The Ruin of the Wailing Shepherds (Zechariah 1:1-3)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/14/2016 3:11 PM

My Worship Time                                                      Focus:  The Ruin of the Wailing Shepherds

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Zechariah 1:1-3

            Message of the verses:  “1 Open your doors, O Lebanon, That a fire may feed on your cedars. 2 Wail, O cypress, for the cedar has fallen, Because the glorious trees have been destroyed; Wail, O oaks of Bashan, For the impenetrable forest has come down. 3 There is a sound of the shepherds’ wail, For their glory is ruined; There is a sound of the young lions’ roar, For the pride of the Jordan is ruined.”

            Now as we look at these three verses the first thing we realize that Zechariah is talking about three different portions of land.  Verse one speaks of Lebanon, and verse two speaks of Bashan, and then verse three speaks of the Jordan, and as we look at these verses we can also see that Zechariah begins in the North and works his way to the South.  Now since these are judgmental verses we can see that the judgment begins in the North and moves to the South.  The verses are descriptive of how this judgment will take place.  MacArthur adds “And the Holy Spirit herewith poetic imagery and dramatic movement arranges the words with an almost rhetorical power to describe the ruin and the ravages of the whole land of Israel.”

            Lebanon was noted for their cypress trees, as seen in the OT book of 1 Kings when Solomon gets Cyprus lumber from Lebanon to help build the temple.  Bashan was more mountainous and had oak trees on it.  Now the Jordan valley runs all the way into the Dead Sea, and on both sides of the Jordan River we found dense foliage.  Now we have to believe that the description of this judgment from Zechariah is a picture of a judgment to come, (which has already happened, but had not when Zechariah wrote about it), and there was not all of the fire spoken about here in these verses, but the fire represents the judgment.  There would be no sense of fighting this judgment since God said it was going to happen.

            There are some who believe that this is a spiritual judgment that comes from the Lord as I think we looked at when we looked at these verses in August.  This may have been a spiritual judgment to a certain extent, but a physical judgment is the main point seen here. 

            Now when we get to verse three we see lions as a part of the judgment.  “At the beginning of their living there, they did not fear the LORD; therefore the LORD sent lions among them which killed some of them (2 Kings 17:25).”  This verse speaks of after the Northern Kingdom was defeated and the Assyrians sent some people back into the land to live.  Jeremiah 49 and 50 speaks more about the lions.  The lions had a good place to hide along the Jordan River as we mentioned about the plant growth there. 

            We also see in verse three the human cry “There is a sound of the shepherds’ wail, For their glory is ruined.”  Not real sure that these are literally shepherds, but they could be.  The Hebrew word for howling is like the sound of a coyote or a lone wolf wailing.  There are others who think this is the wailing of the spiritual shepherds of Israel who did a very poor job in caring for the physical sheep.

            We will conclude with what John MacArthur spoke in his sermon on these verses:  “Now, we meet then the wailing shepherds. And they wail because they've been ravaged. The question is, to what destruction does this refer? At what point in Israel's history did this happen? And I'm going to give you what I believe to be the soundest and the best interpretation. And incidentally, it's the oldest one, it's the old one that the old rabbis believed and it's still currently held by many scholars, and I'm convinced it's true, that what this is referring to is the destruction of Israel and Jerusalem that occurred in 70 A.D. You remember that after Jesus was crucified around 30 or so A.D., nearly forty years later, there was the great devastation, the Roman army came in and destroyed Jerusalem. And I mean, when they destroyed Jerusalem, they didn't just destroy Jerusalem, they destroyed Jerusalem good, and one million, one hundred thousand Jews died...one million, one hundred thousand. They threw a hundred thousand bodies over the wall, just for the sport of it.

“And years following that, Hadrian marched through the area north toward Galilee and destroyed 985 towns. Literally devastating the state of Israel, scattering them all over the world. And only in your life time have they come back, since 1918 and following. And I believe that what he sees here is this unbelievable devastation that occurred in 70 A.D. And the reason I believe that is because of what immediately follows which is given as the reason for the judgment. And the reason for the judgment is the rejection of the shepherd. And that just fits history beautifully because when they rejected Jesus Christ, it wasn't 40 years later until their whole nation went out of existence...as a nation, although the Jewish people have been preserved as individual people.”

9/14/2016 3:42 PM