SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/3/2016 10:09 PM
My Worship Time Focus: The Accused
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Zechariah 3:1a, 3
Message of the verses: “1a Then he showed me Joshua the high priest
standing before the angel of the LORD, 3 Now Joshua was clothed with filthy
garments and standing before the angel.”
First we
will look at a short introduction to this third chapter of Zechariah from the
pen of Warren Wiersbe: “Haggai’s first
message (Hag. 1:1-11) and Zechariah’s call to repentance (Zech. 1:1-6) are
evidence that the spiritual level of the Jewish remnant was very low. Most of these people had been born in
Babylon, where there wasn’t much religious example or instruction to nourish
their worship of Jehovah; and the difficult circumstances in their own land
tested their faith greatly.”
In our
verses for this SD we are looking at the accused who is Joshua who is the high
priest, and his accuser is Satan whom we will look at in our next SD from
verses 3b. Now in this vision we see
that Joshua was standing before the Lord as being a representative of Israel,
who were a people that the Lord had called to be a holy nation of priests as
found in Exodus 19:5-6. Now as we look
at verse three we see that he was dressed in filthy garments and he was not
wearing these filthy garments because he was sinful personally, but because the
people of Israel had sinned and were unclean in the sight of God. When you look at the different prayers from
the ninth chapters of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah we saw that each of these men
were confessing not only their sins because they were born a sinner, but were
mostly confessing the sins of the people and that is what we see represented by
Joshua’s filthy clothing. Dr. Wiersbe
writes “God had chosen Jerusalem and had plucked the Jews out of the fire of
Babylonian Captivity (v. 2). What God
did for Joshua symbolically He would do for Israel personally: the iniquity of
the land would be removed in a day (v. 9).”
Let us look
at Genesis 41:46 “Now Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh, king of Egypt. And
Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh and went through all the land of
Egypt.” Next Deuteronomy 10:8 “At that
time the LORD set apart the tribe of Levi to carry the ark of the covenant of
the LORD, to stand before
the LORD to serve Him and to bless in His name until this day.” One more from 1 Samuel 16:21 “And David came
to Saul, and stood before
him: and he loved him greatly; and he became his armourbearer.” We can see from these three verses,
especially the highlighted portions that to stand before the Lord means to be
in a place of service. “3 Now Joshua was
clothed with filthy garments and standing before the angel.”
What happened is the Jews became defiled while they were attempting to
serve the Lord. Now question this if
their service for the Lord was unclean in the sight of God what do you think
their deliberate sins were like?
Warren Wiersbe quotes Merrill Unger who says that the word “filthy” as
seen in the Hebrew language denotes the worst kind of defilement possible for a
Jewish person.
From some OT
passages like Ex. 28:39-43 and 30:17-21 we would see that the Jewish priests
were to keep themselves ceremonially clean and if they did not then they could
have been killed. Joshua’s wearing
filthy garments would be a terrible personal embarrassment and an offense against
the law of God. Exodus 28:2 and 40 says “"You
shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty. 40 "For Aaron’s sons you shall make
tunics; you shall also make sashes for them, and you shall make caps for them, for glory and for beauty.” Notice the highlighted portions of these
verses. The problem is that the Lord did
not see either glory of beauty in these filthy garments that represented the
people of Israel, the remnant of Israel.
5/3/2016 10:38 PM
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