SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/16/2016
2:37 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
The Rejection of the True Shepherd PT-1
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Zechariah
11:4-14
Message of the
verses: “4 Thus says the LORD my
God, "Pasture the flock doomed
to slaughter. 5 “Those who buy them slay them and go unpunished, and
each of those who sell them says, ’Blessed be the LORD, for I have become
rich!’ And their own shepherds have no pity on them. 6 "For I will no
longer have pity on the inhabitants of the land," declares the LORD;
"but behold, I will cause the men to fall, each into another’s power and
into the power of his king;
and they will strike the land, and I will not deliver them from their power." 7 So I pastured the flock
doomed to slaughter, hence the afflicted of the flock. And I took for myself
two staffs: the one I called Favor and the other I called Union; so I pastured
the flock. 8 Then I annihilated the three shepherds in one month, for my soul
was impatient with them, and their soul also was weary of me. 9 Then I said,
"I will not pasture you. What is to die, let it die, and what is to be
annihilated, let it be annihilated; and let those who are left eat one
another’s flesh." 10 I took my staff Favor and cut it in pieces, to break
my covenant which I had made with all the peoples. 11 So it was broken on that
day, and thus the afflicted of the flock who were watching me realized that it
was the word of the LORD. 12 I said to them, "If it is good in your sight, give me my wages; but
if not, never mind!" So they weighed out thirty shekels of silver as my wages. 13
Then the LORD said to me, "Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by
them." So I took the
thirty shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the LORD.
14 Then I cut in pieces my second staff Union, to break the brotherhood between
Judah and Israel.”
I have to say that this section of Scripture which speaks
of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah while on planet earth is easier to
understand than the first three verses of this chapter, although there are some
parts of it that are very confusing. We
will probably have to take more than one SD to thoroughly look at what is here.
We learned from our last SD on Zechariah 11:1-3 that it
spoke of the Roman army under the leadership of Titus, who eventually became
the leader of the Roman empire, that he came down from the Northern part of
Israel down to Jerusalem and destroyed everything that was in his way. I remember learning that he did not intend to
destroy the temple, but there was gold in between the layers of the large limestone
pieces and the only way to get that gold out was to take it down one stone at a
time “1 Jesus came out from the temple and was going away when His disciples
came up to point out the temple buildings to Him. 2 And He said to them,
"Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here
will be left upon another, which will not be torn down’ (Matthew 24:1-2).” It probably would be impossible to describe
the devastation that happened in 70 AD unless someone depicted in a movie, but
after that devastation many of the Jews were either killed or left the land and
as stated before offered themselves as slaves, but were not bought: “De 28:68 “The LORD will bring you back to
Egypt in ships, by the way about which I spoke to you, ’You will never see it
again!’ And there you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male
and female slaves, but there will be no buyer’”
John MacArthur says the following from his sermon on
Zechariah chapter 11 “Now I want to give you some information you have to have
to understand this prophecy. I've studied a lot of chapters in the Bible. I don't think I ever studied one
that's more difficult than this one. This is a very difficult chapter. I
say that basically so that you'll understand that if you don't quite get every
little thought here, I'm not sure anybody gets every little thought here, very
difficult...because the style is often poetic. And trying to reproduce
everything that was in the mind of the prophet is difficult. But I want you to
see the flow of it because the overall flow and purpose of the chapter is very
clear in spite of some of the little nuances in the Hebrew that are very
difficult and I don't want to get bogged down in all of those. You know, I just
know a little Hebrew, and he runs a delicatessen. So, I don't want to get
involved in all of that.
“But anyway, there is an important key, there is an important key to the chapter, and you've got to get this. There are many styles of prophetic utterance in the Old Testament. I remember having a course in Old Testament prophecy and my professor was Dr. Fineberg and he really knew this. And he opened up to me an understanding of so many kinds of prophetic method that I never understood. And one of them that he talked about that was interesting, I thought, was the fact that the prophets often made a prophecy by acting out a symbolic act. In other words, rather than just verbalizing something, they literally acted out something. For example, well Isaiah 8 might be a fitting example. Don't turn to it, I'll just read a verse or two real quick. Isaiah 8, "Moreover the Lord said to me, Take a great scroll and write in it with a man's pen concerning Maher-shalal- hash-baz. And I took to me faithful witnesses to record," etc., etc., etc.
“In other words, the Lord said I want you to do a
demonstration, Isaiah. Get a big scroll and write some stuff on it. Well that
was a demonstration. That was doing something very visible as a symbol of a
certain prophecy.”
Ok we will stop here, but I have to say before we
do, that we have looked at this concept in our OT study of the books of
Jeremiah and also Ezekiel, mostly in Ezekiel, and that is what Dr. Warren
Wiersbe often called “Action Sermons.” MacArthur
then goes on in his sermon to talk about the 4th chapter of the book
of Ezekiel showing what we have referred to as an action sermon. He states that what Zachariah is doing in
this chapter.
“Let's look at them, beginning at verse 4.
"Thus saith the Lord my God, Feed the flock of the slaughter." Now
first Zechariah is to feed the flock of the slaughter. Now the word here
"to feed" is the word "tend" in the Hebrew. It means to
care for, to feed, to lead, to nurse. It's used in Psalm 23 to speak of the
ministry of a shepherd. He says, "Now the first thing I want you to do in
your role as a shepherd is act out a feeding. Feed the flock." And that
would mean, of course, to teach them. I want you to be like the...like the true
shepherd, like the spiritual shepherd and you feed the flock the Word of God.” 9/16/2016 3:15 PM
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