Okay, Zechariah 7 begins a new section. We've just completed the night visions, which is the first section of the book. The second section happens about two years later, and that is given to us in Zechariah 7 and 8. And then we have two oracles at the end, which you will find in chapters 9 and 10, and then 11 through the end. So now we're beginning the second section here, the question from the delegation at Bethel. on fasting, Zechariah chapter 7, and it came to pass in the fourth year of Canaan Darius that the word of the Lord came unto Zechariah in the fourth day of the ninth month even in Jislev. when they had sent unto the house of God Sherezar and Regemilech and their men to pray before the Lord, and to speak unto the priests which were in the house of the Lord of hosts, and to the prophets, saying, Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these so many years? Then came the word of the Lord of hosts unto me, saying, Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye fast it all unto me, even to me? And when ye did eat and when ye did drink, did not ye eat for yourselves and drink for yourselves? Should ye not hear the words which the Lord hath cried by the former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity, and her cities thereof round about her, when men inhabited the south and the plain? And the word of the Lord came unto Zechariah, saying, Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compassions every man to his brother, and oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor, and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart. But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped the ears, that they should not hear. Yea, they made their hearts like as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law and the words which the Lord of Hosts hath sent in His Spirit by the former prophets. Therefore came a great wrath from the Lord of Hosts. Therefore it is come to pass that as He cried, so they would not hear. So they cried, and I would not hear, saith the Lord of Hosts. But I scattered them with a whirlwind among the nations whom they knew not. Thus the land was desolate after them. And no man passed through nor returned, for they laid the pleasant land desolate. All right, the setting of this passage here is a delegation came, and our English version says it came unto the house of God. The Hebrew word is Bethel, which is the name of a town. And they didn't go to Bethel, they came from Bethel. So it's a delegation of people that have come from Bethel, the city in Israel, to Jerusalem to inquire of the priests and the prophets. This takes place about two years after the night visions. And they go and they inquire, and their question is this, should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these many years? This brings to mind the question of fasting. What they're talking about is fasting. The two Hebrew words they use, the first one is to weep, and the second one is to take a Nazarite oath. If you remember in the Old Testament, in the law of Moses, a man could separate himself for a particular time and vow to abstain from wine and touching dead bodies and cut his hair. And the idea was he was dedicating himself unto God's service through the ceremony. He could do it for a short time. There were a few people that it was done to for their whole life, like Samson and Samuel and John the Baptist. And there were also those that did it for a short period of time. The Apostle Paul did it for a short period of time. We read about it in the book of Acts. When the Lord responds to them, He responds using the word fast. So we're talking about all of this together. A fast was where you separated yourself again to God's service. You abstained from food. You abstained from drink. You wore sackcloth and ashes. Sackcloth was a rough, hairy garment made from goat hair. and you sat in the ashes and put ash on your head to proclaim that you deserve the desolation and the wrath and fire of God for your sins, and you weep for your sins. Now, they did that every fifth month, and the Lord adds another one, they also did it the seventh month. We don't know where this fast at the fifth month came about. It's possible that they were weeping for the destruction of Solomon's Temple, which happened in the fifth month, but it was not something commanded by the law. That doesn't mean it was wrong for them to do. The Lord always accepts true facts. And so it wasn't wrong for them to do. But now they're asking, should we continue to do it? Now the temple's being rebuilt. It's two years after all these night visions, these tremendous promises. Now they're back in the land. Solomon's temple is still destroyed. So it's really a valid question. They go to the priest. They say, well, what about this fast we've been doing for 70 years? Should we keep doing that? We've been doing that for a long time. What should we do? And now comes the Lord's answer. It's interesting that He doesn't give a yes or no answer because this is one of those questions that can't be answered yes or no. Because the heart of the question is wrong. The heart of the question is this. How can I appease the wrath of God should we keep doing this ceremony? Well, God doesn't want ceremonies and words. That's exactly the same problem the Jews had that Isaiah addresses in chapter 58 of Isaiah, where God says to them, you're doing all these fasts. Have I commanded a fast? Why are you doing fasts? Here's a fast. Feed the hungry. Feed the poor. Quit oppressing the poor and the widow and the orphan. Quit making yourself rich off the back of the poor. Be kind and merciful and joyful to one another. Change your behavior. throughout the law, it says, rend, tear your hearts, not your garments. It's very easy to tear your garments. But a true fast is not just tearing your garments and being really, really sorry for sin. It's actually changing your behavior. So the Lord addresses this by dealing with the actual problem. The heart of the issue is that they had a false view of God. The view of God that we've all inherited from birth, from our father Adam, is that God is angry, unapproachable, untouchable, and we have to offer some kind of sacrifice or do some kind of ceremony or go through some kind of ritual in order to get God on our side for a little while. It's up to us to do that. If we do that, we might appease Him, and then we can go back living our same old rotten, nasty, filthy lives. Let's look at just simple things. We want to steal. We want to commit adultery. We want to commit fornication. We want to be drunk. We want to get rich off the back of the poor. We want to continue our rotten, filthy practices. We want to treat our wife and our husbands and our kids exactly the same way, and woe be anybody that tells us that might be wrong. But meanwhile, I've got God that I've got to deal with. I'll go to church. I'll give a lot of money, put in the offering plate. I'll repent when I get caught. I'll really cry. And maybe deep down inside you do feel really, really, really bad for the consequences of your actions. Maybe you should put on sackcloth and ashes because you really do feel horrible about it. But then what if God doesn't accept that? And God is saying, you have a completely different and wrong view of God. The problem with man goes to the very heart. It's not that God had some kind of ceremony that man didn't go through. That never was the problem. The problem is man is rotten to the core. And true repentance is turning your back on that and facing God Himself. So it goes right to the behavior of people. And so Zechariah is answering this, not by saying yes or no. Yes, you should continue the fast. Or no, you shouldn't continue the fast. But going to the heart of what God requires of His people. And that is, we need a new heart. Our uncircumcised hearts are hard as flint. He uses the example of the former prophets. Look at verse 5, and let's look at this. Zechariah, to speak unto the people of the land and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did ye fast at all unto me? It sounds awkward in English, but it sounds awkward in the Hebrew, too. Some of the translations might say, Did you fast for me? And this has to do with the use of the cases in Hebrew. To fast for someone means to fast for their benefit, for their advantage. The case that would be used is the dative case. In Hebrew, this is not in dative. It's in the accusative case, which makes it a direct object, which makes it a little awkward. But the idea is, Israel thought, indeed, that when they were fasting, they were fasting for God's benefit. That's what they thought. God is changing the question on them and saying, did you fast with regard to Me? And then the very next word, which is translated, even Me, like it's repeated, is not really repeated. It's simply the word, I, which is just as awkward in English as it is in Hebrew. It says, when you fasted, did you fast unto Me? I. The idea is, what does he mean by that? And I think what he's doing here, using this language, is he is convicting them because their repentance does not have any regard or any care or any concern about the true God, the I am that I am. What they're doing is they're trying to appease the Canaanite deity as if that was God. As if fasting on the fifth day of the month and the seventh day of the month would actually appease God. They have no regard For the true God, the I am that I am. And this comes up in the very next phrase when he explains to them what his problem is. Fasting is abstaining from food and drink. Well, you do that twice a year and you think you're holy. But what about the rest of the year when you're eating and drinking? There's a few words added to make sense of this in our translation and they're not bad It is the idea but take it out for a second and in reading verse 6 and when you did eat and when you did drink Did you not eat? Did you not drink? That's exactly what the Hebrew says. The idea is didn't you just eat and drink for yourselves? But it goes a little bit deeper than that because they could have said for yourselves if you think about it and Paul said, whatever you do, whether you eat or whether you drink, do all to the glory of God. He also said, whatever is not of faith is sin. The only reason we have any food at all is because God has allowed us to eat it. Remember in Genesis 1, even before the fall, God said, see, I've given you all the herbs and all the fruit of all the trees for you to eat. Eat it. Enjoy it. And so we as Christians receive our food with thanksgiving and our drink with thanksgiving. And as unbelievers, food is something that's just there. And if you go out and take it, if you get some, well, wahoo, I worked hard, I got it. But if I don't take any, then I'm going to get mad, and I'm going to go hungry. And if I get hungry, then what I need to do is I need to oppress somebody that's weaker than me in order to get their food. See, when you are your own God, when you worship yourself, your food and your drink and your clothes and your shelter and your security and your peace and your safety and all that has to come from you. And how do you do that? Because you are weak. Well, you can either do it through the state, or you can do it through business, or you can do it through personal power by oppressing people around you. Because you're worshiping yourself, and you insist that everyone else worships you too. This, what we think about God, shows itself in what we think about our food and drink. the very simple things that we do every day. Do we do it in the presence of God? Do we do it in thanksgiving to God? Do we do it as servants of Almighty God, receiving all bounty from His hand and from His hand alone? Or are we simply caught up in this whirlwind of time, scrapping around, trying to dig a living out of this ground that God's cursed? And maybe if we happen to do everything right, we'll eat tomorrow. Follow what I'm saying? It's very interesting here. And so God is saying, when you live your whole life eating and drinking, and what are you doing? You're eating and drinking. You're not praising God. You're not glorifying God. You're not praying to Him to give to you your daily bread. You're not expecting all good from His hand only. All you're doing is eating and drinking. It's you eating. It's you drinking. And now all of a sudden, twice a year, you're going to fast and mourn and think that that's going to do God's service. What he's rebuking here is what's called in the modern 21st century, moralistic therapeutic deism. That God's up there to make us feel good when we get into trouble. If we do all the right things, then God will love us. But the rest of the time, God just leaves us alone and has no concern with what we do whatsoever. And so we go to church on Sunday. We jump and we yell and we listen to the rock band and we feel very holy inside. And we roll our eyes behind our head and go, ooh. And then we go back on Monday robbing and stealing and cheating and fornicating. and drinking, and on and on and on it goes. And we think we're okay. And if we get into trouble, then what do we do when we get into trouble? Well, then we cry out to God. And God's going to deal with this at the end of chapter 7. This is exactly what their fathers did. And so the heart of it is not whether you should fast or whether you shouldn't fast. Just like the heart of our problem is not whether we should go to church or whether we should not go to church. If your heart is right, going to church is certainly a righteous, godly thing to do that God-honoring people do. It's where the food is. But if you come to church and don't eat the food of the Word of God, there's no point in coming at all. If God is not on His throne, if He is not our Almighty Defender and Protector, if all good does not come from His hand alone, if really we're just on our own, well, then stay home on Sunday morning. That's the point. What are we doing here? So that's what He's saying there. He says, didn't you just eat and drink yourself? And then verse 7, didn't you... that's translated. I translated this whole passage, which is... all of these are parallel. So he says, when you didn't eat, when you didn't drink, did you not eat and drink for yourselves? Did you not hear the words which the Lord spoke, cried out? And that word is important in verse 7. The Lord cried out. He doesn't use the word to proclaim or even to speak. Most of the time when God speaks, He uses the simple term, He spoke. Here he's using the verb kara, which means to call out. It's a town crier shouting and yelling and making a proclamation. And this describes exactly what God did through the former prophets. He cried out this message over and over and over again. We have almost the exact same passage in Isaiah chapter 58, where God is crying out. This is not a fast. This is not a religious service. I'm sick to death of your feasts. What does God require of you? Do justly to one another. Keep the law. Be kind and merciful to each other. Oh dear. Be kind and merciful to each other. Quit oppressing the poor and the widow and the orphan and the needy. And instead, work with kindness and love and joy towards one another. And as I've said over and over again, every unbeliever in the world says it would be awesome if everybody just loved one another. It would be. The problem is you hate me, and you hate your wife, and you hate your kids, and you hate the storekeeper, and you hate the gas, and you hate the government, you hate the gas company, you hate everybody. That's the problem with mankind. I love everybody until they get in my way. I love everybody until they make me get off the couch. I love everybody until they pull in front of me in the road. See what the problem with mankind is? It's not rocket science to figure out. The problem is, our hearts are so corrupt and so crooked and so rotten, God requires us to love. Instead, we hate. Okay, so God says, I cried this out to you. I said, do justice. Love mercy. And so he repeats it again. The end of verse seven, he reminds them that when he cried this out in verse seven, the cities were full. Jerusalem was full. Little villages around Jerusalem were full. Even in the south country, the Negev, it's the desert in the south of Israel. That was full. People lived there because there were so many people in the land. They were at ease. They were at peace. And why was Israel settled and at peace and full and prosperous in the land? Only for one reason. Because God was gracious to them. But because they weren't thankful, and they didn't worship the true God, they thought that they had to keep things that way themselves, and they could do that by getting richer and richer and richer, building bigger barns, filling the barns with more and more and more food, and oppressing everyone around them. It's the only way to do it. Either you worship the one true God and expect all good from His hand alone, or you're going to provide it for yourself. And the only way to do that is by taking it from others by force. whether it's food, or whether it's emotional security, or whether it's peace, or whether it's respect, or whether you worship having a good meal, and if you worship having a good meal, that you're going to have peace and prosperity, expecting the marriage supper at the Lamb, when you go to Mimi's for dinner, Mimi's will always disappoint you, because it isn't the marriage supper at the Lamb. And then you're going to lash out at the waitress. You're going to lash out at the cook. It happens every time. Only when you expect all true good from God's hand alone can you deal with justice and kindness towards those around you. So he says, so he reminds him of that. Then in verse 8, we bring the second part of this message, which is this. Tell you specifically what to do. Execute true justice. This is two Hebrew words. One's the verb and one's the noun. The verb is judge. And the noun is judgment. Judge judgment. And then connected to the noun is the word for faithfulness or surety, which we've talked about. It's the word amen. Let your judgment be amen. And mishpat in the Hebrew only means the judgments of God. God is the solid place to put your feet. And so how do you determine an issue when it comes before you? If you are a judge or in whatever position in the world you happen to be in, how do you judge it? You judge it by the Word of God, not by anything else. And so everything flows from there. Execute true judgment. He says, show mercy and compassion to every man to his brother. Oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, nor the stranger, nor the poor, and let none of you imagine evil against your brother in their heart. Here it's very interesting. What he's answering, let's go back to what he's answering. Should we weep and fast and mourn like we always have? And he responds not by saying yes and no, but by saying what you need to do is you need to change your behavior. You need to rend your heart, not your garments. In other words, this is very shocking, true repentance is a whole lot more than just words. That's one thing that the church needs to learn immediately. Because most often you have a man who's been abusing his wife, abusing his children, living in a drunken wreck, and they're finally called before the spiritual council, and the spiritual council goes, are you sorry? And he says, I'm sorry. And they go, oh, he's repentant. And then they excommunicate the wife and the kids for not forgiving him. Because what happens as soon as he says, I repent, he goes right back home and begins to beat his wife and kids again. Because nothing's changed. He's just given words. He's fasted before the Lord. He ate for fasting before the Lord. It does absolutely no good if he hasn't actually changed his behavior. And this is creedal in our catechism when we say, what two parts does true conversion or repentance consist? What is repentance? The first one is the dying of the old man and the quickening of the new. If you have not put to death sin so that you might walk in newness of life, you're not repentant. You may be very sorry, but Paul said the sorrow of the godly man leads to repentance, which means sorrow and repentance are not the same thing. There's godly sorrow that will lead to repentance. There's also ungodly sorrow that leads to destruction. Everybody's sorry. That's not the same as repentance. Repentance is actually turning your back on your oppressive, godless behavior, and instead learning to do justice and righteousness and godliness, and so forth. And so, like I read this morning, God only told Cain once. Because here's the thing, and I've changed my view on this. Somebody comes to me for counseling, and they are living in drunkenness, or they are living in fornication, or they're living in adultery, and they will not repent, but they say, I'm really sorry. I can sit there and dig into all the different motives, and I can trace back their childhood on all the behavior that led to all of this stuff, that's what modern therapy does, and I can analyze it and change all the behavior, but the fact is, if they don't put off Their sinful behavior, they're not repentant. So the first thing they have to do is put off their sinful behavior. And then I can help them untangle all the rest of the knots. There is no point in counseling a man who will not give up his drink. If he's going to drink himself drunk, there's not a thing I can say to him. All I can do is what the prophets did. You're going to hell. And you better listen to God. Now, once he repents and puts off his drink, then we can help him untangle the knots of his life. But repentance is not words. It includes words, but it's far more than words. It includes outward shows of sorrow. See, the problem with man is we think that if we're accepted by men, then that means we're accepted by God. If we're powerful and significant and rich before men, then we're powerful and significant and rich before God. That comes through in everything that we do. He's such a godly man. How do you know he's a godly man? Well, he's built a 1500-member church. He really knows all the right prayers. Everybody says he's a godly man. It means absolutely nothing if he's not actually godly. That's what true justice is. True judgment is making your decisions and your judgments based upon the solid ground of God's Word, not everybody else's opinions. And so he says, this is what we said over and over again, the former prophets. And he says, but they refused to listen. They pulled away the shoulder, they stopped their ears that they should not hear. The Hebrew is very interesting there. They absolutely refused to hear. They refused to pay attention. They refused to pay attention when God spoke, number one. Number two, they set their shoulders stubborn. That's the idea. We have it, they shrug their shoulders. Or they just, you know, your body language says a lot about how you're receiving God's Word. They shut their shoulders stubbornly. The last one at the end of that verse is, they stopped their ears that they should not hear. They made their ears too heavy to hear. In other words, they had one excuse right after another why they couldn't understand God's Word. Oh, I don't understand that. What's it saying there? I don't understand what it's saying there. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You mean I'm supposed to do this? That's very unjust of God to do that. One excuse right after another why they can't simply do what God has commanded them to do. They've made their ears heavy to hear. And then the very next verse, it says, they set their hearts as adamant stone. It's flint, a very, very, very hard rock. And then it's interesting, that last phrase, lest they should hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts has sent in his spirit by the former prophets. A very long phrase. All of that phrase, the subject of that phrase is the word flint, the hard rock. And what he's saying is, Imagine a flintstone and a prophet preaching the words of God to the stone of flint. How is the flint going to respond? That's how you set your heart. You set your heart to be a brick wall when God sent His prophets by His Holy Spirit to speak His words unto you. And here, by the way, we also have God confirming that the words of the former prophets were His very words given to them by the Holy Spirit, and therefore another affirmation of the errancy and infallibility of the Holy Scripture. It came from the Spirit of God, as Paul himself said in the New Testament. That's a side note. It is a very dangerous thing to turn your back, shrug your shoulders, and refuse to hear what the Spirit is saying through His prophets. That's a very dangerous thing. In fact, in Isaiah, The fascinating passage, go back to Isaiah chapter 28. Every one of God's prophets treated people like this. That's not the right passage. Isaiah 28. Isaiah 28. He's rebuking, I'm going to start at verse 8, but he's rebuking all of the princes and all the people of Israel, and he says, he first of all tells them in verse 8, all your tables are full of vomit and filthiness, there is no place clean. Every single thing you do is corruption and abomination before the Lord. That's why you're not having any rest. That's what the problem is. Now he goes on to describe, and this in verse 9, he's quoting them. It's like saying, yeah, I've heard what you've been saying about the prophet. You're saying, well, who will he teach knowledge to? Whom shall he teach knowledge and whom shall he make understand doctrine? Them that are weaned from the milk and drawn from the breasts? In other words, oh, that guy's just a simpleton. Who does he think he's talking to? We're smart. We know the law. We know what's going on. We've got it all laid out before you. And he says, they're making fun of the prophets in this. And then the very next thing he says, for precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little. This does not mean this is how God's people should be taught. What this is, is Isaiah quoting the mockery of the prophets. If you read it out loud in the Hebrew, what he's saying is, It's a stupid, mocking little rhyme. It roughly translates to that. But Isaiah is saying, I've heard the mockery that you've given to the Word of God. And so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to send you into captivity to the Assyrians, where every time they speak to you, all you're going to hear is, I'm going to mock you because you've mocked me. And he says the same thing back in Zechariah, when he says in verse 13, therefore it has come to pass that as he cried and they would not hear, so when you cry, he will not hear. In other words, God cried out with a loud voice to His people, and His people went, la, la, la, la, la. And so now, trouble's going to come. The people are going to cry out to God, and God's going to go, la, la, la, la, la. How you hear God's Word will determine how God hears you. That's what we have to keep in mind when it comes to repentance. God doesn't want our empty words. He wants us to hear His Word. And we will stop right there.