Good morning, everybody. Please stand as we look into Zechariah here and see what God has to tell us in Zechariah chapter 3. Yeah, really excited that you guys are starting in a minor prophet next week with Habakkuk, but we can learn something from Zechariah this week. We're looking at Zechariah 3, 1 through 5. Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan, the Lord rebuke you, O Satan, the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you. Is not this a bran plucked from the fire? Now Joshua was standing before the angel clothed with filthy garments. And the angel said to those who were standing before him, remove the filthy garments from him. And to him, he said, behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments. And I said, let them put a clean turban on his head. So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the Lord was standing by. You can be seated. Let me pray for us briefly. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this morning, the chance to gather here freely in your name as we worship you. We thank you for these words from Zechariah that you have passed down from generation to generation. And we just pray that you speak these words to us this morning, that we would be able to learn more about you, more about how we relate to you, and how you have made a way for us to do that. So in your son's name we pray, amen. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is one big story about God making a way for him to dwell with his people. Despite his people throughout the Old Testament, even in the New Testament, certainly through church history, who have turned their backs on him, God continues to pursue and to find a way for us to dwell with him. He is a God that is totally pure, totally clean, and totally spotless. But we are people who are impure, and unclean, and filthy. But despite that, God makes a way for us to be with him. You see, at your core, at my core, we are made to be in communion with God, to relate to Him. But like a magnet that is repulsed by the wrong side of a different magnet, His holiness can't be in contact with our unholiness. His cleanliness can't be in contact with our uncleanliness. His purity with our impurity. We live in Seattle, just a couple miles north of U-Dub. We live in Maple Leaf, if you're familiar with the area. Seattle is a remarkably beautiful city. It is gorgeous. Thinking about driving on a sunny day across the I-5 bridge, going down, and get U-Dub on the left there, and then Portage Bay, and out to Lake Washington with the Cascades to the east, and then Lake Union and the Olympics to the west. You know, if you get the sun shining on the water there, it can kind of like, you know, sparkle off and hit you. You get the downtown skyline and you get Mount Rainier in the distance. Not from that particular spot, but Mount Baker is up to the north. It is a remarkably beautiful city as you're driving across the top of that bridge. But there is a little bit of a different story once you get underneath the bridge. There are all sorts of things that are happening in different pockets of the city that aren't so beautiful or sparkling or glistening, that aren't so clean and pure and beautiful. There is certainly both a beauty and a brokenness to the city that I live in. all sorts of different tattered tarps and cold and shivering nights, things that have been left uncared for, and it is a problem for both the people who are experiencing that type of lifestyle and for the rest of the city and beyond. Here's what I want to say. From the top of the bridge, a lot of our lives look pretty good and pretty put together. There's a lot of us who have things that are going on that are pretty presentable to other people. If I was to have a visitor come into Seattle, I would want to show them a lot of the beautiful things about Seattle. I might not take them to the underside of the bridge. Maybe the Fremont Troll, but that's a different story. You know, we like to show people certain aspects of who we are, but there's a lot going on underneath the surface that we don't like to put forward because it's not so clean, not so pure, not so spotless. If we are totally honest with ourselves, our hearts resemble the grunge of Seattle, okay? Resembles the grunge of Seattle. There's all sorts of little encampments growing within the city limits of our hearts that cause problems both for ourselves and for those around us. I don't know you each individually. I love preaching to UW students because I get to have coffee with them and talk to them and know what's going on in their lives. I don't know you all very well, at least, and I just ask you to think about this question. What are those areas of your life that you might not be so willing to put forward as presentable to other people, that aren't so glistening and sparkling and beautiful? This could be a number of things. It could be professional. It could be personal. What are those things that, once you get underneath the bridge of your life, don't present so well? Today we're looking at Zechariah 3, and it's a great passage. I love this passage. Let me give you the context for this passage. The first half of the book of Zechariah is these kind of strange seven night visions. Pretty fun literature, different style of literature, but you get these seven night visions that Zechariah has. And this is the fourth one that we're looking at here. But the first and the seventh have to do with the nations. All right, kind of like what's out there. And then the second and the sixth have to do with Judea. And then the third and the fifth have to do with Jerusalem. And the fourth, this middle one, the one that we're looking at today, has to do with the Holy of Holies. This is like the meeting place of God and his people. Real estate is like location, location, location. The theological meat of the book of Zechariah is right here in these five verses that we just looked at. I would go as far as to say that these verses also contain the theological meat of the entire Bible. This is pretty big, and I just love this passage because you get to find the gospel right here in the Old Testament. It kind of smacks you right in the face. There's a few characters in this story, all right? There is Joshua, the high priest. He's the one mediating between God and the people. You also get Satan, the accuser, right here in these verses. And then lastly, we get the angel of the Lord. The angel of the Lord, a few different takes on this, great scholarship out there. I take this to be the second person of the Trinity. This is the pre-incarnate Christ who has come to Zechariah in this vision here. He is the same as Jesus just several hundred years before he walked on earth. Three things that I want to look at in this passage. One is that Satan accuses us of our filthy clothes. Second is that Jesus removes those filthy clothes from us. And third, Jesus gives us a whole new set of clothes. Satan accuses us of our filthy clothes. Jesus removes our filthy clothes. And Jesus gives us a whole new set of clothes. So first, Satan accuses us of our filthy clothes. Now, Satan is a master of trickery and deception and lies. He does a lot of nasty stuff in the world. But at his essence, he is the accuser. Just his name in Hebrew just means to accuse. It is just the verbal and the noun form of the same word. So a literal translation of the end of verse 1, you could say that the accuser was standing at his right hand to accuse him. The Lord said to the accuser, or you could say that Satan was standing in his right hand to Satan him, right? It's just the same word in Hebrew. Satan is the great accuser, but we don't actually see Satan accuse Joshua of something, like he doesn't speak. So what is he accusing him of? We have a very legal scene here. We have a courtroom scene. Five times in his verses, you have the language of somebody standing. Somebody is standing by. We use the same language in a court today. In the courtroom where somebody is standing before the judge. It's a pretty judicial and legal scene here. So what is he accusing Joshua of? Satan's the prosecutor here, the one who is there to accuse the defendant of his imperfections, uncleanness, and filthiness. He's there to accuse Joshua of being in the presence of God in an unfit state. He's not supposed to be there because he has filthy garments. He's got filthy clothes and he's in the Holy of Holies. The amount of ritual cleansing that you would have to do to get into the Holy of Holies on a very special occasion was pretty unfathomable for us at this point. They were doing so much and here Joshua the High Priest is standing in the presence of the Holy One with filthy garments. This word filthy, it's certainly dirty, but it's more than that. There's a putrid smell to it. He reeks. He is like really, really awful and gross. And he's here in the Holy of Holies. RUF, I get to do a handful of weddings every now and then. I got to do one a few months ago, and Saturday afternoon wedding, it was great. Just imagine this scene. Not true, this is make-believe, okay, but let's just say Saturday morning, I woke up. And I put on my gym clothes and I just did a big workout. And then I go straight and I do a tough mudder. And then I go doing some woodwork and sawing and a bunch of sawdust gets on me. And then somehow I'm like rolling around in like cow manure, like, you know, whatever, whatever you want to do. Okay. All this stuff. And then I look at my watch. I'm like, Oh no, I got to go officiate the wedding. And I go straight to up front at the altar and I'm like, I'm here. I'm ready to officiate the wedding. David, no, you are not ready to, if we're gonna postpone the wedding, at least by an hour or half an hour, whatever, you need to go clean up and get your clean clothes on and clean up so that you can actually officiate this wedding, right? Like Joshua shouldn't be standing in the presence of God and the Holy of Holies. He's not prepared to officiate this scene. He is dressed in filthy and putrid clothes. He can't stand before the Lord. And if he can't stand before the Lord, then none of the Israelites can. Because he is the mediator, he is the go-between as the high priest. We are all like Joshua. We all stand before the Lord in filthy and putrid clothing. We do not deserve to be in his presence. We have nothing to offer. We have just filthy rags. Our relationship with him is even checkered with impure motives. Our relationship with each other, all sorts of ways that I could elaborate on this. I'll give you a very brief example of this just in my own life. Summer is just like a different schedule for us. I always envision that I'm going to just get way ahead for the fall quarter, and write out all ten of my sermons for the fall quarter, and get all the stuff ordered, all the promotional material, and plan out every event, and get things in a row. And somehow kids are more around, and we have three young kids, and our vacation schedule maybe like lumps some of my wife's work shifts together in different ways. I just don't get to where I want to go all the time. And then in September, my kids go back to school, and I'm like, Here's some more dedicated time that I'm going to be like, I'm going to knock out some administrative tasks and plan ahead and prepare. And I remember this one day in September this past year where I was like, OK, this is like the second or third day of school for my kids. I've got like 10 hours blocked out. I'm just going to knock out a bunch of stuff that I was hoping to do last week or the week before. And we're starting school. The quarter at UW is pretty late, but we're starting in a couple of weeks. I'm just going to knock out a bunch of stuff. And then, last minute, my wife got called into work, which meant, okay, that's fine. I could just reduce my day by a little bit, where I was responsible for kid drop-off and kid pick-up. I was like, I still have like six or seven hours to do a lot of stuff here. And then, the day before, Seattle Public Schools decides to, the teachers go on strike, and so, my kids were at home. My day is shot from that perspective, a day that I was looking forward to, putting my head down and grinding a little bit. Who did I take this out on? I took it out on my kids, just because they were there. And I call myself a pastor. This is awful. They don't deserve my attitude towards them. I was just frustrated that I didn't have the day that I thought I was going to have. I use this as an example to say we all have stains on our clothing. We all get thrown a curveball and don't handle it the way that God would want us to handle it. silver lining, I got to ask my kids for forgiveness, and hopefully they'll remember that at some point in their life. Okay, all of us stand before God with impure motives, with stains in our clothes, and Satan is right there to accuse us of our filthy clothes. Second, Jesus removes us from our filthy clothes. This is good news. Let's look again at verses 2 and 3. And the Lord said to Satan, the Lord rebuke you, O Satan, the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you. Is not this a brand plucked from the fire? Now Joshua was standing before the angel clothed with filthy garments. All right, notice who is rebuking Satan. It's not Joshua. It's not you or me. It's the Lord. It's God who is pushing back. He is the only one who is strong enough and capable enough. I'm reminded of a scene in Macbeth, for those of you who are Shakespeare scholars. And she's repeating this phrase. She's got this guilty conscience. She's got blood on her hands and on her clothes, quite literally. And she's sleepwalking, and she's walking around, and she's saying, out, spot, out. That's the PG version of that. Out, spot, out. And she's scrubbing her clothes so hard and so vehemently. She's trying to get the spot out. But no matter how hard she scrubs, she just can't get the spot out. No matter how hard you and I scrub in our lives, we can't get the spot out. We just can't do it. One of my favorite theologians calls the blood of Christ a strange detergent. I love this little two-word phrase here. The blood of Christ is a strange detergent. It gets into the fabric of our lives, into the very texture of who we are, and somehow, miraculously, it makes us as white as snow. It cleanses us, this strange detergent that is the blood of Christ. How does this work? How does his blood actually cleanse us? Well, in order for something dirty to become clean, something clean has to become dirty. In order for something dirty to become clean, something clean has to become dirty. And so Jesus, in all of his purity and cleanliness, takes on the dirt that we deserve. He absorbs it. Think about this as you're doing dishes. You're not going to take the rag that you just wiped your car engine with and go and do your dishes. You need a clean washcloth or paper towel or something, sponge, in order to clean your dirty dishes. You need something clean to wipe away the dirt. A little cross-reference here in Isaiah 6. This is the call of Isaiah. Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hands a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said, Behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. This is Jesus removing us from our filthy clothes. Christ has taken away our guilt, all of our wrongdoing. We are washed in the blood of the Lamb. This is Jesus removing us from our filthy clothes, but he doesn't stop there. The third point here is that Jesus gives us a whole new set of clothes. He gives us a whole new set of clothes. We get these pure garments. Right after the sermon, we're gonna sing a hymn, and can it be, and it captures this pretty well. One of the verses reads like this. No condemnation now I dread. Jesus and all in him is mine. Alive in him my living head, and clothed in righteousness divine. We're clothed in righteousness divine. Bold I approach the eternal throne, and claim the crown through Christ my own. Clothing back then was of far more significance than it is today. It still holds a decent amount of symbolic weight to it. But back then, there wasn't walk-in closets or big, huge dressers to store your clothes in. People would have a few chains of clothes maybe if you're wealthy and maybe super wealthy, you got a lot of clothes. But for the most part, clothing just, it was more important. You think about the labor hours that went into producing clothing. It was more valuable. It also held more symbolism. So if you think about the story of Joseph with the multicolored robe, long-sleeved robe that he got from his father, this was a sign of inheritance. Whoever had this particular piece of clothing was going to inherit at least more, at least a double portion, if not more than that, than the other siblings. You can think about Adam and Eve as they are being cast out of the garden. God clothes them with animal skins and sends them out. What are these people inheriting? Well, in Adam's case, inheriting some measure of God's righteousness, something that is being passed down to him, this sign of inheritance. God has made a way to dwell with his people. Joshua here is inheriting the clothing from Jesus. He's inheriting Jesus's righteousness. I got to sit in on Sunday school, which is right over here, going through the Ordo Salutis, which I highly recommend. It's a great study on just thinking through salvation and the different components to that and different facets and how it all fits together from the biblical basis. One aspect of that is justification. And here is Westminster Shorter Catechism number 33, which asks the question, what is justification? And the answer that the catechism gives is justification is an act of God's free grace where he pardons all of our sins. All right, this is Jesus removing the filthy clothes from us. He pardons all of our sins. There is no spots left remaining. And he accepts us as righteous in his sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. That is him giving us a whole new set of clothes. So not only are our clothes, our dirty clothes removed, he gives us a whole new clean set of clothes. Paul picks up this theme in the New Testament a couple of places, actually more than a couple of places, but in Galatians 3 he tells the Galatians they have clothed themselves with Christ. They've actually clothed themselves with Christ is actually likened to the clothing itself. It's not just symbolic, it's actually Christ is the clothing. God has given us more than just pure vestments. He's given us Himself. He's given us Jesus. I could say a lot more about clothing. Let me say a couple of things. One is that this is your primary identity. If you are in Christ, then your clothes, the clothes that Christ has given you, this is your primary identity. A year and a half ago, Russell Wilson was wearing the clothes of a Seattle Seahawk, right? And then this past season, he was wearing the clothes of a Denver Bronco. His allegiance shifted and his clothing resembled that. Christ's clothes that we wear show us our identity. Second thing that I'll say here is that these clothes that we wear, we now get to live into. They are Christ's clothes, and so therefore we get to at least aspire to imitate Him. It's spring right now, and we do a little bit of gardening and yard work around our house. And my wife has these little clogged gardening shoes that she puts on. And we have an eight-year-old daughter, and she, from time to time, enjoys coming out to help us outside. And whenever she does, she loves to be the first one out so that she can put on Mom's gardening shoes. They're several sizes too large, but she wants to wear those, not because they fit or because they're comfortable, but just because she wants to imitate her mom. We get to don the clothes of Christ and then imitate what he does. We get to live into our given identity. So what? Thanks, David, for this message, but is there any other landing point here? One thing that I'll say is that there is no longer any condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. If you are in Christ, you are not condemned. No condemnation, now I dread. This is something that we need to hear over and over and over again. There is simply no longer any guilt or shame when you are in Christ. It doesn't matter where you've been or what you've done. You are covered with Christ's clean clothes. I hope you were able to drink deeply from that truth. This is a message that I get to proclaim to UW students weekly, if not more often, certainly from up front at our worship service that we call large group, but also in small groups and in one-on-one settings over lunch and coffee and to our leadership team as they come over to our house for meals. It's a message that bears repeating because we are so apt to forget it. One student that I was thinking about as this passage came to mind, she is a remarkably gifted student. She is in a competitive major. She is liked by her peers. She is sociable and fun and energetic, sees people who other people don't see, and people really enjoy being around her. And you might even say that from the top of the bridge, her life looks pretty put together. But once you dig a little bit more, you find out that things aren't quite what they seem from the top of the bridge. She's got a lot of hard things going on at home. She suffers from pretty crippling anxiety and even sometimes depression. There has been seasons of her life that she has just wanted to end it all. And she doesn't like to present that side of herself to anybody else, right? She has struggled a lot in her couple years that I have known her, and that would be shocking and a big surprise to so many students that know her. My prayer for her is the same as my prayer for you, is that she would find rest in the finished work of the cross, that she would drink deeply from that truth daily. Let me pray for us. Heavenly Father, thank you for the truth of the gospel. that you are a God who has made a way to dwell with us. Thank you for these words that you've given to us out of the book of Zechariah. Pray for this congregation. Pray that you would just bless the work that is being done here in Bellevue and beyond, that they would be able to rest deeply in what you have accomplished on our behalf. And all these things we ask in Jesus' name, amen.