SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/9/2016 7:26 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 God calls His People to Repent
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Zechariah 1:1-6
Message of the verses: “1 In the eighth month of the second year of
Darius, the word of the LORD came to Zechariah the prophet, the son of
Berechiah, the son of Iddo saying, 2 "The LORD was very angry
with your fathers. 3 “Therefore
say to them, ’Thus says the LORD of hosts, "Return to Me," declares the LORD of hosts,
"that I may return to
you," says the LORD of hosts. 4
"Do not be
like your fathers, to whom the former prophets proclaimed, saying, ’Thus
says the LORD of hosts, "Return now from your evil ways and from your evil
deeds."’ But they did
not listen or give heed to Me," declares the LORD. 5 “Your fathers, where are they?
And the prophets, do they live forever? 6 “But did not My words and My
statutes, which I commanded My servants the prophets, overtake your fathers?
Then they repented and said, ’As the LORD of hosts purposed to do to us in
accordance with our ways and our deeds, so He has dealt with us.’"’"”
As we begin
to look at these first six verses in the book of Zechariah we can see that Zechariah
first of all tells us the month that he begins his messages to his people by
stating that it happened on the eight month of the second year of Darius. I would like to expand on that a bit, for
when we read OT Jewish prophets we can usually see that they would be naming
the Jewish king whom they lived under, but now there are no Jewish kings as the
nation had gone into exile and so there were no more kings, so Zechariah speaks
of the Gentile king Darius who was in power.
In the book of Luke we see that Jesus spoke of “the times of the
Gentiles” and that time began after the fall of the Southern Kingdom and will
continue until the Lord Jesus returns to set up His promised Kingdom.
I now quote
from John MacArthur’s sermon: “The Persian
emperor that had released the Jews was Cyrus.
When Cyrus died he was succeeded by Cambyses and Cambyses is well known
for having conquered Egypt, but Cambyses didn’t have a child and he committed
suicide. And when Cambyses committed
suicide there was a vacancy and Darius was a powerful man and in that vacancy
Darius drove to the top and became the ruler.
He began to reign in 522 BC Which means if this is the second year of
Darius, then it was written in 520 B.C.
And Darius I just can’t help but tell you, Darius here is the king under
whom Zechariah writes. You see even
though they were back repatriating their country they had no king and the king
or the ruler of the whole world at that time was Darius, so he is really the king
over Zechariah.”
Zechariah
wastes no time in telling the people what problems the Jewish people had as far
as whey they were in the predicament they were in but does not go into a lot of
detail because just the mention of their fathers and what they had done to
cause this trouble would have been known by these Jewish people.
Now when we
studied the book of Haggai we learned that the work of the temple had stopped
and we went through some things that were the reasons as to why it stopped and
so Haggai, the older prophet came to the remnant to get the job going
again. However there was one thing that
needed to happen before the Lord would bless these people and the work and that
was repentance. We surely have here a
picture of what a person needs to do in order to be saved, and the first thing
is repentance, to agree with the Lord that you have sinned and then repent of
your sin. When Haggai came we believe
that after his four messages that there was revival in the hearts of the
people, as they surely repented of their sins and then wanted to please the
Lord, especially in continuing to rebuild the Lord’s temple.
Now one
more quote from Dr. Wiersbe this time as he writes about the people knew the
sinfulness of their fathers: “The Jewish
people who had returned to the land knew their nations history very well. They knew that God had sent prophet after
prophet to plead with their forefathers to turn from idolatry and return to the
Lord, but the nation refused to listen.”
“15 The LORD, the God of their
fathers, sent word to them again and again by His messengers, because He had
compassion on His people and on His dwelling place; 16 but they continually mocked the messengers of
God, despised His words and scoffed at His prophets, until the wrath of the
LORD arose against His people, until there was no remedy (2 Chronicles
36:15-16).”
Now in our
next SD I want to focus in a bit more on the anger of the Lord which is seen in
verse two.
4/9/2016 8:04 PM
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