Zechariah 1:1-9

Spiritual Times and Seasons

Zec 1:1-9

We dislike men who know the day upon which they were converted. We have lived, by the temptation of the devil, down to that low point. Our reason for disliking such men is that we do not know the day of our own conversion; and if we do not know when we were converted, how is it possible for any one else to know when he was converted? All the prophets must go down before this narrow and shallow criticism of ours, because they give the day and the date, and almost the very hour. The difficulty is for a man to forget the day when he first saw the Lord. Why, there is no other day. All the so-called other days are so many nights, or at best twilights. We never saw the true day until we saw the light that is above the brightness of the sun; this day puts out all other light, this incident of conversion puts out all other history, or throws it into its right perspective and relationship. Zechariah was a youth. That is a term which ought to be explained, because it conveyed a meaning in the Hebrew which it does not convey in English. A "youth" does not necessarily mean a child or a boy. Jeremiah said he was a child, "a little child." So are we all in the presence of a century: what must we be in the presence of eternity? Joseph was called a child, or a youth, when he was twenty-eight years of age; the men who mocked Elisha were called little children: they may have been forty years old. All these terms are relative, and are not to be understood except by a clear conception of the circumstances under which they were used. The Lord chooseth both old men and young; his message will fit any age: sometimes he has a word to us that a boy could not utter; sometimes he has a message to deliver that only a young heart can properly announce, because it alone has the requisite freshness of sympathy and music. The Lord has a word which only men of business can speak; and they will not speak it. There are some sermons that ought never to be preached in the pulpit; they ought to be preached in the market-place, or over the counter, or on high 'Change; and men of business only can speak them with clearness and precision, and moral, because personal, authority. There are some texts that preachers have no business with; they cannot pronounce the words aright; they can utter the individual syllables, but they cannot run them into that persuasive music which belongs only to the tongue of honest commerce.

"The prophet" ( Zec 1:1 ). Zechariah is not ashamed of his function. We are not to read "the son of Iddo the prophet," according to English punctuation; the comma ought to be after the word "Iddo"; and, omitting the intermediate genealogy, the word will then stand "The word of the Lord unto Zechariah the prophet." How can the Lord send his word to anybody but prophets? Other people could not understand it. Here is a mystery, but it is a mystery of fact rather than of speculation or dream. Some men laugh at the Gospel. Do not mock them; they cannot do aught else. Why I cannot tell, I did not make the universe; the human heart is no construction of ours. There are men to whom there is no Church. Do not reason with them; you cannot put liquid into a vessel that is open at both ends; do not waste your words: the kingdom of heaven is sent to them who can understand it, feel it, catch its music, and answer it with kindred melody. All this involves much questioning; all this indeed supplies the basis upon which angry cross-examination might take place; and we know it. The explanation may come by-and-by, and that explanation will be adequate; meanwhile, there are men to whom sermons cannot be preached because they cannot be heard. There are souls on whom hymns are wasted. How this is we know not.

When the Lord sends his word to his chosen one he will make it easy for that chosen one to deliver it, will he not? No: he sends his servant upon hard work. When did the Lord ever give any servant of his an easy function? When did he say to his Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, or Daniel, or other prophets, Come now; this is easy, this will cost you nothing; you could do this at odd times? Never. There are men who can apparently do the Lord's work without suffering through it; but it is not the Lord's work they are doing, or if it be the Lord's work in any superficial sense it is not done with the Lord's spirit, which is the spirit of the Cross, the spirit of shed blood, the spirit that keeps nothing back. There be those who say that the Lord deceived us by going into a swoon. A poor Lord to follow and unworthy of being followed! If he only swooned in love he is a deceiver. All who teach that dead Christ who lived again must be prepared to carry heavy weights, and run long distances, and say words that scorch their tongues.

Zechariah was commissioned to say to the people, "The Lord hath been sore displeased with your fathers." "Sore displeased" is somewhat feeble. Yet it is significant. The word which Zechariah really used was, "The Lord hath been wrath with a wrath." Real Hebrew, word upon word, with cumulativeness of emphasis until repetition becomes argument, and reduplication becomes eloquence. The details are left to the imagination. Who will set down the Lord's judgment in numbered particulars? He who would do so would trifle with all the higher aspects and meanings of providence. When all heaven is draped with one cloud of anger, where is the man who would take paper and pen and write thereon the detail of the wrath of God? Take it in its summariness; take it in its unbroken unity.

But being "displeased with your fathers," what is that to do with us? Let Darwin himself be commentator. Darwin says, "No being can ever get rid of its antecedents." If the Bible had said that, we might have smiled at the fanaticism, and charged the book with a species of immorality, because it follows men from age to age, and says, You! the man who was not in Eden when the fruit was stolen. Darwin says he was, and Darwin was a prophet. That is to say, if ever there was a man who did anything wrong, all men belonging to that man can never shake him off. Have we sufficiently considered the solidarity of history? Do we really know that there is only one Man in the world? Not one individual, or not one man, spelling man with a small m: but only one Man. So we recur to our question, Where are those who separate themselves from humanity, and shelter themselves under the canvas of their ancestral respectability? It is well for the theologians that they can quote Charles Darwin, because Zechariah is of no account. Only a man who has collected ten thousand insects and pinned five thousand butterflies, and studied night and day the minutest processes of nature accessible to the microscope or the telescope, only he may now be believed. Zechariah had no telescope poor Zechariah! "Your fathers": what have we to do with our fathers? Everything. Did you object to being made rich by your father? When do you want to cast your fathers off? When you can get no more out of them: but Darwin says a man, a creature, cannot get rid of his antecedents and Darwin had a microscope! We are thankful for such testimony; it is the testimony of patience, intelligence, and fearlessness, and ought to be valued by every student of human nature.

But there is another factor in the universe that does not come within the ken of the microscope: "Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts." That is religious. If there is a Lord of hosts, that makes all the difference in the universe. Of course, I had thought before I came to this that the universe got into existence in some kind of surreptitious manner; I did not know how it stole in upon me, or where I was when it came into existence, but I have been given to understand that it made itself in some kind of way, or came out of something so minute that nobody ever saw it, and nobody ever remembers its exact name; it came out of particle, or atom, or mist, or fire-vapour, or cloud. Perhaps: but where did the thing it came out of come from? That is what we want to know. If you start with an atom, we only ask where the atom came from. It is going to be a greater mystery than we at first supposed; a grander display of power, a more august, tremendous wisdom. Hear the new name "The Lord of hosts": is there a power outside of us that rules us, directs us, on the ground of having made us? If so, that makes all the difference in the argument. If we are not alone in creation, who is it that divides and spoils our solitude? The Lord of hosts is unthinkable. So is everything under the sun and above it, in its higher, deeper, grander meanings. Zechariah does not deliver any message of malediction or of benediction as the result of his own inspiration, or any movement on his own part. Whatever he says he sanctifies by a name; that name is "the Lord of hosts," and Zechariah believed that the universe was made all the more possible and beautiful and useful, because it was created by the Lord of hosts. We accept his doctrine; it looks to us more rational than any other.

What will the Lord of hosts have done? He will have a gospel proclaimed, and that gospel shall be the great doctrine of the possibility of human conversion "Turn ye unto him." That is the word that makes highest history. Here you have an action proceeding in one direction, and a voice says, Reverse, halt, turn, come back! That is a new possibility in life, we never thought of that before. We understood that if a motion was created, it must go on through eternity; but here is a power that says, Whatever is going on one way can go back the other way. There is a voice, rational or irrational, that says, Whatever we do can be undone, if we associate ourselves with an economy larger than the world which we call the world of nature. "Be not as your fathers." What, is it possible to shake off your antecedents? Is it possible to be grafted into another tree? Is it possible to start a new history? What? Listen "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." Here, then, we have conversion, reconstruction, regeneration, sanctification.

In the fifth verse we have an extraordinary colloquy: "Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever?" How many pensive sermons we have heard preached on these inquiries that have no relation whatever to the question, except a relation of accommodation! The colloquy is between the prophet and the people: Your fathers, where are they? saith the prophet, dead, gone, perished, crushed beneath the wheel of righteous retribution: your fathers, where are they? And the people answered Well, what of it? the prophets, do they live for ever? If our fathers were bad men and are dead, the prophets you say were good men, and are they alive? The prophets, do they live for ever? And so the colloquy proceeds a colloquy of angry exhortation on the one side, and angry and scornful recrimination on the other. Zechariah says, Your fathers are dead, and the people say, So are your prophets. The hearers are dead, so are the preachers. This power of reproach, this genius of recrimination, must be carefully watched. There is a law of dissolution, as well as a law of penalty. The prophet was not speaking about the mere dissolution of the fathers, as who should say, Even the wisest men are mortal. He was pointing to their removal as a proof of the righteous retribution which governs human affairs. As for the prophets, when they die, they die by a natural process, and pass on to a higher development; in so far as they were good men they never die. Zechariah is not dead; David the sweet singer is not dead; Mary the mother of Jesus is not a dead woman; the Saviour lives for ever.

Zechariah is not only empowered to deliver a message, he is authorised to found all his messages and expostulations upon his own personal experience. Unless a theologian is a converted man, and has a testimony of his own about Christ, he is an invader of the sanctuary, he is a trespasser, though a preacher.

Now Zechariah speaks in his own person, saying, "I saw by night." What an extraordinary combination of terms! It is all some men can do to see by day; they can only see dim outlines; they do not see realities, they see images, types, and symbols; the prophet says, "I saw by night," which is in reality the only true time for seeing. If you want to see your dead friends, look for them at midnight: all the lights out, all the curtains drawn, the room all darkness; then, hush! they come. Another man may say, I never saw. Very good; what of it? Who ever charged you with having seen anything? Because you do not see, was Zechariah blind? Because you have never seen anything under your feet but the paving-stones, have other men not seen flowers? Who made thee a ruler or a judge of other men's power of insight and penetration? Zechariah says he saw, and he saw by night, and he saw "a man riding upon a red horse, and he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom; and behind him were there red horses, speckled, and white." It is easy to sneer at these visions; the sneer is a tribute. Men by sneering show the limit of their own capacity, and the limit of their own influence. Zechariah saw. Some living men are always seeing, and are always being mocked. That must be so. Have no fear of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do: cultivate the spiritual faculty, encourage, so to say, your spiritual vision to look for more and more light and beauty. Some of us do live more in the spiritual than in the so-called material. When men ask me if I believe in the supernatural, I say, No: there is no supernatural. Why? Because what you call nature is not nature in any limited, sensuous, and superficial sense: there is nothing but supernatural. We deny the etymology and the exactness of the term; "Super" that is the part of the word we cast away, and we say, All creation, all matter, all souls, live on the appointed level, and God is in all, and above all, and round about all. We do not admit the distinction between nature and supernature; we find the standard of judgment in God's personality. Men see different things in the world, and they must interpret their own symbols or get them interpreted. We never saw a man riding upon a red horse, and standing among the myrtle trees; but he is always there; it is the eye that is wanted, not the man. "Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw." That is the sublime mystery of development.

"And the angel that talked with me." That is poor, but the literal rendering is grand "And the angel that talked in me." That is it. The interpreter must always be in a man, "The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." Listen to your soul, listen to yourself, listen to yourself when you are in your best moods, when the keys of heaven are given to you, and the Lord says, Ask what thou wilt, and it shall be done unto thee. Then seize the crown, and hold it with a faithful hand.