SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/16/2016 10:10 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-5 Divine Plan for Jerusalem
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Zechariah 1:9-17
Message of the verses: I want to remind you of what the first
section of the book of Zechariah is, which is the first six chapters, and that
is comfort, God is comforting the readers of this book, which were the Jews
that He still has a plan for the nation of Israel, which is something that I am
sure not all of them knew much about. We
will see eight visions designed to comfort Israel as they are preparing to
rebuild their city, and the first vision is in verses 7-17 as we have begun to
look at it in our last SD.
Remember
we have seen the Angel of the Lord on a reddish horse leading an army of
angels. John MacArthur writes “So it’s a
fantastic picture. They are outside
Jerusalem, they are waiting to take the city, they are waiting to move in. It’s a picture of God’s humiliated people, and
their angelic defender, protector, who is ready to lead the battle and win the
victory, and rebuild the city. What a
tremendously comforting picture this must have been to that group of patriots
that hand come back to reestablish their land.
Chastened for a time, but about to see the end of all chastening, as the
angel of the Lord was ready to do conquering.
And so that’s the picture seen.”
Now
in the rest of this SD we are going to look at “The perplexity solved” which is
the first of five facets that we will be looking at in our next few Spiritual
diaries, and this facet comes from verse nine:
“Then I said, "My lord, what are these?" And the angel who was speaking
with me said to me, "I will show you what these are.” He did not say who are these, but what are
these, as it seems like he knew who they were, but did not know what they were
going to do. Another thing we must look
at and it seems that as we read this verse that there is another angel who is
talking to Zechariah which is not the Angel of the Lord, as John MacArthur
gives him the name the “Interpreter Angel.”
He is the one who will interpret what is going on and communicate it to
Zechariah. Remember that Zechariah is
having a vision; he’s given a sixth sense, as it were, in order to perceive things
that are beyond the human vision and insight.
So for him to understand what is going God sends him this angel to help
clear things up, “And the
angel who was speaking with me said to me, "I will show you what these are.”
Let us now look at verse ten: “10 And the man who was standing among the myrtle trees answered and said, "These are those whom the LORD has sent to patrol the earth."” Now remember in the book of Job near the beginning we see that the Lord ask Satan what he had been doing, and Satan said that he was patrolling what was going on, on the earth, well God has angels who are doing the same thing here, patrolling the earth. These angels have now come back to report to the Angel of the Lord. When we studied the book of Ester we saw that the Persian empire had men on fast horses patrolling there empire and reported to the king, so this is another similar thing to compare this with. “11 So they answered the angel of the LORD who was standing among the myrtle trees and said, "We have patrolled the earth, and behold, all the earth is peaceful and quiet."” This is the report that they gave to the Angel of the Lord. Now as I listened to the sermon by John MacArthur he made a point about verse eleven that meant much to me and so we will look at that quote. “Now, I just want to give you footnotes. Verse 11 calls the rider, for the first time, the angel of the Lord. And the angel of the Lord is none other than Jesus Christ, none other than the second person of the Trinity. But every Jew knew the angel of the Lord was his protector and defender. Every Jew who knew anything about his Old Testament, every Jew who knew anything about the history of his people, knew that there was one special angel, one super angel, who was set for the defense of Israel, and it was the angel of the Lord. What is so wonderful is that the angel of the Lord had not appeared for 200 years in the history of Israel. And now all of the sudden the angel of the Lord is back, and all the while of those 200 years while Israel was in wretchedness, and Israel was in sinfulness, their protector and advocate and defender was not around. But when their chastening was done and repentance had taken place, He was back, ready to defend His people. Great lesson, and can you imagine how excited those people got when they heard Zechariah describe his vision as incorporating the angel of the Lord and they must have whispered to each other, "But He hasn't been around for 200 years and now He's back." Victory is imminent. What a joyous vision.
“There's a great truth here people. The Lord Jesus
Christ, the angel of the Lord, is our defender and protector, isn't He? Isn't
He the one who takes up our cause? Isn't He the one in Romans 8 who says,
"Who shall lay any charge to God's elect?" Isn't He the one who says
He has justified us? Isn't He the defender and the protector and the advocate?
Yes He is, but I'll tell you something. He will not make Himself known in that
fashion, when we are living in a state of unrepentant, unconfessed sin. In a
sense, we forfeit His protection, don't we? And He turns us over to the
consequence of our sinfulness. And the moment we repentant and the moment we
confess, He's back, to defend.
:And now He's back among His repentant people to
take up their cause and He always will take up the cause of the people who are
rightly related to Him, always. And here's their report, "Everything is
still in the earth." Say, "Well that sounds terrific." What does
the word mean when it says "The earth sits still and is at rest?" The
term literally means "relaxed, peaceful, tranquil, free from war."
Now this is generally speaking. There were some little squirmishes going on, we
know, in the second year of Darius, but they were pretty well squelched. And
the Persians had managed to pull off pretty much what amounted to a world wide
peace in their world. Shaqat, the verb that is used there, is used
repeatedly in the book of Judges, to express the peaceful interims enjoyed by
the land of Israel. So it means "a time of political peace." And the
conditions that the angels did report is known to have existed in general in
the second year of Darius. They had accomplished a peace. There were a whole
slew of rebellions that had been put down, a just a little flickering of some
of them left by the second year of Darius. So the angelic report is really
accurate. The world was pretty much at peace.
“But that word also means something else. It is a word that is used, and this is where you really have to dig a little bit to find out what they're saying. When it says "The earth is at rest," that word is used several times in the Old Testament to refer to selfish inactivity...selfish inactivity. Such is its use in the case of Moab, in Jeremiah 48:11. Such is its use in the case of the city of Samaria, the country of Samaria, in Ezekiel chapter 16 verse 49. In both of those Scriptures, the term means not a positive thing, but a negative. It means these people, Moab, and these people, Samaria, are selfishly indifferent to the plight of somebody that has a need. It's like the little plaque that says "If you can be peaceful in this situation, you just don't understand the situation." In other words, some people's peace isn't' really peace, it's indifference, right? It's indifference. If you're in a society plagued by poverty and pain, and you're totally blissful, that's not really peace, that's indifference. And that is the way Shaqatis used in Jeremiah 48:11, Ezekiel 16:49.
“Incidentally this is a peace that isn't long to
last. It is a peace that is doomed. In fact, Haggai, the other prophet of this
time, said in Haggai 2:7, "'I will shake the nations and the desire of all
nations and I'll fill this house with glory' saith the Lord of Hosts." And
over in verse 21, He says essentially the same thing, "I'll overthrow the
throne of kingdoms, I'll destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations,
I'll overthrow the chariots and the people who ride them, and the horses and
the riders, etc., etc.," And Haggai kept saying, "There's coming a
day when these so called peaceful nations aren't going to be at peace anymore,
when God begins to shake the nations."”
We will stop at this point and continue looking at
this in our next SD.
4/16/2016 10:52 PM
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