue and persuade. God calls us to consider the way forward which opens when people disregard God and do not heed his call. God says to Israel look at your past history. God calls them not to be like their forefathers.

What happened then? God again and again gave his gracious call through the numbers of prophets he sent to call the people to return to him. His grace abounded in the fact that he sent and sent, and he called and he called, and again and again he waited for the people to respond. This was gracious love. Such love was in God to be so patient and long-suffering. God calls Israel to consider this. Here was not a God who acted in passionate anger out of peek that people ignored him, but a God of love yearning over his people.

Yet the people refused to return to the Lord even after such patient long-suffering. God in love through Zechariah calls his people to consider the result of all this rebellion and rejection of God’s call. What happen to Israel of old those long 70 years before. Israel thought they were invincible. They presumed on the fact that God had chosen them to be his people. Yet their rebellion could not go on forever, for a time had to come when God would uphold his holiness and justice, and this happened and Jerusalem was destroyed and the people carried off as slaves into a foreign country. Those fathers who rebelled had all gone, and God called Israel in the present to consider this. So in grace God uses persuasion.

How kind of God to remind his people that to stand against him is folly and destructive of life and blessing. God also reminded them that this disobedience resulted in another loss even greater than the loss of their country and freedom. God says, “And where are the prophets, do they live forever.” What is God telling his people by this sentence concerning the prophets. Surely it is this that constant rejection of God’s call brings about the worst evil of all, which is the judgement that God ceases to speak and to call. He sends no more prophets to call his people. The overtures of grace stop. This is an awful thought that constant rejection of God’s call brings us to the time when God ceases to call, and we are left without God in the world, which leaves us with no hope.

It is bad enough to suffer temporal deprivation and suffer in the body, but it is far, far worse when our souls are left to die because there is no spiritual food from God to sustain life in the soul. There is nothing so awful as for God to withdraw from us, and not speak to us or call to us any more.

So God in his grace calls in this winsome way, and urges Israel to consider the consequences of not heeding his call to return to him. Is there anything so foolish as the people of the world going there own way, walking without concern down the broad road which inevitably leads to destruction. There is no threat here, but the telling of the truth in love, in order to bend our hearts and minds to God.

On the other hand there is this wonderful assurance in the winsomeness of God as he calls Israel to consider the awful end of their forefathers who continued in disobedience. There is this wonderful assurance that if they heed his call and return to him there is abundance of blessing and fruitfulness which will come from the Lord who will return to them.

HOW TO RETURN TO THE LORD.

Lastly we have the important example which gives instruction as to how we return to the Lord. This is given in verse 6 where we read, “Then they repented and said, ‘The Lord Almighty has done to us what our ways and practices deserve, just as he determined to do.’”

So much renewal and returning to the Lord can be shallow and unacceptable. What we see here is an essential ingredient of returning to the Lord. We see first of all there is a genuine conviction of sin and what sin deserves. Unless repentance includes this sense of sin and how evil it is before God, and what it deserves in judgement from the Lord, it can not be said to be very deep or even truly genuine. The people acknowledge that they deserved all the pain and sorrow of the exile and that God had acted justly in it.

A true work of repentance worked by the Holy Spirit brings the soul into sense of being justly under God’s judgement because of the evil of sin, and how grievous is the sins committed. We see Isaiah suffering this true conviction and repentance when he went into he temple as a young man. He was a young man who sought to live for God. He saw the evil in the nation and went into the temple to seek God about this evil. He was seeking a remedy to this godless trend in the nation. What happens? He sees the Lord high and lifted up. He saw God in his holiness in a way he had never appreciated before. In the light of this sight of God he saw himself as he had never seen himself before. He thought he was one of the few who were holy and in God’s favour, but now he is overwhelmed by a sense of his unworthiness before God, and feels that his sins deserve only punishment and that this punishment could not fail to fall. He crys ‘Woe is me, I am undone’. This is genuine repentance. We see sin as God sees it, and we see sin for what it deserves, and we bow before God in humble acceptance that we deserve nothing good from him.

This is what Israel found worked in their hearts as Zechariah passed on to them the call of God, and like Isaiah in the temple they felt the grace of God returning to them. Isaiah received the purging of his sins, and so did Israel in Zechariah’s time.

This is true turning to the Lord, and where such turning begins. Repentance is a constant condition of the true Christian soul. It keeps the soul always trusting in the merits of Christ for them, and renouncing any claim to personal righteousness that is deserving before God or any trust in it.

CONCLUSION.

So Psalm 95 calls to us (v.7,8) “Today, if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts ...” Such gracious calling of God urges us to respond. If we are still an unbeliever then let us respond and cast our souls on the Saviour who alone can make us acceptable to God. If we are a believer, whatever our spiritual condition, let us hear God calling us to return to him as a call to a closer walk with Christ, and a more diligent mortifying of our corrupt desires, and to a greater devotion to serving him in love.