God’s Word for You

Zechariah 7:8-14 Right worship and life

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Friday, July 29, 2022

8 And the word of the LORD came to Zechariah, saying,  9 “This is what the LORD of hosts says, ‘Make true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, 10 do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the foreigner who lives among you, or the poor. None of you should plot evil in your heart against another person.’”

Now the Lord summarizes his messages to the earlier prophets. Faith comes first and always. After this, show your faith by making right and true judgments, and then through kindness and mercy. Kindness is an act or disposition that benefits someone. Mercy spares them from punishment or misfortune. When it comes to people already suffering misfortune (the widow, the orphan, the foreign neighbor, the poor), they already have enough trouble. Do not compound it.

But “none of you should plot evil against another person.” Basic civil or human rights are not a matter of fellowship, but of godliness. If a wicked man needs a drink of water, it is not a sin to give him a drink of water. If he needs a place to live, it is not a sin to rent him a house. The government must look after the needs of all people, orthodox and heterodox alike; believers and unbelievers. Believers are not required to pray with unbelievers, but we must pray for them, and this is the distinction.

11 But they refused to pay attention. They turned a stubborn shoulder and a deaf ear. 12 They made their hearts as hard as stone so that they could not hear the law or the words that the LORD of hosts had sent by his Spirit through those earlier prophets. Therefore great anger came from the LORD of hosts.

To “turn a stubborn shoulder” is the picture of an ox refusing to submit to the yoke. “Hearts like stone” has come down as a saying with us. The man who rejects one of the commandments will soon reject the whole law, and once he has rejected the law, the gospel will follow, until his Bible is as thin as the school notebooks of the founding fathers. We must stand on Christ as the rock (Matthew 7:24), and not turn our hearts into rocks. Our hearts must be filled with faith, not flint.

13 So, just as he called and they would not listen, “they called, and I would not listen,” says the LORD of hosts.

God does not mean that he won’t listen to our prayers. He says again and again, “Call on me in a day of trouble and I will answer you” (Psalm 91:15; Jeremiah 33:3). But when people reject the Lord, and turn away from him, he will not listen to their prayers or answer them. This he also says again and again; “Your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:2). And there are many other passages like this: Proverbs 6:16-19, 28:9; John 9:31; Romans 10:14; Hebrews 11:6, and 1 Peter 3:12. When an unbeliever is called to faith, this is the moment when his prayers will be heard, because only then is he truly calling on the Lord his God.

In the same way, a Christian must take care, in obedience to the First and Second Commandments, never to pray to anyone apart from the true God, for prayer is worship. This can be seen from the positive command from God that we pray to him. “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you” (John 15:7). “Ask anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:14). “They will ask… they will come and bind themselves to the Lord” (Jeremiah 50:5). “Lift your face to God. Pray to him and he will hear you” (Job 22:26-27).

It can also be seen negatively in the way we would treat anyone apart from God who asked that we pray to him. There is no passage where Abraham invites us to pray to him, nor Moses, David, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, John, the Virgin Mary, or anyone else. Wouldn’t we condemn anyone who dared to say, “Pray to me, and I will answer your prayers”? Even the angels reject the slightest veneration paid to them and say, “Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you… Worship God!” (Revelation 19:10). More than this, when John once again falls down to honor an angel later in the book (Revelation 22:9), the angel adds: “Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers the prophets and of all who keep the words of this book. Worship God!” With these words, John teaches us that all believers from the beginning of time until the end are gathered under the umbrella of “your brothers the prophets and all who keep the words of this book.” Since the angel allows that he himself is a part of this group, and even he refuses our prayers and worship, then our prayers and worship belong to God alone. It is dangerous even to make a distinction between “worship” and “veneration,” since both theologians and dictionaries struggle to see any difference, and the Bible makes no such distinction, nor do the canons of the ancient church.

14 “With a tornado I scattered them among all the nations where they were the foreigners. Then the land they left was so desolate that no one could come or go. It was they who made the pleasant land a wasteland.”

A tornado scatters in a way few other things can. In the Middle East they call this a “whirlwind,” but we say “tornado” in America. A tornado does not discriminate in what it picks up and throws. A board becomes a missile. A stick becomes a spear. A stone becomes a bullet. A haystack becomes a cloud of flying darts. A rooftop becomes a huge spinning sawblade. A twenty-ton truck becomes nothing but a boulder, a meteor to be flung. Animals, people, objects—the storm scatters by hurling, letting fly, and tossing everything for miles upon miles.

The Lord warned his people to treat foreigners well, but when they did not, he picked them up and made them foreigners in every land. Was it the Lord who laid their precious Promised Land waste? No, God says: It was they who did it, with their sinfulness.

Psalm 31 answers this chapter. David combines the right application of the rock with true prayer as opposed to any kind of idolatry, and has a reference to the terrors of being a foreigner in a foreign land or in one’s own home coupled with wonderful assurances of the blessings of God and encouragements for us to put our trust only in him. He says:

“Turn your ear to me” (Psalm 31:2), because the believer knows that God will answer.

“You are my rock and my strong fortress” (31:3), because our true relationship with God is trust and faith.

“I hate those who cling to worthless idols” (31:6), because giving veneration, worship, or prayer to anyone or anything apart from God is a sin, and it is the sin of unbelief, which is the sin that damns (Mark 16:16).

“There is terror on every side” (31:13), because the believer is truly a foreigner in the world no matter what time or place he lives in.

“Love the Lord, all his saints!” (31:23), because all of our worship belongs to the Lord our God, and him only.

And finally: “Into your hands I commit my spirit” (31:5, and Luke 23:46), because to the very end of our days, our trust is in God alone, who has rescued us from the burden of our sins, delivered us from the kingdom and prison of Satan, and he promises to bring us alive out of the grave, into everlasting life in heaven, together with all of the saints and angels who serve God day and night in his temple. It will be our joy to join them, and to sing his praises with throats that will never waver or tire.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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