She tried. But it seemed that the more she put out the more they wanted.
And what she DID put out, well, her managers always managed to find something wrong with it – Never quite right or enough.
        So she quit trying.

Like the young lad ordered to clean up his room. Socks, shorts, pop cans, comics, and a whole assortment of who knows what. Everywhere.
        It seemed so overwhelming that he flopped onto his bed and had a nap instead. Just couldn’t figure out where to begin. So didn’t.

Or the person striving to overcome a damaged past. They began counselling. Started a 12 step programme. But as this individual began to explore some of the ghosts and issues, it all became too much. And before long the painful coping behaviour was back in full swing, even harder than before.

There are times in life when the opposition facing us seems to be more than we can handle. It can be in little things or huge life & death matters. When you bail one bucket and it seems like someone else throws another right back in, why bother? If asked to empty the St.Lawrence River with that bucket, why even start?

Discouragement and setbacks can come in many ways, shapes and places.
Discouragement is what the people of Israel were facing in huge doses. After 70 years of captivity in Babylon, they’d been allowed to return. That was great.
        BUT --
Once the initial party was over, and they took time to really evaluate the situation they saw all the ruins – the temple, the shops, their homes. Farms around town had been taken over by armed squatters unwilling to move, and aggressively hostile to their rebuilding attempts – squatters that we meet again in the New Testament under the name Samaritan.
        Mountains of obstacles.
                Literally.

Discouragement began to affect what they were doing and how they were living.
Last week we looked at this same situation from the vantage point of the prophet Haggai as he challenged the people to stop spinning their wheels in the gravel, so to speak, and get on with building the Temple. When they would begin to acknowledge God, He would in turn acknowledge and bless them in their endeavors.

        Haggai speaks in rather blunt, sermon-like ways. Then along comes prophet Zechariah. He was a priest, born in Babylon and among those who returned to Judah in 538 BC under Zerubbabel and Joshua.
About 20 years pass, years of struggle where the people try to wade through and rebuild the mess of demolished Jerusalem. They get discouraged. Slow down. Wonder - "What’s the use?" Their minds and efforts begin to wander.

Which, perhaps, we can identify with at times -
        - what’s the use of struggling for the rights of the unborn or the elderly?
        - why bother getting concerned about child poverty?
        - can we make a difference, anyway, as creation stewards in a world already so polluted and exploited?
        - the forces against Christian education, and the costs.... they’re so high, it seems impossible to really make it any better.
        - we in the church seem so few, unbelievers so many, growth so difficult.... And even among those here, the differences sometimes are so large.......
                A "why bother" mentality begins to set in.
                And we need words of encouragement from the Lord.

That’s basically the point of Zechariah:
        Encouragement to a discouraged people.
        You’ve tried and can’t do it. But hang in there - God can and will do it!
                Gathering His people.
                Reclaiming His rightful Kingdom.
                Extending His rule over the world.
                        God WILL do it!

Now, we’re not going to read the entire prophecy of Zechariah.
Even though
        – and I really want to stress this –
                even though you really won’t get the full impact of the message unless you do precisely that. So, please promise me that you will read it at home. It takes less time to read than Monday’s Citizen. About the time of one good cup of coffee and muffin.
        You promise to read it, and I’ll take the next few minutes to give you a working introduction that’ll help guide your read and open doors to hearing God speak to you in your life and situation. Deal?

        Zechariah is the most major of the Minor Prophets. Longest and most complex. Lots of visions, oracles, symbol language and vivid poetry. Stuff that we’ve come to call Apocalyptic literature. It’s something we’re not too familiar with today, but was becoming quite well defined towards the end of the Old Testament era. It shows itself full blown in Revelation. You also see elements of it in Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel and Joel.

        Like novels, journalism, or poety - the literature form of apocalypse has certain forms and language that the writers work with. By the eighth century BC there was already a vocabulary of apocalypse. It is a literature that sets root in the peoples’ immediate situation, often a situation of trouble. Then with vivid visual images, dreams, poetry, prophetic oracles, and symbols they look to the future for direction and hope.
        You’ll see writing about feast, battle, judgement, and monsters.
        That’s apocalyptic writing. And we need to read it in that way it was meant to be read. Anything other is a distortion of the Word of God. Like taking the poetry of Robert Frost and trying to interpret it as a novel. You simply can’t do that.
        I remember, for example, seeing some absolutely off the wall movies - nothing more than baptized horror flicks, actually - movies claiming to speak the message of Revelation. And they treated the book in a literal, newspaper-like fashion. The result was totally bizarre and foolish.

Apocalyptic literature – beginning with today and it’s almost hopeless struggle, looking towards the future for some vestige of hope that God can and will act to save His people.
        That’s Zechariah.

There are two sections to Zechariah:
        a. Chapters 1-8
        b. Chapters 9-14

The first section is a series of 8 visions, bracketed by an introduction designed to shake up and wake up the discouraged people, and some sermon-like material to pound home the fact that God is in control and WILL work for them.
        It was written roughly 20 years after Zechariah and the others first came back to Jerusalem.
        The visions and sermon material is reasonably straight forward and is hooked right into the peoples’ immediate situation.

The preface is a call to the people not to get sucked into the traps of lethargy, discouragement and disillusioned waywardness that were the downfall of their forebearers.
        "Return to me, declares the Lord Almighty, and I will return to you... Do not be like your forefathers... they would not listen or pay attention to me...."

        Then come the series of visions which speak to the well-being of God’s chosen people. They show God at work, cleansing and rebuilding His people, and destroying evil and its dark power.

        There are eight of them:

        i. A proclamation that prosperity WILL return to God’s people, even though right now it looks like everyone BUT God’s people are blessed.
        ii. A promise that powers which oppose the Lord will be crushed.
        iii. The declaration that God’s people will explode in number; huge growth!
        iv. God’s cleansing of His people, sin forgiven, holiness restored - symbolized through the reclothing of the priest.
        v. God’s power will flow among His people - Two olive trees representing Zerubbabel and Joshua, the governor and priest; oil representing the Holy Spirit power of the Lord.
        vi. A curse settling on God’s enemies
        vii. Wickedness is removed from among God’s people
        viii. A promise of rest in the North; north being a traditional representation of the place where God’s enemies come from.

After the visions come an order to crown the priest – a symbol of the coming crowning blessing that will be among the people. And there is a sermon: a call to the people to make sure that their faith is not only outward expression, but built on inner obedience. It all concludes with God’s sure promise of blessing.

For people surrounded by opposition, convinced that their own resources were inadequate, and wondering if it was perhaps time to give up on the whole project these words were clear words of power, comfort, and encouragement.
        It was in the power of these words that the temple was completed, temple worship restored, idolatry eradicted and faithfulness relived. The Jews rebuilt their community into the nation where Christ was born. Zechariah’s word become really the launching pad for the reestablishment of the people of God. He set things up for the time of Messiah.

        One more thing that needs saying about the first half of Zechariah.
        In 1-8 you’ll run stuck if you insist on applying this entirely to the biological people of Israel. You need to read it through the lenses, the spectacles, of scripture; without them the message remains but blurry letters on the page.

        The New Testament speaks of the Chosen People of God being enlarged beyond the race of the Jews. It takes in all believers in Jesus and calls them "children of Abraham." The Church of Jesus is the New Testament Israel. This is the insight that the Holy Spirit provides to us through the pages of the Word. We need to connect those back to the Old Testament prophecies.

        Remember some weeks ago when we first talked about prophetic fulfilment. We said that biblical prophecies are often like coming across the prairies and seeing the Rocky Mountains. They look to be but one flat layer of mountains. But as you get closer you see that they are actually multiple layers, one behind the other, sometimes with large valleys in between. There are multiple layers to bible prophecy fulfilment, sometimes with huge valleys/gaps of time in between.

        The struggle of 1-8 is a discouraged, poor, struggling rump of a nation trying to make a go of it amid the ruins of Jerusalem and Judea. Around them were threatening nations - small ones and world powers. The people of God are beginning to wonder, "Why bother? We’re sure to be squashed soon enough, anyway. It’s all a waste."
        The prophet of the Lord reminds them that, "No, serving and living for the Lord is not a waste. Not now. Not ever. God is almighty. He can do it. He WILL do it."

Encouragement is the book’s central theme - there is a great future for the people of God. Even when ruins are all around, hang in and hang tough. Don’t give in to the inner whispers of discouragement. Don’t give up. Don’t surrender your hunger and thirst for purity and righteousness. For the Lord WILL do His work of saving and rebuilding.
        A message, if we will hear it, as relevant to a small church in Nepean, a gathering of believers that want to make a difference in this world for their Lord, but wonder if it ever can or will amount to anything.

God will do it, says Zechariah.

That’s all in the first part.
Then comes the more mysterious part of Zechariah. You may find that harder to understand. In fact, if you get it completely, please write a book. You’ll be the first one with a full understanding of these words filled with apocalyptic images! There are touchpoints to Israel’s history, but here’s we’re really looking ahead. It’s highly poetic and symbolic, filled with picture language. There is lots of tension that acknowledges how difficult things are, but looks toward the final and clear victory of the Lord.

What’s most valuable to us who read this from a New Testament viewpoint is the rather startling allusions to the life and ministry of Jesus in these chapters, and to the effect of His ministry.
        The second half of Zechariah is very Messianic.

        There are two major oracles, or prophetic sermons:
The first one talks about the coming and the rejection of the Messiah.
The second one talks about the deliverance of God’s people, and the Messiah’s coming with His glorious Kingdom.

These two seem to combine and give a major overview of the Ministry of Jesus – His birth, ministry on earth and rejection by the Jewish leaders. His death.
        All in the first oracle.
The spreading of God’s Word around the globe and the bringing in of God’s people amidst struggle and persecution. And then the last stage, still to be written, of the full unfolding and appearing of the Kingdom of Christ.
        All foretold in the second oracle.

And so in ch.9 we read the familiar words of Palm Sunday:
        Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

We read in ch.10 allusions to false shepherds, words that sound an aweful lot like the words of Jesus in John 10 when He speaks of shepherds who come in to kill and destroy, while He the Good Shepherd comes to give life and give it more abundantly (John 10:10). There is Jubilation as the Good Shepherd enters the city.
        Sound familiar?

But then there is tension – the Good Shepherd is sold for thirty pieces of silver (11.12). The money is thrown into the house of the Lord. Allusions are made of a potter.
        And we can’t help but think of Judas’ betrayal, the thirty pieces of silver paid for Jesus, how Judas repented and threw the money into the temple, and how that blood money bought a potters’ field as a grave for the unwanted.

        Into chapter 12 and you’ll read about mourning for one who they pierced, the rejection of deceitful leaders, scattering of the sheep, a terrible time of destruction, but then a final day of gathering in.
        And our minds go to the cross, the mournful cry of the centurian - "Surely, He was the Son of God"; the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD, and the scattering of believers in the Lord across the world.

What we still wait for is Zechariah 14.
It looks ahead yet. Looks to the final day. The day of Messiah’s return.
The day of the final regathering of the saints from old testament times and new; from Israel and the Church – believers of all times and places.

We wait well aware that we, too, will still have times of discouragement.
But we can marvel that God is in control.
He has led so much of Zechariah to be fulfilled.
And as He has done that He will bring this last chapter to fulfillment, too.
He WILL do it.

Let’s close by reading that final chapter together.