SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/17/2016 6:57 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Then Intention
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Zechariah 7:4-7
Message of the verses: “4
Then the word of the LORD of hosts came to me, saying, 5 "Say to all the people of the land and
to the priests, ’When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months
these seventy years, was it actually for Me that you fasted? 6 ’When you eat and
drink, do you not eat for yourselves and do you not drink for yourselves? 7
’Are not these words which the LORD proclaimed by the former prophets, when
Jerusalem was inhabited and prosperous along with its cities around it, and the
Negev and the foothills were inhabited?’"”
As we look
at what the Lord answers in these verses we cannot help but think about what it
was that caused Israel and Judah to go into captivity in the first place and that
was idol worship and also not taking seriously real worship that the Lord had
laid out for them in the early parts of the OT.
We have learned from our study in the gospel of John that real worship
has to come from the heart, you cannot just go through rituals and not have it
come from your heart. Think about taking
of the Lord’s Table or Communion and just doing it as a ritual, not doing it
from your heart remembering what it cost God to send His Son to die on the
cross to save us. Jesus told His
disciples that they were to do this until He comes back, to remember the cost
of their salvation, and Paul tells us that we are to examine ourselves to make
sure that first of all we are truly believers in Jesus Christ and then to
examine ourselves to make sure that there is no unconfessed sin, a sin that you
are holding onto and not willing to confess before you partake of the elements
of the Lord’s Table. This is serious
because the Corinthians whom Paul was writing this to were not following this
procedure, they were doing it as a ritual and because of this some were sick
and some actually died, so this is serious not to worship the Lord with rituals
which is what was about to happen to the remnant who came back from
Babylon.
The Lord
gets to the heart of the matter in verse six when He asks them if they were
doing this for themselves, for that is not true worship. MacArthur writes “You see, He’s…really
proving a deeper problem. Their fasts
and their feasts equally were their own and God was seldom considered as the
implication. You see, the actual
question that they were asking…should we keep the feast of the fifth month? you
know something, is never answered. That
question is never answered because that isn’t the point. The point is, you can worship and you can
celebrate with a fast or you can celebrate with a feast any time you want if it’s
truly done to the honor and glory of the Lord, you see? There is no answer to the question, but the
deeper issue is, what is the serious evil that really is infesting Israel? It is this feeling that all these things are
merely the performance, mechanical. And
the implication again of verse 5 where he says, ‘Even though seventy years, ‘
and again it’s the Word of the Lord saying He’s kind of reemphasizing their
feeling of weariness. Did you just crank
it out for 70 whole years? One
commentator paraphrases the answer of God by these words, ‘When you fast, it is
because of your sins. And when you eat
and drink, it is for your own profit.
The whole matter is for yourselves.
But what have I in all of this?
For neither in the fasting nor the feasting is there anything for My
glory. When you fasted it was like penance, and when you feasted it was for
your own satisfaction. And where did I
ever come in? Did your really ever fast
for Me?’”
In verse
seven God is telling them that they should listen to the prophets. Obedience to the Word of God is what He is talking
about here, as He is telling them that they should have listened to the
prophets, which of course they did not.
And because they did not listen was exactly the reason they were in
captivity.
If they
would have listened to the prophets they would be prospering and not living
under the control of another government, something they would do until the Lord
would give them part of the land back and make them a nation again in May of
1948. They don’t have all He promised
yet, but it is a beginning and some day they will get all of the land He
promised them.
7/17/2016 7:24 AM
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