SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/19/2016 7:57 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4 The Rejection of the True Shepherd
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Zechariah 11:8
Message of the verses: “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.”
What I want
to do is first of all talk about verse eight and then I have some other things
to write about from some earlier verses in this chapter. I listened to a different sermon from John
MacArthur that he did a few years ago on Zechariah chapter eleven and found
some things in that sermon that I want to pass along. It is my desire to write what I believe is
true about the verses that I look at each day, and if I find something new
about them, then I want to write about it in my blogs so that whoever reads these
Spiritual Diaries will have the truth of what the verse mean, as that is most
important to me.
Now I want to quote from the recent sermon that I listened to from John MacArthur to help us understand verse eight, a verse that is very difficult to understand as we will see from this quote: “The idea of a month means a short time. In the drama that he’s playing out, in a short time, when the Messiah comes, He will eradicate the shepherds of Israel. He will annihilate the shepherds of Israel. And what happened in the judgment of 70 A.D., when the Romans came and destroyed Jerusalem and destroyed everything, was the end of all of those orders and that has continued through history. Essentially no longer are there priests and elders and scribes.
“Some think it had reference to prophet, priest, and
king; but they didn’t have a king then, so there was no way to bring that into
the picture. But they had
priests and elders and scribes. The elders would be the religious
leaders of the land who had the power and the authority. They were, according
to verse 8, they were “annihilated.” God ended the offices, listen, of the mediators. Those were the
mediators. The offices of mediators, they...they were the ones who stood
between the people and God and God and the people, and God obliterated them. Why? “My soul was impatient with them.”
That’s what that word means, impatience. It’s a Hebrew word meaning “short tempered,” “lost patience.” That is really
what it means. Some translations are stronger. It says, “My soul loathed them,”
but that isn’t what is best. “My soul was impatient with them, and their soul was weary of Me.”
They hated Christ, and Christ ran out of patience with them. They despised
Christ, right? Isaiah 53? We saw nothing about Him that was attractive. We
despised Him. Christ was exhausted with them who despised Him, the religious
leaders of Israel.”
Ok now we will take a look at verse five, as we go back and get some more insight into this verse from this updated sermon: “Verse 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.” That is an astounding insight into the time of our Lord Jesus Christ. Those who buy them, slay them, and go unpunished--who are they? Foreign oppressors of Israel, the nations that have oppressed Israel before and leading up to Christ, and after, and ever since, even up until the present day we now live in. Though it is true that God sovereignty handed Israel over to the nations for judgment, still the nations are responsible for their sin and cruelty against Israel. Israel here is said to be abused, to be slain by Gentile oppressors who feel no guilt. You see that kind of thing in the words of Jeremiah in chapter 50. The nations come against Israel and seem to have no conscience and seem to suffer no punishment for the slaughter against the people of God. This will escalate. There will be continually nations that buy them, slay them, and go unpunished.
“And on top of that, and this is what’s so
remarkable, there will also be those who sell them. The buyers come from the outside. That’s
representative of the nations. The seller comes from the inside. This is their
own leaders who sell them out for money and show no compassion. Their own
shepherds have no pity on them. The nations have no defense. They have no hope.
They have been bought by their enemies. They have been sold out by their own
leaders who actually are so proud that they say, “Blessed be the Lord for I’ve
become rich. I’ve become rich by selling my people.” That’s exactly what the Sadducees did.
That’s exactly what the leaders of Israel did in making their alliances with
Rome and giving Rome the privileges that Rome had in occupying the land of
Israel and the reason they allowed Rome to come and do what they did is because
Rome put money in the hands of the Jewish religious, elite leadership.
“First, God has Zechariah demonstrate the fact that
in the future, Gentile nations will buy and sell them like sheep to be
butchered and their own leaders will show no compassion on them but sell them
off like slaves to make themselves rich. This extends all the way into the
destruction of Jerusalem. The Romans came in from the outside and massacred
them. The Romans who destroyed them also sold a hundred thousand of them, according to Josephus,
into slavery. And Josephus says they sold them to their own priests, elders,
and scribes who corrupted them. That’s what their future is going to be like.”
We will next look at verse eight in what seems to be this never ending 11th chapter of Zechariah.
9/19/2016 8:37 PM
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