About this sermon
Zechariah began his ministry among the returned exiles, whose first zeal had faded, with a warning: “Return to me, says the Lord of hosts, and I will return to you,” for the word of the Lord outlasts the prophets and the fathers who ignored it. Jesus pronounced the same sober word over Jerusalem, which killed the prophets sent to it. Yet the prophets also brought immense promise, and God’s restoration of Jerusalem was the first footprint of his plan to redeem people from every nation, so believers trust his mercy with a hope that does not tire.
Sermon transcript
We come now to the reading of the sacred scriptures. As we turn our attention there, let me bring you, in imagination at least, to a certain island. Strange little known Pacific Island on the equator part of a remote chain of 15 islands about 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador Heaps of rock pushed up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean by volcanic force mountain peaks nearly a mile above the sea level and where ship captains sometimes marooned wayward sailors They called them for a while the Enchanted Islands.
The British gave the name to one of them, Indefatigable Island. The Spanish called it Santa Cruz, Holy Cross. Turtles in Spanish are Galapagos. What islands? The Galapagos Islands. Charles Darwin went there in the 1830s and as a young naturalist in his 20s on a world-round expedition like going to the planet Mars or going to the moon back in those days. A land so hostile that even the iguanas figured out how to eat in the seawater. The only lizards, I think, that do so worldwide. There is almost no fresh water on this island.
What did the Brits call it? Indefatigable Island. Is that a familiar name? Indefatigable. Is that a familiar word? It was on my sixth grade vocabulary lists. I remember still because I thought it was such a cool word. Indefatigable means unable to get tired.
There’s no fatigue in indefatigable and such an island cannot be defeated. You try to civilize the place, you lose. It’s unable to be defeated because it never tires of its opposition against you. Indefatigable island. The island that never gives up. Well, today’s scripture is a word something like that island. It is an indefatigable word, a word of power that cannot be defeated because it never tires.
It’s like that line proclaimed by Isaiah, by the word of the Lord, my word that goes out of my mouth. Maybe you know the rest. It will not return to be empty, but will certainly accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I said. Or as Jeremiah preached in words marvelously set to music in Mendelssohn’s oratorio, Elijah, maybe, you know, these lines, maybe, you know, the music too is not my word like a fire declares the Lord and like a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces.
The word never gets tired. It is indefatigable. It cannot be defeated. And that is true of the sinners that oppose it. They cannot win. It is also true for the saints who adore it. They cannot lose! And it is by the power of this word inhabited by the Holy Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, it is by this word that we are born again, says Saint Peter. to the Christians reading that first letter, you’ve been born again, not of something perishable, but of an imperishable seed, the living and enduring word of God. God speaks that word into the elect. And faith and repentance are awakened and enabled. That which had been impossible, namely the love of God, now comes to the fore. and becomes the most powerful force in such a life. All right, all that introduction, that prepares us, I hope, to hear these words, words that are indefatigable. In the eighth month of the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to Zechariah, son of Barakiah, son of Edo, the prophet.
The Lord was furious with your fathers. So say to them, this is what the Lord of the heavenly armies declares. Return to me, declares the Lord of the heavenly armies, and I will return to you, declares the Lord of the heavenly armies. Do not be like your fathers to whom the former prophets preach saying, this is what the Lord of the heavenly army says.
Turn from your evil ways and from your evil deeds. But they would not listen or pay attention to me, declares the Lord of the heavenly armies. But your fathers, where are they now? And the prophets, do they live forever? But my words and my decrees, indeed, which I commanded my servants, the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers?
And then they repented and said, just as the Lord of the heavenly armies has planned to do to us as our ways and our evil deeds deserved. So has he done with us. So far the reading from the Old Testament, and then we turn to one of the sterner words from our Lord, Matthew 23. This might be Jesus’s angriest speech. A speech to the Pharisees, the scribes, the religious leaders of that time who did not love God. They said they loved the law of God. They said they loved God.
But Jesus, in this speech in Matthew 23, this is the famous speech of the seven woes. In biblical numerology, seven is the number of completeness. Seven blessings spoken upon Abraham, right? Seven woes upon the Pharisees, the teachers of the law, the experts in the mosaic ordinances. Let’s hear a portion of that. Matthew 23 verse 27 and following.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You were like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside, you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside, you are full of hypocrisy and witnesses. Woe to you, teachers of the law, Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, if we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets. So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of the sin of your forefathers.
You snakes! You prudent vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I’m sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of you, some of them you will kill and crucify. Others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth. From the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation. Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who killed the prophets and stoned those sent to you.
How often I would have longed, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
So far, the reading of God’s own Holy Word. Thanks be to God. I’m focusing today upon the text from Zechariah 1. You’ve heard me preach that text once, and I return to it. We have heard in the meantime five sermons, I think on Zechariah’s older contemporary Haggai, and I’ve concluded my words on Haggai. So now we continue with his colleague. The two prophets overlapped in Jerusalem. They both preached in the year 520 BC.
Jerusalem was no major city in those days. Now it’s more than 900,000 people. You could have two prophets, I guess, in Jerusalem today, and they would never meet each other. But back in those days, we’re talking maybe 1,000 people, 2,000, 3,000, something like that. The Book of Ezra mentions eventually 50,000 who return. But in the year 520, that’s probably not yet. 50,000 would be a large city in those days indeed. And so in the Jerusalem of 520 BC, probably these two men knew each other, Haggai and Zechariah. I suspect they knew each other well. And I suspect that Haggai may have been the spiritual mentor to this much younger man, Zechariah.
And so in this text, we have the power of the prophetic word. We have an indefatigable word, a word that never gets tired, a word that can never be defeated because it is the word of the living God, a word that endures even after the death of its speakers. In the ancient world and still in some places today, the word of the king is law. You know, your wish is my command. In the Roman world, the decree of the emperor A decree that had not been confirmed by Senate perished with the emperor.
So Claudius gives a decree in 49 AD expelling all the Jews from Rome. Alright, the Jews had to leave. There was apparently a riot among Jews in Rome. One Roman historian tells us it was instigated by someone named Crestus. Probably a misunderstanding of the Greek name Christos. Christ. And so we presume, we reconstruct Jewish Christians being opposed by non-Jewish Christians. And Claudius says, OK, all of you out. But in 54 AD, Claudius died. And his decree died with him. And so the Jews moved back to Rome, including Jews like Prisca and Aquila. All right, so in our text today, This Word does not die. It’s the living and enduring Word of God, a Word that never tires out, a Word that cannot be defeated, a Word that never gives up.
And so in the book of Haggai, we heard of five oracles from the prophet, oracles that begin with rebuke, like this prophetic book does, Zechariah. It begins with rebuke to this return community of exiles. They’re rebuilding the city after three generations of Babylonian domination and Babylonian destruction. They’re rebuilding a temple. And Haggai has said that the latter glory of that temple would surpass even the glory of Solomon’s. Wow. A message not merely about architecture, but about the spiritual power of God’s kingdom upon the world. But this prophet Haggai, as we now know, did not work alone.
In the weeks after his third recorded oracle, the oracle of Haggai 2, verses 1 through 9, some two months after his work of prophecy begins, he’s joined by a young man whose grandfather is one of the chief priests in Jerusalem at that time, and that’s how we know he’s young.
Grandfather alive and well and active as one of the 12 chief priests named in the book of Nehemiah chapter 12, among the 12 chief priests, the grandfather, Edo, the father, Barakaya, the grandson of Edo, Zechariah, the prophet. Matthew 23 suggests that Zechariah was martyred. We have no such story, but such things were perhaps unrecorded but known, or not recorded in text that we receive, but known. We do have Zechariah’s name in another list of chief priests. In Nehemiah 12, There is a generational list of 12 chief priests of the generation that came to rebuild Jerusalem in the 530s, 520s BC. Edo’s name is on that list, the grandfather. Half a page later in Nehemiah 12, there is the next generation of the chief priests. And in the slot where Edo’s name had been for the previous generation, there we see the name, Zechariah.
He survived at least long enough to become one of the chief priests. But Zechariah, as we now know from the latter half of his book, though first believed, was soon opposed. And in chapter 11 of that book, he says, the flock hated me. And I refused to be their shepherd any longer.
We have no martyrdom story, but Jesus seems to allude to a martyrdom for this Zechariah. This prophet like Haggai will begin with a call to repentance. And this is one of the weirder stories in the Bible, because these are the very people who seem to be the repentant ones who returned from exile, having believed the good news of the prophets, having believed the word of Isaiah, that God would bring them back to rebuild their, their homeland and their city and their institutions and their temple. These are the people who seem to be the repentant, the rendent, the pure. And it seems very odd indeed that they should be addressed with such a stern word of rebuke. in the opening page of the Book of Zechariah. Haggai likewise begins with rebuke. And what we here see is that when the people first return in 536 or so, they are zealous.
You know, most Jews never returned. There are a couple hundred thousand Jews probably in that Persian world of the Persian Empire that had conquered Babylon and taken that territory, probably at least 200,000, maybe 300,000 Jews in that world, most never returned. And many did not want to. They had houses and land and businesses and families in the lands of their exile. But some did.
Ezra chapter 2 mentions some 50,000 that eventually return. Out of the two or three hundred thousand, whatever the number is, that’s not a big percentage, is it? And in Haggai and Zechariah’s own time, probably only a couple of thousand have come. Aren’t these God’s marines? The few, the proud? It seems to be so. And yet, what happened?
In the 530s, after founding the temple and restoring the altar and beginning sacrifice upon it, Moses style, they stopped building. And Haggai will rebuke them for paying attention to their own houses, paneled houses, he says, while this house, namely the house of the Lord, remains in ruins. What had happened, as I preached some months ago here, very likely that opposition from Samaria, made building difficult because the Samaritans were jealous of the restoration of Jerusalem.
They’d lose their toll booth on the road, the main trunk road of trade through central Palestine. Jerusalem and Samaria are on the same road about 25 to 30 miles apart. If you rebuild the toll booth at Jerusalem, Samaria’s toll gets cut in half at least. And so Samaria had the political connections.
They had the local allies. Jerusalem was a newborn city out of nothing, out of ashes and broken stone and burnt timber. There had been no Jerusalem for three generations. Samaria had flourished in its absence. So Samaria, with its local allies, gang up upon this little kid of a city, and they stopped the building. Should the returned Jews have stopped, No! But they did. And for 16 years or so, no further construction of the temple happens. They had come with zeal, but they now languished in despair. And they had lost their first love. They had lost their priorities.
And so what’s the word of the prophet? We heard this my last message on Zechariah. The Lord was furious with your forefathers. Return to me, declares the Lord of the heavenly armies. And I will return to you and do not be like your forefathers. Return to me and I will return to you. They were His. They still were His. But they were wandering, and their faith was faltering.
So Zechariah, this new upstart prophet, probably 20-ish or so, son of a priestly family, newly returned from Babylon, a man who was born in Babylon and whose name means Yahweh has remembered, perhaps a name about the restoration promise for the people of God, probably so. A man who bears that name comes back with his grandfather as a teenage boy, maybe, and arrives in a city that is still ashes and broken stone, and soon is called to be a prophet. First, a prophet of warning, and then a prophet of immense promise and hope. Some of the most extraordinary promises in all the Bible are found in his book. Some of the most glorious sentences in all the Bible are found in his book.
Shall I quote one? Not by might. Maybe you can quote it with me now. And not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts. How many know that sentence? Well, not many. Okay, some hands going up. Not by might. Not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts. How does God’s kingdom come? Well, not by political power, not by economic might, not by treaties and armies and in human wisdom. How does it come? It comes by my spirit. says the Lord of Hosts.
The King James Version uses that familiar phrase, the Lord of Hosts. I’ve translated it differently. Did you notice? The Lord of the Heavenly Armies? Why do I translate it differently? Because we’re so accustomed to this phrase, the Lord of Hosts, but in the prophets of this time, The phrase now peppers the pages of the Bible from the 520s, 510s, 500s BC, the post-exilic time, down through the book of Malachi. The phrase becomes at least twice as frequently attested in those books. Why?
Precisely because Jerusalem has no army of its own. The Persians rule the day. There is no kingdom. There is only a province called Yehud, the Aramaic name for Judah. And there’s a broken city that for most of the time has no defensive wall. Anyone can ride in with their little gang of criminals, the mafia, whatever it may be, coming in from Sicily, who knows, and take over the town for a while, ravage everything right away with whatever wealth they can gather, which wouldn’t be much. All right, hardly a city at all.
And it’s in that very time that the prophets emphasized that this Lord is the Lord of hosts. Well, what are the hosts? The word there, Zivahot. Maybe you sing that line in Luther’s In the Mighty Fortress, Lord, Sabaoth his name. Sabaoth is the transliteration into English of Zivahot. Zivah is army. Zivahot, armies. The Lord of armies is the one who gives this word. Judah has no army.
But is there any lack of divine power to fulfill this word? And to bring these people to repentance? And to restore the institutions commanded by Moses by the word of the Lord? There is no lack of power. And even that David dynasty apparently ruined. Even that David dynasty would be reclaimed by divine power. And so Zechariah prophesized the restoration of the branch, the tzemach.
The word branch actually is misleading. Take the cut down trunk of a tree still rooted to the ground. And the tzemach is not a horizontal shoot going out that way, a branch. A tzemach is the vertical growth out of the living flow. of the tree. The root lives. The trunk grows again. The tzemach is the trunk of David’s tree growing again. And the tzemach, the branch, the shoot, the shoot of David will come and he will branch out from his place and re-establish the house of the Lord, says Zechariah 6.
It’s the Messiah. And there is no lack of divine power to bring him into that world. He would arrive at that temple that they’re building. So under such difficulty back in the five twenties, he would arrive at that very temple on the eighth day of his life to be circumcised there. Six miles north from Bethlehem. Luke tells that story. of the dedication of Jesus on the eighth day of his life in the temple that had been reestablished in those days.
And so Zechariah’s point then is that the church and the world must pay heed to the power of this prophetic word because it cannot be defeated. It will be fulfilled. And among the things that must be fulfilled is the words of all the previous prophets. They had declared that Jerusalem will be destroyed. Micah probably said it first. Back in the 700s BC, Isaiah also said such things.
Jeremiah a hundred years repeated them and was charged with heresy until he could demonstrate that he had good precedent in the book of Micah. That’s how he got off the charge of heresy. He proclaimed the destruction of the temple. Heresy! Nope, Micah said it. Canonical scriptures. But not only would it be the disaster that would be fulfilled, also the words of restoration must be fulfilled.
So there is Ezekiel Carried in the spirit somehow maybe by the hair of his head Says one of those texts and carried to a great vast valley, which is covered with the dry bones bleached white of some vast army probably the Jezreel Valley and Probably for him a remembrance of the disaster that happened there in 609 BC when Pharaoh Nico the second massacred the troops of Judah and killed the great King Josiah in the Jezreel Valley by the fortress Megiddo. Ezekiel the prophet was alive and well and a young man when that disaster happened. He probably had friends and family members killed on the battlefield. He mourned the death of Josiah. And there he is in Babylon called as a prophet in the 590s. Jerusalem still stands, but he’s been in exile for five years. And there, the Lord speaks to him. Son of man, can these bones live?
You know the story, perhaps. Only you know, Lord. Only you know. What happens next? Prophesy to the bones! And what happens? Bone joins to bone, like in that old black spiritual, based upon that text. And dem bones gonna rise again. And head bone connected to neck bone, neck bone connected to the backbone. Okay, all that is based upon that text, that old song. And they stand with breath and flesh and muscle all together, because God’s Spirit has breathed into their corpses, and they stand as a vast army. The word of the Lord can never be defeated.
It brings life to the dead. It restores a destroyed people. It rebuilds their holy city. It reestablishes temple. More important, it reestablishes Davidic dynasty and in the person of great David’s greatest descendant, who is nothing less than the son of God. I’m sorry.
Your fathers, where are they now? And the prophets, do they live forever? The prophets do not live forever. But did not my words and my decrees, which I commanded my servants, the prophets, overtake your forefathers? The word never gets tired. The word can never be defeated. And that word is not merely a word of judgment.
It is that against our sin, against the sins of the world. And a judgment enacted for us on the cross of Jesus. When this branch of David, this shoot out of dry ground, gives us life for the sins of all the elect. And so in the great judgment of our sin upon Christ, the great words of restoration must be fulfilled and far beyond that mere little piece of geography called Jerusalem. a tiny swatch of land or the land of Israel, which is only 160 miles from north to south.
It fits all in between Morgantown, West Virginia and Presque Isle. That’s all it is. It’s tiny. God’s words of restoration are not just about a piece of geography, but rather that piece of geography is the first footprint of God as he intends to put his footprints over all the planet and to redeem people from every tribe and tongue and language and people.
Because the words of the prophets are not just Israelite. They belong to the world. And so, as Isaiah preached, the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And the nations will stream to Jerusalem, seeking the word of the Lord. In Jesus’ words, that order is reversed. And so from Jerusalem you go, carrying the gospel to all the nations.
The prophets are not principally predictors. They are principally speakers of divine will. But there is prediction in them. I mentioned in the Sunday School lesson the actual statistical count of prediction versus other types of statements by the prophets. Does anyone recall the number? What’s the percentage of prediction in the words of all the prophets in the Bible? 20%. Okay. 80% then is not prediction, and prophets are principally speakers of the divine will. That’s very important to know.
But often the speeches of the prophets will climax with prediction. And the predictions are sometimes, yes, judgment. But they are also, more importantly, statements of divine redemption. And the Bible is clear that God delights in redeeming what was lost more than He desires the judgment on the wicked. And so that proverb from the letter of Peter is true, that mercy triumphs over judgment. Judgment is true. Matthew 23 is Jesus at His angriest, denouncing the religious leaders, the theologians of His own day. Who got it wrong? But beyond Matthew 23 comes a story of a cross and a resurrection.
And then this final word in Matthew, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. And indeed, I’m with you always, even to the close of the age. That’s one of the greatest sentences in all of human history.
And it shows us that the goal of God is not to express His wrath, but to save the world. God’s goal is to save, and His resolution to save is massive. And the election of grace is massive. How that is true remains mysterious. That it is true is not. And so this prophet who begins with words of rebuke and of difficulty and of judgments that overtake the ancestors becomes, by the end of that book, a glorious expectation. Do you know how Zechariah ends? It really is quite beautiful. There is Jerusalem, chapter 14 of the book. I won’t turn there, but I’ll paraphrase. Chapter 14, Jerusalem is now exalted as the highest of all Himalayas. Everything else is flat.
The nations stream up to it, a very long uphill ascent. And there the nations celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, one of the kosher feasts announced by Moses. And from Jerusalem, Two streams of living water flow forth east and west. Fresh water rivers. One enters the Dead Sea and renders the salt water fresh. The other enters the Mediterranean and renders the salt water fresh. And a vast oasis, oh no, much more than that, a vast fruitfulness erupts where the streams of living water flow. And that dead sea, which is 34% saline, so salty you don’t swim in it, you float on it. That water, where nothing lives, becomes a garden of God.
And there’s no longer night and day, cold and heat, says Zechariah. And on that day the Lord shall be one, O Enni, and His name shall be one, O Enni. That is no idolatry anymore, no unfaithfulness. And even on the cooking pots and the horse harness bells will be inscribed these words, Gadosh ladonai, holy to the Lord. That is the inscription on the high priest’s crown. The gold plate upon that turban that Aaron wore by the command of Moses.
What will bear the same inscription? Horse harness bells and cooking pots. So there you are frying your eggs for breakfast in a skillet. And how is the skillet marked? Holy to the Lord. There you go to harness your horse to take your carriage into town or maybe it’s drive your Chevy to the levee. And how is it inscribed on the side? Holy to the Lord. And you wake up and open your closet and how are their clothes inscribed? Holy to the Lord! And you put on your leather shoes and what’s on the bottom of them? Holy to the Lord! Because all of life has been redeemed and is sacred. And God has won everywhere and life is happy and blessed. That’s how Zechariah ends.
So I preached to you the beginning and the end of the book. Do I need to do the middle? All right, I’ll do some in the middle too, but not today. So some of man, can these bones live? You alone know, Lord. But what will Ezekiel learn by the end of that story? The bones will live. And the gospel cannot be defeated. It is an indefatigable word that will save massively. If we didn’t know better, we might even think that St. Paul was a universalist. Can I quote him? Yeah, I think he’s richer.
For God has consigned all people over to disobedience. so that he might have compassion upon them all. Now, if that were the only sentence from St. Paul that we ever had, we would think maybe universalism. That’s Romans 11, the last sentence of the prose there. After a long discussion of Israel and the Gentiles and the problem, the perplexity of the apparent unbelief of Israel in the face of God’s election. The gifts and calling of God cannot be revoked. Says St. Paul a few lines before.
Yes, even Israel somehow. I’m not quite sure what all that means, but even Israel somehow. All right. So we have this wonderful statement from Paul that God has consigned all people over to sin. All right. That’s us. But the sentence isn’t done. so that he might have compassion upon them. And here is the last word of Paul’s sentence, of Paul’s paragraph. Oh, it’s astonishing. How shall it be true? I do not know. That it shall be true, I believe.
And the very next lines in that chapter are words in poetical form of praise. Oh, how surpassing is the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How is ways beyond tracing out? For from him and through him and to him are all things to him be the glory forever. That’s how Paul ends his meditation upon human salvation. Can God lose? No. Will some be lost? Yes. Yes. And so, as Zechariah’s hearers must do, return to me. And I will return to you, says the Lord of the heavenly armies. Shall we pray?
Lord, this gospel These words of scripture, they are astonishing. We ask you, Lord, in your mercy, that you grant us hearts to truly believe and to believe in your mercy. It is perhaps easy to believe in judgment because we deserve it so richly. And it’s easy to believe in judgment upon the world because the world seems to deserve it so richly. Lord, let us believe all the more ardently in your mercy, your mercy upon us and your mercy upon the world. Thank you, Lord, that your declaration of mercy is true.
May we live in that glorious and blessed hope, a hope that becomes like the word indefatigable unable to get tired, unable to be defeated, a hope that perseveres and is not disappointed because it is poured out into our heart by the Holy Spirit who has been given us. We pray these things most gratefully and in Jesus’ holy name. Amen.
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